Just two months ago, on the 6th of August of this year, we lost our compañero in struggle Ricardo Campos Orta. The loss of Ricardo is also a moment to recall the benefit that his life meant for many. It is an extremely fertile occasion to harvest the lesson that his living legacy leaves in the heart of all comrades that shared with him the happiness and problems of a struggle, that like a ray of light does not cease. This is the principal lesson that the compañero Ricardo bequeathed to us—the struggle from all the trenches and at all times, as an antidote to the unfeeling nature of the capitalistic system of life that imprisons us daily.
Ricardo was a tireless striver from the trenches of the political party of the “people at the bottom,” fighting against the colonialism of his motherland Puerto Rico in the archipelago island as well as from the imperial bowels of North America. In that same spirit of struggle, Ricardo fought shoulder to shoulder with women and men of all social strata and nationalities, in the noblest spirit of communist and proletarian internationalism, staunch to his own roots from a proletarian father and mother.
From his motherland he became known as a militant of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and as an outstanding member of groups of advanced communists such as the Revolutionary Socialist Party. From such organizations, he worked as much in the area of street protest demonstrations as in the field of ideological struggle as a writer, historian, university teacher and debater, always in defense of the proletarian struggle against capitalist exploitation and domination.
He was obligated to migrate to the US due to political persecution and by his own need to search in other areas of struggle, to meet revolutionary fighters of other nationalities in the space opened by the then newborn Communist Labor Party. Within that political space he succeeded in becoming connected as an intellectual proletarian to the class struggles in which the CLP was active. In Rally, Comrades! and the Tribuno del Pueblo, the writing and revolutionary analysis of Ricardo are linked to the proletarian intellectual collectivity of the CLP to popularize the ideas, tactics and strategies developed in the heat of the struggles of the homeless, the migrant agricultural workers and the industrial proletariat in decline—all exploited and dispossessed by capitalism in its new phase of destructive re-creation.
Today, it moves many compañeros and disciples in struggle to celebrate his legacy in the one and only way which Ricardo would want us to: continuing in the struggle that as the ray of light does not cease, against a capitalist system which is dying but each day becomes more dangerous and more obsessed with pushing us toward the struggle of all against all, instead of toward humanity without slavery to which we all aspire.
