Raymond Lotta is opening up great debate about the past and future of communist revolution, and the future of humanity. At a time when the abject failure of capitalism to deal with the climate, with war, with immigration, with gender and racial equality stands out... in a world where 160 million child laborers form an essential part of capitalism’s global supply chains ... at a time, in short, in which humanity’s need for an emancipating revolution cries out as never before … communism has been ruled off the agenda.

But wait... doesn’t everyone know that these revolutions were no good? That they were “utopian projects” that turned into “totalitarian nightmares.” Well, that’s what people think they know—when in fact it’s what’s been drilled into people’s heads by this system’s “experts” and “scholars of communism,” its ideologues, and reinforced by highly promoted memoirs of hardship and suffering (like understanding the Civil War through the lens of the Confederacy).

This “verdict” that communism has been a disaster is built on distortions and slanders, and has become a kind of unquestioned and institutionalized “conventional wisdom”—including and especially in academia, where critical thinking shuts down when it comes to this question. This puts a lid on people’s capacity to conceive of a world beyond capitalism—at a time when revolution is so urgently needed... and more possible.

Yet because of the work done by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, there is not only a way to scientifically understand both the great strengths as well as the errors, even grievous errors, of the first two socialist revolutions—in the Soviet Union 1917-56 and in China 1949-76—but also a way to go beyond them to a qualitatively more emancipating future. 

Communism is the scientific analysis of, and method of analyzing, human society and its development and transformation. It is the theory guiding the living struggle to achieve a communist world without exploitation and oppression and the division of society into classes. The very development of human society makes it possible to get beyond a world of scarcity and antagonistic social conflict. Bob Avakian has summed up the previous experience of the communist movement and of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, and he has drawn from a broad range of human experience. In doing so, he has brought forward the new communism, which is a continuation of but also represents a leap beyond and, in some important ways, a break with previous communist theory. 

A core feature of the new communism is the repudiation of the poisonous notion that the “ends justify the means.” The communist revolution’s means and morality must flow from, be consistent with, and serve the struggle to achieve a world in which human beings can truly flourish. Further, the new communism emphasizes the great importance in socialist society of intellectual and cultural ferment, and not only the protection but the promotion of dissent, including opposition to socialism.

Basing himself on the new communism, Raymond Lotta is rescuing from distortion the truth of the first communist revolutions. These were the most significant revolutions humanity has seen. They involved hundreds of millions in creating something utterly new and liberatory. They established the first planned socialist economies to meet social need; they made the liberation of women and overcoming national-ethnic oppression touchstone goals and real-life objectives; and they inspired and aided struggles of oppressed humanity.

These first communist revolutions have been subjected to more slander than any other events in history... bar none! Hardly a surprise, as we live in a capitalist-imperialist world of savage exploitation, grotesque inequality, and the commodification of everything... and whose ideologues never cease reminding us that this is the best and only of all possible worlds.

The Raymond Lotta campus tour will put before people the real history, the great and unprecedented accomplishments of the first communist revolutions; their problems; and how we can go much further and do much better in making revolution in today’s world. He will refute lies about Mao and the Cultural Revolution. He will expose the nonsensical equating of Stalin with Hitler conveyed by notions of “totalitarianism” put forward by liberal anticommunist writers like Timothy Snyder, as well as Hannah Arendt.

The stakes could not be higher. The U.S. and Russian imperialists are risking world war, nuclear war, over Ukraine—and the U.S. is ramping up war threats against imperialist China. The climate crisis is racing towards global catastrophe. Fascism is on a rampage. At the same time, the rulers of the system are bitterly divided, in a way they haven’t been since the Civil War, and are increasingly unable to rule in a unified way. This actually makes it more possible to make revolution. A revolution guided by the new communism to abolish this system and its horrors... a revolution to change everything!