“Like a cool drink of water in the middle of the desert”

The Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund received the following letter:

Dear Comrades,

Kudos to Chairman Avakian’s Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity! It is the most lucid and easy to grasp transcription of his talks I have seen. In fact, having spent over a year sitting on the fence due to reservations, after reading this excerpt from Part One, I have decided… to dedicate the remainder of my life to the Party’s cause.

One of the issues addressed which spoke to me was the mindset of, “Yeah, communism’s a great ideology but, I’ll adopt it right after I reach my commercial goal of _____.” [Fill in the blank.]

On a personal level, I love motorcycles, and my goal for years has been to own a Harley-Davidson Electroglide “dresser” with all the bells & whistles soon after my release from prison and before I’m too old to ride (I’m now 50). Yet, when I see pictures like the one of terrified little children running from the napalm rained down by the Capitalist/Imperialists – rained down in our name; napalm purchased with our tax dollars – I would gleefully walk everywhere I went for the remainder of my days if it’d help to keep incidents like this from ever happening again. And, of course, they are happening right now in the Middle East and elsewhere, so we can “have it our way.”

Chairman Avakian says, “But if you don’t want this world, then you cannot want the things that define this world and that are the underlying and driving forces of this world. You cannot want a network of commodity relations and of capital, because then you have everything that goes along with that, not only immediately around you, but throughout the world, and all the horrors that we know about and could catalog almost endlessly.” This paragraph captures the entire ethos of the world situation and a person cannot claim to be rational and humane and socially conscious on the one hand, and embrace the “I got mine, to hell with everybody else” sentiment of Capitalism/Imperialism on the other—they’re mutually exclusive....

I will attempt to pass the RCP Newspaper around as much as possible, and then get it back so I can save the Making Revolution article. I tried this with another article awhile back, but my neighbor lost the paper during a routine shakedown or cell search. Once a paper leaves my cell, it’s kinda iffy whether I’ll ever see it again! (Smile)

Thank you so much for these papers and other writings by Chairman Avakian. I treasure them like a cool drink of water in the middle of the desert. In a very real sense the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. is my family now, and I look forward to its weekly paper like others here look forward to letters from home…

With much respect and gratitude,

XXX

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