Communism and Socialism

Hear the shoutin' from the mountains on out to the sea
No two ways about it, people have to be free (they gotta be free)
Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be
Natural situation for a man to be free

From: People Got to be Free (1969) by The Rascals

Sixty years and one week ago, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a self-described Marxist and admirer of Fidel Castro. Kennedy himself was an anti-communist who described the Communist threat as "an enemy, power[full], unrelenting and implacable who seeks to dominate the world by subversion and conspiracy." 

America was alarmed by communism during the 1960s. For example, the Washington State Communist Party was distributing The People’s World, published in San Francisco. It aligned with the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Today, 40% of Americans have a favorable view of socialism with GenZ’s favorability up to nearly half. “Eighteen percent of Gen Z and 13% of Millennials think communism is a fairer system than capitalism.” 

Why was JFK so anti-communist and how does socialism and communism really stand up?

The Human Cost

Many fail to recognize the difference between the theory of communism and the practice. In practice, some of the biggest mass murderers in history have been communists including Joseph Stalin (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), Ho Chi Minh (North Vietnam), Mao Zedong (The People’s Republic of China), and Fidel Castro (Republic of Cuba).  The executions, many in their own countries, included gassing, man-made famines, firing squads, hanging, forced labor, and drowning. The numbers of deaths in the four counties attributed to communist leadership are:

U.S.S.R.:     20 million people

China:         65 million people

Vietnam:     1 million people

Cuba:           7–10,000 people

Control Over Private Life

Both communism and socialism advocate public control of the means of production, and both reject market economies. Communists believe in an equitable distribution of wealth and reject private property favoring common ownership of property. Socialism allows some private ownership of things but not means of production, i.e., companies. Both believe in an economy planned by a powerful central government.

Democracy

The Soviet Union allowed voting but only one candidate was on the ballot; communist China has a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Party; Cuba also has a one-party state with no opposition candidates, and Vietnam is a socialist one-party system led by the Communist Party.

Equity

While some believe that such systems offer a fairer distribution of wealth, the exact opposite is true; for example, Communist China houses more billionaires (83), i.e., the “Red Aristocracy” in its government than any other country of the world. In the Soviet Union it was said that “in the USSR, there emerged a system of entrenched economic and social inequality.” Around 40 percent of the entire Soviet population was poor.

Support for Communism Still Widespread in the U.S.

Today, 48 percent of younger people, 18 to 24, support the horror perpetrated by Hamas on the people of Israel. “The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It combines Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology” (i.e., communism). One reason for support by young college students is that the number of professors who admit to being “more socialist than conservative has risen from 43 percent in 1970 to around 60% today. In fact, “Studies consistently reveal that America’s high school and college students do not know basic facts about the history of communism.”

It has happened before in the United States. This dangerous philosophy was popular in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s. To prevent communism from spreading further, it falls to those who study history to educate the young about the realities. 

We are, and will continue to work on being “A more perfect Union,” but we still have a lot of freedoms that communist countries will never know, including:

Freedom to cast a vote that counts, freedom to own your own house, freedom not to work for another person but to own your own business, freedom to travel to other countries, freedom to protest—even the government.

These matter but they can be lost in a generation of ignorance.