Category: politics

Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

I wrote up an analysis of the Stephen King novel years ago; if you’re interested, Dear Reader, you can find it here. In that analysis, I made only one or two brief references to Kubrick’s film adaptation, which everyone ought to know by now is wildly different from the novel (much to King‘s annoyance).

I also felt, when I wrote that analysis, that an in-depth analysis of Kubrick’s film would be unnecessary, as others had already done so. I’ve since changed my mind about that, since I feel that an analysis of the themes of Kubrick’s adaptation will put the spotlight on a lot of issues most relevant to our world today.

I’ll discuss changes from the novel to the movie only as pertinent to these issues as Kubrick’s version addresses them. The story is no longer merely about an aspiring writer battling with alcoholism (a semi-autobiographical issue that King had been dealing with at the time of writing his novel), but rather about how issues of settler-colonialism in the US intersect with capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse.

Given the troubled state the US is in now (and how that affects the rest of the world), Kubrick’s film seems to be gifted with “the shining” in how it, 46 years ago as of the publication of this blog article, predicted the intersecting of those above-mentioned problems, leading to today’s nightmare as I see it allegorized in this film.

Anyway, the 1980 film was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and written by him and Diane Johnson. It stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, with Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, and Tony Burton.

The non-original music used in the film includes a synthesizer adaptation that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind did of Dies Irae, as Hector Berlioz had used it in his Symphonie fantastique. We also hear excerpts from “Lontano,” by György Ligeti, and the first half of the third movement (“Adagio“) of Béla Bartók‘s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. From Krzysztof Penderecki, there are excerpts from “Ewangelia” and “Kanon Paschalny II” from Utrenja, as well as his “Awakening of Jacob” and “De Natura Sonoris” Nos. 1 and 2, his “Kanon,” and his “Polymorphia.” These are all either modern adaptations of classical music (Carlos/Elkind), classical modernism (Bartók), or post-war avant-garde classical (Penderecki/Ligeti), music originally intended just as expressive in itself or as experiments with sound…and yet here presented as ‘scary music.’

Contrasted with these are a few old-fashioned tunes, such as “Midnight, the Stars and You,” by Harry M Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly, and “Home,” performed by Henry Hall and Gleneagles Hotel Band, among others. This music gives off a sense of…’Life just isn’t as it was back in the good old days,’ a nostalgic attachment to the past that hides, behind a superficial charm, a reactionary hatred of progressive social change.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The movie begins with a shot of a lake and an island in the middle of it, and forest and Colorado Rocky Mountains in the background, with Carlos’s and Elkind’s synthesizer rendition of Dies Irae. Next is a bird’s eye view of the car driven by Jack Torrance (Nicholson) going on a road between forests of trees, then up a mountain to the Overlook Hotel.

Such scenery is beautiful to behold, but the eerie, portentous music is at odds with such a picturesque charm. We feel, instead, a sense of the loneliness and isolation Jack and his family will feel when they’re in the hotel through the winter. This juxtaposition of superficial pleasantness and underlying nastiness will be a recurring theme in the movie.

The significance of the eerie feeling accompanying the pretty natural scenery will be known when we learn that the Overlook Hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground (a trope that would become a cliché in many 1980s horror films), where during construction of the hotel, the builders had to fight off Native American attacks. What is being established here is a confronting of the issue of the white man’s colonizing of aboriginal land, killing off any resistance to it. This issue will be the foundation of the other issues, as I’ll elaborate on later.

The synthesizer music alone is dark and haunting. If one knew that it is Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath,” about the Day of Judgement, one would see far greater significance in how settler-colonialism, the genocide of the North American aboriginals, the other issues of social injustice I’ll go into later, and a final day of reckoning are all interconnected. We see the land of the aboriginals, land taken from them by the white man, whose descendants will do far more evil over the ensuing centuries; and if one were to read the text of Dies Irae, one would sense the depth of these men’s guilt.

In the Overlook Hotel, Jack meets Stuart Ullman (Nelson) for his job interview to be the hotel’s new caretaker for the coming winter. The Ullman of the film is not the “Officious little prick” of King’s novel; here, he’s quite a gentle, smiling, genial fellow.

As Jack’s employer, though, Ullman personifies capitalism, and with not only the juxtaposition of this job interview with the preceding scene of Jack’s drive through the formerly aboriginal landscape, but also Ullman’s soon-to-come comments about the Indian burial ground and fighting off the aboriginal attacks, we see the connection between colonialism and capitalism (for a contemporary example of this connection, recall the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the wish to convert the area into a set of resorts for vacationers…a whole beach of Overlook Hotels.

Ullman’s, as well as Jack’s, smiling throughout the job interview reflect that superficial pleasantness masking nastiness. Ullman is the easy-going boss explaining to Jack how the job is not physically demanding: he just has to do some repairs here and there, keep the boiler room running, and heat different parts of the hotel on a rotational, daily basis. Jack is smiling away and insisting that the job will be perfectly suited to him and his family, partly because, as with anyone trying to get a job, he wants to reassure the boss that he’s the right man to hire, and such reassuring involves some ass-kissing; it’s part of how a powerless worker has to deal with a capitalist.

Under this pleasant veneer, though, is the nasty reality about the job that Ullman has to be frank about with Jack. There’s a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation that one can feel doing the caretaker job over the long winter months, and this led to a caretaker named Grady (Stone) killing his family back in 1970.

Under capitalism, there’s this idea that supporters of it promote: the taking-on of a job is a voluntary agreement between employer and employee rather than something the employee must do to live–it amounts to wage slavery. That a worker can just quit if he doesn’t like his job fails to grasp the fact that, if he even finds a new job to replace it, will it even be any better, or all it be (much) worse? The worker, always needing to sell his labour to live, isn’t the free agent the pro-capitalist claims he is. This issue is the unpleasant underbelly of the pleasant outer skin of the job one hopes to get.

The isolation and loneliness of the caretaker job, the underbelly Jack will confront soon enough, are representative of what Marx discussed as worker alienation. And alienation, as has been seen especially in the US over the past few decades, has led to many gun killings, rather like Jack’s violence at the climax of the movie.

So we see how a number of issues intersect already. The construction of a hotel, a business to make a profit, on an Indian burial ground, which includes the need to fight off and kill aboriginals trying to preserve and protect a sacred space, shows how settler-colonialism and capitalism intersect. That the job of maintaining this for-profit building involves a long spell of maddening loneliness, in which the caretaker would be haunted by ghosts (many, I suspect, being of murdered Native Americans), shows how worker alienation intersects with settler-colonialism and capitalism…if only symbolically.

Next, we have to deal with Jack’s alcoholism and abuse of little Danny (Lloyd). A doctor (played by Anne Jackson) is curious about an injury Danny had, one mentioned in passing by his mother, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), in her conversation with the doctor. Wendy says, with more of that saccharine smiling, that one night five months prior to this discussion, Jack had been drinking, came home late, and saw that Danny had scattered some important papers of Jack’s all over the room. The official explanation is that Jack ‘accidentally’ dislocated Danny’s arm by yanking the boy away from the papers with too much force. The doctor is not smiling after hearing this story.

We’ll notice here that this is yet another example of the attempt to hide nastiness behind a veil of pleasantness. Wendy, in trivializing Jack’s alcoholism and brutishness, is also demonstrating her subservience to him.

This leads to the next issue to intersect with those previously mentioned: the patriarchal family as represented here with the Torrances. We see in them the usual sex roles: Jack is the breadwinner, and Wendy is the housewife…though, oddly (or, perhaps not?), during their time in the Overlook, we see that it is Wendy who is checking over the hotel. Jack, who should be doing this, is instead bouncing a ball against a wall, kind-of-sort-of writing his novel, and slowly going insane.

We ought to look at the word patriarchy a little more carefully than usual, especially as it applies to Jack’s relationship with his family. We all know the word is used to refer to a male-dominated society, of course, but technically, it means “father-rule.” Danny is as male as Jack is, of course, but as a kid, he’s hardly dominant in any way over anyone, including Wendy, even with his “shining” power. It’s Jack, the father–just as did Grady, the father–who has the power, and who wields it so brutally.

This “father-rule” can be symbolic of which men in particular dominate society: the rich and politically powerful, those in leadership positions, not the ordinary, working-class men of the world. Of course, none of this is to deny, trivialize, or invalidate the painful experiences of powerlessness that all women and girls around the world suffer because of sexism, sex roles, and the patriarchal family. It’s just that we need to focus on which men in particular to blame, the powerful ones, when we work for solutions to these problems. Women’s liberation will come through socialism, not through the divisiveness of idpol.

As far as blaming working-class men like Jack is concerned when they help to perpetuate sexism, it would be more useful to focus on their dysfunctional solution of ‘punching down,’ rather than ‘punching up.’ Jack should be raising his fist in anger at the system that’s made him and his family so powerless, rather than raising an axe to kill Wendy and Danny with.

Wendy’s role in the film as submissive, weak, and frail (as opposed to her much stronger and more resourceful portrayal in King’s novel) demonstrates not only the issue of the patriarchal family, but also how this issue intersects with that of the white man’s genocide of the Native Americans. It has been noted by film critics that Duvall, through her clothing and long, thin black hair, is made to resemble a Native American. She dresses this way while in the hotel, as opposed to how she and Danny look in their home at the beginning of the film, in their red-white-and-blue clothing. We go from the pleasant, American-as-apple-pie look to the nasty look of one oppressed by the white man.

The hotel interior significantly has a lot of North American indigenous art on display, as well as other art that can be associated with aboriginals. I mentioned Jack’s bouncing of a ball against a wall: a Native American tapestry is on it. This, of course, is symbolic of the white man beating the aboriginals.

A nation built on the genocide of those who lived there before (as symbolized by building a hotel on an Indian burial ground) is hardly one that will grow into one based on freedom, justice, and equality, in spite of the myths of ‘American democracy’ that many have been brainwashed into believing. That is what Kubrick’s Shining is all about: hence, the intersecting of the aboriginal issue with those of capitalism, sexism, and racism…this last of which we must go into now.

As with the others, things start off superficially pleasant, as Dick Hallorann (Crothers) shows the Torrances–Wendy and Danny in particular–around such areas of the Overlook as the kitchen and the pantry. Hallorann is all smiles as he lists off all the delicious foods the Torrances will enjoy eating. He, also gifted with “the shining,” immediately senses Danny’s telepathic abilities, knowing the boy will be sensitive to the presence of all the ghosts in the hotel.

As a black man, Hallorann of course represents how his people have been victimized by American racism. He is the only one we see murdered by Jack, with an axe in the chest. He is referred to as a “nigger” by the ghost of Grady and Jack in the bathroom scene, where the latter wipes off a spill off the former’s jacket and warns him of his son’s interfering in the hotel’s affairs.

In all of this we can easily see how racism against blacks intersects with racism against the Native Americans. White supremacism, as we know, is used to justify not only the genocide of the aboriginals, but also the slavery of blacks. Such an attitude is clearly expressed when Jack says to Lloyd, the ghost bartender (Turkel), “White man’s burden,” as he is about to play for a drink.

Note also the significance of how the two killing fathers, Grady and Jack, are not only two white men, but also, the first is British, and the second is American. The order of the two men’s appearances and murder sprees in the hotel is particularly significant, as they represent the brutality first of British colonialism, then of American colonialism. And just as with Jack’s smiling first appearance in the film, so is ghost-Grady’s first appearance one of a gentle, polite, affable chap…until he shows his true colours in the bathroom scene, as he, frowning, would “be so bold” as to tell Jack about the need to ‘correct’ Danny.

The hotel is on an Indian burial ground, yet oddly, we never see any Native American ghosts. There’s all that aboriginal art everywhere in the hotel, though, as I mentioned above; it’s as if the hotel ate the remains of the natives, whose digested remains are all of that art, a cannibalism like the kind (which included the eating of two Miwok guides) Jack and Danny talk about in the car ride up the mountain to the hotel.

We don’t ever see aboriginal ghosts–only white ones–because the whole point is that the aboriginals are all gone. Even the memory of them is all but erased. The collective guilt of the white man has been repressed into the unconscious…and yet the repressed returns to consciousness, albeit in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight (aboriginal art, white ghosts, Wendy’s clothing and hair in the hotel).

Many Americans–conservatives in particular, like Michael Medved in his book, The 10 Big Lies About America (Medved, pages 11-45)–are in denial about the genocide of the Native Americans as a basis for the beginnings of the country. They’ll make claims that the spread of diseases from whites to aboriginals, the massacres, and the forced displacements (clearly ethnic cleansing) did not intentionally or systematically cause most of the deaths, but such claims are nonsense. Violence was encouraged through payment. The government enacted laws, such as Andrew Jackson‘s Indian Removal Act of 1830, to displace aboriginals by the tens of thousands, causing many deaths among them from the hardships of the journey from where the whites wanted to settle to where the aboriginals were required to go.

Such denials can be said to be symbolized in The Shining by this ‘repression,’ as I described it above, in the replacement of the indigenous dead with the hotel’s aboriginal art and white ghosts. Being as sensitive as Danny is with his “shining,” he can sense the ghosts, particularly in the forms of Grady’s daughters and in his being lured by ghosts to room 237.

Jack’s seeing of the ghosts coincides with his slowly going mad, of course, for it is the contemplation of the white man’s guilt that is maddening, the confronting of it, as opposed to denying the genocide. Wendy doesn’t see the ghosts and other supernatural phenomena until the climax of the movie, when affairs have gotten so extreme in their violence that the consequences of genocide can no longer be denied by white people.

The guilt may be denied, but it keeps coming back to haunt the guilty. That’s what the motifs of recurrence can be said to represent. Think of the recurring patterns on the rugs and walls, the back-and-forth alteration of the sound of the wheels of Danny’s Big Wheel rolling on the hard floor vs their silence on the rugs, or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again on the pages of his ‘manuscript.’ Similarly, Jack’s reincarnation as the hotel’s eternal caretaker, his having been in the Overlook back in 1921, and his resulting feelings of déjà vu.

The cyclical nature of events in the Overlook–the killing of aboriginals when building the hotel, the murders of the past, culminating in Grady’s and Jack’s, represent how a nation founded on genocide will return to murder again and again throughout its history. We see this in the history of the US, where apart from the Native American genocide, there is the great majority of the country’s history involving either waging or at least being somehow involved in wars; we see it in how Manifest Destiny inspired Hitler; and we see it in Israel’s taking of Palestinian land and continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (backed by the US).

We get repetition in my favourite scene in the movie, when Danny confronts the Grady sister ghosts, who invite him to play with them…”forever, and ever, and ever”…a line Jack repeats to Danny: “I wish we could stay here forever, and ever, and ever.”

It’s been said that the spatial layout of the hotel makes no physical sense. One might try to attribute the inconsistencies of the layout to continuity errors, but that doesn’t make sense either, given Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism. There are windows and doors that shouldn’t be there, rooms in one place at one time and in another place at another time, and furniture that appears and disappears from scene to scene.

In this sense, the hotel interior (which Wendy calls a maze) is rather like that labyrinthine hedge arrangement, in miniature on that table where Jack looks at the model of it, and the real one outside that the model dissolves into. (The hedge maze, incidentally, replaced the animal topiary hedges of the novel, those that come to life, because of limitations with the special effects of the time.)

The point is that the hotel is a trap from which one (usually) cannot escape. As a symbol of the US (which both dominates in its overseeing the affairs of everyone everywhere, and which overlooks its guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs it’s done), the Overlook is a place irrationally constructed, and a labyrinthine trap, because so is the country it represents.

Some may complain that the pacing of the plot is too slow. Such complaining misses the point. It’s slow because the growing evil is meant to be felt as insidious. Jack’s descent into madness is slow, and the tension of the music accordingly grows slowly, from the eeriness of the music of Carlos/Elkind in the beginning and the eeriness of that of Bartók early on and in the middle, to the extreme dissonance of Penderecki’s music leading up to and during the climax.

If we see The Shining as an allegory of the history of the US (or just about any nation founded on settler-colonialism), then it makes sense to see, from white people’s point of view, how the horrors only gradually build until the end. Sensitive Danny and Hallorann can see it from the beginning, like so many of us on the left and black activists, those powerless to do much about it; but many white Americans, like Wendy, are only now seeing the horrors of state-sanctioned violence.

Yet another thing that intersects with the issues of settler-colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse is narcissism, and we can see Jack indulging in that, symbolically and literally. Though most people would dread the sense of isolation in being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, Jack welcomes the job, for he enjoys his solipsism there. He doesn’t want society to be all around him. He wants other people to exist only as reflections and extensions of himself.

He gets irritable with Wendy, even if she just enters his writing room to talk about…anything. He flies into rages if she talks about leaving the hotel with Danny to get him to a doctor. The Overlook is like a Bower of Bliss for him: superficially pleasing, but trapping him in it and slowly eating him up.

There’s evidence of him being frustrated with his family right from the beginning. We see it in his face when he grins in exasperation at Danny ‘s saying he knows about cannibalism from the TV, and this is before the family has even reached the Overlook Hotel. He’s frustrated with his family because it’s a triadic relationship, so–to use Lacanian language–this puts him in a situation of dealing with the Other, where being with at least two other people means dealing with them on their own terms, rather than dealing with the other, where only one other is a reflection of oneself.

It is significant that whenever Jack has a conversation or interaction with a ghost, there’s a mirror behind the ghost. This is true of his interactions with Lloyd, Grady, or the naked woman he embraces and kisses in the bathroom. He enjoys these interactions because he’s in a dyadic relationship with each of them–they are each a reflection and extension of himself.

To use Lacanian language again, Jack is retreating from the sociocultural/linguistic world of the Symbolic, to reenter the dyadic, narcissistic world of the Imaginary. Such a retreat is extraordinary given his ambition to write a novel, yet it is explicable as soon as we realize the entire ‘novel’ is just the repetition of a single sentence–his writer’s block.

Jack’s seeing the ghosts in front of mirrors has him fuse the two sights together each time in his mind. As a result, each ghost becomes the narcissistic ideal-I before his eyes. Each ghost feeds his ego and represents an ideal either to be fused with sexually (the naked young woman ghost), to legitimize his alcoholism (Lloyd), or to be emulated as a perpetrator of uxoricide and filicide (Grady).

Narcissism is used as a defence against psychological fragmentation, and Jack’s belief in his ‘calling’ as the caretaker of the Overlook is an example of such a defence: hence, the firing-up of his rage at the mere thought of leaving the hotel. The Overlook as a sanctuary for his narcissism cannot last forever, though, and this is not solely because of the urgent need to get Danny out of there to see a doctor. His experience with the naked woman also shows this impermanence.

As I said above, the specular image in the mirror is an ideal-I, which one strives all one’s life to attain, ultimately failing. Jack would…attain, to use the word euphemistically, the naked young woman in front of the bathroom mirror because man’s desire is the desire of the Other, the wish to be what the Other wants, so Jack’s wanting her to want him is to see, narcissistically, his desire as idealized in her, to see her as an extension of himself, to see himself as her.

Her youth, beauty, and thinness are also the ideals of femininity in modern, career-woman society, supplanting the old ‘pleasantly plump’ ideal for the ‘barefoot-and-pregnant mothers’ of the past. These issues, of course, are also tied in with the values of the patriarchal family, and so we see how Jack’s narcissism in this manifestation intersects with the other issues mentioned above. The impermanence of the Overlook as a sanctuary for Jack’s narcissism is also seen in the girl’s sudden transformation into a cackling old woman with the mouldy skin of a decomposing body.

The switch from the young to the old nude woman, and the switch from Jack’s aroused to horrified reaction, are also a comment on society’s attitude toward prevailing norms of feminine beauty, as well as on the male addiction to that beauty. This addiction can also be seen in Dick Hallorann when in his Florida home, on the walls of which we see pictures of nude or seminude black women.

Jack rejects the Symbolic–that is, he rejects society (any people other than those as mirrors of his narcissistic self) and language (not only can’t he type any more than the one repeated sentence, but as he freezes in the hedge maze searching for Danny, his speech becomes unintelligible babbling and moaning). He also finds the dyadic Imaginary to be unreliable (the Overlook is a sanctuary of his narcissism that cannot last as such). The lack of the Symbolic and the Imaginary means that all he is left with is the Real, an undifferentiated state of being that cannot be symbolized or expressed through language…a traumatic, chaotic mess.

This messy Chaos is vividly expressed in that iconic deluge of blood splashing out from the elevator and filling up the room so much that it even hits and soaks the camera lens. It’s a redrum running amok. The Real is what results when there are no others, no ability to express oneself or make sense of a world of non-differentiation, and not even another person to reflect oneself against. It’s the trauma of total loneliness.

Danny has a sense of that inability to express and verbalize the Real when, in Tony’s voice, he tries to warn sleeping Wendy of Jack’s imminent attack with the axe by chanting “redrum” over and over. His use of her lipstick to write “REDRUM” on the door, with the second R backwards, represents the Real’s inability to be articulated, as does the word’s being intelligible only in the mirror reflection as “MURDER,” with the E and the second R backwards, too.

The patriarchal dominance of Jack is seen not just in his abusive treatment of Danny and his maniacal yelling at Wendy as noted above, but also in how, after hacking open the door to the room his wife and son are in, he says, “Wendy, I’m home.” We’re reminded of the husband of the 1950s coming in the house after finishing his day at work and calling out to his stay-at-home wife, “Honey, I’m home,” implying that he expects dinner to be ready for him.

Jack’s famous line, “Here’s Johnny!”–with that iconic shot of his maniacally smiling face through the hacked-out hole in the bathroom door, on his way to try to kill Wendy–was improvised by Nicholson. The black humour allusion to Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show (as well as that of the Big Bad Wolf calling out to the Three Little Pigs) is not only jarring in the context of the terror of the scene, but it’s also unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the show, including even Kubrick, who’d been living in England at the time. The line thus could be heard as yet another example of the Real’s inability to be expressed.

Now, Jack’s attempt on his wife’s and son’s lives, as well as Wendy’s discovery of all the ghosts and supernatural activity in the hotel, can be seen to represent the imperial boomerang, what happens eventually to the people of the imperial core, or to colonialists, when their repressive measures against the resisting colonized come back to harm them–a kind of colonial karma. This boomerang is happening in the US right now, where ICE has been trained by the IDF to use the very violence, originally used on the Palestinians, which is now being used on American citizens. Wendy sees white ghosts, but they’re really Native American ones, repressed into the unconscious and returning to consciousness in an unrecognizable form; that torrent of blood she sees from the elevator would be aboriginal red.

Jack, of course, dies with no redemption the way he does in King’s novel, this being one of the many reasons that King dislikes Kubrick’s adaptation of it. The Jack of the novel is flawed, of course, but sympathetic–not so for Kubrick’s Jack.

We must understand, though, that while Kubrick’s Shining is based on King’s novel, it’s a fundamentally different story (hence this being my second analysis of it), which explores almost totally different ideas and themes. Kubrick’s Jack shouldn’t be sympathetic or redeemed because he personifies so much of what is fundamentally wrong with a nation built on the genocide of aboriginals.

The perpetrating of mass murder doesn’t just change the killers; it also changes the descendants of those killers as they enjoy the privileges of living on stolen land. We see this mentality among conservative Americans who enthusiastically support open carry, yet who also defend ICE murdering Alex Pretti, who legally owned a gun that was holstered at the time, making him no threat at all to his murderers. We also see this mentality among Israelis who cheer on the continuing genocide in Gaza.

So King’s complaint that Kubrick’s “cold” ending is fine from the point of view of his novel, yet that cold ending is perfectly fitting for the film. The kind of people that Kubrick’s Jack represent do leave us cold: they keep coming back, as Jack did in his reincarnation from 1921, in that photo, aptly dated July 4th, from the Gold Room, a place where the wealthy American elite can enjoy ‘the good old days,’ dancing and trampling on an aboriginal grave.

From Ballots to Bullets

George Clinton, alas, was wrong.
For a browning of an urban area,
the ballot will never be sufficient.
The other George, of course, knew better than to trust the vote.

Putting a ballot in a box
is like buying a ticket to
watch a theatrical show
in which a president struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

ICE, to the IDF
close in character,
shoot at people.

We the people
thus have the right
to shoot back.

Redacted

******************those************
************************************
****girls***************************
**********************did**********
***********************************
**********nothing******************
************************************
**************************wrong***
************************************
************************************

What Is Feared of Communism Is Here in Capitalism

I: Introduction

Several weeks before I started writing this post, I shared a meme on Facebook, one whose pro-Soviet content I don’t remember (and which isn’t all that relevant, anyway), but which also got me a troll reaction from some liberal who said, “No Gulags.” This comment is what has inspired the current article.

I’ve already written a number of defenses of communism in such articles as these, as well as a number of criticisms of capitalism, from both my former anarchist and my current ‘tankie’ perspectives, as can be found here. In this article, though, I feel I need to address something different.

There’s always this fear among many in the West, including many on the left: what if we ‘tankies’ are in denial about how the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably become totalitarian and oppressive? My answer in this article is that capitalism has already become so. We’d might as well try socialism. What else have we to lose, but our chains?

II: The Forms of Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism, tyranny, an oppressive state–whatever you want to call it–takes on many forms. I’ll list off pretty much the main forms here. First, and most obviously, totalitarianism discards these:

–a free press
–freedom of speech, and
–democracy

Then, with its intrusive government, we start to go into totalitarianism’s harsher forms:

–cults of personality
–surveillance, and
–police brutality

Finally, we come to the most horrifying forms:

–concentration camps, and
–mass murder, or genocides

Communism, of course, has been accused of perpetrating all of the above. Fascism, even more obviously (or, at least it should be more obvious), has been genuinely guilty of all of these. The horseshit horseshoe theory would have you believe that the extreme left and extreme right are similar in having supposedly led to the same outcomes, leaving liberal democracy as the only viable alternative.

A far more accurate representation of the relationship between the left, centre, and right, however, would be the fishhook theory, in which we can see liberal centrism backsliding into fascism. Recall Stalin’s words on the subject: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Note in this connection that social democracy is as left-leaning as liberals get; the rest of liberalism moves only further rightward.

A casual observation of Western politics, especially from the dissolution of the USSR to the present day, should demonstrate the truth of Stalin’s words. First, liberals demonized communism in lockstep with conservatives. Then, declaring an “end of history” with communism’s demise and the “free market” as the only viable system, liberals helped to chip away at social welfare, since there was no longer any fear of socialist revolution. Finally, as leftist agitation revives, they’ve used fascism to thwart it.

And here we are.

One must take seriously the notion of a fear of communism, through its association with the atrocities listed above, to understand the great lengths to which right-wingers will go to defend capitalism. Note that these right-wingers are usually of the petite bourgeoisie, the useful idiots of the ruling class, whose real reason for fearing communism is the loss of their wealth; so they fear monger in the media they own to tell the middle and lower classes about communist ‘atrocities.’

As a result, the conservative and liberal masses will tolerate any horrors that go on in our society today so as to prevent a resurgence of socialism. If the poor are so bad off, it’s because they’re lazy, talentless, incompetent ‘losers,’ or they waste money that they should be saving. Never mind that class mobility is a myth. People generally stay in the class they were born in.

When one tries to tell these bootlickers of the rich that the root of the problem of the poor is systemic, the inevitable result of capitalism, they claim that our political problems stem from ‘corporatism,’ because apparently, ‘real capitalism’ and the government are mutually-exclusive antitheses of each other. Never mind that capitalists have always used the state to protect their private property interests: that’s what the cops are for.

Even today’s boot-lickers of the rich cannot deny that the political system, especially that of the past twenty-five years or so, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that continues to get worse and worse. What they cannot bring themselves to admit is that this disaster has been the result of the neoliberal experiment, which is a subordination of everything, the government in particular, to the Almighty Market. Hence the need to describe our growing totalitarianism as ‘socialist,’ even when it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the current system is anything but socialist.

Politicians on both sides of the political fence accuse each other of being ‘communist.’ Trump and his administration spew constant verbal flatulence about the dangers of ‘radical Marxist extremists,’ when if anything, even among today’s progressives, Western Marxism is practically moribund. Liberals are similar, with Kamala Harris bizarrely calling Trump a ‘communist.’ At first, this comment just seems to be yet another air-headed one from her; yet on closer inspection, we can see how its purpose was really to associate today’s totalitarianism with communism rather than with its true source–fascism.

Her Democratic Party has also joined Republicans in issuing a blanket condemnation of socialism just before Trump’s meeting with ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. This bipartisan fear of socialist ‘totalitarianism’ is bogus given their recent embrace of fascist totalitarianism, as I’ll attempt to prove below. Their real fear, as I mentioned above, is the plan to have workers take control of the means of production, and therefore to take the excess wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it among the masses. Such a taking of wealth is a taking of power from the ruling class.

But let’s now look at all of the ways that capitalism has turned totalitarian.

III: No More Free Press

This loss didn’t come about in one fell swoop (i.e., with Trump). It started decades ago, and gradually got worse before we came to where we are today. While the mainstream Western media has always been bourgeois in ideology, we can see the beginnings of this particular problem with the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987. Introduced in 1949, the fairness doctrine was a policy requiring the media to present controversial issues of importance from differing points of view. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc would come not too many years since the abolition of this policy, it’s easy to see how the already anti-communist stance of the media during the Cold War would become even more insistently pro-capitalist after that.

Next came the Telecommunications Act that Clinton signed into law in 1996, which allowed mergers and acquisitions in the American media, leading to today’s control of about 90% of the US media by only six corporations. This change thus means that most of Americans’ access to information is decided by the ruling class, and therefore reflecting their agenda and interests. There’s an international networking of media to tell essentially the same stories from largely the same political points of view, so this problem is not limited to the US.

The situation got worse in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Just so there’s no misunderstanding that the centibillionaire supposedly has no interest in the political content in his newspaper, in 2025 he announced that the WaPo would essentially promote right-wing views only, euphemistically worded as defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Well, we all know what conservatives mean when they say that.

Additionally, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, idiotically renaming it “X.” The social media website has also become a haven for right-wing views, which should not be surprising, given its owner’s Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration and other manifestations of Musk’s far-right leanings.

Indeed, Mint Press News (MPN) published an article in late November of 2025 about how seven oligarchs, including of course Bezos and Musk, are now controlling key elements of the mainstream media. Remember in this connection Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of Facebook. Larry Ellison is to purchase CNN as of the writing of my article, and CNN has already been partisan to the Democratic Party/liberal wing of the ruling class.

When you have oligarchs like these controlling the average person’s access to information, who needs a state-owned media to brainwash them into compliance (and, incidentally, the presence of ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officials, ex-generals, and former security state operatives in the news–all of whom work for imperialist capitalism, in case there was any misunderstanding–is enough to make one wonder if American media is anything other than state-owned)? The attendance of elites like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration should have been sufficiently and disturbingly portentous of things soon to come.

Now, there are still left-wing voices like mine and those in alternative media, like MPN or ChatNews Net, to give the people a dissenting voice, but firstly, our voices get nowhere near the circulation of the establishment ones, and we also get trolled a lot by reactionary types, either the useful idiots of that establishment, or paid trolls whose job is to discourage us from being those necessary ones shouting in the wilderness.

The point is that a stifled free press marks the beginning of totalitarianism, because no free press means no freedom of speech, which brings me to my next topic.

IV: No More Freedom of Speech

The one crowning example of a lack of freedom of speech in recent years has been the suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors on the campsites of American universities. This suppression is of crucial importance, for it is about preventing the one basic thing anyone in a truly democratic society should be given the freedom to do: protest injustice.

Injustice has always been a part of human experience, and overcoming it has sadly never been easy. We should, however, at least be able to talk openly about injustice and make demands that it stop. This is especially true if the injustice is as extreme as an ongoing genocide. If the powers-that-be can suppress the protesting of ethnic cleansing, it will become all the easier to suppress the protests of smaller injustices, which leads to…

V: No More Democracy

Let’s start by defining what democracy actually is. At the risk of sounding pedantic and condescending, I’ll use an etymology you should already know: the word comes from Greek words meaning “people rule.” Now, what does the rule of the people actually entail? Mindless voting for a particular political party, with little thought as to what the real issues are (i.e., “Vote blue, no matter who”)? Or does it mean ensuring that the policies enacted serve the will and interests of regular, working-class people?

I’ll put my money on the latter definition.

Let’s compare, for example, Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, as contrasted with the years of revolving-door voting for different leaders, say, every four to eight years or so in the US, the UK, Canada, etc. Neoliberalism has, over the past forty to fifty years, eroded economic democracy by crushing unions; it has cut welfare funding and regulations to allow the rich to gain more profit at the expense of the people and the environment; and it has generally immiserated the poor, leading to an epidemic of homelessness. How is any of this power for the people? How is it democratic?

Contrast that with the ‘despotic’ rule of Gaddafi. His Jamahiriya, or Third International Theory, was a kind of Islamic socialism that provided for the basic needs of Libyans throughout the years of his rule of the country. The benefits that his government provided included guaranteed universal housing, education, and health care, as well as free electricity and the free starting of farming businesses, bursaries given to mothers with newborn babies, cheap gas, and the raising of Libyan literacy from 25% to 87%.

How is ‘Western democracy’ better than that?

The notion that Gaddafi was a ‘brutal dictator’ would be based on the idea of his suppressing of anyone opposed to his system of government; but who would have opposed such a system? Anyone opposed to the kind of thing his government was providing, of course–that is, opposed to giving the benefits described above to his people (such opposition would have included Islamic fundamentalists, who were often imprisoned during his rule). I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I don’t have much sympathy for those opposed to giving the Libyan people the aforementioned benefits.

My point is that Gaddafi may have been a dictator, but whatever actual objective flaws he may have had, he was by any reasonable standard a benevolent dictator. Why is his having stayed in power for over forty years a problem if he had provided those benefits to his people; whereas having an assembly line–as it were–of presidents or prime ministers who change every half- or full decade or so, but largely serve the rich instead of the ordinary people, is considered more democratic?

Another important point must be considered: are the candidates available to be voted for truly representative of the wishes and interests of ordinary people in Western elections, or are they people chosen–directly or indirectly–by the ruling class, while more truly representative candidates are deliberately marginalized, and therefore unavailable?

As anyone who has read enough of my articles should already know, I am no supporter of Bernie Sanders, but note how not only does he not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected (let alone of being allowed to tax the rich to gain the revenue needed to pay for the FDR-New-Deal kind of social programs that are so popular among working-class Americans), but he is correctly understood to be a sheepdog for the left. The establishment uses people like him and AOC to sell hope to the masses, then at the last minute, he bows down and tells his crestfallen supporters to vote instead for the newest corporate whore of the Democratic Party. This is by design.

Similarly, because of their left-wing political positions, the Green Party of the United States stands no chance of even being in a position to challenge the corrupt and morally bankrupt two-party system of the US, let alone to win elections and implement their policies.

Anyone with any sense knows that the Democrats and the Republicans are, at best, mere variations on each other, and at worst, two wings of the same party, the Capitalist Party, with virtually identical, imperialist policies. While generally less extreme than in the US, the bourgeois political parties of any country under capitalism are of essentially the same nature.

This sad state of affairs is actually worse than having a one-party state (and contrary to bourgeois propaganda, there was and is far more democracy in the Soviet and Chinese systems than is assumed in the West), because in multi-party bourgeois politics, there is the illusion of choice that fools the public into thinking they needn’t change the system. The ruling class will never allow any party to challenge the capitalist system; they’ll never allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Recall Goethe’s words.

Voting does not work. I haven’t even gotten into the corruption of the US electoral college or gerrymandering. Revolution is the solution.

VI: Intrusive Government

Thanks to anti-Soviet propaganda like George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as Leon Trotsky‘s description of the USSR as “totalitarian” and his description of their labour camps as “concentration camps,” we in the West have come to associate big, intrusive government with socialism and communism, when associating them with right-wing and fascist governments is far more apt, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

The association of intrusive government with communism is so consummate in the minds of so many in the West that whenever one sees examples of such intrusiveness in the US, it’s assumed that the country has become ‘communist.’ This is especially true when the Democrats are in power, since they are assumed by the politically illiterate to be ‘left-wing.’

Recall in this connection the conservative reaction to Obama becoming president, and how they idiotically said “there’s a communist living in the White House,” and he would enact socialist policies, when in reality he did nothing of the sort. He extended George W Bush’s Patriot Act, ordered more drone strikes than Dubya, was the Deporter-In-Chief, helped oust the actually socialist Gaddafi, and helped the capitalist class do particularly well during the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s, including bailing out the banks. He was in fact groomed by the ruling class to do things like these. The colour of his skin is completely irrelevant.

The problem of NSA surveillance was exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013, during Obama’s very capitalist administration. AI is only going to make this surveillance worse, as I’ll demonstrate in its section below.

Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his administration’s involvement in the regime change operations in Libya and Syria, are clear, blatant examples of capitalist imperialism in those countries, not of socialism. When people speak of ‘human rights violations’ in Cuba, I have two words to say to them: Guantanamo Bay, something Obama allowed to continue from Bush’s administration, and which continues to this day, though with fewer people imprisoned.

The point is that the US government, like any capitalist, imperialist government, is so intrusive that it insinuates itself into the affairs of other countries, places it doesn’t belong, either through military invasions or coups d’état. Right-wingers think of intrusive government as being an essentially socialist affair (welfare, single-payer healthcare, etc.), while ignoring the military, NSA, and CIA as branches of the government, which are totally bloated.

The libertarian notion of ‘small government’ is a con game, anyway. It’s not about whether government is ‘big’ or ‘small’; it’s about who the government serves–the people, or the wealthy elite. Similarly, the validity or invalidity of taxation depends on two things, as I see it–who is being taxed the most, and how the tax revenue is being spent. If the rich pay the most taxes, and the revenue is spent on social programs for the poor, taxation is valid; if the middle and lower classes are being taxed up the kazoo, while the rich pay little if any taxes, and if the tax money is being spent mostly on the imperial war machine and to bail out the banks, taxation is invalid.

So, intrusive government can be totally capitalist; socialism has no monopoly on the problem.

Since I’ve been criticizing the Obama administration a lot, and since liberals are always fawning over him and finding no fault in him at all, this brings me to my next point.

VII: Cults of Personality

Anti-communists love to quack about how we tankies supposedly revere men like Stalin and Mao as if they were gods. We do no such thing. It must also be understood that Stalin and Mao rejected the idea of being raised up on such pedestals, contrary to bourgeois propaganda. We Marxist-Leninists are also thoroughly willing to acknowledge their faults as leaders.

Their achievements in helping to modernize Russia and China are enough to explain that their people simply loved them rather than ‘worshipped’ them. Indeed, decades after it was ‘necessary’ to love Stalin, huge numbers of Russians still love him, and it shouldn’t be difficult to see why: over a mere two and a half decades or so, he transformed the USSR from being a backward, agrarian state into an industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower, while also having defeated the Nazis.

Mao’s attempts to modernize China went on a rockier road, admittedly (with the deaths from the Great Leap Forward wildly exaggerated), but the foundation he built was essential to the glorious success of China today. Again, the Western painting of Stalin and Mao as cruel tyrants has far more to do with bourgeois, Cold War propaganda than it does with reality.

Still, all of that is secondary to the point I want to make, which is that the political right has its cults of personality no less, if not much more, than the left has. Hitler and Mussolini had cults of personality, and contrary to the delusions of many right-wing libertarians, fascism is a capitalist ideology, not a socialist one. The whole purpose of fascism is to crush leftist uprisings (which, by the way, should explain the recent rise in fascist totalitarianism); Hitler’s big business donors ensured that he’d never take seriously the S in NSDAP.

But even more to my point is how we can see a cult of personality in recent, capitalist presidents like Obama and Trump, in each of whom one could write up an epic catalogue of awful things both have done. Still, their worshippers refuse to find fault in them, or they at least minimize their faults.

How many times have we seen nauseating praise of Obama has having led the US for eight years without any scandals, and how he was all grace, style, and class? Let’s just conveniently ignore his drone killings, his prosecuting of (and, based on political and social status, double-standards on) whistle-blowers, his expansion of all of the evils of his predecessor’s administration, and everything else I mentioned above? Eight years of grace, style, and class war…there, I fixed it.

Then, there’s Trump’s even more obvious cult of personality. Many among the religious right have imagined that God sent Orange-face to take on the “deep state” and to “drain the swamp” of corruption. If that isn’t a cult of personality, I don’t know what is.

Not only will the MAGA crowd believe such nonsense about Trump, they’ll also do all kinds of mental gymnastics to do away with their cognitive dissonance upon facing the truth. They claim, for example, that as with King David (who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her cuckolded husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed so he could marry her), God chose a sinner in Trump to do His will. This is so even in light of how it’s pretty much settled that Trump is guilty of having joined in on the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls with Epstein et al.

And the ‘president of peace’? Apart from his failure to end the Russia/Ukraine war (which I figured he wouldn’t have been able to do even if he’d sincerely wanted to), his banging of the war drums against Venezuela–not to stop a drug cartel, but to steal their oil, a motive freely admitted to–proves that he’s no less of a warmonger than any other US president. The MAGA crowd still won’t admit that they were conned…that their Lord and Saviour is as much a sheepdog for the right as Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog for the left.

VIII: Surveillance

Now, if there’s any one thing that we associate with totalitarianism, it’s surveillance. We can thank Orwell for that: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, telescreens that, as you watch them, people on the other side are watching you, the Thought Police, etc. Furthermore, also thanks to the snitch, totalitarian surveillance is also associated with socialism. So, if people today feel themselves to be surveilled, they all too often tend to think theirs is a socialist government.

Well, we’re far beyond what Snowden discovered over a decade ago as of this writing, and as I’ve endeavoured to demonstrate to you, Dear Reader, ours is a capitalist world. Only a small handful of countries today are of the Marxist-Leninist ideology (and some leftists dispute whether a few of those even are truly socialist). People are going to have to confront the reality that it’s our capitalist government that is oppressing us.

To start with a relatively minor example, you must have noticed by now that whenever you show an interest in this or that product online, you tend to see ads for similar products, or ones associated in one way or another with that product. Obviously, capitalists are surveilling you, and trying to get you to part with your money to buy their product and line their pockets. BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

There are surveillance cameras on streets, ready to catch proof of drivers violating traffic laws (including relatively trivial ones) as an excuse to pass out fines and take more money out of your pockets. There seems to be less of an interest in driver safety than there is in controlling people.

Of course, surveillance has recently been enhanced through the use of AI in the forms of smart homes, smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities. Orwell’s telescreens had nothing on this. Keep in mind also how this AI is linked with some of the richest men in the world: Jensen Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, as well as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. There has been growing concern that tech bros like these are further eroding democracy (News flash: they’re all capitalists!)

This surveillance can, of course, be used to help the ruling class track any and all revolutionary activity, on- or offline. Remember how a number of those tech bros are buddying up with Trump. Palantir is another big tech company using AI in aid of government surveillance, helping to enable such things as Trump’s deportations.

Two of Palantir’s founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, have publicly shown themselves to be particularly problematic in their attitudes to human rights, democracy, and warmongering. Thiel has been described as both an Ayn Rand libertarian and a ‘skeptic’ about democracy–something many might find contradictory, but not me, for the reasons I’ve given above and in other posts. As for Karp, one need only watch him ranting in YouTube videos to get a clear sense of how unhinged (and/or addled by narcotics, most likely) he is, fanatically defending imperialist war, Zionism, Western chauvinism, and ICE.

Seriously, do we want loose cannons like these in charge of AI and surveillance? Now ICE, among other things, brings me to my next topic.

IX: Police Brutality and ICE

Now, let’s start going into the truly nasty and violent aspects of our growing totalitarian world, in case what I mentioned above wasn’t enough to convince you, Dear Reader. I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the US, the belly of the beast to which ICE is specific, but manifestations of the militarization of police can be found in many countries around the world–not just in the US, but also in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and the UK, as well as in Africa. I should hardly need to go into great detail about the harm police militarization does to democracy, to public trust, to marginalized communities in particular, and to civilians perceived as enemies. The Thought Police, NKVD, and Stasi had nothing on these cops.

A lot of white people in the US and elsewhere in the West show little, if any, sensitivity to how these cops brutalize blacks, Latin Americans, and LGBTQ+ people. If such white and conservative people had ever had the experience of being disproportionately targeted by militarized police, though, they’d not only realize what a totalitarian world we’ve been living in, they might also realize that those marginalized groups…are…actually…people, too, no less so than the straight white crowd.

We always hear stories of how the secret police of socialist states would round up dissidents in the middle of the night, using torture and intimidation to crush political dissent. What we don’t hear is how these dissidents were, or were at least perceived to be, the kind of capitalist sympathizers who, if left to do whatever they wanted, would have all the sooner and surer brought back capitalism, leading in turn to the capitalist totalitarian nightmare we’re in now…which includes having the same kind of cops doing the same kind of thing to the anticapitalist dissidents of today.

We’ve already seen the extent to which ICE will terrorize people in the Latin American community on the pretext that they’re illegals, kidnapping them, separating children from their parents in cages, then deporting them. Venezuelans have been sent to CECOT in El Salvador; others have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” places that are actually concentration camps (more on that below), where they’ve suffered all kinds of abuses. These cops often nab them at night, too.

We’ve known for ages about police brutality and the killing of blacks, often with impunity. Note that none of this started under Trump, whom liberals like to blame for everything while ignoring the sins of their favoured presidents: the Obama and Biden administrations presided over a lot of this kind of brutality, as well as the ICE deportations. Fascism has been building and growing in the West for a long time.

Things have taken a recent turn for the worse under the second Trump administration, with Pam Bondi announcing that law enforcement officials are to investigate Antifa and other supposed domestic terrorist groups. This will be nothing less than a crackdown on leftist groups perceived as a threat to the American capitalist government. Note that ‘Antifa’ just means antifascist, which should be deemed a perfectly reasonable stance to have, especially in our increasingly fascist world. So criminalizing an ‘organization’ not clearly defined as such should tell you what kind of a government the US really has. Now, let’s talk about those…

X: Concentration Camps and Prisons

Before I get into the current situation, it might be fitting to point out that, contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda that came from such groups as the CIA during the Cold War, the CIA themselves knew that being in the Gulag labour camps was nowhere near as bad as we’ve been led to believe. Among the many facts given in the link above, the Soviet archives reveal that 20 to 40 percent of Gulag inmates were released every year, and the vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offences: murder, assault, theft, and any of the other usual crimes punishable in any society.

The Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were genuine death camps, in which up to 11 million inmates were victims of murder for being Jews, Roma, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and mentally or physically disabled, political and religious opposition to the regime, etc. And fascists were and are allied with capitalism, not socialism…in case you forgot.

As for today’s capitalist concentration camps, I’ve already mentioned those in El Salvador and in Florida, where many have been held without charge or due process, and where many are being subject to beatings, psychological and sexual abuse, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, incommunicado detention, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, etc.

Let’s now do a comparison of the characteristic detainees: in CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz, the great majority of inmates are Latin Americans; in the Nazi concentration camps, the inmates were mostly “Untermenschen“–Jews, Roma, gay men, the mentally ill and disabled, and political prisoners; in the Gulag, they were mostly criminals. Seriously, which political stance is far, far guiltier of using labour camps as places for abuse and injustice–the far left, or the far right?

Next, we can look at the for-profit prison system, which uses inmates to do labour for corporations and typically pays them wages far below the minimum wage, making the work hardly distinguishable from slavery. Prisons for profit are perhaps most notorious in the US, but they also exist in countries around the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, etc., to varying extents.

Note how capitalistic such prisons are (i.e., the motive is maximizing profits for the corporations). The near-slave status of the prisoner-labourers is easily comparable to that of the slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, who generally worked for nothing. In the US, the 13th amendment permits prison slavery. In contrast, in the Gulag, inmates were paid or given food, given more or less of it depending on how productive their work was.

Of course, the very worst concentration camp in the world–and it can legitimately, if metaphorically, be called one, for its victims (innocent men, women, and children) are trapped in the place and murdered and brutalized every day–is the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. The totalitarian mass murder going on there and elsewhere is my next topic.

XI: Mass Murder

Before I go into the capitalist mass murder of today (and of so many years and decades before that), we need to take a brief look at the nonsense that bourgeois propaganda has said about the deaths blamed on communism, or more accurately, how many deaths there supposedly were due to communism, as opposed to how many deaths there actually were.

The spurious sources of the ‘100 million killed by communists’ idea are such books as The Black Book of Communism, the lies of Robert Conquest, and the like. Please click on the links if you want more detail on that, since I don’t wish to waste time and space going into that. Suffice it to say that the 100 million figure is wildly exaggerated and deliberately contrived for maximum propagandistic effect. Bourgeois paranoia about the spread of communism during the Cold War necessitated, from the ruling class’s point of view, exaggerated numbers meant to shock, not to inform. You know the old cliché: in war, the first casualty is the truth.

In any case, even if one accepts the absurdly high number of 100 million deaths as accurate, this otherwise bloated figure is dwarfed by the millions of people who have died, and who continue to die annually, under capitalism. We’ve been able to feed the entire world for a long time, but we don’t because there’s no profit in doing so. The combined wealth of oligarchs like Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Thiel, Karp, and others could feed the world, build hospitals and schools, provide affordable (if not free) housing, and the like. The deaths resulting from starvation, disease, homelessness, and war are largely preventable: only the ruling class’s greed and psychopathy prevent it.

The endless imperialist wars cause constant, needless deaths. The Iraq War alone resulted in at least a million deaths. Contrary to what right-wing libertarians think, war is not just ‘government stuff.’ War is a business. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others are laughing all the way to the bank with all the glorious profits they’re making off of human suffering and death. The stealing of natural resources, like the oil in Iraq and Syria and the oil to be stolen from Venezuela, is a crucial aspect of capitalist imperialism and the obvious motive for these wars.

The recent genocides in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan are the most egregious recent examples of capitalist mass murder, though. Again, weapons from many countries around the world have been sold to the killers in these genocides: the Saudi-led coalition killing Yemenis, the IDF killing Gazans and those in the West Bank, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killing the Sudanese.

Special attention ought to be given to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, though. The real reason for the support of so many countries around the world, especially the Anglo-American NATO-allied empire, for Israel–apart from the obvious business interests (i.e., the buying and selling of weapons)–is how crucial the Jewish state is as an ally in maintaining imperial control of the region. There’s a lot of oil there, and so a lot of money is to be made. Israel is needed to kick ass in the region to secure those capitalist imperialist interests.

The official number killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, as of this writing, and excluding the thousands estimated to be buried under the rubble, is over 70,000 people. The ‘ceasefire’ is of course complete bullshit, since the IDF has still been killing Gazans without interruption, and of course we can see no end to the killing any time soon, for the whole point of the killing is not to stop Hamas, but total extermination.

What should be particularly chilling about all of this is that not only are the people with the power and authority to do so aren’t lifting a finger to stop the killing, but also that these genocides can be seen as a template for possibly wiping out any other group of people who try to stand up to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in general. With AI surveillance, any of us in the resistance can be fingered and hit with a drone strike, if not a balls-out genocide like in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan. The psychopaths in power simply have no respect for human life.

XII: Utopian Thinking

Critics of communism like to claim that we leftists all dream of a perfect world with no pain, and that we’ll force our vision on everybody with a globe-spanning government. It is especially amusing to get this charge of utopianism from the supposedly anti-government right-wing libertarians, who imagine that the “free market” is naturally self-regulating and efficient (easily seen as total bullshit when we consider wasted food and starving people, as well as empty houses and homelessness, to give just two examples), and that the “invisible hand” will magically make everything right.

This “free market” ideology has been increasingly the dominant one in our world since the Reagan/Thatcher years, of course. It would be far more correctly called neoliberalism, since this new liberalizing of the market (translation: let the capitalist class be “free” to be as selfish, greedy, and hoarding as they like) really involves a subordinating of the government (and everything and everyone else) to the whims of the market, not an eliminating of the government.

Just as right-wingers imagine there’s no such thing as governments eradicating poverty (even though many governments have at least made impressive progress in doing so), so do we on the left (as well as anyone with a modicum of common sense) know there’s no such thing as allowing “rational” selfishness to run rampant and magically provide for everyone’s needs, while also not needing a government to protect capitalists’ private property.

For people so supposedly anti-government, many right-wing libertarians sure like getting into it. Look at the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers, who pumped so much of their wealth into the Republican Party. Look at libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who work in the government. And look at Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist, who is set to receive $40 billion from the Trump administration in exchange for forcing Argentinians to vote for Milei, whose policies ruined the country’s economy. I thought it was bad to let the government intervene in the economy, and to force its will on the people.

Apparently not.

XIII: Cold War Fears of Nuclear War

Now, as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough, the one peace dividend we were supposed to enjoy from the end of the Cold War–no more fears of the two great superpowers, the US and the USSR, going into a hot war and killing everybody all over the world through nuclear annihilation–is no longer to be had. The US/NATO provocation of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the looming war with China over Taiwan, has killed even that one peace dividend.

That nut-job I mentioned above, Alex Karp, envisions a three-way war between the West on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. With the connections between the tech bros (and their AI in the US military) and Trump’s right-wing government, such fears of the world’s annihilation are well-founded.

XIV: Conclusion

So, even if socialist revolution leads to the totalitarian nightmare that the right-wingers are so scared of…so what? What’s the difference between that kind of totalitarianism and the right-wing kind we’re currently living in?

I’ll tell you what the real difference is…and yes, the capitalists are terrified of it. Ordinary people will gain access to free healthcare, housing, and education up to university, full employment, food security, a social safety net, etc…all of their basic needs met, and recipients will include people in the Third World. Getting all those things, however, will also mean that the ruling class will lose all their excess wealth–that’s the real reason they’re so scared of socialist revolution.

Let’s scare them.