No Wonder They Slander Communism

By Bob Avakian

If you step back and think about it, no wonder they slander communism so much. If you presided over a system that has such glaring, howling contradictions and disparities in terms of how people lived, a system which denied a decent life to the majority of humanity, and weighed them down with tremendous oppression and superstition and ignorance, while a relative handful in a few countries lived a life of unbelievable luxury—but, more than just luxury, they continued to accumulate capital while they fought with each other over who would beat out the other through this exploitation and accumulation of capital—if you stood back and looked at that... Imagine if you said to somebody: go to a drawing board and draw up the way you think the world should be. And imagine if somebody went to the drawing board and painted a picture of the way the world is now, and they said: this is the way the world should be. I mean, there would be tremendous howls coming from all quarters of humanity, saying: What the fuck—that’s the way you think the world should be, with these tremendous disparities and people, little children, dying of cholera and malnutrition and other things that could be prevented easily, while a small number battle each other to accumulate more and more wealth from the suffering of this mass of humanity—that’s what you think?!

Anybody who would actually draw that up on a board should actually be—and would probably be—rightly accused of criminal insanity. And yet, here’s a class of people, the capitalist-imperialist class, that presides exactly over a world that way, and argues it’s the best of all possible worlds. The only reason that people don’t—masses of people don’t, right at this time—say, “this is criminal insanity” is because they’ve been propagandized and conditioned to believe that, in fact, this is the only possible way, and that the radical alternative to it that does exist, namely communism, has somehow been a horror and a disaster. And it’s not hard to see why the ruling class of capitalist-imperialists would employ a lot of people to propagate that idea everywhere they could. If you presided over such a criminally insane system, you would undoubtedly do the same.

from What Humanity Needs: Revolution and the New Synthesis of Communism, An Interview with Bob Avakian by A. Brooks.

“[O]ne of the most important focuses [of the struggle in the realm of ideas] at this time is the struggle to confront and combat the constant attacks on the experience of socialist countries, and in particular the dictatorship of the proletariat, and especially the whole concept of totalitarianism; and at the same time, while doing that, to confront and critically examine the actual experience of socialist countries and the dictatorship of the proletariat, drawing the fullest lessons from this experience—mainly and overwhelmingly the positive lessons, but also facing squarely and digging deeply into the very real shortcomings and errors.”

Bob Avakian
Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
from Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism

What Humanity Needs

An Interview with Bob Avakian

The New Synthesis of Communism—Putting This in Historical Perspective

Brooks: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about this point that the new synthesis of communism that you’ve brought forward is not based on either of the two dominant trends that are mentioned in the Manifesto from the RCP—either discarding and throwing out the past experience of socialist society, or kind of clinging dogmatically to it. It’s standing on the shoulders of that previous experience, but then actually going further. I wondered if you could speak a little bit to that.

Bob Avakian: Well, one of the ways to get at this—this flows from what I was just talking about, and, again, we do need to focus a lot of attention on setting the record straight around this, because we’re fighting an uphill battle against this massive assault, a massive and multi-sided assault against communism coming from the ruling class and the ruling and dominant institutions of society, from academia to the “popular media” to the so-called news media, and so on—but one of the ways to come at this, and to look at the experience in the Soviet Union and in China, is this: We’re always hearing about how in democratic, i.e. capitalist, society, the individual is valued in a way that was not true before in history and is not true in any other kind of society, especially not tyrannical or “totalitarian” societies like communist dictatorships. The “rights of the individual” are supposedly at the center of the whole political philosophy and the whole political process in these capitalist democracies.

Read on, pp 45-49 "What Humanity Needs"

Read and download COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

Including:

II. The First Stage of Communist Revolution

III. The End of a Stage—And What Conclusions Should, and Should Not, Be Drawn from this Historical Experience

IV. The New Challenges, and the New Synthesis

At a talk I gave, years ago now, someone asked: “How would you do better than the Soviet Union or China under Mao?” One of the things I said to him is: “I don’t believe in tailing people because they’re oppressed—we need emancipators of humanity.” When you are in a qualitatively different situation than what we have now—when the present system has been swept aside and the new, socialist system has been brought into being—there would have to be an army, as the backbone of an actual state, that enforces the new system, and that army would be made up of very basic people in large part. But we have to train them to understand that, as part of that, they are going to have to be out there protecting the rights of people who oppose this new system, and they are going to have to defend the right of these people to raise this opposition, while at the same time they would also have to stop people who really are making attempts to smash the state power we have. I said that this will be a struggle with masses, but we have to bring forward on every level people who have this kind of understanding of what we’re doing. The Constitution of the new, socialist system is going to enumerate the rights of people, and this state apparatus is going to protect people’s rights who don’t agree, so long as they don’t actively and concretely organize to overthrow that state apparatus. That is where the Lenin point comes in: As long as there are classes, one class is going to dictate, and “better me than you”—that is, better the dictatorship of the proletariat than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (capitalist class). But what is that dictatorship of the proletariat?

BOTH aspects of this are important—solid core and elasticity.

BAsics from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian 2:27

Read and Download Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA