That was Pol Pot’s theory. He was warned away from his utopian, revolutionary “Year Zero” program by Chinese communists who understood that a level of pragmatism and gradualism was necessary. He scoffed at this advice and a quarter of his countrymen died.

It’s fair to say that when communism was merely awful rather than utterly catastrophic, it was merely because at those specific times and places, it was still pursued with at least a nod to pragmatic concerns. It’s no coincidence that the best form of communism—Deng’s “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—was the most explicitly pragmatic variation of communism.