Claude McKay, I think, was apart of the CPUSA.

Click the link, if you want, to see and maybe buy it directly from the publisher, idk (we need more people buying directly from Marxist publishers).

Here's the back-cover blurb:

"First printed by International Publishers in 1987, Viktor Afanasyev's Historical Materialism remains a classic of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

Afanasyev authored more than 20 books on philosophy from the 1960s to the 1980s, shaping how millions of people around the world learned and understood Marxism. For more than a decade, he was editor-in-chief of Pravda (Truth), voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and highest circulation newspaper on the planet. He was one of the top Marxist spokespersons in the world, having also overseen Kommunist, the CPSU's flagship ideological journal. But Afanasyev is most remembered for being one of the Communists who challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the USSR's twilight years—and lost.

When it came to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, there were few scholars in the postwar period as prolific as Afanasyev. He was a recognized authority on what bourgeouis academics and New Leftists derisively called "state socialist" ideology. It was with those credentials that Afanasyev faced off against Gorbachev. Though anti-Communists would characterize him as merely an apparatchk, Afanasyev was one of those struggling from inside the ruling party to preserve socialism and the Soviet state as the reform program known as perestroika went off the rails. That battle for the heart and soul of socialism in the USSR against the forces of capitalist restoration was the context in which Historical Materialism was first published. No one knew at the time that its author, still a respected figure in the Soviet Union, was already hurtling toward his own political demise.

This new edition of Historical Materialism includes a Foreword by C.J. Atkins, managing editor of People’s World. Atkins' Foreword not only provides biographical information on Afanasyev, it also puts the publication of this book and Afanasyev in historical and political context, providing readers with fresh insight into one of the foremost—though largely forgotten—Marixsts of the 20th century."

Where can I learn more about Afanasyev?!

He seems really interesting to me!

The Initiative of Communist and Workers' Parties (INITIATIVE, ICWP) was a collective political co-opt association composed of European communist parties founded for the purpose of "contribute(ing) to the research and study of issues concerning Europe, particularly concerning the EU, the political line which is drawn up in its framework and affects the lives of the workers, as well as to assist the elaboration of joint positions of the parties and the coordination of their solidarity and their other activities"

the European ICWP was founded by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and according to a statement from the French PRCF (in the link provided by the initial post itself) was unilaterally dissolved by the Communist Party of Greece without democratic consultation of constituent member parties.

wiki list of members and former members here

Statement translated below.

Today, September 9, 2023, after a plenary meeting bringing together all the members of the Initiative of Communist and Workers' Parties (founded in 2013 and of which the PRCF is one of the founding members) and after approximately two hours of debate where, however , no majority was emerging to go in this direction, a closing speech by comrade Giorgos Marinos unilaterally decreed the dissolution of the Initiative. It was added that it would now be prohibited to use the name or even the logo of the Initiative. The decision was not put to a vote.

As the meeting took place on “zoom” , it was technically impossible for many parties wishing to protest against this obvious anti-democratic act to protest. Our comrade Boris Differ even asked in writing on the discussion thread "Why shouldn't there be a vote on this?" ". The only response he received was that there would be no second round of speaking. Then the written discussion thread was deactivated.

Whatever the possible differences at the international level, and in particular the assessment of the NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine, we consider it unjustifiable to dissolve international tools of struggle forged in the struggle and the trust won over the years.

We suggest to the member parties of the Initiative who are surprised by this brutal dissolution to contact us to reflect together on the best way to continue the international fight consubstantial with communist activity on the basis of maxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and without in the least opposing communist internationalism and the broad development of the Anti-Imperialist Front.

From the PRCF and the PRCF international commission, Fadi Kassem, Georges Gastaud, Gilliatt de Staerck, Rachida El Fekair, Boris Differ, Aymeric Monville

Heyo

Read up.

I like seeing what the rest of SolidNet is doing and perhaps y'all find it interesting as well.

Ciao.

o7

Pretty uncharitable imo, and pretty funny saying that "Graeber did it first" at the end when Graeber pulled a lot from Hudson and ISLET

I recently discovered these two terms, Fordism and Post-Fordism. I have recently been on the David Graeber tip,[, re-reading Bullshit Jobs and some of his other essays on the Anarchist library. Dude was and still is 420% right about modern work and how/why it sucks, however I didn't really have that sort of deeper theory based framework of understanding why it sucks and how it came to suck so much.

I'm generally anti-work as the next leftie. However, I do think there is a lot of work that needs to be done and we should all do, but we should all not have to do it all the time for all of our lives. In general most jobs that need to be done can be done collectively or through a shared and equitable fashion. That said 93.7% of modern jobs don't needs to exist and the remain 6.3% of jobs could be radically re-imagined to be fairer and better for the worker.

Reading about Fordism and Post-Fordism I'm really understanding that capital-M "Management" in just about every industry all want to see a workforce strongly resembles that of a factory churning out repeatable products. Everything a process, that can be measured, and repeated, and traced, even the works themselves become a collection processes. I'm also listening to a podcast on Gramsci and learning more about a theorist I never knew about.

While I knew of this sort of sentiment before I didn't really parse it through a Marxist lens until reading about it more thoroughly and experiencing it now that I'm "moving up" in my current bland MEGACORP job. I'm experiencing people around me trying to internalize this ideology in a weird modern way, like it's somehow "progressive™ ® © " to want to become a better cog. To self optimize your cog-y-ness, and to want to hyper specialize your cog-y-ness. The worst part of it all is that it's seen as "self-actualizing" and generally a good thing to want to turn yourself in to the cog. The manufactured desire of you wanting to debase yourself for your boss is just vile to me.

I guess I just want to share his discovery, and prove yet again Marx was right.

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was established on this day in 1919. CPUSA provided legal aid to the Scottsboro Boys, helped poor Southern farmers form sharecropper unions, and promoted communist ideas within the U.S.

The party was established after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution, and initially operated underground due to the Palmer Raids, a series of anti-immigrant, anti-labor, and anti-communist raids conducted by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

CPUSA was an early opponent of segregation and racial discrimination, giving legal aid to the Scottsboro Boys and helping poor black farmers in the South organize sharecropper unions. Because of this, the party had a strong presence in Alabama in the 1930s. This history is detailed in "Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression" by historian Robin D.G. Kelley.

Hammer and Hoe pdf

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reminders:

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Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was born on August 30, 1948 and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. In high school he excelled in academics and athletics. After Hampton graduated from high school, he enrolled in a pre-law program at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois. Hampton also became involved in the civil rights movement, joining his local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His dynamic leadership and organizational skills in the branch enabled him to rise to the position of Youth Council President. Hampton mobilized a racially integrated group of five hundred young people who successfully lobbied city officials to create better academic services and recreational facilities for African American children.

In 1968, Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), headquartered in Oakland, California. Using his NAACP experience, he soon headed the Chicago chapter. During his brief BPP tenure, Hampton formed a “Rainbow Coalition” which included Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang and the National Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization. Hampton was also successful in negotiating a gang truce on local television.

In an effort to neutralize the Chicago BPP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Chicago Police Department placed the chapter under heavy surveillance and conducted several harassment campaigns. In 1969, several BPP members and police officers were either injured or killed in shootouts, and over one hundred local members of the BPP were arrested.

During an early morning police raid of the BPP headquarters at 2337 W. Monroe Street on December 4, 1969, twelve officers opened fire, killing the 21-year-old Hampton and Peoria, Illinois Panther leader Mark Clark. Police also seriously wounded four other Panther members. Many in the Chicago African American community were outraged over the raid and what they saw as the unnecessary deaths of Hampton and Clark. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton’s funeral where Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference eulogized the slain activist. Years later, law enforcement officials admitted wrongdoing in the killing of Hampton and Clark. In 1990, and later in 2004, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.

Fred Hampton (Documentary)

Why the US government murdered Fred Hampton

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ August Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
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• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

AES- Actually-Existing Socialism

Edit: Dictatorship of the Proletariat + Predominant, collective ownership and control of the economy = AES?

Wasn't up for a while, but its there now.

Cockshott is a terf, and I hate that he is one of the best in the field of economic planning, but this book was interesting. Now you can read it without paying him lol

I figured with all the talk about the People's Republic being abound, it would be a great time to pull this handy infograph out to help illustrate how a communist party functions in a socialist state.

Also FYI this is also - plus or minus details here and there - how the CPSU operated as well.

This is a great interactive guide for both newcomers unfamiliar with how communist parties in socialist states are organized and for educated Marxists who can use the opportunity to both brush up on old info in a shiny new form and help educate anyone with questions.

That said, for anyone new to hexbear's Marxism page, please don't be either annoying, pedantic, or a combination of the two. Productive and educational discussions good. Nitpicking sophistry bad.

Semper post.

Sharing an essay from user Nodrada on Medium that I thought was an insightful Marxist perspective on gender. I am very curious what my trans/nonbinary friends think about this. I'm cisgender and still learning about these issues.

The gist of the essay is that certain forms of radical feminism are flawed and even damaging. The first, obvious form is the trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) whose flaws speak for itself. The second form is the "liberal" form, which takes gender as pure and absolute, an essence which merely needs expressing. What this second form leads to is hyper-personalized genders, in the last resort a unique gender for each individual, as each individual would have their own essence needing expressing. The author finds this to be an empty liberation, since the gender-sex contradiction is never resolved. (This has striking resemblance of Marx's critique of the anti-theists in the famous "opiate of the people" in the Critique of the Philosophy of Right.)

My take-away is that gender cannot simply be abolished outright as the TERFs would like, but neither is recognition of new identities in itself liberating. Of course recognition of new identities, e.g. pronouns, is a necessary step on the road toward actual liberation from gender, which has become an oppressive institution if it ever was anything but. "Being" trans is not an absolute condition, it is a mode of being in an absolute world which demands gender. (Sorry if this comes across as too edgy, happy to hear critique on that last thought.)

excerpt:

In both of these poles [individualists and TERFs], there is a certain identifiable episteme or common sense even in their direct contradictions. Both recognize the body as a primary site of dispute, of autonomy, and of liberation — whether in presentation, reproduction, labor, or sexual desire and pleasure. Both employ a certain authenticity rhetoric, with TERFs positing gender as an external institution as being inauthentic and gender individualists positing gender liberation as the realization of one’s internal, originary essence in an authentic gendered life.

In these stances, both tend to hold to a sex-gender distinction. On the one hand, we have the “objective” category of sex — objective in the sense of literally being present in the object of the body, and in the sense of the categories being assumed to be beyond social-historical influences. On the other hand, there is the “subjective” category of gender, which is understood as variable and a site of change, whether through historical social struggle or through a realization of one’s internal, subjective self-image of authenticity.

Both make a mechanical and dogmatic separation of the unmediated “objective” scientific categories, placed beyond the social in their formation even if recognized as the object of social dispute, and the “subjective” categories, which are rendered either static dichotomies or as pure determinations of the individual. Against this modern view, here we seek to advocate for a position which emphasizes not only the sociality and historicity of gender, but to reject the two-systems approach and emphasize that this extends not only to sex but to all categories. That is because all categories, every single one, are from the perspective of human beings, even as they organize real, concrete, objective things into systems of knowledge. There is no such thing as an unmediated, primary object for a living being.___

Check it out.

I had a literal shower thought today about how many games, whether sport or video game or board game or puzzle, are time-based, and I wondered if that has always been the case or if time-based games have proliferated under capitalism.

The reason I think about this is I enjoy doing the NYT crossword, but I don’t understand why there needs to be a prominent timer. Why does a puzzle need to be timed? It only adds stress to something meant to be fun, and makes leisure feel like work.

There are more connections as I think about it. Role-playing games are an obvious one. Players begin their journey as isolated individuals, true Robinsonades who must forge a life on their own, standing apart from the NPC society created by the developers. The NPCs and world resources serve only as a means for player advancement. And of course, online highscores bring efficiency to the fore. It is not sufficient to advance. You must advance faster than everyone else, or be left behind. RPGs frequently involve player-to-player market economies for another layer of competition.

Were games historically this focused on time, efficiency, and competition? If so, was it to a similar degree as today?

I am not a historian but I remember reading that the ancient Olympic Games, while still being competitive, were also religious and artistic in nature, not purely athletic. The competitive aspect was because of the rise of neighboring Greek city-states which had to compete for resources, and the Olympics served as a peaceful way to blow off resultant steam. So while this is a different kind of competition from capitalist competition in the market, it’s clear that political-economic situation impacts games and how people view their leisure.

I’ll do some research on it this weekend. It’s just been in the back of my head and thought I’d share.

Communist Party USA on the foundation of the multi-racial working class and the organizing and activism behind it as it relates to party-building.

Video is about an hour long.

Check it out.

Image post: GOSPLAN (I think, I don't speak Russian). Found in this weird article: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-mulls-gosplan-2-0-soviet-state-orders-system-261171/

The following were found here: https://nitter.net/rarar/status/1597628735989374976

Open the images in a new tab to actually see the text

Towards a New Socialism by Cockshit and Cottrell

Participatory Economics by Hahnel and Albert

Negotiated Coordination by Devine and Adaman

Digital Socialism by Saros

Check my class analysis comrades. What did I miss, where did I go wrong?

The MIC bourgeoisie wants war with China to make money and also to stop China from strengthening other countries around the world via the BRI. If other countries are strong, then they’re harder to fight, and Americans don’t like losing wars, especially if the enemy tech gets advanced enough to strike American soil / disable American nukes.

 Global south countries with growing economies might also entangle other branches of the American bourgeoisie (the way China has) and make it more difficult to get the whole ruling class onboard with waging war.

The oil bourgeoisie wants war with China because Chinese green tech threatens their profits.

The media bourgeoisie wants war with China because other branches of the bourgeoisie pay for their advertising (and their audience is mostly ravening hogs (and the hogs-in-denial known as libs)).

Pharma bourgeoisie wants war with China because medicine produced in China (and Cuba) is cheap and actually works and therefore threatens their profits.



Tech/manufacturing haute bourgeoisie are uninterested in war with China because they profit from reselling Chinese treats to American hogs. (Witness Gates’s/Musk’s recent visits to China.)

Petite bourgeoisie is obsessed with war with China because they simply cannot compete with Amazon, which itself is basically just reselling Chinese products. They also want to become haute bourgeoisie, but can’t blame the haute bourgeoisie for their problems (since that basically means blaming themselves), so China/Jews/Muslims/woke globalist elites/“criminals” are scapegoated instead.

The American labor aristocracy wants war with China because the desk job gravy train is over for them if China manages to destroy the USA. Exceptions here are quite rare and are based on subjective factors. I belong to this class and am against the idea of war with China because I was fucked so hard and so repeatedly by American capitalism that after thirty fucking years of living in this shithole I finally figured out why I hated it so much etc., etc.

The American proletariat is I think divided over war with China? Some are uninterested because they know that they’re the ones who are going to die in a war with China, others are open to it because war might grant them the opportunity to become bourgeois (by advancing their careers in the military perhaps).

The prior Chapter 1: introduction here

CHAPTER 2: THE SOVIET THEORY OF CRIME

TO UNDERSTAND rightly the theory of crime officially accepted in Russia today, one must read the works of Lenin. Karl Marx is there in the background, to be sure, but he is explained or interpreted in accordance with the opinion of the Soviet Union's first leader. It sounds a simple enough theory -- that, with the final attainment of the classless society, crime, which is the result of economic class relationship, will disappear. But it needs some elucidation. The accomplishment of a state of society in which this would be true is not, after all, quite so simple as the statement sounds.

People have tried for a good many years to account for the phenomenon of crime and to work out some manner of punishment that would control even if not eliminate it, as the present Soviet theory permits. Anthropologists tell us that acts not pleasing to the group, even antagonistic to its best interests, are apparently as old as human society itself. Penalties consisting of curses, banishment, even death, were visited upon those who broke the law in the earliest ages of society. Up to very recent years punishment in the form of untold cruelties was dealt out to those who transgressed. Still crime grew and criminals increased with the complexity of civilization. What makes people do those things -- commit those acts which are against the folk ways or state ways of the community in which he lives, and brings him usually to account? Who knows? Within fairly recent times three main theories have attempted to establish the causes and have laid out measures of punishment designed to protect law-abiding society from the criminal and later, to aid in the readjustment of the individual to life.

We might take a hasty look at these theories before we speak of their rejection by proletariat Russia. The classical school had as one of its chief characteristics the doctrine of free will in the commission of crime. The discretionary power of judges in the years just preceding the development of this theory gave too much play to the possibility, supposedly, of circumstances surrounding the act. As a matter of actual practice, according to such an authority as Gillin, it gave them instead an excellent chance to wreak a personal vengeance on some enemy, or, still acting according to the discretionary power given them, befriend someone to whom they wished to show favor.

But this was one of the evils the classical school of writers decided to remedy. If one committed an act of his own free will, then circumstances had nothing to do with it. A man was a criminal because he chose to be. Thus when two persons committed the same act they should be given the same punishment. And the French Code of 1791 put such a theory into practice, listing a great number of such transgressions and providing for each a set penalty. The difficulties would hardly need to be set down for us. The resulting unwieldy code, the lack of any punishment for acts not listed, made the administration of the code an impossible task.

There was another reason for its modification. It did not take an expert in criminology to see that there were differentiating conditions surrounding the commissions of crime. It was clear that of two people committing similar acts, the one would have the sympathy of those who saw him, whereas the second would be looked on with contempt. That the people in the street were able to arrive at such a conclusion and public opinion in the days of revolutionary action against tyranny, must have had some effect. At any rate the Code of 1810 in France provided a modification of the definite penalty for a definite crime by setting a maximum and minimum and permitting the judge to choose between. The doctrine of free will in the commission of crime thus became modified to a milder form of the same theory.

The neo-classical school went a step further. While it still recognized the theory of free will and individual responsibility on the part of one transgressing the law, it did decide that in view of evidences being submitted by a body of biologists, physicians, and other scientists, that every person was not free to choose, and was thus not responsible for his behavior. There might, for example, be insanity or imbecility to account for an act. It was, however, necessary to establish that at the time of the crime he was in such a mental state. This theory is incorporated in the practice of our criminal courts today.

But here begins another story. Modern science was developing. Research connected with psychiatry and psychology was adding important contributions to the field of the study of the criminal and an attempt to account for crime. Why did a man do things of such an anti-social nature, things harmful to his fellow beings? The anthropological school with Lombroso as its initial spokesman, entered with its explanation.

This theory, attacking the classical and neo-classical writers, took a different line, and swung far in the other direction. Why did the criminal commit his crime? Because he was born with certain stigmata that prevented his following other lines of behavior. He had no choice in the matter. Far from the free-will theory that made him a creature responsible for his deeds, this doctrine made him incapable of rational analysis, or any logical deductions as to cause and consequence. Lombroso weighted his argument with facts and figures. He made an extensive study of eriminals in Italian prisons and concluded finally that at least a certain percentage of those committing crimes were born criminals with definite physical features characteristic of the lower stages of evolution. However, in his later writings he concluded that only one-third of all criminals belonged to this group. Still having to account for the other two-thirds, he decided that part of this number was insane and that the other belonged in the category for which he invented the term -- criminaloid. It is in regard to the latter group that we see his we see his recognition of social influences on crime. Besides those born to criminal ways and those committing their acts because of insanity, there was this third group, who while not born to their deeds, still acted like criminals. There was too much proof by this time of the influence of environment for even an ardent advocate of his own theory to deny its importance.

Long before the death of Lombroso, Ferri had written his Criminal Sociology and our third main theory was well launched. This school, of course, is prominently with us today. It recognizes biological causes and adds to them the results of various social environments. It goes even beyond that and takes into account such physical environment as climate, weather, and geographic location.

The Soviet criminal theory repudiates all of the aforementioned and asserts that crime is caused by the exploitation of one class by another. The attitude which accounts for such behavior, they insist, has evolved over a period that has lasted since the state became an instrument in the hands of a ruling class to force a weaker one into submission by making "laws" to protect its own interests and punishing those who transgressed one of those regulations. Because that "conscience" has had a historical development, has been long in the making, it will likewise take time to change it.

But the Marx-Lenin theory assumes that all crime is the result of the exploitation of one class by another, and that with the achievement of classless society -- which is the ultimate aim of socialist construction -- crime itself will disappear.

Let us trace this line of thought for a moment for fear it is not as familiar as it should be for one to get the full import of this doctrine. According to this belief, there has been one continuous evolution of society toward the establishment of full Communism, beginning with its earliest stage, which will be in its final stage world-wide. But in this evolution, going on since the dawn of history and before, there emerged at one stage of the process an organization through which the stronger element came to rule the weaker and make its members submit to its will. The instrument through which they effected this was the state. From that time on, the interests of the class or group in power have been protected by rules or laws and those who break those regulations, or commit some act not in accord with these interests of the ruling class, are guilty of a crime.

The Marx-Lenin doctrine in rejecting any sort of an idealistic notion such as Rousseau's "social contract" and Hegel's "the reality of the moral idea" as accounting for the state, accepts instead the definition that "the state as organized violence emerged at the definite stage in the evolution of society, that society was broken up into irreconcilable classes, that it could no longer exist without the 'authority' supposed to be above society and to a certain degree isolated from it"

Or again, speaking more plainly, the Marxian formula states "that the state is an organ of oppression of one class by another that it sets up an order which legalizes and consolidates this oppression modifying the conflict of classes." Thus since the state is an organ of class domination, and crime necessarily, by the same definition, is the commission of an act against the interests of the ruling class, a criminal code would be a formulation of penalties imposed for such acts. When a state is reached where there is no domination of one class by another in society, it would logically appear that there would be no need of a criminal code.

But the Soviet Union has a criminal code now, as we shall later see, and of course a recognition of crime. This, however, in their theory is no contradiction. In the first place there is one class now in power (there is an admitted class basis for criminal legislation), and the transgression of the rights of those in authority, the proletariat or working group, does constitute a serious and major crime. That, of course, is to be expected from the nature of our definition. But what of the group of criminals who come from the working class itself?

They are those whose attitude is the result of long centuries of class struggle, and their point of view cannot be changed at once. Every effort is made by a policy resulting from this theory to change their "social conscience" by education while they serve their sentence, but even with that effort it is certain that many of the older generation will not be won over to the new way of thinking. Thus they concentrate on youth, as we shall see in a later chapter devoted to the child who comes in contact with the law.

But crime, except in isolated instances, will disappear as need for the state also vanishes. Let us take the word of an authority for it. Commissar of Justice of the USSR, N. Krylenko, writes: "Only under Communism will the state become wholly superfluous, for then there will be no one to suppress in the sense of waging a systematic class struggle against a definite part of the population."

Understand that, in accordance with the theory, criminal repression will exist as long as the state itself is necessary, and for the present the perfect socialist society is a thing of the future. Even when it is fully come there will still be some who will commit acts of a criminal nature, but they will be of such infrequency that there will be no need of penal restriction. Lenin is our authority this time. In Vol. XXI, p. 432, we find the following:

"For this there will be no need for a special machine, for a special apparatus of coercion; this will be done by the army of people themselves with the simplicity and ease with which any crowd of civilized people even in contemporary society will stop a street fight of rowdies or will disallow the outraging of a woman."

Perhaps it will be easier to understand the theory that permits of the final disappearance of crime if the legal definition contained in their code were given. One can see then that with the gaining of strength on the part of the government, with the "mopping up" of the remaining opposition, there could possibly be such a situation. Part 3 of the Criminal Code, Article 6, contains this:

"A socially dangerous act is deemed every act of commission or omission, directed against the Soviet régime, or one which violates the order established by the workers' and peasants government for the period of time pending transition to a communist régime."

A note added to this article is of special significance in providing for consideration of the circumstances of social class. It reads:

"An act which, although formally falling within one of the articles of the special section of the present code, is free from socially dangerous characteristics, owing to its obvious insignificance or absence of harmful consequences, is not a crime."

It can be seen that crime in the Soviet Union consists mainly, of those acts directed against the state by the so-called class enemies; or those desiring to hamper socialist construction. In this situation those acts defined as criminal would tend to have usually an economic basis. And this would substantiate the theory that recognizes no other motive for a crime than an economic one, which, in a society where all needs would be met, would would supposedly disappear. That is, if in the final socialist state every one should receive according to his needs -- as they insist he will -- then the economic motive for crime would be eliminated. This takes care of those acts which in our own country, we might attribute to economic causes.

But what, we might as, of those murders or other crimes, motivated by jealousy or rage? The theory answers that those, in the person not ill and requiring medical treatment instead of penal, are rare and the act thus usually constitutes the one crime in the person's career. For example the man who murders his wife in a jealous rage would very likely make a good citizen who would never again commit such an excessive act. However, this, in the person not mentally deranged, would also be a rare occurrence for the reason assigned that marriage and divorce are made so liberal under the laws of the USSR that the jealousy motive in a marital tangles is taken care of, and thus one of the main causes of murder is eliminated.

It is interesting to note in this regard that the maximum penalty for murder in Russia in any case, except for death resulting from banditry and robbery with a firearm, is a ten year sentence. In fact the maximum imprisonment for any cause is ten years. They hold long sentences to neither be humane nor constructive. If a man is mentally abnormal to a dangerous extent, there are other places for him than prisons. If he has committed such a serious act as banditry or robbery with firearms, he is likely to get a death sentence unless there are extenuating circumstances such as the youth of the offender, and for other crimes the shorter sentence is held to be more conducive to reformation.

You don't have to use your phone number.

You can use a fake name and a secondary email.

Join because it starts in less than 2 hours from now.

Communist Party of China and Communist Party of Vietnam will be there.

Among others.

Second Thought and Chris Smalls will also be there.