Defining Communism

As much as one-third of the world’s population has lived and died under communism. It accounted for more than 100 million deaths in the last century. Yet this cult remains seductive worldwide. Defenders still argue that real communism has not yet been implemented. The failures documented to date are not intrinsic to the ideology. They persist in believing that cradle-to-grave guarantees will come to pass. New generations of those educated by the fifth columns ensconced in education, the media, and the culture are still prey to an aggressive, imperialistic ideology.

Communism is the political and economic ideology predicated on Marx’s theory of revolutionary socialism. His three-part evolution from feudalism to capitalism to communism claims to be scientifically and economically determined. Dialectical materialism mandates the withering away of the state, but this never occurs as the government consolidates control and replaces the individual with the collective. Communism targets the spirit and soul of each person. It enfolds humanity in the abstract but despises the individual who resists the collective.

Communism requires control of the means of production and all resources, as well as the distribution of goods and services. Despite promises of equality, most experience the equality of poverty, while the elites who control the party and the government and its many institutional and bureaucratic tentacles enjoy the lifestyle of the privileged. Private property is eliminated, and all enterprises are confiscated. What is supposed to become a classless society never does.

To collectivize society, the party and government use purges, a reign of terror, intelligence and military forces, and control of all civic associations from youth groups to labor unions. Deliberate hardships are inflicted to maintain a climate of fear and a culture of complicity and capitulation. Even cannibalism has been permitted to elevate the passionate loyalty of true believers and to punish those who persist in dissenting from the policies and principles of the party and holding on to crops, livestock, or other property to protect their families and communities. In a war against the old —the status quo of stability, traditions, or conventions —the champions of the new continue the duality of oppressor and oppressed to cleave to power.

Some iterations of communism stress nationalism, using socialist realism to have writers self-censor and wars of national liberation to justify warfare and aggressive territorial expansion. Others stress the cosmopolitan promises and global goal of creating a workers’ paradise for the region, hemisphere, or entire planet. Communists revise history. They rely on their ability to rewrite the past to justify the present and plan for the future. With a command economy, centralized quotas on agricultural products, and rapid industrialization, the party promoted corruption and devastating deficiencies. Those tasked with fulfilling quotas had to justify failures to survive or continue to maintain their positions, much less promotions. They either lied about production or blamed others for failure to meet goals. Undue pressure was put on workers and farmers. The exploitation of labor that communism blamed on capitalism applied to their own unrealistic demands. Unions lost all independence and served the interests of the party and state.

Social engineering accompanied the communist cult’s war on religion and on God. They boasted of superior citizens and workers produced by their totalitarian dystopias. Rights, liberties, and freedoms were denied. Conventions were repudiated as bourgeois constructs and counter-revolutionary mechanisms. Purges, eugenics, euthanasia, war on enemies of the revolution, including the nuclear family, were legitimized by an ever-changing and uncontested narrative. Imperial designs were described in glowing terms as measures to protect the fledgling communist countries from colonialist, capitalist regimes. Offensive policies were described as defensive. Mythic conspiracies masked the reality of political power struggles within the ranks of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Communism promises to provide for each person in accordance with his needs and to extract from each person in accordance with his abilities. It sounded good – the promise of perpetual dependence on the all-knowing party to make the difficult decisions of life with a built-in safety net. Department stores and grocery stores promised to fulfil wish lists. Citizens faced long lines and vanishing inventories. Party apparatchiks, on the other hand, wanted for nothing. They ate well, enjoyed country homes and delicacies, and lived with all the privileges and perks of the elite, while the people struggled to survive. When parades and other measures to promote patriotism failed, the informants and spies were ensconced in all areas of life, and the torture and executions carried out at notorious prisons kept the skeptics in line. There was no rule of law; constitutions, the judiciary, and the dictates emanating from the party established the iron law of orthodoxy.

In communist countries, every aspect of a person’s life was dictated by the state. Where a person or family lived, travel restrictions, job prospects, educational opportunities, job conditions and pay, obligations to the party, state and place of employment, the ability to marry and procreate, access to medical care, the silencing of opposition publications, parties and ideas, show trials, terms of imprisonment and military duties all intruded on the ability of the individual. No autonomy, agency, or free will were permitted. It was not enough to acknowledge that 2 + 2 = 5; the party demanded that you believe it. Final acquiescence to the Orwellian determination of truth did not provide absolution. You were still punished for committing thought crimes.

In the end, useful idiots found neither security nor a decent standard of living. They were subject to the proclivity of communists to eat their own. People lived in fear, from those at the bottom who might be singled out for extermination to those at the top, jealous of prospective opponents who might usurp their positions of power. Despite rich traditional cultures, communist regimes sought either to subject them to the dictates of the party or erase them. Entry into hot or cold wars enabled communists to perpetrate further incursions into the dignity and identity of individuals under their control and to elevate their own lust for power—sadism in the elite ranks, whether tribal, clan-centered, or ideology-inspired, was given free rein. Dissidents sought to escape, to secure underground publications, to satirize communist concepts in artworks, or to revolt against the revolutionaries.

Communism committed far more political murders than Christianity or Judaism it excoriated. Communism murdered far more dreams than it ever encouraged. Mendacious, willing to use any means necessary to secure and maintain power, camouflaged by a mask of hope hiding despair and death, communists are monsters engaged in that eternal, existential battle between good and evil. It refuses to die. It returns each generation to delude fresh recruits from new generations of brainwashing. Interview anyone who lived in a communist state and escaped. Leaders with charisma and a blood lust charmed the naïve with visions of revolutionary retribution against the past and visions of a worker’s paradise for the future. They delivered on the former but never produced the latter. Communism is an ideology that deserves to be deposited in the dustbin of history. The invitation to chaos, redistribution that punishes success and rewards failure, and instability fueled by propaganda and the resort to revolutionary violence continue to attract useful idiots.