To AZ State Rep. Joseph Chaplik: Capitalism Is Teaching the Kids Communism!

On September 14, Arizona Republican State Representative Joseph Chaplik complained to Arizona State University (ASU) officials over the IMT’s upcoming Phoenix Marxist School. He said, “how does a publicly-funded state university host Marxism training on campus for students? … I have a big problem with this.” His criticism, as well as the Marxist School itself, were further publicized by a bourgeois news outlet called the NE Valley Times. The comrades of Socialists Revolution at ASU respond with the following letter. 

The Phoenix Marxist School is scheduled for the weekend of November 4–5. Register today!

Dear Representative Chaplik and the NE Valley Times,

Thank you so much for publicizing the Phoenix Marxist School. Posting the titles of our discussions was an excellent touch. We think these topics, which include the struggle for women’s liberation and revolutionary history, will be very enticing to the youth and workers of America.

As your friends at the Fraser Institute have pointed out, there are literally tens of millions of young people in America who think communism is the “ideal economic system.”

But unfortunately, the vast majority of them have never attended a Marxist school. And while they may go to university, the “Marxism” they teach there is actually light years away from true communism. So what has made all these young people communist? The only thing to blame is the system you defend: capitalism. Capitalism, with all its violence, inequality, discrimination, and disaster, is a communist-making machine!

This past July was the hottest month ever recorded, a palpable sign of the climate crisis that has been caused by the irrational nature of the capitalist market. 50% of young adults are living with their parents, an all-time high caused by staggering housing costs across the country. And company after company are now cutting tens of thousands of jobs, with another recession eventually on the horizon.

The overwhelming majority of the US population is made up of workers, active and retired, and their families. However, your own statistics show that the richest 10% own almost 75% of all the wealth. Who creates all this wealth? All of it comes from the labor of the working class applied to the natural resources of the earth, and yet, most workers do not make enough to live decently and stay out of debt.

Marx explained that crisis is inevitable in capitalism, and it is only getting worse over the years. The younger generations have lived through nothing but crisis, so it’s little wonder that tens of millions of them want to destroy this system!

So yes, you’re correct—although we are receiving no funding for this from ASU, we are running “Marxism training” on campus. We want to turn all of those young communists into serious, organized revolutionaries, who can find more communists, educate them in Bolshevik ideas, and form a genuine, revolutionary American Communist Party to lead the overthrow of this rotten system.

It’s likely that there are communists reading this letter now. If so, what are you waiting for? Get organized—join Socialist Revolution! And register for the Phoenix Marxist School!

Will these young communists “destroy our country from the inside?” No, in fact, they will totally revive it. Only the rotten parts need to be destroyed: private ownership of the means of production, which leads to periodic economic crises and acts as a fetter on the harmonious expansion and running of the economy; and the imperialist machine that feeds off of it, dripping blood from every pore.

What will rise in the place of this will be a workers’ government that can rationally and democratically plan the economy according to human need. Instead of serving the needs of big business, it will be able to feed, house, employ, and provide healthcare to every person in the country. It will free the massive wealth that already exists to fund new infrastructure, the arts, life-saving scientific research, and the fight against climate change.

In addition, the workers’ government will remove the imperialist boot off the throats of so many workers in other countries—Palestine, Cuba, and Venezuela, to name a few—helping to lay the basis for a worldwide proletarian revolution.

This will add to the proud class-struggle history of this country, from the 1776 American Revolution, to the revolutionary war to overthrow slavery in the 1860s, and the rise of the working class and the labor movement in the decades that followed. In short, only a socialist revolution can “make America great again!”

Socialist Revolution at ASU