This site is dedicated to finding solutions to the rise of individual depression, as in a state of feeling down for long periods of time, and global depression, the one percent versus the 99.

Is the solution to come from ‘classic’ communists?

I think not.

In the featured picture you see comrade Peter Mertens, the boss of the Belgian Pvda, on the right you see little old me. Below you see me speeching at a party event, and not taking the whole thing too seriously judging from my facial expression…

I advice any capitalist in the west to totally accept any communist activity, they don’t need to be afraid, they are no threat, but if you suppress them and fight them, you give them attention, and some serious people might get interested in what the fuss is about. Best to let them shoot themselves in the foot, they excel at that.

How do I know?

I worked for one of the communist parties in Belgium. Their main propaganda center was located right smack in the middle of Brussels, which is the heart of the European Union you could say and NATO headquarters is there. So yes, they are accepted and not outlawed or anything. They are just ignored, which is the better strategy.

There are two communist parties in Belgium, you have the PVDA, the stalinists, and you have the Trotskytes. They hate each other more than they hate any kind of capitalists. This feud was funny at times. They refused to cooperate, but the Trotskytes sometimes offered to help, because the stalinists were doing a bit better in the voting booth. Of course the stalinists just thought their offer of help was a trick to infiltrate the PVDA to destroy it from within. Apparently stalinists see Trotskytes as people who fuck up everything by being to radical and too ‘democratic’ and Trotskytes see Stalinists as the guys who want to turn society in one big jail.

Although the PVDA did nothing profitable, no commercial activities, they were swimming in money. They find people with real jobs and make them live at the level of an average factory worker. Some people earned 3000 euro a month but donated 1200 euro a month to the party. Some pledged the inheritance they would get if their parents died to the party. Throughout the party their was an embrace of poverty as a virtue, but the most prominent party members did have all digital gadgets. The party elite is not allowed to own houses, so they have to rent.

My paycheck was decent. Especially because nobody does any actual work. We had nothing but meetings, meetings, meetings, in which we usually bashed other communist parties and complained about how nobody was reading our articles or what kind of mistakes we made last week. There was a culture of self-flagellation, we constantly had to criticize ourselves, say what we did wrong, bash our colleagues, you could criticize your boss, but only if you could guess what he wanted to hear, this was so inbedded in the culture that we seemed to do only things that went wrong. A very frustrating work environment.

To the outside world they pretended to be social democrats. Internally they talked about how to bring on the revolution, abolish all other parties and silence the Parliaments (we have a lot those in Belgium) with such confidence you would expect there was a fleet of old T-34 tanks parked in the basement… Ridiculous. They worshipped Stalin, denied he had anything to do with famines, gulags, etc. They had ties with North-Korea which they denied. They owned a lot of real estate, which nobody outside the top of the party knew about. They cheated the government out of money in many different ways. They have physicians who are party members and these offer free medical aid to anyone who applies, a fine initiative, except that the government gives them money to take care of their patients, but it’s one way of funding their propaganda.

They also organise a communist congress in Brussels, every 30 months I think, or perhaps yearly these days, I’m not sure, and lots of communist parties from all over the world are invited. The delegates from ex communists countries usually talk about how everything was so much better under communism. Why so few people vote for them then is not explained.

They pretend that they make their decisions democratically, but it goes like this, the party elite comes together, they decide what the party members can vote for and the result is this:

• Option A

• Option A with a twist

• Option A phrased a little bit differently

• Option A on a Sunday

• Option A on a rainy day

• Option A in the morning

The most annoying part of my job was having to go and interview people with a list of answers in my pocket that the party elite wanted me to write down or somehow draw out of the mouth of the one interviewed. We didn’t lie, but we omitted anything that didn’t please us.

The most fun part of my job was…. I had a lot of time to do whatever I wanted while the others were fighting about the most petty issues… In general they had no other real solution than taxing the supperrich. Which is probably what we need to do, but if that tax money goes to communists to decide what to do with, you end up with a dictatorship and a tiny elite that lives well and the cumbersome, sluggish economy we know so well from what happened in the Soviet Union.

If you’re a smart western capitalist you let these guys just do what they do best: talk, talk, talk, march in the streets occasionally, and be on Facebook. They LIVED on Facebook.