To learn what pro-capitalist, anti-communist propaganda is doing and what it is trying to keep you ignorant and forgetful of, I would recommend reading The COINTELPRO Papers edited by Ward Churchill, The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, and Endless Holocausts by David Michael Smith. These will give a sense of the full scale of atrocities committed by capitalist imperialists against revolutionaries who sought a better life for everyone, from the U.S. Empire to the countries neighboring it to the world as a whole.
History of pro-capitalist anti-communism:
I would also recommend watching the following documentaries to learn more about the history of capitalist brutality:
COINTELPRO 101 created by the Freedom Archives, which includes firsthand accounts and interviews from people who the U.S. government targeted for organizing in the Civil Rights movement, opposing the Vietnam War, and fighting for liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
The War You Don’t See directed by John Pilger, which covers the way that corporate media and governments deceive us about the actual nature of 21st century imperialist wars in Africa and Asia by misrepresenting them as fights to “make the world safe for democracy” and eliminate dictatorships.
Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War directed by Daniel Miller, which goes into the history of U.S. overseas imperialism and how it has always been misrepresented to the public as a crusade for democracy and freedom.
The Corporation directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, which goes into the history of modern corporations, how they achieved legal personhood, and how they’ve established a monopoly of control over all aspects of life under 21st century capitalism.
Capitalism: A Love Story directed by Michael Moore, which dives into the ways that 21st century capitalism directs society’s wealth towards anti-social and destructive ends. It also points out the contradictions in a lot of pro-capitalist anti-communist ideology.
For a basic overview of what communism is trying to accomplish, I would recommend reading these two short essays written during the biggest working class revolutionary wave in Western history in the aftermath of World War I: Rosa Luxemburg’s The Socialization of Society and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Socialism.
For a more detailed sense of what communist society would mean, I like Cornelius Castoriadis’s Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society (for some idea of post-revolution measures) and Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (for a stronger sense of a well-rounded communist society).
To learn about the history of communism in the U.S., some good books to read are Pioneers of Liberty by Rudolf Rocker, The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich, Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley, The American Revolution by James Boggs, and Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
History of capital-C Communism:
For the history of 20th century capital-C Communism, you’re going to have to rely on a pretty wide range of sources to get a good look at the big picture. I’ll just list some books, then some documentaries.
As intros that come at the topic from radical liberal and social democratic outlooks, many people start with Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, written as a critique of 1990s anti-communist triumphalism, and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee, which points out that the personal freedom that feminists were fighting for in the 2010s had come closest to becoming a reality in 20th century socialist states.
For a fuller portrait of some 20th century socialist experiments, I would recommend reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Soviet Experiment, William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China and After, and Aviva Chomsky’s A History of the Cuban Revolution. These all cover the three most influential socialist revolutions in the 20th century and will give you a better sense of why so many people supported them in their day before the neoliberal anti-communist propaganda that Parenti and Ghodsee critiqued placed them behind the pale of acceptable discourse in the 1990s and 2000s.
If you’re okay with a longer book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel will give you a very comprehensive portrait of what everyday life in the Soviet Union was like. It really humanizes the experience compared to the cartoon caricatures we’re used to getting from family, school, and anti-communist media.
To learn a bit about the U.S.’s own tradition of communist militancy, I would highly recommend watching The Wobblies directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer. It includes archival footage and interviews with working class veterans of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and shows how they became communist revolutionaries as a result of struggling to improve the conditions of their own lives against the power of capitalists.
Red Storm Rising: The Struggle for the American Communist Party from PBS covers the basic history of the CPUSA and how it declined under the leadership of people who wanted to liquidate into New Deal Civil Rights reformism and focus on advocating for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. However, it does neglect to cover the militants like Harry Haywood and Mary Inman who wanted to keep fighting for total liberation and world revolution. These were the people who carried on into Black Power and the New Left in the 1960s.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution goes more into the history of American communism and shows just how recent and relevant it is for regular people struggling for liberation. This is what the repression and programs of programs like COINTELPRO are designed to destroy and prevent.
The Lost World of Communism from the BBC covers the Eastern Bloc from a liberal perspective but gives a pretty detailed sense of everyday life in the socialist states. It’s definitely a much more grounded source than a lot of what we’re taught in the U.S., which is that there effectively was no society in the Eastern Bloc and it was just a totalitarian police state all the way down.
October: Ten Days That Shook the World directed by Sergei Eisenstein is the first documentary about the 1917 Russian Revolution and includes reenactments of its events from the regular people who lived through it and participated in making it. If watching a silent movie is not so much your speed, surprisingly Lucasfilm made a pretty good documentary about the Revolution called The Russian Revolution: All Power to the Soviets, although it comes with all the one-sided pitfalls of a 21st century liberal perspective.
China: A Century of Revolution directed by Sue Williams covers the rise of the People’s Republic of China and demonstrates how it was very much an indigenous product of China’s revolutionary process. It goes into the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the Republican period and wars of the 1920s-1940s, the rise of the PRC’s New Democracy in 1949, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and finally the Reform and Opening Up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Morning Sun directed by Carma Hinton, daughter of William Hinton, covers the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the perspective of everyday participants and victims. It gives a much more grounded sense of what the era was like than some of the cartoonish and racist caricatures that conventional U.S. narratives offer.
For the Cuban Revolution, you can get the most comprehensive coverage by watching Fidel: The Untold Story directed by Estela Bravo and Che Guevara: Beyond the Myth directed by Tancrede Ramonet. The pro-capitalist anti-communist lies that we’re told about this Revolution are the most straightforward for us to debunk because of how closely the participants were linked with the rest of the Americas, including the U.S.
The Death of Yugoslavia from the BBC is one of the better documentaries for seeing just how chaotic and horrific the collapse of 20th century Communism was for the people who lived it. Although it’s from a liberal perspective, it’s ultimately right that the collapse stemmed from inner rot as much as enemy encirclement. It avoids the pitfalls of the dumbest and most simplistic anti-communist narratives about corruption and inefficiency in the socialist states.
Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul from REDFIST Media covers DPRKorean citizens living in the Republic of Korea. It shows how difficult the conditions of their lives are once they go to the south, how these horrific conditions incentivize them into agreeing to produce propaganda for the capitalist dictatorship of the South against the North (as if the North were the only dictatorship in the peninsula), and how many of them seek to return to the North where they at least have families, jobs, and social assistance.
The big picture problem with the pro-capitalist anti-communist perspective is that they a priori rule out thinking about anything from a global perspective. They ask you to ignore the overwhelming violence and sabotage that it took to destroy 20th century communism in spite of its massive appeal for regular people. At the same time, they expect you to believe that the brutality and misery of capitalism is justified by its successes, and by the “greater” threat of communism. Then they point to the agonies of overwork, industrialization, and state-directed capital accumulation in socialist countries, as if these can be objected to without implying our very own objections against capitalist exploitation and corporate tyranny.
If there’s any other blindspots of anti-communism and pro-capitalism that you want to explore, feel free to let me know and I can add more sources for them here
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