And now for an explanation of capitalism, socialism and the latter’s mutations:

Capitalism: A system of exploitation in which a minority of people own the means of production and use private ownership in order to marshal labor from the remaining working class majority, thereby accumulating profit and capital.

Socialism: A system wherein the working class owns the means of production, eliminating minority rule, and democratically plans a rational and fair economic distribution of the world’s wealth, labor and resources.

Capitalism furthers a course that impoverishes the working class so that wages may be kept adequately low, thereby keeping profits adequately high. To wit: The Nov. 4 edition of Business Week editorializes: “…over the next year, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index may have to cut as many as 900,000 jobs, or 4% of the labor force, to boost profits by 12%.”

Socialism furthers a course that empowers the most number of people and further hampers the ability of a minority to benefit at the majority’s expense.

To wit: the weekend, unions, the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, child labor laws, civil rights, universal suffrage-all socialist victories.

But what about the atrocities carried out by ‘Communist’ countries?

What do all of these countries have in common?

None of these countries represented real workers’ power or socialism. In fact, the revolutions in China, Cuba and Vietnam wholly lacked working class involvement!

The Russian revolutionaries, stemming from a feudalist country plagued by famine, with an extremely poor economy, stated from the outset, “we may have a workers’ revolution, but left isolated in the world market (without socialist revolutions occurring in advanced capitalist countries that can provide us aid), our country will not be self-sustainable, and capitalist exploitation will rear its head within our economy, born of the compulsion of international competition for capital accumulation.”

Socialism requires the equal distribution of abundance, not poverty, lest its opposite be produced.

The Russian revolution degenerated into capitalism, but a strong state remained to be used by capitalists to centralize their exploitation of the workers, and the label ‘socialism’ outlived its actual existence. Roughly the same occurred in Vietnam, et. al., except these revolutions explicitly desired a strong national capitalism. It was only after the West rebuffed these countries that they adopted the misnomer of socialism.

And in the former Eastern Bloc: socialism can never come under the wheels of tanks, much less those of a capitalist country!

World capitalist competition forced these countries to ‘catch up’ with countries such as the U.S., already tremendously wealthy through the genocide of 12 million Native Americans, the slaughter of 10 million Africans, the massacre of one million Filipinos.

But why did those countries call themselves socialist if they were capitalist?

Well, why did America label herself a democracy whilst she had slavery?

Capitalists everywhere have ruled through deceit, hypocrisy and massacre.

Socialists everywhere have fought to expose all of the foregoing and to liberate humanity. Thus, Marxism lives as long as the spirit of human resistance lives.

And I dare say that we still have the fight left in us.