Every revolution in history promised equality, brotherhood, and shared prosperity. Every one of them delivered tyranny, suffering, and betrayal. And yet the dream persists—because it was never wrong. Only the method was.

In What Institutional Communism Got Wrong, Boris Kriger—a former Orthodox priest who ran a homeless shelter in his own house for nine years, lived in an Israeli kibbutz, and once found himself teaching communism to the general secretaries of Canada’s two communist parties—makes a case so simple it sounds radical: cooperation is the natural state of human beings. Conflict requires effort. Happiness does not require perfection. And the future belongs not to revolutionaries but to people who are simply left alone to figure out how to live together.

Drawing on evolutionary biology, game theory, the sociology of intentional communities, and a doctoral thesis on complex systems—but wearing its learning lightly, with the warmth of a man who has lost his home, his savings, and his clerical robes and discovered that losing everything is a kind of freedom—this book dismantles the myth that people need to be forced into goodness. It shows why top-down utopias always collapse, why most voluntary communes also fail (and why that’s fine), why the invisible ninety-five percent of peaceful cooperation never makes the news, and why the real revolution is not a revolution at all but a quiet, stubborn insistence on doing good.

Funny, honest, and unexpectedly hopeful, What Institutional Communism Got Wrong is a book for anyone who suspects that the world is not as broken as it looks—and that happiness, like cooperation, may be the most natural thing we do.

The academic article on which this book is based appears at the end of the volume.