A primitive form of true communism was practiced in the early Christian communes of Greece and Rome. Work and meals were shared in common, as in the Essene communes. But, since these communes were trying to exist in the midst of an emerging empire based on large slave plantations and in which republicans and free farmers were ruined and murdered, they were bound to fail as economic units. After Constantinian "Christianity" came to power, these Christian communards were gradually enslaved or turned into indentured servants (gradually to become serfs). Many times, these serfs and slaves were owned by "Christian" bishops. The last slave to be freed in Western Europe was owned by a bishop.
The Founding Fathers realized that the seeds of liberty must be spread in order to flourish anywhere. True democracy could only flourish in isolated communities (mostly in the Western territories: Ohio, upstate NY, Kentucky) unless American republicanism could be spread to Europe. The American Revolution was subverted by the Federalists and failed to support the sons and daughters of liberty in Europe. As a result, the French Revolution was overthrown by Napoleon and the Directorate. Royalist England and the other royalist states of Europe were eventually able to destroy this Napoleonic perversion and set up a king in France. For all intents and purposes, the English ruling class then ruled the world. In America, those who wanted democracy moved west or joined together in unions of farmers, craftsmen, or millworkers (originally models of true democracy); here, a dynamic form of democracy which can be called "workers' democracy" emerged. This was not the so-called "democracy" of the emerging American capitalist state.
Just as the democracy of a nation must be spread or perish in isolation, union democracy that is not spread is doomed to fail. An effort to create a re-invigorated form of unionism was inaugurated prior to World War I by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other true unionists, who named their new industrial union the CIO. Later, the CIO (after a spurt of growth in the 1930s) merged with the less democratic and counterrevolutionary AFL to form the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO was eventually subverted and used as a counterrevolutionary force to undermine workers' democracy and support anti-union and anti-communist front groups in Latin America, where currently the AFL-CIO is known popularly as the "AFL-CIA". Most unionists in the U.S. belong to a member union of the AFL-CIO and are under the thumb of what real unionists call "labor aristocrats".
True democracy (liberty) will not be established until workers, and the few surviving small farmers, rediscover workers' democracy for themselves and smash the chains of official unionism, eventually bringing all workers and small farmers into "one, big union" (the watchword of the IWW). They will have also to smash the governments, here and worldwide, which have perverted the unions for their own social control and war-mongering imperialist ends. This true democracy will be indistinguishable from the ideal of true communism (if "ideal" is the right word, since real communists rely on materialist analysis rather than idealism). But a very important difference will be that advanced economic methods of production and trade will be universally available once the workers and farmers take the large industrial enterprises into their own hands to serve the interests of society, rather than the profits of a few. Enterprise and trade will then be the right of all workers as social equals under the law, until such time as law becomes unnecessary and is replaced by a common desire for each to work in the interest of all. Only in this way will enterprise be truly free and democracy flourish as the duties required by liberty are part of the conscience of every man and woman.
We have a long way to go, brothers and sisters. Time is short and the prize is great.
