About

I have been writing about communism since 2006.  My task is to challenge the two dominant falsehoods that dominate the accepted thinking about communism.

The first falsehood is the allegation that communists like Mao and Stalin deliberately killed tens of millions of people.  This has been easily shown to be false, but few have the courage to point this out.

The second falsehood is the belief that communism is necessarily economically inefficient.  Communist countries were, in fact, affluent compared to most countries in the world.  The figures about communist performance need to be challenged.  In fact, new research is hugely undermining the conventional wisdom about socialist inefficiency.

Communism is the only alternative to capitalism.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, like many others, I  looked for new alternatives to capitalism.  The libertarian models I investigated either boiled down to a planned economy that in some way was meant to be ‘planned by the workers’ or it was a type of ‘worker-controlled’ capitalism.  As the historian Alec Nove once suggested-either society decides what it is going to produce in some more or less conscious way, that is by agreeing on plan targets for different groups of workers to reach or goods are allocated by buying and selling.  There is no third way.  The quest for the illusory third way just leads to reformism or worse.  I realised that if the oppressed people of the world are to be led out of the pit of defeatism, populism and fundamentalism, we must first prove the case for communism and then boldly propagate it once more.