Before we begin, congratulations on getting through the very pretentious title! Now that you are amused, we can proceed. Communism, capitalism. socialism, liberalism. These are all terms that we have thrown around in arguments and discussions. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. In my opinion, all of
these words are vaguely used, and are complex concepts that take years to understand, and for someone who has little patience and a much littler attention span, here’s a fun analogy. The socialist sees society and property as a single pie, and gives it to a single person, the government, to divvy out. The capitalist sees the entire table and sees that there is room for as many pies as you want, and divides each pie according to who has done the most in creating that pie. If you feel like you haven’t got your rightful share, you can make your own. As probability would have it, the ones who are inherently better at making pie and have access to better ingredients are the ones getting more pie to eat, and the ones that never had any resources to start with, and have no room on the table to make any more pie, are left scratching their heads. So the capitalist, just to make more pies and eat more pies, tells these people, “I will give you 1/40th of the slice that I eat
if you help me make twenty pies daily”.
Liberalists say, that if you make the capitalists better people, then maybe everyone can get a reasonable amount of pie. Communists say that the pie is everyone’s pie, the person who made it, the person who bought
the ingredients as well as the person who oversaw it. Everyone can use their ingredients, decide who makes what part of the pie, and eat according to their appetite and contribution. There is no high or low authority because everyone handles their pies together. Yes, I am as hungry as you are, but hey! You understand these terms better now!
Over the years, communism has earned a horrible reputation, because of it being merely a dream for Utopian society, it has been exploited by dictators across the world. From the USSR centuries ago, to more recently countries like China and Belarus. Communism has been used as an excuse for state surveillance, zero freedom of press, tyranny, rigging election results and much more.
Belarus’ Head of State is dubbed Europe’s only living dictator, and everyone knows it, except Vladmir Putin (no surprises there) and he himself. But after 26 years in power, this autocrat sees rigging his election result, tear gassing and issuing orders of police brutality against civil protesters and deporting his opposition as the only means of staying in power.
This can be called pseudo communism, but I prefer imperialist intoxicated with power, and all the way back in the 1940s, George Orwell, in the thick of World War 2, thought so too. And wrote two brilliant dystopian yet eerily foreshadowing novels about the same. George Orwell, an absolute genius of a man, saw through the Mussolini's, Hitlers and Stalin's with their big dreams and beautiful speeches, and in his trademark stinging satire, revealed the pile of garbage under them. Animal Farm and 1984 read like an oracle’s prediction of the world as we see it in 2020, with apps that can hear and see you, store your data on an unprotected server, the narratives of history being twisted as needed, and much, much more. While the two are brilliant books, I think calling them fiction is ignorant, at least in today’s day and age. As scary as that thought is, it is simply the truth. And it is time we come to terms with it.
Amazing