Occupy Wall Street is an un-American movement generated by an un-American depiction of our country. In 2008, the leaders of the Democratic Party painted the United States as a “decaying, racist, capitalist realm,” unable to provide medical care for the poor, to rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or to replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race.”

A young generation of Americans, who had never been taught real history in school, became galvanized by the Democratic Party’s pledge to “change” that rotting America. Some eighty thousand of them gathered in front of the now famous pseudo-Greek temple resembling the White House that had been erected in Denver, shouting for “hope and change.”

Of course, people everywhere want their political leaders to be better than their predecessors. But “change” is also the quintessence of Marxism, which is built on the dialectical materialist tenet that quantitative changes generate qualitative transformations. 

In my other life, when I was national security adviser to Communist Romania’s President Nicolae Ceausescu, I wrote the lyrics of his ode to “change.” Ceausescu pretended that his predecessor had devastated the country, and he pledged to change that change. In those days I heard that ode to change a thousand times, and today I am stunned by its similarity with the Democratic Party’s “change.”

“Change” is now the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement as well. Capitalism is evil, and it should be changed. “Rediscover other ways of relating to each other and the world around us.” “Tax the rich! Redistribute their wealth.” “Occupy. Block. Strike. Take over!” “Change! Cuba is the future.” “Long live Che!” These are just a few of the slogans and signs dominating the Occupy Wall Street encampments.

Today it is not politically correct even to whisper the word Marxism. Nevertheless, there is a real and organic connection between Marxism, the Democratic Party’s “Change,” and the Occupy Wall Street movement’s calls for abolishing (American) capitalism. In his Manifesto, Marx portrays “America” as a “racist capitalist country” that generated “despotism and exploitation,” and he urges his followers to “eradicate [American] capitalism” by wresting “by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.” Marx advocates ten “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” which became known as the Ten Planks of Communism. The first is the “abolition of property.” The next two are a “heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” and the “abolition of all rights of inheritance.”

The United States spent too many years fighting Marxism, and its free population of independent entrepreneurs will never succumb to that heresy. Be that as it may, Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party has endured to turn 162 years old this year, and the remaining Marxists of the world seem to be clamoring to see their fantasy finally come to pass: the eradication of American capitalism.

On October 6, 2011, in a broadcast in English, the Cuban radio station that calls itself “A Friendly Voice Around the World” announced that the Workers World Party (WWP) had decided to join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations “against the capitalist system and in favor of a socialist future.” Radio Havana also reported that a WWP conference to be held on October 8 and 9 in the Bronx in New York City would debate, “from a Marxist perspective,” America’s current economic crisis and its “fight against racism and imperialist wars.”

On October 10, people carrying Workers World Party signs calling for the “Destruction of Capitalism” joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. “Behead bankers and the rich who won’t give up wealth,” a demonstrator stated. “Immediate across-the board debt forgiveness for all,” others demand. They also want a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment, along with a minimum wage of twenty dollars per hour — for now.

The WWP is a Marxist party that was financed by the Soviet KGB during the days when I was at the top of its community. The KGB created the WWP in 1957, with the initial task of helping the Kremlin to generate a favorable impression of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary among the trade unions and the “colored” population of the United States. In 1959, the WWP got its own newspaper, Workers World, edited by the KGB’s disinformation department and at one time printed in Romania. To camouflage Moscow’s hand, the early issues showed both Lenin and Trotsky holding up a banner saying, “Colored and White Unite and Fight for a WORKERS WORLD.”

The WWP website now states: “We’re independent Marxists” whose “goal is solidarity of all the workers and oppressed against this criminal imperialist system.”

Currently, the WWP has a national office in New York and 18 regional headquarters across the United States, the addresses of which are posted on the internet. Now the WWP represents itself as a “national Marxist-Leninist party promoting socialism, supporting working class struggles and lesbian/gay/bi/trans liberation, organizing protests, and denouncing racism and sexism.”

On October 11, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) held a national teleconference to discuss the “Occupy” movements, and also to endorse them: “The movement reflects a new level of class-consciousness.” According to its communiqué, the CPUSA and Young Communist League (YCL) began “working in ‘Occupy Los Angeles.’”

“The bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means,” a CPUSA speaker shouted at an Occupy Los Angeles demonstration. “No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution and Indian so-called Revolution. … India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty. … Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental revolutions. But it was bloody. … Long live Revolution! Long live socialism!”