Re: Communalism versus Communism

You can call it anything you wish, but communism is "An economic or political system based on the sharing of all work and property by the whole community."  It is the paranoids in the United States who have attached Stalinist style attributes to it.

I've heard all the BS about the China revolution and while yes, they did some killing it wasn't near what it has been made out to be.  Everyone forgets that when Mao came to power in 1949 the life expectancy in China was 27 years.  Last I checked about a decade ago it was 68 years.  They virtually eliminated famine (but did have an extensive one in the 1960s), something that the Chinese lived with for centuries.  They also provided health care on a level that had never before been seen by the masses.

I lived through the era of the praises of the "Christian" Chang Chi Chek, but he killed just as many if not more than Mao - and they both went to military schools in the Soviet Union together.

Even under Mao the Chinese people were much, much better off than under Chang or any of the previous dynasties.  It's something that conservatives in America are totally unwilling to admit.

Russia is a different story.  Stalin made humongous mistakes, beginning with the elimination of the Kuluks (estimates of anywhere from 5 to 15 million of the best private farms in Russia) from which it took them 30 to 40 years to recover (if indeed they ever did).  Stalin's purge of the generals in the 1930s almost cost him his empire and his starvation of his own republic during WWII killed at least 3.5 million people.  I traveled throughout the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and Tblisi Georgia is the only place where I saw a statue to Stalin remaining.  He was born and raised within 20 miles of Tblisi.  Stalin style government is totalitarianism, not communism.

Don't confuse communism with what has been labeled communism.  The definition of communism that I quoted at the beginning came from the U. K.  It has been so trashed in the U. S. that we don't even know what it means.  All communism points to its roots in the book of Acts which says "All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need." (Acts 2:44-45)  If you look over Marx and many others who believe in communism you will find an almost verbatim quotation of that scripture.