I saw something in downtown Amherst that should at least make people stop and ask some questions: red shirts, hammer-and-sickle imagery, Karl Marx on a banner, and people asking passersby, “Are you a communist?”
This isn’t somebody doing an edgy college bit.
The Revolutionary Communists of America openly describes itself as a revolutionary communist organization committed to the overthrow of capitalism. It says it is building a Leninist cadre party modeled on the Bolsheviks, and its own program says that Marxists need to organize in workplaces, on the streets, and on college campuses. The organization reported in June 2026 that it now has a new cell in Western Massachusetts.
That deserves scrutiny.
And no, I am not arguing that these people shouldn’t be allowed to speak. If they want to stand in Amherst wearing red shirts and carrying Marx banners, the First Amendment applies to them just as much as it applies to everybody else.
I’m saying students should understand what is actually being sold to them.
Something Looking Good on Paper Doesn’t Make It Work
Communism has always had an extraordinarily attractive sales pitch.
Everybody gets what they need. Workers control society. Nobody is exploited. Housing is available. Healthcare is available. Education is available. Huge inequalities disappear.
The RCA’s own program makes versions of those promises today. It advocates nationalizing major banks and industries and eventually replacing the market economy with a democratically planned economy on the way toward what it describes as a classless, stateless and moneyless communist society.
Fine.
Now comes the question that matters:
How?
Who determines what gets produced?
Who decides how much gets produced?
Who determines what labor and resources are worth?
Who determines which industries receive resources when there isn’t enough to satisfy every demand simultaneously?
Who decides what constitutes a “need”?
And, most importantly, who controls the people making all those decisions?
Nature doesn’t guarantee everybody everything they want. Neither does economics. Resources are finite at any particular moment, people’s desires compete, unforeseen shortages occur, technology fails, crops fail, transportation fails, and human beings disagree.
Every economic system has to deal with scarcity.
You don’t eliminate scarcity by declaring that capitalism created it.
You merely change the mechanism through which scarce resources are allocated.
Somebody Still Has to Run Everything
This is the part revolutionary rhetoric tends to glide past.
If you’re going to remove markets, private capital and private ownership from major portions of an economy, somebody has to replace all of the decisions those institutions were previously making.
The RCA says those decisions will be made democratically by workers.
Okay.
Then show me the machinery.
Who appoints management?
Who removes management?
What happens when two groups of workers want incompatible things?
Who determines investment?
Who determines wages?
Who determines which factory gets steel?
Who determines which hospital gets a limited supply of equipment?
Who decides which new technology deserves billions of dollars of investment when nobody knows whether it will succeed?
The answer cannot simply be, “the workers.”
Millions of people cannot simultaneously administer every individual economic decision.
Eventually there are representatives, administrators, committees, managers, planners and political leaders.
And suddenly we’re right back to one of humanity’s oldest problems:
A relatively small number of people have enormous power over everybody else.
Calling those people “workers’ representatives” doesn’t make them immune from greed, incompetence, ambition, corruption, favoritism or authoritarianism.
Don’t Design Society Around Saints
That’s ultimately my problem with revolutionary Marxism.
It requires extraordinary confidence in the people who eventually control the revolutionary state.
I don’t have that confidence in anybody.
Not Republicans.
Not Democrats.
Not corporations.
Not billionaires.
Not unions.
Not universities.
And certainly not a revolutionary political party promising that everything will work once it controls the commanding heights of the economy.
Government should be designed around the assumption that sooner or later somebody selfish, incompetent, dishonest or power-hungry is going to get into office.
That’s why checks and balances matter.
That’s why independent institutions matter.
That’s why competing centers of economic and political power matter.
That’s why freedom of speech matters.
That’s why opposition parties matter.
And that’s why concentrating political and economic power in the same institution should make people extremely nervous.
“That Wasn’t Real Communism”
Then comes the oldest escape hatch in the conversation.
“That wasn’t real communism.”
In the narrow theoretical sense, there’s a trick buried inside that statement. Marx’s final communist society was supposed to be classless and stateless. The Soviet Union never reached it. Mao’s China never reached it. Nobody reached it.
But that’s not the historical question.
The historical question is what happened when political movements attempted to get there.
You don’t get to declare every attempt irrelevant because it failed to reach the promised destination.
If I design an airplane and every attempt to fly it ends with the airplane crashing before reaching its destination, eventually somebody should be allowed to ask whether there’s something wrong with the design.
And there’s an additional problem here: the RCA isn’t running away from Bolshevism.
It openly embraces it.
Its organizational material says it is building a Leninist cadre party “along the lines of the Bolsheviks.” Its newspaper describes the organization’s mission as bringing Bolshevism into American political life.
So history isn’t an unfair comparison somebody else imposed on them.
They brought the comparison with them.
College Students Should Ask Hard Questions
That is why seeing this organization recruiting around a major university deserves attention.
College students are precisely where ideological movements go looking for recruits because young adults are encountering enormous political, economic and philosophical questions for the first time.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
College should expose people to difficult ideas.
Read Marx.
Read Lenin.
Read Adam Smith.
Read Keynes.
Read Hayek.
Read people you completely disagree with.
But don’t stop with the sales brochure.
If somebody tells you capitalism has failed, ask what replaces it.
If somebody tells you workers will control everything, ask what happens when workers disagree.
If somebody promises housing, healthcare, education and economic security for everybody, ask how those resources are allocated when supply cannot meet demand.
If somebody advocates revolution, ask what happens to people who oppose the revolution afterward.
And if somebody tells you their revolutionary party will exercise enormous political and economic power but somehow remain perfectly democratic, ask them what prevents the next generation of leaders from deciding otherwise.
Watch the Organization, Not the Costume
The hammer and sickle gets attention.
The red shirts get attention.
The Marx banner gets attention.
But those aren’t the important parts.
The important part is the organizational philosophy behind them.
The RCA openly says it wants cells in workplaces and campuses. Its membership material tells “Active Party Builders” to find other communists and organize them into communist cells while studying Marxist theory and spreading communist ideas.
That’s political organizing. They’re entitled to do it.
Everybody else is equally entitled to scrutinize it.
Because humanity has seen movements promise that once the correct people obtain enough power, society can finally be made fair.
The problem is that the people acquiring that power remain human.
And humanity has never been particularly good at producing saints.
So when somebody comes onto or around a college campus promising a revolution that will finally put the right people in charge, students shouldn’t merely ask:
“Are you a communist?”
They should ask:
“What happens if you win?”