Good old-fashioned communism, once discredited, is now finding new adherents among those too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It may be clichéd to quote George Santayana and say that those who forget the mistakes of the past are damned to repeat them, but truer words were never spoken. Although it may be hard for those who remember Soviet bread lines to believe – and even harder for the well-versed in history who learned of Soviet mass starvation – workers of the world are once again uniting under the red banner. In Japan, for instance, economic stagnation, depressed wages, and a workforce that is 44 percent part-time only has created fertile ground for the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), now the nation’s fourth largest political party. Treating this at Telegraph.co.uk, Danielle Demetriou writes:

New recruits [for the JCP] are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and communist-themed ‘manga’ comics [200,000 copies sold a year] are enjoying soaring success.

A further sign of disaffection among young Japanese . . . is the increasing frequency of rallies by workers on the streets of the capital.

Earlier this month, crowds of up to 5,000 young Japanese workers marched through the streets of central Tokyo to express their growing discontent with the government over working conditions.

That “proletarian novel” is Kanikosen (the Crab-Canning Ship), which is a story about “. . . embattled factory workers who rise up against their capitalist oppressors.” Its newfound popularity has vaulted it from paltry sales of 5,000 annually to 507,000 thus far this year.

The Land of the Rising Sun isn’t the only nation where the sun is setting on relatively free markets. In Germany, Karl Marx’s economic treatise Das Kapital is experiencing a similar resurgence, sadly, selling like beer during Oktoberfest. Writing in TimesOnline.co.uk, Roger Boyes reports:

‘Marx is fashionable again,’ declares Jörn Schütrumpf, head of the Berlin publishing house Dietz, which brings out the works of Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Sales have trebled – albeit from a pretty low level – since 2005 and have soared since the summer.

‘We have a new generation of readers who are rattled by the financial crisis and have to recognise that neo-liberalism has turned out to be a false dream,’ said Mr Schütrumpf.

Visitors to Karl Marx’s birthplace in Trier have soared – 40,000 so far this year – with many coming from China, eastern Germany, Cuba and Bolivia.

‘I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say: ‘The man was right!’,’ says Beatrix Bouvier, chief curator of the [Marx] museum. Alexander Kluge, the film director, is preparing to make a blockbuster film out of Das Kapital. Little wonder, since Marx comes highly recommended. President Sarkozy of France has been seen flicking through the book, while the [sic] Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, recently admitted: ‘Certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams [the prelate who recommended some acceptance of Sharia Law in Britain], gave him a decent review last month: ‘Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves.’

Mr. Schütrumpf said “neo-liberalism has turned out to be a false dream,” yet he proposes to once again embrace a far more malevolent false dream. But it doesn’t surprise me. Man’s nature doesn’t change, and it seems that each generation has to learn life’s hard lessons anew. As my mother used to say, “Life is the best teacher.”

And given how we’ve thoroughly failed to inculcate the young with Truth, it’s sometimes their only teacher. After all, what passes for education nowadays? Schools have become leftist propaganda mills, replete with teachers and professors who are closet Marxists – and some who are even a tad more honest. Barack Obama ally Bill Ayers, for instance, calls himself a “small c communist,” by which he means that he has never actually been a member of a communist entity. But he is wrong. He’s part of the academy.

Working in concert with academia to bend reality is the media. Populated by the former’s fellow travelers, it does its utmost to portray our market as free, when it’s not, and every economic failure – such as the current crisis – as a defect of it. For example, economist Walter Williams wrote recently:

We see comments such as those in the New York Times: ‘The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal . . . .’  Another says, ‘Since 1997, Mr. Brown (the British Prime Minister) has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party's embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation.’

The only question remaining is whether the Times’ writers are ignorant, liars, or ignorant liars. Since when have most Americans valued “laissez-faire capitalism” (note: I avoid the word “capitalism” since it was originated by a communist)? If we had, we would have enjoyed something remotely close to it lo these many decades.

Ironically, though, the media may end up visiting poetic justice upon itself.  For, if it keeps on carrying water for the Red Menace, we soon won’t have a laissez-faire press, either.

In reality, it isn’t hard to understand communism’s fatal flaw. To wit: if people were good enough for a communist government to work, we wouldn’t need government. After all, the ideology’s success rests on the idea that people will be industrious and productive absent financial incentive in deference to some greater good. But if people were that angelic, we wouldn’t need police or a military, either. We’d enjoy the impossible: Heaven on Earth.

Quite possible, though, is Hell on Earth. And if Karl Marx resides in the netherworld, I suspect our current course brings him the closest thing to joy you can experience in that realm. 

Selwyn Duke is a columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show, at WorldNetDaily.com, in American Conservative magazine, is a contributor to AmericanThinker.com and appears regularly as a guest on the award-winning, nationally-syndicated Michael Savage Show. Visit his Website.

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