Is Communism bad?

The First Cut
4 min readJan 16, 2023

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I am a born and bred Capitalist.

My earliest memories of books are Atlas Shrugged and Jeffrey Archer’s, The Fourth Estate.

At 34, I can still remember pivotal texts I read as a child about building businesses and the leverage that came from doing so. It shapes how I think and navigate the world. Actively.

Words are that important. Have that much impact. I’m not digressing, I promise.

We know Governments are corrupt. Any idea of more Government causes apprehension. Hence, a case for more Government is difficult to build. But society cannot function without some independent arbitration. We need some more of their intervention in key areas. But their powers and infringement have long since exceeded any necessity and they don’t get the important things done and yet are in power! Imagine that. My boss would fire me for lesser things.

In that sense, ‘Governments’ have a bad reputation. We need it. Just not in its current format.

The problem is in the word, too. Because what we need for certain, is Governance. If not Governments. A bit of framework to operate within, so as to offer guidelines to the general populace as they perambulate.

As you might say, guidelines are suggestive. There are ways to enforce suggestions. But I’m a firm believer that people, generally, behave the right way in most cases; assuming that they will operate within the guidelines is a bet I’m willing to take. At the very least, more people will behave the right way than not.

I’ll let that bring me to Communism. Communism is different from Government. One is an ideology and the other is an organizational body, though a Government will have to find processes & procedure that suit the standard ideology. Or their local representations of it, anyway.

Let’s assess the word first.

I’m fairly certain it stems from ‘Community’, which is a pivotal word. We all show up and do our jobs, and somehow the world functions. It’s predicated on us holding our own, while knowing there is endless and unknown help coming from each other. Like the root systems of trees in a forest. All interconnected, they’ll keep stumps we’ve left, alive for years because they can, and probably must. That must be what they wanted to invoke with ‘Communism’ rather than bleak siberian skies, factories that do not produce, and crumbling soviet murals.

The west has watched its manifestation fail and want none of it. But in a certain future representation, we’re going to need some of it. Blatantly so. It’s not the sharing of resources, it's that some resources are shared. It’s quite literally, how we exist, once you start paying attention. That’s also how the world outside of us exists

Mans inventions are all replications of nature. Almost all human endeavor has generally been a pursuit to replicate what we’ve found in nature. From flying to planes. From seeing to Cameras. From, the brain saves things, to Storage. In that sense, we’re not that creative or wise, as a species. We find it in Nature and replicate it by doing incredible things. You can have that one. It suits me here, to say that we should be taking our cues from nature on how to exist as well. As much as I’m a believer that Man exists despite Nature and not because of it, the idea that we’ll go left when all signs point to the right would be a special kind of naive, in terms of what Nature is telling us on ways to exist, for us to replicate.

I have some ideas to make the rubber meet the road. Here’s one, and it’s not necessarily a hill I’m willing to die on, but I think classrooms should only move as fast as its slowest student, especially at the younger ages. Without delving into that in detail, I urge you to think of your own and suggest it to the world. Aspire to see it come into existence. Cases where we move and live as a unit, and it is beneficial to do so. Now is when we build the operating procedures of the future. Let’s not get stuck in the legacy one because of our lack of participation. Then consequence will make the choices for us. It only takes action to avoid this.

If there is a point I’m trying to make, which I’m certain now there isn’t, is that in this case good or bad is too black and white.

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The First Cut

Preliminary ideas. Their first cut, on its way to other manifestations. One-liners, prose, poetry, essays & more.