The naturalness or normality of communal relations is similar to the classical social thought – the ideas of Machiavelli, Bernard de Mandeville, Thomas Hobbes. If, for Hobbes or Hegel, the civil state (society) is limited by the natural state, the situation "man is wolf to man", then for Zinoviev the essence of the social is the triumph of communality, the principle "man is rat to man". "Communal rattle" is a jungle, a nightmare, evil. French commentator Vladimir Berelovich noted that this world is an exemplary anti-utopia, in which utopian paradise embodied in hell. The society is not separated from the natural state and is, in comparison with Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopias, more "mundane", resembling communities of animals or even insects. As Konstantin Krylov writes, Zinoviev, unlike many, allowed the theoretical possibility of building a society of material abundance, where human labor would be abolished. The answer to the question of what "real communism" would be was the story in "Yawning Heights" about rats who were given ideal conditions of existence. Rats, according to Zinoviev, would have created a concentration camp.