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.

A liberal friend told my husband, when he mentioned the millions of people who were murdered in the name of communism - “Communism has never been implemented properly.’

You mean in the future people will give up their freedom, their rights and all the worldy posessions willingly and peacfully all in the name of communism??? The big problem communism has is keeping the communication of the opposition quiet. Even tougher to do now. North Korea imprisons and kills daily in order to remain communist.

The commies know they have an opportunity for a fresh crack at the USA by going after the already propagandized minds of our youths.

It would seem that the fall of the Iron Curtain was a Phyrric victory for the West. We thought we were reintroducing (and in some cases, introducing for the first time) freedom in those parts of the world, but in actuality we were releasing the legacy of Lenin and Stalin from its cage.

communism and capitalism

Articles of this nature come with a built in fatal flaw.

The flaw is in presenting the notion that capitalism is contrary to communism. Capitalism is present in all forms of government. The difference worthy of comparison is in discovering who owns and controls the capital under the different forms of government.

Nations with Communist governments do not allow private ownership or control of capital.
America’s constitutionally guaranteed Republican form of government protects private ownership of capital.

There are four aspects of ownership necessary for the ownership of property to be full and complete. These four are title, control, use, and the ability to dispose of what a person owns.

In a free market economy, these aspects are unrestrained so long as the owner does not infringe on the legitimate rights and claims of others. True ownership of property and freedom go hand in hand. They always have.

Now let’s compare the two systems of capitalism, monopolistic state-controlled capitalism and competitive free enterprise capitalism.

Private ownership and control of capital exist in the competitive free enterprise system. In the monopolistic system, private or state title of ownership to the capital exists but more importantly, the state or the elite few who control the state control all the capital.

Today’s commie intellectual believes (quite falsely) that they themselves are soooo much smarter and wiser than those who have gone before (self-aggrandizing ego trip). They think communism and socialism have only failed because the right people weren’t in charge. Of course, they believe themselves to be “the right people” to lead us poor slobs. They honestly think they know what’s best for everyone. I know, laughable right? It would be knee-slapping funny if they weren’t actually serious about that. They think only they know best.

So did the communist before them. Today’s communist will behave exactly like yesterday’s communist if given the chance. They have to kill and oppress other-wise the strong and enterprising will rise up and kill communism again.

Ditto on The Black Book of Communism. It is translated from French and very academic, so I wouldn't call it a fun read.

I also recommend Gulag by Anne Applebaum. Not worthy for a Pulitzer, and the author did little to amplify the evil of the Gulag system. It does show the utter destruction of the prisoners' souls and humanity.

Add to the reading list MAO, The Unknown Story by Jung Chang. It goes into great detail, not only about Mao's moral depravity, but also his willingness to sacrifice as many Chinese as it took for him to maintain power.

The problem with this Salon author is that in his opinion he excuses all examples of communism as being untrue to Marx, and condemns every problem with capitalism in the next breath. The systems under which we live will never be pure and are subject to the forces of human nature. It takes an exceeding poor understanding of human nature to think that communism will every work, because collectivism doesn't reward hard work. Collectivism rewards just enough work to not get noticed.

“They believe communism and socialism have failed repeatedly (100% failure rate at making happy, prosperous societies) due to mistakes made by the people trying it.”

If that’s what they believe, they believe a theory about society that has no real people on it. Sounds like the old joke about the physicist making a cow produce more milk: “first, we assume a spherical cow”

The fruits of socialist indoctrination in our public schools.

Travis, you've got kids. Are they in the public schools? Even if they're in a private school, the indoctrination monster is growing larger in Florida and it's new name is COMMON CORE CURRICULUM. As an educator myself these last 25 years, I have seen the visages of the monster growing on the horizon. I have fought this agenda for decades and I'm thinking I might retire before it takes hold, anyway. Because this is the first of only a few steps to complete indoctrination mode: Make no mistake, even the liberal educators admit that our profession is about to disappear in favor of the "virtual classroom." The only human input will come from "moderators" to watch student behavior and issue bathroom passes and maybe call for a tech to fix computer glitches. This is how you complete the final indoctrination of youth. This is how freedom dies starting with the first generation of virtual education and that is happening now. Right freaking now! It's only in the introductory phases, but already most of the upper eschelon learners, the gifted and advanced placement high school kids are getting their content online in Florida classrooms, at least in the larger counties like my home of Miami-Dade. The smart ones are the first to fall. They are the "movers & shakers" of tomorrow.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marxism?show=0&t=1305753451

Marxism: the political, economic, and social principles and policies advocated by Marx; especially : a theory and practice of socialism including the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, the class struggle, and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of a classless society.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism?show=0&t=1391526939

Socialism: 3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.

They always try to redefine terms; don’t let em.

The more faithfully communism is implemented, the more brutal and tyrannical it becomes. This is because communal-ism is architected on lies, coveting and theft, which are three of the Ten Commandments that system violates by its very nature.

Capitalism is the system of free (voluntary and peaceful) exchange. The closer to a fully free market a system becomes, the more prosperous all participants will become. Any failures of capitalism are the failures of individuals to adhere to the moral framework that allows capitalism to thrive.

Anyone who defends communal-isms in any form is either evil or foolish.

The stupid is strong with this one, and his logic-fu is astonishingly weak.

Half the points are not even about communism, and the bulk of the content of the remaining points amount to “you suck too!” Writing a rebuttal would require discerning anything relevant to rebut; responding to “2+2=5 because oranges are orange” doesn’t work.

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