The cover of Economics professor R. D. Wolff’s latest book, Understanding Socialism features a red rose as a symbol of socialist workers struggles indicating that change can come peacefully. This rejects the historic red flag used worldwide today that symbolized the bloodstained bed sheets carried by workers from their deadly battles against their capitalist oppressors.
 Wolff describes the two major anti-socialist purges of the 20th century as European fascism and the U.S.-led post World War II cold war. These were in fact capitalist attempts to prevent further worldwide communist revolutions that had already expropriated enormous property, profits, privileges, and power from capitalists since the 1917 Russian working class revolution and founding of the Soviet (workers’ councils) Union.
FDR and socialists save capitalism
Wolff says that the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s socialism was a harsh, political dictatorship and praises U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) for his “embrace of socialism” during the Great Depression of 1929-41. During that period of international capitalist collapse, the Soviet Union was the only country with full employment and production while in the U.S. tens of millions were unemployed, homeless, hungry, and marching in the streets for revolution. When FDR sent army tanks against workers occupying Ford auto plants, the workers threatened to burn the factories down if one shot was fired at them. Fearing another 1917 revolution, FDR ran to his capitalist bosses and got them to provide the working class with New Deal benefits in exchange for outlawing communist politics in their unions. Socialists supported the capitalists during this economic crisis helping them survive depression and revolution.
The Soviet Union was the world’s first attempt to build a communist society where everyone was needed and no one was left out. It was a society that fought racism and sexism. The Soviet Union never achieved a communist society because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system like wages and privileges. They also lost millions of their most communist workers in WWII when the Soviet Union’s mighty Red Army destroyed 80 percent of the Nazi armies, the world’s most powerful capitalist military, saved Europe from becoming a Nazi colony and showed the power of an organized working class society to the world that still makes capitalism tremble.
Wolff equates communists with dictatorship. He says they oppose democracy and freedom without defining those terms. The present U.S. champions of democracy and freedom have 1,000 military bases in almost 100 countries that support the sanctioning and bombing into submission of any country that resists domination. It would seem that Wolff opposes dictatorship unless it is coming from the capitalist class.
Socialism preserves inequality
Socialism engages in economic and reform struggles, but its essence and practice has been to enable capitalists to hold onto power during economic crisis, wars, and revolutions. Wolff says, “where once socialist parties represented opposition to capitalism, they have become parties advocating a kinder, gentler private capitalism with a mixture of state capitalism.” Wolff says the socialist principle is “from each according to ability, to each according to their work.” Translated into capitalist economics that means managers and professionals can make hundreds or thousands of times what a worker is paid. This explains why socialist China has the most billionaires and why capitalist world inequality exists where one percent own more than 99 percent of the wealth that workers produce.
 The communist principle is ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need.’ Translated into communist economics that means those with greater needs like poorer communities, large families or those with medical problems would receive more.
Capitalism’s socialist allies try to prevent the primary source of communist power which is the working class’s understanding and implementation of communist ideas. Communism requires a communist movement and revolutionary struggles led by today’s communist Progressive Labor Party to end capitalism.