In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of the most provocative questions in the age of AI: Does artificial intelligence finally make communism feasible?

They explore the structural failures of historical communism (incentives, power consolidation, information problems, and catastrophic mismanagement), why small-scale communism works (families, kibbutzim) but large-scale versions collapse, and whether AI-driven post-scarcity could solve these issues or simply replicate the same human problems of bad actors, bureaucracy, and distorted incentives.

Topics include:

* The Sam Altman UBI study and why unconditional cash transfers often fail

* Why Soviet science succeeded in some areas but governance always failed

* Power vacuums in anarcho-communism vs. centralized systems

* The future of “techno-fiefdoms,” AI-managed communities, and human reserves for those left behind by AI disruption

* Demographic collapse and the likely rise of religious/techno-puritan movements

A raw, nuanced debate that challenges both right-wing and left-wing assumptions about economics, human nature, and the coming AI era.

Show Notes

Why Implementations Fail

* Economic calculation problem (Ludwig von Mises, 1920):

* Without private property and market prices, planners lack information on relative scarcity/costs.

* You can’t rationally allocate steel, labor, or grain.

* Attempts at “material balances” or cybernetic planning (e.g., Soviet OGAS—an attempted nationwide information network) failed repeatedly.

* HOW AI CAN FIX THIS

* Adequately and dynamically track supply and demand

* Incentive and knowledge problems (Hayek):

* People respond to incentives.

* Common ownership dilutes responsibility (”tragedy of the commons”).

* Local knowledge is dispersed; central decrees can’t match it.

* AI can just more adequately monitor dispersed local knowledge

* Innovation and maintenance collapse without profit/loss signals.

* If AI becomes like a mother and just “handles” everything, then it’s not an issue

* Power dynamics:

* Enforcing abolition of private property and markets requires massive coercion.

* With AI, we’re approaching a place where the majority of the population won’t have anything (or anything to lose), property-wise.

* This concentrates power in a vanguard/party, which becomes a new ruling class (see Milovan Djilas’ The New Class).

* We might see a bifurcated society: One ruling elite doing their own thing, then AI-led/governed communist societies for everyone else

* The state doesn’t wither; it entrenches (Orwell, Animal Farm).

* This is more of an issue when the state is fighting over something desirable, but what we’re looking at is a society largely abandoned by the elite.

* Human nature (loaded with self-interest, status-seeking, family preferences as it is) doesn’t vanish.

* Not a problem if a non-biological mind is governing.

* Repeated patterns:

* Initial revolutionary fervor lead to…

* purges of “wreckers”/kulaks, which lead to

* Shortages, which lead to…

* blame external enemies/capitalism, which lead to…

* more controls, which lead to…

* corruption/black markets, which lead to…

* reform or collapse

* This is not bad luck or “revisionism”; it’s structural.

* Even small-scale communes (e.g., 19th-century utopian ones, Israeli kibbutzim long-term, or modern intentional communities) often dissolve due to free-riding, exit of talent, and disputes over “needs.”

* HOWEVER, with AI, I imagine communism to not come as a revolution, but rather a deus ex machina saving the leftovers in society from death.

Why has “real communism never been tried?”

“Real communism has never been tried” is a rhetorical defense that shifts the definition of communism away from every historical implementation. It functions as a motte-and-bailey tactic or “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the ideal (a stateless, classless, moneyless society of perfect equality and abundance) is defended, while real-world attempts are dismissed as insufficiently pure.

Defenders counter with “not real” because:

* Stalin/Mao “betrayed” the revolution.

* No stateless end-stage achieved.

* External sanctions/wars interfered.

* “State capitalism” or “deformed socialism.”

What “real communism” means in theory

Marx and Engels described:

* Socialism as the transitional stage: proletarian dictatorship, state ownership of production.

* Communism as the higher stage: state “withers away,” common ownership, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” no classes, no money, no scarcity.

Lenin, Trotsky, and later Marxists added layers like vanguard parties and democratic centralism to get there.

Every major attempt followed Marxist blueprints:

* USSR (1917-1991): Bolshevik Revolution, War Communism, collectivization, Five-Year Plans. Result: Holodomor famine (millions dead), Gulags, purges, stagnation, collapse. Leaders admitted severe deviations but blamed “capitalist encirclement” or “bureaucracy.”

* China (1949-): Great Leap Forward (30+ million dead from famine), Cultural Revolution, mass starvation and chaos. Shifted to market reforms under Deng for survival; current system is state capitalism with CCP control.

* Cambodia (Khmer Rouge, 1975-79): Explicitly tried Year Zero agrarian communism. ~1.5-2 million dead (25% of population) via execution, starvation, overwork.

* Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Venezuela: Similar patterns—initial redistribution, central planning, suppression of markets/dissent, economic decline, emigration, authoritarianism. Venezuela went from richest Latin American country per capita to hyperinflation and collapse under “21st-century socialism.”

The Black Book of Communism estimates 80-100 million deaths from democide, famine, and repression across implementations. These weren’t fringe experiments; they were the largest-scale attempts, backed by ideology from Marx’s writings.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be discussing an exciting topic, which is does communism make sense now? Specifically what we’re gonna be digging into here is, like, we are known as, I guess, far right-wing YouTubers or podcasters or intellectual influencers.

I don’t know, right? No. But, but people consider us far right-wing. Now, a lot of our fans consider us very centrist, so maybe, but I, I identify as, as right wing, so whatever, right? Like, I... The, the, the sane far right is where I think I’d put us, right? A- at least within, like, the tech right circles and stuff like that.

Which puts us in an interesting position vis-à-vis communism, ‘cause I’m not gonna come out here and just be like... We have said it in the past on the show very clearly that communism may work in a post-scarcity economy. And we have also a number of times gone into what it means when we say something like that, right?

Mm-hmm. Where, like, we are putting [00:01:00] extremely heavy caveats on this. When people have done UBI experiments and they have just handed people money, they have seen extremely bad outcomes. The most famous is the Sam Altman one where they gave people $1,000 every month for three years, and the people who had been given the money they, they had less money at the end of it, total money, than the people who had been given nothing in terms of, like, wealth increase, right?

They, they didn’t spend any more time with their kids. They didn’t have any more kids. They didn’t spend any more time in education. They really only spent more time in recreation. That’s it.

Simone Collins: And they paid down their debt a little, so that’s nice.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. That doesn’t really mean anything. Oh, they

Simone Collins: visited the doctor a little more.

Malcolm Collins: It doesn’t really mean anything if on net they had less money.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So

Malcolm Collins: yes, they paid down their debt, but on net they had less money. Right. So, just a disaster, and we’ve seen this in communities that are offered UBI, right? Like Native American communities, for example, where we see them just completely [00:02:00] dissolve in terms of productivity, in terms of drug addiction, in terms of alcohol addiction the moment they get on something that is the equivalent of, like, UBI or, like, local communism or something like that.

And so then the question is okay, How do we eh, th- that, that all being the case, like also clearly AI is gonna disrupt what the economy means, right? And, and, and it may not happen this generation, right? It may not happen, ... Well, it’s probably gonna happen in our lifetimes, if I’m gonna be honest.

Like, if we look at- Yeah ... the speed of AI in relation to automated workers e- even, even for physical labor from what we’re sort of seeing behind the scenes, that’s developing a lot faster than people realize. And ...