To start with, although I’m not a Marxist, there is nothing evil in using Marxist methods of analysis. Also, kindly stop acting as though Marxism is synonymous with Marxist-Leninism. Everything that was repressive in the Soviet and Chinese models was caused by what was called “Leninism”-the vanguard party and the concept of “democratic centralism”.

The Soviet Union no longer exists and China is, for all practical purposes, capitalist.

Therefore, it is ludicrous to use rhetoric from 1947 and act as though any deviation from the status quo inevitably leads us all to the Gulag.

There are many choices other than Galt’s Gulch or the Kolyma.

Most of the left supports libertarian socialism, in which the wealth would not be in the hands of the market OR the state, but in the hands of the working people who create it. That objective has nothing in common with Stalinism, and neither does anything else the left backs today.

We don’t need capitalism to be free.

We never did, actually.

Implying that we do means making the insulting implication that only the wealthy or those who wanted to be wealthy ever cared about freedom, and that freedom was never anything other than the right to try and make money.

That idea is not only disrespectful to the vast majority of the human race who have always struggled for liberation, but depressing as hell.

Making freedom solely about wealth and property means taking any possibility of true joy, true spontaneity, or creativity and learning for their own sake out life. At its logical conclusion, freedom as mainly profit and property leaves us with a world without poetry or music, and therefore a world without any reason to go on living. It would leave a few of us with full plates and empty spirits, and the many with empty plates and broken spirits.

There is and always was a natural human will to be free, to live without hierarchy, without exploitation, and most importantly, to live free from want-human beings can’t be free while living in want, while struggling to survive.

To be free, what we need is the natural human will to BE free, and the means of expressing that will through freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

If we have that, we will be free.