FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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The Gorky educational colony organized to carry out collective work. Teachers worked alongside students and staff. Permanent detachments centered on areas of work. Each detachment had a commander who attended council meetings.
Mixed detachments took care of temporary tasks. The council appointed new temporary commanders for each. They also attended council meetings. In this way, more became committed to the collective.
Everyone did not respond as the council hoped. The colony had a plan for that, too. The commanders’ council demanded that offending colonists explain themselves before an open meeting.
For example, the colony gave allowances to students they sent to Rabfak (roughly high school). Colonist Uzhikov stole the stipends.
He was summoned to the council meeting. They decided to shun him. He was expelled from his detachment and not allowed to join any mixed detachment. His commander assigned him individual tasks.  He could not talk to any other colonists.
The representatives from the Regional Education Department were aghast. “Of course, you are not going to confirm this resolution!” demanded the officials of the director.
“It must be confirmed,” answered the colony’s director Makarenko.
Two weeks later the officials returned. The colonists ate dinner with their detachments; Uzhikov had to sit by himself. An official went over to ask how he felt.
Uzhikov stood up. He replied that he couldn’t talk to him without his commander’s permission.
The council met. They immediately ended the punishment. The threat to the collective the thievery presented ended and a new comrade gained.

The Joy of Collective Struggle

Uzhikov was not the only hard case. The Gorky colonists--teachers, hired workers and students -- learned the joy of collective struggle. The key to producing communists is “to visualize a better tomorrow, to aspire to it in joyful, common efforts with steadfast visions.”
“Perhaps,” mused Makarenko, “that is the main distinction between our education and the bourgeois one.”
Building our party is a lot like that now. If you expect to find fully minted communists on the streets, you will be disappointed.  You will become cynical. You’ll develop pessimistic theories that say significant growth is impossible.
Recruitment and consolidation involve fighting for the collective. We must organize common efforts with a steadfast communist vision among new members and friends.
Makarenko was clear. He wanted to discover “methods of communist education.” His “epic of education” was a great contribution, but was written in a socialist society. In the end, his educational methods were discarded for traditional capitalist ones.
Looking back, we can see the telltale signs. Makarenko repeated the usual socialist nonsense to justify wages. “Wages help the novice to learn to coordinate personal and social interests.”
Wages segregate the working class. They lead to other forms of separation. More than once, the Gorkyists attacked (sometimes with fists) racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. Nonetheless, certain conventions of the times were tolerated. Girls were still channeled into “women’s work” like sewing. The collective never stopped the boys’ racist caricatures of black people.
Educational successes like the Gorky colony are impossible under capitalism. They can only succeed over the long term under communism. In turn, they create the able, dedicated cadre necessary for a successful communist society.
The Gorkyists forged the first large-scale experiment in communist education. Their weapons were collective struggle and labor, not money and big budgets. Whatever the colonists’ weaknesses, even the most callous among us must cry out, “Look! Look what we can do!”
All quotations from The Road to Life: An Epic of Education by Anton Semyonovich Makarenko

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