Rebranding the Revolution.

I don't think I am actually a Communist, even though I voted for the Communist Party in the last few elections. Well, to be precise, I voted for the Marxist Leninist party because in my old riding both the Communists and Marxist Leninists were fielding candidates. You'd think that, given the high unlikelihood that either one of these parties was going to win they could put aside any ideological differences they had until after the election and then come up with an amicable way to divide their collective responsibilities as they nationalized all the key industries and reorganized the monetary system and distribution of essential services and foodstuffs, but no, they could not; the ideological gap was just too wide.

Part of the problem is, of course, that small political parties and fringe political parties are almost inevitably going to be peopled by wing-nuts of one stripe or another. Such folk (whether they are realistic about it or not) can afford to stand on the kind of principles that divide Marxist Leninist thought from Communist thought because there is just no goddamn way they are ever going to be elected for anything. It is only when the party begins to gain some kind of traction that compromises have to be made toward the centre and toward the more pragmatic political heavyweights who occupy this centre.

I'm speaking only of Canada here, because obviously very extreme formally fringe parties have done well in other places and at other times, but if you look at the evolution of something like the current Conservative Party you will note that the original party, brought forth under the leadership of Preston Manning (as gentle as their extremism was) never stood a chance of election until they began to abandon many of their principles and move to the centre.

Another problem, and this applies directly to both Communists and Marxist Leninists, is that the centre simply has no interest in embracing any political experiment even remotely associated with the USSR. The rhetoric of the Evil Empire is still thick enough that during the last US election, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republicans were able to scare up more than a few votes by accusing Barack Obama of being (not even a Communist but) a socialist.

So, even if there are a good many salvageable ideas in Communism (or Marxist-Leninism, if you prefer), as long as anybody starts with the word "Communism" people are just going to shut down and refuse to listen and as long as the same damn photo of Che Guevara keeps getting waved around people are going to shut down and so on and so on.

For this reason, I propose that what Communism needs is a rebranding campaign to sex it up a little; to bring it forward into the 21st century. I think that a political party could probably put forward a lot of Communist ideas as long as they adamantly denied that they were Communist ideas whenever anyone asked. They could call themselves the National Conservative Democrats or something and no one would be the wiser.

If they wanted to be even more hip, of course, then they could take the revolution online and make up a whole bunch of campaigns with savvy sexy kids in their 20s with wavy hair and colourful clothes talking about how technology is helping everyone to learn to share everything now and that this idea of sharing should be infectious and spread into every sector…because that's the way things work now.

The screen fades to red and the title credits come on in bright yellow: iMarx …the way things work now.