The Communists Are Coming
The communists are coming. This is not hyperbole. This is a real threat. And it requires attention, concern, and action from capitalists themselves.
No longer in waiting
Growing up, I loved to play Davy Crockett. Coonskin cap. Toy rifle. Suburban sidewalks and my grandparents' woods, pretending I was on the frontier or at the Alamo.
Even as a kid, I knew it was play. The frontier was closed. Playing was second-best.
When I got older and started studying philosophy and economics, I noticed the same thing in myself with regard to fighting communism.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was obvious that communism was morally corrupt and a practical failure. Even China, under Deng Xiaoping, was adopting free-market reforms to save the country from ruin. The great intellectuals who fought communism — Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and so many more — had won.
Just as Crockett and his like tamed the frontier, those intellectuals had tamed the philosophical and economic frontier. All that seemed left were debates on the margins.
When I started Students For Liberty, I helped young people around the world fight and flee totalitarian governments, and even the few remaining socialist states like Venezuela. I was not facing those obvious evils in America. The threat of communism felt like something from the days of yore. Not the present. Not my home country.
That is why, in the 2000s and 2010s, the biggest fights were about improving the way people do business. Calling out the fraud, abuse, and exploitation of corporations and leaders who were not living up to the principles of capitalism. Delineating the bad actors, Enron, Bernie Madoff, from the moral ones, like John Mackey of Whole Foods.
Some threats never fully disappear. The enemies of moral agency and human progress were waiting for their time to come back.
That time is now.
The floor is cracking
Gallup has been asking Americans about capitalism since 2010. In August 2025 it recorded the lowest favorability in the history of the survey: 54%.
That is still a majority. Barely. A few points is the difference between a country that still believes in the system that made it rich and a country that does not.
Among Democrats, the collapse already happened. 42% view capitalism favorably. 66% view socialism favorably.
On its own, souring on capitalism would be bad enough. It is worse than that. The alternative being put forward is not “be nicer.” It is a new effort to bring communism to America.
Bernie Sanders used to be the lone kook in office who called himself a socialist. That club is not a club anymore. AOC. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York City. A DSA machine that just swept New York primaries, knocking out incumbents and installing democratic socialists on the path to Congress.
This is not a vibe. It is a bench.
“We're socialists, not communists”
Some people will tell you there is a difference between those who call themselves socialist and those who are really communist.
I have several responses.
They said the quiet part. The explicit goal of influential DSA leadership is communism. Word for word. Red Star, a Marxist-Leninist caucus with people in DSA's national leadership, states it as policy: abolish capitalism, achieve communism. A member of the national committee put it in six words: “Our goal is liberation. Our goal is communism.” Read the points of unity.
They quote the dead men. These individuals, and those they push forward, quote Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and the rest. They are citing communists as inspiration. That is not a branding accident.
The wealth tax is confiscation with better PR. Calls for a national wealth tax are straight out of the communist playbook. It is the modern version of confiscating farms. It is not just an effort to seize cash. It is an effort to seize the means of production by forcing the people who own companies to sell their stakes in them.
Business leaders are being hunted. Not criticized. Targeted. Successfully, in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Unsuccessfully, in the arson attack on Sam Altman's home. Targeted nonetheless. When a society starts treating entrepreneurs as legitimate prey, it is not having a policy debate. It is rehearsing a purge.
They already told us the names are the same. The Soviet Union, the bastion of communism, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Communism is a form of socialism. After World War II, it became the predominant form.
Ask them. Ask anyone who says their socialism is not communism to disavow communism. Disavow Marx. Disavow the existing, explicitly communist countries: China, Cuba, and the rest. Ask them to define the difference between their socialism and communism, and listen closely.
When they cannot give any substance, when they will not condemn the countries where communism still lives, you know where they stand.
Mensheviks still lose. At best, you could say these new socialists are Mensheviks proposing a different path toward socialism than the Bolsheviks. Even if we grant that, ask: who won that battle, and what happened next?
Those who say our socialists are different from communists are either lying, or unintentionally covering for the greatest evil they can name.
The communists are coming. It is no longer a costume. It is no longer a seminar topic.
Those of us who studied what happened under communism in the 20th century have to take the lead now. Energize the people who have not yet understood the seriousness of this threat. And oppose it.
Playtime is over.
Culture, not politics
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation exists because 100 million people do not get a second chance to tell you what the system did to them. If you need a monument to take this seriously, go stand in front of that one. Then get back to work.
The threat is not just political.
Yes, it is about elected officials. It is more than that. It is about ideology. Beliefs. Ultimately, culture.
That means the battle is first a battle of ideas. Academia already lost that fight. It will not be won by another white paper from a think tank that talks to itself.
It has to be led by business leaders. People who actually create value. Capitalists themselves have to stand up for capitalism.
The threat is real. What is to be done?
Stop buying one more quarter
If you are in business, start thinking about the system as a whole. Then start speaking up.
Vivek Ramaswamy's Woke, Inc. laid out the deal with the devil too many leaders made for too long. They painted themselves in the colors of the critics of capitalism. They gave lip service to the causes those critics pushed. They empowered the people who wanted their downfall, in exchange for one more quiet quarter.
Whatever happened to capitalism didn't matter. So long as they could make a little more money this year.
That deal is up. The people you funded, platformed, and apologized to are not going to spare you because your DEI slide was prettier than your competitor's.
Everyone in business should start reading and understanding what capitalism actually means. Study F.A. Hayek. Ayn Rand. Milton Friedman. Read about the Russian Revolution. Not the campus version. The real one.
Take responsibility for being a capitalist
What you do reflects on the system as a whole. Until you realize that, nothing else can be done.
William Schlamm said it: “The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists.”
That is one of the highest praises you can offer capitalism. The system works. The people have to. Everything worth doing is hard to implement. Nothing is easy. It is a calling to do better.
If you want a starting list:
Lead with love. Not slogans. Care about the people who work with you, buy from you, and live near you. Enemies of capitalism tell a story in which you are a predator. Starve that story with how you actually treat people.
Give more. Create more value than you capture. That is the job.
Treat people with respect and dignity. Every employee, vendor, customer, and competitor is a moral agent. Not a prop. Not a headcount.
Find the win-win-win. You, the customer, the community. If your model only works by extracting from one of those three, you are handing the other side its next case study.
Engage the community. Show up. Hire. Build. Explain what you do in plain language. If the only story people hear about business is the one told by people who hate business, that is on us.
Speak out
Silence reads as consent. Or guilt.
Prepare your own talking points. Prepare your own story. Why did you start the company? Who has a better life because it exists? What would disappear if it didn't?
Then say it. In the boardroom. On the factory floor. On a campus. On X. At dinner when someone repeats a line they did not earn.
You do not need to become a politician. You need to stop outsourcing the moral case for your own life's work.
Work with people who share your values
Do not cede ground. Do not give them capital. Do not help them succeed so they can use that success to undermine you later.
This is not a call to be cruel. It is a call to stop being useful to people whose stated project is your abolition.
Partner with the builders. Hire the people who believe human beings are capable of creating value. Fund the founders who will defend the system that lets them build. Put your name on Principled Business. Put your time into the people who will still be standing when the mood changes.
Culture moves before law does. Law is how culture gets a badge and a budget.
If capitalists will not fight for the culture that makes capitalism possible, politicians who hate it will be happy to finish the job.
The Anti-Communism Campaign
It is time to launch an Anti-Communism Campaign.
Not a branding exercise. A campaign. With a pledge, a curriculum, resources, rooms, and arguments. Run by people who build things, not people who only write about them.
If the other side has a meme and we have a 40-page PDF, we will lose the room.
The Capitalists for Capitalism Pledge
Put your name on it.
A public commitment that you will create value, tell the truth about how value gets created, refuse to fund the people working to abolish voluntary exchange, and train the next generation of leaders to do the same.
Pledges are easy to mock. That is fine. The mockers are not the audience. The audience is every executive who has been waiting for permission to stop apologizing.
Sign it. Put it on your site. Put it in your onboarding. Make it expensive, socially, to hide.
Educational programs
Most people defending capitalism cannot explain it. Most people attacking it cannot either. That is a training problem.
Build programs for:
- Founders and executives (what the system is, why it is moral, how to talk about it without sounding like a press release)
- Employees (so the people inside the company can answer a dinner-table attack)
- Students (before the campus version of history is the only version they get)
Assign the books: Hayek, Rand, Friedman, Mises. Assign the history: 1917, Holodomor, Great Leap, Venezuela. Partner with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation so the dead are not an abstraction.
Principled Business already exists to do this work. Use it. Grow it. Do not reinvent a nonprofit in your spare time when one is already in the field.
Resources
Talking points. Stories. Data. Videos of what they actually say, not what their consultants say they mean.
A founder should be able to open a one-pager the night before a campus talk and walk in ready. A CEO should be able to send a new hire a 20-minute brief on why this company exists in a free economy.
Events
Rooms still matter. The Right Room. Summits. Dinners. Pitch competitions where capitalism has to perform, not just pose.
Get business leaders in front of students, investors, and each other. Not to network in the empty sense. To recruit.
Every event should produce three things: a story someone can retell, a relationship that turns into a deal or a hire, and one more person willing to say the word capitalism without flinching.
Debates
Stop talking only to people who already agree.
Invite the socialists. Record it. Make them answer the questions on camera. Disavow communism. Disavow Marx. Disavow China and Cuba. Define the difference.
If they can, the public deserves to hear it. If they cannot, the public deserves to see that too.
The campus playbook
Campuses are where this is being lost in real time. Treat them like a market you intend to enter.
- Identify campus leaders. Students who will actually organize, not just like a post.
- Flyer the campus. Physical presence still beats a Slack channel.
- Bring in speakers: business leaders, not just professors, to talk about why capitalism is great and what they have built.
- Run pressure campaigns against campus communists with the same energy they use against you. Sunlight. Records. Questions they do not want asked.
- Shirts, bumper stickers, slogans. Culture has merch. If you are allergic to that, you are allergic to winning.
What winning looks like
Not a vibe shift on Twitter. A generation of founders, executives, and students who can make the moral case for capitalism, live it, and refuse to fund its demolition.
The communists are coming. They are organized. They have a bench. They have a story.
So do we. Ours built the world they want to confiscate.
It is time to act like it.
Sign the pledge. Teach the ideas. Show up on campus. Get in the room.
Summit: 28–30 October 2026, Hilton Austin Downtown. principledbusiness.org/summit