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Fair enough (aside from the piles of skulls). I don't know all that much about what lower productivity people do in moderately functional communist societies, but ideally it would be something other than overdosing on fentanyl. My understanding is that communist states are supposed to tell their people what to do with themselves, even if it's sometimes "you're bad at everything, accept this pension, move to the countryside, and keep a small orchard" or something.
I don't have a good sense of what Freddie would do if he were in charge of the communist city state of New York, but get the impression he's thinking of more than half the population when he refers to people who aren't academically inclined, so it can't just be "give everyone money, hope the trash doesn't pile up too high." Or is it?
Bolsheviks learned quickly that ordering everyone was often the only solution. The Red Army was originally meant to be a democratic institution where the moral thing to do was to fight as hard as you can. What most people did instead was fight only when they felt safe. Trotsky had to use the power of
friendshipcommissars and literal decimations to turn the Red Army into a literal army from a loose confederation of opportunistic partisans.More options
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