Debunking 10 Common Misconceptions of Communism

It is often purported that the existence of private, independent news alone guarantees the free proliferation of information, untainted by government bureaucrats who, we are led to believe, are singularly interested in distorting the facts. The basis for this assertion is the assumption that, without any centralized ideological organizer, the private owners of these competing firms will have no universal common interests among them, such that the public discourse between them will illuminate the truth. But the U.S. is a capitalist society, a society in which the vast majority of industry is owned privately, by a relatively slim minority of capitalists, who each seek the same goal: to generate profits by selling commodities. And in an advanced capitalist society in particular, where industry has become centralized into bigger and fewer monopolistic firms, it is not only the means of material production that are monopolized by the capitalist class, but also the means of ideological production. That is to say, all the major media outlets, platforms, networks, think-tanks, etc, are owned by a single class of people who, even without coordinating with each other, share the same essential interests, and really only deviate in the details of their ideologies. It is little surprise, then, that in all but the smallest holdouts of truly independent, non-profit productions, the media we’re exposed to is resoundingly anti-Communist; news, film, and other media that exist only to generate profits for the capitalist owners and to perpetuate their ideology will inevitably serve to demonize their enemies. This process, whereby information is distorted by anarchic forces, has only accelerated with the nominal end of the Cold War and the development of mass infotech, which has brought about a new age of decentralized information publication. Now, through social media and other online fora, the hegemonic powers are able to control “truth,” not necessarily through centralized censorship, but by drowning it out with an unstoppable tide of disinformation, and by controlling what is seen as “legitimate” or as “acceptable.” Lies become unfalsified by repetition in a purported “free marketplace of ideas,” where they are converted from disinformation into unsourceable misinformation, while the truth quite literally fails to compete. The result is that few people today really understand what the words “socialism” and “Communism” mean, yet we’ve been taught to instinctively fear socialists and Communists all the same.

Fortunately, even with all these methods of ideological control, the state and the media can never completely forestall the struggle between the dispossessed mass of workers and the capitalists. The workers and the poor instinctively sense that their interests are opposed to those of the rich, and, before long, the most class conscious, in pursuit of a scientific understanding of their oppression, are drawn to socialism; the best learn Marxism — the sole scientific ideology of Communism — and become revolutionaries, dedicated to serving the people. If you are reading this now, then perhaps you are among them, searching for answers.

At this critical historical junction, where Communism is still widely vilified, it is my honor to have compiled rebuttals to ten of the most commonly held misconceptions for those readers who will take the time to read them. For those who would consider themselves “free thinkers” or “truth seekers,” I encourage you to read on in a courageous and good-faith spirit. After all, as Comrade Assata Shakur once said, “We’re taught at such an early age to be against the Communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what Communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”

10. Compared To Capitalism, Socialism Is Despotic And Undemocratic

If someone claimed that all countries on earth, even the most democratic of republics, are, at the same time, dictatorships, would that surprise you? In every-day speech, “democracy” and “dictatorship” are understood as antonyms, and a “democratic dictatorship” sounds like an oxymoron. But Marxists have a different understanding of the state. Marxists understand the state as a product of the irreconcilable conflict between social classes, as a means by which the ruling class keeps the working class from revolting and ending their exploitation. For instance, during the Roman republic, the state served the interests of the slaveholding nobility by repressing the struggle of the slaves and free laborers for emancipation. Similarly, in the antebellum American South, the state served the interests of the big and medium slaveholding planters, and all others who profited from the Atlantic slave trade, by deploying the military and militias alike to crush slave revolts. Today, the American state serves the interests of the capitalists and the other propertied colonizer classes, and represses the struggles of the oppressed classes and nationalities for emancipation.

If all we mean by ‘democratic’ is that the government consists of elected representatives, then of course the United States, like all republics, is democratic. But if by “democratic” we mean that politics and policy are directed by the will of the people, or in the interest of the people generally, then we could not possibly call the United States a “true” democracy. America is a bourgeois republic, a republic under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, even though we have mass suffrage and vote in elections, the representatives we elect do not actually represent our interests, but rather the narrow interests of the ruling capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. It is the bourgeoisie who control policy, and not merely by casting a ballot in an election, but by “voting with their wallet.” Most people come to understand this pretty intuitively just by participating in electoral politics, but it’s worth pointing out that this has actually been proven empirically: “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Just as the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the antebellum American South were “democracies,” but only for the slim minority classes of slaveholders and profiteers, and dictatorships over the slaves, the propertyless free laborers, the smallholders, etc., so, too, is America today only a “democracy” for the capitalists, and a capitalist dictatorship over the dispossessed classes.

The primary difference between the political systems of socialism and capitalism, then, is not an absence of representative democracy, but rather, which class is politically empowered — the “class character” of the state. Under capitalism, workers only have the right to vote for whichever representative of the ruling class is going to oppress them next. The only choice we have is, “Shall we ‘elect’ to be oppressed by the Republicans or the Democrats this year?” But the development of socialism commences with the overthrow of the capitalist dictatorship and the institution of a new class dictatorship: the dictatorship of the oppressed classes, led by the proletariat. In a developing socialist society, the state is an instrument of working class power, where the workers and the poor have, for the first time in history, true political representation. And since the working class comprises the vast majority of society, socialism is actually far more democratic than capitalism. Of course, in any representative system, there will be deviations between the interests of some individual workers and those of the working class as a collective, but this “defect” is inherent to all democracies, regardless of class character, and the proletarian democracy will carry on until classes disappear, until the hydra of class society has finally been slain.

Some people object that a class can not be accurately represented by a single party, that multiple parties ensure effective representation. This is what we are taught in every liberal political “science” (sic) class, and what is echoed by every bourgeois politician. But whether we look at the United States, where only two parties have parliamentary representation, or England or Canada where a handful do, nowhere do we find the interests of the workers represented. True, there are factions of the bourgeoisie with competing political programs: high spending or low spending, laissez faire or Keynesianism, isolationism or interventionism, and so on. But the socialist class interests of the proletariat will never be up for election in a capitalist regime. “Our” representatives serve the ruling bourgeoisie alone — perhaps different “sides” of the bourgeoisie, but always one side or the other. The “choice” between bourgeois parties is about as meaningful as that between different brands of snacks owned by the same monopoly. For Lockhead Martin, it makes no difference if Democrats or Republicans occupy the Oval Office; its shareholders will get their pockets lined by ever-increasing defense spending either way.

As for the proletariat in power, we understand that truth is not a compromise between two contrasting views, and that factions have no need for independent representation. Political competition in capitalist society is a facade at best; in socialist society it is a vehicle of counterrevolution, allowing interests contrary to that of the proletariat to express itself. Hence, fighting bureaucratization and capitalist restoration is not a matter solved by party pluralism, but rather by continued class struggle, fierce adherence to criticism and self-criticism, and by mass political education and participation.

9. Socialists Want to Take Away Your Belongings

When Communists advocate for the abolition of private property, this is often a source of confusion. People worry that this means Communists want to take their property, to force them to share what they have fairly earned. But in the existing system of bourgeois private property and capitalist production, the “fruit of one’s labor” is already taken from the vast majority of the population — the workers — by their capitalist employers. In our current society, every commodity is a social product, because every commodity must pass through many different hands, through a worldwide chain of fields, factories, ports, warehouses, and so on, and through a whole series of labor-processes, to finish it — even the bourgeois ideologues do not deny this. What they do continue to deny and quibble about, is that only those who own the means of production, who employ labor, are able to privately appropriate the products of labor. This kind of private property, capital, is already the means by which the many are forced to give up what they have worked to produce, in exchange for a price (a wage) which is, with only some exception in the imperialist metropoles, far less than the value they produce.

So when the imperialists of the World Economic Forum speak of a “great reset” in which “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” some people mistakenly think this is communism. In fact, for the working people, this is capitalism! Under communism, the products of social labor are socially owned, and hence each person is entitled to personally appropriate those articles of consumption they need and desire from the social product. Under capitalism, not only is one’s subsistence not guaranteed, but even that which is commonly understood as their property — one’s home or car, for example — is constantly under threat of seizure, foreclosure, forfeiture, and so on. It is, in fact, the capitalists who want us bereft of the right to this kind of personal property, so that they can extract ever more profit out of single-use items, debts, leases, and so on. Such a wasteful and inhumane reality can only be avoided through socialist revolution!

8. Socialism Is When The Government “Does Stuff”

The idea that socialism simply means “bigger government,” “more welfare,” or “state ownership” is commonly advanced both by self-described “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would have us believe that Norway and Finland, for instance, are model socialist countries, and equally by conservatives, who would have us believe that socialism is a metric of state bureaucracy, so that “more socialism” means little more than “more of the DMV.”

The idea that different modes of production can be placed along a one dimensional axis from libertarianism on the one side to Communism on the other confuses people by making it seem like the difference between socialists and liberals is merely a matter of quantity, that socialists are just “more liberal” than liberals. While this state intervention or “government size” spectrum might be helpful for comparing bourgeois ideologies like neoliberalism and Keynesianism, socialism is qualitatively distinct from capitalism, so they can not be meaningfully compared this way. Imagine trying to explain the difference between capitalism and feudalism by appealing to “the scale of the monarchy” or “the degree of clerical state power” — wouldn’t that be absurd? No, socialists are not liberals, and trying to fit socialist positions into the bourgeois political spectrum only results in spurious ideas like the so-called “horseshoe theory,” which claims that “far-right” and “far-left” politics share fundamental similarities with each other but not with the liberal “center.”

So if that’s what socialism isn’t, then what actually is it? Socialism is the period of revolutionary transformation from class society to communist society. This transformation of society is carried on under the aforementioned “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat,” which, according to a scientific plan, builds the conditions which will enable the abolition of classes and state power: the abolition of private property, exploited labor, and poverty, and their replacement with communist property, equality in production and distribution, and universal abundance.

Crucially, to say that all state ownership is socialist is firstly to confuse ownership by the workers as a class and ownership by the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not advocating handing more power to the existing government of today, but rather a completely new government, with completely different institutions — one that truly lives up to the slogan “of, by, and for the people.” But there is another difference too: under capitalist state ownership, wage labor is maintained, the market and profit motive are maintained, the system of commodity production is maintained. A collection of workers might own their own workplace in a local co-op, for example, but as long as they remain wage-laborers producing goods and services for the market, they remain exploited by the system even without a specific member of the bourgeoisie employing them. Even in a nationalized industry in a capitalist economy, a worker may no longer be employed by a particular member of the bourgeoisie, but the economic relationship between the workers and the owners as classes is maintained, the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor is maintained, the divisions of labor and industry are maintained, and so on.

7. Everyone Gets Paid The Same, So There’s No Incentive To Work Hard

This one’s a myth from the Cold War era — and as such has no connection with reality whatsoever. This myth asks us, “Why would anyone become a doctor if they’d be paid the same as a janitor or a McDonald’s fry cook?” All one has to know to refute this misconception is that the slogan of Communism has always been “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Hence, where people have different needs, people will receive different  incomes. What Marx did advocate, particularly during the early phase of socialist construction, is a meritocratic basis for income, where what you give in terms of labor-time is however much you are owed back from the social product — or, in short, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution.” Lenin used the biblical slogan, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat,” to describe this early stage. There will be no room for exploiters and blood suckers. However, all socialist states have provided for people who are unable to work — persons with disabilities, the infirm, the elderly, children, pregnant persons, and so on. Marx also recognized distinctions between skilled and unskilled labor — labor requiring differing amounts of specialized training and education — and explained how skilled labor can be counted as  “simple labor” multiplied or intensified. So in no sense did Marx ever advocate for a uniform income.

Comrade Stalin once succinctly rebuked this view:

Leveling in the context of necessities and personal life is a reactionary and petty-bourgeois absurdity, worthy of any primitive ascetic sect, but not for a socialist society organized in the Marxist spirit, because one can’t demand everyone have the same needs and tastes, that everyone live their personal lives according to a single and universal model […]. In terms of equality, Marxism no longer understands it as leveling in the context of personal necessities and living standards, but as the elimination of classes.

Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend

6. Private Entrepreneurship Is Better And Faster At Development Than Socialized Production

While it cannot be denied that capitalism is superior at providing a greater variety of useless garbage — funko pops, pet rocks, unregulated vitamin tinctures, etc — and luxuries that can only be afforded and enjoyed by the extremely rich — private jets, sports cars, $12,000 watermelons, etc — the idea that capitalism can develop the productive forces of society faster than socialism is a theoretical and historical lie. The pace of industrial development in socialist countries has repeatedly oustripped any precedent set by the capitalist world — and they did so while besieged by the imperialist countries. The USSR, for instance, converted the lands of the former Russian Empire from a backwards, primarily agrarian and peasant country, in which the vast majority of people lived in abject poverty and periodic famines were unavoidable, to an industrial superpower within three decades, despite the immense losses suffered by the Soviet peoples in the First World War, the Russian Civil War, and the Second World War.

One of the essential contradictions of capitalism is that its system of exchange and ownership can no longer maintain and grow the productive forces that were birthed by them. The division of industry, the anarchy of production, the insatiable greed for profits, compels all the competing capitalist firms to continually increase productivity, which requires them to invest in greater machinery and reduce the labor required, which only has the effect of lowering the value of their commodities. Inevitably, the supply of commodities becomes too great for the available market, causing prices plummet and a general crisis to set in. The result of this crisis of overproduction is inevitably the destruction of the excess commodities or the destruction of the means of production. In the stage of advanced imperialist decay, where monopolization has reached an incredible degree, even during periods of relative stability we see mountains of unsellable goods buried in landfills and locks on dumpsters filled with edible but unsold goods. The fetter of capitalist production which produces such chaos and absurdity is only solved through the socialization of production, hence casting off the supreme power of the market in directing production. It is socialism, and only socialism, that frees the development of production from such crisis!

5. Communism Is Utopian

The first people to call themselves “communists” were indeed utopians. They believed that they could colonize “empty” land and establish self-sufficient, primarily agricultural, primitivist, egalitarian communes. Their experiments inevitably ended in failure; some amounted to cults, and some cults today are similarly utopian. But the starting point of modern Communism was exactly the criticism of utopianism by Marx and Engels, which led to their development of scientific socialism. Today, “Communism” is synonymous with Marxist scientific socialism. Marx and Engels proved that socialism is not a utopia, nor can it spring from a dream in any great philosopher’s head; they proved that socialism is, instead, an inevitability of human history. They proved that the instability, or “contradictions,” inherent to capitalist society, and the emergence of the modern proletariat, would inevitably lead and yield to socialist revolution. As Marx himself wrote,

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

It’s certainly true that there are “leftist” tendencies which even today seek to impose their ideal models onto a resistant world rather than investigating how the existing contradictions in society must be resolved — the social democrats, the democratic socialists, the anarchists, the market “socialists” (sic!), etc. But these are not Marxists and are therefore not to be properly understood as Communists.

Furthermore, if Marxism is utopian, then what is liberalism? In its modern day incarnation, the trend of liberal “progressivism” is little more than what Marx and Engels derided as “bourgeois socialism,” a failed political ideology which espouses that the fundamental contradictions of capitalism can be peacefully reconciled through gradual reforms but without fundamentally altering the economic structure of society. The effects are to be changed but the causes left in-tact! And all this is to be done ostensibly in the interests of the working class — how generous! And even in its former revolutionary glory, that wonderful political philosophy that toppled monarchies — well that too was utopian! In Engel’s Words:

The new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror… The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest… The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified… In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

The principles on which bourgeois society had constituted itself, those grand revolutionary ideals, turned out in the course of history to be absolutely at odds with capitalist economics and bourgeois society generally — and yet the defenders of this legacy would accuse us of being the utopians! Such hypocrisy, is it not?

4. Abolition Of The Family

Marx and Engels infamously defended “abolition of the family” in the political program of the Communist Manifesto. Nearly 200 years later, this remains one of the most misunderstood and contentious positions of the Communists, even among those who claim to profess Marxism. When speaking of “the” family, we should be clear that we are referring to a particular historical form of the family, not the concept of kinship bonds and communities “in the abstract.” In contrast to what the bourgeois ideologues — and in particular the fascists — would have us believe, the modern “nuclear” family is not the only kind of family that has ever existed; in fact, it is a very recent development, appearing only with the development of the modern bourgeoisie in the last few centuries. Originally, in primeval hunter-gatherer societies, families did not exist, and there was no division of the community into smaller kinship units. The family first developed with the advent of agriculture, the expansion of the community into larger settlements of agriculturalists, and the earliest emergence of private property in discrete household units in the Neolithic. Since that time, the family has transformed in tandem with the transformation of class society in each subsequent epoch: the capitalist family is distinct from that of the feudal family, and the feudal family from that of the ancient family. Moreover, the family takes a different form among the different classes in a society: a family of slaves will not look like a family of slaveholders, nor will a proletarian family look like a bourgeois family.

When Communists speak of “the abolition of the family” they do not mean there will no longer be personal bonds between parents and children, or that people will not be able to find lifelong partners, etc.; what they mean is that the economic basis of the contemporary family will be abolished, and that a new community and kinship structure will organically arise from these new economic conditions. Furthermore, the abolition of the family was never an immediate programmatic demand; Marx identified capitalism as having already functionally abolished the working class family, and then suggested that the absence of the working class family would vanish with the vanishing of capital. The double negative in this construction is confusing: Marx suggested that Communism would promote the re-development of a working class family, a new family form where the bonds of its members are purely sentimental rather than coerced by economic necessity. The exact, concrete form in which this new family will appear is not for us to decide for our progenitors; all we can say definitively is what features will disappear. Lineal inheritance, which in its development enabled accumulation of wealth in one family by the accumulation of destitution in many others, is one such economic condition that will be done away with. In our contemporary society, those individual families without the means to raise their children will have them abducted by the state, which then pays for strangers to raise them in their stead; this too is one of the economic conditions which belies the current form of the family. The uncompensated labor of women in social reproduction, her status in capitalist society as a tool of reproduction, is another. With these conditions done away with, partners will no longer be mutually dependent on each other for their subsistence, and families will cease to compete against each other for the subsistence of their children; hence, the antagonism between individual families will wane, and communal child rearing will once again become not only possible, but preferable. It takes a village, after all!

3. Real Communism Has Never Been Tried Before

The truth that must be reckoned with, the truth that all tried and true Communists today will readily acknowledge, is that real communism was tried! And it was good! It is, of course, true that no socialist society has successfully developed into a “mature” or “late stage” communist society — one where classes have been abolished and the state has withered away — but this is not for any lack of doing “real socialism.” Class society first emerged thousands of years ago, with the earliest development of private property and the division of the population into distinct classes — the propertied and the propertyless. The transformation of class society into communist society will, therefore, not happen overnight, but will be a centuries-long historical epoch. The first large-scale socialist revolution, the October Revolution of 1917 that led to the formation of the USSR, happened just over a century ago. We still stand at the very dawn of the transition from capitalism to socialism; people alive today have witnessed, and are witnessing, only the first of many socialist revolutions to come.

“But Communism lost in the Cold War!” Yes, the USSR lost. It was vanquished by the reactionary forces of global capitalism, or capitalist-imperialism, led by the United States, and by internal counterrevolutionaries. As Lenin rightly noted, even once the bourgeoisie is overthrown, it remains the economically dominant class, and will desperately seek to overthrow the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat in order to restore its own class dictatorship. That is to say, if we can speak at all of the “failures” of 20th century Communism, it is by and large only to the extent that it was defeated. Sometimes externally by imperialism, sometimes internally by counterrevolutionaries — usually some combination of the two. 

The first dictatorship of the proletariat, the Paris Commune, was also defeated, but this did not preclude the Bolshevik revolutionaries from carrying the next great revolutionary project forward. Yes, it’s true: the collapse of the Communist bloc has certainly been a tragedy for humanity, but history isn’t over yet! It’s well worth recognizing that it took the ascendant bourgeoisie several centuries and numerous revolutions, some successful and some failed, before the final victory of the capitalist revolution over feudalism was achieved. Wherever the young bourgeoisie successfully seized state power, they remained in conflict against the surviving remnants of the old aristocracy and nobility for a long time. As recently as 2022 there was even a failed monarchist putsch in Germany! The class struggle is not a straight line; it advances in fits and starts, with progress as well as regress. So fret not: as long as we learn from the successes and failures of our predecessors, our time will come again!

2. Socialism Causes Famine

Far from causing famines, socialism ended them! Nearly every country so far that has produced a socialist revolution has had the misfortune of inheriting semi-feudal, underdeveloped economies in which periodic famines have always been unavoidable and catastrophic. It goes without saying that uplifting a country from these conditions is a herculean task that cannot be accomplished with a snap of a finger; to even establish a socialist economy first requires the industrialization of the economy, including agriculture. And while it is certainly true that rapid industrialization came with grave costs and sacrifices, it cannot be denied that by the end of this process, each socialist revolution in history succeeded in eliminating the famines which had plagued their countries for millennia prior.

By contrast, let’s look at the track record of capitalist economies in the world today. Every country today faced with acute food insecurity and malnutrition crises are capitalist countries, mostly in the global south. According to the World Food Programme, a capitalist-funded NGO, there are “more than 345 million people facing high levels of food insecurity in 2023.” How can this be? The world’s productive forces have the capacity to feed the world’s entire population several times over. Food insecurity today is caused by a number of fundamentally capitalist problems: economic exploitation of the Global South by the imperial center, wars by and between imperialist nations, the effects of the climate crisis, the devastating effects of profit-first agricultural practices (eg. monocropping), the anarchy of capitalist production, and by the wealth inequality inherent to capitalist economies. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the adoption of a neoliberal market economy in the Russian Federation, food insecurity and malnutrition increased rather than decreasing. A 1993 survey conducted by CARE “classified 70% of households, 77% of women, and 32% of children as hungry” in the former USSR. In part this was because of decreased agricultural and livestock production, increased income inequality and decreased purchasing power, and increased unemployment. Even in the wealthiest parts of the wealthiest empires, starvation, food insecurity, and malnutrition continue to rear their heads in impoverished communities and homeless encampments. Sky rocketing market prices, food deserts, supply chain failures, overlapping economic crises — aren’t these endemic to even the most “wealthy” capitalist countries?

1. “Everyone will be equally poor” 

The bourgeois ideologues have claimed for centuries that ending inequality, rather than eliminating poverty, would actually make it general, universal. The claim comes in two parts: the first is that poverty is a product of humanity’s unchanging nature to reproduce at a faster rate than production can keep pace with, and second that the wealthiest few in capitalist society earned their wealth by contributing more to society (and hence, redistribution privileges the laziest, dumbest, or weakest members of society). The pseudoscientific theory of “overpopulation,” first systematically expounded by the English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has long been debunked, and anyone without their head buried in the sand can clearly see that the wealthiest members of society are not producing millions of times more value than your average laborer — in fact, they produce little to no value at all!

What conditions the distribution of resources is neither human nature nor the supposed superiority of the wealthy; what conditions the distribution of resources are the relations of production in our society, in which those who own the means of production hold the means of subsistence hostage in exchange for the propertyless laborer’s ability to work. The more the proletarian works, the less he works for himself, and the more his surplus value is exploited, for the magnitude of his wage bears no relationship to the product of his own labor. It is this system of exploitation that polarizes wealth, and anyone who would deny this, as, for instance, the arch-neoliberal propagandist Milton Friedman did, must believe that the wealth in our society has, or could have, an infinite magnitude. But this is an absurdity: our planet has finite material resources and its human population has a finite sum of labor-power to expend on converting those resources into wealth. Opulent wealth at one pole of society must therefore be balanced by destitution at the other pole. Hence, by overthrowing the capitalist class and reforging the economic system, the average and median distribution of wealth will not only rise, but rise substantially! And where some inequality might remain, it ceases to be a social power over others.