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even if we left this out of the argument, what is the renegade Padmore trying to do? He is trying treacherously to confound primitive Communism with scientific Communism, only with the purpose of showing that there is no need for revolutionary struggle, since, as he tries to befuddle the Negro toilers, "we have already Communism in Liberia". But any class-conscious worker knows that scientific Communism is the ultimate stage of development through class struggle, from the insufficiency of primitive Communism to the economic and cultural plenty of scientific Communism, when the means and the high level of production developed under capitalism will have become socialized after the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class.

Secondly, regarding the contention that in Liberia there is no active capitalist class, that the Liberian upper classes are sympathetic to Communism. This, of course, is a downright lie. True, in Liberia there is no real native industrial bourgeoisie. The Liberian upper class, the descendants of American slaves, live chiefly in the coastal towns and are engaged mainly in trading and usury. This class in alliance with the native chiefs have established themselves as an oligarchy over the indigenous tribes in the interior. Their government in Monrovia has become a "policeman" for imperialism in the robbery and rape of the Liberian masses. At the behest of American imperialism they have carried through the forceful expropriation of the tribal lands of the natives which have been turned over to the imperialist enterprises, Harvey Firestone Rubber Plantations, etc. They are the chief recruiting agencies for Harvey Firestone. They impose oppressive taxes and fines of all kinds on the native population. But this is not all; they are actively engaged in slave traffic, recruiting slaves among the native masses for the Portuguese slave traders. Moreover, they have carried out a series of bloody punitive expeditions against the

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numerous rebellions of the natives of the interior. It is these parasites and slave dealers, these murderers of the Liberian masses which Padmore and his friends seek to represent as sympathetic to Communism! Thus the whole system of slavish oppression and torture of the Liberian people by imperialism and its lackeys is sanctioned in the name of Socialism! 
 Finally, contained in this whole reactionary theory of establishment of Socialism in Liberia without a revolutionary struggle, is a crude attempt to distort a fundamental thesis of our Leninist program on the national colonial question, namely, the possibility of the "non-capitalist path of development for the colonies". Marxism-Leninism teaches us that it is possible for the colonies and backward nations to avoid the capitalist stage of development and pass over directly to Socialism on the basis of a victorious revolution in the advanced imperialistic countries. This has been brilliantly confirmed in the Soviet Union. Under the leadership of the victorious working class in the Soviet Union,  scores of oppressed peoples, kept in the most primitive backwardness by the centuries-old oppression of Czarism, have experienced in the sixteen years since the October Revolution unparalleled economic and cultural development. Under the leadership of the proletarian dictatorship and the workers' and farmers' government in the Soviet Union, these peoples were guided from the most backward and slavish conditions on to the road of Socialism, completely avoiding the whole bloody, torturous stage of capitalism. 
 On the basis of the Soviet example, it is clear that the avoidance of the capitalist stage of development by the colonial peoples is possibly only on the basis of revolutionary struggle on the part of the masses in the colonial countries for national independence, in alliance with the working class of the advanced countries, for the overthrow of the imperialist

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Transcription Notes:
I fixed one typo, removed the unnecessary [[page number]] remarks, and completed the hyphenated word at the end. Otherwise it should be good to go.