The Freedom That Communism Brings

By Glen Wallace

Perhaps I should have elaborated that some element of capitalism can be both beneficial to humanity and also exist harmoniously with a system of communism.

So the communism that I'm suggesting is not absolute but rather broadening of its implementation in this country and abroad. It would be a broadening because this country utilizes a lot of communism already. Not only does communism already exist in the USA, most people use and enjoy it, without thinking that they have become the least bit of a 'pinko commie.' What I'm referring to is the publicly owned property that nearly all of use such as sidewalks, roads, parks, bike paths, lakes, rivers and streams. Those properties are owned by the community for all to use and therefore to advocate and support the continued creation and maintenance of community owned land and infrastructure is to support communism.

Without the existence of widespread communism in this country our lives would be much more restricted and less free than they our today. Imagine a world where as soon as you walk out of your front door having to pay a toll just to walk on a sidewalk. And that's if your lucky enough for a vendor to have created the sidewalk. Maybe the owner of the property outside of your front door doesn't like pedestrians or anyone for that matter and has put 'no trespassing' signs everywhere, causing you to be a prisoner in your own home! What an awful world. But that is just the sort of world that you might face if the supporters of free enterprise capitalism had there way. But it's not the sort of world I want to live in. I love being able to stroll down the

sidewalk anytime without having to swipe my credit card at every intersection just to pass through. I love having beautiful parks, full of nature where people like myself with little money can visit and be with the towering trees that birds flutter about in. Anyone can look up property records online and see that most city parks have valuations in the millions of dollars that I'm sure some greedy capitalist would love to get there hands on to bulldoze and turn into a high-rise condo with big iron gates surrounding the property to keep out the unwashed masses like myself. I'm sure it also irks many capitalists that I can go the public library and be able to check out a book or movie without providing the least bit of revenue to some profiteer.

I think whenever someone sees the term communism, people tend to automatically assume the word is referring to the system used by the so-called communist states of the former eastern block and some Asian nations. I say so-called because they are/were pseudocommunist nations that merely paid occasional lip service to communist principles to help build what was in reality a tyrannical oligarchy that only cared about gaining power and cared nothing about the welfare of the community they were governing.

Perhaps the biggest mistake was to use Karl Marx's philosophy on the relationship between a worker's labor and the material wealth created by that labor, as a complete playbook for how to run an entire government system. I don't know if Marx ever even intended for his philosophy to be used as a complete system, but some did and in doing so, it left the door wide open to the abuse of power. And when it comes to political power, if you give an inch they take a mile - and a Marxian system gave several feet of leeway to the bureaucrats. And it's now historical record that the bureaucrats that got that leeway used it in such a horrific manner that the some of the pseudocommunist perpetrators such as Stalin and Pol Pot have become rightfully vilified as ordering some of the worst cases of mass murder not just in modern history, but in recorded history as well.

The solution then is to implement a communist system measured by libertarianism. While most people automatically consider libertarianism and communism to be mutually exclusive, close examination reveals that not to be true at all. Instead, utilitarianism; the belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice justice for a few individuals for the betterment of the society at large, is the antithesis of libertarianism.

Utilitarianism has been, and continues to be used, as a justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals, in order further the goals of both capitalist and communist systems. While many may be very familiar with the ways utilitarian principles have been used to justify communist tyranny - sending dissident writers to the gulag was justified by the belief that their authors beliefs presented an obstacle to reaching a utopian Marxists state, but few realize how often utilitarianism is used to justify restrictions on freedom because exercising that freedom is believed to result in lower revenue for certain industries. The most obvious example of this is the efforts by the music recording and motion picture industries to restrict the freedoms of individuals to copy, share and manipulate digital works as the individual sees fit in the privacy of their own home. The recording industry argues that it is ok to sacrifice the freedoms of the individual owners of copies of artistic or intellectual works, because if freedom were allowed in that case, society as a whole would lose out on future works because the creators of those works would no longer have the incentive to create because the guarantees of profit from those works would be gone. The problem with that argument is twofold. First is the mistake of prioritizing values whereby specific freedom of action is given a lower priority to vague theories about both to the benefits to society as a whole in the form of better arts and entertainment and improved profits garnered from sales that would have been lost to file sharing. Therein lies the problem with utilitarianism: some theory about the benefits to society as a whole can always be thought up to justify any given restriction on freedom and justice for individuals. And typically there isn't any demand by lawmakers that the theories about societal benefit be in anyway corroborated with evidence. Rather if the theory makes any sense at all, by the principles of utilitarianism, it is justifiable to impose any degree of draconian laws that impose tyranny on a people, if it can be successfully argued that in the long run society will be better off for it. What ends up happening though is the government or corporate official puts forth the appealing utilitarian argument for the tyrannical measures while at the same time, being motivated by entirely different, selfish reasons for implementing the measures. If utilitarianism is allowed any acceptability by society, all that is required by the ruling elite to impose a harsh draconian tyranny onto the populace, is merely a little creativity to generate a useful fiction that the people will buy.

While some may argue that the injustice faced by those that can no longer file-share pales in comparison to the injustice endured by the millions of individuals sent to Stalin's gulags, I would counter that, in a way, we already effectively have our own sort of gulag system in this country in the form of the prison industrial complex. And there are many capitalists that benefit tremendously from our prison system, that since the start of the war on drugs, this country has incarcerated millions of citizens for engaging in the non-violent act of merely possessing or selling a substance that people wanted to use out their own free will in their own bodies. Industry groups that act either as vendors for government run prisons or operate privately run prisons, have lobbied legislatures to pass laws recommending or mandating longer prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders. The utilitarian justification presented for the longer prison sentences is that society as a whole will benefit by limiting the scourge of narcotic drug intoxication but undoubtedly the real reason for desiring the longer prison sentences is that it will result in more prisoners requiring more product and therefore more profit for the prison vendors and private prisons operators. It may be a very poor justification for the grave act of taking away someones freedom and putting them in a cage for years at a time, but therin lies the problem with utilitarianism - an excuse, reason or justification that has some appeal to the public can always be found with it for implemmenting tyrannical measures. But the actual reason for measure that would be unappealing to the public, can remain hidden by the tyrants.

The solution then is to implement a communist system measured by libertarianism. While most people automatically consider libertarianism and communism to be mutually exclusive, close examination reveals that not to be true at all. Instead, utilitarianism; the belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice justice for a few individuals for the betterment of the society at large, is the antithesis of libertarianism. Utilitarianism has been, and continues to be used, as a justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals, in order further the goals of both capitalist and communist systems. While many may be very familiar with the ways utilitarian principles have been used to justify communist tyranny - dissident writers were sent to the gulag because their beliefs presented an obstacle to reaching a utopian Marxists state, but few realize how often utilitarianism is used to justify restrictions on freedom because exercising that freedom is believed to result in lower revenue for certain industries. The most obvious example of this is the efforts by the music recording and motion picture industries to restrict the freedoms of individuals to copy, share and manipulate digital works as the individual sees fit in the privacy of their own home. The recording industry argues that it is ok to sacrifice the freedoms of the individual owners of copies of artistic or intellectual works, because if freedom were allowed in that case, society as a whole would lose out on future works because the creators of those works would no longer have the incentive to create because the guarantees of profit from those works would be gone. Once again, no attempt by the recording industry is made to either prove that any individual that illegally copies would have instead legally bought the recording instead of just going without owning the recording at all. Nor is any attempt made to prove that people would no longer create music without the incentive of money. Rather the theory is put forth and the legislatures consider the theory, especially a theory coming from large campaign contributor, sufficient justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals handling digital works. Freedoms are something that should be held with a degree of sacredness by those who are responsibly for managing them. In a free society, it should be the freedoms that come as a first priority, and it should then be problem of business and police to find ways to deal with the requirement of citizen freedom, not the other way around as it is quickly becoming in this country. In the communist system I envision, a society is organized to allow the most freedoms possible with the understanding that there is a certain degree of necessary scarcity in the world. In any given community, there is only so much space for roads and sidewalks on the surface area within the confines of that community. I think there is a degree of unwritten understanding by individuals of that fact already and has resulted in the open widespread willingness of citizens to think there is a need for public roads and sidewalks and use and enjoy them and not think they should be converted to privately owned and operated entities with the same accompanying property rights by the owner as a homeowner has. But in a society that values capitalism and free enterprise while decrying communism so much, the properties owned and used by the public are rarely called by the communist leading term 'the peoples' as in the peoples sidewalk, or the peoples library. Instead the leading term 'public' is used even though both 'the peoples' and 'public' used in the same contexts mean basically the same thing, regardless of whether you live in a communist country or a free market capitalist one.

I would contend that Stalin and company perverted and thus gave a bad image and reputation to the term 'communism' in much the same way as the Nazi's perverted the swastika symbol. Just as the swastika is one of the oldest known symbols that were used by mankind for literally thousands of years before the rise of the third Reich, communism as a form of ordering society was used for thousands of years before the communist part was ever formed. In fact, communism is such a natural and fair way of running a community, that I believe it has been used throughout human history, recorded or not. I believe most native american societies were using a form of communism before the invasion by western Caucasians. Communism was such a common sense idea to the first nations peoples of this continent that they didn't really have a conception of land ownership like the colonists did. Rather, it was intuitively obvious to the native american peoples that the land was created for everyone to use in a responsible and respectful manner.