I have heard about communism all my life. My teachers (from first through twelfth grade) were Marist brothers who came to El Salvador after Fidel Castro drove them out of Cuba. They had nothing nice to say about Castro, but a lot about the horrors of communism.
My career in international development has taken me to live and work in 23 countries around the world: Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Myanmar, and others, including populist autocrats, military dictatorships, oil-rich monarchies, and communist countries.
Now that I am over 70, it is a good time to tell you what I have learned about communism.
For one thing, “communist” is the far right’s favorite accusation against its opposition. The far right uses the threat of communism to scare you and get you to vote for them.
Communism is a form of government in which the state owns most of society’s resources, including property, education, transportation, agriculture, and the means of production. In practice, this means that the state (government) owns everything. So there is no private ownership of anything.
For example, communist countries are countries where all agricultural production is done on land owned by the state and the peasants are tenants. And in some cases, private land is expropriated by the state and given to landless workers. In communist countries, the state owns the banking system. Not just the central bank, but all the banks. That happened when I lived in El Salvador – all the banks were “nationalized.” It was a terrible idea.
In communist countries (like Venezuela) and in Middle Eastern monarchies (like Kuwait), the state owns everything in the energy sector: oil wells, pipelines, oil tankers, refineries, trucks, pumping stations, and so on. And as if we lived in a communist country or monarchy, the former US president is trying to manipulate the energy argument in his favor. When he says that your wallet benefits when you produce more oil (“drill, drill, drill…”), he is lying. Increased production benefits countries like Venezuela and Kuwait and the owners of the oil companies, not you. Oil production in the United States is not owned by the US government, but by private companies.
The Democratic Party has never claimed and will never claim that the government needs to expropriate oil drilling facilities, gas stations, or other energy assets. In fact, the U.S. government only has its own energy reserves for military purposes.
The Democratic Party has never claimed and will never claim that land should be expropriated or that all banks in the United States should be “nationalized.” So what is the point of this insult?
The point is that the Republican Party is using the “communist specter” to scare you and get you to vote Republican.
The Democratic Party does not want to expropriate anything because we know that capitalism is a much better system of government in a democracy. We, the American people, love private property, we love freedom, we love prosperity – we love owning our means of production; and we know that communism does not work. Even communist countries like Russia and China have recognized the failure of the communist system and have been implementing private sector initiatives for decades.
Obama and Biden were also accused of pursuing a communist agenda during their campaigns. So what happened? Well, we did not become a communist country during those administrations. The “communist specter” did not appear because it was a lie. The lie did not work then and it will not work this time.
In my hometown, in the 1970s and 1980s, many of my colleagues and I who worked on affordable housing were labeled communists by the far right. I believe the far right does not understand the difference between communism and service to others. Service to others is a fundamental Christian value. We should not confuse the teachings of Jesus Christ with communism.
Sometimes I wonder if Republicans believe that Jesus Christ was a communist. Someone should ask them.
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Carlos Linares is an international development and environmental professional with 45 years of experience. He is the chair of the Buncombe County Democratic Party’s Hispanic Outreach Committee, secretary of the Lake Committee at Biltmore Lake, and a member of the Blue Ridge Public Radio/NPR Community Advisory Board.
