A question of words ?

If we wish to stick to the word communism and object to democracy, it's not for tradition's sake, but for historical motives. In spite of its imperfections, communism expresses the endeavour of the exploited and of the human species to liberate itself. The word and the notion were meaningful (that is, debatable and debated) in 1850 or 1900. The revolution that failed in Russia, and Stalinism later, loaded the term with a totally different meaning. As the S.I. once explained (#10, 1966), captive words become like prisoners put to hard labour: they too are forced to work for the benefit of those who've captured them. Communism is not oppressive or bureaucratic by nature.

On the contrary, democracy has been a distorted word ever since its return in the mouth of bourgeois revolutionaries from the 18^th century onwards, and of most (but not all) socialists in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The distortion does not consist in an outright lie like the Maoist descriptions of life in China, but in a mental displacement of reality: as it identifies modern parliaments to Ancient agoras, and the 21^st century citizen to a 5^th century B.C. Athenian citizen, and as it suggests the modern one has a lot more power, it compresses history and confuses us.