Are Communism and Socialism Integral Components of the Megamachine?

On the first of May, the bookstalls of the orthodox Left still stand in many German cities. Marx, Engels, Lenin, sometimes Mao, sometimes Stalin, occasionally Trotsky. Young people leaf through the books. Some buy. Anyone who gets into conversation with them and asks the obvious question — how they reconcile the record of really existing socialism with their theory — hears a sentence that is spoken, astonishingly often, in exactly the same words: The theory is right. The practice has always been wrong so far. This text is a reply to that sentence. It treats it with the seriousness it deserves — namely as a theory, which must itself be tested.

I. The sentence at the bookstall

The sentence has a dignity of its own. Whoever says it has, as a rule, not given up, but listened, read, made an effort. He knows that the twentieth century left a field of ruins in the countries that called themselves "socialist" or "communist". Secret police, camps, famines, walls with orders to shoot, economies of shortage, closed borders. He does not deny it. He merely says: that was not real socialism, that was not real communism. Those were aberrations, Stalinist distortions, bureaucratic degenerations, betrayals of Lenin or of Marx or of both. The theory itself, he says, is untouched by all this.

The sentence has a political function: it keeps hope alive. It allows one to go on reading, go on fighting, go on being a comrade, without asking whether the programme to which one gives one's loyalty might itself have been the design flaw. It allows one to honour Marx without defending Lenin's Kronstadt massacre, and to honour Lenin without answering for Stalin's Ukrainian famine. It is a door through which every step of real history can be read as a betrayal of the step after next.

But the sentence has an epistemological weakness that — if one takes it seriously — renders it useless as a theory. It is precisely this weakness that this text sets out to demonstrate. Not polemically, not morally, but logically and empirically. Whoever still says the sentence afterwards should know what he is saying. And whoever gives it up should know that this by no means means giving up everything of value in Marx and in the older left-wing tradition. On the contrary — it is precisely by giving up this one sentence that the question of real alternatives opens up again.

II. Karl Popper and falsification

Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher, proposed in 1934 in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung) a criterion that the philosophy of science still uses today: a theory is scientific if, and only if, one can state which observation would refute it. If no conceivable experience can refute it, it is not a theory about the world — it is a statement that no longer has anything to do with the world.

Popper's examples were the Marxism of his Viennese years, Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. All three, he observed, shared the same mechanism: whatever happened, it confirmed the theory. If a socialist revolution occurred, it was the work of the laws of class. If it failed to occur, it was the work of false consciousness, which had yet to be overcome. If the patient behaved aggressively, it was a conflict of drives; if he behaved peacefully, it was a reaction formation. Everything fitted. Precisely because everything fitted, the theory no longer said anything.

The sentence "The theory is right, the practice has always been wrong so far" has exactly this form. It is immunised against every possible experience. If the next socialist attempt likewise ends in camps, walls and an economy of shortage, then that too was not the right practice. The theory remains unchallenged, because it may never be measured against any concrete attempt. It hovers above history like the perfect triangle of geometry above every triangle drawn with a pencil — always pure, always flawless, always beyond the reach of any empirical evidence.

This is the structure that Popper identified as the hallmark of a pseudo-scientific statement. It is not false. It is not even true. It lies outside the sphere in which true and false can be decided. It has the same formal structure as the sentence: God exists, only the churches have not yet been holy enough. Or: The free market works, only it has never yet been truly free anywhere. Or: Democracy is the best form of government, only democracies have never yet been democratic enough. Whoever considers one of these sentences absurd should examine the others with equal rigour.

But that does not end the argument. Labelling a statement as unfalsifiable is only half the work. The other half is to show a mechanism that operates independently of theory and practice — one that explains the ever-recurring convergence of socialist attempts into Megamachine structures without having to fall back on "wrong practice" every time. This mechanism exists. It has a name. Its name is Robert Michels.

III. What Marx saw correctly

Before we get there, a necessary pause. A text that looks critically at Marx and his heirs owes him, first of all, what is his due. It is his due because he earned it — not because politeness demands it.

Karl Marx was one of the sharpest diagnosticians of capitalism that the nineteenth century produced. Four of his observations are as valid today as they were then.

First, accumulation. Capital concentrates. It has an inherent tendency to concentration, because larger units have efficiency advantages, can buy up or undercut smaller competitors, and profit reinvests itself. That was visible in 1867, and it is visible in 2026. Today's platform economy is Marx in pure form: a few corporations control global data traffic, cloud storage, advertising, AI infrastructure. Concentration is not a political aberration. It is a structural law of accumulation.

Second, the commodity form. Marx showed that in developed capitalism everything that can be exchanged can become a commodity — including things that are by their nature not commodities: labour power, land, money, and later knowledge, data, attention, relationships, feelings. Karl Polanyi sharpened this line of thought in 1944 as The Great Transformation. It is still at work today. Anyone who wonders today why every aspect of life — care, education, housing, mobility, social contact — is increasingly organised as a market finds in Marx and Polanyi an explanation that no bourgeois economist can give.

Third, separation. Marx understood that the capitalist order rests on the majority of people being separated from the means of production. They have no land, no workshop, no machines — they have only their labour power, which they must sell. This separation did not grow naturally; it was produced: by the enclosures in England, by the clearing of peasants from the land in Mecklenburg, by the expulsion of indigenous populations in the colonies. Whoever forgets this forgets that the "free labour contract" is a construction built on a history of violence.

Fourth, ideological concealment. Marx showed how class relations present themselves as natural orders — as "market laws", as "practical constraints", as "competitiveness". Behind each of these terms stands an interest that goes unspoken. The art of ideology critique lies in breaking open the language with which power disguises itself. This art is as necessary today as it was in 1867. Anyone who reads today's texts on "competition between business locations" or "capacity for innovation" sees the same mechanism.

Whoever takes Marx seriously as a diagnostician holds a toolbox with which the present can be analysed. That is a great deal. It is enough to keep Marx on one's desk. What it is not: a guide to action. Marx analysed capital, but he did not see the Megamachine. And it is precisely in this gap that the disaster his heirs wrought has its roots.

IV. What Marx and Lenin did not see — the Megamachine is older

The American historian of cities and technology Lewis Mumford introduced in 1967, in The Myth of the Machine, a concept that fills the gap Marx left: the Megamachine. By it Mumford meant the hierarchical organisation of human masses for the production of power. His original image was the building of the Egyptian pyramids in the third millennium BC: thousands of workers, coordinated like the cogs of a single great machine, steered by a bureaucracy of scribes, overseers and engineers, sacrally legitimised by a theocracy, secured by an armed caste.

The pyramids were not built by joint-stock companies. There was no private ownership of the means of production in the sense Marx analysed. There was no wage labour, no commodity, no accumulation. And yet there was the Megamachine — a structure of hierarchy, specialisation, bureaucracy, violence and ideological legitimation that forced thousands of people under a single apex. Mesopotamia at the time of the first city-states shows the same structure. China at the time of its first imperial unification. Pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru. The Megamachine is a design principle that people in different cultures, with different property relations and different religions, invented independently several times over. It did not emerge from capitalism. Capitalism is one of its historical manifestations.

This is the correction that Marx lacks. Marx believed that with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, domination itself would be abolished. The socialisation of production by the state was to make the class state superfluous, and the state was to "wither away". That was an astonishingly naive assumption about power — naive for someone who commanded dialectics so sharply. It assumed that hierarchy is a function of private property rather than a social phenomenon in its own right. Lenin furnished the proof that this assumption was wrong. Within months of the October Revolution a new hierarchy had arisen — the Party. Within years a new class had arisen — the nomenklatura. Within a decade a new apparatus of secret police, camps and show trials had been built. Private property in its previous form no longer existed. But the Megamachine was there, and it was often harsher than the capitalist variant, because it did not even face a liberal market as an outside in which one could have handed in one's notice or found a way out.

Mumford described the Megamachine as the true tragedy of human history — as a prison that people have built for themselves and keep building anew. He did not see it as inevitable. He saw it as a recurring temptation that can only be countered by the deliberate construction of other ways of life. Whoever reads Marx without reading Mumford has half a theory. Whoever lives in the hope that the abolition of capital will abolish the Megamachine has learned nothing from the twentieth century.

V. Robert Michels — who he was

Robert Michels, born in Cologne in 1876, died in Rome in 1936, was one of the most peculiar sociologists of his time. The son of a wealthy Rhenish bourgeois family with French-Belgian ancestors, he was turned away from an academic career in Germany more than once — because of his membership of the Social Democratic Party, which in the Wilhelmine university system counted as grounds for exclusion. He went to Italy instead, became a pupil of Max Weber, then a friend and correspondent of Werner Sombart. His principal work, Political Parties (Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie), appeared in 1911.

Michels had one quality that set him apart from academic outsiders: he was himself a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, at that time the most democratic and internally most egalitarian party in the world. He did not write his study from the outside but from the inside. He examined what he himself was living through — the unstoppable transformation of a movement that had inscribed democracy on its banners into an apparatus that made itself independent of, and turned against, its own base.

His finding was harsh. Even the SPD, which in its self-image wanted to be the most transparent, most grassroots, most democratic party, inevitably produced a layer of functionaries who set themselves apart from the members, defended their position and reproduced their power. From this observation Michels formulated what later became known as the iron law of oligarchy: Who says organisation, says a tendency towards oligarchy.

What became of Michels afterwards belongs to the truth of this text. He became disillusioned with the SPD, then with the Italian socialists, then with parliamentary democracy as such. He looked for a "strong man" who would break through the paralysis of the functionary apparatuses — and he found him, in the last phase of his life, in Mussolini. Michels became a fascist. He obtained a professorship in Perugia, which had been denied him in Germany, and in the 1920s wrote about fascism with a sympathy that is hard to bear today.

This biographical turn is no accident. It is the temptation to which a disillusioned socialist can succumb when he himself cannot bear his own law. Whoever has once understood that every organisation becomes oligarchic can draw one of two conclusions: either he looks for architectures that limit this tendency — small units, rotation, hard limits on the power of functionaries. Or he capitulates before the law and seeks refuge with the one who at least states the hierarchy openly. Michels chose the second path. That was opportunism, that was despair, it was both at once. It does not devalue his law. It only shows how little one can rely on insight automatically leading to the right conclusion.

Whoever reads Michels today should know where he came from and where he went. Both. His law was not anti-Marxism from the outside — it was the disenchantment of a socialist from the inside, who could no longer believe that the movement to which he had dedicated himself would be free of the mechanisms it castigated in others.

VI. The iron law of oligarchy

Michels' law can be summed up in one sentence: Every organisation above a certain size necessarily develops a layer of functionaries that makes itself independent of the base and reproduces its own power. That is a sociological statement, not a moral accusation. It does not say that functionaries are evil. It says that the structure turns them into functionaries, with all the psychological, social and material consequences that such a status entails.

Michels named five mechanisms that work together.

First, the specialisation of knowledge. As soon as an organisation becomes complex, individuals must specialise in particular areas — finance, strategy, communication, negotiation with outsiders. This specialisation is objectively necessary, but it creates an asymmetry. The specialists know things the base does not know. They can put forward arguments the base cannot check. Objective necessity turns into structural superiority.

Second, control of information. Functionaries sit at the nodes through which information flows. They decide what is passed on to the base and what is not. They draft the motions to be voted on. They control which documents are produced, which are archived and which are suppressed. This control is not necessarily malicious — often it is simply a consequence of the division of labour. But it creates a power that is hard to break.

Third, control of the apparatus. Functionaries deal with the apparatus — the offices, the databases, the membership lists, the funds — every day. They know how it works. They hold the keys. Whoever has once reached this position has a practical head start over all competitors, who would first have to catch up. This practical head start alone protects them against being voted out.

Fourth, psychological attachment. The base identifies with "its" leaders. This identification is not naive — it has a real function. A movement needs people by whom it can orient itself, whom it defends in election campaigns, with whom it can identify. But this identification makes it psychologically difficult to criticise or vote out those same people. Whoever criticises the functionary feels as though he were criticising the movement itself. This attachment is one of the most powerful mechanisms by which oligarchy reproduces itself.

Fifth, material self-reproduction. Over time, functionary positions come to be paid — at first only as an expense allowance, then as full-time posts, then with pensions, company cars, staff. The functionary lives off his position. His livelihood, his social status, where he lives, often his marriage and his plans for children depend on it. From this material entanglement grows an elementary interest in holding on to the position. That is not morally reprehensible — it is the situation of every adult who has to feed a family. But it turns the functionary into a defender of his own position against every attempt to challenge it.

These five mechanisms work together. They operate independently of the organisation's ideology. They operate in parties, in trade unions, in churches, in corporations, in universities, in associations, in clubs above a certain size. They cannot be overcome. At most they can be limited — by architectures that work against them. But more on that later.

VII. The nomenklatura everywhere — no exceptions

Whoever has once understood Michels' law sees the nomenklatura everywhere. Not only in the Soviet Union. Not only in Mao's China. Not only in Honecker's GDR. The nomenklatura is the organising principle of every party, every trade union, every larger NGO, every public authority, every corporation, every university. It is merely called by different names in different contexts.

In the states of really existing socialism it was called the nomenklatura in the narrower sense. The lists of posts that could only be filled with the Party's approval, with the privileges that went with them — better flats, better shops, special polyclinics, holiday homes, trips abroad, Western currency. In the Soviet Union some three million people with their families. In the GDR about half a million. In Mao's China considerably more, in Castro's Cuba proportionally similar. A class with its own schools for its children, its own hospitals, its own supply facilities, its own worlds — sealed off from the people in whose name it ruled.

Today the same structure exists in the countries that still call themselves socialist. In Xi's China the functionary layer of the CCP is by far the richest political class in the world — the fortunes of many senior functionaries and their families are estimated in the billions, as researched by Reuters and the New York Times in several reports in recent years. In Maduro's Venezuela the Boliburguesía is an openly visible phenomenon — the daughters and sons of functionaries drive SUVs while ordinary caraqueños queue for flour. In Castro's Cuba the functionary layer drinks in special shops paid for in hard currency while the population lives with the libreta ration book and chronic shortages. In Kim's North Korea the population of the capital is a privileged class of its own compared with the rest of the country. There is not a single example of a really existing socialist country in which the nomenklatura did not arise.

That is one half. The other — and it is the more important one for younger readers who think today that this only concerns others — is the nomenklatura in the parties, movements and organisations of the present in which we live.

In the SPD there is a functionary layer of members of the Bundestag and of the state parliaments, party executives, staff of the federal party headquarters, foundation functionaries (Friedrich Ebert Foundation), trade union functionaries, mayors, local councillors. This layer reproduces itself. Candidacies for seats are pre-decided within party structures. Whoever "moves up" has, as a rule, local branch work, experience in the Jusos (the Young Socialists) and a system of patrons behind him. Whoever enters without these structures has a hard time.

In Die Linke a similar structure exists — smaller, but just as developed. Members of the Bundestag and of the state parliaments, party executives, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, managing directors of local council groups. The internal currents — reformers, the Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus, the Kommunistische Plattform, the Antikapitalistische Linke — are themselves small apparatuses with their own functionary layers.

In the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht the nomenklatura is still young, but it is clearly pronounced. The person of Wagenknecht herself is, as it were, the entire upper functionary layer. Whoever deviates is out — witness the expulsion proceedings of the first months.

In the DKP, the MLPD and the various K-groups (the small Maoist and Marxist-Leninist sects), despite minimal membership numbers, there is a functionary layer of its own that has been reproducing itself for decades. Chairmen who have been in office for twenty or thirty years. Foundations, publishing houses, newspapers in which the same people employ one another as authors and editors. The size of the organisation is not the point here — the point is the structure.

Among the Greens there is a functionary layer of members of the Bundestag and of the state parliaments, party executives, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, business associations, NGO structures. It reproduces itself through the Realo and left currents, through district and state executives, through established systems of patronage.

In the CDU, in the CSU, in the FDP — the same picture, with different labels. In the AfD the functionary layer exists despite all its rejection of an established political class — and it reproduces itself in exactly the same way, with Höcke, Chrupalla and Weidel camps and their followers.

In the trade unions — IG Metall, ver.di, IG BCE — there is a functionary layer of full-time officials, district leaders, federal executives. Here too the same structure. Anyone who has ever sat on a collective bargaining committee knows the feeling that the full-time officials occupy the actual field of negotiation while the volunteer members play more of an accompanying role.

In the churches, in the foundations, in the large NGOs, in the universities — everywhere the same structure. Council chairs, secretaries-general, managing directors, rectors, deans. A layer that reproduces itself, and a base that nominally votes but has hardly any real choice.

And finally, because Mondragón deserves to be mentioned once without being idealised: even in the cooperatives of the Basque Mondragón group, which work against oligarchy with strict internal pay limits, rotation and member ownership, the functionary layer has not disappeared. It is limited — but it exists. Managing directors, boards, bankers. Mondragón is not the counter-example to Michels. It is an example of how far one can get by building architectures that actively limit Michels' law. But even there the law has not been suspended.

The point of this chapter is not that all parties are equally bad. They are not the same. Some reproduce their functionaries more transparently, some limit their power more strictly, some have taken internal party democracy more seriously than others. The point is that the functionary layer is structurally unavoidable. Whoever joins a socialist party today — of whatever current — and believes that with a revolution or with the right programme the formation of oligarchy will then be abolished has not understood Michels. If he succeeds, he will produce a new functionary layer that reproduces itself just like the one he wanted to replace. That is not an accusation. It is a sociological law.

VIII. The structural kinship of capitalism and really existing socialism

Whoever lays capitalism and really existing socialism side by side and is not confused by their self-descriptions sees their structural kinship. Both need hierarchy. Both produce elites. Both need bureaucracies to administer production. Both degenerate over time — according to Walt Rostow through phases of saturation, according to Ibn Khaldun through the loss of asabiyya, according to Laurence Peter through the famous rise to the level of incompetence. Both create their own underclasses — the lumpenproletarian, the "antisocial asocials" of the GDR, the migrant worker without a hukou in today's China.

The nomenklatura was a class like the bourgeoisie. It had privileges, it passed them on to its children, it reproduced itself over decades. Whole dynasties of functionaries are documented in the Soviet Union. In China the princelings — the children of the revolutionary generation who today control corporations, banks and political posts — are an openly visible hereditary class. In the GDR the children of SED functionaries were disproportionately represented at the EOS (the Erweiterte Oberschule, the upper secondary school leading to university) and at the universities. The nomenklatura differed from the bourgeoisie not in its mechanism of reproduction but in the language with which that mechanism was legitimised.

Stalin and Rockefeller had more in common than either would admit. Both sat at the apex of a Megamachine that organised its intervention in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Both had personal wealth (Stalin in the form of dachas, guards, a court — Rockefeller in the form of a fortune). Both had loyalty apparatuses (the NKVD in Stalin's case — Pinkertons, private police and political patronage in Rockefeller's). Both had their rivals eliminated — Stalin by shooting, Rockefeller by economic annihilation. The form differs. The function is related: the preservation and expansion of power in a hierarchical structure.

To see this kinship is not "equating" the two — the accusation that comes reflexively as soon as one lays capitalism and really existing socialism side by side. No one here is saying that a liberal constitutional state with elections and freedom of the press is the same as a dictatorship with secret police and a Gulag. They are not the same — the question of whether one may speak one's mind with impunity makes a huge difference in everyday life. What they share structurally is the logic of the Megamachine: the concentration of power in hierarchical apparatuses, the reproduction of a functionary layer that defends its position, the separation of producers from decision-making, the concealment of class relations through ideological language. This logic is what connects the two systems, beyond their self-descriptions.

IX. The empirical record — a brief series

A theory, as Popper said, is to be tested against empirical evidence. Even if the immunisation strategy "the practice was wrong each time" explains away every individual case, it is worth looking at the series. It is not short.

The Soviet Union, 1917 to 1991. Mao's China, 1949 to 1976 (with the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962, which by current estimates claimed 30 to 45 million deaths from starvation; the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 with hundreds of thousands persecuted and killed). Pol Pot's Cambodia, 1975 to 1979 (some two million dead out of a population of eight million). Honecker's GDR. Castro's Cuba since 1959. Hoxha's Albania, 1944 to 1985. Ceaușescu's Romania, 1965 to 1989. Tito's Yugoslavia (with Goli Otok as a camp complex of its own). Vietnam under Lê Duẩn. Laos. Kim's North Korea since 1948. Mongolia. Mengistu's Ethiopia, 1974 to 1991 (with the Red Terror, some 500,000 dead). Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary — all with secret police, show trials, closed borders, economies of shortage. Mugabe's Zimbabwe (which was really an African nationalist variant, but openly understood itself as socialist). Maduro's Venezuela. Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua today. In every variant the same pattern: secret police, camps or at least political prisoners, hunger or shortage, ossification of the apparatus, a ban on emigration for its own population. What varies is the severity, not the structure.

The question that the orthodox Marxist-Leninist does not answer is: How many independent attempts must a theory fail before one questions the theory? When a chemist carries out the same experiment twenty times and it fails twenty times, he questions the theory. When a doctor treats twenty patients with the same therapy and all twenty die, he changes the therapy. Only in political theology is the twentieth attempt supposed to be the first that is "finally done right" — by people who read exactly the same texts as their nineteen failed predecessors.

The argument is not: it is impossible for a theory to be implemented wrongly twenty times. The argument is: when twenty independent attempts in different cultures, with different people, in different eras, with different resources all produce the same Megamachine structure, then the cause lies not with the particular people but with what they have in common. What they have in common is the theoretical gap that Marx himself did not see — the question of hierarchy and power, which operates independently of the question of ownership.

X. The theological structure — Marxism-Leninism as a doctrine of salvation

Whoever observes orthodox Marxism-Leninism over a longer period finds that it has the structural features of a religion, which have little to do with science. This is not a polemical claim — it is a formal observation. Religions and totalising doctrines of salvation share certain structures, and Marxism-Leninism fulfils them all.

There are holy scriptures — the works of Marx and Engels, supplemented by Lenin, supplemented by Stalin or Mao or Trotsky, depending on denomination. There are holy persons — the founders as canonical authorities, whose words are quoted to settle current disputes. There are heresies — reformism, Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Maoism, left deviation, right deviation. There are schisms — the split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, the Stalin–Trotsky rupture, the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, the countless splits of the Western European K-groups. There are martyrs — Liebknecht and Luxemburg, Trotsky, later countless victims of persecution. There is an Inquisition — the show trials of the 1930s, the purges, the Cultural Revolution.

The structure of the accusation of heresy is exactly the same in Marxism-Leninism as in the medieval Church. Whoever deviates from the line is not refuted but unmasked. The question is not whether he is right or not — the question is where his position comes from, whose interests it serves, which class he is objectively working for. That is Bishop Augustine against the Donatists, that is Calvin against Servetus, that is Lenin against the Mensheviks, that is Stalin against the Trotskyists, that is Mao against the "capitalist roaders within the Party". The same structure. The same vocabulary of purity, of contamination, of defence against the enemy within.

This is the line drawn in the Christian Leviathan and Luther–Calvin papers of the Megamachine series. It is not repeated in detail here, because this text should be able to stand without it. But whoever has once seen the parallel cannot get away from it. Marxism-Leninism has the form of a religion without the humility that religion otherwise admits to. It calls its own accusations of heresy "class analysis" and its own show trials "exposure". But the structure is that of the Inquisition.

This observation is not meant polemically. It is painful even for someone who feels attached to the Left. But it is necessary if one wants to understand why the orthodox left-wing tradition tries so vainly to change the world. It operates with tools that do not match its claim. It claims to be materialist and works like a doctrine of salvation. It claims to be dialectical and knows only loyalty to the line and betrayal. It claims to be the heir of the Enlightenment and responds to criticism with condemnation instead of argument.

XI. What remains of the left-wing tradition

If one gives up orthodox Marxism-Leninism, a great deal of the left-wing heritage remains — just not what the bookstalls sell on the first of May. At least six lines remain that did not take the path of the Megamachine and on which one can build today.

The trade union tradition. Trade unions are the only form of organised countervailing power within the existing order that has really improved conditions, historically and in the present. The eight-hour day, paid holidays, occupational safety, co-determination, collectively agreed wages — none of this was won by revolutionary vanguards, but in tough negotiations, strikes and lockouts over more than a hundred years. The trade unions too are subject to Michels' law; they have their own functionary layer, their own apparatuses. But within the Megamachine they are the most effective counterweight that the last 150 years have produced. Whoever stands up for improving the living conditions of the majority should not join in the contempt for the trade unions that was customary in many K-groups.

Reformist social democracy. As early as 1899, Eduard Bernstein, in The Preconditions of Socialism (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus), called into question the orthodox Marxist theory of collapse. For this he was branded a traitor by the SPD Left. The historical record has proved him right: in the countries where social democracy worked in a reformist way — Scandinavia, the Federal Republic after 1945, Austria, the Netherlands — more real improvements were achieved for working people than in any state of really existing socialism. Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, Olof Palme's welfare state, co-determination in German mining, the Swedish wage-earner funds of the Meidner reform — these are achievements that orthodox Marxism dismissed as "bourgeois reforms". But they improved the living conditions of millions without requiring camps and secret police. This tradition is battered today — the SPD itself has moved away from it. But it is there as a heritage, and it can be renewed.

The cooperative tradition. Mondragón, founded in 1956 in Arrasate-Mondragón in the Basque Country, is today the largest cooperative group in Europe — over 80,000 members, some 95 cooperatives, its own bank (the Caja Laboral Popular), its own university, its own research system. The pay structure is capped at roughly six to one — that is, no executive earns more than six times the pay of the lowest-paid worker. In crises, jobs are kept, sometimes in exchange for pay cuts, instead of people being laid off. Profits flow partly into a common solidarity fund and partly into the members' individual accounts. Mondragón has crises, has problems, cannot be idealised — the closure of the household appliance maker Fagor in 2013 was a turning point, and the reforms of the internal solidarity mechanisms in 2025 were controversially debated. But Mondragón has existed for seventy years as a functioning alternative to the capitalist corporate form. It hardly appears in German Marxist study literature — presumably because it has Basque Catholic roots (Father José María Arizmendiarrieta) and did not go by way of class struggle and revolution but by way of education, cooperative and bank.

From an entirely different history comes CECOSESOLA — the Central de Cooperativas de Lara, founded in 1967 in Barquisimeto in western Venezuela, originally as a funeral cooperative for the city's poor neighbourhoods, today a network of some fifty grassroots organisations with around 1,500 full-time workers and some 23,000 members. CECOSESOLA runs food markets that each week sell several hundred tonnes of fruit and vegetables at prices well below the usual market rate, as well as a health centre, savings and loan funds and its own coffin production. The structure is free of hierarchy to a degree that Mondragón does not reach: no board, no management, a uniform advance (anticipo) for all full-time workers, regular rotation of tasks, collective decisions in weekly assemblies open to everyone. CECOSESOLA has — and this is the decisive point for this text — survived Venezuela's hyperinflationary crisis since 2014, in which a regime calling itself "socialist" drove its own people into an economy of shortage. While Maduro's Boliburguesía secures its privileges and more than six million Venezuelans have emigrated, a grassroots-democratic cooperative structure in the same city organises supplies for some hundred thousand families — a good quarter of Barquisimeto's population. In 2022 CECOSESOLA received the Right Livelihood Award, the so-called alternative Nobel Prize. Whoever wants to know how far the non-Megamachine Left can get should take a look at Barquisimeto — and make clear to themselves that this success was possible not because of but in spite of the state that calls itself socialist. Here the dividing line between orthodox really existing socialism and the cooperative alternative runs through a single city.

The libertarian socialist tradition. Pyotr Kropotkin against Marx in the nineteenth century, Mikhail Bakunin in the dispute within the First International, later Rudolf Rocker, Emma Goldman, and in Spain the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in the 1930s. This is the tradition that posed the question of power from the very beginning — the question that Marx brushed aside. In 1873, in Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin predicted what was built into the Marxian programme: the dictatorship of a "new aristocracy of real and pretended scientists" over the masses. This prediction was as precise as political predictions rarely are. The libertarian socialist tradition has produced no mass murderers, because it rejects the concentration of power that mass murder requires. Nor, for that matter, has it produced mass movements — but to this day it remains a source from which one can learn.

The council republic tradition. The Munich Council Republic of 1919 (crushed by the Reichswehr and the Freikorps). The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. The Kronstadt sailors of 1921, who rose against the Bolsheviks with the demand "Soviet power without the Bolsheviks" — and were crushed by Trotsky's Red Army. The workers' councils in Poland in 1956, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The councils in Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1974. Councils are the form in which direct democracy briefly becomes real — small, rotating, recallable assemblies that make decisions without a detached functionary layer. They have never lasted for long. They were always either crushed from outside or cannibalised from within by party structures. But as a form they exist, and they are an important point of reference for anyone who will not accept Michels' law.

The communitarian tradition. The Beguines from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century — a women's movement that, without central leadership, without monastic vows, without a male guardian, organised hundreds of communities in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The English Diggers of 1649 under Gerrard Winstanley — short-lived, but there as a principle. The early Israeli kibbutz movement — largely privatised today, but for decades a functioning model of communal economy. And, in a tradition that has nothing to do with the European Left: Las Gaviotas in Colombia, founded in 1971 by the development visionary Paolo Lugari in the exhausted Llanos of the department of Vichada — a region in which drug cartels, FARC guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the military waged for decades a war that was meant to make every form of shared life impossible. Some two hundred people live there today. No mayor, no police, no church, no weapons. They invented wind turbines that work in the weak winds of the Llanos, solar collectors for the mostly cloudy region, a water pump disguised as a children's seesaw. Above all, on a savannah considered uninhabitable, they planted several million Caribbean pines — and in their shade the tropical rainforest that once stood there centuries ago has returned. Lugari himself formulated the point that is central to our context: Utopia literally means no-place. We call Gaviotas a topia, because it is real. Gabriel García Márquez therefore called him the "inventor of the world". Las Gaviotas is probably the most concrete refutation of the thesis that communal life is only possible in the protected niches of wealthy societies. It works in the middle of a civil war.

Today's housing projects, the Mietshäuser Syndikat (a German network of collectively owned rental buildings), community-supported agriculture, repair cafés, multi-generational houses and open-source movements build on these lines. Much of it is small, much of it is precarious. But it is a living tradition. And it has not submitted to the logic of the Megamachine.

Whoever reads these six lines together sees: giving up the orthodox Marxist-Leninist tradition by no means means losing the left-wing position. It means liberation from a single variant that has decayed from within, in favour of a richer, older, more diverse tradition that always ran parallel to the orthodox strand and that is accessible again today — provided one leaves the closed system of the doctrine of salvation.

XII. Conclusion — an invitation

Michels' law does not lead to resignation if one understands it correctly. It does not say that every attempt to organise fairer conditions is pointless. It says that every such attempt stands under the pressure of a structural tendency that cannot be abolished, only contained. This containment is a question of architecture. There is no political solution against Michels — there are institutional safeguards that limit his effect.

What works? Small units. Whatever does not swell beyond the size of a community in which members know one another personally has a lower tendency for its functionaries to become independent. Mondragón divides itself into hundreds of individual cooperatives. The Beguines organised themselves in communities of between twenty and two hundred women. Councils function in assemblies in which people can still see one another.

What works: rotation. Whoever must regularly move into and out of office builds up no inheritance. Athens had selection by lot. Councils rotate. Open-source projects with "Benevolent Dictator for Life" structures are the exception; most successful community projects rotate their maintainers.

What works: pay limits. If the material difference between functionary and base is limited, the economic attachment to the position is limited. Mondragón's six-fold cap. The restriction of executive salaries in German cooperative banks. The early kibbutzim's renunciation of private wages altogether.

What works: transparency and strict accountability. Whoever must demonstrate publicly what he decided and why has less room to pursue a line of his own against the base. That is laborious, it slows decisions down, it is not "efficient" — but it is the price of keeping the base in the game.

And finally, what works: a chronic distrust of one's own apparatus. Not paranoia, not conspiracy thinking — but the sober expectation that one's own functionary layer, if it is not actively limited, will turn against one's own base. That is an attitude that was not popular in the left-wing traditions. It was familiar to the anarchists. It was familiar to the council communists. It was alien to the Bolsheviks and their heirs, because they did not want to call their own position as the vanguard into question.

To the young readers coming across this text for the first time today: Marx on your desk — by all means. Engels on your desk — by all means. Lenin as a historical document of an extreme situation — if you must. But put Mumford next to them. Put Michels next to them. Put Bakunin and Kropotkin next to them. Put Polanyi next to them. Put next to them what Mondragón in the Basque Country and the Mietshäuser Syndikat in German cities are attempting in practice today. Read also what is not lying on the bookstalls on the first of May — the Beguines, the Diggers, Bernstein, the councils. Above all: test every doctrine to which you are asked to commit yourselves by whether it is open to falsification or whether it immunises itself against every possible experience. If it immunises itself, it is not a theory but a religion. Religions are a respectable thing. But they should be known as such, not pose as science.

The question with which this text began — are communism and socialism integral components of the Megamachine — can now be answered. The answer is: In their historically realised, Marxist-Leninist form, yes. They were not an alternative to the Megamachine; they were one of its varieties — sometimes a particularly harsh one. In their other traditions — trade unionist, reformist social democratic, cooperative, libertarian, council-democratic, communitarian — they have not necessarily been so. These other traditions are today the lines on which one can build. They are less heroic. They promise no revolution. They promise no New Jerusalem. They promise only that, under the given conditions, spaces can be built in which people do business less against one another and more with one another — and that these spaces need not necessarily end up in the Megamachine if one builds architectures that actively work against its logic.

More cannot be promised. Less would not be honest.