Introduction: Common Misconceptions about communism

1)      Communism is a totalitarian dictatorship wherein the people are oppressed and allowed little to no freedom

2)      Communism has nothing to say about the world today as it lost the war of ideas after the breakup of the Soviet Union

3)      Communism leads to dictatorships like Stalin in Russia and Kim Jong Il in North Korea

4)      Communism has no place in the Occupy movement

Part One: Definitions and Terms

Capitalism – The economic system wherein the means of production are owned and controlled by privately by a class who employ persons to create objects which are sold on a private market for profit.

Communism – The economic system which is the antithesis of capitalism. Means of production owned and controlled by those who utilize them and distributed based on the motto “From each according to ability, To Each according to need” for the general welfare of society and it’s citizens.

Means of production – the buildings, machinery and products used in the making of commercial goods

Mode of production – the ways in which the means of production are used and in what fashion

Social relations of production – The relationship and societal norms and values that develops around the mode of production and the members of the productive entity.

Proletariat – The working class – all those who sell their labor in the form of wages.

Bourgeoisie – The Capitalist class – those who own and control the means of production

Materialism – The philosophical principle that the focus is on the material world.

Part Two: Basic Communist Theory

1)      History – For Communists, history is the fundamental way one understands the process of humanity. Deriving much of it’s philosophy from GWF Hegel, history and the study of it, are what gives us perspective on how we have come to the present and what the future may hold.

2)      Dialectics: The theory of understanding the relations between all things, first presented by Hegel and adopted by Marx as a means of analysis, also found (albeit differently) in the study of evolution and physics.

3)      Dialectical materialism (DM): The basis for Marxist theory. Basically the history of humanity can be understood through the dialectical process of material things. For Hegel it was dialectical idealism which focuses on the movement of the Idea, for Marx, it was the movement of relations between classes and their corresponding social relations of production. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

4)      The history of humanity vis a vi DM is the dialectal interacts of differently classes which brings about new means, modes and social relations of production.

5)      The current stage of human development, embodied in Capitalism is the culmination of the dialectal process of history. It has built within it, as all other historical epochs, internal contradictions which set forth its eventual demise. (discussed below)

6)      Like all other transformative periods it is the oppressed class which rises up to become th new ruling class. In capitalism, that falls to the proletariat.

7)      The replacement of capitalism with communism brings about the next stage of human development.

Part Three: What is Communism?

1)      In essence Communism is Democracy.

2)      Communism is the retooling of private production (which seeks profits) to public production (which seeks the fulfillment of public need)

3)      The basis of this is done in concert between trade organizations and a central planning body which will facilitate the orderly and rational production of goods and deliverance of services.

Part Four: The Critique of Capitalism

1)      Capitalism, like every other previously existent mode of production is flawed based on its own construction. It carries within it, the seeds of its own demise.

2)      Unlike all other systems, Capitalism is a contestant state of crises. This crises is overproduction. “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

3)      This continuous crisis is combined with the fact that in order to maintain profitable, the cost of labor must be contained. Profit is nothing more than the usurption of surplus labor.

4)      This is exploitation, another key internal contradiction of capitalism.

Part Five: Communism and Occupy Wall Street

1)      Occupy wall street is a reflection of an awakening of social forces who have a limited class-consciousness. Occupy members understand the inequality and injustice of capitalism, but because of societal pressure, are often weary to consider themselves “anti-capitalist”

2)      The Communist Party of the U.S.A. has been active in progressive politics for over a hundred years and have occupied factories and businesses just as long.

3)      Occupy lacks sufficient focus and tactics because it lacks class consciousness. The Communist Party U.S.A. and Communists in general have a unique understanding of the problems of capitalism, a framework for its replacement and the program to achieve the revolution to do so.

4)      Like Communists, Occupy Wall Street and its affiliates are suffering from media misrepresentation and misunderstand and hostility from Police. Communists have been forced underground, jailed, barred from public office, etc. This creates solidarity, but also has led many to misunderstand or downright despise Communism and Communists.

5)      For Hundreds of years people have sought to curb the rampant destructive of capitalism, only to win peicemeal changes, while the underlying framework of capitalism has remained strong. The occupy movement must, in order not be co-opted, infiltrated, or disillusioned, must understand the program offered by the Communists is exactly what it needs.

Conclusion: Together we can make a revolution.