Communism in The Last of Us
From The Last of Us (HBO)
Categories:
Run time: 1:41
Clip Description: A community organized on collective principles after the collapse of the state, described by its members in exactly those terms and working – for now – rather better than the authoritarian alternative shown elsewhere in the series.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for the distinction between collective ownership at small scale and a command economy at state scale, and for the conditions under which cooperation is sustainable – repeated interaction, small numbers, visible contribution and the ability to exclude. It connects to Ostrom’s work on governing common-pool resources, which is the most useful corrective to the assumption that collective arrangements always fail.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this against the Hunger Games clip in the same session. One shows extraction dressed as order and the other shows cooperation that functions, and the productive question is what differs between them – which turns out to be scale, exit and accountability rather than ideology.
Discussion Questions
- The settlement calls itself communist and appears, at least at first, to work: everyone eats, everyone contributes, nobody owns much. It is also very small, and surrounded by threat. Which of those two conditions is doing more to make the arrangement viable, and what does your answer imply about whether it could be scaled up?
- Small-scale collective arrangements have a long and largely successful history; Elinor Ostrom documented dozens of them. Her design principles include clearly defined boundaries, monitoring by the users themselves, and graduated sanctions for those who defect. Check this settlement against those conditions and say which ones it satisfies and which it does not.
- The settlement is also governed by one man whose authority is not formally constrained by anything. Separate the economic arrangement from the political one, and ask what happens to each when he is no longer there. Succession is where personalist arrangements usually fail, and it is worth asking what this one has in place.
Assignment
Ostrom’s design principles were derived from irrigation systems, fisheries and community forests, not from post-apocalyptic television. Pick one real commons with a documented history — a specific fishery, grazing system or community forest — and check it against all eight principles. The International Journal of the Commons is open access and a good place to find cases. In two pages, report which principles the case satisfies and whether the ones it violates are the ones the literature associates with failure. The hard part is survivorship: the well-documented commons are disproportionately the ones that lasted, and you should say what that does to the strength of the evidence.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 1: Political Systems, Regimes, and Governments
Topics: 1.2 Defining Political Organizations; 1.3 Democracy vs. Authoritarianism; 1.8 Political Legitimacy
Skill: Concept Application
Big ideas: Power and Authority; Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: China, Russia
A community organized on collective principles after the collapse of the state, described in those terms by the people living in it, and working better than the authoritarian settlement shown elsewhere in the same series. Students routinely collapse communism as an economic arrangement into authoritarianism as a method of holding power. This clip pulls them apart, because here the collective is not the repressive one.
Discussion questions
- Explain the difference between an economic system and a regime type. Use this community to show that the two can vary independently of each other.
- China has a largely market economy and a single ruling party. Name one thing that combination makes easier for the government and one thing it makes harder.
- The community here works at the scale of a town. Name two problems that appear when the same arrangement is attempted at the scale of a country.
Short activity
Two axes, four boxes (15 minutes). One axis for the economy, planned to market. One axis for the regime, authoritarian to democratic. Students place China, Russia, the United Kingdom and this community on the grid, with one sentence of justification each. The exercise exists to kill the assumption that those two axes are really one axis, which is the single most common error students carry into the course and the one that costs them most on conceptual questions.