Are socialists and communists really a dying breed? If one were to swallow whole Mazeni Alwi's recent article ('Shedding the camp mentality', June 2) one could only come to the conclusion that socialism, as we know it, is dead and buried. However, it is not difficult to discern that the writer too often succumbs to the fervent 'religion' of anti-communism.

Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the spectre haunting property owners and the landed classes, because it threatens the very essence of their class position and superiority.

The successes of the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were great setbacks to these elites, and the ongoing conflicts and well-publicised abuses of communist states have attributed to elevating opposition to communism.

This ignorant ideology helps mobilise the populace against an 'enemy', and because the concept is fuzzy, it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with communist states and radicalism in general.

If the triumph of communism is seen as the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism at home or abroad is justified as a lesser evil.

For example, as the writer so poignantly points out, communism may have been the root of the horrors that have plagued Vietnam for too long. However, to simply concentrate on such atrocities is to turn a blind eye to Western crime in Indochina, the Americas, Africa and elsewhere.

A simple example - in his brief tenure in the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch attacked corruption in the government, undertook large-scale land reform a la Cuba and organised mass education of the populace. These policies threatened powerful internal vested interests, and the United States resented the extension of civil liberties to communists and radicals.

Bosch's subsequent overthrow by the military thus had at least the tacit support of the United States. Indeed, a couple of years later, the US invaded the Dominican Republic to ensure that Bosch did not return to power. And we are only now uncovering the great many atrocities - explicit and otherwise - committed by the Western world in the name of freedom, democracy and liberty.

At the beginning of the 1990s it was said that all models for changing the world had disappeared, together with the possibility of finding new ones. The lasting tenure of communism and socialism, however, rises throughout the world as a spectre that continues to grow.

The anti-communistic religion that prevails under the current system stems from the fact that it ignores one decisive reality: today's growing poverty, the root of the evils and the anguish suffered by modern human beings, together with the destruction of nature. Overcoming this situation is humankind's greatest challenge as the 21st century begins.

From any perspective, taking up this issue - rather than pretending it does not exist - is the essence of an ethical system that aspires to be built on solid foundations for the future. Ignoring human pain is the greatest crime of the social systems that currently exist. Socialists and communists are realists, but for us the reality of humans is complete and whole, not partial and mean, which is the way the existing interests see reality.

Ernesto Che Guevara, for one, saw and appraised reality from an ethical standpoint - in order to improve it. That is where the power of the myth he left us resides. His ideas combine the most advanced thinking of European philosophical thought - Marx and Engels - with the utopian vision that socialists and communists aspire for.

The error of those who renounce utopia is in not considering the real needs that emerge from the facts that lie beneath the surface. For this reason, they are unable to conceive of tomorrow's truths.

"To the powerful masters we represent all that is absurd, negative, irreverent, and disruptive in this [world] that they so despise and scorn," Guevara told the students at the University of Havana in March 1960. But to the great mass of the people of the world, "we represent everything noble, sincere and combative". More than 40 years later, those words continue to ring true.

As Che once wrote, "Socialism must live, it is not worth dying beautifully."