The year is 2018. There is no red beacon of hope in either Russia or China. Hundreds of millions of workers are not debating and organizing for communism. Yet, capitalists today still fear communism!
They have good reason. Only communist revolution offers freedom from exploitation, oppression, poverty, fascism, and terror for the working class of the world.
Communist parties are illegal in Estonia, Indonesia, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Myanmar, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Ukraine, Georgia, Hungary, and in the U.S.
Today communist parties are banned:
In countries traditionally in the American ‘sphere of influence” – that have been dominated politically and economically by U.S. imperialism. In Latin America communists and militant workers are still repressed, arrested, murdered. But, as U.S. influence as weakened somewhat, legal restrictions on communist parties have been lifted.
In Indonesia, after the bloody coup d’etat of 1965-66, during which between 500,000 and two million leaders, activists, and rank-and-file supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party were murdered, along with supporters of the ousted President Sukarno, all with the help of the U.S. CIA. This disaster was caused by the communists trying to exist legally, unprepared for fascist repression and the line of “uniting with the anti-colonial bourgeoisie” (Sukarno). PLP condemned this phony Marxist line and practice then, and we still do!
In Islamist Iran, after the events of 1983, when almost all the leadership and activists in the Tudeh Party (successors to the Communist Party of Iran), plus others, were arrested and killed – as many as 30,000 persons. The Tudeh Party supported the so-called “Islamist revolution” of 1979 – which was really carried out by the “mujaheddin”, left militants—in hope of joining the government and gaining power by the revisionist “peaceful” road. Instead they were murdered. In 1979 PLP issued a pamphlet, translated into Farsi, urging Iranian communists, workers, and activists NOT to trust the Islamists.
In South Korea, a U.S. imperialist creation, dominated by fascists who collaborated with the Japanese imperialists and murdered anyone even suspected of being a protestor.
In countries where all political parties are forbidden: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates. All of these are in the U.S. economic and political “sphere of influence.”
In Thailand, “communist activity” is forbidden.
In Turkey, all “communist agitation” has been forbidden for decades.
The same was true in South Africa, after the fall of the racist, fascist, apartheid white supremacist government, which the U.S. had always supported.
In Pakistan, communist activity was outlawed during the Cold War, for 40 years, from 1954 to 1994.
The U.S. also officially banned communist organization and action under the Communist Control Act, signed into law by president Dwight Eisenhower in 1954.  
Anti-communism is making a comeback. As the U.S. rulers gear up for war with its rivals Russia and China (former socialist countries), they will use their tool of anti-communism to fool workers and build patriotism.