The Failure of Communism and Socialism
The Failure of Communism and Socialism



      At a time when elimination of capitalism as a totally failed system is being seriously discussed for the first time in nearly a hundred years, it's essential we understand that communism and socialism are NOT viable options. Both have failed miserably and are unworkable systems of societal coordination.

     The only viable option to terrorist, capitalism is a cooperative commonwealth community movement, as explicated in this essay and in a previous essay on the Form, Commonwealth.

    When communicating with people about such political-economic issues, we must take special care to use the correct terms and reference important historic events and personalities in precisely the manner to promote effective understanding.

     Analogously, we must also make certain that we don't allow misconceptions pretending to be truths to be foisted on us by the demonic cabal that has seized control of the United States.


 
        For example, in the current economic crisis, Obama's policies were misrepresented as socialist or Marxist because his cabal junta was said to be nationalizing financial institutions. Actually, Treasury and the Fed were looting American taxpayer money and giving it to financial institutions--nothing more. Capitalists revert to looting--which they con people into calling socialism--when their system collapses.

      The cabal isn't communistic or socialistic but fascistic. Trump has now ushered in the new American-Nazi party.


    In this essay, we'll expose the failure of communism and socialism, exploring the features that render them unworkable systems. Communism as a theory of sharing and living in common dates back to prehistoric times, even being mentioned in the Christian New Testament as a way in which some of the early Christian communities ordered their lives.

    But this is not the kind of communism we're referring to in this essay; we're speaking of the communism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler. Marxist communism contained within it the doctrine of destroying "racial trash" such as the Serbs, the Basques, the Britons, and the Poles. Hitler's "National Socialism" took much of its genocidal dogma from Marx and Engels.

      It's first essential to distinguish clearly between a commonwealth movement and communism and socialism.

Essential Distinguishing Points
Commonwealth Communities Communism Socialism
A new movement to create local and regional political systems founded in law by agreement of the members for the common good to replace plutocracy and state-corporate capitalism with small cooperative community groups A theory of social organization in which real property and the means of production are held in common; in modern terms, Communism (written with a capital C) refers to the historical movement that aims to overthrow the capitalist order by violent revolutionary means and to establish a classless society in which real property and the means of production will be publicly owned An economic/political system to replace the capitalist order through evolution rather than revolution to establish a classless society in which real property and the means of production will be publicly owned; Socialism has been combined with capitalism in all nations where it's been tried.


      This chart makes it clear that a commonwealth movement is to be clearly dissociated from both communism and socialism. Communism is an ideology fraught with negative connotations--as in these communist slogans and perpetration of mass murder:
After a trip to China in 1973, David Rockefeller praised Mao Zedong (who had just murdered 45 million Chinese). "The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history."

New York Times, 8-10-1973


Stalinist dictatorship
      These examples of armed insurrection and genocide separate communism completely from a commonwealth movement's non-violent methods.

      Socialism as a historic movement also contains a great deal of negative baggage, such as the fact that many American and European socialists continued to embrace Russian communism even after it had clearly been seen to have devolved into a murderous totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin.

      Around 1835 the word "socialism" made its first appearance in France. According to the historian G.D.H. Cole, "the 'socialists' were those who, in opposition to the prevailing stress on the claims of the individual, emphasized the social element in human relations and sought to bring the social question to the front in the great debate about the rights of man let loose by the French Revolution and by the accompanying revolution in the economic field." 3

      Critical examination of the predatory capitalist system by such thinkers as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky help us see its glaring defects.

      Writing my Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University on Karl Marx's early thought, 4  I came to see that he and other socialist thinkers saw clearly how the ideology of capitalism reduces humans to "commodities" within a mechanistic system. Marx's theory of a communist society and Bellamy's fictional account of a socialist Boston--in which human welfare would be the primary value--offer interesting visions in contrast to vulture capitalism's horrors.

      However, when it comes to the implementation of such a "new society," there the communists and socialists trail off into vague nostrums ("withering away of the state") or propound absolutistic dogmas ("inevitability of revolution") that have no real merit. Granted that neither communist nor socialist theory has ever been genuinely implemented--certainly not in the Soviet Union or any other European countries such as Britain, France, or Italy. But its doctrines as put into practice by its advocates have proven unworkable on any account. We must identify an economic system--or movement--primarily in reference to how it becomes manifested, not simply as it is advocated in pure theory.

      The movement away from predatory capitalism to a new, humanistic economic system will not occur automatically as if the workers of the world were to magically unite, telling themselves they have nothing to lose but their chains.

"Earlier socialists and communists, from Marx to Lenin, had no concrete plans for a socialist or communist society; this was the great weakness of socialism."

Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be?, 1976


      However, even though socialists and communists have no viable, concrete patterns for a beneficent society, certainly none of the current capitalist fascist rulers have any workable archetypal paradigms either--they merely carry out whatever transient expedient produces the most profit for them, and the most destruction and death for workers.

The Truth About Soviet Communism

      Soviet Communism can be identified by its bloody beginning under Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. These criminal, homicidal propensities led inevitably to the revision of Marxist communism into Stalin's murderous totalitarian dictatorship. Stalin mug shot Lenin and Stalin began as bank-robbers and killers. Lenin had been hardened by the execution of his elder brother after a botched conspiracy to kill the Czar. Stalin was essentially a brutal thug, engaging in protection rackets, ransom kidnappings, counterfeiting operations, assassinations, extortions, and robberies.

      There was no Russian revolution as the communists claim--only the seizing of power by one criminal gang murdering other gangs. The German Army, with its invincible might, had slowly purged Russia of its military and economic strength. The so-called "Russian revolution" was not an epic contest of vast forces but skirmishes between weak factions operating in a power vacuum, with the Bolshevik gang of thugs, thanks to Lenin and Trotsky, the most adept at filling that vacuum. The Bolsheviks were the only left wing group to organize their own military force. The power vacuum had become so complete that it took them only five days to seize power. "It had all been 'as easy as picking up a feather,'" Lenin commented later. "Lenin took power in a coup, not a popular uprising." 5

    Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were financed by capitalists who wanted to scare the world into thinking that communism was a world scourge threatening to take over the universe. The capitalists used the cold war scare to make billions of dollars in armaments manufacture to win the "missile gap" and the other fake gaps.

the myth of Lenin as fearless leader of the masses       According to Bertram Wolfe, in his book An Ideology in Power: Reflection on the Russian Revolution, Lenin "[seized] power not in a land 'ripe for socialism' but in a land ripe for the seizing of power." Communism and socialism were ideological "covers" that Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky used as propaganda for despotism. The "Russian masses leading its revolution" was pure fantasy. Lenin and his gang never allowed the "masses" any voice whatsoever; when the Bolsheviks could gain only a small minority in the elected Constituent Assembly, Lenin simply disbanded it and appointed himself Dictator.

      Lenin's "dictatorship of the proletariat" revealed itself as dictatorship over the proletariat and over other party members. Lenin entrusted the prevention of "factionalism" within the party to Stalin, since he had proved quite adept at murdering anyone who stood in their way. This included burning villages in order to intimidate the peasantry into submission and discourage food bandit raids. In May 1919, in order to stem mass desertions in the "glorious revolution," Stalin had deserters and renegades publicly executed as traitors.


"The strongest of us are loath to give up a long-cherished dream. I had come to Russia possessed by the hope that I should find a new-born country, with its people wholly consecrated to the great, though very difficult, task of revolutionary reconstruction. And I had fervently hoped that I might become an active part of the inspiring work.

Emma Goldman "I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise. It required fifteen long months before I could get my bearings. Each day, each week, each month added new links to the fatal chain that pulled down my cherished edifice. I fought desperately against the disillusionment. . .

"Then came Kronstadt. It was the final wrench. It completed the terrible realization that the Russian Revolution was no more.

"I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything. Unable and unwilling to become a cog in that sinister machine, and aware that I could be of no practical use to Russia and her people, I decided to leave the country. Once out of it, I would relate honestly, frankly, and as objectively as humanly possible to me the story of my two years' stay in Russia."

Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment In Russia, 1925


      Murderous insurrection as a necessary means of seizing power was an integral doctrine within the Marxist ideology. Marx and Engels believed that an extensive period of violence, civil conflict, and international conflict was inevitable and essential to ultimate communist victory.

      Unfortunately, many American and European pseudo-intellectuals sympathisized with the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin Soviet dictatorship, deluding themselves--in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary--that the mythical "Russian Revolution" represented a genuine victory for the working class.
"The lives and work of many western intellectuals in the twentieth century were intimately bound up with Stalinism. But the French writer Romain Rolland (1866-1944) belongs to an especially interesting club: he joined the most celebrated Rolland in Soviet Russia interwar 'friends of the Soviet Union', illustrious western visitors who came to be lionized in an unprecedented way during the rise of Stalinist culture in the USSR in the 1930s. Like Bernard Shaw, Henri Barbusse, Andre Gide, and Lion Feuchtwanger, he was granted an audience by Stalin himself; his 1935 Moscow tour was treated as a milestone of cultural propaganda inside the USSR as well as a state visit of the highest level. The elderly Rolland--musicologist, grand ecrivain, playwright, biographer, popular enlightener, pacifist, anti-fascist, earnest man of conscience, outspoken defender of French-German, pan-European, and East-West reconciliation--remained silent during the purges and was perhaps the most famous European intellectual to become an uncritical apologist for Stalinism in the 1930s."

Michael David-Fox, "The 'Heroic Life' of a Friend of Stalinism:
Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture," Slavotiica, April 2005

Barbaric Communism In New Guises

      Lenin's manifestation of Marxism in blood-thirsty revolutionary slaughter provided a model for a rogues gallery of deranged thugs such as Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong-un, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Xi Jinping.

Nixon and Mao       The only reason Stalinist and Maoist brands of communism were allowed to persist beyond the second world war, was that capitalism needed fantasy enemies against which to fight the new "cold war," in keeping with the cabal's primary strategy of controlling the masses through the terror of war.

      Finally, in 1991 when the pretence of Soviet communism's viability could no longer be propped up by CIA lies, the failed "command economy" was allowed to collapse--so capitalists and oligarchs of all stripes could rush in to plunder Soviet wealth.

      Chinese style communism has been allowed to persist because "China is the cheap-labor foundation upon which the survival of world capitalism presently depends. Subtract China from the equations of modern world economy and what would be the present position of American capitalism?" 6

"If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of superrich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite."

Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy


America's Brief Flirtation With Socialism

      The meteoric rise of American socialism can best be described by conditions within the American Socialist Party in 1912:

  • Its candidates were elected to municipal offices across the country

  • Its leader, Eugene V. Debs, running for the presidency, received fully 6 percent of the national vote

   Only eight short years later, 1920:
  • The American Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was serving a prison term for agitation against World War I

  • The party's ties to the trade-union movement and the electorate were sundered

      At the same time, we must remember that Debs ran for US president from his prison cell in 1920 and won nearly one million votes, the largest vote total ever received by a socialist candidate in the United States.

      Upton Sinclair, a well-known novelist, ran in the 1934 California gubernatorial election as a Democrat. He received 879,000 votes, his most successful run for office, though he was overwhelmingly defeated. Sinclair's platform, known as the End Poverty in California movement (EPIC), failed to gain any widespread support after 1934.

"The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC [End Poverty in California]. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."

A letter from Upton Sinclair to Norman Thomas, 25th September, 1951

The Rise and Fall of European Socialism

      At the end of World War II, conditions in European countries were so volatile--the myth of the Russian revolution still fresh in the minds of workers worldwide--the capitalist cabal determined that a modicum of "democratic socialism" would be instituted in Europe.

      The pretence that "democratic socialism" might be a viable political-economic strategy was the seeming success of the American and European governments to organize wartime economic resources through modified "command economies." Under the direction of the capitalist cabal, all nations that instituted "democratic socialism" did so as part of a "mixed economy:" socialism and capitalism combined. It was inevitable that such a mongrel admixture of contradictory ingredients would prove unworkable.

      The Swedish welfare state was founded in 1933. It was initially successful because of its small homogeneous population and its commodity exports of lumber and iron ores. During World War II, Sweden was ideally placed as a neutral exporting nation needed for German rearmament.

      The Labor Party in England won a sweeping electoral victory in 1944. Clement Atlee pretended to put "democratic socialism" into practice in the birthplace of capitalism. It began with nationalization of "the main factors in the economic system:" the Bank of England, coal mines, civil aviation, cable and wireless communications, railroads and trucking, and electricity and gas.

      Some 58 third world states established somewhat-socialistic governing structures in the years of post Word War II decolonization and Cold War. Many political-economic leaders in the developing nations had been indoctrinated in socialist concepts in Western universities--especially in the London School of Economics established by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to spread socialist dogma.

      In Britain, the unworkable combination of "democratic socialism" and capitalism soon forced an end to further nationalizations and even a retrenchment in social welfare: reductions in subsidies for food and imposition of a modest charge for medical prescriptions.

      By 1951, the Conservatives under Churchill were back in power. Wage controls and limitations on the right to strike had undermined worker support for the Labor Party. The Conservatives reversed only the nationalization of iron and steel, so the bulk of the socialist experiment remained in place in the British economy until the 1980s.

      For three decades, neither Labor nor Conservatives could make England's socialist-capitalist system work--and voters kept expressing their displeasure at the ballot box until the Conservatives found a straight-out capitalist hireling--Margaret Thatcher--who would make a clean break from socialism and rejuvenate predatory capitalism. Her mirror image in the United States was Ronnie Reagan, controlled by George H. W. Bush (the defacto President after the failed assassination attempt on Reagan's life).

      Retrenchment from "democratic socialism-capitalism" to full-out vulture capitalism was instituted in France under François Mitterand. In the face of stagnant output, trade balance collapse and soaring inflation, Mitterand ordered "an abrupt about-face" from earlier socialist-capitalist policies. "The private sector is recognized as the creator of social wealth," proclaimed Mitterand.

      The cabal began as early as the 1970s to obliterate gains for American workers realized under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. Union elites were bribed into becoming capitalist Leach and Grammrunning-dogs, leaving the workers--as in the auto industry debacle--without benefits or jobs. Structural gains such as the Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting a bank holding company from owning other financial companies was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The American Democratic Party played essentially the same role as European social democratic parties.
"The Democratic Party has been the principal instrument employed by the American capitalists for more than a century to block the development of an independent working class party, preserve the hegemony of the capitalist two-party system, and maintain the capitalist class' monopoly of political power." 7

"The first wave of the struggles for socialism, that of the twentieth century, has shown the limits of European social-democracies, of the communisms of the third international, and of the popular nationalisms of the Bandung era--and the demise and collapse of their popular, social-democratic, socialist ambitions."

Samir Amin, "Seize the Crisis!" Monthly Review, December 2009



Socialism's Historical Demise

      Over the past seventy-five years, European "democratic socialism" parties have increasingly compromised with predatory capitalism or, in certain cases have completely capitulated to capitalist demands. Certain "socialist" features such as nationalized healthcare and welfare have made these nations more supportive of workers than a totally capitalistic system, as in the United States. However, these "socialist" elements are being rapidly debased or, in some instances, outright destroyed. Historical socialism's congenital defect of compromising with capitalism inevitably leads to its ultimate demise. This is clearly evident in the current capitalist bailout of big banks and financial institutions on the backs of taxpayer-workers worldwide.


"The so-called Irish bailout is only the beginning. The financial markets are demanding not just a limited period of austerity, but the destruction of the entire post-war European social welfare system."

Nick Beams, "After the Irish bailout: The financial wolf pack targets new victims," 12/1/2010, Source


      The decline of social democratic parties throughout Europe is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the June 2009 elections debacle. Across Europe, social democratic parties received only 22 percent of the vote, six percent less than in the 2004 European election. Only 43 percent of the voters turned out, so this means that less than one person in ten voted for socialist party candidates.
  • Great Britain (the Labour Party had been in power for the past twelve years): Support for Labour dropped to a record low of 16 percent--less than the vote received by the extreme right-wing UK Independence Party

  • Spain: the ruling Socialist Party lost five percentage points and now has less support than the right-wing People's Party

  • Germany: the Social Democratic Party (in power for eleven years), received a new low of 21 percent of the total vote

  • Portugal: ruling Socialist Party support fell from 45 to 27 percent

  • France: the Socialist Party (in opposition to the leading party for the past seven years) received just 17 percent--a decline of 12 percentage points compared to five years ago

  • Italy: Democratic Party (successor organization to the Italian Communist Party and other "left" parties) support dropped from 31 percent to 26 percent

  • Denmark: the opposition Social Democrats received 21 percent, losing 12 percentage points from the last election

  • Dutch Labour Party support fell to 12 percent, half what it had been

  • Austria: the socialist party support decreased from 33 to 24 percent

"This decline is all the more remarkable when one bears in mind that the election took place in the midst of the most severe world economic crisis since the 1930s. Although unemployment is rising rapidly and the living conditions of broad layers of the population have worsened considerably, voters are deserting the social democrats in droves."

Peter Schwarz, "The Decline of Social Democracy"


Why Communism and Socialism Failed

      Historically, Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes have been nothing more than totalitarian dictatorships. They've used Marxist and communist rhetoric as a cover for sheer despotism: criminal gangs seizing power through armed insurrection. Marxist and communist theory has been used as a propaganda tool to hoodwink and brainwash the masses.

"Socialism and communism quickly changed from a movement whose aim was a new society and a new man into one whose ideal was a bourgeois life for all, the universalized bourgeois as the men and women of the future."
Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be?


      "Democratic socialism" has predominantly gained power through peaceful means rather than armed revolution, but its failure Marx and Engelshas been inevitable nonetheless. Its primary practical defect has been in compromising with capitalism in almost every regard, even to the point of renouncing solidarity with workers in other countries when war has broken out (as in World Wars I and II).

      The nineteenth century exposé of the actual workings of capitalism by Marx and Engels was brilliant in its daring to cut through the euphemisms, delusions, and subterfuges that theorists such as Adam Smith and Hobbes used to mask capitalist corruption and depravity. For the first time in human history, we were able to see beneath the veil of propriety that capitalists kept over their transactions: how profit derived, for example, from the surplus labor value implanted into commodities by workers and looted by capitalists.

      However, within the theories of Marx and Engels--and those of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and later communist thinkers--there are inherent defects that lead to their unworkability and failure. The downfall of communism and socialism could be predicted from the fundamental flaws in their theoretical foundations. Disciples and advocates of these conceptual systems also become complicit "carriers" of these ideational and practical flaws.

      We'll examine three such innate, congenital defects:

  • Ideological zealotry

  • Intellectual presumptuousness

  • Bias leading to distortion

          These defects in thought and practice--as examined in a few illustrative cases within true-disciples of Marxism and socialism--will provide a glimpse into the more extensive inherent defects in Marxist and socialist theory and implementation.
  • An Allegory of Communist Defect

    In 1987, Kim Jong Il began building what was to be the world's largest hotel. Construction stopped in 1992, due to lack of funds and instability due to sub-par concrete. It now looms over the city, windowless and empty, costing 2% of the country's GDP, as the citizens starve.

    Ideological Zealotry

       A small number of Marxists and socialists 8 prove to be some of the most intelligent thinkers now studying political-economic structures and events. Their ability to steer through labyrinthine subterfuge and complexity is truly outstanding at times. We're fortunate to have their writings and organizations available to us in these times of pandemic falsifying and sophistic propagandizing. My criticism of their excesses and mistakes in specific instances is in no way meant to indicate that their thinking in general should be rejected out of hand.

          At times, however, these discerning Marxist-socialist scholars evince in their thinking and writing all three of the defects we've outlined above. In his 2005 essay, "Marxism, history and the science of perspective," David North, chief analyst for the World Socialist Web Site, waxes ecstatic on the transcendental brilliance of Marx's and Engels' Communist Manifesto:

    "There is no more powerful refutation of the denial of the possibility of historical prediction than the text of the Communist Manifesto, the first truly scientific and still unsurpassed work of historical, socio-economic and political perspective. In a few pages, Marx and Engels identified in the class struggle an essential driving force of history, outlined the economic and political processes out of which the modern, bourgeois, world emerged, and explained the world-historical revolutionary implications of the development of capitalist industry and finance."

          Anyone who seriously studies the Communist Manifesto recognizes it as an important original and innovative exposé of capitalist theory and practice, but describing it as "the first truly scientific and still unsurpassed work of historical, socio-economic and political perspective," is nothing more than ideological zealotry similar to that of Lenin in the quotation below.


    "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true."

    Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
    The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism


    Intellectual Presumptuousness

          Within the Communist Manifesto, there appeared the defect of presuming that with the proper Marxist theory one could unerringly predict the course of history.
    "The weapons with which the capitalist class [bourgeoisie] felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the capitalist class itself. "But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians."
          This presumption of prophetic infallibility has proven false: the capitalist class has seized almost absolute power over the working class throughout the world--to the point that capitalists are now perpetrating genocide on workers as a class. Instead of proving to be the "weapon" that destroys the capitalist class, the working class has proven to be submissive victims.

          Taking their lead from Marx and Engels, contemporary disciples presume that they alone can explicate the hidden meanings of current events.

    "How are these seemingly opposite phenomena [of 1991 to 2001] to be explained? I think it is fair to say that outside of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site, nobody has been able to provide a cogent answer." 9


          Bary Grey is correct that few other thinkers at the present time have the demonstrated capability of explicating complex events in a manner that reveals their hidden implications and meanings. But, there is a small number of non-Marxists and non-socialists who are able to discern the covert significance of contemporary events. I would suggest that a serious study of the material on the site where this essay appears would prove this to be the case.

    Bias Leading to Distortion

          True believer disciples become so enamored of and dedicated to Marxist-socialist theories and analyses that they distort historical facts. In this example, a socialist scholar proves to be such a biased defender of his master, Leon Trotsky, that he misinterprets historical events.
    "Certainly after the Russian Revolution, the role of Stalinism was decisive in aborting the development of the world socialist revolution. Trotsky was obliged to expose the mistakes, and later the crimes, of the Stalin clique, trace them to their political and ultimately their social roots, and elaborate a perspective and a strategic and tactical orientation for the working class to overcome the obstacles thrown in its path by both capitalism and capitalism's bureaucratic agencies within the labor movement." 10
          As we saw above, there was no "Russian revolution;" only a criminal gang led by Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky murdering other criminal gangs. The "world socialist revolution," similarly, is a figment of Grey's and other socialists' imagination. Trotsky felt "obliged" to expose the crimes of the Stalinist clique only after they had him expelled from the party and then exiled him from the Soviet Union in 1929. Until that time he had felt obliged to say that the murders, rapes, kidnappings, and extortions Stalin committed were perfectly acceptable as necessary for the glorious "Russian revolution."

    A Spectre Is Haunting the World: Capitalism

          One of the main disservices that Marxist and socialist scholars do to American workers is to give them the impression that something like the illusory "Russian revolution" could and should occur in the United States.

    "In the epoch of capitalist decline and socialist revolution, the objectively revolutionary role of the working class can be realized only if and when that class, or at least its most advanced layers, becomes conscious of its revolutionary role and the historical necessity embodied in that role."   11


          If an armed insurrection were to occur in America, it would be the workers who would suffer, not the Marxist-socialist theorists. But, in fact, no such "revolution," can or will occur in the United States; the criminal cabal is too thoroughly ensconced in power for such an event to occur, holding in its tentacles all the instruments and agencies of violence (police, military, propaganda, "intelligence").

          Socialists are also misleading workers worldwide by perpetrating the misconception that the beginning of an overthrow of capitalism has begun with the "color revolutions" in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria and Iran.

    These "color-revolutions" are actually CIA-sponsored fake revolutions. Denmark's socialist-like state is certainly much better than capitalism, but the recent forced increase in working hours for Danish teachers by the government, indicates that Denmark is still a class society: financiers against workers. Genuine revolutions succeed only if they're directed by highly intelligent leaders, who can distinguish a fake from a real revolution.

          Workers need to understand just what conditions are in America and throughout the world, so they can plan intelligently to respond to the capitalist pandemic of terror and tyranny. The situation in the United States at present is nothing like that in Russia in 1917. Yes, there has been a total collapse of the capitalist economic system--arisisng from the 2007-8 prime mortgage crime spree--which was quickly covered over by American fascist leaders looting public funds to bailout the criminals. But, as yet, in 2019, there are no proven "countervailing powers" to oppose the cabal. The old capitalist system of a supply and demand market has been scrapped and a new totally fascistic structure put in its place: looting taxpayer money to give to financial institutions, with fat-cats receiving obscene multi-million dollar salaries, bonuses, and tax-breaks, accompanied by a systematic genocide of workers.

         Cannibalistic capitalism is currently employing these tactics (among others):
    • The Reichstag Fire Syndrome: The Reichstag Fire Syndrome occurs whenever a ruling junta attempts to destroy the working class by contriving a terrorist crisis and offering as a "solution" the abdication of civil liberties and states' rights to a powerful but unaccountable central dictator. The men of wealth who put the tyrant into power are then able to reap obscene war profits.

    • False flag stratagems: operations in which a nation attacks itself but makes it appear that an enemy has committed the attacks, provoking peace-loving people into fighting against the demonized "enemy" and refusing to question its leaders during critical times

    • Agents provocateur: 12 Police and military forces are increasingly using hidden agent-thugs to provoke protestors and demonstrators to escalate to violence so they can then be arrested. It also appears likely that some of the recent so-called "terrorist operations" have involved agents whom the security forces conned into carrying out acts of violence so the masses can continue to be frightened into submission.

    "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."

    President James Madison


          In light of these cabal tactics, workers are ill-advised by socialist propaganda that they must at some point begin their "revolution." Cabal "security forces" (read goon squads and agents provocateur) like nothing better than ignorant protestors escalating into violence, armed or unarmed. The arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors--including professional persons such as physicians and nurses at 2009 rallies--and the incarceration of refugee children in internment camps in 2018--indicates that cabal "security forces" don't hesitate to react with whatever level of violence they see fit. The attitude of capitalists toward worker protest was best expressed in 1886 by railroad and financial baron Jay Gould: "I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

          Socialist indoctrination also does the disservice to workers of convincing them that change can occur only if the entire capitalist economic system is replaced with a socialist system. It will be impossible to change America's total system from capitalist private ownership to public ownership of the means of production in one fell swoop.

          We can see clearly that both communism and socialism have failed and continue to fail. The capitalist cabal is so much in charge of the economic, political, and propaganda (press, TV, publishing) systems in the U.S. that it won't allow capitalism to appear to have failed--even though any clear-eyed, clear-minded observer can see that it has collapsed utterly. For example, to keep up the illusion that the U.S. economy is healthy, the Fed is now purchasing U.S. treasury bonds on the sly.

          Current propagandists (liars) such as Donald Trump try to befuddle the minds of Americans by continuing to refer to "capitalism" as if it were the same as it was according to its classical definition: an economic system in which a "free market" allows for profit or loss according to the mechanics of supply and demand. From the beginning of the world capitalist system, persons with wealth have been able to manipulate the so-called "free market" through hidden, criminal means. What persons such as Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin now call "capitalism" is actually "fascism:" the manipulation of the economy so that certain institutions (e.g. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan/Chase) receive money looted from tax payers while others (e.g. Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual) are destroyed. Their use of the term "capitalism" to describe the current fascist looting is a deliberate deception.

          Contemporary socialists still do not have any viable program for moving away from predatory capitalism to a more humane and equalitarian society. They continue to mouth such vaguity 13 as:
    "The defense of democratic rights and the defeat of American imperialism, along with the struggle against social inequality, depend on the emergence of a mass political movement of the working class on the basis of a socialist program." (from World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org)

       The regimes of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela had some small measure of success in implementing socialist measures. However, neither regime was stable enough to persist beyond the lifetime or popularity of these two leaders. Capitalism is already insinuating its way back into Cuban society and Venezuela has always contained powerful capitalist forces working against any socialist progress.

          If we wait for the spontaneous "emergence of a mass political movement of the working class" we wait in vain. The "blue wave" of Democrats re-taking control of the House of Representatives in 2018 is a possible (only possible) trend in a positive direction. Pelosi and the Capitalist Democrats are still in charge of the Democratic party and are demonstrating clearly that they will not bring any real improvement in the lives of the working class. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is a definite advocate for improved conditions for workers, but he and the other socialist-leaning persons in Congress (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) 14   have been side-lined by the dominant Corporate Democrats, who are running a fascist such as Joe Biden against Trump in 2020.

          All progressives should support genuine worker-advocates such as Bernie Sanders, but continue to assess political-financial-social conditions in the U.S. and the world and respond intelligently to the overal situation as it unfolds.

          Genuine and systemic change can only come about if we create small communities where experimentation can determine the best methods and then as these cooperative communities increase in number they can leaven the larger society -- as in the specific program outlined above.



    Cooperative Commonwealth Communities

    1. Community ownership of the means of production by members

    2. Democratic control: policies and actions decided by democratic consensus of all community members

    3. Production solely for use, not profit: community-regulated production of goods and services relative to need without the intervention of a buying and selling market mechanism

    4. Replacement of capitalism by a commonwealth polity one community at a time, not nationally as a whole

    5. Screening and training of community applicants for membership, not indiscriminate acceptance of all applicants


    Cooperative Commonwealth Communities
          As conditions rapidly deteriorate in America and worldwide, the necessity of joining in cooperative communities becomes imperative.






    Updates and Reference:
    Notes:

    1 Dictatorship of the proletariat: A term employed by Marxists that refers to what they see as a temporary state between the capitalist society and the classless, stateless and moneyless communist society. During this transition period, "the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." The term is said not to refer to a concentration of power by a single dictator, but to a situation where the proletariat (the working class) would hold power and replace the current political, economic and social system controlled by the bourgeoisie (the propertied class: capitalists).

    2   When I attended Yale University Divinity School in the late 1950s, I pastored a small church in New Haven, Connecticut (where Yale is located). One of my parishioners had been an informant for the F.B.I. in the Connecticut state communist party. I attended a public meeting of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy where a retired U.S. Army general was speaking about our China foreign policy. He claimed that when Mao reported that he had "liquidated" Chinese peasants, Mao meant only that he had "relocated" them. I was the only person in the audience who stood up to challenge the retired general's remarks, stating that the evidence was available that the Chinese communists had murdered ("liquidated") thousands of Chinese peasants; that even Mao had admitted this.
       The general merely asserted that he was right, that neither Mao nor any other "friendly" Chinese ally had ever murdered Chinese peasants.
       The next day my parishioner came by to inform me that I had been invisibly filmed by the F.B.I. when I challenged the retired U.S. Army general's claims. The retired general was known to the F.B.I. as a notorious defender of China and its communistic policies and operations. Both my parishioner and I had a good laugh over this at the time.

    3 A History of Socialist Thought: Volume I: The Forerunners 1789-1850, 1953

    4 My 1962 doctoral dissertation at Yale University was titled The Principle of Activity in Marx's Philosophy--with an English translation of Marx's doctoral dissertation. My dissertation was later published as a book in 1968 by Martinus Nijhoff.

    5 Joshua Muravchik, Heaven On Earth, The Rise and Fall of Socialism

    6 David North, The Crisis of American Democracy

    7 Ibid.

    8 One thinks of such groups as the World Socialist Web Site and selected writers for the Monthly Review journal. Certain persons within these and similar groups show intelligence when critiquing capitalism's destruction of workers. However, when it comes to evaluating communism and socialism as movements and specific communist and socialist persons such as Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao, these persons manifest the most appaling moral and intellectual wrong-headedness.

        An example: "Of course, Marx's contribution to formulating the socialist/communist project was the critical breakthrough in its elaboration. Marx's thought, in fact, was elaborated on the basis of a rigorous scientific critical analysis of capitalism taking into account all aspects of its historical reality. This had not been the case with previous socialist formulations or later ones that disregarded Marx. The formulation of capitalism's own law of value; the specification of the long-run tendencies of capital accumulation and of their contradictions; the analysis of the relationship between class struggles and international conflicts and likewise of the transformations in methods for managing accumulation and governance; and analysis of the alienated forms of social consciousnes--these together define the thoughts of Marx that initiated the unfolding of historic Marxisms, especially those of the Second and Third Internationals, of Sovietism and of Maoism." Samir Amin, "Popular Movements Toward Socialism," Monthly Review, June, 2014

    9 Barry Grey, "The world historical implications of the political crisis in the United States," 6 February 2001, world socialist website, wsws.org

    10 Ibid.

    11 Ibid.

    12 Agents provocateur were caught red handed in Canada in August, 2007, when they tried to keep peaceful protestors from demonstrating and attempted to provoke violence.

    13 An element (e.g. word, phrase, or concept) that is so unexplicit and superficial as to be unintelligible and useless. See Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition, 1953

    14 Ocasio-Cortez needs to think before she mouths off so often