Communism doesn't work

Communism doesn't work, and the capitalists have spent billions of dollars and killed millions of people to make sure it'll be thus. Just to give the most notorious examples: 1) perhaps 100,000 Native Americans were killed in the effort to uproot the primitive communist property relations shared by most tribes and establish private ownership; 2) the French abandoned their resistance to the Prussian invasion because they needed Prussia's help slaughtering thousands of communist and anarchist rebels in Paris; 3) after the Russian revolution, the Russians had major rebellions on three fronts, all funded to some degree and one funded almost entirely by foreign powers; 4) Russia also faced a total trade embargo by every other country in the world that lasted more than 10 years, something no other country in the globalized epoch has faced; 5) the major imperialist countries including the U.S. collectively executed, imprisoned, and banished tens of thousands of radicals during this period; 6) Mussolini and Hitler went on to imprison or kill leftists on a much larger scale; 7) the Spanish Republican (Popular Front) government enlisted the help of the KGB to kill tens of thousands of anarchists, centrists, and Trotskyists (that is, communists on the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition); 8) however, because this Popular Front included the Socialist and Communist Parties and had won the election, Franco's forces inaugurated a brutal war against it and its allies in the Basque and Catalan communities. This war was notorious for killings of civilians both in mass shootings and in bombings such as the German bombing of Guernica; 9) meanwhile, Chgiang Kai-shek's government ordered the mass slaughter of 150,000 communist party members after breaking his alliance with them, and during the civil war in China would kill 450,000 more; 10) Germany and its allies then invaded the USSR, with 20 million killed on the Soviet side alone (including massacred Jews and Romany). The date of Germany's invasion of the USSR marks the only day in history that the Dow Jones Industrial Average doubled; 11) when Truman bombed Hiroshima, killing another 150,000, his stated reason was to gain an advantage over the USSR in the Cold War he intended to start; 12) the capitalists killed thousands more in bloody wars in Yugoslavia and Greece to prevent the workers' parties backed by the majority from taking power. In greece, as in Spain, this resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship notorious for torture and murder of political opponents; 13) more bombs were dropped on Korea during the Korean war than by all parties during world war two. The bombing only ended because U.S. forces ran out of targets to bomb, including huts. Biological weapons were also used against Korea. 100,000 bodies have been recovered from mass graves of people killed by the U.S.-backed south Korean government, also long notorious for torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and murder; 14) 1 million members of the Communist Party were slaughtered by Suharto); 15) another bloody war with villages napalmed, resulting again in a brutal dictatorship, was waged against Lumumba's forces in Congo-Kinshasa; 16) the Vietnam War killed at least 3 million and featured bombings of dikes, warfare against the environment resulting in permanent pollution, chemical warfare, mass bombings and strafings of civilians, torture, murder of leftists by every successive government of S. Vietnam; 17) meanwhile in Cuba, there were 3 separate incidents in different decades of biological warfare attacks--by Kennedy against sugar crops, by Carter against pigs, and by Clinton against civilians; 18) there were also several literacy volunteers lynched by U.S.-backed mercenaries; 19) a French ship carrying weapons to Cuba--legally purchased--was blown up by the U.S.; 20) Cuban sugar fields were bombed, hotels and beaches were machine-gun attacked in an effort to stop people from other countries from investing in tourism, there was a 40-year embargo as well as a full-fledged naval blockade during the October crisis, and of course there was the attack on the Bay of Pigs; 21) the CIA spent millions of dollars illegally to prevent a communist candidate from winning an election in Lebanon; 22) a bombing carried out with CIA support killed hundreds of people on a Cuban civilian jet liner; 23) the U.S. intervened to have the democratically elected leaders of Guatemala and Chile; between these nations and El Salvador, which waged a brutal war against rebel forces backed by the majority, perhaps 400,000 were killed; 24) meanwhile, France's war against a communist-led anticolonial movement in Algeria was notorious for the use of torture and mass reprisals; 25) the U.S. backed the bloody Khmer Rouge government, which created not a workers's state but more a national Auschwitz, because it was fighting against Vietnam. The Thai government, as brutal in its own way against communist rebels as the Khmer Rouge, also supported the Khmer Rouge; 26) meanwhile, Portugal's fascist dictatorship waged bloody wars against leftist anticolonial movements in its former African colonies; when Portugal's government was overthrown, the U.S. backed a bloody civil war in Mozambique that lasted about 15 years, included vicious attacks on villages, and spilled over into zimbabwe, where it continues today. Meanwhile in Angola, the U.S. with its cold war allies in Mobutu's Zaire and apartheid S. Africa organized attacks on villages and infrastructure and laid down a huge number of land mines; 27) the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua killed 1 in 6 Nicaraguans mostly in attacks on schools, hospitals, factories, and government offices; 28) meanwhile, the CIA trained ten times as many people for guerrilla warfare in Tibet as in Nicaragua; 29) the U.S. also mined civilian harbors in Nicaragua, for which it was found liable by the World Court but has neglected to pay its $90 million fine; 30) the U.S. has repeatedly intervened to overthrow democratic governments in Haiti and the dOminican Republic, as well as in Iran with untold consequences, giving as its reason the friendliness of those countries' governments with communist regimes; 30) similarly, the U.S. intervened recently against the elected president of Honduras; 31) and of course there were three separate attempts--the coup, the bosses' strike, and the constitutional attempt--against the elected president of Venezuela; 32) the COINTELPRO and other Red Squad programs, and the McCarthy-Nixon witch hunt, killed some Americans and put hundreds more behind bars; 33) and of course there's the U.S. intervention against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, often portrayed as a response to the Soviet invasion, but actually begun before the Soviet invasion; 34) the U.S.'s intervention against Soviet-backed governments in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya created a legacy of wars and famine; 35) all this was accompanied by a massive and expensive intelligence-gathering and disinformation campaign not to mention the U.S.'s development of an arsenal unparalleled in history and increasingly coming with a price in high taxes and cuts in infrastructure and social programs.

Why? The State Department's explanation of the need to invade tiny Grenada is revealing. Grenada was dangerous, they said, because it had a Black majority that spoke English. If oppressed Blacks in the U.S. saw a successful communist country a few miles away, and heard what their leaders had to say, it could be dangerous to the power structure here at home.

Now the workers' states have had their setbacks, of course. Partly this has been human error, partly the result of corruption (and Zinoviev's analysis of the origins of opportunism, which can be verified by reference to countless empirical cases, shows that repression and corruption facilitate each other). Partly, however, they were the result of war, terror, sabotage, and economic warfare.

Even so, it was capitalism that gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the first concentration camps, industrial-level slavery, apartheid, the bloody partition of India, fascism, , genocide against the Indians, two world wars and countless others, 2 billion underfed, 1 billion without access to clean water, 200 million homeless, 2 billion illiterate, and I don't know how many premature deaths each year from preventable diseases. Meanwhile the workers' states for all their problems can boast world-record economic growth rates (#1, China; #2, USSR); the highest rates of citizens with advanced educations and of women with advanced educations; land reform; first country in space (USSR); world's 2nd-largest economy (USSR); massive engineering projects; aid to liberation forces and in humanitarian crises throughout the capitalist world; etc. E. Germany was the first country to eradicate homelessness, a feat later duplicated in Cuba. Cubav went in 3 years from 1 in 3 illiterate to virtually no illiteracy. N. Korea has the highest literacy rate in the world. The USSR was the 3rd country in the world to have woman suffrage. It also played a major role in bringing down Hitler, while Cuba played an even bigger role against apartheid. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had important parts in the civil rights movement, and the USSR and its Anmerican allies are largely responsible for the NAACP, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and CIO. The USSR introduced the 5-year plan while Cuba did the first gall bladder transplant. Vietnam forced pOl pot from power. China had a lower literacy rate than India in 1949; now it is almost 70% higher. Cuba, a very poor country, has a health care system that compares to the U,S.'s. Cuba was also first to sign the international convention against terror and has an unparalleled record fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has an all-time world record incarceration rate and is openly torturinbg people in Afghanistan.

Failure is in the eye of the beholder. Hannah Arendt suggests that one feature of totalitarianism s to insulate people at the top of a hierarchy from everyone but the (more radical) layer above them and the (less zealous) layer under them so that they are blinded to how their decisions affect and are seen by the majority, while they see themselves as occupying a moderate poaition in comparison. But of course this is a social function of money and it blinds most of us to the realities of capitalist success.