December 19, 2025
The Original Strategy
Part I: How Communism Learned to Capture Institutions
By: Idaho Dist. 25 Representative David Leavitt
One of the most persistent misunderstandings about communism is the belief that it was primarily an economic theory aimed at improving working conditions. While economics played a role, the deeper objective was always political. Communism sought control not merely of production, but of the structures that organize people, shape identity, and concentrate leverage. Power was never meant to flow upward from individuals. It was meant to be centralized, managed, and redirected.
This strategy was not implied. It was stated.
When the original goals of communism were articulated and later discussed publicly in the United States, they read less like revolutionary slogans and more like a blueprint for institutional capture. They did not focus on overthrowing government overnight. They focused on weakening it from within by gaining control over organizations people already trusted.
In that sense, the strategy operated less like a coup and more like a disease process. It did not announce itself. It embedded itself. It moved quietly through existing structures, using the body’s own systems to spread. Healthy institutions were not attacked head-on. They were gradually repurposed, redirected, and hollowed out while still appearing intact.
This is how institutional capture works. Like cancer, it does not begin by destroying the host. It begins by blending in. It uses familiar forms, trusted roles, and legitimate grievances to establish itself. By the time the damage becomes visible, the system no longer functions as it once did, even though it still looks the same from the outside.
Several of the stated goals make this approach unmistakable. Some focused on capturing political parties. Others targeted courts, schools, media, cultural institutions, and churches. Importantly for this discussion, one goal explicitly called for infiltrating and gaining control of labor unions.
That emphasis was not accidental.
Unions were identified as strategic leverage points because they organized people collectively. They allowed leadership to speak for large groups without requiring individual consent at every step. Control the organization, and you effectively control the voice of thousands or millions of people, even if many of them disagree with the direction being taken.
The objective was never simply to improve conditions for workers. It was to redirect loyalty away from the individual and toward the collective, and ultimately toward centralized authority.
To understand why unions were such an effective target, it helps to understand how they originally formed.
In the early industrial era, blue-collar workers faced real and often brutal conditions. Long hours, dangerous environments, unpredictable wages, and little legal protection were common. Workers organized not out of ideology, but necessity. Early unions were organic. They formed locally. Members knew one another. Grievances were personal and specific. Collective bargaining emerged as a practical response to imbalance, not as a political doctrine.
This bottom-up nature mattered. Power originated with individuals who voluntarily chose to associate. Their demands were narrow and concrete. Safer conditions. Fairer pay. Predictable hours. In that sense, early unions reflected a deeply American instinct to organize freely when institutions failed to protect individual rights.
Communist theory recognized this organic power and sought to redirect it.
Under this framework, unions were no longer valuable simply because they existed, but because they could be captured and repurposed. Once leadership structures were aligned, the union could be used as a political tool regardless of whether individual members supported that direction. The worker was no longer just a laborer seeking fair treatment. The worker became a representative of a class, defined in opposition to other classes, and increasingly detached from family, faith, and nation.
This was the strategic shift. Collective bargaining was useful. Collective identity was the real prize.
Once centralized, unions could be mobilized to influence elections, pressure governments, and normalize ideological conformity, all while maintaining the appearance of worker representation. The organization spoke. The individual was expected to follow.
This same pattern appeared repeatedly across the stated goals. Capture institutions. Replace organic authority with managed consensus. Use trusted structures as transmission belts for ideology rather than representation.
The United States resisted this model more effectively than many countries, though not perfectly. Over time, American labor unions became subject to significant regulation. Federal and state laws govern their formation, finances, elections, bargaining authority, and political activity. They are scrutinized, audited, litigated against, and publicly contested.
That scrutiny reflects an underlying recognition that collective power, even when well intentioned, must be constrained in a constitutional republic. The individual citizen remains the primary unit of political authority, not the collective body. When organizations grow powerful enough to override individual agency, they cease to be representative and become managerial.
By the mid to late twentieth century, the influence of traditional blue-collar unions began to plateau. The economy changed. Manufacturing declined. Service industries expanded. Professional and credentialed occupations grew in influence. Power shifted away from factory floors and toward offices, institutions, and regulatory systems.
What did not change was the underlying strategy.
The impulse to collectivize leverage did not disappear. It adapted.
Communism failed in many places not because it misunderstood power, but because it revealed itself too openly. The lesson learned was not to abandon infiltration, but to refine it. Influence would no longer be asserted primarily through mass movements. It would be embedded within systems that appeared neutral, technical, and inevitable.
Understanding this history matters because it reframes how modern governance operates. Many of the structures that dominate policy today did not arise organically from citizens demanding representation. They emerged as professionalized replacements for older forms of collective power, carrying forward the same centralizing impulse under new labels.
This is not a claim about intent in every case. It is an observation about structure. Systems matter more than slogans. Incentives matter more than rhetoric. And once power is centralized, it rarely remains benign.
The story of unions is not simply a story about labor. It is a warning about how collective mechanisms can be redirected away from individuals and toward centralized authority. It is a reminder that legitimate grievances can be used to justify long-term control. And it is an argument for vigilance whenever representation becomes abstracted from the people it claims to serve.
In the next piece, I will examine what replaced traditional unions as the primary vehicle for collective influence, and why so many policies today feel imposed rather than chosen.
Author’s Note
This essay is the first in a four-part series examining how power has gradually moved away from individual citizens and into organizational structures that operate largely outside public awareness. Each part builds on the last. The goal is not to provoke outrage, but to provide clarity about how modern governance came to feel imposed rather than chosen.
