FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Shakespeare wrote that “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Conflicts of ages, families, friends’ opinions, as well as “war, death and sickness,” he said, stand in the way. He could have added unemployment, disagreements about raising kids, infidelity and many other sources of conflict that make personal relations complicated. Contradictions and qualitative changes drive them in one direction now and another one later, sometimes leading to temporary or permanent failure.  Sometimes the relationships come out stronger.
There is nothing unique about the course of personal relations.  Almost all processes have leaps forward, reversals, catastrophes and periods of calm. This is certainly true of the development of the communist movement. The Russian communists (Bolsheviks) fought in a failed revolution in 1905, and their party lost many members and suffered many arrests and exiles. Over the next twelve years, however, they rebuilt the party and led a successful revolution in 1917.
The Bolsheviks accomplished a great deal, industrializing the country and mobilizing the masses to defeat the Nazis. But their movement was eventually reversed because they fought for socialism, not communism. At bottom, socialism is a form of capitalism, with a capitalist wage system and inequality, which eventually turns back into open capitalism.
The defeat of the communist movement in Russia and China did not mean that communism is dead, however. It means that the old idea of socialism as a stepping-stone to communism has to be abandoned. Our new communist movement has learned to fight directly for communism, without deadly detours.

Why Processes Twist and Turn
Almost all processes, including love and communist revolution, never “run smooth” because they are driven by contradictions, by conflicts inside the process. The character of the process is determined by those contradictions, and particularly by which side of a contradiction is the dominant one.
A system is capitalist because the capitalists are the dominant side in the capitalist-worker contradiction. When the working class gets strong enough to make a communist revolution then the workers become the dominant side. But that does not make the capitalist side disappear immediately. Some former capitalists will hang around and try to find a way to get back on top, perhaps by dividing the masses with racism. If someone sees his or her lover flirting with other people, it can make anger or fear dominate the affectionate side of their relationship and eventually lead to a breakup.

Changing Sides
It isn’t uncommon in the history of the communist movement that people who have made important contributions drop out or even turn into enemies. This is because there are contradictions inside a person between his or her desire to serve the working class and advance toward communism versus opposite sides that prevents this. The other side can be selfishness, fear, feeling overwhelmed, alcoholism or many others. Which side is dominant determines what the person does. The dominant side can change and sometimes change back again. Political struggle with the person will often make the difference.

Twist Limits
There are some general principles of dialectics that limit how twisted a process can get. The main one is the law called “negation of the negation.” The name is clear as mud but the idea is important. It means that if a qualitative change occurs (a “negation”) and a second one follows it, the process never completely returns to the original situation. Engels gave an example of a seed growing into a plant (a negation) and the plant producing new seeds (a second negation). The new seeds may be quite similar to the original ones, but never exactly the same. History does not make circles. Capitalist economic crises occur over and over again, but each is somewhat different from those that came before.
The fight for communism will not “run smooth.” But we can learn from past mistakes so that the next revolution will overcome the failures of the revolutions of the past. The “negation of the negation” law does not itself guarantee that we will get it right, but only that the next result will be different. It is the determination of the masses, led by our best communist ideas, to learn the lessons and make the right changes that will let us navigate the twists and turns of revolution and win communism.  Join us and get in the fight

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