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California assemblyman Rob Bonta authored AB 22, which repeals part of a law allowing state employees to be fired for being members of the Communist Party. The Bay Area Democrat has withdrawn the bill, but his gambit provides a tutorial on the currently raging subject of foreign intervention in American elections.

The Communist Party USA was not just another American political party, like the Democratic, Green, Libertarian and Republican parties. The Communist Party was the creation of the Soviet Union, which established the Communist International, the Comintern, to manage its parties in other lands.

Ben Gitlow, twice the Communist Party candidate for vice-president, described the party as a militarized colonial service in the land they were colonizing for the USSR, the United States.

Millennials and such might wonder which Americans joined a Party like that and still managed to get a job in California government. Rob Bonta failed to name any, including the most prominent.

Few African Americans joined a party that represented an all-white foreign dictatorship, but that proved no impediment to Angela Davis. Long after prominent blacks like Richard Wright abandoned the CPUSA, as he explained in The God That Failed, Davis duly joined the Party. She then gained her first teaching job at UCLA, which she retained despite attempts to fire her.

Davis involvement in a courthouse gun battle made her a national figure, and in 1979 the Soviet Union awarded Davis the International Lenin Peace Prize. In 1980 and 1984, Angela Davis was the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA, on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall.

Serving as the candidate of communist Russia, a hostile totalitarian foreign power, did not prevent Angela Davis from becoming professor of the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In that post she was a state employee, but was never fired for her CPUSA membership and candidacy.

Another American, Bert Corona, joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and dropped out of USC to become a professional Party agitatorwhat would now be called an organizer. Corona had no college degree and was completely unqualified for a job at Cal State LA, which took affirmative action to hire him.

Corona left that job, but the violence-prone Stalinist was not fired for Communist Party membership. He went on to bilk state government out of millions of dollars.

As the record shows, even the most high-profile and violent Communist Party members can easily secure and retain high-paying jobs with the state of California. That has also been true of the federal government.

The curiosity is not that there were undoubtedly many Reds that made government their vocation, but that the entire Communist Party was not on the federal payroll. That is not some right-wing McCarthyite, but the late liberal Democrat Robert Vaughn, star of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., who at USC wrote his PhD thesis about Communists blacklisted by the movie industry.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bontas legislation was an attempt to rehabilitate Communists by portraying them as just like members of other political parties. They werent and arent.

Communists are prodigious haters who never accepted the U.S. Constitution nor any democratic institutions. They are members of a Party founded, directed and funded by a hostile foreign power. Communists are the sycophants of dictators like Fidel Castro and apologists of their totalitarian regimes.

Just so millennials know, communism still prevails in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. That regimes Sado-Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-un hopes to strike the United States with a nuclear missile. So one might say that communism remains a threat to the peace, freedom and security of the United States.

Lloyd Billingsley is a Policy Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is the author of Barack em Up: A Literary Investigation, and Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield.

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California's Communist Tutorial - The Daily Caller

Communism is one of our top all-time lookups, and user comments suggest thats because it is often used in opaque ways. In some sources, communism is equated with socialism; in others, it is contrasted with democracy and capitalism. Part of this confusion stems from the fact that the word communism has been applied to varying political systems over time. When it was first used in English prose, communism referred to an economic and political theory that advocated the abolition of private property and the common sharing of all resources among a group of people, and it was often used interchangeably with the word socialism by 19th-century writers. The differences between communism and socialism are still debated, but generally English speakers used communism to refer to the political and economic ideologies that find their origin in Karl Marxs theory of revolutionary socialism, which advocates a proletariat overthrow of capitalist structures within a society, societal and communal ownership and governance of the means of production, and the eventual establishment of a classless society. The most well-known expression of Marxs theories is the 20th-century Bolshevism of the U.S.S.R., in which the state, through a single authoritarian party, controls a societys economy and social activities with the goal of realizing Marxs theories.

Communism is often contrasted with capitalism and democracy, though these can be false equivalencies depending on the usage. Capitalism refers to an economic theory in which a societys means of production are held by private individuals or organizations, not the government, and where prices, distribution of goods, and products are determined by a free market. It can be contrasted with the economic theories of communism, though the word communism is used of both political and economic theories. Democracy refers to a system of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised through a system of direct or indirect representation which is decided through periodic free elections. Democracy is contrasted with communism primarily because the 20th-century communism of the U.S.S.R. was characterized by an authoritarian government, whereas the democracy of the 20th-century U.S. was characterized by a representative government.

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Communism | Communism Definition by Merriam-Webster

President Joko Widodo. Photo: Reuters / Darren Whiteside

President Joko Widodo wants to make it clear that he thinks communism is a threat to Indonesia and that hes ready to whoop any reds that dare to show their face in the archipelago. You just need to show him one.

The question is, where are they? Where? Jokowi asked on Saturday during a speech at the University of Muhammadiyah Malang, as quoted by Tribun. If you show them me to me, I will clobber them immediately because the law is clear.

Ever since 1965, when a supposed coup plot by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) led to the assassination of four military generals, a power grab by the dictator Suharto and the death of an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 people in a bloody purge of everybody in and associated with the PKI, Indonesia has been haunted by the ghost of communism. Even today, military generals and politicians often speak about the dangers of communists infiltrating Indonesia.

The problem, of course, is that there isnt a single credible communist threat to Indonesia today. The PKI are long gone, communism in almost all of its forms are banned from the country (even t-shirt form!) and the only semi-communist superpower left, China, is close trading and business partners with Indonesia.

But after decades of being subjected to propaganda about the evils of communism under Suhartos New Order (such as forced viewings of the ridiculously inaccurate docudramaPengkhianatan G30S/PKI) Indonesian fears about the mostly failed ideology remain high and no politician, including President Jokowi, wants to be seen as being soft on commies.

Since he first decided to run for president, Jokowis political enemies have attempted to trick regular citizens into believing conspiracy theories and fake news on social media about how Jokowi was either a secret Christian and/or an agent of the Chinese attempting to protect a new PKI threat.

Jokowi said during his speech on Saturday that, while he usually couldnt be bothered to respond to those kinds of rumors, he wanted to finally take the opportunity to directly refute them.

When the PKI were disbanded, I was only three years old, he said. Addressing rumors that there were communist sympathizers in his family, he invited people to investigate his genealogical history as he had nothing to hide.

He reiterated once again that communist organizations were banned from Indonesia for being contrary to the countrys founding principles of Pancasila, and he would immediately disband any such organization in line with the constitution.

Last month, the government initiated the disbandment of the Indonesian chapter of Hizbut Tahrir, an Islamist organization with the goal of replacing all governments with an Islamic caliphate, with Jokowi citing the fact that the organizations goals were contrary to Pancasila and thus banned by the government.

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President Jokowi: If there are any communists, show me, I'll clobber them immediately - Coconuts

This a PBS documentary which looks into how Communism started with Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks revolution. Also offers testimony of members of the Red Guard, party activists, students, and workers striving to build a modern industrial state.

Communism is a social structure and political ideology in which property is commonly controlled. Communism (written with a capital C) is a modern political movement that aims to overthrow capitalism via revolution to create a classless society where all goods are publicly owned. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only becoming possible after a socialist stage develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the various communist states which had government ownership of all the means of production and centrally planned economies. Communist regimes have historically been authoritarian, repressive, and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power. Episodes included: 1. Red Flag, 2. Fallout, 3. Brave New World, 4. Great Leap Forward, 5. Guerrilla Wars, and 6. People Power.

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Communism: The Promise and the Reality - Top Documentary Films

What is 'Communism'

A political and economic ideology based on communal ownership and the absence of class. Communism, which can be thought of as capitalism's opposite, says that in a capitalist society, the working class (the proletariat) is exploited by the ruling class (the bourgeoisie).

While based on a Utopian ideal of equality and abundance, as expressed by the popular slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," communism in practice has only existed under authoritarian government and has been the source of millions of human rights violations and deaths.

One of the fundamental problems with communism is the knowledge problem, which describes how, without a price system, central planners cannot accurately determine what goods and services should be produced or in what quantities. Useless surpluses and devastating shortages are the result. Communism is often considered to be a twentieth century political experiment that officially failed in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Communism - Investopedia