WHY, we are doing precisely that : only our approach is perhaps different.

From the Buddha to Gandhi and from Jesus Christ to Leo Tolstoy, universal experience demonstrates that the noblest doctrines of love, compassion and non-violence have never gone beyond replacing one form of exploitation and oppression by another. Of course, this is not to say that conflicts and violence by themselves beget peace. The real thing is that so long as society remains split in mutually antagonistic classes and strata, there can be no final riddance from ill will and bad blood, from torture and revolt, either by preaching peace or by wielding the gun to punish the oppressors. The only solution therefore lies in putting an end to social antagonisms which breed violence and counter-violence in so many forms. And we communists are striving for just that — for a society where classes will be abolished and, on that basis, other social relations (gender, ethnic, etc.) harmonised.

This, however, is not a novel idea “invented” by the brilliant brain of Karl Marx. What he and his friend Engels did was to demonstrate that such a solution, which was objectively impossible earlier, is now possible and historically necessary : that is to say, in capitalism class society has reached its highest, most developed form and is now ripe for a transformation into a classless society. They located in the modern proletariat the real force which can — and owing to its social position, must — lead this transformation; formulated the broad philosophical and theoretical frameworks required for that; and set about organising the working class along these lines. Thus, started the Marxist proletarian project for making this planet a peaceful place to live happily together. But can such epochal change be brought about peacefully?

History knows of no instance where a ruling class rendered superfluous left the stage of its own accord. “A Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood”From Thomas Grey's The Elegy, Oliver Cromwell led the sanguinary bourgeois democratic revolution in England in mid-seventeenth century. could exist only in the poet's fancy, and we cannot think of the great French revolution without the guillotine. Whether one likes it or not, class struggle and its explosive intensification in revolution has always been the real locomotive of history, and force, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. In this background, we deem it our duty not to deceive the masses with empty rhetoric on peace and love, but to organise them for radical reconstruction of society. If by any chance that can be achieved peacefully, we would be the happiest. And if in the process masses are compelled by vested interests to take up the gun to destroy all guns on earth, we march on the front ranks.