Nowadays your average shopping area is completely dominated by giant corporations offering the same product or service at numerous locations, giving a homogenised and monotone image wherever you go. The centralised purchasing decisions of these corporations and their demand for standardized products have given them an unprecedented degree of power over 'governments and nations'. Independent businesses can rarely keep up with the uniformity offered by these giants and hence the general picture emerging is that large franchises and chains "wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.

Having destroyed or on its way to destroying nearly all small or local businesses, these giants have now developed into the largest private employer, inevitably breeding a large low-paid and unskilled labour force. Within the corporations themselves only a handful of workers manage to rise up the corporate ladder, while the vast majority lack full-time employment, receive no benefits, learn few skills, exercise little control over their work place, quit after a few months, and float from job to job. Even within the agricultural sector the hardy independent farmers are quickly disappearing leaving large multi-corporations in control of agriculture, dominating one commodity market after another. Farmers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land.

With their sophisticated mass marketing techniques targeting even and especially children and with the new trend being imported from the US, of government bodies and agencies created to protect workers and consumers too often behaving like branch office of the very companies they are supposed to be regulating, there seems to be no way out of this gloomy scenario. With the amount of revenue these giant companies generate, they become supranational governments in their own right and not surprisingly work closely with actual governments opposing new health safety and minimum wage laws.

Many people feel that the alternative to this scenario, the solution to this problem is Communism, despite of its history of purges, genocide, suppression and totalitarianism. They feel that Communism stands for the masses and the common people, as contrasted with Capitalism which represents the interests of a rich minority. But what those people do not realise is that the task of the communist party is not to realise the interests of the people as the people see them but - in the words of the founding fathers of Communism themselves - to set up a "superior mode of production" by establishing a "system of Socialism and Communism ... through the dictatorship of the proletariat" i.e. the Party. But this cannot come about unless the small producers and peasants who by nature are "non-socialistic" have been eliminated, which in practice means that they are suppressed and killed.

To be sure, Communism sees itself as a creed opposed to Capitalism. But this nature of the doctrine can be misleading as by "Capitalism" the communists do not mean the big monopoles, multinationals and corporations. By Capitalism they mean - in the words of Stalin - "the system of commodity productions" and "the small production in towns and particularly in the rural districts". So anyone who thinks that Communism was meant to or in fact means to oppose big monopolies and stick up for the common man ought to know Lenin a little better according to whom, the strength of Capitalism lies "in the strength of small production". As in theory, so in practice Communist stalwarts have regarded the independent producers, small businesses, the peasants and the farmers who merely fought for their independent status and to be saved from the whirlpool of engulfing monopolising Capitalism as "reactionary (this is a swearword in Communist jargon), for they try to roll back they wheel of history" and worked tirelessly to eliminate them through systematic purges.

We know for a fact now that Communism has historically been more concerned with extracting greater resources from the starved and reluctant masses and organising pillages on a scientific and sustained basis than with providing for the individual needs of the people. In Soviet Russia 90% of the total marketable grain was extorted from the poor peasantry as tax. Not only this, even the price of their goods was artificially depressed by forcibly fixing it at a very low level in relation to the industrial goods, the means of production of which were all in the Communists hands. This isn't the time to go into the reality of the conceited claim of Communism to be a "higher system of production". But what does need mentioning is the deceptive nature of this phrase. In the Newspeak of Communism "higher system of production" has never meant, sufficient food for the starving masses, appropriate shoes or warm clothing for the cold-winters or more prosperity. Instead it has meant exactly what the doctrine of Communism had intended - "accumulation in hands of the State of material means" and exploitation of "small scale private economy by extracting from it a greater sum of values than was given to it of industrial products in exchange". Those who think that the reality of what has happened in Communist countries is unrelated to the original intention of the doctrine itself shouldn't forget Molotov's words "We must repudiate all talk about the theory that Socialism means production to meet the needs of consumption".

In today's world, large corporations possess large-scale and highly centralised means of production at their disposal. With this they control every aspect down the production line and drive down the costs of their products, consequently eliminating any competition from small businesses and, through this vicious circle of manipulating market forces, further their stranglehold over the masses. The superiority and supposed inevitability of large scale production has completely dominated communist psychology as well. At the back of their slogans, dictatorship and totalitarianism, purges and serial liquidation of classes, lay a belief in the superiority of centralised, large-scale production, which had to be brought about at any cost. Lenin believed that "good harvest on the peasant farm-that is not enough; good conditions of light industry - that too is not good enough; we need heavy industries". For having the heavy industries we must economise, "often at the expense of the population....economise in all things, even in schools". And the same pattern as that of industry was extended to agriculture as well. In order to facilitate the rapid industrialisation based on intensified appropriation from the peasantry (or "sack of potatoes" as Marx called them), they were brought under a unified centralist system of control. Even the small plot of land that the poor farmers had, was snatched away from them and they were forced to work in collective farms (or forced labour camps for the even less fortunate ones) under most degrading conditions farms. They were reduced to the status of serf, working for a party in control of all the repressive agencies of the state, working for a pittance-wage in order to perpetuate his like. This was direct result of Communist belief that industry could only be built on the "feudal exploitation of the peasantry".

The condition of those suffering under the Communists bears an odd yet striking resemblance (for those who are ready to see it) to an average worker in large corporations and multinationals. In its own peculiar way, the individual toiling in a fast food restaurant for minimum wage, for up to 10-12 hours a day, with a forced smile on his face could probably relate to the peasant in a Soviet collective farm or industry. The same analogy applies even more vividly if we think about the sweatshops operated by Multinationals in the cheap labour havens known collectively as the "Third World". This is because in its last analysis, Communism as a system of thought is derived from the same premises as those of Western Capitalism. These premises are a materialist world view, an evolutionistic sociology, a hedonistic psychology, a utilitarian ethics, and a consumerist economy. This is why throughout the old Eastern bloc members of the old Communist elite have the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism. According to Marx, Capitalism and imperialism in the West is founded on the creation of "surplus value" or "expanded reproduction". His Socialism was also built on the creation of "surplus value", only expedited by "dictatorial methods". Lenin had invited his followers "to study the state Capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort to copy it, and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia".

While large corporations and multinationals take to the remorseless operation of market forces, communists had taken the road of State Capitalism and systematic terror. But at the end of the day both have led to a centralised roundabout production which is a wasteful, expensive mode, itself consuming what it produces. It is based on a progressive exhaustion of our real resource-capital, that of human dignity and lives, labour and material. It has lead us to move further from our humanity, to sink lower for our water, dig deeper for our coal and iron, go further for our timber and fuel, which in turn has given rise to further use and subsequent exhaustion of more capital, in a progressive self propelling necessity of more use and more exhaustion.