Letter from PA’s Coal Country

I think that it is time for me to join a real Communist group and I think that the WIL seems to be such a group. So I am considering becoming a member. But I want to do some more reading and I think that it is time for me to re-read Trotsky and Lenin.

Of course, we will have to talk this over. Currently, I am working with the Johnstown-based Citizens for Social Responsibility (CSR) doing antiwar work and we have protested at the office of Rep. John Murtha several times. If I join the WIL and I probably will, I will struggle to win others to revolutionary Communist-Trotskyism and attempt to get people to subscribe to Socialist Appeal. But again, I want to get some feedback from you guys. Concerning the antiwar work, I agree with the WIL position that only the working class, due to their position in bourgeois society, has the power to stop imperialist war. Also, only a proletarian communist revolution can end imperialism for all times. So, on a local level, I can struggle to win other workers to the communist perspective and to Trotskyism, as is advocated by the WIL.

Personally, I have thought for a good while now that socialism is about more than economics. Of course, it is important to eliminate economic scarcity and provide decent jobs and health care. But it is also important for the people to fight for real workers’ power and to combat the ignorance that festers like a cancer on the soul of this mind numbing bourgeois order. In actuality, I can see the need for a real proletarian cultural revolution. In reality, people must have control in a real socialist society.

Bourgeois thinkers of every stripe never grow tired of telling us that what exists in capitalist America is a democracy, and many of them seem to believe this nonsense. In other words, they believe what the ruling capitalist class imagines their system to be.

So if we do look beyond the illusive appearance of bourgeois so-called democracy, we will discover a system based upon exploitation and a dictatorship of the ruling capitalist class.