Communism was the regime for the privileged elite, capitalism the creed for the common man.

All the same, conservatism still eludes satisfactory definition even as an aim. If it were just a style, as some writers seem to assume, the Soviet regime would qualify without difficulty, but all states which endeavour to avoid political change will not be allowed by the nouveaux philosophes of the right, wherever in the world, to be conservative. ‘Rightism’ will not do either: the Nazi programme of destroying an entire social order and its institutions, though supported initially by many German conservatives, drove some of them in the end to conspiratorial resistance.

For the citizens of Romania, communism was a regime imposed by a political group self-designated as possessor of the truth, a totalitarian regime born through violence and ended through violence. It was a regime of oppression, which expropriated five decades of modern history from the Romanian people, which trampled law underfoot and forced citizens to live in lies and fear.

Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a country of small peasant economy, and it is up to us to realize this quite clearly.

Given these evolving notions, it would seem that communism, like fascism—however counterintuitive the idea might be—was a right-wing revolutionary movement. As a consequence, we are now counselled that ‘perhaps we have tended to misjudge the communist elites of yesterday and failed to notice their latent nationalism all along.’ And perhaps we never really appreciated the hierarchical character of communist systems, or the role played in the various regimes by the Vozhd or the Chairman, the Dear Leader or the Lider Massimo.

Communism draws its strength from deeper, more serious sources. Offered to us as a means of improving the economic situation, it is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible, attraction. Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success.

The most dangerous Communism [...] is the wolf in sheep's clothing of conservatism who bent upon preserving the policies of greed.

Communism arises in various ways. In Russia, it was the result of the crash following the First World War, the revolution and the civil war. It was brought to Eastern European countries by the Soviet army, victorious over Nazi Germany. But whatever the diversity of historical paths it takes in this or that corner of the planet, communism has this particularity in that it is not born from nothing and is not completely foreign to the country where it is established. (…) p. 14-16

[On the Polish government in the 1950s] My analysis was that the only wish of Communism was the need to stay in power.

The positions communism as a threat because communism names the defeat of and alternative to capitalism. It recognizes the crisis in capitalism: over-accumulation leaves the rich sitting on piles of cash they can't invest; industrial capacity remains unused and workers unemployed; global interconnections make unneeded skyscrapers, fiber-optic cables, malls, and housing developments as much a part of China as the US. At the same time, scores of significant problems – whether food shortages linked to climate change, energy shortages resulting from oil dependency, or drug shortages resulting from the failure of private pharmaceutical companies to risk their own capital – remain unmet because they require the kinds of large-scale planning and cooperation that capitalism, particularly in its contemporary finance and communications-driven incarnation, subverts.

Communism, which came to control a third of the planet in a generation, was the most important political movement of the past century. It carried out what other socialists had only talked about, abolishing capitalism and creating publicly owned, planned economies. Its crimes and failures are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements - both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism.

The trouble with Communism is that it has neither a theology nor a Christology; therefore it emerges with a mixed-up anthropology. Confused about God, it is also confused about man. In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.

Perhaps communism may even have been a viable solution to the problems of the unequal distribution of wealth that characterized the industrial age, if all of the hypothetically oppressed were good people and all of the evil was to be found, as hypothesized, in their bourgeoisie overlords. Unfortunately for the communists, a substantial proportion of the oppressed were incapable, unconscientious, unintelligent, licentious, power mad, violent, resentful, and jealous, while a substantial proportion of the oppressors were educated, able, creative, intelligent, honest, and caring.

Since the will attempt to construe any move toward serious as a return of the great mustachioed Soviet monster, it is essential that those fighting to rein in the excesses of capitalism promote a more realistic view of twentieth century , which cannot be reduced to Stalinism. Despite the many shortcomings of really existing socialism, the communist ideal (even in its most undemocratic forms) was based on a humanistic, egalitarian vision of the future, one that may have been corrupted and badly implemented in practice, but which is nevertheless opposed to the racist, xenophobic nationalism of the (ideals that were quite effectively realized during World War II). Furthermore, we have to accept that really existing democracy, especially as experienced in the former countries after 1989, was far from the democratic ideal. Like the example of Americans bringing democracy to the penguins, post-Cold War democratization served as a tool to promote the economic interests of Western elites who stood the most to gain from access to previously inaccessible consumer markets and vast new populations of cheap labor.