Opinion: I’m No Communist, But…
I’m no communist, but any time I see someone use money, it makes me want to violently rise up in revolution to overthrow those profiteering bourgeois fat cats who steal all of the surplus value of the proletariat in the name of private ownership.
I mean, I truly believe that the free market is the hands down the best option we have, but seeing someone exchange currency for goods or services never fails to cause me to pull out my heavily annotated copy of Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book and angrily quote from it in front of a portrait of Vladimir Lenin to a crowd of workers in a secret radical labor union meeting where we’re planning an extensive campaign of agitation and sabotage.
Just because I’m a fan of private property doesn’t mean I can’t have memorized what Pyotr Kropotkin wrote in his book The Conquest of Bread that:
“The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one’s part in the production of the world’s wealth.”
After all, who isn’t intimately familiar with the works of Kropotkin?
Look, when you think about it, capitalism is will probably solve most of the world’s problems. But at the same time, I can’t help but dream of the Utopian worker’s paradise, where classes and the state have withered away, and mankind enjoys true equality, everyone living in accordance to Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That’s like the opposite of communism.
