Red Flag Letters

Red Flag aspires to be a newspaper of a new type for a party, dedicated to mobilizing the masses around the world for communism. We’re breaking new ground and learning as we go. We will inevitably make mistakes—and disagree about what the mistakes are that we’re making. The letters page is a good place for comrades to engage in criticism and self-criticism, and help us learn to write in a way that will advance the work. We ask writers to be brief, and to criticize in ways that are sharp, but comradely. Collectively we have a lot to learn.

LOS ANGELES, USA — Several years ago, a short video showed some young people in a major city destroying some private property. It was a hit on the internet, widely shared and liked. Why? These activists were attempting to allow the homeless access to resting places by covering large metal bolts with rubberized coating.
As capitalism tightens its grip on even more civil societies, there are fewer and fewer places where the homeless may simply rest their tired bodies. The owners/bosses pay to have even unused spaces made inhospitable.
It is often said that “a society will be judged on how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable population.” We who live in larger cities in the US know that the thousands who live on our streets illustrate just how brutal our society has become.
In Los Angeles, what was called “Skid Row” is now referred to as “The Arts District and Toy District.” Driving through, one can see that the population of the streets is overwhelmingly Black and aging.
People who should be in mental hospitals are left to fend for themselves. This is partly the result of “the 1980s presidency” that emptied mental hospitals to save money and partly the result of the endless war machine that does as little as possible for veterans and their families.
It will not be so under a money-free system! We will provide housing, meaningful work and a supportive community to each and every person.
A county-wide “survey” is done each year in the largest city in this country. In 2015, three days work, by an army of volunteers, found roughly 44,000 people who sleep outdoors every night.
The real question is: At what point in their lives did these human beings slip through the fabric of our society? We all come into the world with parents, neighbors, some form of relations.
I would point the finger of blame on capitalism, because it is the perceived scarcity of resources that forces many to tell themselves that they simply cannot “afford” to keep family together.
We all know someone who is “couch-surfing,” living in borrowed space to avoid living on the streets. It will not be so under a renewed society! Under a just and humane system, we will use housing to meet needs, not to give views and luxury to a moneyed few!
—Angry communist

This is about a previous letter “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”
The letter correctly argues not to lump together the revolutionary communists of the past who fought for socialism, with the socialists of today, like Hollande in France, Syriza in Greece, Maduro in Venezuela, Sanders in the US, etc.
It correctly pointed that our communist predecessors’ goal was communism but mistakenly thought they needed a transition belt, socialism, to get there. However, socialism never led to communism.
However, the letter concludes, “But to say that they [the communists] became socialists, and in the end failed, like all socialists before and after, is mistaken at best.”
I disagree. I agree that their struggles contributed enormously to the advancement of our movement. Thanks to their successes and failures we have a better political line to defeat capitalism-imperialism and build the communist world they strived for.
However, they became more than “socialists.’ They became capitalists-imperialists exploiting workers everywhere possible and gearing in Russia and China to fight the US and other Western imperialists for world domination.
One of those “giants,” the Chinese communist leader Mao, did become a capitalist-imperialist. All those other “giants” would have ended the same, if they had been for long at the helm of socialist countries like Russia and China, unless they changed their line and mobilized the masses for communism.
The communist parties they organized did not correct this mistake. In China, the left in the CCP did try during the Cultural Revolution but failed. These parties recruited millions of members to administer socialism, state capitalism. They became and continue to be the new capitalist-imperialist rulers of these socialist states.
Dialectical materialism teaches us that the material basis of society determines our political consciousness. You can’t administer capitalism without becoming a capitalist. Only a communist society can create communists. Anything else – like it or not – will inevitably create capitalists-imperialists.
—A Comrade

I think that the letter praising Muhammad Ali in the last issue should have had some comment from the Red Flag editors. Ali opposed the Vietnam war but he was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, the most reactionary and pro-capitalist of the black nationalist movements. He even endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. I don’t see how anyone is going to get a communist message out of his actions or his politics, as the letter claims. His view was thoroughly nationalist, not communist.
—Another old red
RF responds: We agree. Thank you.

FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!

International Communist Workers Party

Letters to Red Flag

	FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party


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