Transcription
So, the other day, one of our reporters was covering the No Kings protest over in Chicago when he came across some actual card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. Just out and out communists doing some good old-fashioned recruiting right there during the protest. They were also handing out this magazine right here. It was simply called the Communist. Actually though, they weren't handing it out. They were selling it. Each one of those copies was $5.
Now, what's interesting is that in the center fold of that magazine, they had a map of colleges and high schools across the US where they were doing recruiting. And they're not shy about it since they were actually showing off the number of signups they got at each location. 11 signups over at Iowa State University, 42 signups at the University of Missouri, five signups at the University of New Mexico, 15 signups at the Appalachian State University, and so on. The numbers themselves were not too big, but they're out there, straight-up communist party members doing communist recruiting at American schools.
So, with that as the backdrop, as well as with the rise of socialist Zora Mammi right here in New York, let's discuss the current taste for socialism that's been developed right here in America. And I hope that if you appreciate content like this, you do take a super quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm.
Now, to start with, let's delineate communism from socialism. And a great place to start that most people across the spectrum can accept is the Encyclopedia Britannica, according to which communism is defined as following: "A political and economic system that seeks to create a classless society in which the major means of production, such as mines and factories, are owned and controlled by the public. There is no government or private property or currency, and the wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need."
Now, that is, of course, the hypothetical, aspirational communist society that they were describing there, where everything is owned publicly. And as Karl Marx put it, the production and distribution of goods is based upon the principle of "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs." In other words, do what you can to help the collective, and take from the collective whatever you need to live. Of course, in practice, whenever this has actually been tried, all of a sudden, people have very little incentive to use their abilities to help the collective. Well, on the flip side, they have a lot of needs that suddenly need to be filled by the state. And of course, anyone who questions the system is dealt with accordingly. But that's all besides the point.
Now, getting back to the question at hand, which is, what is the difference between communism and socialism? Well, that question is actually a bit harder to delineate. In his writings, Karl Marx actually often used the two words interchangeably. But since then, a consensus has generally been formed about where the line is between the two. Getting back to the trusty Encyclopedia Britannica, here's how they describe the difference: "For many, however, the difference can be seen in the two phases of communism as outlined by Marx. The first is a transitional system in which the working class controls the government and economy, yet still pays people according to how long, hard, or well they work. Capitalism and private property exist, though to a limited degree. This phase is widely regarded as socialism, meaning in a practical sense that socialism is just a step on the continuum towards full-blown communism."
If you're looking at it on an actual spectrum, it can be thought of as the early onset of communism, where the workers, usually represented by either the communist or socialist party, are in charge of the government. And this is actually the case every single time. In fact, right now, communism is the official form of government in five countries: You have China, North Korea, Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam. But they are not actually communist. Communism is that system's North Star. In a real, practical definition sense, based on what the system actually looks like, all those countries are socialist. In those governments, the state is controlled by a communist party, an authoritarian dictatorship, which purports itself to be the representative of the people working towards communism. And so, by definition, those countries are not communist. They're socialist countries on the way to achieving full-blown communism.
In fact, to this very day, there's never been a truly communist country where there's no government, no currency, and no private property. Meaning, by the way, that those college protesters who say that true communism has never been tried before, they're actually accurate. Although their implication is usually that it would be better if it was, but that's debatable. Regardless, the main point to take away moving forward for our discussion today is that socialism is not this standalone term that just means to provide a little bit of welfare to those in need. If someone is referencing socialism or referencing moving towards socialism, that means they're within the paradigm of communism because it's a spectrum, with socialism simply being the step where the government is consolidating more power, more influence over the economy, more influence over people's minute aspects of their lives for the eventual greater good.
Now, that's, of course, a charitable view of it, but that is exactly the sentiment that's growing right here in America towards socialism. You have survey after survey showing the same thing. For instance, in September, a Gallup poll found that support for capitalism dropped to just 54% in 2025, which is the lowest figure in 15 years of data. That same poll, by the way, found that 39% of respondents view socialism positively. And those two things are obviously interrelated, since socialists typically point to the supposed failings of capitalism and then paint themselves as the answer to those failings.
However, perhaps one of the most ironic parts of that narrative is that most of these supposed failings of the capitalist system, when you dig into them, are actually the result of socialist policies. I mean, looking at America on a broad macro scale, we don't have anything close to pure capitalism. If we did, the markets wouldn't be hanging on to every single word coming out of Jerome Powell. And then also, if we did, the zip codes surrounding Washington D.C. would not be some of the wealthiest in the nation. I mean, there's no industry or factories in that area. So it doesn't really make sense for so much wealth to be concentrated there. A lot of the problems we have come from the last 100 years of socialist policies being slowly but surely enacted, such that the federal government, through taxation, welfare spending, lobbying, and just heavy regulation, now controls a huge swath of the economy. Now, that's not capitalism. It's, you can call it maybe crony capitalism, but really, it's just socialist things within a capitalist framework.
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And as just one example of how this socialist welfare scheme creates problems, let's just look at one small example within SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The idea behind SNAP and EBT, the way it was sold to the public back in the '60s, is that it offers supplemental nutrition to the poor. When people are down on their luck, they're now going to have to starve to death because the federal government will come in and give them a little bit of money to go ahead and buy groceries. That makes sense. But then you fast forward 60 years, and now estimates show that companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, they derive a quarter of their revenue from SNAP and EBT programs.
"In its current form, SNAP operates as a de facto subsidy program that props up some of the unhealthiest parts of the food industry. Take for example, the most frequently purchased item in SNAP, sugar-sweetened beverages, which comprise 9.3% of all SNAP expenditures. This part of the SNAP subsidy, by our estimates, drives 20 to 25% of U.S. revenues for Coca-Cola and PepsiCo." And as wild as that already is, that type of a setup naturally has a cascading effect on public health.
"Current policy is also economically inefficient because taxpayers pay twice to keep unhealthy foods in SNAP. First, they pay for procuring the unhealthy food itself at a rate of $23 billion annually. Second, they pay for the healthcare of SNAP participants who develop nutrition-related diseases from consuming these foods." And the costs here are staggering. A recent Rockefeller Foundation report found that diet-related diseases cost the U.S. $1.1 trillion annually, amounting to 25% of the total health expenditures. Medicaid alone cost $66 billion in 2023, about 10% of the federal budget.
But if you don't know that connection, if you don't connect those dots, you might just naturally look at a graph of the last 50 years and you might say, "Hey, capitalism is failing because health metrics are going down, health expenditures are going up, and we need the government to provide universal healthcare." But the problem itself, when you dig into it, was caused by government intervention in the first place. And that, by the way, is just an oversimplification of just one problem within a small part of the SNAP program. That program has many other problems like this, as do pretty much every other scheme enacted by the federal government.
In fact, if you trace it all the way back even further, at the very center of the U.S. economy sits the Federal Reserve central bank. And we here at The Epoch Times, we once published a great analysis piece examining whether the central bank system itself is a communist or a capitalist structure. That analysis, by the way, you can find it in the description box below. Anyway though, that was a long tangent to say that the problems and distortions that socialist policies create are then blamed on capitalism and then used to push more socialism. It's a perfect spiral that traps society into a doom loop headed for communism. The people get poor, they vote themselves closer to socialism in order to fix that problem, only for that solution to eventually make their kids or grandkids even poorer. And then those kids eventually vote themselves even closer to socialism. And the cycle then repeats itself over and over again.
In fact, in a separate poll that was conducted in September, it found that 53% of likely voters aged 18 to 39 said that they would like to see a Democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. That same poll, it also found that 55% of them also supported a law to confiscate excess wealth to help young people buy a home. Also, just the other day, Axios published a different survey which found that the majority of U.S. college students favor socialism over capitalism by a margin of 67% to 40%.
Further evidence of the American shift towards socialism is being exhibited by the "Fighting the Oligarchy Tour," or it's sometimes being called the "Where Do We Go From Here Tour," that's led by Bernie Sanders and AOC. Those rallies, they unironically oppose the influence of billionaires and big corporations here in America with chants of "Tax the Rich" being shouted by supporters who yearn for wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. Those rallies have attracted sizable crowds in the last several months in a testament to the warming of American sentiment to socialism. In March, 15,000 turned out for an Arizona rally, which is probably the biggest crowd that Bernie Sanders ever drew, which includes his two presidential runs. Then less than a week after that, you had 34,000 people attend the rally over in Denver, Colorado, which was bigger than any event held by the Democratic Party at the time. And this was then followed in April by a crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles.
And of course, right on the heels of the Bernie Sanders-AOC national tour is the rise of Zora Mammi right here in New York, an out-and-out member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a socialist mayor in arguably what's America's most important city. And so obviously, it's too early to say how this whole experiment will play itself out nationally and here in New York, but we should at least learn from the past.
And so let me play for you an excerpt from a video series that we here at The Epoch Times put together called "The Dark Origins of Communism."
"Communism promises a world without suffering. And yet, in its execution, does the exact opposite. Is this a tragic case of the road to hell being paved by good intentions? Or were the intentions bad from the get-go? Before he was the founder of communism, Karl Marx wrote many publications in his early years. In his early poem, 'Invocation of One in Despair,' he wrote, 'So a god has snatched from me my all. Nothing but revenge is left to me.' This theme of revenge continues. In his 1839 play, 'Oulanem,' believed to be Emmanuel, an alternative name for God pronounced backwards and with each pair of letters inverted, the character in the play seeks to destroy not only himself but the world along with him. In his 1841 poem, 'The Player or the Fiddler,' Marx writes, 'Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab unairringly within thy soul. God neither knows nor honors art. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.' And he also writes, 'See this sword? The prince of darkness sold it to me.' And, 'With Satan, I have struck my deal. He chocks the signs, beats the time for me. I play the death march fast and free.' Marx had a dark fixation with death, destruction, and revenge. And it's only fitting that his manifesto would create a system that achieved exactly these. Communism capitalized on humankind's desire for a higher purpose and did so by destroying religion and placing itself at the helm instead. In an imagined communist state, the government controls everything, all matters public and private. People are all reduced to matter, cogs in a machine, and as employees are assets within a soulless collective. Communism is a belief built on the destruction of belief and immorality built on the destruction of morality. It is a dead-end ideology built on struggle, hatred, and destruction.'"
That, by the way, was just a snippet of episode one of "The Dark Origins of Communism" series. If you want to check out the whole thing, which I would really highly recommend, it goes through the reign of terror under the Paris Commune, the rise of global socialism, and generally, it roots out the philosophical underpinnings of communism to expose not just the economic system, but rather the dark, quasi-religious underpinnings, which are literally antithetical to traditional human values. It's a great series, and I'll throw a link to it. You can find it down in the description box below, which again, I would highly recommend because, you know, as this rise of socialism is spreading throughout all of America, it's quite important to understand communism in more than just an economic sense. Because the arguments for communism usually, they, they're very shallow. And, you know, on the one hand, they just kind of have the morality play, "Oh, it, it wouldn't be nice if everyone would share equally and we can live in this utopia." And it's, but "share equally" is kind of rooted in the economics of it. But if you dig deeper, which that series does, the philosophical underpinnings, and even the, if you trace those philosophical underpinnings back centuries, it, it gets very, very dark, very, very fast. I mean, it's like, um, I'll let Josh explain the Luciferian, basically, underpinnings of communism, but they're there. And they're not something that's like, that is, is like the realm of conspiracy theory. If you really trace back all the writings and all the people who were involved in them, it just is what it is. It's, it's a very dark system.
So, if you want to check it out, "The Dark Origins of Communism" series, I believe it's a five or six-part episode series. Excellent. I'll throw the link to it. You can find it down in the description box below. And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from The Epoch Times. Stay informed. Most importantly, stay free.