The Ramblings of a Communist

'Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption.'

I always find John F. Kennedy's famous quote on communism a rather entertaining one. Not because I find it to be true or because I hate Russia: as a matter of fact, neither of those statements apply to me. What entertains me is the hypocrisy of it all. Did it ever cross JFK's mind that his own country was at war with Vietnam during his entire presidency? Or that the constitutional process of election means that one's chances to enter the US Houses of Congress are driven almost solely by the money poured into campaigning? The very idea that the USA never was/is disrupted by war or corruption is a frighteningly inaccurate analysis.

And yet so many of us westerners are as deluded as JFK himself when it comes to communism: deluded by the idea that it is born from some kind of hatred and doomed to fail. Perhaps we can't really blame ourselves for our false preconceptions. After all, what else are we supposed to think when all the West has heard since the Cold War is the same anti-communist, right-wing claptrap churned out like a bar of Dairy Milk at Cadbury's World.

The Cold War has left communism with a legacy of hostility and prejudice in the western world. A legacy which is unfair. For communism does not spawn from evil: it spawns from mass movements for the common good, just as capitalism once did. The USSR does not define communism: the failure of communist Russia was not due to communism itself, but due to the failure of Russian leaders to ever implement true 'communism' in Russia. Moreover, for the 99%, communism isn't a hindrance: it could improve your quality of life.

This book is not a manifesto of ideologies or a plea for communism. It is the ramblings of a communist living in a capitalist world, and it's only aims are to dispel the myths, teach the theories and provide an alternative to decades of broken capitalism. And if nothing else, at least it kills time.