It’s May Day, an international day of celebration for community organizers and other communists everywhere. What’s that? You say it’s unfair for me to label ACORN and its supporters in the media, academia, and the White House as communists?
Au contraire. You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party USA (or similar American parties such as the Revolutionary
Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party) in order to be a communist. People who sympathize with those organizations are small-c communists, that is, fellow travelers, who for whatever reason never got around to joining a communist party.
Saul
Alinsky was one. Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont is one. So is, or was, President Barack
Obama. Obama’s college classmates described the future president as a
humorless, intolerant Marxist-Leninist. Sanders claims to be a socialist, not a
communist, but the senator from Ben and Jerry’s is straddling a very thin
semantic line.
As I argue in Subversion Inc., which will be published this
month, communism is a political movement whose adherents believe that markets
are fundamentally unjust and that physical force should be used to attain a
classless society. When the legitimate political process allows groups like ACORN
to achieve their goals, they support American-style democracy. When it doesn’t,
ACORN steps outside the legitimate political process and uses physical force and
intimidation.
Socialist is simply not a strong enough adjective to describe ACORN.
ACORN is not a debating society. It is not a collection of coffee klatch
bohemians pontificating about making the world better. ACORN
is about taking action to tear down the American system.
Besides, is socialism much different from communism? Karl Marx thought of
socialism as a necessary weigh station on the road to the supposed utopia of
communism. Socialism versus communism is a never-ending debate in academic
circles, and it is one that is too involved to get into here. (Fellow ACORN
chronicler Stanley Kurtz agonizes over the definition of socialism in his
wonderful recent book Radical-in-Chief. It is so unnecessary.)
Suffice it to say that socialists and communists all want government or the
collective to be master. They all subscribe to bad, un-American ideas, are all
in the same ideological camp, and all tend to believe that the ends justify the
means. In ideological terms, there is no bright line dividing socialism from
communism.If a government nationalizes an industry does it really matter whether
that government was elected or seized power by force? The fundamentals are more
or less the same.
Communists, small-c and otherwise, attempt to marginalize adversaries by
calling them crazy when they point a finger at actual communists, as if
communists were figments of someone’s fevered imagination. “In a stunning
demonstration of the power or propaganda, accusing someone of having been a
Communist makes you the nut,” Ann Coulter opined in Treason:
Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
It’s time to start calling these people what they are.
Follow me on Twitter and
check out my book Subversion
Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off
American Taxpayers, which will be published this
month.
(originally posted on NewsReal)