Why you're wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism)

As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka and Pete Seeger made abundantly clear, most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is arrant nonsense. This is not surprising, given our country’s history of Red Scares designed to impress that anti-capitalism is tantamount to treason. In 2014, though, we are too far removed from the Cold War-era threat of thermonuclear annihilation to continue without taking stock of the hype we’ve been made, despite Harry Allen’s famous injunction, to believe. So, here are seven bogus claims people make about communism and capitalism.

Obviously, no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt – including those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said fortune.

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is, he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.

This is true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a title – deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means of production,” we are in the realm of property; when Fox Business Channel hosts move to confiscate my tie, we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?

The mirror-image of the “oppressive communism” myth is the “liberatory capitalism” one. The idea that we’re all going around making free choices all the time in an abundant market where everyone’s needs get met is patently belied by the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people. Most find ourselves constantly stuck between competing pressures and therefore stressed out, exhausted, lonely, and in search of meaning. — as though we’re not in control of our lives.

We aren’t; the market is. If you don’t think so, try and exit “the market.” The origin of capitalism was depriving British peasants of their access to land (seizure of property, you might call it), and therefore their means of subsistence, making them dependent on the market for their survival. Once propertyless, they were forced to flock to the dreck, drink and disease of slum-ridden cities to sell the only thing they had – their capacity to use their brains and muscles to work – or die. Just like them, the vast majority of people today are deprived of access to the resources we need to flourish, though they exist in abundant quantities, so as to force us to work for a boss who is trying to get rich by paying us less and working us harder.

Even that boss (the apparent victor in the “free exchange”) isn’t free: the market places imperatives on the ownership class to relentlessly accumulate wealth and develop the forces of production or else fail. Capitalists are compelled to support oppressive regimes and wreck the planet, as a matter of business, even as they protest good personal intentions.

And that’s just the principle of the system. The US’s particular brand of capitalism required exterminating a continent’s worth of indigenous people and enslaving millions of kidnapped Africans. And all the capitalist industry was only possible because white women, considered the property of their fathers and husbands, were performing the invisible tasks of child-rearing and housework, without remuneration. Three cheers for free exchange.

*The number cited is as consistent as it is rooted in sound research; i.e., not.

Greg Gutfeld, one of the hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” and a historical scholar of zero renown, recently advanced the position that “only the threat of death can prop up a left-wing dream, because no one in their right mind would volunteer for this crap. Hence, 110 million dead.” In declaring this, Gutfeld and his ilk insult the suffering of the millions of people who died under Stalin, Mao, and other 20th Century Communist dictators. Making up a big-sounding number of people and chalking their deaths up to some abstract “communism” is no way to enact a humanistic commitment to victims of human rights atrocities.

For one thing, a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. These people weren’t resisting having their property collectivized; they were committed to collectivizing property. It is also worth remembering that the Soviets had to fight a revolutionary war – against, among others, the US – which, as the American Revolution is enough to show, doesn’t mainly consist of group hugs. They also faced (and heroically defeated) the Nazis, who were not an ocean away, but right on their doorstep.

So much for the USSR. The most horrifying episode in 20th Century official Communism was the Great Chinese Famine, its death toll difficult to identify, but surely in the tens of millions. Several factors evidently contributed to this atrocity, but central to it was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” a disastrous combination of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution designed to transform China into an industrial superpower in the blink of an eye. The experiment’s results were extremely grim, but to claim that the victims died because they, in their right minds, would not volunteer for “a left-wing dream” is ludicrous. Famine is not a uniquely “left-wing” problem.

Whatever one’s assessment of the crimes committed by Communist leaders, it is unwise for capitalism’s cheerleaders to play the body-count game, because if people like me have to account for the gulag and the Great Sparrow campaign, they’ll have to account for the slave trade, indigenous extermination, “Late Victorian Holocausts” and every war, genocide and massacre carried out by the US and its proxies in the effort to defeat communism. Since the pro-capitalist set cares so deeply for the suffering of the Russian and Chinese masses, perhaps they’ll even want to account for the millions of deaths resulting from those countries’ transitions to capitalism.

It should be intuitive that capitalism, which glorifies rapid growth amidst ruthless competition, would produce great acts of violence and deprivation, but somehow its defenders are convinced that it is always and everywhere a force for righteousness and liberation. Let them try to convince the tens of millions of people who die of malnutrition every year because the free market is incapable of engineering a situation in which less than half of the world’s food is thrown away.

The 100 million deaths that are perhaps most important to focus on right now are the ones that international human rights organization DARA projected will die climate-borne deaths between 2012 and 2030. 100 million more will follow those, and they will not take 18 years to die. Famine like the human species has never known is in the offing because the free market does not price carbon and oil-extracting capitalist firms have, since the collapse of the USSR, become sovereigns of their own. The most virulent anti-communists have a very handy, if morally disgraceful, way of treating this mass extinction event: they deny that it’s happening.

5. 21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors.

Before their revolutions, Russia and China were pre-industrial, agricultural, largely illiterate societies whose masses were peasants spread out over truly vast expanses of land. In the United States today, robots make robots, and less than 2% of population works in agriculture. These two states of affairs are incalculably dissimilar. The simple invocation of the former therefore has no value as an argument about the future of the American economy.

For me, communism is an aspiration, not an immediately achievable state. It, like democracy and libertarianism, is utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal, in its case the non-ownership of everything and the treatment of everything – including culture, people’s time, the very act of caring, and so forth – as dignified and inherently valuable rather than as commodities that can be priced for exchange. Steps towards that state of affairs needn’t include anything as scary as the wholesale and immediate abolition of markets (after all, markets predate capitalism by several millennia and communists love a good farmer’s market). Rather, I contend they can even include reforms with support among broadly ideologically divergent parties.

Given the technological, material, and social advances of the last century, we could expect an approach to communism beginning here and now to be far more open, humane, democratic, participatory and egalitarian than the Russian and Chinese attempts managed. I’d even argue it would be easier now than it was then to construct a set of social relations based on fellowship and mutual aid (as distinct from capitalism’s, which are characterized by competition and exclusion) such as would be necessary to allow for the eventual “withering away of the state” that libertarians fetishize, without replaying the Middle Ages (only this time with drones and metadata).

Apparently, lots of people are unable to distinguish equality from homogeneity. Perhaps this derives from the tendency of people in capitalist societies to view themselves primarily as consumers: the dystopic fantasy is a supermarket wherein one state-owned brand of food is available for all items, and it’s all in red packaging with yellow letters.

But people do a lot more than consume. One thing we do a huge amount of is work (or, for millions of unemployed Americans, try to and are not allowed). Communism envisions a time beyond work, when people are free, as Marx wrote, “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In that way, communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity: tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even with in a single person’s “occupation.”

That so many great artists and writers have been Marxists suggest that the production of culture in such a society would breed tremendous individuality and offer superior avenues for expression. Those artists and writers might have thought of communism as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” but you might want to consider it an actual instantiation of universal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Instead of allowing all people to follow their entrepreneurial spirit into the endeavors that fulfill them, capitalism applauds the small number of entrepreneurs who capture large portions of mass markets. This requires producing things on a mass scale, which imposes a double-uniformity on society: tons and tons of people all purchase the same products, and tons and tons of people all perform the same labor. Such individuality as flourishes amid this system is often extremely superficial.

Have you seen the suburban residential developments that the housing boom shat out all over this country? Have you seen the grey-paneled cubicles, bathed in fluorescent light, clustered in “office parks” so indistinct as to be disorienting? Have you seen the strip malls and service areas and sitcoms? Our ability to purchase products from competing capitalist firms has not produced an optimally various and interesting society.

As a matter of fact, most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.

Despicable. Would Salon print a similar article about Nazism, which is dead and gone, while Communism continues to claim victims? Where is the outrage such as when some obscure British historian presents an original interpretation of WWII? In some post-Communist countries such an article would cause legal proceedings against the author and the publication, and don’t give me lame arguments about the 1st Amendment, there are victims of these utopias still alive and suffering.

Imagine however that it is 1940 and an article such as this by, say, Walter Duranty, a recipient of Pulitzer Prize appears. The purpose of propaganda of this type is to plant the seeds of doubt and that is sufficient to affect foreign policy of the country, and was sufficient then, as it was sufficient during the Vietnam war. There are two sides to the story, the propagandists persuade us, and that’s quite enough, don’t believe those crazy Birchers whose writings we will not publish.

Yeah, but how are they going to get smart people to adopt communism? Put another way, why would high-ability people buy into the idea of a redistributionist society?

That's because communism and socialism for that matter doesn't mean what you think it means. Far from being a true redistribution paradigm, it really means for the ultra-rich to consolidate and control all sources of funding, including precious metals and even bit-coins. Everything. Put in that light, it suddenly becomes very clear why so many of the super rich and corporate C.E.O.'s belong to the Bilderberg society and the Council on Foreign Relations. See?

I’m in the banking business.

When I work in a high school, I usually teach American Government and Economics. I didn't really understand economics in the bigger picture as it pertains to the Fed and central banking and the concept of Fractional Reserve Banking until I read the Creature From Jekyll Island. Every year I get invited to the dinner for Economics teachers held at the Fed branch here in Miami. I go whether I'm in a middle school or high school. I live for the Q&A session at the end of whatever presentation is being given right after the AMAZING free meal and open bar. HoooooAH!

The first year I asked the speaker a question from the book and he couldn't answer it, although I forget just now what it was that I asked. But I do remember the Fed brass at the front table (I was at an adjoining table right next to them) utter in a stage whisper to "get the microphone away from that guy!" The next year I was NOT issued an invite from the Fed, but several of my friends (other economics teachers) did send me one anyway. I went. I wasn't the only one asking questions from the book. That was like ten years ago, now and we always go each October. A few of us can be counted on to ask them the difficult questions.

The guys from the Fed figured it was better to join rather than resist. I'm even on pretty good terms with a few of them. I asked for some of the shredded money they gave us in our Fed "goodie bags" along with the obligatory Fed indoctrination materials for our students (middle school and high school levels). The guy sent me a CASE of those shredded money packets. Each packet held an average of $500 to about a thousand in old shredded cash. I use them for kid motivation. They love 'em!

I have been in a bank for almost 10 years. I spent 25 years as a State examiner in Alabama, the last 5 of which was in the regulation of regional banks over $10 billion in assets. During those 5 years, by necessity, I was joined at the hip with Fed examiners since all 5 of our regionals at the time were Fed member banks. Suffice it to say that bank supervision had become exponentially more intrusive and meddling over my examiner career. I did not, and do not, like the trend. It is excessive, overbearing and now the tool of fascist style government where the shape and form of the product is dictated by government. I hope I can find a way to get out of the banking business in the next 3 - 5 years . . . I am only 57. I would like to get my hands on that book you cited.

Communism is harder to kill than Dracula. They are always waiting to seduce another generation of historical idiots with their siren song of forced equality...

Interesting though that the two have a lot in common: Fear of sunlight (Truth and transparency), Fear of Christians, Christian symbols and Christian doctrine, fear of weapons capable of doing them damage. Also they share a strong desire for mind control. They both embrace abomidable practices.

Something clicked just in time when I saw that picture...At first, I thought it to be pornographic in nature, but another part of me thought...

How appropriate...

I will leave it to the imagination of those willing to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...;-)

Communism may be winning the hearts and minds of the mush-heads that are being spawned these days...But in the end...

We’ll win...There is no other way to look at it...Either you are onboard willingly, and with full understanding and commitment, or get the heck out of my (our) way...

When the tide turns, I bet we’ll notice how many people do not say they work, or used to work at Salon magazine...And other places we know the be hives of liberal/socialist pests...

You just have to believe in our future, of regaining our liberties and freedoms, the way it was intended to be from those aged, but most important documents, and the inspiration that forged them in the minds of great, virtuous men...

If you can’t fathom it now, I can dig it...People go through their ups and downs...It takes a little faith, and little courage, and be unapologetic about your beliefs, in spite of “their” nonsense...

I know it cannot get much worse...Both socially and economically...But if it comes down to it, the fight they think will never come, will certainly be something that really stings when and if it does...And I hope they learn a lesson a shrink back into the depths of hell where this abominable political and social ideology came from...

IT has to happen...

Just my knee-jerk reaction...

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