Communism is the name of a Party. Socialism is a certain economical policy (which, in its more radical variants, may be naive and preposterous, but not immoral in itself). The real problem we have to speak about is Bolshevism.

Bolshevism – as different from Communism and Socialism - is a political strategy which is grounded in certain assumptions about reality. It is neither restrained to a certain party nor to a certain economical policy, but can be transferred in a lot of ways to other parties and to other political goals

Here are the main features of Bolshevism, such as I would propose to define it by:

1. Our group and our interests are absolute. There can be no legitimate countergroup or counterinterests.

2. So there is no base for consensus finding by a debate.

3. So the only viable path to progress is manipulation of the public opinion, including the suppression of critique and opposition (In a lot of cases the best path to progress is simply to force progress upon the public and allow for no alternatives; in this case they will get used to it on the long run.)

4. Consequence 1: We are entitled to deceive the public and to be dishonest.

5. Consequence 2: As an opposition, we are entitled to use physical violence against our enemies. As a government we are entitled to broadscale oppressive measures, which require the threat and, if necessary, the execution of similar violence by the state forces.

6. Consequence 3: We are entitled to destroy oour enemies' economical base of existence, be it their job or their enterprise.

The epoch Root had to live in was an epoch of „transfer“. The Communist Party became obsolete and socialist economy became unfashionable. Most Bolshevists of the Red Decade turned their attention to other projects (which now are broadly called: „Cultural Marxism“).They worked undercover but they were extremely successful to spread Bolshevist memes, Bolshevist tactics and the Bolshevist way of thinking about poltical strategy. After thirty years the Communist Party was dead, Socialism was marginalized, but the central ideas of Bolshevist strategy had become a normal or even normative position, at least in „liberal“ circles.

Root's generation was somewhat helpless against this development – I think, above all because they first had to learn the distinctions. They felt that something went dangerously wrong, And that's what made them so intense. But their approaches were inevitably clumsy. For example, they took a lot of pain to demonstrate M.L.King's connections with the Communist party. But they did not enough to precisely demonstrate in what way this distorted the thinking of the Civil Rights Movement,- so the adherents of the CRM easily shrugged it off.

But first efforts are often clumsy, and that is no reason to ignore them. I think that it is useful to browse through some heaps of dry and dusty hay in order to find the gold nuggets from which to begin with a new critique of contemporary poltical strategy.