Scare Tactics

Nazi’s Are Not Socialist

First lets start with the biggest myth associated with socialism. The biggest scare tactic is associating the German Nazi party with communism or socialism. Firstly in socialism all the people equally benefit from working as a whole. Instead of producing goods for profit the goods are created for the society use as a whole. Workers rights are put before that of the rich and ruling classes. Socialism attempts to destroy the ruling class and replace capitalism with a workers democracy.

National Socialism is only socialism for the national majority or in the Nazi’s case, socialism only for white non-jewish Germans. But they benefited from the oppression and exploitation of the minorities. As anyone who cares to read up on history, the communist and social democrats were the first people thrown into the death camps or were just taken out into the country side and shot. The National Socialist party was actually more accurately described a fascist party. Fascism has been described by many people as corporatist jingoism (extreme and aggressive patriotism/right-wing-racist nationalism).

In Nazi Germany the unions were destroyed and profit for the ruling class and their factory owning friends was the number one priority. The only reason some Jewish men/woman lived through the Holocaust is they were a source of free labor.

All socialist/communist parties are staunchly anti-fascist and in most cases join forces with anarchist all the way to liberals to combat fascism. The two ideologies could not be more different.

Wrongful Name Association

One of the next biggest scare tactics against socialist is name association. As a socialist Ive been called many things in my life. It never fails for people to drop one name when trying to discredit socialism; Stalin. I have personally been called a Stalinist so many times I have lost count.

Let me start by saying this; the word Stalinism has no base. Mao, Marx and Lenin, all of these people contributed something to the ideology of their respective forms of communism. For example Mao created “people protracted war” (and many other ideas) and there for Maoism is distinct from other forms of specific socialism. Stalin (unlike Mao/Lenin/Marx) contributed no advancement of socialist ideology. Thus the word Stalinist/Stalinism is just a scare tactic used to scare people away from socialism and has no base or meaning what so ever.

Communism is “Un-democratic”

First lets explain that un-like the popular opinion in the US, there is more than one form of “democracy”. The US uses bourgeois democracy, meaning that the candidate with the highest funding mostly wins the election. In the US “democracy”, party candidates are nominated by the parties after paying a sum of money, then voters get to pick from them in the primaries.

In socialism run on democratic centralism people are nominated by other people at the local level. Then after this they will run in a popular vote at the local/state or national elections depending on what they are nominated for. This is commonly called a workers democracy. In democratic centralism everyone votes as individuals but acts as one. This also keeps the citizens of said country involved in their government but this system also has problems but I will touch on that in a later post.. The idea that communism is un-democratic is a truthful as saying Iraq still has WMD.

Socialism is an idea of peace, love for your brothers and sisters, community, equal rights, anti-oppression, anti-imperialism, and is all about giving the power to the majority, power to the people!

By:Dustin Slagle