As environmental catastrophe, extreme inequality, and the threat of world war loom over our species, people are looking for a way out of the current system. But even while so many people are doing all they can to fight inequality, environmental destruction, and imperialist war, many of these people are caught up in a false worldview that’s been constructed for them by capitalist propagandists.
This worldview says that however big the evils of capitalism are, turning to communism would create nothing but tyranny. The ubiquity of the lies about communism that Americans are exposed to make it an almost universal political punching bag, with even Bernie Sanders having once demonized it by misleadingly calling Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator.” And since communists have been vilified in American discourse on the same level as Nazis or Islamic terrorists, in many cases it’s not possible to get communism’s opponents to look at it through an unemotional lens.
But the truth is the truth, no matter who believes or disbelieves it. And if we don’t defeat anti-communist propaganda, it will constrict us from realizing the solutions we need. So here’s a clarification on the myths about communism that keep people clinging to the dictatorship of capital.
Lie 1: communism is tyrannical in nature
The great irony behind the endless denunciations of communism is the fact that communism’s stated goals are completely tame, and that they follow the basic human logic of helping one another. Marx was someone who looked at the direction of history, and concluded that society was in the process of evolving into something which made political and economic power collectively controlled. He and Engels imagined a scenario where poor and working people would seize control of the means of production from the capitalist class, after which there could be a “withering away of the state” where centralized power became no longer necessary.
This idea that society should transition into a setup where no person owns another person or accumulates wealth beyond their own labor is really just a piece of common sense among the egalitarian-minded, one which Marxist thinkers have turned into a more detailed school of thought. And to believe the popular charges against socialism and communism, you’d first have to completely disregard the idea that the capitalist elites have had a motivation for spreading lies about a system that threatens their power.
The biggest of these lies is that Marxism calls for oppressive government. However much hyperbole Marxism’s detractors spin around it, its actual principles can only be read as the antithesis of totalitarianism. Its founding tenets don’t include any calls for violence or repression, and the logic behind it is non-threatening to the point of being benign. As the socialist essayist Helen Razer recently wrote: “You could read Marx for yourself, of course, and find that his communism is not made from dreary monsters but instead complex reasoning toward a future social evolution. Many of its features may even be acceptable to your conservative aunt, if only she read him, too.”
Lie 2: communism leads to tyranny when put into practice
As a rule, the capitalists will distort the truth about the socialist movement whenever it makes any advances. So as socialist states started to appear, capitalist propagandists were immediately prepared to exaggerate or fabricate any missteps that these states made while omitting all the good that they would do.
In reaction to the Russian revolution, capitalist propagandists attacked the Bolsheviks with anti-Semitic propaganda and created posters which portrayed them as grotesque, animal-like barbarians. And as Russia continued to build a socialist state, those who sought to destroy it began fabricating a litany of heinous deeds on the part of the Soviet government-often with the help of actual fascist propaganda.
Their first big lie involved the famine of 1932–33, where a combination of drought and poor agricultural planning by the capitalist landlords known as the kulaks created a tragedy which was misleadingly blamed on Stalin. Stalin’s approach to bringing the property of the kulaks under collectivized control was done with care to avoid state violence, and the ensuing warfare between the peasants and the kulaks was out of Stalin’s hands; as the historian Bruce Franklin has written, “It was the hour of Russia’s peasant masses, who had been degraded and brutalized for centuries and who had countless blood debts to settle with their oppressors. Stalin may have unleashed their fury, but he was not the one who had caused it to build up for centuries.”
Additionally, Moscow sent millions of rubles in aid to the Ukrainian S.S.R. throughout the famine, proving the claim that Stalin committed a “genocide” in Ukraine is completely disingenuous. The charge that the communists had deliberately starved Ukraine originated in a series of fraudulent reports published in 1935 by William Randolph Hearst, who’d decided to promote the anti-Soviet lies about the famine that were originally created by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Next came the myths that were spread about the Soviet Union’s purges. The purpose of the purges carried out by Stalin and the other governing communists was not to target Stalin’s opponents, since holding political opinions which were unfavorable towards Stalin wasn’t a crime within the USSR. The purges, which began under Lenin, were about removing people from the Communist party who threatened to sabotage it. Racists, sexists, and czarists were primarily the ones who were targeted by Stalin and his colleagues. And these individuals weren’t arrested or executed, but merely fired. The only ones who Stalin sought to further punish were the legitimately treasonous elements, such as Nazi collaborators and people who’d been caught planning to assassinate the USSR’s leaders.
Having clarified this distinction, the other important detail about Russia’s purges is that the officials who’d falsified evidence in order to execute people were not communists. They were a group of corrupt, fascist-sympathizing operatives, lead by the later discredited figure Nikolai Yezhoz, who’d worked their way into the Soviet police and carried out mass repressions against innocent people. Their goal was to undermine the Soviet state and stage a coup on behalf of the Nazis, a plan which failed when Yezhoz was found out and executed for his crimes.
What further weakens the claim that the Russian revolution created a repressive dictatorship is the reality that dissent was not only tolerated by the government, but was encouraged by it. As author Robert Thurston wroteabout the conditions in Soviet Russia:
The regime regularly urged people to criticize local conditions as well as leaders, at least those below an exalted level…. Pravda went so far as to identify lack of criticism with enemies of the people: “Only an enemy is interested in saying that we, the Bolsheviks… do not notice actual reality…. Only an enemy… strives to put the rose-colored glasses of self-satisfaction over the eyes of our people.” As the Zawodny materials and a mass of other evidence show, these calls were by no means merely a vicious sham that permitted only carefully chosen, reliable individuals to make “safe” criticisms.
It’s these facts, which are further detailed in Bruce Franklin’s eloquent work The Essential Stalin, that show how the enemies of communism have so appallingly twisted the realities surrounding the Russian revolution. They’ve continued their slander when additional socialist states have appeared, and they’ve used the same tropes.
Capitalist portrayals of China’s communist revolution have been just as deceptive as their claims about Soviet Russia. Any objective analysis of the Great Leap Forward shows that most of the deaths which took place under it were due to natural disasters, and that the government’s policy errors in handling the famine were accompanied by an ultimate rise in living standards as a result of communist economic management. And Mao Tse-tung, like Stalin, was not in fact a dictator. Both of these leaders were simply people on a committee, and many times they didn’t get their way during decision-making processes.
There are more examples of socialist states that have been falsely characterized as genocidal dictatorships-and examples of real genocidal dictatorships that have been characterized as communist despite having no real relation to the ideology. The Khmer Rouge, whose leaders were really racist nationalists who disingenuously postured themselves as communists up until a point, have absurdly been made out to be representatives of Marxism by those who seek to discredit the movement for economic justice. And the more crude anti-communists have claimed that Hitler was a socialist, despite the fact that Hitler shared these people’s desire to destroy socialism.
Having debunked these biggest myths about the supposed crimes of communism, I should acknowledge that there are instances of socialist governments acting unjustly. The excessive power and influence of East Germany’s Stasi police may be the most legitimate example of a socialist government that’s engaged in oppressive behaviors. But blaming Marxism for every misdeed that a self-described Marxist government makes is ridiculous.
Oppression isn’t a feature of socialism, it’s a consequence of government in general; one can find numerous examples of capitalist states whose crimes far surpass whatever wrongdoings that socialist governments have perpetrated. As Bruce Franklin wrote in his biography of Stalin: “This [hatred of the USSR] was part of my over-all view of communism as a slave system, an idea that I was taught in capitalist society. Communist society was not red but a dull-gray world. It was ruled by a secret clique of powerful men. Everybody else worked for these few and kept their mouths shut. Propaganda poured from all the media. The secret police were everywhere, tapping phones, following people on the street, making midnight raids. Anyone who spoke out would lose his job, get thrown in jail, or even get shot by the police. One of the main aims of the government was international aggression, starting wars to conquer other countries. When I began to discover that this entire vision point by point described my own society a number of questions arose in my mind.”
This discrepancy between the typical evils of socialist and capitalist governments can be explained by the fact that when a state exists to serve a ruling clique of business owners, that state will inevitably carry out violence against society’s vulnerable people.
Lie 3: communism hurts living standards
I emphasize again that Marxism, which is aware of this inherent evil of government, advocates for making government obsolete. No socialist country has been able to fulfill this goal, but the steps they’ve made in bringing civilization closer towards it have resulted in massive increases in human wellbeing.
History has shown that socialism is far better than capitalism both at bringing economic growth and at ensuring good living standards. Had socialism not come to Russia, the country couldn’t conceivably have undergone the unparalleled economic expansions that happened to it throughout the 20th century. In 12 years, the country’s new planned economy took a backward feudal society and turned it into an industrialized superpower, an accomplishment which stands as the greatest economic growth in history. And in between 1928 and 1989, when the planned economy was in effect, the economy grew every year without a recession-something which undoubtedly wouldn’t have happened under capitalism, since recessions are one of capitalism’s routine features.
The situation has been similar for the other socialist experiments. East Germany, China, and Vietnam were all able to turn countries plagued by feudalistic poverty into economies which could effectively avoid any recession, not have inflation, and guarantee full employment. The German Democratic Republic continued the trend of planned economies outperforming market economies, as evidenced by the fact that it was more efficient than West Germany in spurring economic growth.
These achievements of socialism were not temporary gains in an unsustainable system, as capitalist thinkers want to believe; the argument that socialism inevitably fails ignores vast amounts of history and current events. The USSR and the GDR failed not because of socialism, but in spite of it. And the socialist economies in Cuba and the DPRK continue to exist after generations of economic strangulation from capitalist saboteurs.
In all of these cases, the governments of these countries have provided food, education, shelter, and medical care to the best of their abilities. In the case of East Germany, myths about communism-imposed scarcity are contrasted by the fact that free food, housing, and transportation were abundant and very adequately funded. One former resident of the GDR has recounted on the forum Quora that “there was bread at all times and it was so cheap that as kids we often went shopping with a few cent pocket change. In fact bread was so cheap that some farmers fed it to their animals instead of the more expensive grain…Same goes for sausages and meat. Maybe not the most exotic cuts but always there and more than affordable. Still we welcomed new flavors like a rare can of corned beef or Spam, of all things.”
The resources that the Soviet Union’s welfare system was able to provide were also far superior to what poor Americans now have to endure, with the country having created a top-tier universal healthcare system, greatly reduced homelessness, and increased life expectancy by 65%. In 1983, the CIA even admitted that “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious.”
This all proves the opposite of the claims about socialism being inefficient, unsustainable, or a creator of artificial scarcity. It’s necessary for capitalism’s defenders to spread these myths because capitalism is the system that has these things built into it. In fact, artificial scarcity is the driver of capitalism, since the exploiter class needs to keep people desperate for resources so that they can be corralled into working for corporations.
This is why half the American population is now in or near poverty, 14% of Americans don’t have access to healthcare, and a third of the country’s households struggle to afford food or shelter. These problems and more would disappear under socialism.
Lie 4: communism is unrealistic because of “human nature” (or because of other cynical platitudes)
The current world situation provides maybe the biggest opportunity in history for socialist revolution. The poverty and inequality that America is experiencing is mirrored by almost the entire rest of the globe, sadly including Russia; this week a study showed the top 3% of Russians own 90% of the country’s wealth. There’s a growing effort around the world to win poor and working people their rights. But unless socialism and communism become the agenda of this movement, it will fail.
We can’t let the exploiting class negotiate their way into an arrangement where capitalism continues in a “reformed” state. We can’t let the battle to stop climate apocalypse be run by capitalists who will only make their corporations partially more “green.” As the class uprising continues, we’ll need to make it into a force that will bring about new versions of the Russian revolution, ones which will hopefully win out not just in Russia’s capitalist kleptocracy but throughout Europe, North America, and the other places where the capitalists are in control. This will require us to educate many people about why their anti-communist worldview is based in lies.
In a 1880 piece, the socialist Peter Kropotkin wrote: “when one is speaking to those who have suffered from the effects of bourgeois surroundings, how many sophisms must be combated, how many prejudices overcome, how many interested objections put aside!” This popular reflex to oppose socialism is what we still need to persevere against. And the falsehoods we need to combat aren’t just the historical and philosophical ones that I’ve covered so far, but the ones that come from those who say that communism shouldn’t be tried because it’s “not realistic.”
The talking point about communism not working because it goes against “human nature” is repeated mainly by the types who like to think of themselves as “realists,” and who won’t entertain ideas that they know will “fail.” One thought leader who’s spoken along these lines is the blogger Caitlin Johnstone, who recently claimed: “Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed…The plan was to unite the working class against the elite oppressors around the world and implement socialism, and it failed. It is a strategy which does not work.”
These calls for “realism” in regards to socialism so that we can find “real solutions” ironically seek to divert us from the practical solutions that socialism has already laid out before us. The socialists and communists are the ones who’ve created a plan for defeating the global capitalist oligarchy, granting wellbeing to every person on earth, and creating a civilization that coexists with the natural world. They’re also the ones who are building a worldwide network of institutions dedicated to toppling the existing power structure.
As one Marxist writer declared this month in their analysis highlighting the good that socialist states have done: “To all detractors, to neigh-sayers, to all non-descript anti-capitalists, to democratic socialists, to neo-Marxists, and to all others, the message is simple: Communism works…We are very impressed by these achievements and will not dismiss them for the false prophets. The working class needs what works not more idealism and wishful utopias. We need Communism.”
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