For most people who live in the United States, the notion of Communism is tied to all sorts of beliefs and misinformation. I remember in high school "learning" about Communism and being taught that it meant the State owned all property, while in a college history class I "learned" that the United States government actively combated Communism during the Cold War and onward. For a while, I held onto my own assumptions: that Communism could work on paper, but was impractical and would lead to obvious exploitation of the people by the State. Each time I tried to picture Communism in action, images formed of a family, dirt-caked, barefoot and malnourished, toiling in a field while off in the distance a USSR flag flicked back and forth in the wind. Obviously, I had a rather skewed and sinister understanding of the word. Somewhere along the line, Communism had become synonymous with Exploitation, Immorality, and Oppression. That changed when I read " The Communist Manifesto " by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Throughout high school, I had a friend who was an outspoken communist. He had read The Communist Manifesto sometime during our freshman year, or maybe earlier, and it spoke to him, so much so that by the time we were seniors, he had decided to write his AP English senior project on Communism and why it was a valid societal choice. The project consisted of a ten to 15-page paper along with a speech to be presented in front of the class on the topic of the paper. When he went up to give his speech his face was beet red because he already knew what to expect from our class. From what I can remember, the moment he said the word the room grew hushed, and he received only a smattering of applause at the end even though his speech was one of the best in the class. It surely topped my presentation on why prostitution should be legalized and federally regulated, but none of our classmates recognized that because from the moment "Communism" left his lips, they were off in a Soviet labor camp, sweating and fearing for their lives while the monster of Communism forced them to work more, work harder.

In his speech Alex, my friend, attempted to fit a lot of information into a small place, but what I would deem the most important of it all is that there is a big difference between the Communism of Marx and Engels and the "Communism" that we in the United States are made to fear. The Communism of Marx and Engels calls for the abolition of private property. While this sounds simple, it really isn't. Abolishing private property can be understood to mean taking away someone's right to own an object, but what it actually means is doing away with capital, and by extension, doing away with class. Henryk A. Kowalczyk, a writer for " The Huffington Post, " described Communism as envisioned by The Communist Manifesto as an alternative to capitalism in which there is a classless society, “without hierarchy, without currency, without personal property, where people would work in harmony, resolve their problems in friendly discussions, produce enough goods and services, and where each would contribute according to his abilities and receive according to his needs.” This explanation of Communism is already miles away from the lay understanding of the word, but why is that? Why are we taught to believe that Communism means one thing, one terrifying, oppressive thing, when, in reality, it is merely a form of society in which everyone works, and everyone benefits, just no one person more so than any other?

We believe that Communism is so big, so bad, and so dreadful, because of two reasons. The first is that it flies in the face of our capitalist system. Communism developed as a response to the inequalities present in what Marx and Engels referred to as the bourgeoisie society in which the bourgeoisie held all means of production and the proletariat (the working class) were exploited to produce more capital for the bourgeoisie to profit from. This sort of dynamic is still present today in our country, even though the authors of the Manifesto first published it in 1848 in Europe, and Communism is still diametrically opposed to it, so to continue promoting our capitalist system, it is necessary to denounce with all of our power its opposite. The second reason is that there are too many examples of false Communism throughout history which lead to the general misconception that people have of it. The most well known false Communist state is obviously the Soviet Union. First and foremost, the USSR was not actually communist. At no point were the means of production in the hands of the working people of the USSR. The USSR was a totalitarian state in which everything was controlled by the government, but the government in this case was not made up of representatives of the people. It was rather a body of individuals who stood above the people. True communism calls for a classless society without hierarchy, yet there was a clear hierarchy instituted in the Soviet Union. But beyond that, and most saliently, there hasn't been a case of true Communism being practiced somewhere in the world ever at all.

The failure to fully realize the Communist goal is not one that rises out of the impossibility of Communism itself, but rather, in my opinion, the impossibility to convince the vast majority of people (people raised to understand capitalism as natural, normal, and the utmost expression of freedom in life) that it is possible for Communism to work. You see, Communism works very well on paper, and if it were actually attempted on a small scale (say a self-sufficient commune), it would probably work there as well because everyone would be willing, and their children would be taught to understand Communism as normal, not capitalism. However, attempting to shift on a large scale from a wholly capitalist society to a wholly Communist one requires the re-education of the vast majority of the populace, and since we live in capitalist society, that is rather unlikely.