FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Communism creates real human beings. Anton Makarenko, author of The Road to Life, searched for the real human beings he needed to forge an educational collective. He never found them, but the travails over the eight years it took to mold the Gorky colony built them.

Over the past weeks, Mexican educators marched, struck and burned down two election offices. The demand was to end teacher evaluations based on standardized tests. In the last issue, Red Flag ran an article about roaming one-day teachers’ strikes in Washington State. The demand was for more money for education.
The Gorky colony had different priorities. They had no budget to speak of. They relied on the labor of teachers and students. Together they forged an educational institution of a new kind, a communist educational system. They transformed the lives of these young thieves, waifs, prostitutes and gangsters.
The colony was a commune of street kids that replaced a traditional school. A civil war followed the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution. It forced millions of children to fend for themselves without homes or parents.
Everything revolved around useful collective work. They “did not regard social education as a pageant of youthful souls unfolding, the right of the individual and similar poetical claptrap.”
Much weight was given to the “discipline of combating and surmounting difficulties.” Initiative was not “a sort of inspiration, coming from God knows where.”
 “Initiative comes when there is a task to be performed, responsibility for its fulfillment, and the demand of the collective.”
The discipline of combating and surmounting difficulties is as important today as it was then.
A young comrade, recently returned from the U.S. Army, described her work on base. First she laid out the difficulties. The Army spends a lot of time and money indoctrinating the troops. Some thought the armed forces provided for their families, as the civilian world could not.
But then she told how she slowly convinced the troops to read and eventually distribute Red Flag.  One decided not to become a border guard; one brought her friends around, etc. Troops are continuing to distribute the paper, even though she has left the base.

Organizing Communist Education
The Gorky colony organized to carry out collective work. The teachers worked alongside the students.
Permanent detachments were organized around areas of work. Some cared for the horses. Others forged and repaired metal tools. Still more built and repaired facilities, sewed clothes, cooked meals, etc. Each had a commander who attended commanders’ meetings.
The colony assigned mixed detachments for temporary tasks like sowing or reaping. New temporary commanders were appointed by the council.  Permanent commanders would become part of the rank-and-file for the duration. In this way, more became committed to the collective.
Everyone did not respond as the council hoped.  In the next article we’ll discuss the hard cases and the joy of collective struggle.

All quotations from The Road to Life: An Epic of Education by Anton Semyonovich Makarenko

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