This is a primer. A very straightforward rant for understanding Communism, thereby some context for considering that lies built upon lies, built upon generations of fabrications of half-truths and quarter-truths, are only a manifestation of power, and not about truth, justice, or access to a fair and equitable economy.
The first thing one should consider is that unless you’re part of some legacy family who accumulated wealth by exploiting peoples and environments, communism is not likely your enemy. You might not like it for whatever reason and if you’re not going to like it, you should at least know what it is that you’re not liking.
First off, communism is a response to the way industrialization was happening in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the early years of industrial manufacturing and industrialists sought to change the world for better or worse. Industrialists made things. They made goods, provided services, and distributed and transported them to markets. Accomplishing this required labor and resources. Not a lot of thought was put into the health and safety of workers, the living conditions that workers lived in, the paltry sums of money that they made, or the environments that they destroyed. Industrialists were motivated by power and profit and did what they could to influence governments and militaries.
It wasn’t long before treatises and books were published celebrating industrialism and technology, justifying new ethics of social inequality and greed. Before patent laws, for example, industrialists stole ideas and were no different from thieves, taking what they needed to maximize their profits. What emerged was Capitalism, an unregulated industrial and national conceit for wealth accumulation built upon the back of mercantilism.
It is not an exaggeration to accuse industrialists of genocide, slavery, theft, and fraud. Applying biological concepts like Natural Selection to racial, social, and national constructs reinforced colonialism and ecocide, rationalizing hegemony to increase profits and minimize costs.
For everyone living under these conditions, regulations were needed and strategies for striking and collective bargaining were created. Unions were organized for workers to protect their health, and increase their wages and living conditions; in the colonies, people revolted to protect themselves from being kidnapped, slaughtered, terrorized, and exploited.
Many people across the world devised ways to end this industrial abuse and in the mid-19th century, Karl Marx provided the real world with an economic manuscript that presented just how Capital should be used for the benefit of the workers and the protection of colonial peoples. The first thing—the most obvious thing—was that wealth consolidated at the very top needed to be redistributed to people, either through taxes or through legal government regulation whereby living wages, health, and safety, housing and education, environmental protection, etc., would be provided for. This was a global call for economic justice. Marx provided labor and colonized peoples with a basic understanding of how Capital functions in industrialized economies.
Capital was first published in Germany in 1867, three years after the 1st International worker’s conference and three years before Germany became a unified state in 1871, centralizing the German banking system. The second Communist International of 1889 lasted until roughly 1918 when the Bolsheviks defeated Czarist Russia.
When the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, it was a global movement across all the industrialized economies because it organized workers that had nothing to lose but their chains. This gave rise to international labor unions. We should understand that labor unions functioned differently under free-market industrialized economies than when communist or socialist countries were achieved because People’s republics were by definition inherently union governments.
As a response to the internationalism of communism— fascism was literally designed to imbue workers with a sense of nationalism opposed to internationalism. Industrialists and their government collaborators literally invented notions of national identity that excluded peoples, particularly the “stateless” Jews, who at that time were seen as internationalists. The fascist propaganda campaign split workers into two camps. Communists understood that their misery was caused by rich industrialists, landowners, and exclusion. Fascists promoted nationalist viewpoints that Jews, blacks, or other foreigners were the cause of their misery. Fascism bred a form of nationalist zealotry that used race and religion as a basis for cultural supremacy. It is not a coincidence that the racist incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was invoked in DW Griffith’s 1915 film, “Birth of a Nation,” a film that sought to create a white nationalist narrative against the internationalism of labor and anti-colonialism.
Communism seeks to raise the living standards of all peoples, particularly those who are oppressed and enslaved by the greedy motivations of profit and power in the hands of the few.
With the success of the proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, it wasn’t long before the Soviet State was established by Stalin five years later in 1922. Russia was primarily an agricultural country, rich with minerals, and did not have a strong industrial base. Stalin proved that you could have strong industries that benefitted the workers, and it wasn’t long before the Soviet Union became an industrial powerhouse competing with England, the United States, and the other European industrial powers. The rich industrialists—who we call “the capitalists”– saw Russia as a threat, especially when the free-market system they so cherished crashed in 1929. It is a total fabrication to consider that communists are anti-capital. Communism seeks to raise the living standards of all peoples, particularly those who are oppressed and enslaved by the greedy motivations of profit and power in the hands of the few.
It is important to understand that for these industrialists to maximize profit, they had to own and have access to resources, privatize modes of distributing goods, and create value chains around goods and services. They sought to maximize profits where they could. Governments even altered the taxation system to benefit industrialists who argued that they should not have to pay tariffs and pay fewer taxes thereby ensuring that workers and consumers paid the government revenue. Stalin did none of those things.
What I won’t delve into here is the grand conspiracy to demonize Stalin, other than to say his purges undermined whatever good reputation he may have deserved for having literally created the entire bureaucracy of the Soviet State from nothing. These purges were exaggerated and not unmotivated. They were caused by both internal and external situations involving both Trotsky and his followers who considered the Soviet State as a betrayal of the Second Internationale, the worldwide revolution they sought to lead; as well as external factors that sought to impede the successes of the Soviet Union.
To put things in perspective, Stalin built a state amidst conspiracies of Shakespearian proportions. When we consider the legacy of slavery and genocide that the United States was committed to during its state-building campaign– not just on the continent, but in all the territories– the conspiracy against communism was hypocritical, manufactured, and self-serving.
The events that led to WW2 were a competition for territories and resources. It was really a struggle between the fascists and the old colonial interests. The Soviet Union entered WW2 in 1941 when the Nazis invaded. Earlier in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was signed, the Soviet State was still young and they were still building its industrial infrastructure. In 1939, as Nazi Germany began their campaign, the Soviet Union did not have the industrial capacity to win the war as they did and used that agreement to buy time to build their industries.
In 1934, a year after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, it became apparent that anti-Semitism was rising in Europe, particularly the fascist countries and among nationalist and fascist communities in Europe. Stalin created Birobidzhan near the Mongolia-China-Russia border, a Zionist autonomous oblast for Jewish settlers facing persecution across Europe. It was widely celebrated as Jews had been seeking their own state throughout the 19th century. When WW2 ended, it would have been a normal function of statecraft to have carved out a Jewish state in Germany, rather than to have forced one onto the then British-occupied Palestine. The establishment of Birobidzhan, however, reveals a deep understanding that Stalin had of state-building and a new internationalist order.
The communists really represented a people’s interest and when you look at how and why the United Nations Charter was drafted, the anti-colonial and labor-driven aspects were driven by not just Stalin, but the communists in the old Administering Powers as well. While most notably, it was primarily the Soviet Union that initiated the process through which decolonization happened, thereby ending colonialism, the United States under President Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace understood the cooperation necessary to build the kind of peaceful world that the UN Charter was predicated upon.
Just how tenacious and conspiratorial were the industrialists?
Just how tenacious and conspiratorial were the industrialists against communism? There are a lot of places to start but for the purpose of this article let me start with the DNC conspiracy that stole the vote away from Roosevelt’s then vice-president, the popular, labor-friendly, and communist-sympathetic Henry Wallace. A last-minute rule-change by the DNC that included police locking out delegates that supported Wallace, connived to put the largely unknown Harry Truman in as VP.
Predicting that Franklin D. Roosevelt was not likely to survive his fourth term, Truman’s promotion led him to the White House where the anti-communist agenda of the Marshall Plan or the Truman Doctrine was implemented. This economic cooperation literally co-opted many of the foundational principles that were enshrined in the United Nations Charter for the benefit of the United States, advancing primarily the free-market industrialized countries, also known as the old colonial Administering Powers.
It is no coincidence that most of the countries that signed on to the Marshall Plan were indeed the colonizing industrial powers. Newspapers, books, and magazines inundated the market with fabricated stories about the communist countries and established a network of information that exaggerated the deficiencies of communism, many of these being the result of embargoes and military blockades. It should also be noted that while most of the colonized world has been liberated, there are still colonial possessions held by France, the UK, and the US, the very same countries that led and signed the Marshall Plan.
The 1948 Marshall Plan, also known as the 1948 Economic Cooperation Act, was the moment when the Cold War began. The United States and industry-led lobbyists fully implemented anti-communist campaigns of containment, obstruction, aggression, and military interventionist policies that were anti-democratic and corrupt. This created campaigns that turned Greece’s Civil War away from the communists. The Marshall Plan also supported the post-colonial Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang. After losing to Mao and the communists in 1949, the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan as it was under US occupation at that time.
Industrial greed led to the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and nearly every destabilization conflict across the continents until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. The Marshall Plan divided the world into either pro-communist liberated countries or US-backed “free-market” vassal states. It is well known that this capitalist corruption literally invented the Red Scare that excluded communist sympathizers and led to post-colonial policies, that to this day continue to perpetuate war crimes across the continents. This includes regime change and neoliberal privatization initiatives in current US-backed campaigns in Somalia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen, to name a few.
Communists, like everyone everywhere, like to have fun and party. They are not always poor, they are not anti-capital, and communists are not evil or godless. Anti-communist accusations don’t even make sense. Simply put, communists believe that the greed-based power and profit motivations of these privatizing industrialists need to be reversed. And with that, we come to say, “it’s not China, it’s not Russia, it’s the 1%, stupid!”