Whenever a new way of organizing society and our economic system opens up, one of the comments that comes to the surface is :"But isn't that communism?"
Now, communism in itself as a word has become a word of Terror. It is used specifically to instigate fear reactions within people, where you do not want to be linked or involved in anything that may be deemed 'communistic'. But what is communism really? Nobody knows anymore. It's one of those terms -- just like the Inflation concept -- that has taken on a life of its own. In the case of communism, it's become a boogieman story. I mean, when people talk about communism and 'fighting communism' it is done from an assumption that communism is 'one clearly defined thing' and ‘it’s clearly evil’. Truth is, there were many various different concepts that developed that could be deemed 'communistic'. It's the same with Religion, you can talk about for instance 'Christianity' but then within that you have various variations and adaptations of Christianity. Forms of communism were adopted in Spain in the 1930s which were highly effective, yet you don’t hear about it anywhere.
So when you talk to people and ask why they are against anything that could closely be related to communism, they go "oh but just look at Russia, and all those people that died it was a total failure, it’s never going to work". What is not being done is putting communism that took place in Russia (or what actually would be more correct is to say 'the communism that DIDN'T take place in Russia) into context.
What must be understood is that Communism as an idea and Communism as ‘what happened in Russia’ are two different things. You see, people were angry, people then had an idea and then they went into a Revolution to try and implement that idea. The thing is that once they were in power – they had no practical plan or way of implementing their idea in a way that would actually work. They had no knowledge of things like politics and economics and were completely inadequate and incompetent to actually run a country. So, they tried things out, it failed, they went into fear and established a form of authoritarianism and all in all the story did not have a happy ending.
To go back to the Christianity example – the way Communism is treated is the same way the Jesus message and Christianity is being treated today. We have what Jesus said, being one thing – as principles of ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘Give as you would like to receive’, which is very much a principle of Equality and Harmonious Living. And then you have Christianity in all its various ways as what is ‘supposedly the Jesus message’ – but when you look at what is actually being lived out, is a message of fear, hate and inequality. So just like ‘what Jesus said’ and what ‘Christianity does’ are two completely different things – you can’t say that ‘Communism as an idea’ and ‘How communism took place’ are the exact same thing.
If you look at what happened in Russia, this is exactly one of the reasons why we never promoted any type of ‘Revolution’ to bring about change within any of our proposals, because they are impulsive and short-sighted. So yes, communism in Russia failed because there was no practical common sense reasoning or research that had gone into what they were doing. And because they failed big time, communism now has forevermore been branded by the mark of the Devil, and we should fight it in any way we can.
So now, each time something comes up that even in the slightest way could disturb the way things currently are and can in the slightest way be interpreted as ‘communistic': fear rises and it gets boxed away. All communism has been reduced to in this day and age is a form of fear induced superstition to keep people from actually thinking for themselves, kind of the same way Parents will tell their children that the boogieman’s gonna come for them if they don’t eat their veggies. Come up with any idea that will bring about a change in the way the current system works and people will come at you with the big C-Word to scare you into shutting up and conforming.
It’s come to a point that anything that doesn’t fit and support the status quo is labelled ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ and anything that does support the current system is called ‘democratic’ and ‘free’. It’s just a word used as one pleases – if you don’t like it, call it communistic – if you do like something, call it ‘democratic and free’. I mean, you can have two countries who both to some extent operate within a form of Nationalization – but depending on how much they threaten the status quo the one will be called Communistic and the other one won’t. It’s just a word of convenience. Take Chile for instance whose economy is based on the nationalization of copper, copper being one of their main exports. They nationalized it and they did it effectively – and yet Chile is not deemed communistic. In fact, the World Bank will tell you that they are very proud of Chile and that Chile is an example for other South American countries in terms of adopting the Free Market System. But if you’re a different country and you nationalize say your oil and you adopt policies that are unfavorable to the United States = now you’re communistic = You are evil, your president is the Devil, you must be stopped.
It should actually become a rule that you can’t use the word ‘Communism’ in any form of argument or way to make a point, because the word has gotten abused so much that it’s just a joke. If you can’t make a point without resorting to terms like Communism as a form of Propaganda to terrorize people, then you just shouldn’t bother.
