It’s the power hungry capitalist rulers who work hard to convince us of this lie. One of their main tools is George Orwell’s book Animal Farm. An earlier review of this book revealed Orwell’s anti communism and his negative outlook on the masses. Orwell also suggested cynically that all leaders are power hungry and self serving and will lead the masses to ruin. We saw him trash Stalin, distorting the Stalin era purges to paint him as nothing more than a murderer. Orwell ignores Stalin era victories such as the massive reorganization of production and mobilization of society to defeat the Nazis. History shows, even if history textbooks don’t, that defeating the Nazis was only possible because of the determined might of the Red Army. To be clear, socialism itself created a new state capitalist ruling class. This developed under Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which mistakenly encouraged small scale capitalism. It expanded during the Five Year Plans, when socialism kept key capitalist features, like money, commodity production, and wages. Unfortunately, workers did not remove this new capitalist class with communist revolution. It still requires removal.

“Power hungry” individuals don’t create capitalism. Rather, capitalism creates “power hungry” individuals.
Capitalist power is the power of a small class of exploiters over the rest of us. In class society, the rulers push a “survival of the fittest” outlook. This serves their interest by “proving” capitalist leaders are “more fit” to lead and should not be challenged. It makes us think that poverty, un employment, lack of medical coverage, etc., are our fault. It also encourages us to view our class brothers and sisters as rivals. When workers believe that the masses are gullible and incapable of leadership, they may think they have no choice but to follow some strong armed fascist. The capitalist bosses try to sell us these lies to make their sick system seem like natural human progress.

Communism: REAL Human Progress
Under communism, we are not rivals. We work collectively and everyone’s contribution is valued. More helping hands mean more free time to study and dialog, to grow, develop, and spread our ideas, and to really enjoy the results of our collective work. Communist power means involving the masses in collective leadership. Leaders try to win increasing numbers of people to a deep commitment to serving society by helping coor dinate production and social development for the collective. Many teachers assign Orwell’s book, so we need to be ready to expose his lies and advance our communist ideas!

The current worldwide capitalist (economic and political) crisis, together with the mass uprisings and mobilizations from Egypt to India, from Turkey to South Africa, from China to Brazil, cry out for the ab solute need to mobilize the masses for communism!
Without mobilizing the masses for communism we will be condemned to further and deepening capitalist exploitation, destruction and eventual World War III. That’s why the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) is organizing Summer Projects in Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle.
ICWP students, teachers, workers, and soldiers will make this a Red Summer. We‘ll take Red Flag to factories, bus divisions, shopping centers, military bases, schools and universities. We will visit farmworkers in the Central Valley of California. We will visit bus drivers in Oakland and Boeing workers in Washington State.
By visiting workers we will learn from them about their experiences and discuss communist ideas with them. We will also learn from each other—experienced worker comrades, high school and college students from different places.
We will study communist philosophy and history, organize social events,, and hold rallies. In the process, we will begin to de velop the practice of communist social relations.
The focus of the Summer Projects is to develop and expand a communist base in industrial sectors and in the military. Both industrial workers and soldiers have proven historically that they are key sections of the working class for making revolu tion and building a new society.
In this way we are building the basis for a world in which humanity, undivided by borders, racism, sexism, privileges and classes, will decide every aspect of society. We will all contribute to society according to our commitment and receive according to our need. We invite workers, soldiers, teachers and students around the world to organize sim ilar summer projects so we may advance the struggle to emancipate the international working class from capitalist exploitation and build a worker’s state. Long live communism!

Letters Page