By Tom Woods

One of the first articles I ever wrote was for a college publication in the early 1990s, about communist nutcase Angela Davis.

I use “communist” according to its precise meaning here, because she once ran for vice president on the Communist Party USA ticket.

She was a professor of the “history of consciousness” at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

When she was approached by people seeking the liberation of dissidents from prison in communist countries, who appealed to her as someone who had some influence in those places (she had been a recipient of the “Lenin Peace Prize,” after all), she replied: “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.”

Nice lady.

Many Marxists coped with the embarrassment of the Soviet Union and its satellite states by claiming they weren’t “real socialism.” Not Davis. She openly lamented the collapse of these regimes.

That didn’t stop her from being named “Distinguished Professor Emerita” at her university.

Davis received her doctorate in — where else? — East Germany.

I raise this because I just read what Loren Balhorn, contributing editor at the left-wing Jacobin magazine, had to say — in 2024 — about East Germany.

The article is a long “yes, but….”

So yes, you didn’t dare criticize the regime, but.

Thus: “Workers, though unable to criticize the regime in public, were by all accounts self-confident and prone to speak their minds when it came to workplace matters.”

Sure, it was a repressive police state, but “workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized.”

And yes, there was “a chronic lack of certain consumer goods,” but this had the salutary effect of teaching citizens “to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.”

And yet “whatever gains workers had made under socialism evidently were not enough to retain their loyalty when the moment of decision came.” How about that.

Oh, and notice the but in this description of the Berlin Wall:

The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical instability it ensured also gave the GDR [East Germany] the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders.

I was pleasantly surprised several years ago when Jacobin published material in opposition to the Covid lockdowns, because they could see how they were crushing the working class.

But this stuff reminds us: ain’t no way these people are my friends.

The people you and I struggle with on a daily basis may not be literal communists — a word that’s thrown around a lot these days — but their mentality is not a million miles remote from the ideas of Marx, that’s for sure.

I remind you of the words of one of my business partners, Kevin Dolan:

You can’t own the libs if you don’t own your income, your wealth, your personal security, your children’s education. As long as these things come hand-to-mouth at the sufferance of people who hate you, you will live like a mistreated zoo animal, and any talk of political action will remain hallucinatory cope.

Hence why it isn’t enough to write angry letters to the editor or put a political sign in our front yards or write lengthy blog posts.

Any anti-left strategy that doesn’t involve making people as independent as possible from the system is not one worth speaking about.

Hence tonight my workshop on step one of building a supplementary (or full replacement) income stream untethered to some corporate overlord infected by this hideous mind virus.

Step one is choosing a niche — the most important issue of all.

Skeptical? I’d hope you’d know me well enough by now not to be, but that’s why you don’t have to pay a cent unless you’re impressed. And I promise, you will be.

You (and also your teens, who will be at a massive advantage if they figure this stuff out early) should certainly attend.

The link to reserve your spot:

https://www.tomwoods.com/niche

Tom Woods