tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71031094510957898652024-03-05T21:48:43.531-05:00Revolutionary SpiritAPLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comBlogger125125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-39528078267351097432012-11-30T07:00:00.000-05:002013-04-02T17:28:39.315-04:00Revolutionary Spirit Vol. #3 Issue #3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDdTffzop1VDSVEAJIyi9QR3BLDp2kfBhuB3A-59bISwEinByslM6zNx1C0gLxGObDtLgNqgHtb6KAyu1KNdQGuX4r_OVHXq4ux18GaJddD7oy20jl79UuoVf-n-07MNPWkbgbKhqnqFr2/s1600/rs+vol+3+issue+3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDdTffzop1VDSVEAJIyi9QR3BLDp2kfBhuB3A-59bISwEinByslM6zNx1C0gLxGObDtLgNqgHtb6KAyu1KNdQGuX4r_OVHXq4ux18GaJddD7oy20jl79UuoVf-n-07MNPWkbgbKhqnqFr2/s1600/rs+vol+3+issue+3.png" height="400" width="307" /></a></div>
<br />APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-75007731940804004402012-11-30T06:30:00.000-05:002013-04-02T17:28:09.037-04:00Table of Contents<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Revolutionary Spirit</b></i><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;" />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;" />
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;">Published</i><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;">November 30th, 2012</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Why Socialism?</b> by J. Bialek</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>An ABC of Communism: A Study Course </b>by Tony Clark</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>A Brief Guide to the Ideological Differences between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism: A Study Course </b>by Tony Clark</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It </b>by Alexandra Kollontai</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;">Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution and a Legal Response to the Demand for Prostitution </b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;">by Janice G. Raymond</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Ernesto "Che" Guevara: A Rebel Against Soviet Political Economy </b>by Helen Yaffe</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Resolution on the Situation in Syria </b>by International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Resolution on the West African Region and Mali </b>by International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>On the International Situation </b>by International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>The Colonies and Oppressed Nations in the Struggle for Freedom </b>by League Against Imperialism and for National Independence</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;"><b>Socialism – class struggle in the Soviet Union (1936-1953). The revolutionary trials of the 1930’s as the continuation and escalation of </b></span></span><b style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;">the class struggle </b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.890625px;">by the Movement for the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-55</span>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-5937804922997993062012-11-30T06:00:00.000-05:002013-04-02T17:23:18.239-04:00Why Socialism?<b>by J.</b><strong style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Bialek</strong><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The spectre which once haunted Europe long ago in
1848, materialized in corporeal form in 1917 and was seemingly exorcized in
1991 has returned in force. This time the “spectre of communism” is haunting
the entire world. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the <i>Manifesto of the Communist Party</i><span style="font-size: small;">, also
called </span><i>The Communist Manifesto</i><span style="font-size: small;">, in
order to explain to the population at large the general beliefs of communists,
and to differentiate communists from liberals and other social movements which
existed during that revolutionary era.</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Today
it cannot be denied that we are once again living in a revolutionary era. As
capitalism continues to degenerate, demonstrating with each passing day that it
has outlived its usefulness to the vast majority of humankind, we see violent
explosions of popular rage, ranging from peaceful demonstrations to chaotic
riots. The ruling class and its “free” press would have us believe that even in
these dark times progress is being made. We have the Arab Spring, a series of
revolutions supposedly made possible thanks to the help of the
Western-developed Twitter and Facebook. The Occupy protests, which complained
of a media blackout during its infancy, soon managed to capture the attention
of the world and to make its mark on the year 2011. As the media would have it,
all that is necessary to solve the ills of the world are “democratic”
revolutions in certain countries such as Egypt, but not in others such as Saudi
Arabia, Bahrain or Yemen, and of course maybe a little more participation for
“the little guy” in American politics. While the press has in recent years
admitted that there are some flaws in the global economic system, those who
have been paying attention since the start of this crisis might have noticed an
explosion of increasingly shrill anti-communist propaganda.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">The
renewed interest in Marx and his theories, along with a rising tide of
dissatisfaction and nostalgia for pre-1989 life within the former Eastern Bloc
nations and the ex-U.S.S.R., has clearly sent chills down the spines of
Europe’s elite. Their message could not be more clear. On one hand the media
concedes that something is broken with the capitalist system, but on the other
hand it warns the working class not to consider alternatives to capitalism.
They are once again trying to exorcize this spectre that is haunting them, and
indeed terrifying them; they insist that the working class limit their protests
against the system so as to fit within the boundaries established by the ruling
class. For them the greatest tragedy would be the rejection of the slogan that there
is no alternative to capitalism and the assumption that mankind has reached its
peak of societal evolution in the system of free markets and commodity trading.
So here we are again, so far from 1848, and communists are again compelled to
disclose their ideas and distinguish themselves from all other factions who
claim to have a solution to our present crisis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">In
these times of crisis it comes as no surprise that working people find
themselves faced by a large number of proselytizers from a wide spectrum of
ideological backgrounds preaching the superiority and explanatory power of
their ideas. Each has an explanation as to why we are in this crisis today and
a set of proposals which can supposedly solve the problem. In this marketplace
of ideas, Marxists cannot pretend as though we sit above the fray, treating our
theory as some kind of esoteric revealed knowledge in a manner similar to many
of those aforementioned ideologues. We have an explanation, a theory, but what
sets us apart is not simply our assertion that these are true, but rather that
what we are truly offering is not so much a set of pre-packaged answers which
constitute some kind of universal truth, but rather a methodology of analysis
which allows people to find what can reasonably be judged as true. This is not to state that we do not believe
in the correctness of our theories, but that Marxism is a living theory to
which we add our observations and experiences year after year, rejecting that
which has been found to be no longer accurate and adopting that which is
relevant and observable.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Other
ideologies will claim that our problems stem from lack of regulation, too much
regulation, the Federal Reserve, hierarchical authority, the Illuminati, the
breakdown of the family, “multiculturalism” and a whole host of other
scapegoats either real or imagined. By contrast, while Marxist analysis has
identified certain laws or truth about the history of human society and the
capitalist system, it is up to us in modern times to apply this analysis to our
changing world, and to come up with answers based on our analysis rather than
simply accepting some alleged axioms and then setting about to envision our
ideal world. In this sense, Marxism does not reject all ideas outside of
itself; in fact it does acknowledge the validity of many other ideas or
concepts. However, Marxists see in many of these other ideological strains the
neglect, either by accident or design, of certain factors which, without being
accounted for, cause these other ideological analyses to be lacking and
one-sided.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">If we
consider as an example neo-classical or “mainstream” economics, we cannot fault
its proponents for ignoring class struggle, denying the existence of
exploitation, and not dealing with the question of creating a more egalitarian,
just society. Neo-classical economics was never intended to deal with these
matters, and indeed, a common answer to questions about inequality and social
injustice under capitalism is that these problems are outside the realm of
economics, which of course means neo-classical economics, and that these are
issues for sociologists to discuss. Marxism, on the other hand, sees all things
in the world as being interrelated; any effect can have potentially infinite
causes and any cause can have potentially infinite effects. This is important
to keep in mind when one encounters a common straw man argument against
Marxism, such as the claim that Marxism is “economic determinism,” or that
Marxism sees class struggle as the main focal point of all human history.
Marxism sees many factors influencing human society. On the other hand, class
has been, via observation of history, a crucial factor in understanding
inequality within society, and thus if one wants to change society in order to
eliminate inequality and exploitation, Marxist theory says we must take this
into account as a crucial factor. Of course, if one is not interested in
changing society in such a way that deals with these problems, then class isn’t
so important. Every individual who professes a political ideology insists that they
want a more just society, but justice to the worker differs greatly from the
justice of the owners of capital.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">For the
sake of argument, let us assume a position that declares the world as it is to
be unjust, and in need of a significant change. From this starting point, let
us now deal with the questions, “Why socialism? Why do we need revolution and
why can’t we do something else?” For practical purposes this text will deal
primarily with “left-wing” objections to socialism under the assumption that
bearers of such arguments are at least sympathetic to ideals such as social
justice and equality. However, while they really deserve to be dealt with in
separate articles, we will have a look at some objections coming from the right
and even the far-right. Right-wing reactionaries have a history of clothing
their arguments in populist language so as to propagate their message among
otherwise unsuspecting people who would never give them the time of day if they
knew exactly who they were dealing with.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">A word
of caution - the reader should not assume that what follows is a false
dichotomy insisting that Marxism is the only path out of the current crisis.
Crisis is both inherent and cyclical in capitalism, and thus we can assume that
the current crisis will eventually work itself out. This process may be
violent, and in the end yesterday’s winners may be tomorrow’s losers, but the
system will go on. It is important to understand that a system’s ability to
perpetuate itself isn’t necessarily a merit; it only means that humans simply
do not give up and resign control over their society. What this text argues is
not simply “socialism or else,” but rather that while other solutions may have
progressive and positive outcomes, so long as capitalism and its core
contradictions are not dealt with these same painful effects will only return a
few years down the road. Furthermore, these </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">ad
hoc</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"> solutions will not resolve some of capitalism’s cruelest effects such
as starvation, war, imperialism, death due to preventable diseases, and the
like. The second thing this text will not attempt to do is try to play a
logical game so as to lead the reader to the idea that Marxism is “right” based
on formal reason alone. If one does not see inequality or exploitation as
morally wrong or at worst a necessary evil, no amount of logical arguments can
convince them that socialist revolution is necessary. Logic dictates that those
who stand to benefit from the system as it is are likely to defend it.</span><br />
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Why do we need revolution? Why can’t we fix the
problem through the electoral system? You have to work within the system to
make changes otherwise you’re just a dreamer who’s wasting everyone’s time.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Here we
have typical arguments from lifelong supporters of the Democratic Party. They
acknowledge that they too are disappointed in their hero Obama, but they warn
us that things will be much worse under a Republican president. When we express
our disapproval of Obama, they accuse us of being dreamers and spoiled children
who are now throwing a fit because we didn’t get everything we wanted from the
president. Communists find this argument somewhat amusing, seeing as how we
never expected anything from Barack Obama. Communists do not see Obama in a
vacuum, but rather as part of a clear and obvious rightward trend within the
Democratic Party. The truth about “what Obama has done so far” is not a matter
for this article. Media outlets such as the outstanding Black Agenda Report
have easily cut through the excuses and lies of Obama and his party lackeys.
For those pressed for time, sites like obamatheconservative.com catalogue
nearly every hard right turn this supposedly “progressive” president has made,
complete with sources for each item. Mainstream leftists often label Obama’s
compromises with the radical right as “disappointments” at best and “betrayals”
at worst. To communists on the other hand, everything is going as intended, not
because these actions are part of some secret plan, but because the state is
merely carrying out the very function it was designed to do. In other words,
our opposition to supporting Obama has nothing to do with Obama himself; it is
in fact opposition to voting for anybody. The state is designed to provide a
foundation for a capitalist society, and however much “freedom” it may permit
in its best moments, it will never permit the freedom to abolish capitalism and
its relations of production. The system is meant to self-perpetuate, and the
system inevitably favors the wealthy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">To some
this might sound like political cynicism, but this is a readily observable fact
throughout history. Let us first consider the remedies that liberals have
offered us thus far in the endeavor to limit the influence of wealth in
American society. Some demands will simply never be fulfilled. Congressmen are
not going to consciously eliminate their own perks, including those which they
gain from courting lobbyists both when they are in office and after they leave
or retire from public service. The idea that politicians can be convinced to
give up the vast privileges they gain from their relations with corporations and
lobbyists simply based on an appeal to their conscience about “fairness” is
simply laughable, and even more so when it comes from the mouth of an Obama
supporter who chides leftists for not being realistic.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">What of
regulation, which will supposedly keep banks and corporations in line? Any
attempt to pass such regulation through Congress will inevitably be met with a
massive blitzkrieg by lobbyists, but for the sake of argument let’s say they
somehow pass. What comes next? The advocates of regulation are fond of
referring back to some earlier period in American history when various
regulations of industry and banking still existed. The massive trend of
deregulation since the 1980s is responsible for our problems, these people say.
In this case we are forced to ask, if regulations can solve our economic
problems, how did this deregulation take place to begin with? Perhaps more
importantly, what will ensure that the new regulations won’t be overturned ten,
twenty, or thirty years down the road? How can we be sure the exact same thing
won’t happen again? As to why the regulations failed, we are again faced with
the reality that the republican system we live under in the United States of America
favors those with money, which inevitably means corporations and wealthy
individuals. It cannot do otherwise. Some have suggested measures such as
ending corporate personhood, but this is about as realistic as limiting or
abolishing access for lobbyists. The politicians are not going to cut their own
throats.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">There
are some on the so-called “left” who accuse us of being unrealistic,
overly-cynical, and counter-productive by not working within the system. We are
accused of wanting our way or no way, and that if we were really serious about
change we would participate in the political process and then perhaps we would
get the change we wanted, if only incrementally. First, the change we seek is
radical; it is revolutionary and not a matter of reforms. Does this mean that
we totally reject any participation in the political system as it is, or that
we reject any reform in favor of total revolution? Absolutely not; every reform
that the working class can squeeze out of the state for their benefit is a
small victory. On the other hand, we will not cede massive ground to the right in
exchange for a few crumbs from the table, nor will we line up to support
candidates that do not represent our interests. To those who say we should stop
complaining and vote “our people” into office, we may respond thusly: we would
happily cast our vote for “our people,” that is candidates who represent our
working class interests, but we will not vote your people into office.
Moreover, if we somehow manage to find “our people” to vote for, we will reject
all your attempts to blame us for the failure of your people if they should
fail. You cannot accuse us of being unrealistic contrarians for not using the
choices we supposedly have, and then condemn us when our choice differs from
yours.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Getting
to the bottom line, we must acknowledge that if we dare to say our problems
stem from capitalism, as an increasingly larger segment of mainstream liberals
and “leftists” are, we must set about finding a way to abolish capitalism, the
root of the problem. By extension, we cannot expect to abolish capitalism via
the very same state structure which serves as its foundation and defense. On
this point we must agree with the anarchists who say “smash the state.”
Politics can be likened to a sort of game, wherein players are permitted to
make various decisions and perform actions so long as they do not violate the
rules of the game. You can make many moves in chess but you cannot substitute
its rules for those of another game, and you must make your moves on the
chessboard. If for any reason we can achieve meaningful goals within the rules
of the game, we will happily use these opportunities so long as they do not
compromise our end goals. What we will not do, is accept the assumption that
the game cannot be changed entirely and that we must forever struggle to
achieve our gains within the confines of a system which is stacked against
us.</span><br />
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Why can’t we fix capitalism? Can we not eliminate the
negative effects of capitalism while keeping its benefits?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">This is
a relatively easy question, which has been somewhat answered in the previous
section. However, it is worth taking a
closer look at this argument because one can propose a radical change in
government without necessarily eliminating capitalism and its trappings, or as
we call them, its relations of production. Here we won’t bother debunking the
efficacy of reforms or regulations, but rather we will pose a question
ourselves, along with a novel answer. People have been working against the ills
of capitalism ever since its emergence in human society, yet to this day we
still experience the same problems, oftentimes on a worse scale than before.
Awareness of poverty, super-exploitation of workers in developing countries,
and even modern-day slavery is higher today than it was in previous decades,
but has any of this actually solved these problems? It is simply untrue that
the resources necessary to solve these ills do not exist; rather it is one of
capitalism’s hallmarks that resources necessary for life can be created in
abundance, yet those who are in charge of their creation will not do so unless
it proves profitable to them. In fact “relief” is often itself a very
profitable industry, to the point that experienced relief workers often warn
donors to carefully evaluate charity organizations before handing over their
money. In any case, the solution to these problems lies not in increasing
charity, but rather eliminating the conditions which make charity necessary.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Finally
on this point, when we speak of eliminating the ills of capitalism while
preserving its benefits, we would assert that this does describe socialism to
an extent. We seek to create a society in which the great productive power
brought into being by capitalism is put to use by the masses, for the benefit
of the masses, as opposed to a minority of owners and investors. So long as
these means of production are owned by a minority of individuals driven by the
quest for profits, this cannot happen. Socialism is a synthesis which arises
from the struggle to eliminate the contradictions inherent to capitalism, and
when it triumphs, we will ultimately be left with capitalism’s benefits without
its disadvantages. This may be a long, arduous process, but we have no reason
to assume that it cannot be done. And if our struggle for a better, more just
world never achieves our highest ideals, what does it matter so long as we
strove to achieve all that we could?</span><br />
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The problem isn’t capitalism! We don’t live in a capitalist
society! Our society is corporatist, or even socialist!</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">This
kind of objection is as absurd as it is common in today’s discourse. It has
often been propagated by Libertarians (typically followers of the Ron Paul
cult), fellow admirers of the Austrian school of economics, and all manner of
right-wing populists. We might ignore such absurd claims were they only
espoused by such reactionaries, but because of their propensity for attempting
to inject their ideas into left-wing movements, and the mainstream left’s
susceptibility toward superficially radical attacks on everything “corporate,”
we cannot avoid addressing such claims. Granted, this is a subject which
demands its own article, and in fact many on this subject already exist. Here
we will deal with it for the benefit of an audience which sees itself as
left-wing or progressive, and we will do so in an abbreviated manner.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">If
capitalism is not the system under which we live now, then we must ask not only
what capitalism is, but also when it has existed. If one asserts that it has
never existed, as a few fanatical libertarians will occasionally admit under
pressure, this is in itself an indictment of capitalism. Who can fault the U.S.S.R.
for not achieving communism in seventy years if people have been championing
the idea of capitalism for several centuries without ever having established it
anywhere? But we need not concern ourselves with this rarer, ludicrous
argument. Instead we will deal with the assertion that our modern system has
transformed from some kind of “good” capitalism into something more grotesque.
This assertion is especially troubling for those progressives and even more “radical”
leftists who assert this argument, as it logically implies that there was some
better time in the past, which is remarkably similar to the claims of right-wing
ideologues.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">The
corporation, which earns so much hatred from the mainstream left, did not fall
out of the sky one morning. It came into being through a natural process of
capitalism’s evolution. The claim that our system is different than it was
thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, regardless of who is making the argument, is
based on a wholly metaphysical view of the world and in particular of
capitalism. It presents capitalism as defined by a particular ideal, and then
asserts that if reality should differ from this ideal, then reality must then
be something other than capitalism. This way of thinking does not allow one to
see capitalism as a system which went through changes from its inception to the
present day. It is essential to deal with capitalism as it exists today, and as
it has existed hitherto, as opposed to some abstract ideal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">In
limiting our objections to this argument only as it is asserted by “leftists”
as opposed to reactionary free market fanatics, then we find that we have come
full circle back to the idea of “fixing capitalism.” To attack corporations and
champion small and local business amounts to attacking the weeds without
pulling up the roots. Again, these corporations did not fall from the sky one
day, fully formed. To deny the connection between small businesses and
multi-national corporations is akin to an economic Intelligent Design theory,
as though the latter were once called into existence as they appear today. Even
small local businesses will put their money into banks which will loan it out
all over the country, if not the world. Communists seek not to cut the weeds of
capitalism, but rather to uproot it entirely.</span><br />
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Can’t we subvert capitalism by changing our lifestyle
and choices as consumers?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">From
the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s emerged an idea which
began as a bastardization of Marxist thought, one that has recently gained
popularity again, stripped of any hint of Marxism whatsoever. The gist of this
idea goes like this: capitalists and by extension the capitalist system itself
are compelled to sell their products in the market, and thus must ensure that
consumers will continue to spend money on an ever-increasing array of products.
Many of these products are not necessary to human life, and some wholly
unnecessary, making it essential to somehow convince people they need such
products. The conclusion of these observations is that capitalism requires
conformity in order to survive. Via aggressive and seemingly omnipresent
advertising, people are encouraged to follow trends and buy what other people
are buying. This leads to the rise of what is generally termed “consumerism,” a
lust for ever more material goods that always seems to afflict other people, as
opposed to the person decrying it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">From
this argument it follows that this system can be subverted via a revolt against
consumerism, and in particular, the “jamming” of cultural messages which
promote this lifestyle, namely advertisements. We allege that these theories
are nothing but idealistic nonsense, wholly divorced from even a superficial
analysis of how capitalism works. Capitalism does not require that people act
alike and have the same tastes; on the contrary, it thrives when people seek to
express their individuality via their lifestyle and purchases. There will
always be a capitalist willing to fulfill some desire so long as there is
profit to be had. Decades of counter-cultural rebellion have failed to put a
dent in the capitalist machine, and there is no reason to believe that “fair
trade” products, defaced advertisements, and the occasional street rave will
succeed at overthrowing capitalism in the future. Moreover, making the struggle
against capitalism a matter of purchases is little more than funneling money
from big capitalists to small or medium-sized capitalists.</span><br />
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="text-indent: 35.4pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Aren’t you reducing everything down to economics? What
about feminism, the struggle for people of color, and so on?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Marxists
fight for an egalitarian society which means we fight against racism,
xenophobia, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and all other social ills which create
division and conflict within the working class. Despite this, we are still
continually accused of reducing all matters to economics or class struggle, which
is a woefully bad interpretation of Marxist theory. This accusation comes from
a variety of directions but occasionally it is voiced by some die-hard
followers of certain identity politics movements. Some, but by no means all or
even a majority, put the struggle of their particular group above all others.
History has shown identity politics to be largely a failure when it comes to
achieving equality, much less overthrowing capitalism and its systematic
division and oppression of people based on ethnicity, gender, sex, and so on. While
many recognize the role of class in the oppression of their particular group,
there are those who prefer to spend their time bickering over redefinitions of
what it means to be a part of this or that group, who is more oppressed and
how, and tit-for-tat arguments about who is “co-opting” their movement.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Marxists
on the other hand recognize a historically observable fact that oppression of
women, ideas of race, caste systems, and other forms of systematic oppression
are very much rooted in class society. They all serve the purpose of
maintaining, in one form or another, a system whereby one class exploits
another. We may liken class society to a disease, and things like sexism,
racism, and so on represent symptoms of that disease. History has shown that
struggles for civil rights and the liberation of women have often failed
because they focused on symptoms without having any kind of historical material
analysis of that which they were struggling against. In many cases, this often
led dedicated fighters into alliances with their class enemies, all in the name
of liberation for a particular repressed group. The promised liberation has yet
to come. Marxists do not reduce every issue down to class struggle, but if we
are analyzing two particular subjects, specifically the history of human
society and formulating a way to build a better one, we see that class plays a
major role in relation to both.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">Of course
this should not be taken to mean that problems like racism or patriarchy will
simply disappear once the capitalist class is overthrown. Some forms of
oppression are quite old; patriarchy, in particular, dates back to the dawn of
class-based society. And while a
struggle must be waged during and after the revolution to right these wrongs,
one thing is clear- we simply </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">cannot</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 35.4pt;">
ultimately triumph over these social ills until we overthrow that system and
its ruling class which has a vested interest in maintaining a complex society
of privileges designed to divide the exploited class and incite them against
one another. This having been said,
Marxists have an obligation to set the standard for the kind of society they
wish to live in by waging the day-to-day struggle against forms of oppression
such as racism and patriarchy both inside and outside of their organizations
and parties. Those who feel that this
question can be put off till “after the
revolution” are shirking their responsibility and not setting a good example of
what could be possible once the system of class-based organization is
overthrown.</span></div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-88345348123326389432012-11-30T05:30:00.000-05:002013-04-02T17:01:44.764-04:00An ABC of Communism<b>by Tony Clark</b><br />
<br /><b>WHAT IS CLASS SOCIETY?</b><br /><br />Class society is thousands of years old. Basically class society exists when one part of society exploits, robs and cheats the other part. In class society one part of society works for another part who own the conditions, or means of production. In simple terms class society is the form taken by the exploitation of the many by the few.<br /><br />Class society is basically about the exploitation of the many by the few. It is organised exploitation and robbery of the working people for the benefit of the few. We can say quite definitely that class society is synonymous with exploitation, i.e., robbery.<br /><br />THE EXISTENCE OF CLASSES IS THE FORM OF APPEARANCE OF THE EXISTENCE OF EXPLOITATION BY ONE SECTION OF SOCIETY OF ANOTHER SECTION.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS THE STATE?</b><br /><br />When classes are formed, when exploiters and exploited become a feature of society, when one part of society lives by exploiting, robbing and cheating another part of society, they cannot do so without force, that is, a means of coercion.<br /><br /><div>
In a society founded on exploitation and robbery, that is to say class society, the state emerges out of the contradiction between the robbers and the working people. Thus the exploiters use the state to keep themselves in power. The role of the state in this case is to suppress, curb the resistance of the working people to exploitation which they face daily. The state, therefore, is a machine for the domination of one class by another class.</div>
<div>
In a society divided into exploiters and exploited, into robbers and their victims, i.e., the working people, the state serves the interests of those who live by exploiting the working people.</div>
<div>
IN A SOCIETY BASED ON THE EXISTENCE OF CLASSES THE STATE IS A MEANS OF FORCING THE EXPLOITED CLASS TO SUBMIT TO EXPLOITATION.</div>
<div>
<b>WHAT IS CAPITALIST SOCIETY?</b></div>
<div>
<br />Capitalist society is the latest, and Marxists believe, the last form of exploitation. Like previous class societies, such as slave society or feudal society, capitalism is also based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Under capitalism, like former class society, one part of society lives by exploiting, and robbing the other part of society.<br /><br />The essence of capitalist exploitation is that workers are only paid for part of the labour service they provide to the capitalist employers. The other part of the labour provided goes unpaid. The proceeds from this end up in the pockets of the capitalists. So in the working day the worker is engaged in earning money for him/herself, i.e., wages, and also earning money for the capitalists from which profits are derived.<br /><br />UNDER CAPITALISM PEOPLE WORK FOR EXPLOITERS WHO PRIVATELY OWN THE SOCIAL MEANS OF PRODUCTION.<br /></div>
<div>
<b>WHAT IS COMMUNIST SOCIETY?</b><br /><br />In the historical sequence of things communist society comes after capitalism. The basic difference between capitalism and communism is that in a capitalist society the few exploit and rob the many, i.e., the working people. In this society the state actually defends the robbery and exploitation of the working class people by the capitalists. It is therefore called a capitalist state.<br /><br />In a communist society people do work, but they work for the community (themselves) instead of working for a class of exploiters and robbers. In a communist society one section of society does not live by exploiting and robbing another section. In a communist society productive property comes under social ownership and serves the interest of all the members of society, not just a few.<br /><br />Communist society, that is when people work for the community instead of a robber class, as under capitalism, is divided into two stages: i.e., a lower stage and a higher stage. The first, lower stage of communist society is usually called socialism. This is the stage of communist society as it emerges from capitalist society, its traditions and habits. At the socialist stage of communist society people take from society the equivalent of the amount of labour they give to it minus deductions for the common good. At the higher stage of communist society, simply referred to as ‘communism’, people take from society according to their needs.<br /><br />When there is no more capitalism, that is, when people no longer work for exploiters and robbers, but instead work for the community, profit will also cease to be the goal of production. With increasingly advanced technology society’s labour time can be reduced, giving people the time to spend on other pursuits.<br /><br />A COMMUNIST SOCIETY IS A SOCIETY WHERE PEOPLE WORK FOR THE COMMUNITY ON THE BASIS OF SOCIAL PROPERTY, AS OPPOSED TO WORKING FOR AN EXPLOITING CAPITALIST CLASS ON THE BASIS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. <u>ANY OPPOSITION TO COMMUNISM MEANS DEFENDING THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING PEOPLE BY CAPITALIST ROBBERS.</u><br /></div>
<div>
<b>WHAT IS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT?</b><br /><br />The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is the form taken by working class political power in the transition to communist society. A period of transition is needed to make the change from a society based on robbery and exploitation to a society where people no longer exploit other people. Many if not the majority, of those who live by exploiting the working people, will resist the change to a society where people simply work for the community. If they are able to, they will do everything to undermine the new society. What they fight for is a return to the old society based on exploitation and robbing the working people. In order to stop these enemies of the people from achieving their selfish aims, they must be resisted and fought. Iron dictatorship against the counterrevolutionaries is called for. This dictatorship is against those who support robbing and exploiting working people. Those who oppose the dictatorship of the working people against the robbers and exploiters are in fact servants of the latter. The dictatorship of the proletariat itself will fade away when exploitation and robbery are things of the past.<br /><br />THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IS WORKING CLASS POLITICAL POWER, DIRECTED AGAINST THE EXPLOITERS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS TO FORCE THEM TO GIVE UP EXPLOITING THE WORKING PEOPLE FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT?</b><br /><br />The Communist Movement, which exists in every country, is a political movement made up of all those people who are against a society based on one group, or class of people living by the exploitation of another group or class. In short, Communists are against societies based on robbery and exploitation. In the struggle between communism and exploitation, Communists follow the teachings of Karl Marx, 1818-1883, whom they regard as the father of modern, scientific communist ideas. A notable ally of Marx was Frederick Engels.<br /></div>
<div>
Marx taught that the forms of society were determined by the level of development of the productive forces it contained. This explanation is called by Marxists ‘historical materialism’. <u>What Marx argued was that as the productive forces developed, they broke down the old forms of society. That is to say the new productive forces begin to clash with the old forms of society. The growing contradiction between the new and the old eventually erupts into revolution. The revolution leads to a new society adapted to the new level of the productive forces.</u> For instance, feudalism gave way to capitalism. Eventually capitalism must give way to communism, which is the most rational, most modern adaptation to the new, enormous productive forces which now exist in the world. The present contradictions in the world cannot be resolved by capitalism. Society’s enormous productive capabilities are utilised by the capitalist class to make wars. For many capitalists war is good business, so is the environmental destruction of the planet.<br /><br />The old society proves the point of Marx that it no longer deserves to exist when it uses the colossal productive power at its disposal, science and technology, to make wars and impose incalculable misery on humanity, misery imposed by the few on the many.<br /><br />THE AGE-OLD STRUGGLE BETWEEN THOSE WHO DEFEND EXPLOITATION AND ROBBERY AND THOSE WHO OPPOSE IT, LED TO THE BIRTH OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT. COMMUNISTS ARE PEOPLE WHO SIDE WITH THOSE WHO OPPOSE EXPLOITATION. KARL MARX IS THE FATHER OF THE MODERN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT.</div>
<div>
<b>WHAT IS REVISIONISM?</b></div>
<div>
<br />Lenin described revisionism as the struggle against Marxism within the Marxist movement itself. The revisionists strive to revise Marxism in the direction of serving the interest of the capitalist class, who want the working people to continue working for exploiters. Revisionists are the ideological representatives of the bourgeoisie in the communist movement. The revisionists wear a ‘communist’ mask so that they can better divert the communist movement from accomplishing its historical mission of destroying capitalism.<br /><br />In short, revisionism is the bourgeoisie inside the communist movement. They seek to undermine the principles on which the Marxist-Leninist movement is founded. What the revisionists seek more than anything else is to remove Marxism-Leninism from the leadership of the communist movement. The struggle against revisionism is therefore a class struggle; it is the highest form of the ideological struggle against the bourgeoisie because in this case their representatives disguise themselves as communists.<br /><br />The former Soviet Union is a good example of this. In this case, after the death of Stalin, the Soviet revisionists, the servants of the capitalist class, concealing themselves behind a communist mask, gained control of the leading positions in the Communist Party and state and opened the door to the restoration of capitalism. Stalin was continually denounced by the revisionists as the people were returned to exploitation and robbery.<br /><br />The supporters of imperialist exploitation will do everything in their power to preserve exploitation and robbery. This means doing whatever is necessary to oppose Communism. Acting through the revisionists, the supporters of capitalist exploitation seek to gain control of the Communist movement and use it to serve their own class interests. The revisionists, the concealed representatives of the capitalist class in the Communist movement, must be unmasked and driven out of our movement.<br /><br />THE BOURGEOISIE, ACTING THROUGH THE REVISIONISTS, SEEK TO GAIN CONTROL OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT, TO USE IT TO SERVE THEIR OWN CLASS INTERESTS, THAT IS, TO DEFEND CAPITALISM. BUT ANY DEFENCE OF CAPITALISM IS A DEFENCE OF THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING PEOPLE BY A ROBBER CAPITALIST CLASS.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?</b><br /><br />Social Democracy is the ideology of class collaboration. It is a petty-bourgeois ideology in the working class movement. The adherents of this ideology use the support of the working class to defend capitalism. The historical role of the representatives of Social Democracy is to defend capitalism by making certain concessions to the working class where this is possible. Social Democracy is therefore a petty-bourgeois movement that preaches class collaboration to the working class. Social-Democracy serves the interests of the upper strata of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the relatively privileged upper sections of the working class, the ‘labour aristocracy’, who fuse to form a party on the basis of defending capitalism by making some concessions to the working class.<br /><br />THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IS TO DEFEND CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION BY MAKING CONCESSIONS TO THE WORKING CLASS. THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY PREACH CLASS COLLABORATION TO THE WORKERS AND SO DIVERT WORKERS AWAY FROM CLASS STRUGGLE AND ANY THOUGHT OF REVOLUTION.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?</b><br /><br />Lenin defined Imperialism as monopoly capitalism, the highest and final stage reached by capitalist society. In the imperialist epoch, giant transnational corporations dominate the world economy.<br /><br />Originating in the developed capitalist countries, these giant companies are able to rob and exploit the poor countries. They make superprofits and use part of this to create and bribe an upper section of the working class, who come to form a labour aristocracy, which renounces the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Imperialism facilitates the domination of the working class movement by the gang of class collaborators who lead the Social-Democratic movement, which we have seen defends capitalism by making some concessions to the working class. Imperialism makes it possible for these Social-Democratic people to hold back the working class from destroying capitalism by revolution, although capitalism is now a threat to humanity and the planet we live on.<br /><br />Imperialism, because it makes life easier for large masses of people in the advanced capitalist countries, is one of the main factors holding back the world revolution against capitalism. However, imperialism is nearing its end. This was signalled by the 1914-1918 war, which led to the Russian revolution of 1917, and subsequent events. Marxism-Leninism teaches that the downfall of imperialism will usher in the world revolution.<br /><br />IMPERIALISM IS MONOPOLY CAPITALISM, THE HIGHEST AND FINAL STAGE REACHED BY CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT. IMPERIALISM MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PRIVILEGED SECTION IN THE WORKING CLASS WHO RENOUNCE REVOLUTION AND SUPPORT CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION OF THE MASSES OF WORKING PEOPLE, HOLDING BACK THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITALISM.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM?</b><br /><br />Marxists put forward the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!". But this is no sentimental slogan, pious dream or wish. This slogan reflects the actual state of the present day world economy, which is based on interdependence. The world economy forms an uneven integral unity. Take for example the construction of a motor car, it is made up of hundreds or thousands of components which are imported from different countries. This is internationalism; countries trading with each other. Proletarian internationalism is a slogan, which expresses objective reality. Lenin argued that true internationalism is fighting for the revolution in our own countries. Only in this way can we really support the revolutions in other countries.<br /><br />PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM REFLECTS THE TRUE STATE OF THE WORLD ECONOMY. TO SUPPORT REVOLUTIONS IN OTHER COUNTRIES WE MUST FIGHT FOR THE REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRIES WHERE WE ARE.<br /><br /><b>WHAT IS THE PROBLEM OF ‘BUREAUCRACY’ IN THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM?</b><br /><br />Bureaucracy, it is often said, can be a good servant but a bad master. The Russian socialist revolution certainly raised the issue of bureaucracy in the communist movement, as the writings of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky show. While both Lenin and Stalin recognised that the struggle against bureaucracy was a long-term affair, Trotsky put forward a pseudo-left, (i.e., ultra-left) slogan calling for a ‘political’ revolution to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy. By a pseudo-left slogan we mean a slogan, or policy which on the surface seems left and rather militant, but in its content would serve the interest of the enemies of communism, i.e., those who believe in the exploitation and robbing of the working people.<br /><br />However, on the basis of social ownership of the means of production the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the working class was not irresolvable, or rather could be resolved without revolution, which often entails civil war. For Marxist-Leninists there are two basic types of contradictions, namely:<br /><br />Antagonistic contradictions and non-antagonistic contradictions. In a country building socialism, the contradiction between the working class and bureaucracy is of the latter type of contradiction.<br /><br />Bureaucracy will not vanish overnight, or on the morrow of the socialist revolution, bureaucracy fades away with the progress of socialism, the first stage of communist society. However, a bureaucracy in any society, including a socialist society, is in a strategically powerful position to arrogate power and privilege to itself. The working class and its communist party must remain constantly vigilant, and be ready to purge bureaucrats if they seek to feather their own nests. There is no doubt that communists must fight against bureaucracy, beginning by opposing its negative features.<br /><br />‘<b>That it is necessary to combat the elements of bureaucracy, and that this task will confront us all the time, as long as we have state power, as long as the state exists, is also a fact</b>’. (J. V. Stalin. Works, 10; p.327)<br /><br />The fight against bureaucracy is a long term affair. This was recognised by both Lenin and Stalin. In the transition to socialism, which is the first stage of communist society, the working class, led by the communist party, must remain vigilant and be ready to purge bureaucrats who deviate from socialism. At the same time, a pseudo-left approach to fighting bureaucracy can only serve the interests of those who want to exploit the working people, i.e. the counterrevolution, and must be resisted. Marxism-leninism teaches that Trotskyism represented a pseudo-left approach to fighting bureaucracy.<br /><br /><b>CONCLUSION</b><br /><br />The two conflicting principles are: exploitation of the working people versus Communism. The choice today is either to embrace the principle of exploitation, that is, Capitalism, or to rally behind the principle of Communism, in which people work for the community instead of working for exploiters.<br /><br />THIS IS THE CHOICE WHICH EVERY MEMBER OF SOCIETY FACES, THE CHOICE OF THE 21ST CENTURY.</div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-69484371646331316872012-11-30T04:30:00.000-05:002013-04-02T15:21:02.228-04:00A Brief Guide to the Ideological Differences Between Marxism-Leninism and Revisionism<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>by </b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>Tony Clark</b></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>INTRODUCTION. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">EVER since Lenin died in 1924, Trotskyism has challenged Marxism-Leninism for the ideological leadership of the international communist movement. J.V. Stalin, 1879-1953, was able to meet and saw off this challenge, to the extent that Trotskyism became a marginal, exterior tendency in relation to the communist movement. However, the attacks on Stalin by the Khrushchevite leadership in the Soviet Union, and the consequent rise of revisionism in some of the most influential parties of the communist movement, served to breathe new life into the project inspired by Trotsky. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">This creed, Trotskyism, gained a substantial intellectual following in all the main imperialist countries due to its attacks on what they and the bourgeoisie call ‘Stalinism’. In attacking Stalin, and in fact, every country of socialist orientation, and regarding themselves as representing authentic Marxism, the activities of these pseudo-left sectarians promoted the propaganda interest of the imperialist bourgeoisie. However, the claims of Trotskyism rest not only on attacking Stalin and the countries of socialist orientation. These claims rest also on convincing certain intellectuals that Trotskyism is the continuation of Leninism. This is why it may be considered useful for us to present a synoptic exposition of the main ideological differences between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism as a guide for those who seek to examine this matter more deeply. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotskyites argue that the October, Russian revolution of 1917 was the realisation of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The Marxist-Leninist position is that the revolution was made possible by the peculiar circumstances created by the 1914-1918 war and that without these conditions the transition to the socialist revolution would not have been possible. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>LABOUR POLICY. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Following the revolution and civil war, Trotskyites argued for the militarisation of the trade unions, that is a policy of coercion towards the unions. Marxist-Leninists around Lenin, including Stalin, opposed the Trotskyite militarisation policy, arguing instead that emphasis must be placed on persuasion rather than coercion. This led to a serious factional dispute in the communist party between the Marxist-Leninists and the Trotskyites between 1920-1921. Lenin himself regarded Trotsky’s policy on the trade unions as representing a ‘reactionary movement’.(See: Lenin: Collected Works, Vol.32) </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>THE WORLD REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IN REGARD TO SOCIALISM. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">For Marxist-Leninists, socialism in one or several countries is a stage in the world revolution. Trotskyites argued that the policy of building socialism in one country was opposed to Marxism. The Marxist-Leninists argued building socialism in one country was an integral part of world revolution and, in fact would serve this process, in aiding the development of the latter. Since Trotsky did not raise the issue with Lenin, Marxist-Leninists can only assume that Trotsky’s real motives were of a factional nature. Or, with Lenin out of the way, following his death in 1924, Trotsky sought to impose his Permanent Revolution theory on the party. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>INDUSTRIALISATION POLICY. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">The Trotskyites sought to impose an industrialisation and collectivisation policy on the communist party at a time when the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat were in a weak position. Marxist-Leninists around Stalin wanted to wait until the party and the state had gathered enough strength to oversee such a policy. This meant defending the mixed economy of the NEP period until the party had strengthened itself in the working class and in the countryside. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>THE QUESTION OF FIGHTING BUREAUCRACY </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotskyites argue that after the death of Lenin a “Stalinist bureaucracy” emerged in the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy would undermine the revolution and to forestall this a political revolution would be necessary to remove the bureaucracy from power. Marxist-Leninists argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was more anti-Stalinist than ‘Stalinist’, a fact underlined by the frequent purges directed against it. In addition, Marxist-Leninists rejected the Trotskyite theory of a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy as completely one-sided, and argued that what was needed was not a political revolution to overthrow a supposedly counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, but rather there was a need to expose and purge the counterrevolutionary elements from the bureaucracy. The Trotskyite talk about a 'political' revolution to overthrow bureauracy represented a break from Marxism to Anarchism. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>THE POLICY OF PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Soon after coming to power the Bolshevik communists, led by Lenin pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist states. The thinking behind this was to force the capitalist States, particularly the imperialists States, to live in peace with socialism, as far as foreign relations were concerned. This was not only based on the recognition that combined the imperialists States were by far stronger than the Socialist State, it was also because socialism, unlike capitalism, is not a warlike system. It is capitalism which needs war to increase profits for the monopolists, not socialism. While it is true that, on the one hand, the Khrushchevite revisionists distorted the communist policy of peaceful coexistence, it is also true, on the other hand, that the Trotskyites, and other pseudo-leftists rejected Lenin’s policy, wanting the socialist countries to act like capitalists and embroil the world into war. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>THE COUNTERREVOLUTION IN THE SOVIET UNION. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotskyites claim that the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union was the work of a supposedly “Stalinist bureaucracy”. Such a claim made no sense because not only was there no entity which could be called the “Stalinist bureaucracy”, but the Stalinists, i.e., supporters of Stalin, had been purged by the Khrushchevites in the 1950s. Marxist-Leninists maintain that the Soviet counterrevolution was led by the revisionists who had come to power after Stalin’s death. This counterrevolution was begun by Khrushchev and completed by Gorbachev. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>COMMUNIST HISTORY. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotskyites blame the defeat of revolutions in China, Germany, France and Spain on Stalin’s leadership of the Communist International. Marxist-Leninists have long argued that Stalin was in a minority in the Comintern. Therefore, the defeats experienced by the communist movement cannot simply be dumped at Stalin’s door. Only a concrete analysis, based on Marxism-Leninism, can throw light on how individual defeats came about. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>REVISIONISM. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">One of the slanders aimed at Stalin by the open and concealed Trotskyites is that he led the international communist movement into the camp of revisionism. However, neither now or in the past, have they been able to provide any documentary evidence to support these claims based on Marxism-Leninism. The truth is, that any study of the writings of Stalin shows, without any shadow of doubt that he remained a committed Marxist-Leninist all his life. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>EVALUATION OF STALIN. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotskyites argue that Stalin betrayed the 1917 socialist revolution. However, in 1936, stunned by the gains that the Soviet Union had made under Stalin’s leadership, Trotsky had to pretend that this had nothing to do with Stalin. Marxist-Leninists argue that Stalin was a defender of the socialist revolution in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Furthermore, in his time Stalin successfully defended the socialist orientation of the Soviet Union against revisionists and other two-faced elements posing as communists in the party and State. When these concealed enemies of socialism were found out they were unfailingly purged by Stalin. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;"><b>CONCLUSION. </b></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #29303b; line-height: 19.5px;">Trotsky and his followers joined the bourgeoisie and their henchmen, the Mensheviks, in a campaign to convince the workers, peasants and communists that socialism was impossible in the Soviet Union. They tried to undermine the confidence of the working people using an argument opposed to Lenin’s standpoint. The only conclusion is that Trotskyism played a counterrevolutionary role, hiding behind pseudo-left rhetoric. Promoting defeatism was the essential role of Trotskyism in regard to the Soviet Union. </span></span>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-81566639563531284742012-11-30T04:00:00.000-05:002013-04-02T14:52:33.693-04:00Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 24px;">by </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #000033; line-height: 20px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">Alexandra Kollontai</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><span style="background-color: white; color: #000033; line-height: 20px; word-spacing: 0.2em;"><br /></span></b></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Comrades, the question of prostitution is a difficult and thorny subject that has received too little attention in Soviet Russia. This sinister legacy of our bourgeois capitalist past continues to poison the atmosphere of the workers’ republic and affects the physical and moral health of the working people of Soviet Russia. It is true that in the three years of the revolution the nature of prostitution has, under the pressure of the changing economic and social conditions altered somewhat. But we are still far from being rid of this evil. Prostitution continues to exist and threatens the feeling of solidarity and comradeship between working men and women, the members of the workers’ republic. And this feeling is the foundation and the basis of the communist society we are building and making a reality. It is time that we faced up to this problem. It is time that we gave thought and attention to the reasons behind prostitution. It is time that we found ways and means of ridding ourselves once and for all of this evil, which has no place in a workers’ republic.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Our workers’ republic has so far passed no laws directed at the elimination of prostitution, and has not even issued a dear and scientific formulation of the view that prostitution is something that injures the collective. We know that prostitution is an evil, we even acknowledge that at the moment, in this transitional period with its many problems, prostitution has become extremely widespread. But we have brushed the issue aside, we have been silent about it. Partly this is because of the hypocritical attitudes we have inherited from the bourgeoisie, and partly it is because of our reluctance to consider and come to terms with the harm which the widespread mass scale of prostitution does to the work collective. And our lack of enthusiasm in the struggle against prostitution has been reflected in our legislation.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">We have so far passed no statutes recognising prostitution as a harmful social phenomenon. When the old tsarist laws were revoked by the Council of People’s Commissars, all the statutes concerning prostitution were abolished. But no new measures based on the interests of the work collective were introduced. Thus the politics of the Soviet authorities towards prostitutes and prostitution has been characterised by diversity and contradictions. In some areas the police still help to round up prostitutes just as in the old days. In other places, brothels exist quite openly. (The Interdepartmental Commission on the Struggle against Prostitution has data on this.) And there are yet other areas where prostitutes are considered criminals and thrown into forced labour camps. The different attitudes of the local authorities thus highlight the absence of a dearly worded statute. Our vague attitude to this complex social phenomenon is responsible, for a number of distortions of and diversions from the principles underlying our legislation and morality.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">We must therefore not only confront the problem of prostitution but seek a solution that is in line with our basic principles and the programme of social and economic change adhered to by the party of the communists. We must, above all, clearly define what prostitution is. Prostitution is a phenomenon which is closely linked with unearned income, and it thrives in the epoch dominated by capital and private property. Prostitutes, from our point of view, are those women who sell their bodies for material benefit – for decent food, for clothes and other advantages; prostitutes are all those who avoid the necessity of working by giving themselves to a man, either on a temporary basis or for life.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Our Soviet workers’ republic has inherited prostitution from the bourgeois capitalist past, when only a small number of women were involved in work within the national economy and the majority relied on the “male breadwinner”, on the father or the husband. Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs. The institution of marriage made it possible to prevent the wealth that had been accumulated from being scattered amongst a vast number of “heirs”. But there is a great difference between the prostitution of Greece and Rome and the prostitution we know today. In ancient times the number of prostitutes was small, and there was not that hypocrisy which colours the morality of the bourgeois world and compels bourgeois society to raise its hat respectfully to the ‘lawful wife” of an industrial magnate who has obviously sold herself to a husband she does not love, and, to turn away in disgust from a girl forced into the streets by poverty, homelessness, unemployment and other social circumstances which derive from the existence of capitalism and private property. The ancient world regarded prostitution as the legal complement to exclusive family relationships. Aspasia </span><span class="context" style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">[the mistress of Pericles]</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> was respected by her contemporaries far more than the colourless wives of the breeding apparatus.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">In the Middle Ages, when artisan, production predominated, prostitution was accepted as something natural and lawful. Prostitutes had their own guilds and took part in festivals and local events just like the other guilds. The prostitute guaranteed that the daughters of the respectable citizens remained chaste and their wives faithful, since single men could (for a consideration) turn to the members of the guild for comfort. Prostitution was thus to the advantage of the worthy propertied citizens and was openly accepted by them.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">With the rise of capitalism, the picture changes. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prostitution assumes threatening proportions for the first time. The sale of women’s labour, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female, body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and “dishonoured” girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labour by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favours seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The black shadow of prostitution stalks the legal marriage of bourgeois society. History has never before witnessed such a growth of prostitution as occurred in the last part of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In Berlin there is one prostitute for every twenty so-called honest women. In Paris the ratio is one to eighteen and in London one to nine. There are different types of prostitution: there is open prostitution that is legal and subject to regulation, and there is the secret, “seasonal” type, All forms of prostitution flourish like a poisonous flower in the swamps of the bourgeois way of life.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The world of the bourgeoisie does not even spare children, forcing young girls of nine and ten into the sordid embraces of wealthy and depraved old men. In the capitalist countries there are brothels which specialise exclusively in very young girls. In this present post-war period every woman faces the possibility of unemployment. Unemployment hits women in particular, and causes an enormous increase in the army of “street women”. Hungry crowds of women seeking out the buyers of “white slaves” flood the evening streets of Berlin. Paris and the other civilised centres of the capitalist states. The trade in women’s flesh is conducted quite openly, which is not surprising when you consider that the whole bourgeois way of life is based on buying and selling. There is an undeniable element of material and economic, considerations even the most legal of marriages. Prostitution is the way out for the woman who fails to find herself a permanent breadwinner. Prostitution, under capitalism provides men with the opportunity of having sexual relationships without having to take upon themselves the responsibility of caring materially for the women until the grave.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">But if prostitution has such a hold and is so widespread even in Russia, how are we to struggle against it? In order to answer this question we must first analyse in more detail the factors giving rise to prostitution. Bourgeois science and its academics love to prove to the world, that prostitution is a pathological phenomenon, i.e. that it is the result of the abnormalities of certain women, just as some people are criminal by nature, some women, it is argued, are prostitutes by nature. Regardless of where or how such women might have lived, they would have turned to a life of sin. Marxists and the more conscientious scholars, doctors and statisticians have shown clearly that the idea of “inborn disposition” is false. Prostitution is above all a social </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">phenomenon; </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">it is closely connected to the needy position of woman and her economic dependence on man in marriage and the family. The roots of prostitution are m economics. Woman is on the one hand placed in an economically vulnerable position, and on the other hand has been conditioned by centuries of education to expect material favours from a man in return for sexual favours – whether these are given within or outside the marriage tie. This is the root of the problem. Here is the reason for prostitution.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">If the bourgeois academics of the Lombroso-Tarnovsky school were correct in maintaining that prostitutes are born with the marks of corruption and sexual abnormality, how would one explain the well-known fact that in a time of crisis and unemployment the number of prostitutes immediately increases? How would one explain the fact that the purveyors of “living merchandise” who travelled to tsarist Russia from the other countries of western Europe always found a rich harvest in areas where crops had failed and the population was suffering from famine, whereas they came away with few recruits from areas of plenty? Why do so many of the women who are allegedly doomed by nature to ruin only take to prostitution in years of hunger and unemployment?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">It is also significant that in the capitalist countries prostitution recruits its servants from the propertyless sections of the population. Low-paid work, homelessness, acute poverty and the need to support younger brothers and sisters: these are the factors that produce the largest percentage of prostitutes. If the bourgeois theories about the corrupt and criminal disposition were true, then all classes of the population ought to contribute equally to prostitution. There ought to he the same proportion of corrupt women among the rich as among the poor. But professional prostitutes, women who live by their bodies, are with rare exceptions recruited from the poorer classes. Poverty, hunger, deprivation and the glaring social inequalities that are the basis of the bourgeois system drive these women to prostitution.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Or again one might point to the fact that prostitutes in the capitalist countries are drawn, according to the statistics, from the thirteen to twenty-three age-group. Children and young women, in other words. And the majority of these girls are alone and without a home. Girls from wealthy backgrounds who have the excellent bourgeois family to protect them turn to prostitution only very occasionally. The exceptions are usually victims of tragic circumstances. More often than not they are victims of the hypocritical “double morality”. The bourgeois family abandons the girl who has “sinned” and she – alone, without support and branded by the scorn of society – sees prostitution as the only way out.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">We can therefore list as factors responsible for prostitution: low wages, social inequalities, the economic dependence of women upon men, and the unhealthy custom by which women expect to he supported in return for sexual favours instead of in return for their labour.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The workers’ revolution in Russia has shattered the basis of capitalism and has struck a blow at the former dependence of women upon men. All citizens are equal before the work collective. They are equally obliged to work for the common good and are equally eligible to the support of the collective when they need it. A woman provides for herself not by marriage but by the part she plays in production and the contribution she makes to the people’s wealth.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Relations between the sexes are being transformed. But we are still bound by the old ideas. Furthermore, the economic structure is far from being completely re-arranged in the new way, and communism is still a long way off. In this transitional period prostitution naturally enough keeps a strong hold. After all, even though the main sources of prostitution – private property and the policy of strengthening the family – have been eliminated, other factors are still in force. Homelessness, neglect, had housing conditions, loneliness and low wages for women are still with us. Our productive apparatus is still in a state of collapse, and the dislocation of the national economy continues. These and other economic and social conditions lead women to prostitute their bodies.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">To struggle against prostitution chiefly means to struggle against these conditions – in other words, it means to support the general policy of the Soviet government – which is directed towards strengthening the basis of communism and the organisation of production.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Some people might say that since prostitution will have no place once the power of the workers and the basis of communism are strengthened, no special campaign is necessary. This type of argument fails to take into account the harmful and disuniting effect that prostitution has on the construction of a new communist society.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The correct slogan was formulated at the first All-Russian Congress of Peasant and Working Woman: “A woman of the Soviet labour republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling.” The slogan was proclaimed, but nothing was done. Above all, prostitution harms the national economy and hinders the further development of the productive forces. We know that we can only overcome chaos and improve industry if we harness the efforts and energies of the workers and if we organise the available labour power of both men and women in the most rational way. Down with the unproductive labour of housework and child-minding! Make way for work that is organised and productive and serves the work collective! These are the slogans we must take up.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">And what, after all, is the professional prostitute? She is a person whose energy is not used for the collective; a person who lives off others, by taking from the rations of others. Can this sort of thing be allowed in a workers’ republic? No, it cannot. It cannot be allowed, because it reduces the reserves of energy and the number of working hands that are creating the national wealth and the general welfare, from the point of view of the national economy the professional prostitute is a labour deserter. For this reason we must ruthlessly oppose prostitution. In the interests of the economy we must start an immediate fight to reduce the number of prostitutes and eliminate prostitution in all its forms.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">It is time we understood that the existence of prostitution contradicts the basic principles of a workers’ republic which fights all forms of unearned wages. In the three years of the revolution our ideas on this subject have changed greatly. A new philosophy, which has little m common with the old ideas, is in the making. Three years ago we regarded a merchant as a completely respectable person. Provided his accounts were in order and he did not cheat or dupe his customer too obviously, he was rewarded with the title of “merchant of the first guild”, “respected citizen”, etc.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Since the revolution attitudes, to trade and merchants have changed radically. We now call the “honest merchant” a speculator, and instead of awarding him honorary tides we drag him before a special committee and put him in a forced labour camp. Why do we do this?’ Because we know that we can only build a new communist economy if all adult citizens are involved in </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">productive labour. </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The person who does not work and who lives off someone else or on an unearned wage harms the collective and the republic. We, therefore, hunt down the speculators, the traders and the hoarders who all live off unearned income. We must fight prostitution as another form of labour desertion.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">We do not, therefore, condemn prostitution and fight against it as a special category but as an aspect of labour desertion. To us in the workers’ republic it is not important whether a woman sells herself to one man or to many, whether she is classed as a professional prostitute selling her favours to a succession of clients or as a wife selling herself to her husband. All women who avoid work and do not take part in production or in caring for children are liable, on the same basis as prostitutes, to be forced to work. We cannot make a difference between a prostitute and a lawful wife kept by her husband, whoever her husband is – even if he is a “commissar”. It is failure to take part in productive work that is the common thread connecting all labour deserters. The workers’ collective condemns the prostitute not because she gives her body to many men but because, like the legal wife who stays at home, she does no useful work for the society.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The second reason for organising a deliberate and well-planned campaign against prostitution is in order to safeguard the people’s health. Soviet Russia does not want illness and disease to cripple and weaken its citizens and reduce their work capacity. And prostitution spreads venereal disease. Of course, it is not the only means by which the disease is transmitted. Crowded living conditions, the absence of standards of hygiene, communal crockery and towels also play a part. Furthermore, in this time of changing moral norms and particularly when there is also a continual movement of troops from place to place, a sharp rise in the number of cases of venereal disease occurs independently of commercial prostitution. The civil war, for example, is raging in the fertile southern regions. The Cossack men have been beaten and have retreated with the Whites. Only the women are left behind in the villages. They have plenty of everything except husbands. The Red Army troops enter the village They are billeted out and stay several weeks. Free relationships develop between the soldiers and the women. These relationships have nothing to do with prostitution: the woman goes with the man voluntarily because she is attracted to him, and there is no thought on her part of material gain. It is not the Red Army soldier who provides for the woman but rather the opposite. The woman looks after him for the period that the troops are quartered in the village. The troops move away, but they leave venereal disease behind. Infection spreads. The diseases develop, multiply, and threaten to maim the younger generation.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">At a joint meeting of the department of maternity protection and the women’s department, Professor Kol’tsov spoke about eugenics, the science of maintaining and improving the health of humanity. Prostitution is closely connected with this problem, since it is one of the main ways in which infections are spread. The theses of the interdepartmental commission on the struggle against prostitution point out that the development of special measures to fight venereal diseases is an urgent task. Steps must of course be taken to deal with all sources of the diseases, and not solely with prostitution in the way that hypocritical bourgeois society does. But although the diseases are spread to some extent by everyday circumstances, it is nevertheless essential to give everyone a clear idea of the role prostitution plays. The correct organisation of sexual education for young people is especially important. We must arm young people with accurate information allowing them to enter life with their eyes open. We must not remain silent any longer over questions connected with sexual life; we must break with false and bigoted bourgeois morality.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Prostitution is not compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic for a third reason: it does not contribute to the development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the proletariat and its new morality.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development – Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Prostitution is alien and harmful to the new communist morality which is in the process of forming. The task of the party as a whole and of the women’s departments in particular must he to launch a broad and resolute campaign against this legacy from the past. In bourgeois capitalist society all attempts at fighting prostitution were a useless waste of energy, since the two circumstances which gave rise to the phenomenon – private property and the direct material dependence of the majority of women upon men – were firmly established. In a workers’ republic the situation has changed. Private property has been abolished and all citizens of the republic are obliged to work. Marriage has ceased to be a method by which a woman can find herself a “breadwinner” and thus avoid the necessity of working or providing for herself by her own labour. The major social factors giving rise to prostitution are, in Soviet Russia, being eliminated. A number of secondary economic and social reasons remain with which it is easier to come to terms. The women’s departments must approach the struggle energetically, and they will find a wide field for activity.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">On the Central Department’s initiative, an interdepartmental commission for the struggle against prostitution was organised last year. For a number of reasons the work of the commission was neglected for a time, but since the autumn of this year there have been signs of life, and with the co-operation of Dr Gol'man and the Central (Women’s) Department some work has been planned and organised. Representatives from the People’s Commissariats of health, labour, social security and industry, the women’s department and the union of communist youth are all involved. The commission has printed the theses in bulletin no. 4, distributes circulars to all regional departments of social security outlining a plan to establish similar commissions all over the country, and has set about working out a number of concrete measures to tackle the circumstances which give rise to prostitution.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The interdepartmental commission considers it necessary that the women’s departments take an active part in this work, since prostitution affects the propertyless women of the working class. It is our job it is the job of the women’s departments – to organise a mass campaign around the question of prostitution. We must approach this issue with the interests of the work collective in mind and ensure that the revolution within the family is completed, and that relationships between the sexes are put on a more human footing.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The interdepartmental commission, as the theses make clear, takes the view that the struggle against prostitution is connected in a fundamental way with the realisation of our Soviet politics in the sphere of economics and general construction. Prostitution will he finally eliminated when the basis of communism is strengthened. This is the truth which determines our actions. But we also need to understand the importance of creating a communist morality. The two tasks are closely connected: the new morality is created by a new economy, but we will not build a new communist economy without the support of a new morality. Clarity and precise thinking are essential in this matter, and we have nothing to fear from the truth. Communists must openly accept that unprecedented changes in the nature of sexual relationships are taking place. This revolution is called into being by the change in the economic structure and by the new role which women play in the productive activity of the workers’ state. In this difficult transition period, when the old is being destroyed and the new is in the process of being created, relations between the sexes sometimes develop that are not compatible with the interests of the collective. But there is also something healthy m the variety of relationships practised.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Our party and the women’s departments in particular must analyse the different forms in order to ascertain which are compatible with the general tasks of the revolutionary class and serve to strengthen the collective and its interests. Behaviour that is harmful to the collective must he rejected and condemned by communists. This is how the Central Women’s Department has understood the task of the interdepartmental commission. It is not only necessary to take practical measures to fight the situation and the circumstances that nourish prostitution and to solve the problems of housing and loneliness etc., but also to help the working class to establish its morality alongside its dictatorship.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The interdepartmental commission points to the fact that in Soviet Russia prostitution is practised (a) as a profession and (b) as a means of earning supplementary income. The first form of prostitution is less common and in Petrograd, for example, the number of prostitutes has not been significantly reduced by round-ups of the professionals. The second type of prostitution is widespread in bourgeois capitalist countries (in Petrograd; before the revolution, out of a total of fifty thousand prostitutes only about six or seven thousand were registered), and continues under various guises in our Russia, Soviet ladies exchange their favours for a pair of high-heeled boots; working women and mothers of families sell their favours for flour. Peasant women sleep with the heads of the anti-profiteer detachments in the hope of saving their boarded food, and office workers sleep with their bosses in return for rations, shoes and in the hope of promotion.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">How should we fight this situation? The interdepartmental commission had to tackle the important question of </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">whether or not prostitution should be made a criminal offence. </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Many of the representatives of the commission were inclined to the view that prostitution should be an offence, arguing that professional prostitutes are dearly labour deserters. If such a law were passed, the round-up and placing of prostitutes in forced labour camps would become accepted policy.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The Central Department spoke in firm and absolute opposition to such, a step, pointing out that if prostitutes were to be arrested on such grounds, then so ought all legal wives who are maintained by their husbands and do not contribute to society. The prostitute and the house-wife are both labour deserters, and you cannot send one to a forced labour camp without sending the other. This was the position the Central Department took, and it was supported by the representative of the Commissariat of justice. If we take labour desertion as our criterion, we cannot help punishing all forms of labour desertion. Marriage or the existence of certain relationships between the sexes is of no significance and can play no role in defining criminal offences in a labour republic.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">In bourgeois society a woman is condemned to persecution not when she does no work that is useful to the collective or because she sells herself for material gain (two-thirds of women in bourgeois society sell themselves to their legal husbands), but when her sexual relationships are informal and of short duration. Marriage in bourgeois society is characterised </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">by its duration and by the official nature of its registra</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">tion. Property inheritance is preserved in this way. Relationships that are of a temporary nature and lack official sanction are considered by the bigots and hypocritical upholders of bourgeois morality to be shameful.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Can we who uphold the interests of working people define relationships that are temporary and unregistered as criminal? Of course we cannot. Freedom in relationships between the sexes does not contradict communist ideology. The interests of the work collective are not affected by the temporary or lasting nature of a relationship or by its basis in love, passion or passing physical attraction.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">A relationship is harmful and alien to the collective only if </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">material bargaining between the sexes is involved, </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">only when </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">worldly calculations </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">are a substitute for mutual attraction. Whether the bargaining takes the form of prostitution or of a legal marriage relationship is not important. Such unhealthy relationships cannot be permitted, since they threaten equality and solidarity. We must therefore condemn all prostitution, and go as far as explaining to these legal wives are “kept women” what a sad and intolerable part they are playing in the worker’s state.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Can the presence or otherwise of material bargaining be used as a criterion in determining what is and what is not a criminal offence? can we really persuade a couple to admit whether or not there is an element of calculation in their relationship? Would such a law be workable, particularly in view of the fact that at the present time a great variety of relationships are practised among working people and ideas on sexual morality are in constant flux? Where does prostitution end and the marriage of convenience begin? The interdepartmental commission opposed the suggestion that prostitutes be punished for prostituting, i.e. for buying and selling. They confined themselves to suggesting that all people convicted of work desertion be directed to the social security network and from there either to the section of the Commissariat that deals with the deployment of the labour force or to sanatoria and hospitals. A prostitute is not a special case; as with other categories of deserter, she is only sent to do forced labour if she repeatedly avoids work. Prostitutes are not treated any differently from other labour deserters. This is an important and courageous step, worthy of the world’s first labour republic.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The question of prostitution as an offence was set out in thesis no. 15. The next problem that had to be tackled was whether or not the law should punish the prostitute’s clients. There were some on the commission who were in favour of this, but they had to give up the idea, which did not follow on logically from our basic premises. How is a client to be defined? Is he someone who buys a woman’s favours? In that case the husbands of many legal wives will be guilty. Who is to decide who is a client and who is not? It was suggested that this problem be studied further before a decision was made, but the Central Department and the majority of the commission were against this. As the representative of the Commissariat of justice, admitted, if it were not possible to define exactly when a crime had been committed, then the idea of punishing clients was untenable. The position of the Central Department was once again adopted.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">But while the commission accepted that clients cannot he punished by the law, it spoke out for the moral condemnation of those who visit prostitutes or in any way make a business out of prostitution. In fact the commission’s theses point out that all go-betweens who make money out of prostitution can be prosecuted as persons making money other than by their own labour. Legislative proposals to this effect have been drawn up by the interdepartmental commission and put before the Council, of People’s Commissars. They will come into force in the neat future.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">It remain for me to indicate the purely practical measures which can help to reduce prostitution, and in the implementation of which the women’s departments can play an active role. It cannot be doubted that the poor and inadequate wages that women receive continue to serve as one of the real factors pushing women into prostitution. According to the law the Wages of male and female workers are equal, but in practice most women are engaged in unskilled work. The problem of improving their skills through the development of a network of special courses must he tackled. The task of the women’s departments must be to bring influence to bear on, the education authorities to step up the provision of vocational training for working women.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The political backwardness of women and their lack of social awareness is a second reason for prostitution. The women’s departments should increase their work amongst proletarian women. The best way to fight prostitution is to raise the political consciousness of the broad masses of women and to draw them into the revolutionary struggle to build communism.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The fact that the housing situation is still not solved also encourages prostitution. The women’s department and the commission for the struggle against prostitution can and must have their say over the solution of this problem. The interdepartmental commission is working out a project on the provision of house communes for young working people and on the establishment of houses that will provide accommodation for women when they are newly arrived in any area, However, unless the women’s departments and the komsomols in the provinces show some initiative and take independent action in this matter, all the directives of the commission will remain beautiful and benevolent resolutions – but they will remain on paper. And there is so much we can and must do. The local women’s departments must work in conjunction with the education commissions to raise the issue of the correct organisation of sex education in schools. They could also hold a series of discussions and lectures on marriage, the family and the history of relationships between the sexes, highlighting the dependence of these phenomena and of sexual morality itself on economic factors.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">It is time we were clear on the question of sexual relationships. It is time we approached this question in a spirit of ruthless and scientific criticism. I already said that the interdepartmental commission has accepted that professional prostitutes are to be treated in the same way as labour deserters It therefore follows that women who have a work-</span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;"> </em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">book but are practising prostitution as a secondary source of income cannot he prosecuted. But this does not mean that we do not fight against prostitution. We are aware, as I have already pointed out more than once today, that prostitution harm the work collective, negatively affecting the psychology of men and women and distorting feelings of equality and solidarity. Our task is to re-educate the work collective and to bring its psychology into line with the economic tasks of the working class. We must ruthlessly discard the old ideas and attitudes to which we cling through habit Economics has outstripped ideology. The old economic structure is disintegrating and with it the old type of marriage, but we cling to bourgeois life styles. We are ready to reject all the aspects of the old system and welcome the revolution in all spheres of life, only . . . don’t touch the family, don’t try to change the family! Even politically aware communists are afraid to look squarely at the truth, they brush aside the evidence which dearly shows that the old family ties are weakening and that new forms of economy dictate new forms of relationships between the sexes. Soviet power recognises that woman has a part to play in the national economy and has placed her on an equal footing with the man in this respect, but in everyday life we still hold to the “old ways” and are prepared to accept as normal marriages which are based on the material dependency of a woman on a man. In our struggle against prostitution we must clarify our attitude to marital relations that are based on the same principles of “buying and selling”. We must learn to be ruthless over this issue; we must not be deflected from our purpose by sentimental complaints that “by your criticism and scientific preaching you encroach on sacred family ties”. We have to explain unequivocally that the old form of the family has been outstripped. Communist, society has no need of it. The bourgeois world gave its blessing to the exclusiveness and isolation of the married couple from the collective; in the atomised and individualistic bourgeois society, the family was the only protection from the storm of life, a quiet harbour in a sea of hostility and competition. The family was an independent and enclosed collective. In communist society this cannot be. Communist society presupposes such a strong sense of the collective that any possibility of the existence of the isolated, introspective family group is excluded. At the present moment ties of kinship, family and even of married life can be seen to be weakening. New ties between working people are being forged and comradeship, common interests, collective responsibility and faith in the collective are establishing themselves as the highest principles of morality.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">I will not take it upon myself to prophesy the form that marriage or relationships between the sexes will assume in the future. But of one thing there is no doubt: under communism all dependence of women upon men and all the elements of material calculation found m modem marriage will be absent. Sexual relationships will be based on a healthy instinct for reproduction prompted by the abandon of young love, or by fervent passion, or by a blaze of physical attraction or by a soft light of intellectual and emotional harmony. Such sexual relationships have nothing in common with prostitution. Prostitution is terrible because it is an act of violence by the woman upon herself in the name of material gain. Prostitution is I naked act of material calculation which leaves no room for considerations of love and passion. Where passion and attraction begin, prostitution ends. Under communism, prostitution and the contemporary family will disappear. Healthy, joyful and free relationships between the sexes will develop. A new generation will come into being, independent and courageous and with a strong sense of the collective: a generation which places the good of the collective above all else.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Comrades! We are laying the foundations for this communist future. It is in our power to hasten the advent of this future. We must strengthen the sense of solidarity within the working class. We must encourage this sense of togetherness. Prostitution hinders the development of solidarity, and we therefore call upon the women’s departments to begin an immediate campaign to root out his evil.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Comrades! Our task is to cut out the roots that feed prostitution. Our task is to wage a merciless struggle against all the remnants of individualism and of the former, type of marriage. Our task is to revolutionise, attitudes in the sphere of sexual relationships, to bring them into line with the interest of the working collective. When the communist collective has eliminated the contemporary forms of marriage and the family, the problem of prostitution will cease to exist.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Let us get to work, comrades. The new family is already in the process of creation, and the great family of the triumphant world proletariat is developing and growing stronger.</span>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-48024402725383082412012-11-30T03:30:00.000-05:002013-05-24T17:03:59.470-04:00Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution And a Legal Response to the Demand for Prostitution<br />
<b>by <span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;">Janice G. Raymond</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><br /></span></b>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><b>[PLEASE NOTE: </b>The <i>Revolutionary Spirit</i> journal reprints this article solely for educational purposes. The reprinting of this article <i>should not</i> be taken as an endorsement of all opinions expressed by the author in her other work.]</span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><br /></span></b>
<div align="center" class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div>
(Published in simultaneously in hard copy in <i>Journal of Trauma Practice</i>, 2, 2003: pp. 315-332; and in <i>Prostitution, Trafficking and Traumatic Stress</i>. Melissa Farley (Ed.). Binghamton: Haworth Press, 2003.</div>
<div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
Summary<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The following arguments apply to all state-sponsored forms of prostitution, including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution, or any system in which prostitution is recognized as sex work or advocated as an employment choice.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry, we urge you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as work does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to strengthen the sex industry.</div>
<ol style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps, traffickers and the sex industry.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex industry promotes sex trafficking.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control the sex industry. It expands it.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases clandestine, hidden, illegal and street prostitution.</li>
<li>Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect the women in prostitution.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable settings.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote women's health.</li>
<li>Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women's choice.</li>
<li>Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry legalized or decriminalized.</li>
</ol>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>ARGUMENTS:</strong><br />
<strong><br />1. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps, traffickers and the sex industry.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
What does legalization of prostitution or decriminalization of the sex industry mean? In the Netherlands, legalization amounts to sanctioning all aspects of the sex industry: the women themselves, the so-called clients and the pimps who, under the regime of legalization, are transformed into third party businessmen and legitimate sexual entrepreneurs.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Legalization/decriminalization of the sex industry also converts brothels, sex clubs, massage parlors and other sites of prostitution activities into legitimate venues where commercial sexual acts are allowed to flourish legally with few restraints.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Ordinary people believe that, in calling for legalization or decriminalization of prostitution, they are dignifying and professionalizing the women in prostitution. But dignifying prostitution as work doesn't dignify the women, it simply dignifies the sex industry. People often don't realize that decriminalization, for example, means decriminalization of the whole sex industry not just the women. And they haven't thought through the consequences of legalizing pimps as legitimate sex entrepreneurs or third party businessmen, or the fact that men who buy women for sexual activity are now accepted as legitimate consumers of sex.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
CATW favors decriminalization of the women in prostitution. No woman should be punished for her own exploitation. But States should never decriminalize pimps, buyers, procurers, brothels or other sex establishments.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>2. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex industry promotes sex trafficking.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Legalized or decriminalized prostitution industries are one of the root causes of sex trafficking. One argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that legalization would help end the exploitation of desperate immigrant women trafficked for prostitution. A report done for the governmental Budapest Group* stated that 80% of women in the brothels in the Netherlands are trafficked from other countries (Budapest Group, 1999: 11). As early as 1994, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) stated that in the Netherlands alone, nearly 70 per cent of trafficked women were from CEEC [Central and Eastern European Countries] (IOM, 1995: 4).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The government of the Netherlands promotes itself as the champion of anti-trafficking policies and programs, yet cynically has removed every legal impediment to pimping, procurement and brothels. In the year 2000, the Dutch Ministry of Justice argued for a legal quota of foreign sex workers, because the Dutch prostitution market demands a variety of bodies (Dutting, 2001: 16). Also in the year 2000, the Dutch government sought and received a judgment from the European Court recognizing prostitution as an economic activity, thus enabling women from the EU and former Soviet bloc countries to obtain working permits as sex workers in the Dutch sex industry if they can prove that they are self employed. NGOs in the Netherlands have stated that traffickers are taking advantage of this ruling to bring foreign women into the Dutch prostitution industry by masking the fact that women have been trafficked, and by coaching the women how to prove that they are self-employed migrant sex workers.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In the one year since lifting the ban on brothels in the Netherlands, NGOs report that there has been an increase of victims of trafficking or, at best, that the number of victims from other countries has remained the same (Bureau NRM, 2002: 75). Forty-three municipalities in the Netherlands want to follow a no-brothel policy, but the Minister of Justice has indicated that the complete banning of prostitution within any municipality could conflict with the right to free choice of work (Bureau NRM: 2002) as guaranteed in the federal Grondwet or Constitution.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In January, 2002, prostitution in Germany was fully established as a legitimate job after years of being legalized in so-called eros or tolerance zones. Promotion of prostitution, pimping and brothels are now legal in Germany. As early as 1993, after the first steps towards legalization had been taken, it was recognized (even by pro-prostitution advocates) that 75 per cent of the women in Germany's prostitution industry were foreigners from Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and other countries in South America (Altink, 1993: 33). After the fall of the Berlin wall, brothel owners reported that 9 out of every 10 women in the German sex industry were from eastern Europe (Altink, 1993: 43) and other former Soviet countries.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The sheer volume of foreign women who are in the prostitution industry in Germany, by some NGO estimates now up to 85 per cent, casts further doubt on the fact that these numbers of women could have entered Germany without facilitation. As in the Netherlands, NGOs report that most of the foreign women have been trafficked into the country since it is almost impossible for poor women to facilitate their own migration, underwrite the costs of travel and travel documents, and set themselves up in business without outside help.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The link between legalization of prostitution and trafficking in Australia was recognized in the U.S. State Department's 1999 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. In the country report on Australia, it was noted that in the State of Victoria which legalized prostitution in the 1980s, trafficking in East Asian women for the sex trade is a growing problem in Australia. Lax laws, including legalized prostitution in parts of the country, make [anti-trafficking] enforcement difficult at the working level.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>3. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control the sex industry. It expands it.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Contrary to claims that legalization and decriminalization would regulate the expansion of the sex industry and bring it under control, the sex industry now accounts for 5 percent of the Netherlands economy (Daley, 2001: 4). Over the last decade, as pimping became legalized and then brothels decriminalized in the Netherlands in 2000, the sex industry expanded 25 percent (Daley, 2001: 4). At any hour of the day, women of all ages and races, dressed in hardly anything, are put on display in the notorious windows of Dutch brothels and sex clubs and offered for sale -- for male consumption. Most of them are women from other countries (Daley, 2001: 4) who have in all likelihood been trafficked into the Netherlands.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
There are now officially recognized associations of sex businesses and prostitution customers in the Netherlands that consult and collaborate with the government to further their interests and promote prostitution. These include the Association of Operators of Relaxation Businesses, the Cooperating Consultation of Operators of Window Prostitution, and the Man/Woman and Prostitution Foundation, a group of men who regularly use women in prostitution, and whose specific aims include to make prostitution and the use of services of prostitutes more accepted and openly discussible, and to protect the interests of clients (NRM Bureau, 2002:115-16).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Faced with a dearth of women who want to work in the legal sex sector, the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking states that in the future, a proposed solution may be to offer [to the market] prostitutes from non EU/EEA countries, who voluntarily choose to work in prostitution. They could be given legal and controlled access to the Dutch market (NRM Bureau, 2002: 140). As prostitution has been transformed into sex work, and pimps into entrepreneurs, so too this potential solution transforms trafficking into voluntary migration for sex work.The Netherlands is looking to the future, targeting poor women of color for the international sex trade to remedy the inadequacies of the free market of sexual services. In the process, it goes further in legitimizing prostitution as an option for the poor.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Legalization of prostitution in the State of Victoria, Australia, has led to massive expansion of the sex industry. Whereas there were 40 legal brothels in Victoria in 1989, in 1999 there were 94, along with 84 escort services. Other forms of sexual exploitation, such as tabletop dancing, bondage and discipline centers, peep shows, phone sex, and pornography have all developed in much more profitable ways than before (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Prostitution has become an accepted sideline of the tourism and casino boom in Victoria with government-sponsored casinos authorizing the redeeming of casino chips and wheel of fortune bonuses at local brothels (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001). The commodification of women has vastly intensified and is much more visible.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Brothels in Switzerland have doubled several years after partial legalization of prostitution. Most of these brothels go untaxed, and many are illegal. In 1999, the Zurich newspaper, Blick, claimed that Switzerland had the highest brothel density of any country in Europe, with residents feeling overrun with prostitution venues, as well as experiencing constant encroachment into areas not zoned for prostitution activities (South China Morning Post: 1999).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>4. Legalization/decriminalzaton of prostitution increases clandestine, hidden, illegal and street prostitution.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Legalization was supposed to get prostituted women off the street. Many women don't want to register and undergo health checks, as required by law in certain countries legalizing prostitution, so legalization often drives them into street prostitution. And many women choose street prostitution because they want to avoid being controlled and exploited by the new sex businessmen.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In the Netherlands, women in prostitution point out that legalization or decriminalization of the sex industry cannot erase the stigma of prostitution but, instead, makes women more vulnerable to abuse because they must register and lose anonymity. Thus, the majority of women in prostitution still choose to operate illegally and underground. Members of Parliament who originally supported the legalization of brothels on the grounds that this would liberate women are now seeing that legalization actually reinforces the oppression of women (Daley, 2001: A1).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The argument that legalization was supposed to take the criminal elements out of sex businesses by strict regulation of the industry has failed. The real growth in prostitution in Australia since legalization took effect has been in the illegal sector. Since the onset of legalization in Victoria, brothels have tripled in number and expanded in size; the vast majority having no licenses but advertising and operating with impunity (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001). In New South Wales, brothels were decriminalized in 1995. In 1999, the numbers of brothels in Sydney had increased exponentially to 400-500. The vast majority have no license to operate. To end endemic police corruption, control of illegal prostitution was taken out of the hands of the police and placed in the hands of local councils and planning regulators. The council has neither the money nor the personnel to put investigators into brothels to flush out and prosecute illegal operators.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>5. Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Another argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that it would help end child prostitution. In reality, however, child prostitution in the Netherlands has increased dramatically during the 1990s. The Amsterdam-based ChildRight organization estimates that the number has gone from 4,000 children in 1996 to 15,000 in 2001. The group estimates that at least 5,000 of the children in prostitution are from other countries, with a large segment being Nigerian girls (Tiggeloven: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Child prostitution has dramatically risen in Victoria compared to other Australian states where prostitution has not been legalized. Of all the states and territories in Australia, the highest number of reported incidences of child prostitution came from Victoria. In a 1998 study undertaken by ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) who conducted research for the Australian National Inquiry on Child Prostitution, there was increased evidence of organized commercial exploitation of children.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>6. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect the women in prostitution.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW) has conducted 2 major studies on sex trafficking and prostitution, interviewing almost 200 victims of commercial sexual exploitation. In these studies, women in prostitution indicated that prostitution establishments did little to protect them, regardless of whether they were in legal or illegal establishments. The only time they protect anyone is to protect the customers.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In a CATW 5-country study that interviewed 146 victims of international trafficking and local prostitution, 80% of all women interviewed suffered physical violence from pimps and buyers) and endured similar and multiple health effects from the violence and sexual exploitation (Raymond et al: 2002).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The violence that women were subjected to was an intrinsic part of the prostitution and sexual exploitation. Pimps used violence for many different reasons and purposes. Violence was used to initiate some women into prostitution and to break them down so that they would do the sexual acts. After initiation, at every step of the way, violence was used for sexual gratification of the pimps, as a form of punishment, to threaten and intimidate women, to exert the pimp's dominance, to exact compliance, to punish women for alleged violations, to humiliate women, and to isolate and confine women.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Of the women who did report that sex establishments gave some protection, they qualified it by pointing out that no protector was ever in the room with them, where anything could occur. One woman who was in out-call prostitution stated: The driver functioned as a bodyguard. You're supposed to call when you get in, to ascertain that everything was OK. But they are not standing outside the door while you're in there, so anything could happen.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
CATW's studies found that even surveillance cameras in prostitution establishments are used to protect the establishment. Protection of the women from abuse is of secondary or no importance.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>7. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable settings.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
With the advent of legalization in countries that have decriminalized the sex industry, many men who would not risk buying women for sex now see prostitution as acceptable. When the legal barriers disappear, so too do the social and ethical barriers to treating women as sexual commodities. Legalization of prostitution sends the message to new generations of men and boys that women are sexual commodities and that prostitution is harmless fun.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
As men have an excess of sexual services that are offered to them, women must compete to provide services by engaging in anal sex, sex without condoms, bondage and domination and other proclivities demanded by the clients. Once prostitution is legalized, all holds are barred. Women's reproductive capacities are sellable products, for example. A whole new group of clients find pregnancy a sexual turn-on and demand breast milk in their sexual encounters with pregnant women. Specialty brothels are provided for disabled men, and State-employed caretakers who are mostly women must take these men to the brothels if they wish to go (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Advertisements line the highways of Victoria offering women as objects for sexual use and teaching new generations of men and boys to treat women as subordinates. Businessmen are encouraged to hold their corporate meetings in these clubs where owners supply naked women on the table at tea breaks and lunchtime.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
A Melbourne brothel owner stated that the client base was well educated professional men, who visit during the day and then go home to their families. Women who desire more egalitarian relationships with men find that often the men in their lives are visiting the brothels and sex clubs. They have the choice to accept that their male partners are buying women in commercial sexual transactions, avoid recognizing what their partners are doing, or leave the relationship (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Sweden's Violence Against Women, Government Bill 1997/98:55 prohibits and penalizes the purchase of sexual services. It is an innovative approach that targets the demand for prostitution. Sweden believes that by prohibiting the purchase of sexual services, prostitution and its damaging effects can be counteracted more effectively than hitherto. Importantly, this law clearly states that: Prostitution is not a desirable social phenomenon and is an obstacle to the ongoing development towards equality between women and men.**</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>8. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote women's health.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
A legalized system of prostitution that mandates health checks and certification only for women and not for clients is blatantly discriminatory to women. Women only health checks make no public health sense because monitoring prostituted women does not protect them from HIV/AIDS or STDs, since male clients can and do originally transmit disease to the women.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
It is argued that legalized brothels or other controlled prostitution establishments protect women through enforceable condom policies. In one of CATW's studies, U.S. women in prostitution interviewed reported the following: 47% stated that men expected sex without a condom; 73% reported that men offered to pay more for sex without a condom; 45% of women said they were abused if they insisted that men use condoms. Some women said that certain establishments may have rules that men wear condoms but, in reality, men still try to have sex without them. One woman stated: It's regulation to wear a condom at the sauna, but negotiable between parties on the side. Most guys expected blow jobs without a condom (Raymond and Hughes: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In reality, the enforcement of condom policy was left to the individual women in prostitution, and the offer of extra money was an insistent pressure. One woman stated: ;I'd be one of those liars if I said "Oh I always used a condom." If there was extra money coming in, then the condom would be out the window. I was looking for the extra money. Many factors militate against condom use: the need of women to make money; older women's decline in attractiveness to men; competition from places that do not require condoms; pimp pressure on women to have sex with no condom for more money; money needed for a drug habit or to pay off the pimp; and the general lack of control that prostituted women have over their bodies in prostitution venues.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
So called "safety policies" in brothels did not protect women from harm. Even where brothels supposedly monitored the "customers" and utilized "bouncers," women stated that they were injured by buyers and, at times, by brothel owners and their friends. Even when someone intervened to control buyers' abuse, women lived in a climate of fear. Although 60 percent of women reported that buyers had sometimes been prevented from abusing them, half of those women answered that, nonetheless, they thought that they might be killed by one of their "customers (Raymond et al: 2002).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>9. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women's choice.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Most women in prostitution did not make a rational choice to enter prostitution. They did not sit down one day and decide that they wanted to be prostitutes. Rather, such choicesare better termed survival strategies. Rather than consent, a prostituted woman more accurately complies to the only options available to her. Her compliance is required by the very fact of having to adapt to conditions of inequality that are set by the customer who pays her to do what he wants her to do.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Most of the women interviewed in CATW studies reported that choice in entering the sex industry could only be discussed in the context of the lack of other options. Most emphasized that women in prostitution had few other options. Many spoke about prostitution as the last option, or as an involuntary way of making ends meet. In one study, 67% of the law enforcement officials that CATW interviewed expressed the opinion that women did not enter prostitution voluntarily. 72% of the social service providers that CATW interviewed did not believe that women voluntarily choose to enter the sex industry (Raymond and Hughes: 2001).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
The distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution is precisely what the sex industry is promoting because it will give the industry more security and legal stability if these distinctions can be utilized to legalize prostitution, pimping and brothels. Women who bring charges against pimps and perpetrators will bear the burden of proving that they were forced. How will marginalized women ever be able to prove coercion? If prostituted women must prove that force was used in recruitment or in their working conditions, very few women in prostitution will have legal recourse and very few offenders will be prosecuted.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Women in prostitution must continually lie about their lives, their bodies, and their sexual responses. Lying is part of the job definition when the customer asks,did you enjoy it? The very edifice of prostitution is built on the lie that women like it. Some prostitution survivors have stated that it took them years after leaving prostitution to acknowledge that prostitution wasn't a free choice because to deny their own capacity to choose was to deny themselves.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
There is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be in prostitution, especially in public contexts orchestrated by the sex industry. In the same way, some people choose to take dangerous drugs such as heroin. However, even when some people choose to take dangerous drugs, we still recognize that this kind of drug use is harmful to them, and most people do not seek to legalize heroin. In this situation, it is harm to the person, not the consent of the person that is the governing standard.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Even a 1998 ILO (UN International Labor Organization) report suggesting that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, found that prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of labour; the surveys [in 4 countries] show that women worked "with a heavy heart,""felt forced,"or were ";conscience-stricken" and had negative self-identities. A significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998: 213)."</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
When a woman remains in an abusive relationship with a partner who batters her, or even when she defends his actions, concerned people don't say she is there voluntarily. They recognize the complexity of her compliance. Like battered women, women in prostitution often deny their abuse if provided with no meaningful alternatives.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>10. Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry legalized or decriminalized.</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
In a 5-country study on sex trafficking done by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and funded by the Ford Foundation, most of the 146 women interviewed strongly stated that prostitution should not be legalized and considered legitimate work, warning that legalization would create more risks and harm for women from already violent customer and pimps (Raymond et al, 2002). "No way. It's not a profession. It is humiliating and violence from the men's side. Not one woman interviewed wanted her children, family or friends to have to earn money by entering the sex industry. One stated: Prostitution stripped me of my life, my health, everything.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>CONCLUSION</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Legislators leap onto the legalization bandwagon because they think nothing else is successful. However, as Scotland Yard's Commissioner has stated: 'You've got to be careful about legalizing things just because you don't think what you are doing is successful.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
We hear very little about the role of the sex industry in creating a global sex market in the bodies of women and children. Instead, we hear much about making prostitution into a better job for women through regulation and/or legalization, through unions of so-called sex workers,and through campaigns which provide condoms to women in prostitution but cannot provide them with alternatives to prostitution. We hear much about how to keep women in prostitution but very little about how to help women get out.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Governments that legalize prostitution as sex work will have a huge economic stake in the sex industry. Consequently, this will foster their increased dependence on the sex sector. If women in prostitution are counted as workers, pimps as businessmen, and buyers as consumers of sexual services, thus legitimating the entire sex industry as an economic sector, then governments can abdicate responsibility for making decent and sustainable employment available to women.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Rather than the State sanctioning prostitution, the State could address the demand by penalizing the men who buy women for the sex of prostitution, and support the development of alternatives for women in prostitution industries. Instead of governments cashing in on the economic benefits of the sex industry by taxing it, governments could invest in the futures of prostituted women by providing economic resources, from the seizure of sex industry assets, to provide real alternatives for women in prostitution.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>NOTES:</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
*Budapest Group. (1999, June). The Relationship Between Organized Crime and Trafficking in Aliens. Austria: International Centre for Migration Policy Development. The Budapest process was initiated in 1991. Nearly 40 governments and 10 organizations participate in the process, and about 50 intergovernmental meetings at various levels have been held, including the Prague Ministerial Conference.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
**The National Rapporteur on Trafficking at the National Swedish Police has stated that in the 6 months following the implementation of the Swedish law in January 1999, the number of trafficked women to Sweden has declined. She also stated that according to police colleagues in the European Union that traffickers are choosing other destination countries where they are not constrained by similar laws. Thus the law serves as a deterrent to traffickers. Quoted in Karl Vicktor Olsson, Sexkopslagen minskar handeln med kvinnor, Metro, January 27, 2001: 2.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<strong>REFERENCES</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Altink, Sietske. (1995). Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery (London: Scarlet Press).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Budapest Group. (1999, June). The Relationship Between Organized Crime and Trafficking in Aliens. Austria: International Centre for Migration Policy Development.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Bureau NRM. (2002, November). Trafficking in Human Beings: First Report of the Dutch National Rapporteur. The Hague. 155 pp.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Daley, Suzanne. (2001, August 12). "New Rights for Dutch Prostitutes, but No Gain. New York Times, pp. A1 and 4.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Dutting, Giseling. (2000, November). Legalized Prostitution in the Netherlands Recent Debates. Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights, 3: 15-16.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
IOM (International Organization for Migration). (1995, May). Trafficking and Prostitution: the Growing Exploitation of Migrant Women from Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: IOM Migration Information Program.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Lim, Lin Lean (1998). The Sex Sector. International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Raymond, Janice G., Donna M. Hughes, Donna M. and Carol A. Gomez (2001).<br />
Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States: Links Between International and Domestic Sex Industries, Funded by the U.S. National Institute of Justice. N. Amherst, MA: Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.<br />
Available at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120915135209/http://www.catwinternational.org/" style="color: #660000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.catwinternational.org</a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Raymond, Janice G., Jean d'Cunha, Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin, H. Patricia Hynes, Zoraida Ramirez Rodriguez and Aida Santos (2002). A Comparative Study of Women Trafficked in the Migration Process: Patterns, Profiles and Health Consequences of Sexual Exploitation in Five Countries (Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Venezuela and the United States). (2002).<br />
Funded by the Ford Foundation. N. Amherst, MA: Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).<br />
Available at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120915135209/http://www.catwinternational.org/" style="color: #660000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.catwinternational.org</a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
South China Morning Post (1999, September 10).Brothel Business Booming at a Legal Red-Light District Near You.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Sullivan, Mary and Jeffreys, Sheila. (2001). Legalising Prostitution is Not the Answer: the Example of Victoria, Australia. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Australia and USA.<br />
Available at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120915135209/http://www.catwinternational.org/" style="color: #660000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.catwinternational.org</a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
Tiggeloven, Carin. (2001, December 18). Child Prostitution in the Netherlands. Available at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120915135209/http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/laws/www.nw.nl/hotspots/html/netherlands011218.html" style="color: #660000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.nw.nl/hotspots/html/netherlands011218.html</a>.</div>
</div>
</div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-54932761392934928312012-11-30T03:00:00.000-05:002013-04-01T19:48:51.206-04:00Ernesto "Che" Guevara: A Rebel Against Soviet Political Economy<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">by Helen Yaffe</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">In January 1962 Guevara told colleagues in Cuba's Ministry of Industries (MININD): 'In no way am I saying that financial autonomy of the enterprise with moral incentives, as it is established in the socialist countries, is a formula which will impede progress to socialism'.[1] He was referring to the economic management system applied in the Soviet bloc, known in Cuba as the Auto-Financing System (AFS). By 1966, in his critique of the Soviet Manual of Political Economy, he concluded that the USSR: 'is returning to capitalism.'[2] This paper will demonstrate that Guevara's analysis developed in the period between these two statements as a result of three lines of enquiry: the study of Marx's analysis of the capitalist system, engagement in socialist political economy debates and recourse to the technological advances of capitalist corporations.[3] At the same time Guevara was engaged in the practical experience of developing the Budgetary Finance System (BFS); an alternative apparatus for economic management in MININD.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara was head of the Department of Industrialisation and President of the National Bank in 1960 when all financial institutions and 84% of industry in Cuba were nationalised. His BFS emerged as a practical solution to problems thrown up by the transition from private to state ownership of industrial production. Cuba had an unbalanced, trade dependent economy dominated by foreign interests, principally from the United States. The production units which passed under the Department's jurisdiction ranged from artisan workshops to sophisticated energy plants. Many faced bankruptcy while others were highly profitable. Guevara's solution was twofold: first, to group entities of similar lines of production into centralised administrative bodies called Consolidated Enterprises. This allowed the Department to control the allocation of scarce administrative and technical personnel following the exodus of 65-75% of managers, technicians and engineers after 1959; and second, to centralise the finances of all production units into one bank account for the payment of salaries, to control investment and sustain production in essential industries which lacked financial resources. With the establishment of MININD in February 1961, the BFS evolved into a comprehensive apparatus which embedded these organisational structures in a Marxist theoretical framework, to foster Cuba's industrialisation, increase productivity and institutionalise collective management.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Advanced technology</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara set up the BFS with compañeros who understood the internal accounting practices, administrative centralisation and productive concentration of US corporations and their subsidiaries in Cuba. Guevara examined the documentation from these companies as they fell into state hands. He was impressed with their management structures, the use of centralised bank accounts and budgets, determinate levels of responsibility and decision-making, and departments for organisation and inspection.[4] He told colleagues that the BFS had an accounting system similar to the pre-1959 monopolies operating in Cuba, with their efficient control systems: 'it's not important who invented the system. The accounting system that they apply in the Soviet Union was also invented under capitalism.'[5] </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara first travelled to the USSR in 1960. His deputy Orlando Borrego recalled that they visited an electronics factory which did accounts by abacus. Having studied the US-owned Cuban Electricity Company, Shell, Texaco and other corporations which used the latest IBM accounting machines, Guevara was struck by the backwardness of Soviet techniques. He believed that advances achieved by humanity should be adopted without fear of ideological contamination.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">With the imposition of the US blockade, Cuba was forced to buy factories from the socialist countries, especially the USSR. This assistance was essential, but the relative backwardness of the equipment clashed with Guevara's desire for advanced technology transfers. He did not criticise the Soviets for this backwardness per se. Rather, he complained about the contradiction between the high level of research and development in military technology and low investment applied to civilian production. He objected to their ideological resistance to appropriating advances made in the capitalist world. This was a costly mistake in terms of development and international competitiveness.[6] For example: 'For a long time cybernetics was considered a reactionary science or pseudo-science... [but] it is a branch of science that exists and should be used'.[7] He added that in the US the application of cybernetics in industry had resulted in automation - an important productive development.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Basing a management system for socialist transition on capitalist technology was consistent with Marx's stages theory of history, which predicted that communism would emerge from the fully developed capitalist mode of production. Marx showed how the tendency to concentration of capital, that is, to monopoly, was inherent in the system. Therefore, the monopoly form of capitalism was more advanced than 'perfect competition'. The Soviet system originated from predominantly underdeveloped, pre-monopoly capitalism. A socialist economic management system emerging from monopoly capitalism could be more advanced, efficient and productive. The origin of the BFS was the multinational corporations of pre-1959 Cuba and it was therefore more progressive than the AFS which was adapted from pre-monopoly Russian capitalism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Marx's analysis of the law of value</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">While Guevara argued for the adoption of advanced technology he opposed the use of capitalist mechanisms to determine production and consumption. He challenged the Soviet's reliance on capitalist categories to organise the socialist economy, particularly the operation of the law of value. The dispute about the law of value in transition economies is central to the question about the feasibility of constructing socialism in a country without a fully developed capitalist mode of production. It is integral to problems of accumulation, production, distribution and social relations. Communism implies a highly productive society in which conditions exist for distribution of the social product based on need, not surplus-generating labour time. However, the countries which have experimented with socialism have been underdeveloped, lacking the productive base for the material abundance implied by communism. The Soviet solution was to rely on the operation of the law of value to hasten the development of the productive forces, applying the profit motive, interest, credit, individual material incentives and elements of competition to promote efficiency and innovations. Guevara argued that these were not the only levers for fostering development. The BFS was the expression of his search for an apparatus to increase productive capacity and labour productivity without relying on capitalist mechanisms which undermine the formation of new consciousness and social relations integral to communism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Between 1963 and 1965 these questions were examined in Cuba during the Great Debate on socialist transition. To the extent that commodity production and exchange through a market mechanism continued to exist after the Revolution in Cuba, it was clear to all participants in the Great Debate that the law of value continued to operate. The social product continued to be distributed on the basis of work done. However, the disagreements were about the conditions explaining the law's survival, its sphere of operation, the extent to which it regulated production, how it related to the 'plan' and whether the law of value should be utilised or undermined, and if so, how. This discussion was linked to practical questions such as how enterprises should be organised, how workers should be paid and whether goods should be exchanged between state enterprises as commodities.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara agreed that the law of value remained under socialism but argued that measures taken by the Revolution to undermine the capitalist market meant that the law could not serve as the dynamic catalyst to productivity and efficiency in the same way as it did under capitalism.[8] Socialisation of the means of production and distribution had 'blunted' the tools of capitalism.[9] Marx described a commodity as a good which changes ownership, from the producer to the consumer. Consistent with this definition, Guevara insisted that products transferred between state-owned enterprises did not constitute commodities because when they were transferred from one state factory to another there was no change in ownership. The state itself should be considered as one big enterprise.[10] For Guevara commodity-exchange relations between factories threatened transition, via 'market socialism', to capitalism. He stressed central planning and state regulation as substitutes to such mechanisms.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The Soviet's argued that commodity production, the law of value, and money would disappear only when communism was achieved, but that to reach that stage it was necessary to use and develop the law of value as well as monetary and mercantile relationships. Guevara disagreed:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">'Why develop? We understand that the capitalist categories are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be predetermined, but the characteristics of the period of transition are those of a society that is throwing off its old bonds in order to move quickly into the new stage. The tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast as possible the old categories, including the market, money, and, therefore, material interest - or, better, to eliminate the conditions for their existence.'[11]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">For Guevara the task was not to use the law of value nor even hold it in check, but to define its sphere of operation and make inroads to undermine it - to work towards its abolition, not limitation. He developed many policies within the BFS to attempt just that.[12] In February 1964, Guevara concluded: 'We deny the possibility of consciously using the law of value, basing our argument on the absence of a free market that automatically expresses the contradiction between producers and consumers... The law of value and planning are two terms linked by a contradiction and its resolution.'[13] For Guevara, centralised planning was the fundamental characteristic of socialist society. He conceded only: 'the possibility of using elements of this law [of value] for comparative purposes (cost, "profit" expressed in monetary terms)'.[14]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">The protagonists in Cuba were well-informed about the broader debate on incentives and financial autonomy contemporaneously underway in the eastern European socialist countries - a response to the problems of economic stagnation, low productivity and efficiency, particularly in comparison with economic growth in the developed capitalist world. In July 1964 Guevara told colleagues that he had been reading analyses from the socialist bloc, including the resolutions of the 14th Congress of the Polish Communist Party: 'The solution that they are proposing for these problems in Poland is the complete freedom of the law of value; that is to say, a return to capitalism.'[15] Commenting on the push to 'liberalise' the socialist economies Guevara said: 'The theory is failing because they have forgotten Marx'.[16] Instead of Capital, the Soviet Manual of Political Economy had been turned into a bible.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Marx characterised the psychological or philosophical manifestation of capitalist social-relations as alienation and antagonism; the result of the commodification of labour and the operation of the law of value. For Guevara, the challenge was to replace the individuals' alienation from the productive process, and the antagonism generated by class relations, with integration and solidarity, developing a collective attitude to production and the concept of work as a social duty. Capitalist competition created the drive to increase productivity through technological innovations and increasing exploitation. Alienation and antagonism increase with productivity. Under socialism, the development of the productive forces could be less accelerated, but it should be accompanied by a growth of consciousness. For Guevara, efforts to change consciousness must be incorporated into socialist transition at the earliest stage.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Critique on the Soviet Manual of Political Economy</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">In April 1965, Guevara left Cuba to lead a Cuban military mission in the Congo. The guerrillas were defeated and Guevara stayed in Tanzania and the Czech Republic between 1965 and 1966 where he began work on a comprehensive analysis of the political economy of socialist transition. In preparation for this work, Guevara took notes on the Soviet Manual, applying his theoretical arguments expounded in the Great Debate to that text. The notes were not written for publication, nor brought together as text. They were comments responding to specific paragraphs of the Manual; notes to himself, including indications of areas for further study.[17] </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara criticised the Manual's mechanistic adaptation of classical Marxist conceptions of class relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class, without considering the effects of imperialism which created a privileged working class in the advanced capitalist countries as well as beneficiary sectors in the exploited nations. He denounced as opportunism the Manual's attempts to air-brush the inherent violence of class struggle integral to the transition from capitalism to socialism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Turning to the period of transition, Guevara argued that the USSR's Kolkhoz collective farm system was not a characteristic of socialism and that cooperatives were not a socialist form of ownership - they generated a capitalistic superstructure which clashed with state ownership and socialist social relations imposing their own logic over society. Guevara systematically refuted the so-called laws of socialism cited by the Manual, particularly the law of constant rising worker productivity - which he called an outrage: 'It is the tendency that has driven capitalism for centuries.'[18] He condemned as 'dangerous' the Soviet's policy of peaceful co-existence and economic emulation with the advanced capitalist countries and pointed to serious disagreements between the socialist countries, blaming them on unequal exchange and the imposition of capitalist categories in trade relations.[19]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">While declaring his daring, respect, admiration and revolutionary motives, Guevara announced that Lenin was the ultimate culprit because the New Economic Policy (NEP) which he had been forced to introduce in 1921 imposed a capitalist superstructure on the USSR. The NEP was not installed against small commodity production, Guevara stated, but at the demand of it. Small commodity production holds the seeds of capitalist development. He was certain that Lenin would have reversed the NEP had he lived longer. However, Lenin's followers: 'did not see the danger and it remained as the great Trojan horse of socialism, direct material interest as an economic lever.'[20] This capitalist superstructure became entrenched, influencing the relations of production and creating a hybrid system of socialism with capitalist elements that inevitably provoked conflicts and contradictions which were increasingly resolved in favour of the superstructure - capitalism was returning to the Soviet bloc.[21]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Guevara's notes offer a profound criticism of Soviet political economy. He himself warned that some would misinterpret his proposed work as rabid anti-communism disguised as theoretical argument, but asserted that the inability of bourgeois economics to criticise itself, pointed out by Marx at the beginning of Capital, was seen in contemporary Marxism. He dedicated his work to Cuban students who go through the painful process of learning 'eternal truths' in eastern European manuals. He concluded that: Humanity faces many shocks before final liberation, but we cannot arrive there without a radical change in the strategy of the first most important socialist powers.[22]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Conclusion</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">This paper has summarised the analysis which led Guevara to forewarn the collapse of socialism in the socialist bloc. He made an important contribution to both the theory and practice of constructing socialism. He hoped to persuade socialist countries to gradually replace capitalist mechanisms during transition and offered alternative policies to serve this function. His warnings were not heeded and, for the reasons which Guevara predicted, among others, capitalism returned to all those countries. In Cuba, his analysis was revisited in the mid-1980s in the period known as Rectification which pulled the island away from the Soviet model before it collapsed, arguably contributing to the survival of Cuban socialism.</span></span><br />
<h4 style="color: #333399; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 28px; margin-left: 36px; margin-right: 36px; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;">
Notes</h4>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[1] Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 'Reunion Bimestrales', 20 January 1962, in <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">El Che en la Revolución Cubana: Ministerio de Industrias</em>, tomo VI. La Habana: Ministerio de Azúcar, 1966, 147.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[2] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes Críticos a la Economía Política</em>. La Habana: Ciencias Sociales, 2006, 27 & cited by Orlando Borrego in <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">El Camino del Fuego</em>, la Habana: Imagen Contemporánea, 382.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[3] This paper assumes knowledge of the laws governing the operation of the capitalist system expounded by Marx in Capital.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[4] Miguel Figueras, interview, 27 January 2006, Enrique Oltuski, interview, 15 February 2006 & Alfredo Menéndez, interview, 17 February 2005.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[5] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Bimestrales</em>, 21 December 1963, 420.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[6] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Bimestrales</em>, 14 July 1962, 289.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[7] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Bimestrales</em>, 28 September 1962, 318-9.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[8] Guevara, 'On the Concept of Value' in Bertram Silverman (ed) <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate</em>, New York: Atheneum, 234.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[9] Guevara, 'Socialism and Man in Cuba' in Silverman (ed) <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Socialism</em>, 342. </div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[10] Guevara, 'On the Budgetary Finance System', in <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Socialism</em>, 143.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[11] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Budgetary</em>, 42. Guevara's italics.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[12] My book, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution</span>, details these policies.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[13] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Budgetary</em>, 143.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[14] Guevara, 'The Meaning of Socialist Planning' in <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Socialism</em>, 109.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[15] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Bimestrales</em>, 11 July 1964, 505.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[16] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Bimestrales</em>, December 1964, 566-9.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[17] First published in Havana, February 2006 as <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, cited above.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[18] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, 52.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[19] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, 91-2, 185-6, 192-3.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[20] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, 112.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[21] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, 27.</div>
<div style="margin-left: 98.8125px; margin-right: 98px; text-indent: 1em;">
[22] Guevara, <em style="word-spacing: 0.2em;">Apuntes</em>, 25-28 & Borrego, Camino, 381-383.</div>
<br />APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-17244058498995003012012-11-30T02:00:00.000-05:002013-04-01T11:27:05.945-04:00Resolution on the Situation in Syria<b>by International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</b><br />
<br />The plenary of the ICMLPO, held for the first time in Africa, reaffirms its support for the right of the Syrian people to live under a democratic regime: a regime that guarantees freedom, equality, social justice and dignity, as well as assures the unity and total independence of the country, including the recovery of the Golan Heights occupied by Zionism since 1967.<br /><br />The ICMLPO:<br /><br />1. Denounces the dangerous development of events in Syria. The popular movement of protest has been transformed into a destructive civil war. The bloodthirsty repression is striking the people, and since the beginning, the Assad regime has rejected any democratic reform that would satisfy the aspirations of the Syrian people. This situation is the consequence of the foreign reactionary, imperialist and Zionist intervention, through Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which masked by the so-called “Free Syrian Army” and under the pretext of “saving the Syria people”<br /><br />2. We reaffirm that this war has nothing to do with the interests of the Syrian people and their aspirations. On the contrary, it serves the reactionary forces of the country, the region and internationally. Syria is at the moment the place of confrontation between, on the one side the U.S., France and Israel and Arab and Turkish reaction that are trying to subject Syria to Western rule and make it break its ties with Iran and Hezbollah. On the other side, Russia and China are supporting the regime to preserve their strategic interests in Syria and the region, after having lost their influence in Libya.<br /><br />3. We reject all intervention by NATO in Syria under any pretext, given the dangers that this represents for the Syrian people, the peoples of the region and world peace in general. The Conference calls on the Turkish people to oppose Turkey’s intervention in Syria. It sends a call to the workers and peoples of the Western countries, in the first place of the United States, Great Britain and France, whose leaders are threatening military intervention in Syria, to pressure their governments to stop them from carrying out their criminal strategy that caused disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, etc. in the past<br /><br />4. It is up to the Syrian people, in all cases, to determine their own future. The ICMLPO calls on the Syrian patriotic and democratic forces to unite to save their country from the claws of the Assad regime and the armed gangs and to prevent the foreign powers from mortgaging their future and making use of a part of their minorities to undermine their unity. The ICMLPO calls on those forces to strive to build a new, democratic, secular, independent and united Syria in which the different religions and nationalities live together in freedom and equality.<br /><br />5. Calls on the patriotic, democratic and progressive forces of the region to urgently mobilize and to undertake the necessary measures of solidarity to support the patriotic and democratic forces of Syria, forces that must act to end the slaughters perpetrated against the Syrian people, to stop the destruction of the country and prevent the foreign intervention, to facilitate dialogue among its inhabitants to achieve their aspirations and break with the tyranny and foreign domination.<br /><br /><b>Organisation pour la construction d’un parti communiste ouvrier d’Allemagne<br /><br />Parti Communiste des Ouvriers du Danemark – APK<br /><br />Parti Communiste d’Espagne (marxiste – léniniste) – PCE(ml)<br /><br />Plateforme Communiste d’Italie<br /><br />Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de France – PCOF<br /><br />Organisation Marxiste Léniniste Révolution de Norvège – Revolusjon !<br /><br />Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Turquie - TDKP<br /><br />Parti des Travailleurs de Tunisie - PT<br /><br />Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Côte d’Ivoire – PCRCI</b>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-69139189852581001662012-11-30T01:30:00.000-05:002013-04-01T10:59:46.596-04:00Resolution on the West African Region and Mali<b>by the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</b><br />
<br />
Since 2010, the West African region and particularly the sub-Saharan zone has been marked by the armed interference and intervention of the imperialist powers. The objectives of those actions are:<br />
<br />
* Political, geostrategic and military, related to the struggle for the redivision of the world and of the African continent.<br />
<br />
* Economic (access to the petroleum of the Gulf of Guinea and the Ivory Coast; to the uranium of Niger and the precious metals that abound in the region; to solar energy; cacao, coffee, etc.<br />
<br />
* The struggle of the Anglo-Saxon (U.S. and Great Britain) and French imperialists to prevent the penetration into the region by new actors such as China, India, Brazil, etc.<br />
<br />
* The will of the imperialist powers to crush any type of protest by the popular masses, who are condemned to misery and lacking in political freedom, as well as the repression that they suffer carried out by the corrupt puppet powers, and their desire to crush any revolutionary insurrectionary movement.<br />
<br />
The military-political crisis after the military coup d’état of the National Committee for the Defense and Restoration of the State (CNRDE) of March 22, 2012, as well as the military occupation of the North of Mali, begun January 22, 2012, which covers two thirds of the national territory, an occupation carried out by the National Movement for the Liberation of AZAWAD (MNLA) and the “jihadists” (AQMI, ANSAR, DINE, MUJAO, BOKO, HARAM…) must be put in this context.<br />
<br />
The military-political crisis in Mali has grave consequences for the neighboring countries, particularly Algeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, etc. and the group of the countries of the west African region (destabilization of States, proliferation of arms, massive displacement of populations towards the South of Mali, and thousands of refugees in other neighboring countries).<br />
<br />
The military-political crisis in Mali is also a threat to the interests of imperialism, particularly French imperialism, in that country and the whole region. That is why there are preparatory maneuvers for an open military intervention that the troops provided by the members countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) can carry out, with the consent and logistical support of the great imperialist powers (France and U.S.A.) and of the UN under the pretext of “making a secure transition,” of “restoring constitutional life” and of “restoring Mali’s territorial integrity.” This is a reactionary plan by the imperialist powers and their allies in the region to maintain and reinforce their domination.<br />
<br />
Faced with this serious situation, the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO):<br />
<br />
* Denounces and condemns the puppet powers that have opened their territories (particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mauritania and Senegal) to the troops of imperialist aggression.<br />
<br />
* Denounces and condemns the proclamation of independence of the State of AZAWAD by the MNLA, instrument of French imperialism.<br />
<br />
* Denounces and condemns the crimes perpetrated against the peoples of the North of Mali by terrorist group AQMI and the Islamist groups ANSAR-DINE, MUJAO and the MNLA.<br />
<br />
* Supports the brave resistance of the peoples, particularly of the youth, against oppression and medieval and obscurantist practices.<br />
<br />
* Denounces and condemns the reactionary plan of the ECOWAS in Mali.<br />
<br />
* Calls on the proletariat and peoples of the imperialist countries, particularly France, to support the Malian people in their struggle for a revolutionary solution of the military-political crisis.<br />
<br />
* Calls for solidarity and support for the struggle of the peoples of the West African region against imperialist domination and their African lackeys.<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Tunisia, November of 2012.</span>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-19558724113078942902012-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:002013-04-01T10:58:05.225-04:00On the International Situation<b>by the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)</b><br />
<br />
The most significant development in the world capitalist economy, since the last meeting of our Conference is undoubtedly the intensification of the symptoms that prove the trend toward a new recession in all fields, after a certain rise in the second quarter of 2009, followed by a period of stagnation. Despite the trend towards a rise in the second quarter, world industrial production shrank 6.6% in 2009 and rose 10% in 2010. The industrial production of June 2010 exceeded its previous level before the crisis of 2008. But starting from the first quarter of 2011, the growth lost momentum and fell to 0.4% in the last quarter of that year. In 2011, world industrial production declined by half (5.4%) compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, after a weak rise, the growth declined. The growth was 1.8% in the first quarter, 0% in the second and 4% in the last quarter of 20l2. All the data show that, despite fluctuations, a decline persists that began in the first quarter of 2011, which led to zero level in the middle of this year [2012] and is heading for a new period of decline.<br />
<br />
Industrial production in the European Union, which is a larger economic power than the U.S.; in Japan, which is third largest world economic power; in India, one of the largest economies in Asia, have had consecutive declines in the third quarter of 2011 and in the first two quarters of 2012 compared to the same period last year. Industrial production in Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America, has also entered into decline in the last two quarters. North African countries like Tunisia and Egypt, and other countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Peru, are in similar situations.<br />
<br />
The rate of growth of industrial production in China, in the first and second quarters of 2012, was 11.6% and 9.5%, while it was 14.4% in 2010 and 13.8% in 2011. The downward trend continued in July, 9.2% and in August, 8.9%. China, which grew by 12.9% and 12.3% in the crisis years (2008 and 2009), was, along with India, one of the factors that prevented a further sharpening of the crisis and that allowed the world economy to enter into a new period of growth. The situation in that country has changed considerably. Now it is a country that is accumulating stockpiles in the steel industry, which is facing a slowdown in the construction sector, which has important holes in the financial sector. Those countries that saw lower growth rates despite the stimulus measures to revive the domestic market, are now unable to play the same role as before. The industrial production of Mexico and the Confederation of Independent States (CIS), including Russia, continues to grow. However, while the industrial production in the major countries and the volume of international trade are falling, for these countries also, a decrease is expected.<br />
<br />
Unlike simple commodity production, a more rapid growth in the production of the means of production, compared to consumer goods, is a condition for expanded reproduction. But with the capitalist mode of production producing for an unknown market, with the sole purpose of obtaining profits, a consistent development of the two sectors is impossible and this is one of the factors that makes crises inevitable. In the last three years, as well as before, these two sectors have not developed consistently. In the first sector, demand has fallen, the volume of growth has fallen, stockpiles are accumulating and capacity utilization has fallen. In 2010 and 2011 the steel industry, an important component of the production of means of production, grew faster than the consumer goods sector. According to data from the World Steel Union, the growth rate in production was 15% in 2010 compared to the previous year, but in 2011 the figure fell to 6.2%. In January raw steel production saw a sharp drop to 8%, and it has stayed at 0.8% in the period from January to May of 2012. In August of 2012 raw steel production fell 1% in relation to 2011. In the same period, raw steel production rose 3.3% in Japan (a significant increase if one takes into account the major fall due to the tsunami) and 2.6% in India. It has fallen by 1.7% in China, 3.8% in the U.S., 4.4% in the EU, 7.1% in Germany, 15.5% in Italy and 3.8% in the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). The iron stockpiles in Chinese ports reached 98.15 million tons (an increase of 2.9%) belonging to the steel complexes. And stockpiles of Chinese coal are at their highest level in the last three years.<br />
<br />
In manufacturing, a very important element of the production of the means of production, production and demand have declined in many countries. This decline has been one of the reasons for the cooling of industrial production in Germany, for example. In the capitalist mode of production, the agricultural sector, by its level of development and its technical basis, is always behind industry. Agricultural production is largely affected by the natural conditions, climate changes, droughts, storms and other natural catastrophes. Agricultural production is increasingly under the control of the monopolies and the speculative maneuvers of finance capital. In 2010 world agricultural production, including the production of cereals, has shrunk due to various factors such as bad weather or the expansion of plots reserved for bio-fuel production. On the other hand, in 2011, agricultural production has progressed thanks to better weather conditions, and also to increased demand and higher prices due to speculation. For example, wheat production increased by about 6%.<br />
<br />
In 2009 the volume of world trade has declined 12.7%. According to data from the World Trade Organization (WTO), that volume registered a growth of 13.8% in 2010, and only 5% in 2011 (according to figures from the CPL, the growth was 15.2% in 2010, and 5.8% in 2011). The volume of world trade has grown by 0.5% in the final quarter of last year, and by 0.9% and 0.5% in the first and second quarter of 2012 respectively. During the first two months of the third quarter (June and July), the volume of world trade recorded a negative growth of -1.5% and -0.2% compared to the previous months.<br />
<br />
World industrial production reached and surpassed the pre-crisis level of 2008, in June 2010, while the volume of international trade did not surpass this until November 2011. If we compare the data of July 2012 with the level reached before the crisis of 2008 (that is, April 2008), we see an increase of 9.5% in world industrial production and an increase of 5% in the total volume of growth in world trade.<br />
<br />
The data on the increase of the volume of world trade is one of the most important that shows an evolutionary trend, although it does not exactly reflect the volume of growth of world trade. These data show that for the last three years, the world capitalist production has increased rapidly and that the capitalist world is once again facing the problem of overproduction, which is the source of all its crises. Decreased production, closing or reduction in work capacity of enterprises, rising unemployment and poverty; needs in abundance and the restriction of markets are the inevitable consequences of overproduction. The sharp slowdown in world industrial production has been shown above. The events in North Africa and the austerity measures taken in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc., are factors that are aggravating this process and its consequences.<br />
<div style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<br />
Towards a New Financial Crisis</div>
<br />
The crisis of 2008 broke out as a financial crisis, at the same time as the crisis deepened in other sectors, such as industry and trade, it developed with contacts in the finance sector with serious consequences for the following period. The most destructive consequences for the monopolies and the eventual collapse of the financial sector were avoided by transferring of billions of dollars into the coffers of the monopolies by the capitalist States. This rescue operation was only possible by accepting a debt to financial markets with very high interest rates, and the issuance of money into the markets. The end result is an extreme State debt, an increase in the debt and interest burden, a rise in the price of gold and the loss of value (devaluation) of almost all currencies.<br />
<br />
Countries at different levels have entered a vicious circle that has elements of new currency and financial crises, in which they can finance their budget deficit, their debts and interests, having to borrow again. The capitalist world began a period of growth starting in the second quarter of 2009, with the weight inherited from the 2008 crisis. However, this period of growth has enabled recipient countries to breathe a little, turn the wheel that was on the verge of suffocating them. The growth of the world economy stopped and even lowered the price of gold for a moment. In some countries, such as China that had a significant growth rate, the ratio of the public debt to GDP decreased. But in other countries, such as Japan and the U.S., a substantial debt has continued, even during the period of growth of the capitalist world economy. The U.S. public debt represents the sum of $16 billion (the debt of Germany, which grew until the second half of this year, is 8 billion). Other capitalist countries are in a similar situation. The increasing debt is almost the condition of financial sustainability and economic growth. And this is the path that is leading directly to a new financial crisis that may profoundly affect all sectors of the economy.<br />
<br />
The highly indebted countries have not been able to achieve a period of growth after the financial crisis and the fall in world industrial production that took place between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009; this period has led to a financial crisis that has affected the other sectors of the economy that has led them to bankruptcy. The first example of this process was in Greece, where the weakness was such that the industry, very weak, was largely liquidated when it joined the EU. After the 2008 crisis, in 2009, the economy of this country did not grow, and by the end of the year it was on the verge of bankruptcy. This country, followed by others such as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, etc., has not been able to get out of the crisis and stagnation. However, important differences should be noted in its debt in relation to the GDP.<br />
<br />
Austerity measures never seen before, except in times of war or crisis as deep as 1929, have been imposed on the indebted countries. The result of these measures has been to impoverish the people, destroy the economy and reduce the internal market and foreign trade. These austerity plans have been applied (despite the opposition and struggle of the working class and peoples) under the control of the creditor imperialist powers, the international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and European Union, and above all with the support of the collaborator monopoly bourgeoisie and its representatives, these enemies of the people. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign banks, completely betraying the national interests. The national pride of the people, their right to sovereignty and independence have been trampled upon. A country like Britain that had a strong financial sector, but since mid-2011 has seen its industrial production and its economy reduced, has been forced to march along with the countries implementing austerity measures.<br />
The significant decrease in the volume of growth of world industrial production, which began in the second quarter of 2011, is developing the elements of a new international financial crisis and is contributing to the degradation of the situation of the highly indebted countries. They failed to enter a period of growth parallel to the process of growth of the world capitalist economy following the crisis of 2008-2009. While the debate over the future of the Euro and the European Union is sharpening, the communiqués on the economic trends of the advanced capitalist countries and the indebted countries have sown confusion in the stock markets, barometers of the capitalist economy. Although world industrial and agricultural production and the volume of international -trade have exceeded the highest level before the crisis of 2008, the indices of the most influential stock markets remain below that level.<br />
<br />
Although we are not yet experiencing the outbreak of a financial crisis of major proportions, everything makes it appear that the process is advancing towards such an eventuality. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (FED) has announced that it will not raise interest rates and that it will start a process of purchasing bonds for an amount of $2,000 billion dollars, at the rate of $40 billion per month. Japan has announced a similar measure and has begun a program of buying bonds to the tune of $695 billion.<br />
<br />
Germany has had to relax its rigid policy towards the indebted countries and the European fund for the intervention in countries facing difficulties has increased. China, along with measures of revival that it has already applied, announced a new investment package to renovate its infrastructure. The price of gold is rising again. In 2008, the intense intervention of the capitalist States began after the outbreak of the crisis. Now, however, the capitalist States have gone into action before the shocks and bankruptcies at the same level as in 2008 start in the major capitalist countries and worldwide. However, these interventions, which can have some influence on the process of development, cannot change the orientation and the inevitable outcome.<br />
<div style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<br />
The Sharpening of the Inter-Imperialist Contradictions and the Growing Danger of Conflicts</div>
<br />
Uneven, unbalanced development is the absolute law of capitalist development. This process after the crisis of 2008 was not balanced, it deepened the antagonistic contradictions in the evolution and development of the relations between sectors, countries, regions, production and markets, etc. The industrial production of the advanced capitalist countries, including the U.S. and Japan, except Germany (ignoring the high level of 2008), did not reach the level of 2005. Germany, which has exceeded the pre-crisis level and has had a growth in industrial production of 11.5% in 2010 and 9% in 2011, has consolidated its position within the European Union and the Euro zone. Without separating itself from the bloc led by the United States, it has penetrated into new markets, new fields of investment, sources of raw materials, basing itself on its economic and financial strength, and above all, on its technical superiority in the industry of machine construction.<br />
As in previous years, China, both because of its industrial production and its economy in general, was the country that had the most significant growth among major economies. It has modernized and increased the technical basis of its industry, and it continues to reduce the difference in its level of development with the other imperialist powers. Russia is going through a similar process. For the United States and its allies, these two countries, one considered as a vast market and production area with a trained and cheap work force, and the other a solid country, appear today as their main rivals to fight against.<br />
<br />
The inevitable result of the change in the balance of power is the great demand for a piece of the pie by the emerging forces, using all means to get it and a new redivision of the world according the new balance of power. The recent development of the world economy is another factor that exacerbates the contradictions and the struggles among the major imperialist powers. Last year in the Middle East, in Africa and the whole world, the rivalry and struggle to expand their sphere of influence has accelerated. The production of weapons, the arms race is intensifying. China and Russia have renewed the technical basis of their arms industry. According to a report by the Congress of the United States, arms sales by these countries have tripled in 2011.<br />
<br />
China, which increasingly needs more raw materials, energy and fields of investment for its growing economy, and Russia, which is slowly recovering, are intensifying their expansionist desires and their efforts to get their piece of the pie. Therefore, it is a top priority for the U.S. and its allies to prevent China, a young imperialist power in full development, and Russia, from achieving new markets in the field of energy and raw materials. When the Obama administration states that beginning next year the priority strategic objective for the United States will be Asia, and that the deployment of the U.S. military will be renewed according to the new situation, this is merely affirming that reality. The crisis of the archipelagos shows the level of tension between Japan and China; Japan has declared its intention to improve its military capability. The military maneuvers in the region have intensified.<br />
<br />
The consequences of the change in the balance of power in the world have been clearly visible since last year. Russia and China were forced to accept Western imperialist intervention in Libya, even though that intervention was contrary to their interests. The intervention ended with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, the near collapse of the country, the destruction of its economy, the degradation of working and living conditions, the transfer of the country's wealth into the hands of the Western imperialist States, etc. Russia and China lost a good part of their positions, including their oil agreements. After the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Mali has been dragged into war and divided. But the main objective is Syria. The attempts by the Western imperialist powers to topple the Syrian regime and put in a puppet government to fully control the country are intensifying. The United States and its allies have mobilized all their forces within Syria and outside of it in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They are stirring up the religious contradictions, they use and manipulate the popular discontent towards the regime and they try to prepare the ground for a military intervention as in Libya. Meanwhile Russia is arming Syria, strengthening its military base located in that country and sending more warships to the Mediterranean.<br />
<br />
To bring down the Syrian regime, put in place a puppet government, dominate the oil-rich Middle East, control the eastern Mediterranean, block the expansion of China and Russia in the region and expel them as they did in Libya, to encircle Iran, weaken its influence and liquidate its closest allies, are very important objectives. Syria is the only country in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean where Russia has a military base. This small country has become a place of intense struggle between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. The Middle East is a powder keg on the verge of religious conflicts.<br />
<br />
Contrary to what they did in Libya, Russia and China are opposing a military intervention that would alter the balance in the Middle East and result in the domination of the United States and its allies over Syria. But they have left the door open for a possible compromise that would guarantee their interests and renew the Syrian regime which is having more and more difficulties to survive.<br />
<br />
As the case of Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Ivory Coast and Libya show, the imperialist interventions that have had the support of the liberal "defenders" of freedom and democracy, of the pseudo-socialist parties that emerged from the former revisionist parties, have resulted in increased military budgets at the expense of the workers, in the destruction of the productive forces of those countries, in many disasters, the impoverishment and decline in all social aspects. The aspiration of the peoples for the right to sovereignty and national independence, democracy and freedom has never been the concern of the occupiers. Their objective was to further prolong their system maintained by the defeat inflicted on the working class in the middle of the last century, a defeat that guaranteed their super-profits, the expansion of their spheres of influence and the weakening of their rivals. The imperialist powers, which are using all means to achieve this goal, do not lack in demagoguery and low maneuvers to disorient the people's anger.<br />
<br />
Now a period of sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions is beginning, which economic-financial and political-military interventions will multiply. It is increasingly important to fight against such intervention, to develop the united fight of the workers and peoples, in both the advanced and backward countries,.<br />
<div style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<br />
Organize the Resistance of the Workers in the New Stormy Period</div>
<br />
The army of unemployed is growing on the world level, especially in countries in total-debt crisis, in the countries in which the economy is declining, stagnating or is in crisis. In Greece and Spain, unemployment has reached 25%. In these countries, unemployment among the youths, including college graduates, reached 50%. In the Euro zone in the second quarter of 2012, the level of unemployment reached 11.2%, according to official figures. In countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where manufacturing has fallen from 9.6% to 7.5% in the first quarter of this year (2012), the number of unemployed continues to grow. In South Africa, the most developed country on the continent, the unemployment rate exceeds 25%.<br />
<br />
In the current period, in almost all fields, from education to health care, drastic measures have been taken, the retirement age has been delayed and pensions have fallen. The gains of the working class worldwide are targeted for cuts or elimination. While direct taxes on the workers are increasing, no measures are taken to disturb the local and international monopolies, when even within the framework of this system one could increase taxes on the banks and the local and foreign monopolies. Wages continue to fall, etc. Many countries are suffering from a process of absolute impoverishment.<br />
<br />
In recent years practices have been imposed worldwide such as sub-contracting labor, precarious and part-time work, an increase in the age for retirement, etc. In Germany, for example, one of the most developed countries in the world that has had significant growth rates in industrial production, according to the Federal Administration of Statistics, 15.6% of the population lives below the poverty line, a figure that rises to 26% among the immigrant population.<br />
<br />
Last year, on a world scale and in each country, the workers and peoples movement has developed with various demands, in different forms and also at different levels. The struggles carried out in those countries with a “debt crisis” have been outstanding for their broad social base, for their responses and the experiences gained. The miners' strike in South Africa, the youth movement and the strikes in Chile, the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt, etc. are powerful examples of the workers and peoples struggles.<br />
Starting with Greece, Spain and Italy, in various countries with a “debt crisis,” strikes, general strikes and huge demonstrations have taken place. In Greece and Spain, hundreds of thousands of people have expressed their anger in front of the parliaments on the days when these were voting for austerity measures. But the workers and peoples movement, despite some more advanced attempts, has remained within the framework of peaceful demonstrations, general strikes of one or two days and limited resistance. The strikes of long duration, the resistance or occupation of factories, have been limited to one enterprise or one sector.<br />
The austerity measures have affected not only the proletariat and semi-proletarian masses of the cities and countryside; they have also affected the petty bourgeoisie and non-monopoly bourgeois strata. Even the less dynamic strata, the traditional base of the bourgeois parties, have been mobilized given the current situation. The social base of the struggle against the bourgeoisie in Power and against imperialism has expanded, to the point where in some dependent countries the mobilization has taken the character of a movement of the whole nation, except for a handful of monopolists. The conditions are maturing for the working class and its revolutionary parties, as representatives and the vanguard of the nation, to decide to organize and advance the movement and the united front of the people.<br />
<br />
But despite the great movement, the groups of international finance capital and the local monopoly bourgeoisies have not given in (except in the recent delay of the austerity measures in Portugal). They have decided to implement these measures even at the cost of demeaning the image of the parliaments and weakening their social base. However, the masses are realizing through their own experience the impossibility of repelling the attacks with one or two day strikes or through peaceful demonstrations. Sharper forms of struggle and unlimited general strike are beginning to be considered by the more advanced strata.<br />
It is clear that the bourgeoisie in Power, with their hostile character towards the people, is assuming a position of national betrayal. The traditional parties of the bourgeoisie and parliaments have lost credibility and the mass support for those parties is weakening (especially toward those in government that are implementing austerity measures). The social basis of monopoly capital is weakening. Among the masses who have felt their national pride hurt by the imperialists, the discontent, anger and will to struggle against the major imperialist powers, beginning with the United States and Germany, against institutions like the IMF or the EU, and against the local monopoly bourgeoisie that is collaborating with them, is developing.<br />
<br />
The trade union bureaucracy and reformist parties and social trends are following a backward line of "least resistance," not only in their forms of organization and struggle, but also at the level of political demands and platform. Clearly, this attitude is contributing to weakening their influence among the workers. The attacks and harshness of the social conditions are also affecting the lower strata of the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy and are sharpening the contradictions within their ranks.<br />
<br />
The struggles in the countries with “debt crisis” are being developed on a program of protest against the bourgeois governments and parties, against institutions such as the IMF and the EU that are imposing draconian measures and they are demanding their withdrawal. At first this was natural and understandable in the context of a spontaneous movement. But the inability to go beyond those narrow limits is one of the major weaknesses of the movement. This weakness can be overcome with the work of agitation that shows the masses the way out of this difficult situation in which the people and the country find themselves, denouncing the social forces that are an obstacle to that way out. This work of agitation is reinforced by putting forward appropriate demands, slogans and forms of struggle among the masses.<br />
<br />
Especially in Greece, certain small groups (that also have weaknesses) have proposed relatively advanced demands and platforms. But the forces capable of influencing the movement are not even concerned with organizing the work necessary to promote the fight on all fronts. The absence or great weakness of a revolutionary class party, has been felt strongly, as it cannot influence the movement.<br />
<br />
Linked to the evolution of the world economy, the period that is beginning will be one of further degradation of the living and working conditions for the workers and peoples, a period of intense economic and political attacks, of discontent, anger and militancy among workers, as well as sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions and conflicts. We must draw lessons and conclusions from the recent developments and the historical experience of the working class and peoples; we must advance, renewing our work and reorganizing our parties.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Tunisia, November 2012</b>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-40950766927549368282012-11-30T00:30:00.000-05:002013-04-01T10:54:41.003-04:00The Colonies and Oppressed Nations in the Struggle for Freedom<b>by the League Against Imperialism and for National Independence</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Resolutions adopted by the Executive Committee of the League Against Imperialism and for National Independence</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Berlin, June 2, 1931</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Published by the International Secretariat of the League Against Imperialism</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Friedrichstrasse 24, Berlin SW 48</i></div>
</div>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<strong>INTRODUCTION</strong></h3>
<div align="center">
<strong>Two Revolutionary Documents of Great Political Importance</strong></div>
<br />
The League against Imperialism and for National Independence held a plenary session of its Executive Committee in Berlin from the 30th May to the 2nd June inclusive. This plenary session of the leadership of a great international fighting organisation took place during a period of severe world economic and agrarian crisis; at a time when the tremendous wave of struggle for national freedom in the colonies which has been evident for some time is gradually reaching its culmination and shaking the foundations of imperialist dominance.<br />
<br />
The far-reaching revolutionary significance of the two main political resolutions adopted by the Executive Committee at its plenary session cannot be too greatly stressed, for these resolutions clearly reflect the opinions which received expression and approval during the course of the discussions. With the publication of these two resolutions in pamphlet form, the International Secretariat of the League against Imperialism offers the mass movement against imperialism a weapon of the greatest possible effectiveness. It is the duty of all the sections of the League and of all other anti-imperialist organisations to make practical use of this important weapon in their struggle against imperialism and to carry the ideas contained in these resolutions into practice.<br />
<br />
The characteristic feature of this plenary session, a feature which distinguishes it from former international sessions, was the circumstance that not only were the anti-imperialist masses in the colonial and imperialist countries represented, in the persons of their most reliable and trusted leaders and pioneers, but that a series of organisations and fighting groups were also represented which aim at emancipating the various oppressed peoples and national minorities in Europe (for instance, in Western Ukrainia, in West White Russia, in Croatia, in Macedonia, in Thrace, in Kossovo, the Slovakian, Hungarian and German minorities in Czechoslovakia, and the national minorities in Roumania). The presence of youth representatives and the special discussion of the youth problem also increased the importance of the session. Delegates of the most varied origins and of varied political opinions took an active part in the fruitful discussions which developed out of the many reports which were presented in the name of the International Secretariat on the situation in the colonial countries, and on the situation of the oppressed peoples and national minorities in Europe. The common aim of the delegates was to give the revolutionary activity of the League a still greater impetus and to link up still more closely the anti-imperialist struggles on an international scale and thus to strengthen their effectiveness.<br />
<br />
Without exaggeration it is possible to declare that this session whose results can be seen in the valuable reports presented, in the clear demands put forward, and in the categoric line laid down by it for the political activity of the League, will be a decisive turning point in the development of the League.<br />
<br />
What is the meaning of this turning point? It means that the League has finally overcome all hindrances and delays in its activity and that it has now taken up a political course in the direction of a systematic revolutionary mass work on the basis of the consolidation of its organisation and with clear political principles.<br />
<br />
The development of the League is a process which is closely connected with the whole development of the struggles for the independence of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In the very first period of the League development, at the time of the inaugural congress in Brussels, certain groups which approached the League played a progressive role, for instance, the Chinese Kuomintang, the Mexican Nationalist Party, etc. It was not possible to refuse permission to such organisations to take part in the Brussels congress but, of course, they had to be excluded from the ranks of the League as soon as they left the front of the real anti-imperialist struggle and became the counter-revolutionary allies of the imperialists and the oppressors of the masses of their own people.<br />
<br />
On the basis of the experiences of the first period of the development of the League, the international congress in Frankfurt am Main gave the propagandist and organisational activities of the League a new direction, a direction towards the toiling masses in town and country and their revolutionary organisations. At the same time the congress warned the masses against the bourgeois so-called anti-imperialist organisations (the national reformists and the social democrats), and against the leaders of the vacillating circles of intellectuals and petty-bourgeois which are all too prone to capitulate under certain circumstances to imperialism, whilst maintaining superficially the appearance of continuing the struggle for independence to its end. The resolutions of this congress, whose correctness has been confirmed during the course of the last two years by the development of the national-revolutionary movement in the colonial countries, abolished the danger of opportunist degeneration in the League and placed it squarely on the basis of an uncompromising anti-imperialist struggle. Despite this, however, the social democrats of the left-wing (Maxton, Fimmen) and the so-called left-wing national reformists (Nehru, Hatta, etc.) remained in the League and attempted to play the same dangerous and demoralising role as had previously been played by the exposed and expelled traitors. The struggle against these elements was not always easy. There were even moments when these treacherous deserters to the camp of the imperialist counter-revolution considered the idea of an offensive against the League with a view to obtaining control of the organisation and turning it into an instrument of corruption and deception in the services of imperialism.<br />
<br />
However, in the period from the Frankfurt congress to the present plenary session of the Executive Committee, the prestige of the League increased considerably, particularly in the colonial countries where sympathising groups and even organised sections of the League sprang up spontaneously. In various countries the organisations affiliated to the League made an attempt to interest the masses of the toilers in the anti-imperialist struggle and to win them for active participation in this struggle.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that in this phase of the League development also the concrete and positive organisational results were unsatisfactory. Despite favourable objective conditions the League has not been successful in consolidating its organisations in the various countries and in fastening its roots deeply into the broad masses of the toiling population. The organisation of the anti-imperialist youth movement is also in its first stages only and must be energetically developed.<br />
<br />
All in all it can be said that up to the present the League has contented itself with conducting anti-imperialist agitation and propaganda without succeeding in leading energetically the movements which were caused by this agitation and propaganda and without lending these movements an organisational form. Up to the present the activity of the League has consisted of nothing more than a purely moral support of the national-revolutionary movement, and an enlistment of the sympathies of others for this movement. Today a new period of development opens up: the foundation of local and central organisations which will be able to take the initiative themselves and to prepare and carry out lasting anti-imperialist mass actions and campaigns.<br />
<br />
The plenary session has rendered the movement a great service by exposing in the resolutions which follow, the organisational and other weaknesses of the League, and by urgently stressing the necessity of a change in the sense indicated above, whilst at the .same time laying down the most important tasks to be carried out by the League.<br />
<br />
By publicly condemning the treachery of the social democratic and national-reformist hangers-on against the cause of national independence and by finally expelling these traitors from the ranks of the League, the Executive Committee has cleared the air and assured the League of the possibility of speedy development.<br />
<br />
From now on hangers-on of this character will be unable to enter the ranks of the League. The six main paragraphs which form the close of the general resolution and which are intended to serve as the basis for the future program of the League, leave no room for ambiguity and deprive all the conscious or unconscious supporters of imperialism of any possibility of slipping into the ranks of the real anti-imperialist organisations. Whoever is not prepared to support these principles unreservedly, whoever is not prepared to recognise them expressly as inviolable principles, whoever is not prepared to work for their realisation, may under no circumstances be permitted to enter the ranks of the League against Imperialism. Whoever raises objections to these principles must be ruthlessly condemned as an enemy of the struggle for national independence and as a supporter of imperialism. The slightest abandonment of these principles in the future must be regarded as a crime. The detailed program of the League which will be drawn up as quickly as possible, will confirm and strengthen this policy.<br />
<br />
The work of the plenary session with regard to the oppressed nationalities and national minorities in Europe did much to give the session its special character. The resolution, which was unanimously adopted after a detailed discussion, opens the way for an understanding of the whole complex of questions raised by the struggle of the oppressed peoples and national minorities for emancipation, and shows clearly the revolutionary solution.<br />
<br />
The discussion of these questions with the best representatives of the national-revolutionary struggle in Europe, the winning of their support and systematic co-operation on the basis of this resolution, opens up a new field of work for the League and considerably extends its basis of operations. The League never ignored the tragic fate of 42 millions of people who are nationally oppressed in Europe. A number of representatives of these people were present at former congresses and conferences, but for the first time this problem was made the subject of a thorough discussion; for the first time the International Secretariat of the League was instructed to deal with this field of work systematically; and for the first time the attitude of the League in this question was expressed in a political resolution which at the same time represents a program of action. This circumstance is of invaluable significance in connection with the rapid growth of the danger of an armed imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union and of the danger of a new imperialist war in which the masses of the oppressed peoples are intended to be used as cannon-fodder.<br />
<br />
The League against Imperialism, which is taking the initiative in this question at the most favourable moment, thus undertakes to serve as a concentration point for all anti-imperialist national-revolutionary movements, whether these movements are in the colonial countries or movements of the oppressed peoples and national minorities in Europe. The League undertakes the tasks of uniting these movements with the revolutionary struggle of the toiling masses in the imperialist countries in a joint struggle against imperialist oppression. With this united front of all anti-imperialist forces in the colonial and semi-colonial countries and in Europe the League aims at securing full national independence for the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and the full right of self-determination, including the right to separate from the State to which they are at present attached, for all oppressed peoples and national minorities in Europe.<br />
<br />
The main object of the League against Imperialism remains the furtherance of the national-revolutionary movement for independence in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. A simple arithmetical demonstration immediately shows the necessity of this, for while there are 42 millions of people belonging to the oppressed nationalities in Europe, there is an immense mass of over a thousand million colonial slaves who are writhing under the iron heel of a murderous imperialist system of oppression and exploitation. One thing is certain, that the system of exploitation, slavery and terror which oppresses the one is as bloody and brutal as the system which oppresses the other, and that a simultaneous and joint struggle of these two movements is necessary in order to destroy the whole apparatus of terror and oppression on which the imperialist system of exploitation is based, and at the same time to overthrow this system for ever.<br />
<br />
We recommend an anti-imperialist fighters, and all those who sympathise with the national-revolutionary struggle of the oppressed peoples for freedom and wish to support this struggle, to read these resolutions with great care and to do their best to spread a knowledge of their contents as widely as possible. The realisation of the principles contained in these resolutions offers the best guarantee that within a comparatively short space of time the anti-imperialist movements will win the unity and solidarity which they lack to-day, and thus increased power to shake the foundations of imperialist dominance, and to defend the Soviet Union, the only existing anti-imperialist State in the world, against the danger of an armed imperialist intervention.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
The International Secretariat of the<br />
League against Imperialism and for National Independence</div>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<strong>POLITICAL RESOLUTION</strong></h3>
<div align="center">
<strong>Adopted by the Executive Committee of the League Against Imperialism at its Session in Berlin on June 2, 1931</strong></div>
<div align="center">
<strong>Growing Anti-Imperialist Revolt of Colonial Masses</strong></div>
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>a) Asia.</strong></div>
<br />
The struggle of all the oppressed peoples to release themselves from the yoke of imperialism has increased tremendously in strength and extent. In China millions of peasants under the leadership of the working class have formed their own armies and are now carrying on a heroic struggle against the forces of the counter-revolutionary Kuomintang and against the imperialists. The magnificent struggle of the Chinese workers and peasants for national independence, for the land, and for political power shows all other oppressed and exploited colonial peoples the only way to victory in the struggle against imperialism.<br />
<br />
In India the masses of the people are beginning to realise that emancipation from the yoke of British imperialism cannot be won with the treacherous tactics of passivity and non-violence, cannot be won by coming to compromises with the enemy. The working class in India is beginning to use the weapon of the mass strike. It is beginning to understand that a united front of hundreds of millions must be organised together with the broad masses of the toiling peasantry against British imperialism. Amongst the revolutionary youth and the revolutionary intellectuals there is a growing opposition to Gandhism and to "left-wing" social reformism. And at the same time there is an increasing tendency to take up a really revolutionary attitude towards British imperialism.<br />
<br />
The oppressed masses of Indo-China are fighting desperately in the foremost ranks of the great anti-imperialist struggle and showing a magnificent front against the fearful white terror waged against them by French imperialism.<br />
<br />
The revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle is surging higher and higher in Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, Tripoli, Syria, Algeria and all other Arabian countries. Italian fascism has succeeded in slaughtering tens of thousands of insurrectionary Arabs in Tripoli, but it has not succeeded in breaking the fighting spirit of the insurrectionaries. The revolutionary insurrection of the masses of the Arab people in Spanish Morocco and its bloody suppression by the provisional government of the bourgeois republicans and the Spanish socialists represents only the beginning of fresh struggles in this section of Arabian territory.<br />
<br />
Despite the brutal regime of terror established by Japanese imperialism, the colonial peoples under the Japanese yoke are conducting an heroic struggle for freedom. In Formosa there was an insurrection of the native tribes against the Japanese oppressors.<br />
<br />
The workers of the Philippine Islands have now formed their own revolutionary working class party and under its leadership they are taking up the struggle for freedom from the yoke of American imperialism.<br />
<br />
Despite the banishment of thousands of Indonesian national-revolutionary fighters against Dutch imperialism, mass demonstrations are taking place in Indonesia under the banner of the struggle for national freedom from the yoke of Dutch imperialism.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>b) The Negro Masses.</strong></div>
<br />
In South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya Colony, Gambia, Nigeria, the French and Belgian Congo, Guadeloupe, Honduras, San Domingo, the Negro masses have taken up arms in the struggle against imperialism. In South Africa in particular the movement has reached the stage of a conscious class struggle on the part of the white and coloured workers (unemployed workers' demonstrations, the May Day demonstrations, strikes, etc.). New exceptional laws, the increasingly frequent confiscation of the land of the natives, the intensified terroristic measures of the white slaveholders, the new wave of terror, lynching and persecutions in the United States have been unable to stem the rising tide of the Negro struggle for emancipation from colonial imperialism. New and tremendous reserves are wheeling into the anti-imperialist fighting front.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>c) Latin America.</strong></div>
<br />
In the countries of Latin America the anti-imperialist struggle of the workers and peasants against the "revolutionary" movements organised by various groups of capitalists and landowners and their generals, aimed at nothing further than replacing one system of imperialist oppression by another. The ceaselessly growing movement of the masses directs its blows impartially and with equal sharpness against both British and American imperialism.<br />
<br />
The fighting in South and Central America, the interventions in China, the support of the Kuomintang government by the United States of America, the barbaric mediaeval persecutions of the Negroes, the slave relations existing in the southern States, etc., show the real face of predatory dollar imperialism.<br />
<br />
The Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism sends its fraternal greetings to the heroic fighters for the freedom of Nicaragua who have defied American imperialism weapon in hand for three years.<br />
<br />
The Executive Committee denounces the crimes of the Mexican fascist government which is the perfidious instrument of American imperialism and which does not hesitate to organise massacres of the working people. The Executive Committee considers the struggles which are at present taking place in Honduras (great unemployed workers' demonstrations) and in Cuba (mass strikes) to be very important factors in the development of the anti-imperialist struggle. The Executive Committee considers that the necessary conditions for the formation of League sections as mass organisations are present everywhere in the countries of Latin America and appeals for new efforts to widen the mass basis of the anti-imperialist struggle.<br />
<br />
Insurrections and mass movements are taking place in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, China, India, Indo-China, Morocco, Africa and Latin-America. The terrible pressure exerted by capitalist imperialism and the severity of the struggle in the most important colonial countries are leading more and more to the hegemony of the working class, the most energetic and daring section of the masses, in the struggle of the oppressed nations against imperialism. The working class is the binding factor in the great united front of the oppressed peoples against colonialism.<br />
<br />
<div align="center">
<strong>Increased Imperialist Exploitation and Political Repression</strong></div>
<br />
The imperialists are straining every nerve in order to crush the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement for emancipation. They are attempting to find a way out of the world economic crisis, which is a crisis of the whole capitalist system, at the cost of the oppressed colonial peoples by means of increased exploitation of the masses. The world economic crisis has tremendously increased the poverty, misery and exploitation of the toiling masses in the colonial countries. The world economic crisis and in particular the agricultural crisis, is nowhere so intense in its effects as in the colonial countries, where the frightful effects of the agrarian crisis reduces millions and millions to the point of starvation. Slave labour and forced labour are becoming to an ever increasing extent essentials of the imperialist colonial regime. The masses of the peasantry are, coming more and more into movement. They are surging up against the fortresses and strongholds of imperialism.<br />
<br />
The intensification of exploitation in the colonial countries also effects the situation of the toiling masses in the countries of imperialism and increases their impoverishment. The result is that it is becoming clearer and clearer to the masses in the imperialist countries that their interests are identical with the vital interests of the toiling masses in the colonial countries.<br />
<br />
Parallel with the increase of economic exploitation, the system of political oppression has also been intensified to a tremendous degree. The least movement of the masses against imperialism, the least attempt to found national-revolutionary organisations, or to organise the masses of the workers and peasants in trade unions, is countered with increased oppression, imprisonment and even physical destruction of tens of thousands of workers, peasants and students.<br />
<br />
The fascist movement in all countries, which is conducting a chauvinist campaign of race hatred, is an instrument of imperialism for holding down the revolutionary mass movement particularly in the colonial countries (for instance, German fascist officers as technical advisers to the hangman Chiang Kai-shek).<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Religion in the Service of Imperialism</strong></div>
<br />
The growing indignation of the masses against imperialist oppression causes imperialism to use religious organisations to an increasing extent in its struggle against national and social emancipation. This can be seen in the crusade organised by the leaders of all the churches (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Mahomedan, Hindu, Buddhist and others) against the Soviet Union, and also in the warlike attitude of the Vatican towards the Soviet Union, in the Papal Encyclical against socialism and communism, in Gandhi's utilisation of religious propaganda in India, etc. All this, connected with the preparations for the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin next year, reveals the role of the leaders of religion as agents of capitalism and imperialism.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The Social Democratic Leaders -- Active Agents of Imperialist Oppression</strong></div>
<br />
The leaders of the Second (Labour and Socialist) International and of the Amsterdam International (I.F.T.U.) are prominent in the front ranks of the struggle against the oppressed peoples. The so-called "Labour" Government under the leadership of MacDonald uses every possible method of oppression against the Indian national-revolutionary struggle for freedom. It bombs Indian villages slaughtering men, women and children, it arrests and hangs Indian revolutionary leaders, it sends punitive expeditions to Burma to exterminate the native revolutionaries, it sends British warships up the Chinese rivers to bombard the Chinese revolutionary forces. MacDonald's government is doing its best to drown the revolutionary struggle of the Egyptian and Arabian peoples in blood. Slavery in South Africa finds a powerful supporter in MacDonald and his friends. Vandervelde, the Chairman of the Second International, travelled through China as the guest of the murderous bandit Chiang Kai-shek. The French socialist Varenne directed, as Governor-General of Indo-China, the brutal repressive action of French imperialism against the national-revolutionary movement there.<br />
<br />
The French socialists support the bloody actions of French imperialism in Indo-China, Algeria, Tunis, Morocco and in the Negro colonies of French imperialism. Albert Thomas, the representative of the Amsterdam International and Chairman of the International Labour Office of the capitalist League of Nations, organises the struggle against the revolutionary trade union movement in the colonial countries on behalf of the yellow unions rigged up by the Kuomintang with the support of the imperialists. The Spanish socialist leaders are members of the reactionary republican government, the Spanish socialists are assisting to crush the insurrectionary movement in Morocco and the national-revolutionary movements in Catalonia and other parts of Spain. The Belgian socialists not only support the bloody oppression of the Belgian imperialists in the Congo, but they also take a direct share in the proceeds of this colonial exploitation of the Negro masses through the Belgian Workers' Bank. The Dutch socialists, and in particular the "left" socialists, are assisting in the development of plans to save Dutch colonial domination in Indonesia and are taking a direct part in the administration of these colonies, The German social democrats support the new German imperialism in its efforts to obtain mandates from the League of Nations, in other words, to obtain new colonial possessions.<br />
<br />
There are no imperialist crimes against the oppressed peoples in which the leaders of the Second and Amsterdam Internationals have no part and which they would not defend to the working masses of their own countries. The so-called left-wing social democrats of the Maxton and Fimmen type play a very miserable role in this respect. At the last International Congress of the League against Imperialism which took place in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, these two pledged loyalty to the struggle of the oppressed peoples against imperialism, but in fact they have both betrayed this struggle. Fimmen, the leader of the Transport Workers' International did nothing to prevent the despatch of munitions and troops to China against the revolutionary forces. Fimmen made no protest against the treacherous policy of the social democrats in Holland itself. In short, Fimmen has deserted his post in the anti-imperialist struggle. Despite the resolution unanimously passed by the Frankfurt Congress to support the insurrection of the native masses in the Arabian countries, Fimmen disavowed the resolution and took the side of British imperialism and its Zionist agents. The attitude of Maxton was similar. Despite his solemn promise to the Frankfurt Congress Maxton shamelessly supported the manoeuvres of British imperialism against the national-revolutionary movement in India, and the policy of MacDonald, Irwin and Baldwin. Maxton defended the whole counter-revolutionary policy of the British government in India, China, Egypt and the other colonial countries oppressed by British imperialism, whilst at the same time trying to mislead the masses of the workers of Great Britain with radical phrases and to deflect them from the revolutionary struggle.<br />
<br />
The League against Imperialism, which carries on an unswerving revolutionary struggle against imperialism and for national-independence, can have nothing in common with such elements. The Executive Committee therefore confirms the expulsion of Maxton from the British section of the League against Imperialism as a traitor to the anti-imperialist movement. The removal of these two persons from the League against Imperialism can only strengthen the League in its struggle.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The Nationalist Bourgeoisie Bargains with Imperialism and Betrays Cause of Independence</strong></div>
<br />
Apart from the rich landowners, usurers, Princes, Rajahs and compradores, imperialism is attempting with increasing success to win the national bourgeoisie by means of small concessions which do not alter the fundamental character of the imperialist colonial regime, as an ally in the struggle against the steadily growing national revolutionary movement for freedom. The national reformists in the various countries have proved by their actions that they do not represent national interests and that they do not conduct any revolutionary struggle against imperialist oppression. Experience has shown that they very often place themselves at the head of the revolutionary struggle with no other intention than that of throttling it. In return for their treachery to nationalist interests they receive small concessions from the imperialists which in no way affect the essence of the colonial system. The League against Imperialism warns its supporters against the illusions spread by these national reformists concerning the possibility of winning national independence without a revolutionary struggle, merely by utilising the conflicts between the various imperialist groups and depending on one of these groups, whereby the national-revolutionary movement is placed in the service of this imperialist group.<br />
<br />
Bloody terror against the national-revolutionary movement, small concessions, promises, concessions to the renegades who betray the anti-imperialist struggle, this is the character of imperialist policy at the present moment. Negotiations are being conducted with the Indian National Congress, with the Kuomintang in China, with the Arabian Executive in Palestine, with the Kut-el-Watan in Syria, with the Wafd in Egypt, with the Sarekat Islam in Indonesia, etc. The League against Imperialism warns the toiling masses against these manoeuvres. The League against Imperialism also appeals for the exposure of the national-reformists who take part in this treacherous bargaining.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The Indian National Congress and its "Left-Wing" Leaders</strong></div>
<br />
The intensification of the anti-imperialist struggle has clearly revealed the counter-revolutionary role of the leaders of the national reformist parties. The attitude of the Indian National Congress offers us a particularly valuable lesson. In return for unimportant concessions the Indian National Congress has openly abandoned the fight for the national independence of India. The Executive Committee of the Congress has ratified the treacherous agreement between the British Viceroy and Gandhi, and has thus become an open agent of British imperialism and of the rich Indian landowners and capitalists, and a traitor to the cause of Indian independence to which it has rendered so much solemn lip-service.<br />
<br />
The so-called left-wingers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose, have played a miserable role. Nehru, who solemnly pledged himself as a member of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism at the Brussels Congress to conduct an unswerving revolutionary struggle against imperialism, has turned out to be a lieutenant of Gandhi whose treacherous policy was helped to success by the left-wing radical phrases of Nehru. Both Nehru and Bose have attempted and are still attempting perfidiously to deceive the revolutionary youth and the working masses. The Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism declares that Subhas Bose, M. N. Roy, Khandalkar and others have also chosen the path of treachery and abandoned the struggle for Indian freedom.<br />
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism declares that Nehru has become a traitor to the cause of Indian independence and an agent of British imperialism. The Executive Committee denounces his treachery before the broad masses of the workers and peasants of India and expels him from the ranks of the League against Imperialism. At the same time the Executive Committee warns the Indian national-revolutionaries to be on their guard against the deceitful and confusing manoevres which will undoubtedly be carried out by Nehru, Bose, Roy and the other left-wing nationalists who have now become agents of British imperialism.<br />
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism appeals to the masses who followed the Indian National Congress to break with their treacherous leaders, to destroy the treacherous pact with British imperialism made by these leaders, and to mobilise all forces for the organisation of the struggle for the complete independence of India from the yoke of imperialism.<br />
<br />
In reply to the treacherous deception of the masses of the people by Gandhi and MacDonald with "Dominion Status", the League against Imperialism appeals for a revolutionary struggle for complete independence.<br />
The Executive Committee appeals to all revolutionary fighters for the independence of India to link themselves up directly with the League against Imperialism.<br />
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism honours the memory of the heroic Indian revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh and his comrades who have been murdered by British imperialism whilst fighting for the independence of India. The followers of these heroic martyrs must line up in the revolutionary front for the overthrow of imperialism and the independence of India. However, this struggle cannot be won by the heroic acts of individual heroes, but only by the conscious mass action of the workers and peasants, and the revolutionary youth.<br />
<br />
The Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism congratulates the Indonesian comrades on having on their own initiative opposed Hatta who is pursuing a policy of capitulation towards Dutch imperialism.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Imperialist War Preparations against the Soviet Union</strong></div>
<br />
Parallel with the increasing oppression of the colonial peoples by imperialism, the preparations for a great international war of imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union are being conducted. The imperialists are even attempting to form armies composed of the toilers in the oppressed colonial countries with a view to attacking the only country in the world which has really established national freedom as an essential part of its socialist constructive work. It is quite certain that in the coming imperialist attack on the Soviet Union, the imperialists will attempt to use millions of toilers from the oppressed colonial countries against the first Workers' and Peasants' State.<br />
<br />
The Soviet Union is the country of tremendous socialist progress on all fields. It is the bulwark of national independence. The rapid progress of the Five Year Plan, the never ceasing construction of socialism, means a tremendous advance in cultural and economic-development for all the nations united within the Soviet Union. The example of the Soviet Union shows how the more progressive peoples can assist the backward peoples on the basis of the solidarity of the peoples emancipated by the revolution, and further the economic and cultural development of these backward peoples. The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism makes it the urgent duty of all affiliated organisations and of all individual members to use all their forces in the struggle for the defence of the Soviet Union, to expose and destroy the systematic campaign of lies and incitement organised by the imperialists against the Soviet Union, and to make it clear to the masses that this campaign of lies and incitement which serves the ideological preparation of the coming war against the Soviet Union, also aims at winning the masses of the toilers in the colonial countries as cannon fodder for this reactionary war.<br />
<br />
The war and the intervention against the Soviet Union will also be a war against the national revolutionary struggle of the colonial peoples. The League against Imperialism protests in particular against the shameful lies about "forced labour" in the Soviet Union, lies which were originated and spread by those same people who fight for the maintenance of slave and forced labour in the colonial countries with all possible means.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Defend the Chinese Revolution</strong></div>
<br />
At the same time the session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism draws the attention of all honest fighters against imperialism to the fact that imperialism, and in particular American, British, French and Japanese imperialism, not only supports the counter-revolutionary war against the Chinese Soviet Revolution with money, munitions, the despatch of military technical advisers (in which German imperialism plays a leading role), and the supply of war materials to the counter-revolutionary armies, but that the imperialists directly use their own armies and warships in an open counter-revolutionary war of intervention against the Chinese workers and peasants. The greatest possible efforts are necessary on the part of the anti-imperialist front in order to defend the Chinese Revolution effectively.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>New Stage in Anti-imperialist Struggle</strong></div>
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism records with pleasure the fact that the cowardly desertion and shameful treachery of certain former leaders of the anti-imperialist struggle have not succeeded in weakening this struggle, but that, on the contrary, the struggle has gained by these defections as a result of increased clarity and determination in the anti-imperialist camp.<br />
<br />
The anti-imperialist struggle has entered into a new and higher stage. The intensification of all the capitalist contradictions and the general seriousness of the situation make it incumbent upon the League against Imperialism to intensify its struggle and to consolidate its organisational position. All those elements who are willing to fight honestly for the national independence of the oppressed peoples and who are not prepared to abandon the national-revolutionary struggle for fear of the social demands of the toiling masses in the colonial countries, must be organised together in a united revolutionary front. The decisions of the Second World Congress of the League against Imperialism in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, were fingerposts for the future tasks of the organisation. On the basis of these decisions the League against Imperialism remains a non-party organisation uniting all honest national-revolutionaries and their organisations.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Self-criticism</strong></div>
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism points out that the national revolutionary struggle is closely connected with the struggle of the revolutionary masses in the imperialist countries. It points out further that the Soviet Union is the bulwark of the national-revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle, and records with regret that the national sections of the League against Imperialism have not yet developed the degree of activity demanded by the tremendous nature of their task in order to organise and mobilise all the revolutionary forces in the colonial countries, and to win the masses of the workers and peasants. This remains one of the chief tasks of the League against Imperialism.<br />
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism records the fact that the International Secretariat of the League pursued a correct political line in the period from the World Congress of the League in Frankfurt am Main, and took up a correct attitude, in accordance with the decisions of the World Congress towards the most important events in the colonial countries. The Secretariat worked out concrete organisational plans for certain important countries, and in particular for Great Britain, France, Belgium, and West and South Africa. However, it is necessary to record deficiencies with frank criticism in order that they may be removed from the work and organisation of the International Secretariat. Direct connections with the colonial countries were unsatisfactory. In connection with the Arabian insurrection and with the Indian events, the International Secretariat acted on its own initiative, but in connection with certain other events, for instance, the recent campaign on behalf of the Meerut prisoners, the International Secretariat lagged behind the movement. Campaigns in the various countries which were given a good send off, were directed only in their preliminary stages and the result was that they slacked off too quickly and no organisational results were obtained. Insufficient activity was carried on in connection with the organisation of protest campaigns against the terror in China and Indochina. Further, the fact that the international journal of the League has not yet been published, and that in general very little anti-imperialist literature has appeared, must be regarded as deficiencies in the work of the International Secretariat. In the future the active mass work must be led by the International Secretariat in the imperialist and colonial countries to a much greater extent than was previously the case. However, the work of the International Secretariat can only be successful if the sections seriously take up the question of enlarging their organisation and intensifying their work. The session of the Executive Committee is compelled to record the fact that with the exception of certain successes in Great Britain (as, for instance, the recent National Conference) there has been very little organisational progress in the imperialist countries, despite the efforts of the International Secretariat. The French section has distinguished itself by especial passivity. The Executive Committee expects from the sections that they will now energetically take up the task of abolishing the deficiencies of their organisational work. In those countries where no anti-imperialist organisations are in existence, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, etc., steps must now be taken to found them.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Minimum Programmatic Demands of the League</strong></div>
<br />
The League against Imperialism must really become a fighting association of all national-revolutionary movements in the colonial countries of all oppressed peoples and all national minorities in Europe. Through its sections and affiliated organisations the League must mobilise the working masses of the imperialist countries for an active struggle in the anti-imperialist front.<br />
<br />
The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism declares that in this new and higher stage of the anti-imperialist struggle, the following programmatic demands must be taken as laying down the general lines of the activity of the organisation:<br />
<br />
1. The complete national independence of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples;<br />
<br />
2. The full right of self-determination for all oppressed nationalities;<br />
<br />
3. The removal of the imperialist armed forces from all colonial and semi-colonial countries;<br />
<br />
4. Complete freedom of movement for all national-revolutionary organisations, and in particular for all revolutionary working class and peasant organisations;<br />
<br />
5. The confiscation without compensation of all undertakings, mines, banks, plantations, lands, etc., at present in the possession of the imperialists and the nationalisation of the same. The abolition of all debts to the imperialists and the abolition of all reparations payments.<br />
<br />
6. The confiscation without compensation of all lands at present in the possession of rich landowners and the distribution of the same amongst the working peasants.<br />
<br />
Only those who are honestly prepared to support and fight for these demands can be regarded as revolutionary fighters against imperialist colonial oppression.<br />
<div align="center">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Immediate tasks</strong></div>
<br />
On this basis the session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism instructs its Secretariat as follows:<br />
<br />
a) to work out a program according to the above programmatic demands and to submit the same to the sections of the League for discussion;<br />
<br />
b) in view of the tremendous importance of the struggle of the national minorities, to work systematically to group these minorities around the League against Imperialism, to persuade them to affiliate to the League, and to give them the necessary representation in the Executive Committee;<br />
<br />
c) to win the representatives of the oppressed nationalities and the oppressed national minorities to a greater extent than previously for co-operation with and representation on the organs of the Executive Committee;<br />
<br />
d) to take all the steps necessary for the publication of a journal popularising the program and the slogans of the League against Imperialism, to carry the objects of the League to the broad masses, and to form an ideological rallying point for the struggle against imperialism;<br />
<br />
e) to encourage the activities of the League sections particularly in the imperialist countries, and to pay special attention to individual countries by the formation of special initiative groups to establish connections with the broad masses;<br />
<br />
f) to strengthen the League against Imperialism by rallying all revolutionary working class and peasant organisations, and all national-revolutionary organisations in the colonial and semi-colonial countries;<br />
<br />
g) to pay particular attention to the consolidation of the anti-imperialist organisations in the Near East and Latin America;<br />
<br />
h) to see to it that the members of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism take a greater personal part in the organisation and propagation of the anti-imperialist struggle;<br />
<br />
i) to pay special attention to the extension of the youth work, to strengthen the work of the International Youth Secretariat and to extend and strengthen the youth sections in the various countries;<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<strong>RESOLUTION</strong></h3>
<div align="center">
<strong>On the National Revolutionary Movement of the Oppressed Peoples of Europe adopted by the Executive Committee of the League Against Imperialism, June 2, 1931</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>A) Against National Oppression in Europe.</strong><br />
<br />
1. In the name of the national-revolutionary organisations all over the world the League against Imperialism and for National Independence protests indignantly against the scandalous national oppression of millions of people belonging to the national minorities in Poland, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Alsace-Lorraine and Spain, who are forced into a yoke of oppressive exploitation and national persecution by a handful of imperialists of the dominant nations.<br />
<br />
2. During the world war and at the conclusion of the robber treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon and Neuilly, the imperialists of the victorious nations shamefully betrayed their pledges to grant national self-determination and to protect the rights of the national minorities. They robbed over 40 millions of people of their right to national freedom, including Ukrainians, White Russians, Germans, Alsatians, Catalonians, Basques, Hungarians, Slovakians, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Thracians, Bulgarians and Moldavians. Even the modest beginnings of self-administration were abolished. The schools of the national minorities were destroyed and all possible efforts were made to destroy their mother tongue.<br />
<br />
3. The imperialists built up a complicated system in which they played off the small nationalities against each other, and in which they established a whole scale of dependence and oppression. Within the new national frontiers of Europe, which were dictated by the robber interests of imperialism, a series of imperialist vassal States were founded: Poland, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Greece. A number of countries were forced into direct dependence on the victor countries. They were themselves oppressed, but at the same time they were the oppressors, of other nations whose national subjugation was "entrusted" to them by the great imperialist powers.<br />
<br />
4. The situation of the masses of those peoples oppressed by imperialism grew more difficult after the war than ever before. Side by side with the old policy of assimilation there appear prominently to-day essential characteristics of colonial enslavement and exploitation, whereby the standards of life and the working conditions of the toiling masses are depressed more and more to a colonial level. Ruthless exploitation coupled with an arbitrary regime of brutal violence forces the workers and peasants of the oppressed nationalities deeper and deeper into poverty and misery and robs the oppressed nationalities of every possibility of independent economic development even in Alsace-Lorraine, German Bohemia und Catalonia, and still more in Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Carpatho-Ukrainia, the Bukovina, Transylvania, Voivodina, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Cyprus, Venezia Julia, the southern Tyrol, the Dodocanese, etc., where imperialist robbery, terrorism and other colonial methods of oppression are applied in their severest forms. In Western Ukrainia, West White Russia, Bessarabia, the Dobrudja, Macedonia, Thrace and Kossovo a bloody regime of repression prevails, a definite policy of exterminating the native population, with mass arrests, fearful tortures, massacres and the deportation of the "recreant" section of the native population.<br />
<br />
5. The right of self-determination and the principle of the equality of nations could not be mocked to a greater extent than has been the case in the post-war period under the Versailles system of robber imperialism. The League of Nations and other imperialist post-war organisations and institutions are working zealously to maintain the Versailles system. The so-called Congress of the National Minorities which meets every year and unites the worst renegades and agents of imperialism, misuses the appearance of defending the rights of the national minorities in order to reconcile the nationally oppressed masses with the Versailles system, to deflect these masses from the struggle for national freedom and to cloak the national oppression carried out by imperialism. The League against Imperialism which opposes irreconcilably and determinedly all forms of imperialist oppression and exploitation resolves to organise a ceaseless mass struggle against all forms of national oppression and discrimination with a view to winning complete independence for the oppressed nationalities.<br />
<br />
6. The only exception and the only real solution of the national question witnessed in the post-war period is the system of the Soviet Union formed on the territory of the former Czarist Empire. This system guarantees absolute equality, voluntary co-operation and economic development for the various nations united in it and makes possible the development of national culture with a socialist content.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>B) The Demands of the Struggle for Freedom.</strong><br />
<br />
A real solution of the national question, full national independence, demands a determined and ceaseless anti-imperialist struggle on the part of the masses of the people, above all against the imperialism of the dominant nation. The struggle must be conducted for the following demands:<br />
<br />
a) The right of self-determination for all oppressed nationalities up to and including the right to sever themselves from the countries to which they are attached;<br />
<br />
b) Complete equality and protection against all forms of national oppression for the national minorities which live scattered on the territories of other nations;<br />
<br />
Apart from these fundamental demands, the movement for national freedom in the various countries must put forward a series of concrete demands against all forms of national oppression, and in particular such demands as:<br />
<br />
1. against various economic measures adopted by the bourgeoisie of the dominant countries (taxation, customs duties, price manipulations, subsidies and wage depression) which aim at exploiting and enslaving the dependent nations (for instance, in Western Ukrainia, West White Russia, Carpatho-Ukrainia, Slovakia, Croatia, Macedonia, the Dobrudja, Bessarabia, etc.).<br />
<br />
2. against the liquidation of the school system of the national minorities, against the attempts to destroy the language of the national minorities, against the attempts to deprive the national minorities of the right at unhindered movement against the prohibition and against every attempt to limit the use of the language of the national minorities in relations with official institutions, before the courts and in the administrative apparatus, etc. and for the setting up of schools living instruction in the mother tongue of the national minorities, and for complete freedom in the use of the mother tongue in word and writing;<br />
<br />
3. against arbitrary oppression, corruption and terrorism on the part of the foreign administrative apparatus, for the removal of foreign bureaucrats and police, against the sending of soldiers from the national minorities to other parts of the country, and the occupation of the territory of the country, and the occupation of the territory of the national minorities by soldiers of foreign nationalities;<br />
<br />
4. against those forms of centralised administration which even abolish the moderate rights of local autonomy, against the destruction of the local and provincial self-administrations (particularly in Roumania, Yugoslavia, Alsace-Lorraine, Macedonia and the Dobrudja), whereby at the same time the national reformist policy of substituting bargaining concerning local autonomy for the struggle for self-determination must be exposed and opposed;<br />
<br />
5. against the mass deportations of national minorities by depriving them of civil rights, by compelling them to choose one nationality or the other, by "exchanging" them with other countries (particularly in Macedonia, Thrace, Transylvania and Slovakia).<br />
The following demands on behalf of the oppressed workers and peasants who are most threatened in their economic existence, must be put forward within the framework of the national-revolutionary struggle:<br />
<br />
6. against violence and exploitation coupled with national oppression which particularly aggravate the position of the working class of the oppressed nations, for higher wages, for the seven hour day, for social insurance, for the right of combination for the working class;<br />
<br />
7. against the intensified robbery by means of taxation practised by the imperialists in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, against forced auctioning of the property of the peasants for failure to pay taxation (as in West Ukrainia, West White Russia, the Carpatho-Ukrainia, Transylvania, Macedonia, etc.), against the brutal punitive expeditions (as in Kossovo and in Western Ukrainia); for the annulment of all bank and mortgage debts at present burdening the toiling peasantry.<br />
<br />
8. For the confiscation without compensation of the land of the rich owners and its distribution amongst the landworkers, poor and middle peasants of the national minorities (particularly in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, Greece and Spain), against the colonising policy pursued by foreign imperialism on the territory of the national minorities (as in Kossovo, Macedonia, Thrace, the Dobrudja, West Ukrainia, Croatia, Transylvania, Carpatho-Ukrainia and Slovakia), for the immediate return of the land to peasants who have been driven off, whereby the working colonists must receive full compensation at the cost of the rich landowners through the State; for the right of the deported, driven off and exchanged population to return to their land.<br />
<br />
9. For an immediate general political amnesty for all national-revolutionary fighters for emancipation.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>C) Against the Agents and Allies of Imperialism in the Ranks of the Oppressed Nationalities.</strong><br />
<br />
1. The struggle against the main enemy, the direct external enemy, imperialism, is closely connected with the struggle against the agents of this enemy in the ranks of the oppressed nationalities. These elements are paid agents and direct instruments of the imperialist policy of exploitation and enslavement (for instance, the Ukrainian renegades of the former Petlura type, or Archbishop Count Szepticki and Chomyczyn in Western Ukrainia, the former Raditch supporters like Karla Kovatchevitch in Croatia, etc.). These renegades act openly as the instruments of the imperialist bourgeoisie of the dominant country and are openly supported by the imperialist bourgeoisie as the most effective instruments in the struggle against the national-revolutionary movement for freedom. As a general rule these elements have no influence on the masses of the population of the oppressed nationality. They belong to the camp of the external enemy, the imperialist bourgeoisie of the dominant nation, and must be fought as such.<br />
<br />
2. More dangerous than the open instruments of the dominant imperialist bourgeoisie, are the internal enemies of the national-revolutionary movement. These are the national reformist parties and groups amongst the oppressed nationalities, and they conduct a pseudo-opposition to national oppression for the benefit of the oppressed masses. In reality, however, their only aim is to obtain a larger share, of the exploitation of the working population of the oppressed nationality, an exploitation which they wish to carry out jointly with the dominant imperialist bourgeoisie. In this way they betray every day the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of the people for freedom by conducting a policy of national capitulation and by flirting with other foreign imperialists. The danger of the national reformists is above all the fact that they have <strong>mass influence</strong>. The more these national reformists lose their mass influence as a result of their systematic treachery, the more necessary will it become for the bourgeoisie to utilise another internal enemy of the national-revolutionary movement, the national fascist organisations. (The best examples of such organisations are: the fascist organisation in Macedonia, the so-called "Internal Macedonian Organisation", the fascist Dobrudjan organisation in Bulgaria, the fascist Albanian organisation "Bascimi Kombatari" in Yugoslavia, and the "UNDO" in Western Ukrainia, etc.). It is of the very greatest importance that the nationalist demagogy of the national reformists and of the national fascists should be <strong>continuously exposed</strong>. This nationalist demagogy is nothing but a means of detracting the oppressed masses of the people from the path of the undeviating anti-imperialist mass struggle in the form of a united front with the revolutionary proletariat of other nations. It is also necessary to expose and fight systematically against the demagogy of the imperialists, for example, the convening of the Balkan conferences, and their slogan of a "Balkan Federation". The national reformists and the Social Democratic Parties take a zealous part in this demagogy. With this demagogy the imperialists hope to detract the oppressed nations, and the toiling masses of the Balkans from the correct revolutionary path which leads to national and social freedom, and to utilise them for imperialist ends and in particular in the preparations for imperialist war.<br />
<br />
3. The social democrats are everywhere the most zealous supporters and defenders of the policy of oppression conducted by their own imperialist bourgeoisie, and the social democrats of the oppressed nations work together with the treacherous bourgeoisie and with the national reformists against the national-revolutionary movement for emancipation (the social democrats in Macedonia, the Dobrudja and in Croatia, the German social democrats in Czechoslovakia). The interests of the struggle for the national emancipation of the oppressed nationalities also demands a determined struggle against the Social Democratic Parties of the imperialist countries, which practically are in the services of the dominant bourgeoisie and which at the same time encourage the national-reformist policy of deception amongst the masses of the oppressed people in order to detract these masses from the national-revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle.<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>D) Fighting Co-operation between the National-Revolutionary Movement and the International Proletarian Movement.</strong><br />
<br />
The national-revolutionary movement, which ceaselessly mobilises the working masses of the oppressed nationalities, the working class, the toiling peasantry and the working sections of the urban petty-bourgeoisie, in mass actions against all forms of national oppression, can only be really successful if it does everything possible in order to win the broadest masses of the working people of the other nationalities living within the same political State form as allies in this joint struggle. It is also necessary to draw the masses of the fugitives of the respective oppressed nations (Macedonians, Dobrudjans, Thracians, etc.) and also the emigrants into the national-revolutionary struggle for freedom. Above all it is essential for the national-revolutionary struggle for freedom that a close fighting co-operation should be established with the revolutionary proletariat of the dominant country or nation in order to secure the overthrow of the chief enemy, the imperialist bourgeoisie of the dominant nation.<br />
<br />
National oppression cannot be separated from the essence of imperialism and can only finally be abolished by a joint and determined anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of the oppressed peoples and classes.<br />
The example of the Soviet Union demonstrates convincingly that a satisfactory solution of the national question and the establishment of voluntary economic and cultural co-operation between the nations are only possible on the basis of a revolutionary alliance which the masses of the people of the oppressed nationalities must conclude with the international revolutionary proletariat, with the Soviet Union and with the national-revolutionary struggle for emancipation in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-556158706660875882012-11-30T00:00:00.001-05:002013-04-01T10:54:27.540-04:00Socialism – Class Struggle in the Soviet Union (1936-1953): The Revolutionary Trials of the 1930’s as the Continuation and Escalation of the Class Struggle<div>
<b>by the Movement for the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-55</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
The revolutionary changes that took place in the economy of the Soviet Union during the first two decades led, in the mid ‘30s, to the building of the economic foundation of socialism and the elimination of <b>all exploiting classes</b>; these changes were expressed in the new country’s Constitution (1936).<br />
<br />
Analyzing the economic, social, class situation in that stage of Soviet Union’s development, Stalin points out the following in relation to the class structure: “<b>The landlord class, as you know, had already been eliminated as a result of the victorious conclusion of the Civil War. As for the other exploiting classes, they have shared the fate of the landlord class. The capitalist class in the sphere of industry has ceased to exist. The kulak class in the sphere of agriculture has ceased to exist. And the merchants and profiteers in the sphere of trade have ceased to exist. Thus all the exploiting classes have now been eliminated.<br /><br />There remains the working class.<br /><br />There remains the peasant class.<br /><br />There remains the intelligentsia.</b>” (I. V. Stalin, “On the Draft Constitution of USSR” contained in “Problems of Leninism”, 1936)<br />
<br />
However, besides the <b>remnants</b> of the exploiting classes that still exist, <b>new bourgeois elements</b> emerge inevitably due to the transitional nature of socialism – which is not yet a full grown classless society – and the degeneration of former revolutionaries in the course of the construction of socialism-communism.<br />
<br />
The experience drawn from the construction of socialism showed that during the whole course of revolutionary transformations in the economic field – facilitated by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, constantly strengthened under the leadership of the Bolshevik party – from 1917 up to the mid 1930’s the economy of the Soviet Union progressed towards socialism-communism in the midst of tremendous and unseen difficulties and the <b>intensification of the class struggle</b>. The reason why the class struggle became more intense lies in the desperate resistance put up by the exploiting classes still present from the first until the beginning of the second decade and, afterwards, by their remains together with the degenerated bourgeois elements that gained political representation in the ranks of the Bolshevik party: Bukharin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev et al). Unless the building of socialism stopped, these elements had to be politically and ideologically crushed. Moreover, they had to be totally eliminated when they proceeded to form terrorist organizations with a view to assassinate party and state leaders, when they became agents and spies of imperialism and, first of all, the Nazi Germany. The assassinations of S. M. Kirov, B. P. Mrezhinsky, V. Kuibyshev, A. M. Gorky are well known. (Report of Court proceedings in the case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"”). “<b>The Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist centre, after it had killed Comrade Kirov, did not confine itself to organizing the assassination of Comrade Stalin alone. The terrorist Trotskyite-Zinovievite centre simultaneously carried on work to organize assassinations of other leaders of the Party, namely, Comrades Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kossior, Orjonikidze and Postyshev</b>” (“Prozessbericht ueber die Strafsache des Trotzkistisch-Sinowjewistischen Terroristischen Zentrums”, p. 181, Moskau 1936).<br />
<br />
In a decade so critical for the Soviet Union as the 1930’s, the severe crisis in the capitalist world not only deepened the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat compelling the former to resort to <b>fascism</b> in order to check the revolutionary struggle of the latter; it also deepened the competition among the imperialist powers for new markets and spheres of influence a fact that would inevitably lead to a new imperialist war. But “<b>every time the capitalist contradictions start deepening, bourgeoisie turns her attention to the USSR. Perhaps this or that contradiction of capitalism can be resolved or all of them together at the expense of USSR, the land of the Soviets, the acropolis of revolution whose mere existence revolutionize the working class and the colonies and is an obstacle to re-division of the world</b>” (Stalin)<br />
<br />
In imperialist Germany the monopolies help Hitler’s Nazi gang to rise to power and subsequently, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis is formed on the basis of a tripartite military agreement.<br />
<br />
Knowing that the ensuing war was going to be against her, Soviet Union had not only to take advantage of the intra-imperialist competition but, also, to reinforce her defense. This task included the purging the country’s rear of all the terrorist counter-revolutionary groups that had gone too far with their counter-revolutionary action and degenerated into <b>agents</b> and <b>spies</b> of the imperialist and fascist states with the sole aim to undermine Soviet Union’s defense, organizing sabotage, plots, espionage and assassinations. This situation posed a serious danger for the country, especially on the eve of the Second World War, and intensified the internal class struggle. It was in these circumstances, that the revolutionary Moscow Trials against the Bukharinists, Trotskyites and other traitors, agents took place. On the pretext of the revolutionary trials, the world reaction, the Trotskyites, the social-democrats and the various opportunists launched a gigantic campaign of slander against the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
Now, some comments on the trials.<br />
<br />
As it is known, the court proceedings of the Moscow Trials – that were trials in <b>open court and not held “in camera”</b> – have been published in three volumes by the People’s Commissariat of Justice of USSR: the first trial (19-24 August 1936): “Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre”, Moscow 1936, the second trial (23-30 January 1937): ”Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre”, Moscow 1937 and the third trial (2-13 March 1938) “Report of Court proceedings in the case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"”<br />
<br />
<b>1. Trials of views or of criminal actions?</b> The claim made by various well informed reactionaries that the Moscow Trials were <b>“trials of views”</b> of the defendants, i.e. trials that aim to suppress their political views, is utterly groundless and false; it has an obvious albeit undisclosed objective: to defame and slander the socialism of that period presenting it as “anti-democratic”, and “oppressive”.<br />
<br />
The above claim not only is absolutely groundless but it bears no relation whatsoever with the historical truth and this can be easily seen in the verbatim report of the court proceedings which clearly refer to the defendants’ actions and to their ideas. Moreover, and most importantly, it is refuted altogether by the actual conditions prevailing in the Soviet Union at that time: all the books written by the accused former cadres, notwithstanding the false and anti-Marxist views they contained, had been published in the Soviet Union and, many of them, even abroad in various languages by publishers well disposed towards the communist movement. In this respect, the books of the prolific Nikolai Bukharin had a special place. At this point we mention only one which is probably known to many people since its anti-Marxist views were subjected to criticism by Stalin (I. V. Stalin, “The Right Deviation in the CPSU(B)”, 1929, v. 12). We are taking about N. Bukharin’s book “The path to socialism” that was published almost simultaneously in <b>Soviet Union</b> and in <b>Austria</b> (N. Bucharin: “Der Weg zum Sozialismus”, Verlag fur Literatur und Politik, Wien 1925). Bucharin himself in the preface of the German edition confirms the publication of this brochure in other languages: <b>“these reflections justify, I think, the publication of this brochure in other languages”</b> (N. Bukharin: “Der Weg zum Sozialismus”, p.6) All this is familiar to everyone who has even the most elementary knowledge of the foreign literature and the history of the international communist movement<br />
<br />
All this is more than enough to rebut the crudest of lies circulated by the reactionaries and the various counter-revolutionaries (the Trotskyites, the old social-democrats and Khrushchevian revisionists) as well as the slanderous fabrications of Trotsky himself.<br />
<br />
<b>2. “In camera” or open court trials?</b> When the spokesmen of the reaction, the social-democrats, and all sorts of counter-revolutionaries refer to the revolutionary Moscow trials, they imply that these were held “in camera”, i.e. they were close court trials aiming obviously to slander socialism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat presenting it before the working class and peoples as “undemocratic” and” oppressive”. They conceal the fact that all the trials, except one, were <b>public, open court trials.</b><br />
<br />
They were attended by diplomats from various countries, lawyers, and soviet workers and even Dmitri Volkogonov, this fascist and pathetic mudslinger of Stalin, dares not doubt this (not to pass for totally unreliable): “Foreign journalists and even diplomats were invited to attend” (Dmitri Volkogonov, “Stalin, triumph and tragedy”, p. 299, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1991). In relation to this question, we read in “Rundschau”: <b>“the court room is packed. Foreign and soviet correspondents, members of the diplomatic corps and numerous workers were present at the trial”</b> (“Rundschau” ueber Politik, Wirtschaft und Arbeitbewegung, No 10,3/3/1938, p.17, Basel). Also, the American ambassador in Moscow Joseph E. Davies, himself a layer, attended all the sessions and narrates: <b>“At 12 o’clock noon accompanied by Counselor Henderson I went to this trial. Special arrangements were made for tickets for the Diplomatic Corps to have seats” and “on both sides of the central aisle were rows of seats occupied entirely by different groups of “workers” at each session, with the exception of a few rows in the centre of the hall reserved for correspondents, local and foreign, and for the Diplomatic Corps. The different groups of “workers”, I am advised, were charged with the duty of taking back reports of the trials to their various organizations.”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 26 and 34)<br />
<br />
Davies lists the names of the American correspondents, among the many others, present in the trial: <b>“it was Walter Duranty and Harold Denny from New York Times, Joe Barnew and Joe Phillips from New York Herald Tribune, Charlie Nutter or Nick Massock from Associated Press, Norman Deuel and Henry Schapiro from United Press, Jim Brown from International News and Spencer Williams as a correspondent from Manchester Guardian” from whom “Schapiro was an attorney holding an academic title from the Law School of the Moscow University”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: Mission to Moscow).<br />
<br />
Concerning the most slandered Andrei Vyshinsky, the revolutionary prosecutor, the American ambassador notes: <b>“the prosecutor who conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable moderation”</b> while in connection to the defendants’ condition, writes: <b>“there was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p.35).<br />
<br />
Concerning the legal side of the trials, we are informed by the leader of the treacherous Austrian social-democracy the following: <b>“the eminent English lawyer D. N. Pritt concluded that, the court proceedings were flawless and the accused were able to freely enter their pleas before the court”</b> (Otto Bauer, Grundsaetzliches zu den Hinrichtungen in Mokau, in “Der Kampf”, 10/1936, p.396).<br />
<br />
But despite this and the assurances given by eminent layers such as D. N. Pritt, Pierre Villar, Joseph Davies and others for the contrary, the reactionary D. Volkogonov does not hesitate to claim that <b>“most of the accused could only find words to agree with Vyshinsky”</b> and that <b>“all the accused agreed with the procurator, accepted the monstrous charges in a friendly spirit”</b>. He also talks about <b>“violation of the basic rules of socialist legality”</b> (Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, triumph and tragedy, p. 294)<br />
<br />
Whoever is interested in the historical truth, he has only to study the full verbatim record of the court proceedings mentioned above and, also, the communist and bourgeois press of that time.<br />
<br />
The only trial that was not held in open court – because it was related to Soviet Union’s defense– was the trial of Tukhatchevsky who, thrilled by the military might of Nazi Germany, aimed to stage a military coup in order to overthrow the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
In the beginning of 1936, on his way to London to attend the funeral of king George V, stopped at Warsaw and Berlin where he met with Polish and German generals. Returning from London and during a banquet held by the Soviet embassy in Paris, <b>he praised Nazi Germany in public</b> and advised the Romanian minister for foreign affairs Nicola Titulescu to attach his country to “New Germany”:<br />
<br />
<b>“Tukhatchevsky who was sitting on the same table with Romanian Minister for Foreign Affairs Nicola Titulescu, explained to him: Monsieur le Ministre, it is not fair to connect your career and the fate of your nation with old and “doomed” countries like Great Britain and France. We have to turn our attention to the new Germany. For, at least, certain period of time Germany will take the leadership of the European continent. I am convinced that Hitler will contribute to the salvation of all of us” </b>(Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn: “The Great Conspiracy against Russia”)<br />
<br />
These comments by Tukhatchevsky were recorded by another invited Romanian diplomat, Schachanan Esseze, the head of the Press Bureau of the Romanian embassy in Paris. The well known political writer, Genevieve Tabouis recounts later in her book: “My name is Cassandra”:<br />
<br />
<b>“I saw Tukhatchevsky for the last time on the day of the funeral of George V. In Soviet embassy banquet, the Russian general appeared very open in his conversations with Politis, Titulescu, Herriot and Boncour…He had just come back from a trip to Germany and he couldn’t stop praising the Nazis. He was sitting on my right, and whenever he referred to an imaginary agreement between Hitler and the other great powers, he repeated: “Madame Tabouis, the Germans now are already invincible”<br /><br />What urged him to make such enthusiastic statements? Had the German diplomat brainwashed him with an especially cordial reception? That evening I wasn’t the only one who felt worried with his enthusiastic remarks. One of the guests, an important diplomat, after leaving the embassy, whispered in my ear: Well, I can only hope that not all Russians think in this way.”</b> (Michael Sayers – Albert E. Kahn: «Die grosse Verschwoerung», p. 310-311, Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (DDR) 1949, US title: “The Great Conspiracy against Russia”).<br />
<br />
<b>3. “Extraction” of confessions through “torture” and “pressure” or voluntary admission of the crimes by the accused?</b><br />
<br />
The crux of the slandering campaign launched by the world reaction, the Trotskyites and the social-democrat traitors against the Soviet Union, on the eve of the war, was the lie that the defendant’s confessions resulted from torture and pressure. This was later spread by the Krushchevians’ Goebbelist propaganda against Stalin: <b>“the confessions were acquired through the exercise of physical violence, torture”</b> (N. Khrushchev: “The Secret Report” at the 20th Congress of CPSU). This totally groundless claim is still widely spread nowadays as it is shown by the references made by reactionary “historians” and journalists: <b>“the confessions, the course of the trials, was a result of torture”</b> (Christine Reymann, Berlin).<br />
<br />
We have to note, at first, that this argument of the anti-stalinist reaction of all kinds (from fascists to Trotskyites and from old to new Khrushchevian social-democrats) is nothing more a charming fairy tale for children when we are discussing about experienced cadres. In our country, the revolutionary communist Nikos Belogiannis didn’t confess under <b>“the exercise of physical violence, torture”</b> nor in the offer of the local reaction to become a minister and he was executed, choosing to die instead of being humiliated. The same did lots of hundreds of communists.<br />
<br />
Isaac Deutscher, with the semblance of seriousness shown by a professional Trotskyite slanderer writes: <b>“the accused hoped that their confessions would save them and their families, offered them a ray of hope if being saved”</b> (Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, a political biography). But being careless, he forgot a “small” detail: <b>every admission of such criminal acts was punishable by death in the Soviet Union at that time</b>, a fact known to everybody and, most and foremost, the accused themselves. How is it, then, possible that there was even a <b>“a ray of hope of being saved”</b>?<br />
<br />
The same ridiculous slanders are repeated by Dimitri Volkogonov: “Stalin had defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev by exhaustion and deception. He took Pyatakov and his “partners” by torture” (Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, triumph and tragedy, p. 292, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1991). <b>“The investigators had a wide range of means to obtain the desired confession”</b> (ibid, p.294) and for Bukharin he says that <b>“threats were made against his young wife and infant son”</b> (ibid, p.300). This is how low the Khrushchevian social-democrats have descended.<br />
<br />
However, Volkogonov and Co. are unfortunate to be refuted, 52 years in advance, by an eye-witness, lawyer and representative of the American imperialism, the then USA ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E. Davies who was attending the court sessions on a daily basis: <b>“there was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p.35).<br />
<br />
Concerning the issue of forced confessions, we make some brief but important remarks:<br />
<br />
<b>First,</b> none of the accused stated that he was tortured.<br />
<br />
<b>Second,</b> the flawless way the Trials were conducted made sure that the accused had the opportunity for a free statement according to the conclusion of the eminent English lawyer D. Pritt but also of others including Joseph E. Davies.<br />
<br />
<b>Third,</b> the representative of the American imperialism in Moscow, Davies, did not notice that any of the accused were tortured but on the contrary, as mentioned above, <b>“there was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically”</b>. Neither did he mention that there was an atmosphere of fear restriction since Vyshinsky <b>“conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable moderation”</b><br />
<br />
<b>Fourth,</b> if the accused had confessed false crimes, i.e. crimes they had not committed, under the “pressure” or “torture” – as the international reaction claims – then, they would have been shot <b>unjustly</b> but <b>surely</b> since these criminal activities were punishable by death in the Soviet Union at that time.<br />
<br />
However, for the case of Bukharin, there is fortunately an additional and of the gravest importance, testimony which is almost entirely unknown: whatever Bukharin publically admitted in his trial, were confirmed by the testimony of his close friend and renegade Jules Herbert-Droz; consequently, the conspirator Bukharin deliberately admitted his crimes without any alleged “pressure” or “torture” .<br />
<br />
A very close political and personal friend of Bukharin, the Swiss Jules Herbert-Droz, former secretary of Comintern (1921-1928) refers to his last meeting with Bukharin in an interview (30/10/1965) an in a letter to A.G. Loewy (22/11/1965): <b>“I saw Bukharin for the last time at the end of May 1929. He informed me about two things: 1. his companions Rykov, Tomsky and others were planning to form a bloc with the Trotskyites. Tomski had already contacted Kamenev. 2. The opposition was planning to organize individual terrorism against Stalin”</b> (A.G. Loewy: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, p. 373, Europa Werlag Vien, 1969) Moreover, Humbert-Droz himself, writes in the second volume of his memoirs: <b>“before my departure (to Latin America) I visited Bukharin for a last time because I didn’t know whether I was going to see him after my return. We had a long and open conversation. He briefed me on his group’s contacts with the group of Zinoviev and Kamenev and coordination of the struggle against Stalin’s authority. Bukharin also told me that they had decided to resort to individual terrorism in order to get rid of Stalin! This was our last conversation. These who, after Lenin’s death, could eliminate Stalin politically, based on Lenin’s testament, tried to eliminate him physically when he firmly held the police-security apparatus of the state”</b>(Karl Hofmeier: “Memoiren eines Schweizer Kommunisten / 1917-1947”, p. 142, rotpunkt verlag Zurich 1978 and “Memoires de Jules Herbert-Droz”, v.2, p. 379-380).<br />
<br />
And the communist Karl Hofmeier comments the attitude of the renegade Droz: <b>“until his death, Humbert-Droz remained silent about his Trotskyite-Bukharinist past! That is the disgraceful end of the long-term secretary of the Communist International”</b> (ibid, p.380). Afterwards, Droz became the secretary of the Social-Democratic party of Switzerland, 1946-1959).<br />
<br />
More than 35 years after this very important testimony from a very close and personal friend of Bukharin, Herbert-Droz, according to which Bukharin was planning to physically eliminate Stalin, the credibility of the Khrushchevian revisionist slanderers of Stalin and the Goebelist Volkogonov amounts to continue the mud-slinging: <b>“Bukharin was threatened and blackmailed”,</b><br />
<br />
It is obvious from all the above that the accused were compelled to admit their criminal acts not because of “torture and pressure” but <b>because of the legal and political formulation of the indictment by the Procurator and the overwhelming evidence amassed against them.</b><br />
<br />
Moreover, the opinion of foreign diplomats for the Trials and the existence or absence of the Trotskyite-Bukharinite centre and its terrorist activity are of particular importance.<br />
<br />
The American ambassador Davies notes: <b>“I have spoken with many, if not all, of the members of the Diplomatic Corps here and, with possibly with one exception, they are all of the opinion that the proceedings established a clearly the existence of a political plot and conspiracy to overthrow the government”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Als USA-Botschafter in Moskau”, p. 35, Steinberg Verlag Zuerich 1943, English version: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 39).<br />
<br />
Somewhere else: <b>“Another diplomat, made a most illuminating statement to me yesterday. In discussing the trial he said that the defendants were undoubtedly guilty; that all of us who attended the trial had practically agreed on that; that the outside world from the press reports, however, seemed to think that trial was a put-up a job (façade, as he called it); that while we knew it was not, it was probably just as well that the outside world should think so”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 83)<br />
<br />
In a letter to Sumner Welles, concerning the Tukhatchevsky trial, he writes: <b>“Conditions here are, as usual, perplexing. The judgment of those who have been here longest is that conditions are very, very serious; the best judgment seems to believe that in all probability there was a definite conspiracy in the making looking to a coup d’ etat by the army – not necessarily anti-Stalin, but anti-political and anti-party, and that Stalin struck with characteristic speed, boldness and strength. A violent “purge” all over the party has been going on. The opinion of the steadiest minds of the Diplomatic Corps is that the government is not in imminent danger and is still strong.”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 111)<br />
<br />
In a letter to his daughter (on the 9th of March 1938) he writes: <b>“The extraordinary testimony of Krestinsky, Bukharin and the rest would indicate that the Kremlin’s fears were well justified. For it now seems that a plot existed in the beginning of November 1936, to project a coup d’etat, with Tukhatchevsky as its head for May of the following year. Apparently it was touch and go at that time whether it actually would be staged.”</b><br />
<br />
In his overall evaluation of the Bukharin trial, he writes to the State Department: <b>“… after daily observation of the witnesses, their manner of testifying, the unconscious corroboration which developed, and other facts in the course of the trial, together with others of which a judicial notice could be taken, it is my opinion so far that as the political defendants are concerned sufficient crimes under Soviet law. Among those charged in the indictment, were established by proof and beyond a reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason and the adjudication of the punishment provided by Soviet criminal statutes. The opinion of those diplomats who attended the trial most regularly was general that the case had established the fact that there was formidable political opposition and an exceedingly serious plot, which explained to the diplomats many of the hitherto unexplained developments of the last six months of the Soviet Union.”</b> Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 178-179)<br />
<br />
<b>4. The slanderous campaign launched by the world reaction, the Trotskyites and the social-democrats.</b><br />
<br />
The world reaction, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis in the first place, together with the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites and the support of social-democrats outdid everyone else in vilifying the Soviet Union and Stalin. The leaders of the treacherous social-democracy, in particular, were among the campaign’s main props, widely publicized in the daily press.<br />
<br />
Under these circumstances, the international communist and proletarian movement was obliged to respond and one of its leaders, Georgi Dimitrov, addressed the social-democrats with an article: <b>“Support to the terrorists is the same as help to fascism!”</b>, whereby he accurately determine the content of the dispute making clear from the start, that: <b>“it is impossible to read the telegram that the official representatives of the socialist international and the international trade-union federation, De Brouckere, Adler, Citrine and Scheveneis sent so hastily to the soviet government on the occasion of the trial of the terrorist Trotskyite-Zinovievite center without feeling the deepest indignation”</b>; and rightly pointing out that “the trial of the terrorists, the agents of fascism, is an integral part of the international working class anti-fascist struggle” (Georgi Dimitrov: “Gemeine Terroristen in Schutz nehmen, bedeutet dem Fascismus helfen” in ‘RUNDSCHAU” ueber Politik Wirtschaft und Arbeiterbewegung, 5, Jahrgang, No 28, 27/8/1936, p. 1541 Basel).<br />
<br />
The counter-revolutionary Trotsky who, from a Menshevic social-democrat, had degenerated to an agent of fascism and a traitor of his country, the Soviet Union, organized a “counter-trial”; he set up the so-called “Dewey Commission” (1937-1938) presided by the most famous ideological spokesman of American imperialism, the ultra-reactionary pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Unfortunately for him, the outcome was disappointing since none of the evidence presented in the Moscow Trials could be refuted. However, the arrogant collaborator of the Hitlerites assures us that: <b>“I had the opportunity to give an oral and written account before the Investigation Commission on the “Moscow Trials” presided by John Dewey, and not one of these reports was doubted”.</b> So Trotsky gave an account to the Commission set up by himself!<br />
<br />
The significance of the “American Commission for the defense of Trotsky” is indicated by the fact that it published a statement signed by 17 personages seven of whom reported that their names were used without their consent, that they didn’t know the content of the statement and nobody asked them. Among those who complained, was Professor Franz Boas, the Professor Goldenweiser from the University of Wisconsin, Professor Lundberg, the writer of the book “The sixty families of America”, Professor Kilpatrick from Columbia University, Professor Leonard von Roscoe from the University of Wisconsin the writer Burton Roscoe and Wood Krutsch” (RUNDSCHAU” ueber Politik Wirtschaft und Arbeiterbewegung, 5, Jahrgang, No 16, 17/3/1938, p. 1541 Basel).<br />
<br />
What is of particular and special interest is the content of the agreement between Trotsky and the Nazis. In his meeting with Trotsky on the outskirts of Oslo, in the beginning of December 1935, Pyatakov received first hand information about this agreement and fixed date of the outbreak of the war:<br />
<br />
“It was clear to Pyatakov that Trotsky had not invented this information. Trotsky now revealed to Pyatakov that for some time past he had been "conducting rather lengthy negotiations with the Vice-Chairman of the German National Socialist Party—Hess." As a result of these negotiations with Adolf Hitler's deputy, Trotsky had entered into an agreement, "an absolutely definite agreement," with the Government of the Third Reich. The Nazis were ready to help the Trotskyites to come to power in the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
<b>"It goes without saying," Trotsky told Pyatakov, "that such a favourable attitude is not due to any particular love for the Trotskyites. It simply proceeds from the real interests of the fascists and from what we have promised to do for them if we come to power."<br /><br />Concretely, the agreement which Trotsky had entered into with the Nazis consisted of five points. In return for Germany's assistance in bringing the Trotskyites to power in Russia, Trotsky had agreed:—<br /><br />(1) to guarantee a generally favourable attitude towards German government and the necessary collaboration with it in the most important questions of international character;<br /><br />(2) to agree to territorial concessions [the Ukraine];<br /><br />(3) to permit German industrialists, in the form of concessions (or some other forms), to exploit enterprises in the U.S.S.R. essential as complements to German economy (iron ore, manganese, oil, gold, timber, etc.) ;<br /><br />(4) to create in the U.S.S.R. favourable conditions for the activities of German private enterprise;<br /><br />(5) in time of war to develop extensive diversive activities in enterprises of the war industry and at the front. These diversive activities to fee carried on under Trotsky's instructions, agreed upon with the German General Staff.<br /><br />…At the end of two hours, Pyatakov left Trotsky in the small house on the outskirts of Oslo and returned to Berlin as he had come—by privately chartered plane, and carrying a Nazi passport”</b> (Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn: “The Great Conspiracy against Russia, p. 104-105)<br />
<br />
The existence of the Trotsky-Nazi agreement was also admitted by Bukharin in his confession: <b>“In the summer of 1934 Radek told me that directions had been received from Trotsky, that Trotsky was concluding negotiations with the Germans, that Trotsky had already promised the Germans a number of territorial concessions, including Ukraine. If my memory doesn’t fail me, territorial concessions to Japan were also mentioned. In general, these negotiations Trotsky already behaved not only as a conspirator who hopes to get power by means of an armed coup at some future data but already felt himself the master of Soviet land, which he wants to convert from Soviet to non-Soviet….As I remember Tomsky told me that Karakhan had arrived at an agreement with Germany in more advantageous terms than Trotsky”</b> (Report of Court proceedings in the case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”, p. 430,432, Moscow 1938).<br />
<br />
Fortunately, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat managed to defend itself and foiled the plans of the Trotskyite-Bucharinite bloc and the counter-revolutionary Trotsky that included: 1. The undermining of the country’s defense through the action of the terrorist “5th column” 2. The secret agreement with General Staffs of fascist Germany and Japan. 3. The agreement that offered Ukraine and other soviet territory, to the Germans.<br />
<br />
Fifteen years after the treacherous agreements of Trotsky with the Nazis, the various Trotskyite factions show their real facee; we only mention the case of Tony Cliff who outrageously defended the Russian fascist traitors Vlasov-Molyskin who joined the Nazis in the war against their country. (Tony Cliff: “State Capitalism in Russia”)<br />
<br />
It should be reminded that besides the soviet state, the Republican government of Spain during the civil war also put the Trotskyites conspirators to trial and in particular the cadres of POUM (Partido Obrero Unificacion Marxista) who were Franco’s “fifth column”. The leader of POUM at that time was Andreas Nin, an old friend and associate of Trotsky (RUNDSCHAU” ueber Politik Wirtschaft und Arbeiterbewegung, 5, Jahrgang, No 52, 20/10/1938, p. 1765-1766, No 53, 27/10/1938, p. 1807-1809, No 54, 3/11/1938, Basel). Nevertheless, the Trotskyites “recount” that these trials were also organized by Joseph Stalin.<br />
<br />
<b>5. Defense of the Trials from the international communist movement and by hundreds of anti-fascists and communist intellectuals.</b><br />
<br />
The international communist movement in one voice, the Comintern, the communist and workers’ parties individually, including the revolutionary KKE, the anti-fascist and progressive organizations, the revolutionary syndicates and many hundreds of anti-fascist and communist intellectuals from all over the world, defended the revolutionary Moscow Trials of the conspirators, murderers-terrorists, agents and spies of the fascist powers standing by the side of the Stalin’s socialist Soviet Union that was the homeland of all proletarians and the hope for the crushing of fascism.<br />
<br />
At this point, let us mention the universally known names of the communist poet Bertolt Brecht and the anti-fascist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Both of them have been chastised by the reaction and all kinds of pseudo-leftists and pseudo-antifascists not only because they defended firmly the revolutionary Moscow Trials but mainly because they <b>never</b> changed their correct antifascist attitude regarding it as the right one also in the post-war years. The attitude of the two German intellectuals represented the attitude of the overwhelming majority of many hundred anti-fascist intellectuals of that critical period, an attitude vindicated by the great historic event of the 20th century: the great peoples’ Anti-fascist Victory on May 1945.<br />
<br />
Among the various reactionaries and anti-Stalinists that criticize the two German intellectuals are the revisionists Michael Lowey and Robert Sayre who express their grief because Ernst Bloch <b>“from all of his compromises with the Stalinist version of communism, the worst was, undoubtedly, his attitude towards the Moscow trials”</b>, and that he declared “his faith in the USSR and in its “revolutionary tribunals”. They claim that his article “Jubiläum der Renegaten” would be a dark spot in his political activity” (Michael Lowey and Robert Sayre: “Révolte et mélancolie”). Apparently, in order to remove this alleged “dark spot”, Bloch had to collaborate with Hitler like the counter-revolutionary and traitor of his country, Leon Trotsky. The provocative embellishment of the feudal views of the ultra-reactionary German Romanticism is indicative of the anti-Marxist views of this book.<br />
<br />
The great communist poet Bertolt Brecht in an interesting article with the title “For the trials” (1936-1937), expresses himself, from the beginning in the most clear cut way: <b>“concerning the trials: it would be totally erroneous to take a position against the soviet government that conducts them. Because, such a position, by itself, would be very soon transformed to opposition against the Russian proletariat threatened with war by the world’s fascism, opposition against socialism that this proletariat builds. According to the opinion of the most fanatical enemies of the USSR and the soviet government these trials clearly showed the existence of active conspiracies against the regime, demonstrated that the conspirators’ nests had proceeded not only to wrecking activities inside the country but also to negotiations with fascist diplomats regarding their governments’ attitude to a potential governmental change in USSR”. And elsewhere: “The trials is an act of preparation for the war …Initially, Trotsky saw the crushing of the workers state by means of war as a danger – but later it was precisely this possibility that became the prerequisite of his practical activity. Let’s see how: the war breaks out, the superstructure in defense is crushed, the apparatus is alienated from the masses, USSR is forced to concede Ukraine, Eastern Siberia etc, in the interior is forced again to concessions, the return of the capitalist forms, the strengthening of the kulaks (or to tolerate such a strengthening) – yet all these are, at the same time, the conditions of the new era, the return of Trotsky” </b>(Bertolt Brecht: “For philosophy and Marxism”, p. 71 and p. 75, Athens 1977).<br />
<br />
The philosopher Ernst Bloch, besides his main activity in philosophy, he used to comment often the political current affairs of that gloomy period; he wrote four articles on the question of Trials: “Kritik einer Prozesskritik” (March 1937), “Jubiläum der Renegaten” (1937), “Feuchtwangers “Moskau 1937” (July 1937), “Bucharin Slusswort” (May 1938).<br />
<br />
Talking about the Trials, he correctly lays emphasis on the distinction between a revolutionary and a west-European class court because they have completely different class content; he sees “the hate of the Trotskyites against Stalin”, which becomes an ally of fascism only after Hitler’s rise to power and the united “action of Nazi monster, the Japanese grabbing state and the Trotskyite hate” comprising a unified force that should not be underestimated at all; he underlines that the <b>“final result of the Trotskyite action would not be, of course, the world revolution…but the introduction of capitalism in Russia” and“it can be plainly said: the result will be the entry of German fascism to Moscow. Russia would then become what Rathenau had dreamed: a vast eastern colony, a German India”.</b> Somewhere else he writes that it would be <b>“an unprecedented naiveté to doubt about Trotsky’s plans”</b> and wonders <b>“that it would be indeed incomprehensible if Gestapo and Trotskyism did not meet on the ground of the common hate”</b> against the Soviet Union and Stalin (Ernst Bloch, “Kritik einer Prozesskritik“ in Vomm Hasard zum Katastrophe, Politische Aufsötze aus den Jahren 1934-1939, p. 177-179, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972).<br />
<br />
In his article, Jubiläum der Renegaten, Bloch formulates in the most plain terms the nature of the confrontation and the historical dilemma of that time: FASCISM or SOVIET UNION, HITLER or STALIN pointing, at the same time, to the alternative course of action in the most critical moment of that period: <b>“Monopoly capitalism does not give rise to vacillations, the choice between this and the socialist cause of the people is easy. One could say, today, that the notion according to which the anti-Bolshevik slogans serve the devil is the most evident. An unreasonably inflated criticism of the motherland of the revolution, as even Klopstock and Schiller would be able to believe, does not promote at all the ideal of revolution which is only served by Popular Front. And this does not necessarily demand an absolute devotion to Russia but only the simplest and, one would say, easily accepted: without Russia, there can be no Antifascist Struggle and no Victory” </b>(E. Bloch “Jubiläum der Renegaten” in Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormörtz, p. 233, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970).<br />
<br />
What Hitler and his collaborators, the spies of the treacherous Trotskyite-Bukharinite Bloc, did not accomplish – the destruction of the Stalin’s socialist Soviet Union – was unfortunately accomplished by the international reaction in the beginning of the 1950’s, after the death-murder of Stalin through the treacherous clique of Khrushchev-Brezhnev that played the leading role in the overthrow of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the Soviet Union, the elimination of socialism, the restoration of capitalism and its break up in the time of Gorbachev.<br />
<br />
In conclusion, let’s give as an answer, to all those who distort the historical truth, regarding the revolutionary trials, to all kinds of anti-Stalinist slanderers, what the Foreign Affairs Commissar of the USSR Maxim Litvinov told the American ambassador Joseph E. Davies when the latter pointed out that the “purges were bad to the outside reputation of USSR” and “had shaken the confidence of France of England in the strength of USSR vis-à-vis Hitler”; an answer fully confirmed by the course of historic events: <b>“they had to make sure through these purges that there was no treason left which could co-operate with Berlin or Tokyo; that someday the world would understand that what they had done was to protect their government from a menacing treason. In fact, he said that they were doing a while world a service in protecting themselves against the menace of Hitler and Nazi domination, and thereby preserving the Soviet Union strong as bulwark against the Nazi threat. That the world someday would appreciate what a very great man Stalin was”</b> (Joseph E. Davies: “Mission to Moscow”, London 1945, p. 115).<br />
<br />
<b>January 2009<br /><br />The Political Committee of the “Movement for the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-55</b><br />
<br />APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-54845806736889752612012-06-30T23:30:00.000-04:002012-08-27T12:08:04.490-04:00Revolutionary Spirit Vol. #3 Issue #2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyeLRWtoyiv1L0IR1ZWO95H2aR2oR3AFdMPw5z0mhW3bM88VEX4Eis91c5_ChnV7_D7wsqliI83JkU-k6wRjVpz6ilWEpVOATgGEPsNC4M1oMaha4NLX-jeDkaAIoRDgxbcghqIA8onii/s1600/rs+vol+3+issue+3+liberation.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyeLRWtoyiv1L0IR1ZWO95H2aR2oR3AFdMPw5z0mhW3bM88VEX4Eis91c5_ChnV7_D7wsqliI83JkU-k6wRjVpz6ilWEpVOATgGEPsNC4M1oMaha4NLX-jeDkaAIoRDgxbcghqIA8onii/s400/rs+vol+3+issue+3+liberation.png" width="307" /></a></div>
<br />APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-59879561306564169972012-06-30T22:30:00.000-04:002012-08-27T12:06:41.871-04:00Table of Contents<i><b>Revolutionary Spirit</b></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Published</i><br />
June 30th, 2012<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Principles of Marxism-Leninism: A Study Course</b> by Bill Bland<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Arab Jacobins? The Rebirth of Hope in Arabia Felix</b> by Raza Naeem<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Che Guevara and the Political Economy of Socialism</b> by Rafael Martinez<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Moni Guha: Collapse of Socialism</b> by Moni Guha<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Lenin: A Liberal Professor on Equality</b> by V.I. Lenin<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform Part 1</b> by Grover Furr<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform Part 2</b> by Grover Furr<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Thoughts About the Class Roots of Counter-Revolution in the Territory of the Soviet Union</b> by Alexei Danko<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Alleged Collapse of Marxism and Socialism</b> by the Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey (TDKP)<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Class Struggle Within the Party – A Guarantee That the Party Will Always Remain a Revolutionary Party of the Working Class</b> by Ndreçi Plasari<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Raymond Lotta and the Political Economy of Socialism</b> by Sunil Sen<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>On the Shanghai Political Economy Textbook</b> by Rafael Martinez<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Tito Clique’s Stab in the Back to People’s Democratic Greece</b> by Nikos Zahariadis<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Cuba: the Evaportion of a Myth - From Anti-Imperialist Revolution to Pawn of Social-Imperialism</b> by the Revolutionary Communist Party USAAPLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-56484978350449152482012-06-30T22:00:00.000-04:002012-08-27T12:02:01.468-04:00Principles of Marxism-Leninism: A Study Course<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<b><span style="font-size: medium;">by </span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Bill Bland</b></span><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<b><span style="font-size: medium;">CLASS ONE :</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY</span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS ECONOMICS?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The science of the ways in which people satisfy their material needs (for food, clothing, shelter, etc.).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. WHAT IS POLITICS?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The science of the ways in which people organise themselves in
society. (Note: It is broader than 'the science of government'.
Primitive peoples, without state or government, yet have political
organisation).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT IS PRODUCTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The transformation of raw materials into things which people can use,
i.e. into products. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">(Note: The product of one productive process, such
as iron, may form the raw material of another productive process, such
as engineering).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. WHAT ARE MEANS OF PRODUCTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The tools which people use to carry on production—from stone axe to automated plant. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS KNOWN TO HISTORY?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">a. Primitive communism, as in African tribal society;</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">b. Slavery, as
in the Roman Empire;</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">c. Feudalism, as in mediaeval Europe;</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">d.
Capitalism, as in contemporary Britain;</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">e. Socialism, as formerly
existed in the Soviet Union in the time of Lenin and Stalin.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS EXPLOITATION?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The act of living, partly or wholly, on the work of others.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. WHAT IS A SOCIAL CLASS?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A social group which has distinct property relations to means of
production. The members of a class a. own means of production and live
by exploiting a class that does not; b. own means of production and live
by means of their own work; or c. own no means of production and live
by selling their capacity to work to members of a class that does. A
class in category a is an exploiting class, while a class in category c
is an exploited class.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. WHAT ARE THE BASIC SOCIAL CLASSES IN BRITAIN TODAY?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The capitalist class or bourgeoisie, which owns means of production
and lives by exploiting the social class which does not; b. the middle
class or petty bourgeoisie, which owns small means of production and
lives primarily by its own work; and c. the working class or
proletariat, which owns no means of production and lives by selling its
capacity to work to the capitalist class.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. WHICH OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEMS KNOWN TO HISTORY ARE BASED ON EXPLOITATION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">a. slavery (in which the slave class is exploited by the slave-owning
class)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">b. feudalism (in which the serf class is exploited by the
aristocracy; and</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">c. capitalism (in which the working class is exploited
by the capitalist class).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> 10. WHAT IS THE BASIC CAUSE OF HISTORICAL CHANGE FROM ONE SOCIAL SYSTEM TO ANOTHER? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The development of tools and techniques. This process occurs within a
particular social system until the point is reached where these new
tools and techniques can no longer be developed—or even used—to the full
within that particular social system. The frustrations resulting from
this give rise to a political movement, the function of which is to
change this social system to a new one. Eventually this change is
brought about, allowing the new tools and techniques to be developed
further within the new social system. The first stage of human society
was one in which tools and techniques were so primitive, and production
in consequence so low, that it was possible for someone to produce only
barely sufficient to keep himself and his dependants alive. There was,
therefore, no surplus which anyone could take. Consequently,
exploitation was impossible, means of production were communally owned,
and the social system was one of primitive communism. However, within
primitive communism tools and techniques continued to be developed,
until the point was reached where it was possible for someone to produce
more than was necessary to keep himself and his dependants alive. Until
this point prisoners- of-war had generally been eaten; now, however,
cannibalism came to be regarded by society as immoral, because it was no
longer economically sensible: by turning a prisoner-of-war into a slave
it was possible to obtain from him, not one good meal, but a lifetime
of meals from his slave labour. Thus, as a result of the development of
tools and techniques, primitive communism gave way to slavery. society
became divided into two social classes: a class of exploiting
slave-owners and a class of exploited slaves. But within slavery tools
and techniques continued to be developed until the point was reached
where the purely forced labour of the slave (who worked only to avoid
punishment) ceased to be capable of using and developing these new tools
and techniques adequately. In consequence, the slave-owners themselves
gradually transformed the basis of their exploitation into a new form in
which the exploited peasants were given an interest in the use and
development of the new tools and techniques—the slaves were transformed
into serfs. In feudal society the serfs, although legally tied to their
lord's estate, were permitted to work part-time on their own strips of
land. They had, however, to work also on their lord's estate and to hand
over to him a proportion of the produce from their own strips. But
within feudalism tools and techniques were further developed, a new
class of merchants and artisans appeared in the towns. The serfs, in
alliance with the rising merchant class, succeeded in gaining their
freedom from serfdom, in commuting their labour service into a new
system of money rents. With the commutation of labour service, the lords
found themselves unable to obtain labour for their own private estates.
In order to obtain this (as well as for other secondary reasons) they
proceeded to 'enclose' the peasants' own land, that is, to drive them
from it so that they were compelled to seek employment as wage-labourers
in order to live. Great numbers of these dispossessed peasants migrated
to the towns to seek employment with the merchants and artisans. The
working class was born. Within the framework of feudal society, a new
economic system—capitalism—began to develop. But the merchant
capitalists found their efforts to develop the capitalist system (on
which their economic advancement depended) frustrated by the opposition
of the ruling landed aristocracy. This frustration gave rise to a
political movement to change the social system. Eventually the political
power of the aristocracy was overthrown in a bourgeois revolution, and
the capitalist class became the ruling class. Within the framework of
capitalist society, tools and techniques were developed at an
unprecedented rate. In the 20th century the point was reached where the
full use and development of these new tools and techniques was being
held back by the continued existence of a social system which had
outlived its usefulness to the mass of the people. This became the basis
of a crisis within the capitalist system, and it brought into existence
a movement to change (again) the social system to a new one: the
socialist movement. During the 20th century the working class over a
quarter of the world succeeded in abolishing the capitalist system and
in laying the foundations of a socialist system. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">However, for reasons
which will be analysed later in this course, a temporary reversion to
capitalism took place. The establishment of a socialist society in
Britain, as part of a world revolutionary process, is the historic task
which faces the British working people.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE TERM 'PROGRESSIVE'?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">That which helps forward the development of society.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12, WHAT IS MEANT BY THE TERM 'REACTIONARY'?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">That which tends to hold back or turn back, the development of society. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT IS THE STATE?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A machinery of force by which one social class rules over the rest of
the people. In primitive communism, a classless society, there was no
state machinery. The state came into existence with the establishment of
a class-divided society, since the slave-owning minority found it
necessary to hold down the exploited slave majority by force. In slave
society, the state was the machinery of rule of the slave-owning class.
In feudal society, the state was the machinery of rule of the landed
aristorcacy. In capitalist society, the state is the machinery of rule
of the capitalist class. As we shall see, the working class (although it
is not and will not be an exploiting class) also needs its own
machinery of force, its own state, a socialist state, in order to
maintain socialist society and prevent its overthrow by the capitalist
class which has lost its wealth and power. Thus, in a socialist society
the state is the machinery of rule of the working class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT IS A REVOLUTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The forcible replacement of the rule of one class by the rule of a more progressive class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WHICH OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEMS KNOWN TO HISTORY WERE ESTABLISHED BY
MEANS OF A REVOLUTION?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">a. The capitalist system, established as a result
of the revolutionary overthrow of the political power of the feudal
aristocracy in a bourgeois revolution.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">b. The socialist system,
established as a result of the revolutionary overthrow of the political
power of the capitalist class in a socialist or proletarian revolution. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. WHAT IS A COUNTER-REVOLUTION?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The forcible overthrow of the rule of one class by that of a more reactionary class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. WHAT SOCIAL CLASS WAS PLACED IN POWER BY</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">a. THE ENGLISH
REVOLUTION OF THE 17TH CENTURY? The English capitalist class.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">b. THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION OF THE 18TH CENTURY? The French capitalist class.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">c,
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF MARCH 1917? The Russian capitalist class.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">d.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF NOVEMBER 1917? The Russian working class. <br />
<b> </b></span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS TWO :</b> HOW CAPITALISM WORKS (Part One) </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS A COMMODITY?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Something produced for exchange, not for the personal use of the
producer. A peasant who grows vegetables for his family is not engaged
in commodity production, but in production for use. But if he grows them
in order to exchange them with the landlord of the local inn for ale,
he is engaged in production for exchange, in commodity production. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. WHAT IS SIMPLE COMMODITY PRODUCTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The production of commodities by producers who own their own means of
production, like that carried on by artisans under the feudal system.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT IS CAPITALIST COMMODITY PRODUCTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The production of commodities by working class producers in a
capitalist society, that is, by producers who do not own their means of
production and so are compelled, in order to live, to seek employment
with capitalists who do own means of production. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. WHAT IS A MARKET? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">An area where those who wish to dispose of a commodity and those who
wish to acquire it are in contact. Thus, we may speak of a local
livestock market or a world oil market. A market where there are a
number of separate individuals or firms competing to dispose of a
commodity and a number of individuals or firms competing to acquire it
is called a competitive market. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. WHAT IS THE RATE OF EXCHANGE OF A COMMODITY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The number of commodities of other kinds for which that commodity can
be exchanged in a particular market at a particular time. If a cow can
be exchanged in a town's cattle market on a particuar day for two pigs,
the rate of exchange of a cow is equal to two pigs, while the rate of
exchange of a pig is one- half of a cow.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A COMMODITY?. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, it is not necessarily equal to its rate of exchange in a
particular market, for in the last example we may speak of a cow being
'worth more' or 'worth less' than its actual exchange value. At the
basis of the exchange rate between two commodities lies the relative
quantity of work required to produce them. In fact, the value of a
commodity is the necessary labour time required to produce it. So, if it
takes 4,000 times more hours to produce a car than to produce a briar
pipe, the value of a car is 4,000 times that of the pipe.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. WHAT DETERMINES THE RATE OF EXCHANGE OF A COMMODITY IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Supply and demand, which causes the rate of exchange to fluctuate
above or below its value. If, for example, there is a shortage of sugar
in a particular market, those who wish to obtain it will tend to offer
more than its value in order to obtain it. On the other hand, if there
is a glut of sugar in a particular market, those who wish to dispose of
it will tend to offer it at less than its value in order not to have it
left on their hands. However, if the rate of exchange of a commodity is
above its value as a result of shortage, the production of sugar will
yield exceptionally high returns, Consequently, more people will go in
for producing it, and the production of sugar will rise until its rate
of exchange goes down to its value. The reverse process operates if the
rate of exchange of sugar is below its value as a result of supply
exceeding 'demand'; the production of sugar then yields exceptionally
low returns, so that the production of sugar will decrease until its
rate of exchange rises to its value. Thus, in each competitive market
there is a tendency for the rate of exchange of each commodity to
correspond, in the long run, to its value.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. WHAT IS BARTER? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The direct exchange of one commodity for another, e.g., wheat for bricks.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. WHAT IS MONEY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A commodity (or token of a commodity, such as a banknote, which is
the token for a certain quantity of gold) which is generally acceptable
within a particular community as a medium of exchange. The introduction
of a monetary system removes many of the difficulties inherent in a
barter system. Under the latter, if a weaver wishes to obtain a pair of
shoes, he must search for a shoemaker who wants cloth. But when money is
in social use, he may sell his cloth to anyone for money and use this
to buy shoes from any shoemaker.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. WHAT IS PRICE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The rate of exchange of a commodity expressed in terms of money.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WHY DO PRECIOUS METALS SUCH AS GOLD AND SILVER COME INTO USE AS MONEY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">For convenience of use and transport. Being rare, their production
involves a very large amount of labour time, so that a small quantity of
them embodies a very large value. <br />
<br />
12. WHAT IS LABOUR POWER? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The capacity of a worker to work for a certain period of time. The
worker, owning no means of production of his own, is compelled in order
to live to try to sell his labour power to a capitalist. Thus, in a
capitalist society, labour power is a commodity. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT DETERMINES THE VALUE OF LABOUR POWER? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As in the case of other commodities, the amount of socially necessary
labour time involved in its production, that is, the value of the
commodities required to produce, maintain and reproduce it. The value of
labour power is not, however, that of the bare subsistence of the
worker and his dependents (who form the next generation of workers) but
depends on such additional factors as the subsistence necessary to train
a skilled worker, the degree of 'civilisation' of the country
concerned, and so on. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT ARE WAGES? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The price of labour power. In a competitive market, the price of
labour power, like that of other commodities, may fluctuate above or
below its value according to supply and demand, but in the long run its
price tends to correspond to its value. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WHAT IS SURPLUS VALUE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The new value created in the course of production by a worker's
labour over and above the value of his labour power. If a worker
receiving £100 a week in wages were to create only £100 a week in value,
his employer would obtain no benefit from employing him and would cease
to do so. An employer will employ a worker only if he produces in a
week an amount of new value which exceeds what is paid to him in wages.
The difference is the surplus value—value which is created by the worker
but appropriated by his employer. If a worker creates £200 of new value
in a week but is paid £100 in wages, his employer has obtained £100 in
surplus value from that worker. So, if he employs 1,000 such workers, he
obtains a total of £100,000 of surplus value in a week. This is the
mechanism by which the capitalist class exploits the working class.
Clearly, exploitation under capitalism has a more concealed character
than under slavery or feudalism<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. WHAT IS CAPITAL? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">All that is owned or hired by capitalists in a capitalist
society—land, buildings, machinery, raw materials, labour power—enabling
them to acquire surplus value, that is, enabling them to exploit
workers. The money expended by capitalists for this purpose—a process
known as investment—is also called capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. WHAT IS CONSTANT CAPITAL? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">All capital except that used for the buying of labour power. Land,
buildings, machinery and raw materials do not themselves create new
value, but are merely the instruments with which human labour power
creates new value. Since the capital expended on these items does not
change in value in the course of capitalist production, it is called
constant capital. <br />
<br />
18. WHAT IS VARIABLE CAPITAL?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Capital expended on the purchase of
labour power. Since the new value created in the course of capitalist
production is created entirely by the worker's labour power, the capital
expended on this item may be regarded as having changed—increased—in
value in the course of capitalist production. It is, therefore, called
variable capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">19. WHAT ARE RENT, INTEREST AND PROFIT?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The portions of surplus value which are appropriated by different
sections of the exploiting class (or by different exploiting classes) in
a capitalist society. Rent may be paid by the employer (the
entrepreneur) to a landlord for the hire of land and/or buildings where
his enterprise is carried on. Interest may be paid by the entrepreneur
to a financier or bank for the hire of money capital he requires to
carry on his enterprise. Profit is that portion of the surplus value
which the entrepreneur retains for himself after paying any rent or
interest. Rent, interest and profit, being portions of the surplus value
produced in the course of capitalist production, all have their source
in the exploitation of the workers. An entrepreneur who owns his own
land, buildings and money capital retains, of course, all three portions
of the surplus value for himself.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">20. WHAT IS COMMERCIAL PROFIT?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The profit obtained by a commercial capitalist, that is, one engaged in the distribution (i.e., selling) of commodities.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">21. WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF COMMERCIAL PROFIT? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Value is created only by produtive labour, and surplus value is
created only by labour employed in capitalist production. No value is
created in the process of distribution. The source of commercial profit
(as well as the source of the wages of employed distributive workers)
lies in the surplus value created by employed production workers. The
capitalist engaged in production sells his finished commodities to a
capitalist engaged in distribution at a discount, below their value. The
capitalist engaged in distribution realises his commercial profit by
reselling them at their value. In other words, the capitalists engaged
in production pass to the capitalists engaged in distribution a portion
of the surplus value created by their employed production workers in the
course of capitalist production<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">22. WHAT IS THE MOTIVE OF PRODUCTION UNDER CAPITALISM?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Profit. Each capitalist firm strives to make for itself the maximum possible amount of profit. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">CRITICISE THE FOLLOWING ANALYSIS: 'BECAUSE OF THE OPERATION OF THE
PRINCIPLE OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND IN A CAPITALIST SOCIETY AS DESCRIBED IN
PARAGRAPH 7 ABOVE, THE PROFIT MOTIVE AUTOMATICALLY GEARS PRODUCTION TO
DEMAND'. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The 'demand' which is satisfied as a result of the operation of the
profit motive is not the needs of the masses of the people. It is what
is called 'effective demand', that is, 'demand' measured in terms of the
money which consumers are willing and able to spend on the satisfaction
of their needs. If the entire population of a capitalist country were
to demonstrate in the streets for bread, there would be no 'effective
demand' for bread unless they had the necessary money to offer in the
bakers' shops. Thus, the profit motive gears production approximately to
the needs of those people with enough money to express their needs in
effective demand. That is why, although there has long been a housing
shortage for working people in capitalist Britain, capitalist building
firms do not use the resources of the building industry to build houses
and flats for working people but, instead, use them to construct such
things as office buildings (which may stand empty for years). They do so
because the latter course is more profitable, although the social need
for it is incomparably smaller. Only when the profit motive has been
abolished and production is consciously planned can it be geared to the
real needs of the people. <br />
<b> </b></span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS THREE :</b> HOW CAPITALISM WORKS (Part Two) </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The transformation of surplus value into new capital so as to
increase the amount of capital in the hands of an individual or firm.
Even if the rate of exploitation remains unchanged, the accumulation of
capital enables the number of exploited workers employed by a particular
individual or firm to be increased, so increasing the total surplus
value obtained by the individual or firm concerned. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. THE NEW MEANS OF PRODUCTION OBTAINED AS A RESULT OF THE
ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL TEND TO BE MORE MECHANISED THAN THE OLD. WHAT
ADVANTAGE DOES THIS GIVE TO THE FIRM CONCERNED?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The increased productivity resulting from the increased mechanisation
reduces the cost of production of each commodity, enabling the firm
concerned (as long as it enjoys a technical advantage over its rivals)
to make an above-average rate of profit. NOTE: We call the ratio of
constant capital (plant, etc.) to variable capital (wages), the organic
composition of capital. Thus, the organic composition of capital tends
constantly to increase. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT IS CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The enlargement of individual capitals into larger and larger units.
The concentration of capital follows from the process of accumulation of
capital.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. LEAVING ON ONE SIDE THE ACCUMULATION AND MECHANISATION OF CAPITAL, HOW ELSE CAN A CAPITALIST FIRM INCREASE ITS PROFITS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Only by increasing the amount of surplus value it obtains from each
of its workers, for example: 1) by cutting wages (allowing prices to
rise while wages are frozen represents a cut in real wages); 2) by
increasing working hours while preventing a corresponding increase in
real wages; 3) by increasing the intensity of work by methods such as
piecework wage systems (where wages are geared to output), 'speed- up'
of the conveyor belt system, time-and-motion-study (designed to
eliminate any actions which do not contribute to production), etc. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. WHAT IS THE BASIS OF THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL WHICH MARXIST-LENINISTS CALL 'THE CLASS STRUGGLE'? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The division of the value produced by the workers between the two
classes—the working class and the capitalist class. Leaving on one side
the accumulation and mechanisation of capital, higher profits can be
obtained only at the expense of the living and working conditions of the
working class, while improved living and working conditions for workers
can be obtained only at the expense of profit. There is, therefore, a
fundamental conflict of interest between the working class and the
capitalist class. At times smouldering beneath the surface, at times
bursting into the open flames of strike or lock-out, the class struggle
is inherent in capitalist society. No repressive measures can do more
than hold it down for a while. It will disappear only when capitalists
and capitalism no longer exist. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS THE BASIC CAUSE OF SLUMPS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, the unplanned, anarchic character of production under
capitalism, where each firm 'plans' its production in the hope of
maximising its profits, combined, secondly, with the fact that the
working class (who comprise, in a developed capitalist country, the
majority of the population) receive in wages considerably less than
would enable them to purchase all the goods and services they produce,
and with, thirdly, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in line
with the growth in the organic composition of capital. Periodically,
therefore, a glut of unsold goods piles up in warehouses and orders to
producers are drastically cut. As a result, capitalists cut back their
production, putting workers on short time or dismissing them. In
consequence, the purchasing power of the working class is reduced still
further, orders are further cut back, and the whole system sinks into a
vicious spiral of slump or depression, with mass unemployment and
widespread bankruptcies. When production has fallen to a low level
(often with masses of surplus produce being destroyed), the warehouses
are compelled to order at least a minimum quantity of the goods required
by the population. As a result, the capitalists take some workers back
into employment and, in consequence of the rise in the purchasing power
of the workers, more orders flow into producing firms. The system picks
up into a recovery, followed by a boom—at the height of which a new
crisis of relative over-production is precipitated.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. WHAT IS MONOPOLY?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A firm, or association of firms, which possesses monopoly power,
i.e., which controls so much of the output of a commodity within a
market that a competitive market can no longer be said to exist.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF MONOPOLY POWER TO THE CAPITALISTS POSSESSING IT? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A monopoly can price its commodities higher than would be possible
under conditions of competition, i.e., it can sell its commodities above
their value. It can assist this process further by restricting output.
Thus, a monopoly can make a higher rate of profit than would be possible
under conditions of competition. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. A MONOPOLY MAY BE: 1) A TRUST; 2) A COMBINE, OR 3) A CARTEL. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EACH? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A trust is a single giant firm with monopoly power, such as Imperial
Chemical Industries. A combine is a group of firms under single control
possessing monopoly power, such as Unilever. A cartel or ring is an
association of separate firms which have agreed to restrict competition
among themselves in order to reap the advantages of monopoly power, A
cartel may, for example, fix production quotas and the share of the
market for the participating firms and/or agreed prices for a commodity.
An example of an international cartel is the Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. DOES MONOPOLY END COMPETITION?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">No. It reduces competition in the area covered by the monopoly, while
accentuating it in other fields—e.g., between monopoly capitalists and
non-monopoly capitalists and between rival groups of monopolists in the
same or different countries. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WHAT IS FINANCE CAPITAL?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As capitalism develops, concentration and centralisation, of capital
proceed in banking as in industry, and a merging of bank and industrial
capital takes place, so that a small group of monopoly capitalists—a
financial oligarchy—comes to control the large banks and financial
institutions as well as the large industrial firms. This merged bank and
industrial capital is called finance capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE CAPITALIST CLASSES OF ALL COUNTRIES ARE
FACED WITH A MARKET PROBLEM HOW DO THEY ENDEAVOUR TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">'In theory' they could raise the workers' wages to equal the value of
the commodities they produce, but since this would reduce their profits
to nil, capitalists reject this solution. Consequently, they endeavour
to solve their perennial market problem by exporting commodities. Since
all the developed capitalist countries have a market problem, each tends
to direct its export drive primarily towards less developed countries. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHY DOES THE EXPORT OF COMMODITIES TEND TO LEAD TO THE EXPORT OF CAPITAL AND TO COLONIALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Because an underdeveloped country is economically backwards, its
population as a whole tends to be poor. Furthermore, its economy tends
to be autarkic (that is, relatively self- contained). Consequently, an
underdeveloped country provides a poor market for the surplus
commodities from a developed capitalist country unless its economy is
radically transformed. This is one reason why capitalist firms in
developed capitalist countries 'export capital' to such underdeveloped
countries, i.e,, invest it in the acquisition of large tracts of land
for conversion into plantations or mines. They flood the underdeveloped
country with cheap manufactured goods which ruin many of the native
artisans (who still use handicraft methods which cannot compete with
machine production). And if they can control the administration of the
underdeveloped country—a process known as colonialism—they can force a
large part of the peasantry from the land they traditionally held (for
example, by imposing money taxes which can be met only from wages).
These ruined artisans and landless peasants are compelled to seek
employment at starvation wages in foreign-owned plantations or mines
producing cheap raw materials and food for the developed capitalist
countries (at a very high rate of profit for the firms involved—this
providing a second important reason for the export of capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT ARE SUPER-PROFITS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Surplus value which a capitalist class obtains by the exploitation of
workers outside its own country, particularly in underdeveloped
colonial-type countries where the degree of civilisation (and so the
value and price of labour power) is lower than in the developed
capitalist country, so that the rate of profit is (often very
considerably) higher. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WHAT IS A COLONY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A colonial-type country which is administered directly by a developed capitalist country, e.g., Gibraltar, Northern Ireland. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. WHAT IS A SEMI-COLONY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A country which is nominally independent but is in fact dominated by a foreign power (e.g., Saudi Arabia). <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. SOME PEOPLE CLAIM THAT THE WORKING CLASS OF A DEVELOPED
CAPITALIST COUNTRY AS A WHOLE SHARES IN THE EXPLOITATION OF
COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRIES. IS THIS TRUE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">No. Super-profits from the exploitation of the working people of
colonial-type countries go to the capitalists of the developed
capitalist countries concerned. While a small portion of these
super-profits may be used to bribe a stratum of highly- paid workers
(mainly the officials in the labour movement who act as agents of
capital) the workers as a whole receive only the value of their labour
power in wages and do not share in the super-profits. Nevertheless, the
existence of the small stratum of workers bribed by imperialist
super-profits (the so-called 'labour aristocracy') creates an objective
split in the working class which complicates the development of the
socialist movement. For the most part, however, the fact that the
standard of living of the British workers has risen over the past
hundred years is not because they receive in wages more than the value
of their labour-power, but because the value of their labour- power has
increased. A considerable part of the super-profits from colonial-type
countries has been used to accumulate capital and mechanise production
at home, so that productivity has risen and with it the 'degree of
civilisation' which contributes to the determination of the value of
labour power. In other words, total production has risen very
considerably over the last century and the working class has been
accorded a minor portion of this in the form of increased real wages.
However, the share of total production received in wages by the working
class has fallen, so that the exploitation of the British working class
has increased over this period. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">18. THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION OF A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY LIMITS IN
TIME THE USEFULNESS OF THE COUNTRY TO THE DEVELOPED CAPITALIST COUNTRY
CONCERNED. HOW DOES THIS COME ABOUT? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The capitalists of the dominating country need a stratum of
well-educated native people to serve them as civil servants, office
workers, etc., and these people become frustrated by the fact that the
higher positions are reserved for representatives of the foreign
dominating power. Furthermore, although the foreign capitalists try to
limit capitalist development in the colonial-type country, they need
railways, harbours, etc. in order to bring out raw materials and food
from the country. This helps to bring about the development of a
national capitalist class or national bourgeoisie which, although
frustrated in many ways by the dominating foreign power (frustrations
which assist in developing the political consciousness of the national
bourgeoisie), develops a degree of native capitalist industry which
competes with the export industries of the developed capitalist country.
It also creates an industrial working class, small in size but
relatively concentrated; this naturally gives rise to a labour movement,
which begins to struggle for higher wages and better working
conditions. In time, all these factors lead to the rise of a national
liberation movement, led initially by the national bourgeoisie, the aim
of which is to free the colonial-type country from the domination and
exploitation of the foreign capitalsts. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">19. HOW DO THE CAPITALISTS OF THE DOMINATING FOREIGN POWER RESPOND TO THE RISE OF A NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">First of all, by attempting to suppress it by force. Secondly, when
the national liberation movement has attained a certain strength, by
seeking to neutralise it by transferring poltical power nominally to a
group of landlords and comprador capitalists who are dependent upon the
foreign power for their ability to exploit the working people. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">20. WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> Imperialism is another name for monopoly capitalism or finance
capitalism. A capitalist society has developed to the stage of
imperialism when: 1) the concentration and centralisation of capital has
proceeded to the point where it has created monopolies which play a
decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank and industrial
capital has developed to the point where it has created, on the basis of
finance capital, a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital, as
distinct from the export of commodities, has become extremely important.
On a world scale we must note the creation of international monopolies
and the fact that, by 1914, all the underdeveloped countries of the
world had been brought within the sphere of influence of one or another
imperialist power, so that further imperialist expansion could only be
at the expense of some other imperialist power. <br />
<b> </b></span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS FOUR :</b> THE STATE AND THE ROAD TO SOCIALISM </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS THE STATE?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As we saw in Class One, essentially the machinery of force by which one social class rules over the rest of the people. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPAL ORGANS OF THE CONTEMPORARY BRITISH STATE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The monarch, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the judiciary,
the prison service, the armed forces, the police, the security
services, the civil service, the Church of England, the BBC, the post
office, the National Health Service.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHICH OF THESE FORM THE KEY ORGANS OF STATE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The armed forces, the police and the security services. This is
because the key issue in politics is always physical power, and it is
these three organs which possess physical power in the state.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. EXPLAIN WHAT IS MEANT BY THE STATEMENT: "'PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY'
IS A FALSE FACADE WHICH CONCEALS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CAPITALIST
CLASS".<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">British constitutional law lays down that supreme power is held, not
by the House of Commons (the organ principally associated with the term
'parliamentary democracy') but by 'The Queen in Parliament', which is
defined as the Queen together with the House of Lords and the House of
Commons. This means that the legislative power of the House of Commons
(at present the sole elected organ of Parliament) is subject to the
approval in most cases of the House of Lords and in all cases by the
Queen. Furthermore, legislation is subject to 'interpretation' by the
judiciary and can only be put into effect with the cooperation of the
heads of the civil service. However, the monarchy, the House of Lords,
the judiciary and the heads of the civil service are not subject to
democratic election. These posts are reserved for representatives of the
capitalist class or the aristocracy (which has now merged with the
capitalist class). Furthermore, the heads of the armed forces and
security forces—key organs of state—are also drawn from the upper class,
and constitutionally they owe allegiance not to 'the people' or the
House of Commons, but to the Queen. They are thus available to be used
in the Queen's name to 'defend the Constitution' on behalf of the
capitalist class. Thus, 'parliamentary democracy' is a false facade
which conceals the real character of the state as machinery which
embodies the dictatorship of the capitalist class. Parliament is thus no
more than a 'talking shop', the function of which is to deceive the
masses into believing that it is 'their servant'. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. IMAGINE THAT YOUR PARTY—A PARTY OF GENUINE SOCIALISTS—HAS WON A
MAJORITY IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN A GENERAL ELECTION. WHAT STEPS WOULD
YOU TAKE TO INTRODUCE SOCIALISM CONSTITUTIONALLY?.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Even the posing of this question requires considerable imagination.
For the development of electoral opinion to the point where a general
election might occur would clearly take a considerable time and would
not go unnoticed by the capitalist class. Since this class will
obviously use every weapon in its power to preserve its wealth, power
and exploiting 'rights , -- in the name, of couse, of preserving
'freedom' and 'moral values'—it would obviously take steps prior to the
election (alteration of electoral laws and boundaries, outright banning
of your party as 'subversive' etc.) to try to prevent such an
embarrassing electoral result. Let us assume, however, that as a result
of some miracle of stupidity the capitalist class fails to take such
preventive action. Your party must then hope that the Queen will invite
the leader of your party to form a government. It has long been
customary for the monarch to invite the leader of the party with the
largest number of seats in the House of Commons to become Prime
Minister, but there is no constitutional obligation on her to do so. Let
us assume, however, that she takes this step and that the leader of
your party selects his provisional Cabinet. Before these can take office
as Ministers, they are required by constitutional law to take an oath
of allegiance to the Queen. Since your party's electoral programme must
have included pledges to abolish the undemocratic monarchy, the arrest
of these Ministers on charges of perjury will be perfectly legitimate.
And when sufficient of your MPs have been, quite legally, imprisoned,
your party will no longer have a majority in the House. Let us therfore
assume another miracle—that the capitalist class is too stupid to take
constitutional measures to prevent your party from taking office and
that it introduces legislation to socialise the principal means of
production. Such legislation can only be adopted with the approval of
the House of Lords and the Queen (the latter can hold up legislation
indefinitely), so that further miracles have to be imagined for your
socialist programme to be put into legislation. The capitalists may then
appeal to the courts to rule that such legislation is unlawful, and a
further miracle is required to make the upper class judges rule in
favour of the socialist government. Furthermore, the putting into effect
of this socialist legislation requires the cooperation of the heads of
the civil service, who are also drawn from the upper class, so that
their cooperation would require a further miracle. One must also assume
yet another miracle. Constitutionally, the armed forces—the heads of
which are also drawn from the upper class—may in case of 'emergency' at
the request of the monarch establish martial law and rule dictatorially
That reactionary military coups are not confined to distant countries
was shown by the infamous Curragh Mutiny of 1914, which led to the
partition of Ireland. Another miracle has, therefore, to be imagined to
render the monarch and the armed forces inactive in this respect. Such a
wholesale series of miracles does not occur in real life, and it is
clear that the concept of a constitutional transition to socialism is
absurd.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS A POLITICAL PARTY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">An organisation which serves the political interests of a social class (or of a section of such a class). <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. THE BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS ESSENTIALLY 'A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM'. WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS?. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The system is designed to give the electorate at an election a choice
between two large parties. Both parliamentary parties (i.e., the
collective MPs of each party) declare that they are not bound by
decisions of their party conference, and both support the maintenance of
a capitalist society. Thus, after an election, one of these parties
forms Her Majesty's Government and the other forms Her Majesty's
Opposition. When, after a period, a majority of the electors become
dissatified with the government, this may be replaced at an election by
the other party without any disturbance to the capitalst system. The
two-party system deliberately places great obstacles in the way of
smaller parties: large deposits are forfeit where a candidate fails to
obtain a certain proportion of the vote; there is no proportional
representation, so that a party can obtain 49% of the national vote
without securing the election of a single MP; TV propaganda is
restricted to parties putting up a certain number of candidates:
electors who are dissatisfied with both parties often vote for the one
they regard as 'the lesser evil' on the grounds that it is impossible
for a smaller party which they in fact support to form a government so
that a vote for it would be 'wasted' and might even assist 'the greater
evil' to win the election by 'splitting the vote'. British
'parliamentary democracy' is clearly designed, as Marx expressed it, to
give the electorate merely a choice as to which group of capitalist
politicians shall misrepresent them for the next five years.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. ANALYSE THE STATEMENT: 'THE BRITISH STATE IS A 'WELFARE STATE' <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It must be remembered first that the social services had their
origin, not in 'humanitarian concern' on the part of capitalists for
their working people, but in the spread of epidemics from the slums to
upper class residential quarters and in the discovery at the time of the
Boer war that 50% of working class recruits to the army were medically
unfit for military service. Experience, therefore, forced the
capitalists to realise long ago that the state, as the machinery of
their rule, had to take such action in the field of social welfare as
would ensure that the workers had the minimum of health necessary to
produce surplus value for them and to fight in their wars. This
principle having been accepted, the aim of the capitalist class has been
to keep the level of social services down to the minimum necessary to
fulfil this purpose—in particular, to see that benefits are
significantly lower than average wages and that the working class itself
pays for the social services it receives (by means of taxation,
insurance contributions, etc.) out of wages, in many cases after a
degrading 'means test'. These points have, of course, been influenced by
the class struggle of the working class, but statistics show that the
average working class family pays considerably more in taxation,
contributions, etc., than it receives in terms of all the social
services combined. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. WHAT IS NATIONALISATION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The taking over by the state of an enterprise previously under private ownership. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. IS NATIONALISATION IN A CAPITALIST SOCIETY A SOCIALIST MEASURE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since the state in a capitalist society is the machinery of rule of
the capitalist class, nationalisation in a capitalist society is in no
way a socialist measure. It represents merely the transfer of an
enterprise from ownership by a single capitalist to ownership by the
capitalist class as a whole. The most reactionary governments have
carried out measures of nationalsation, affecting principally the fields
of communications and fuel, which serve the capitalist class as a whole
(e.g., the post office, railways, airlines, gas, coal, electricity,
etc.). The motive for nationalisation is to provide a cheap and
efficient service in these fields for the benefit of the capitalist
class as a whole, and nationalisation is usually carried out where
private enterprise is using monopoly power to charge excessive rates to
other capitalist firms or where private enterprise appears to be no
longer capable of providing a reasonably efficient service in some field
essential to the capitalist class as a whole. When an enterprise is
nationalised by the capitalist state, the former owners are usually
generously compensated with interest-bearing state bonds, which enable
them to continue to exploit the working class with their profits
guaranteed by the state. The boards which manage such nationalised
industries are dominated by members of the capitalist class (often,
indeed, by their former owners, who then receive directors' fees in
addition to interest). Thus, as workers in nationalised industries know
from their own experience, the class struggle continues within them, but
it is now necessary for the workers concerned to struggle not against a
single private management, but against the capitalist state. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WHAT IS STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">With the development of monopoly capitalism, of imperialism, the
state comes to be less and less the machinery of rule of the capitalist
class as a whole, and to become increasingly subordinated to the
dominant clique of monopoly capitalists, to become the state machine of
the financial oligarchy. The imperialist stage of development of
capitalism also sees a great expansion of the state apparatus, both in
the field of physical power and in that of the regulation of economic,
political and cultural life. This expansion is not 'socialist' in
character. It is undertaken in the interests of monopoly capital, and
Marxist- Leninists call this development by the name of state monopoly
capitalism. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. WHAT IS A CORPORATE STATE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A concept of the state originally put forward by right-wing Catholic
politicians. Its official aim is 'to abolish the class struggle' (in
fact, of course, to repress it) by abolishing free collective bargaining
between trade unions and employers' organisations. In a corporate
state, 'negotiations' on wages, working conditions, etc., are carried
out by 'corporations', composed of represenatives of the employers and
of the state, together with 'workers' representatives'. Moves by British
governments to restrict free collective bargaining must be seen as
moves in the direction of a corporate state, while propaganda in favour
of 'workers' representation in industry' or 'workers' control' must be
seen as pseudo-leftist propaganda directed towards the establishment of a
corporate state. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT IS FASCISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The open, terroristic dictatorship of a reactionary class (usually of
monopoly capital) exercised through a para-military political party.
The name is derived from the 'fasces' or bundle of sticks, the emblem of
the Roman Empire which was taken over by the Italian fascists. A
fascist party is recruited principally from reactionary elements among
the petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen-proletariat (degenerate, petty criminal
strata of the working class). It is financed, as the situation demands,
by capital and armed (usually unofficially) by their armed forces. A
fascist party directs its appeal demagogically to the most politically
backward strata of the working people (calling itself by such names as
'national socialist') and of the petty bourgeoisie (claiming to be, for
example, 'against monopoly'), but its main propaganda is based on appeal
to racist and nationalist prejudices. Its function is to try to smash
by force the organisations of the working class, and to replace the
facade of 'parliamentary democracy' by an open dictatorship which
strives to exert repressive control over every sphere of social life
(totalitarianism) Within this dictatorship, the fascist party rules
dictatorially (often in the name of an 'infallible leader') on behalf of
the dominant class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. SINCE SOCIALISM CANNOT BE ESTABLISHED THROUGH 'PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY', HOW CAN IT BE ESTABLISHED?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Only by socialist revolution, which requires the working class to
build its own machinery of force, strong enough to defeat and destroy
the machinery of force of the capitalist class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. ARE THERE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH THE WORKING CLASS COULD ACHIEVE THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM PEACEFULLY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> This could occur, and has occurred, only in very exceptional
circumstances—where the capitalist class is temporarily without an
effective state machinery of force capable of resisting seizure of
political power by the working class (as in Finland and Hungary at the
end of the First World War). In theory, such a peaceful transition could
occur in a country where the capitalist class possesses a state
machinery of force, but finds itself isolated from foreign assistance
and facing a working class machinery of force so overwhelmingly powerful
as to make violent resistance appear pointless. In such circumstances
the possibility could exist of peacefully 'buying out' the capitalist
class. This theoretical possibility of peaceful transition to socialism
makes it clear that the stronger the machinery of revolutionary force
built up by the working class, the greater is the possibility—it is no
more—of a peaceful transition. <br />
<br />
</span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS FIVE :</b> THE PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS REFORMISM?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The trend in the labour movement which seeks to
limit the aims of the working class to securing piecemeal social
reforms within the framework of capitalism. In practice, reformism
rejects the concept of class antagonism between the working class and
the capitalist class, and preaches that social reform can be brought
about gradually by a policy of class collaboration of the working class
with the capitalist class. The great majority of the leaders of the
British labour movement have long been reformist. Their practice of
class collaboration has led them to become unprincipled opponents of any
militant action on the part of the workers. Taken in conjunction with
their aim of bringing about social reforms only within capitalist
society, it necessarily leads them to support such policies as may be
necessary to make capitalism function profitably. Their resultant role
as lieutenants of the capitalist class within the labour movement is
demonstrated daily. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. WHAT IS FABIANISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The theoretical basis of reformism in Britain, elaborated by
intellectuals of the Fabian Society such as the sociologists Sidney and
Beatrice Webb and the author George Bernard Shaw. The name is derived
fron the Roman general Fabius Cunctator ('The Delayer'), who developed a
military theory of guerilla war against a more powerful enemy.
Fabianism holds that a capitalist society can be transformed into a
socialist society without violent opposition from the capitalst class if
the transformation is brought about in sufficiently small steps. In
consequence, any proposed social reform which arouses the violent
opposition of the capitalist class is 'too drastic' for the Fabians and
must be postponed. But since any proposed social reform which would make
a serious inroad into capitalist society would arouse the violent
hostility of the capitalist class, the logical consequence of acceptance
of Fabianism is to postpone any radical reform to the indefinite
future. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3, IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE VIEW THAT THE WORKING CLASS CAN GAIN MORE
BY PURSUING A POLICY OF CLASS COLLABORATION THAN BY PURSUING A POLICY OF
CLASS STRUGGLE IS AN ILLUSION. NEVERTHELESS, IF THE WORKING CLASS HAD
MADE NO GAINS DURING THE PERIOD OF THE DOMINANCE OF REFORMISM IN THE
BRITISH LABOUR MOVEMENT THIS ILLUSION WOULD HAVE BEEN DISCARDED LONG
AGO. THE BASIS FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF REFORMISM HAS BEEN REAL GAINS BY
THE WORKING CLASS. WHAT HAS BEEN THE SOURCE OF THESE REAL GAINS?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The
first workers' organisations in Britain (before 1815) were militant and
socialist (and illega). But Britain beceme the first industrialised
country in the world—the 'workshop of the world'—and as a result the
British capitalist class was able, at a relatively early date, to build
up 'an Empire on which the sun never sets'! From about 1850, they began
to use a small portion of the vast super-profits flowing in from
Britain's colonies and semi-colonies to 'bribe' an upper stratum of
skilled craftsmen by paying them slightly above the value of their
labour-power. It was out of this labour aristocracy that a new kind of
trade unionism grew—the 'New Model Unions'—which rejected class struggle
and socialist aims and confined their activities to collective
bargaining on questions of pay, working hours, etc. It must be said,
however, that the larger portion of these super-profits was used for the
accumulation of capital, giving rise to a large increase in
productivity, in the 'degree of civilisation' existing in Britain, and
so in the value of labour- power. The real gains accruing to the working
class in Britain over the past hundred years—gains which have furnished
the basis for the illusion of reformism—have been due primarily to the
rise in the value of labour power, and to the fact that the adjustment
of wage-levels embodying this rise, have, for the most part, been
carried out through reformist negotiating machinery. The real gains of
the working class in Britain over the past hundred years have thus been
due indirectly to the exploitation of the working people of the
colonial-type countries by the British capitalist class. However,
despite the rise in the real wages of the British working class over
this period, the rate of exploitation of the British workers has
significantly increased. And had it not been for 'unofficial' class
struggle outside the reformist negotiating machinery, the rate of
exploitation would have increased still more. It must be emphasised that
at no time has the mass of the British working class shared directly in
colonial-type super- profits. 'Bribery' of this kind has never affected
more than a small upper sratum of the working class, and today, after
the decline of British imperialism since World War Two, the 'labour
aristocracy' consists principally of the bureaucracy of the labour
movement. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. WE HAVE SEEN THAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS AN ORGANISATION WHICH
SERVES THE POLITICAL INTERESTS OF A SOCIAL CLASS, OR PART OF A SOCIAL
CLASS. WHAT CLASS INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Consverative Party is the more-or-less open party of British
monopoly capital, of British big business. Insofar as working people are
concerned, it directs its electoral appeal primarily to working people
whose level of class consciousness is so low that they identify their
interests with those of big business and the aristocracy. <br />
<br />
5. WHAT CLASS INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Liberal Democrats stand for the maintenance of capitalist society
and are hostile to the trade unions; they thus objectively serve the
interests of monopoly capital. However, by their criticism of the
Conservative Party and of monopoly, they direct their electoral appeal
to working people who, while supporting capitalism and regarding the
Labour Party as 'too extreme', are uneasy about the development of
monopoly and recognise the Conservative Party as openly serving the
interests of monopoly capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT CLASS INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY THE LABOUR PARTY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Founded ostensibly to give working people a 'voice' in Parliament,
the Labour Party was, in fact, never a party which served the interests
of the working class, for such a party needs to be a revolutionary
socialist party, based on Marxist-Leninist principles. Anti-Marxist from
its inception, the Labour Party preached the reformist theory that the
state is a neutral apparatus which the working class could use to serve
its interests by gaining a majority in Parliament. Their Fabian ideology
led Labour Governments to operate along lines calculated to make
capitalism work profitably during the (infinitely long) period of
gradual piecemeal social reform. Despite the fact, therefore, that its
membership is drawn mainly from working people and that trade unions are
affiliated to it, the Labour Party objectively serves the interests of
monopoly capital. In the past, it presented itself as a party which
served the interests of working people, and it directed its electoral
appeal primarily towards working people with just sufficient class
consciousness to recognise the existence of the class struggle and, in
consequence, the need for working people to have a 'workers' party'. Its
image as a 'workers' party' enabled it, when in office, to introduce
anti-working class legislation with significantly less opposition from
workers than if such measures had been adopted by a Conservative
government. However, in the new situation following the temporary
liquidation of the international communist movement, 'New Labour', under
the leadership of Tony Blair, has felt itself able to repudiate all
pretence of being a workers' party', and claims to represent the
interests of the whole people, specifically including business. The
Labour Party forms at present the principal reserve party of monopoly
capital, a party which can safely be permitted to form a government at
times when the Conservative Party has lost electoral support.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. WHAT CLASS INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY THE SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Socialist Labour Party, headed by miners' leader Arthur Scargill,
is a new party which has taken over the mantle of 'Old Labour' from
'New Labour'. Although its declared policies are more progresssive than
those of 'New Labour', not being a Marxist- Leninist revolutionary party
it cannot serve the true interests of working people. Indeed, it can
only serve to divert working people from the true path of revolutionary
socialism. Objectively,therefore, it serves the interests of monopoly
capital, and its honest members must, sooner or later, become
disillusioned in it. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. WHAT IS REVISIONISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The revision of Marxism-Leninism, under the pretence of 'creatively
developing it to meet changed conditions', in such a way as to pervert
it to serve the interests of a capitalist class. The publication in 1951
of 'The British Road to Socialism'—which preached that socialism could
be established in Britain through 'parliamentary democracy'—marked the
open transition of the Communist Party of Great Britain from
Marxism-Leninism to revisionism. After the death of Stalin in 1953,
revisionism became openly dominant in the great majority of parties
which had formed the international communist movement and, under the
leadership of revisionist parties, an essentially capitalist system was
restored in the Soviet Union and in most countres of Eastern Europe. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. WHAT CLASS INTERESTS ARE SERVED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRITAIN?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Communist Party of Britain represents a revival of the Communist
Party of Great Britain. (NOTE: After the dissolution of the CPGB, the
name was taken over by an essentially Trotsykist group). It carries
forward the revisionist policies adopted by this party and put forward
in 'The British Road to Socialism'. In other words, having abandoned the
principles of Marxism- Leninism, it rejects the need for the working
class to overthrow the capitalist state in a socialist revolution, and
preaches the illusion of a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism.
Since it seeks to divert working people away from organising for
socialist revolution—the only road to socialism—the CPB objectively
serves the interests of monopoly capital. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. WHAT IS TROTSKYISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The organised presentation of policies which objectively serve the
interests of monopoly capital, disguised under a cloak of pseudo-Left,
pseudo-Marxist, phraseology. In particular, it rejects the
Marxist-Leninist principle that the socialist revolution comes to
fruition at different times in different countries. The father-figure of
Trotskyism, the Russian revisionist Leon Trotsky, fought against
Lenin's policy of building a disciplined workers' party and of building
an alliance with the peasantry, fought against Lenin's and Stalin's
policy of building socialism in one country. Finally, behind the backs
of its supporters, Trotskyism collaborated with the intelligence
services of imperialist states with the aim of overthrowing the
political power of the working class in the Soviet Union. With the
triumph of revisionism in the international communist movement and the
acceptance by the revisionists of Trotskyism's slanders against the
Soviet state, Trotskyism has, in the absence of genuine Marxist-Leninist
Parties in most countries, gained some temporary successes in
influencing militant intellectuals and students. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. IS A MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY NECESSARY TO BRING ABOUT A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, it is essential. We have seen that socialism cannot be
established without the building by the working class of a machinery of
force capable of seizing political power from and defeating the
machinery of force of the capitalist class. But just as an army cannot
wage a successful war without a General Staff to lead and coordinate its
military ativity, so the 'army' of the working class cannot lead to
victory a revolutionary war against the forces of the capitalist state
without its own 'General Staff' to lead it and coordinate its activity.
This vanguard oganisation of the working class cannot be a political
party of the old type of the Labour Party, which is designed for
electoral/parliamentary activity within the framework of 'parliamentary
democracy'. It must be 'a party of a new type', organised in such a way
as to enable it to fulfil its role as revolutionary vanguard of the
working class. It must be a party guided by the compass of
Marxism-Leninism. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. WHAT IS DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM, AND WHY DO MARXIST-LENINIST PARTIES NEED TO ORGANISE THEMSELVES ON ITS PRINCIPLE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In order to lead an army to victory, its General Staff must put
forward a single line of action to the troops. If different generals
were to put forward different lines of action, their army would surely
be defeated. A Marxist-Leninist Party must, therefore, be based upon
unity of will, and this is obtained by means of the organisational
principle of centralism: that is, decisions of higher organs are binding
upon lower organs and upon every Party member, while decisions of
majorities are binding upon minorities. This centralism must, however,
be democratic, not autocratic. There must be freedom of discussion and
criticism at all levels, the right to send statements to higher organs,
and all higher organs must be democratically elected, directly or
indirectly, by the membership. Members elect to higher organs those of
their comrades whom they believe to have the highest political level,
the highest class and Party loyalty, and they agree to accept their
leadership—unless and until they cease to have such confidence, when the
leaders may be, and should be, removed by the same democratic process. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT ARE 1) STRATEGY, 2) TACTICS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Strategy is the determination of the direction of the main blow which
the working class should strive to strike at a given stage of the
revolutionary process. Tactics is the determination of the line of
action which the working class should take in a particular immediate
short-term situation. While the aim of tactics is to win a particular
battle, the aim of strategy is to win the war. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT IS THE LABOUR MOVEMENT?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The various mass organisations composed of working people. The trade
unions are organisations of working people in their capacity as
employees. The cooperative societies are organisations of working people
in their capacity as consumers. The Labour Party, the Communist Party
of Britain, and the Socialist Labour Party are organisations of working
people in their capacity as electors. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WHAT SHOULD BE THE RELATION OF THE MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY TO THESE MASS ORGANISATIONS OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Although these organisations—by reason of their leadership, policies
and dominant ideologies—serve essentially the interests of monopoly
capital, they are composed of working people—and of working people of a
somewhat higher political level than those who yet remain outside the
labour movement. It is these working people who are destined to change
the social system to one of socialism. Marxist-Leninists must,
therefore, work within the trade unions and cooperative societies, where
they must participate in, and strive to win the leadership of, the
day-to-day struggles of the working people. Thir aim must be to
demonstrate, by devoted and selfless struggle on bahalf of the working
people, that they are the most active fighters for their interests; to
win their confidence; and, by patient principled work, to expose the
reactionary leaders of these organisations and bring about their
replacement by leaders who are loyal to the working people. Only if such
removal proves impossible, and is seen to be impossible by the mass of
the rank-and-file (because the leaders succeed in using their control of
the organisation's machinery to prevent the operation of internal
democracy), is it correct to draw the honest rank-and-file into new
independent organisations freed from the control of the labour
lieutenants of the capitalist class. Experience shows that the masses
cannot be convinced of the need to take the revolutionary road to
socialism by means of propaganda and agitation alone. The strategy of
Marxist-Leninists must be designed to lead these masses in their
day-to-day struggles in such a way as to raise their political
consciousness as a result of their own experience in struggle, and in
the same way to win acceptance of the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist
Party among the working people as their vanguard organistion and to
draw the most politically advanced working people into the ranks of the
Party. <br />
<br />
</span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS SIX :</b> THE NATIONAL QUESTION</span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS A NATION?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">"A historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on
the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and
psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture." —J. V. Stalin A
community which lacks any of these characteristics is not a nation. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. HOW DOES A NATION DEVELOP? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The development of a community to nationhood proceeds through three
fundamental stages: The first stage is that of the tribe, based on a
union of related clans. Tribalism is the characteristic form of social
organisation under primitive communism. As the tribal community
disintegrates with the development of tools and techniques, tribes come
together into federations and kingdoms; a common language, based on one
of the tribal languages, emerges. This process leads to the development
of the second stage of the development of a community, that of the pre-
nation or nationality. A pre-nation or nationality is a community based
no longer on blood relationship, but on geographical location. It has a
common language, a common territory and a common culture, but does not
possess economic cohesion in the form of a common market. A pre-nation
is the characteristic form of social organisation under slavery and
feudalism. With the development of capitalism within the framework of
feudal society, the development of pre-national characteristics is
accelerated and, alongside this, the process of establishing economic
cohesion, a common market, throughout the territory of the pre-nation.
This latter process transforms the pre-nation into a nation.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE TERM 'THE RIGHT OF NATIONS TO SELF- DETERMINATION'? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The nations of the world are divided into oppressed and oppressing
nations. An oppressed nation is one dominated, openly or in a concealed
manner, by an oppressing nation for the benefit of the ruling class of
the latter; it is, therefore, not free to determine its own destiny.
When Marxist-Leninists say that they recognise the right of an oppressed
nation to self-determination, they mean that they recognise the right
of an oppressed nation to establishj its complete independence, and
recognise the struggle of an oppressed nation to establish its
independence from an oppressing nation to be a just struggle which they
support.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. WHAT IS A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A country which is industrially under-developed and is dominated
economically, and perhaps also politically, by a greater power. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. WHAT KINDS OF COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRIES ARE THERE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A colonial-type country may be: 1) a colony, under the open, direct
political rule of a dominating power, e.g., Gibraltar, Northern Ireland;
2) a semi-colony, nominally independent, but in reality dominated by a
greater power for the benefit of the latter's ruling class, e.g,
Colombia, Saudi Arabia; or 3) a neo-colony, a former colony which has
become a semi- colony, continuing to be dominated by a greater power for
the benefit of the latter's ruling class, e.g., Tunisia, Jamaica.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS NATIONALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The ideology which puts forward the view that: a) a particular nation
is superior to other nations; and b) that the interests of this nation
should be of paramount political importance for all its members.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. IS NATIONALISM PROGRESSIVE OR REACTIONARY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Where a nation is in process of formaton, nationalism may temporarily
play a limited progressive role. However, once the capitalist class has
become the ruling class of the nation, nationalism plays a wholly
reactionary role. It falsely presents the interests of the ruling,
exploiting class as equivalent to 'the interests of the nation', seeking
in this way to persuade the working class to abandon its class struggle
against exploitation and for the establishment of a socialist society
'in the interests of the nation'—in fact, in the interests of the
capitalist class. Nationalism also plays a reactionary role in so far as
it serves to create in the minds of workers of a particular nation a
subjective antagonism towards the workers of other nations, who are
objectively their allies in the struggle for a socialist world. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. HOW MANY NATIONS ARE THERE IN THE BRITISH ISLES? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Two, the British and Irish nations. For geographical and ethnic
reasons, the development of nations in the British Isles took place in
four distinct regions: in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. But
before the Scottish, Welsh and English nations could complete their
development into nations, the influence of the rising capitalist class
brought about the economic, political and cultural unification of these
pre-nations into a single British nation. By the time of the bourgeois
revolution of the 17th century, the British capitalist class had become
the leading force in the class alliance ruling Britain. Although
remnants of pre-national distinctions in language and culture still
survive in parts of Britain, it constitutes a single economic system, a
single market and a single nation with, for the most part, a single
language and a single culture. In Ireland, however, separated from
Britain by a sea barrier, the development of the Irish nation proceeded
independently, without fusion with the pre-nations developing across the
Irish Sea. With the development of capitalism, the Irish nation came
into existence. The Irish nation is an oppressed nation The northern
counties are under the direct colonial rule of British imperialism. whie
the southern counties (the Irish Republic) form a neo-colony of British
imperialism. Marxist-Leninists uphold the right of the Irish nation to
unification and independence.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9. WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 'SCOTTISH NATIONALISM' AND 'WELSH NATIONALISM'? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since the peoples of Scotland and Wales do not constitute nations,
but form part of the Britsh nation, both 'Scottish nationalism' and
'Welsh nationalism' are spurious. Objectively, Scottish and Welsh
'nationalisms' serve the interests of British imperialism, since they
place the blame for the exploitation of the working people of Scotand
and Wales on an imaginary enemy, the 'English imperialists'. Scottish
and Welsh 'nationalisms' serve the interests of British imperialism by
seeking to divide the working people of Scotland and Wales from their
fellow-workers in England, suggesting that (as members of 'oppressed
nations') they have a common interest with capitalists in Scotland and
Wales. Nevertheless, while recognising that the peoples of Scotland,
Wales and England form a single British nation, Marxist-Leninist support
autonomy for these territories in the form of devolution as a
democratic measure. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. WHAT IS RACISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The view that people of one degree of skin pigmentation are superior
or inferior to people of another degree. Because of the history of
imperialism, the most common form of racism is 'white racism', which
holds that people with 'white' skins are superior to those with 'black'
skins. The imperialists, who form a tiny minority of the world's
population, can maintain their domination over the working people of the
world only on the basis of 'divide and rule'. Consequently, they seek
to set white against black, Christian against Muslim, manual worker
against intellectual worker, young against old, and so on. All forms of
racism, which seek to set people of one race against people of another,
serve the interests of the imperialists. Black racism, although to some
extent a reaction against white racism, complements the former. Both
white racists and black racists oppose the building of an
anti-imperialist united front embracing the working people of the
imperialist countries and those of the colonial-type countries which is
essential to destroy imperialism. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IN A DEVELOPED CAPITALIST COUNTRY
CONSISTS OF A SINGLE STAGE—THAT OF SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. THE
REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IN A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY CONSISTS OF TWO STAGES.
WHAT ARE THEY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, the stage of national-democratic revolution, of national
liberation, directed against foreign domination; Secondly, the stage of
socialist revolution. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. THE CAPITALIST CLASS IN A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY CONSISTS OF TWO SECTIONS. WHAT ARE THEY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, the comprador capitalists (involved particularly in finance
and commerce) who are dependent upon the dominating foreign power and
have an objective interest in supporting it; and secondly, the national
capitalists (particularly those involved in industry) whose interests
and advancement are frustrated by the dominating foreign power and who
therefore have an objective interest in ending foreign domination.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES IN A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY HAVE AN OBJECTIVE
INTEREST IN 1) OPPOSING AND 2) SUPPORTING NATIONAL- DEMOCRATIC
REVOLUTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The landlord class and the comprador capitalist class have an
objective interest in opposing national-democratic revolution. The
national capitalists, the middle and poor peasantry, the urban petty
bourgeoisie and the working class have an objective interest in
supporting it. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES IN A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY HAVE AN OBJECTIVE
INTEREST IN 1) OPPOSING AND 2) SUPPORTING SOCIALIST REVOLUTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The landlord class, the urban and rural capitalist class and the
better-off strata of the urban petty bourgeoisie, have an objective
interest in opposing the socialist revolution. The poorer strata of the
peasantry, the poorer strata of the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the
working class have an objective interest in supporting it. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WHY DO MARXIST-LENINISTS, WHOSE FUNDAMENTAL AIM IS TO BRING ABOUT
A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION, SUPPORT A NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION IN A
COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY AS THE FIRST STAGE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
THERE?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Because the national-democratic revolution enables certain class
forces opposed to the socialist revolution (the landlords and comprador
capitalists) to be defeated by a wider coalition of classes than those
which stand to gain by the socialist revolution. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. WHAT, THEN, IS THE MARXIST-LENINIST STRATEGY IN RELATION TO THE NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION IN A COLONIAL-TYPE COUNTRY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">To support it as an essential preliminary stage in the revolutionary
process in a colonial-type country; to strive to build the broadest
possible united front embracing all social classes which have an
objective interst in supporting the national-democratic revolution; to
strive to win leadership by the working class of this anti-imperialist
united front, and the leadersip of the working class by the
Marxist-Leninist Party: to strive to transform the national-democratic
revolution uninterruptedly into a socialist revolution. The Trotskyist
slogan in a colonial-type country of 'Socialism Now', which seeks to
skip over an essential stage in the revolution, objectively assists the
enemies of socialism.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. WHAT ARE THE AIMS OF THE NATIONAL CAPITALISTS IN A COLONIAL- TYPE
COUNTRY IN RELATION TO THE NATIONAL-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">To strive to lead the national-democratic revolution and to hold the
revolutionary process at this stage so as to establish a capitalist
state in which they, the national capitalists, hold political power and
exploit the working people for themselves. In a colonial-type country
where there is a developed working class led by a Marxist-Leninist
Party, a class struggle takes place during the development of the
national-democratic revolution between the working class and the
national capitalist class for leadership of the revolutionary process.
If the working class is seen to be winning this leadership, the national
capitalists will inevitably desert the national-democratic revolution
and go over to the side of counter-revolution—preferring a subordinate
position as exploiters to the complete loss in a socialist revolution of
their 'right' to exploit. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">18. WHAT IS MAOISM?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The character of Maoism is the subject of much debate. Some people
hold that Maoism—named after the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung—is a
development of Marxism-Leninism. Others hold that it is, at least in
part, a revisionist deviation from Marxism-Leninism. Still others hold
that it is a brand of revisionism for colonial-type countries, designed
to hold up the revolutionary process in such countries at the stage of
national- democratic revolution. The character of Maoism should be
debated during the discussion. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">19. WHAT IS PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> The opposite of bourgeois nationalism, it emphasises the brotherhood
and common interests of the working people of all countries and the need
for their solidarity in action and organisation. It is exemplified in
the Marxist-Leninist slogan: 'WORKERS OF ALL LANDS, UNITE!'. <br />
<b> </b></span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS SEVEN :</b> WAR </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS WAR?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Fighting between considerable bodies of armed men
(not necessarily between states: it may be, for example, between
tribes).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. WHAT IS CIVIL WAR? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Civil war is war within the same state. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT ARE THE MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS WAR OF PACIFISTS AND THAT OF MARXIST-LENINISTS?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, pacifists condemn all wars. Marxist-Leninists are fully
conscious of the human suffering caused by war, strive to prevent the
outbreak of a Third World War, and work to establish a social system
which will make war impossible. Nevertheless, they distinguish between
'just' wars (which they support) and 'unjust' wars (which they oppose).
"There have been many wars in history which, despite all the horrors,
cruelties, miseries, and tortures inevitably connected with every war,
had a progressive character, i.e., they served the development of
mankind, aided in the destruction of extremely pernicious and
reactionary institutions". (V. I. Lenin: 'Socialism and War'; London;
1940; p. 9). "Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be Socialists, be
opposed to all wars". (V. I. Lenin: 'Pacifism and the Workers', in: 'War
and the Workers'; London; 1940; p. 29). Secondly, while pacifists adopt
a policy of conscientious objection to participating in war,
Marxist-Leninists participate even in the most unjust war in order to
win the workers in uniform to a policy of mass opposition to the war:
"Boycott the war is an absurd phrase—Communists must go to any
reactionary war". (V. I. Lenin: 'Notes on the Question of the Tasks of
Our Delegation at The Hague', in: 'The Attitude of the Proletariat
towards War'; London; 1932; p. 12). "An oppressed class which does not
strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, deserves to be treated
like slaves. . . . What will proletarian women do . . .? Only curse all
war and everything military, only demand disarmament? The women of an
oppressed class that is really revolutionary will never consent to play
such a shameful role. They will say to their sons: 'You will soon be a
man. You will be given a gun. Take it and learn to use it. The
proletarians need this knowledge, not to shoot your brothers, the
workers of other countries . . ., but to fight poverty and war, not by
means of good intentions, but by vanquishing the bourgeoisie and
disarming it". (V. I. Lenin: 'Pacifism and the Workers', in: 'War and
the Workers'; London; 1940; p. 34-35). <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. 'IT IS THE INHERENT AGGRESSIVENESS OF MAN WHICH IS THE CAUSE OF WAR'—TEXTBOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY. COMMENT.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Were this true, it would not be necessary for any government to
impose conscription. In fact, war is the pursuit of political aims by
violent means, and these political aims have an economic basis. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. ON WHAT BASIS DO MARXIST-LENINISTS DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JUST AND UNJUST WARS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">By analysing the effect which the victory of each belligerent in a
war would have on the development of society. If its victory would exert
a progressive influence upon the development of society, that
belligerent is fighting a just war. If its victory would exert a
reactionary influence upon the development of society, that belligerent
is fighting an unjust war. Since the dominant feature of the
contemporary world is imperialism, monopoly capitalism, a
non-imperialist state of any kind which is involved in war with an
imperialist state is fighting a just war, since its war effort weakens
world imperialism, while the imperialist belligerent state is fighting
an unjust war, since its war effort strengthens world imperialism. A war
may be just on one side and unjust on the other, or it may be unjust on
both sides. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHAT IS AN IMPERIALIST WAR? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A war between rival imperialist powers (or blocs includng imperialist powers) for the redivision of the world. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF AN IMPERIALIST WAR? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since the victory of either side would merely strengthen one
imperialist group at the expense of another, and would not weaken world
imperialism as a whole, it is unjust on both sides. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. WHAT IS A WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The war of an oppressed nation to secure its freedom from the
domination of an oppressing nation (today almost always an imperialist
power). <br />
<br />
9. WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF A WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since imperialism is the principal oppressing force in the
contemporary world, the victory of the oppressed nation would weaken
world imperialism, while the victory of the oppressing nation would
strengthen world imperialism. A war of national liberation is,
therefore, just on the part of the oppressed nation, unjust on the part
of the oppressing nation. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR OF 1914-18?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It was an imperialist war, unjust on both sides. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WERE THERE, NEVERTHELESS, JUST, PROGRESSIVE ELEMENTS WITHIN THE FIRST WORLD WAR? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yes. If it were possible to consider it in isolation from the
imperialist war as a whole, the war of Serbia against Austria- Hungary
could be regarded as a just war of liberation. But this just element was
completely overshadowed because it lay within the framework of the
unjust imperialist war. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE WAR OF INTERVENTION AGAINST SOVIET RUSSIA OF 1918-22? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It was an attempt by a number of imperialist powers to overthrow the
rule of the working class in Soviet Russia, and so was a just war on the
part of Soviet Russia and an unjust war on the part of the intervening
imperialist states. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR OF 1931-39? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since China was a semi-feudal, non-imperialist state, while Japan was
an imperialist state, it was a just war on the part of China and an
unjust war on the part of Japan. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR UP TO JUNE 1941?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It was, like the First World War, an imperialist war between two groups
of imperialist powers for the redivision of the world. The fact that the
German imperalists ruled through a fascist dictatorship, while the
British imperialists ruled through 'parliamentary democracy', was quite
irrelevant to the basic character of the war as an imperialist war,
unjust on both sides. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. WERE THERE, NEVERTHELESS, JUST, PROGRESSIVE ELEMENTS WITHIN THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN THE PERIOD PRIOR TO JUNE 1941? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yes. Poland was a capitalist state, but not an imperialist state. So,
if Poland's war against Germany could be considered in isolation from
the war as a whole, it could be considered as a just war. Furthermore,
the resistance movements of the peoples of the countries occupied by
German and Italian imperialism (if they could be considered in isolation
from the war as a whole) could also be regarded as just wars. But, as
in the First World War, these just, progressive elements were
overshadowed because they lay within the framework of the unjust
imperialist war. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AFTER JUNE 1941?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Following the German attack on the Soviet Union—then a socialist
state—in June 1941, the Soviet war against Germany (if it could be
considered in isolation) would be considered a just war on the part of
the Soviet Union and an unjust war on the part of German imperialism.
This just, progressive element combined with the other just, progressive
elements listed in the answer to Question 15 to overshadow the unjust,
imperialist elements which still remained. Thus, from June 1941, the
fundamental character of the Second World War changed and it became,
overall, a just war on the part of the United Nations and an unjust war
on the part the Axis Powers.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER OF THE MIDDLE EAST WAR OF 1967?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Israel is a state set up the imperialist powers in the Middle East,
armed and dominated by United States imperialism. It is an arm of US
imperialism in the Middle East. The Arab states are not imperialist
states and most of them were not, in 1967, arms of imperialism.
Consequently, the war was a just war on the part of the Arab states and
an unjust war on the part of Israel.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">18. DOES THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF IMPERIALISM MAKE WAR INEVITABLE?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Capitalist (including imperialist) economies develop at uneven rates.
Consequently, a division of the world which reflects the economic needs
of imperialist powers for markets, sources of raw materials, etc., at
one period ceases to reflect these economic needs at a later period,
Thus, the economic needs of some ('have-not') imperialist powers force
them to try to seize markets, sources of war materials, etc., from the
'have' imperialist powers. Imperialist wars to redivide the world are
periodically inevitable. Only by the destruction of imperialism can wars
cease to be inevitable. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">19. WHAT IS THE STRATEGY OF MARXIST-LENINISTS WHOSE COUNTRY IS INVOLVED IN AN UNJUST WAR?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">To strive to transform the unjust war into a civil war for the overthrow of 'their' imperialists. 20. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">20. DOES NOT SUCH A STRATEGY AID THE ENEMY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yes. But military defeats for 'one's own' imperialists weaken them
and so assist in their revolutionary overthrow. And Marxist-Leninists
'on the other side' are simultaneously striving for military defeats for
'their' imperialists, In Lenin's words: "Only a bourgeois who believes
that the war started by governments will necessarily end as a war
between governments, and who wishes it to be so, finds 'ridiculous' or
'absurd' the idea that Socialists of all the belligerent countries
should express the wish that all their governments be defeated". (V. I.
Lenin: 'Socialism and War'; London; 1940: p. 24).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">21. WHAT IS CHAUVINISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">'Jingoistic' support of one' own government in an unjust war. (The
name is derived from a 'jingoistic' French officer of the Napoleonic
Wars, Nicholas Chauvin. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">22. WHAT IS SOCIAL-CHAUVINISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Lenin coined a number of political terms based on the name adopted by
many 'socialist' parties at the beginning of the 20th
century—'Social-democratic'. Thus Lenin nicknamed a self- styled
'socialist' who was in reality a chauvinist, a 'social- chauvinist'. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">23. WHAT IS GUERILLA WARFARE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">A type of warfare appropriate for weaker, more poorly armed forces
when facing a more powerful enemy. It consists of harassing and
weakening the enemy forces by surprise 'hit and run' attacks by small
units, which, as far as possible, avoid direct confrontation with those
forces. Guerilla warfare is the typical type of warfare carried on by an
army of national liberation in the first phase of a war of national
liberation. The strategy is to build up one's forces by such guerilla
warfare until they are strong enough to go over to regular warfare and
achieve victory. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">24. DESPITE INITIAL SUPERIOITY IN ARMS, AN IMPERIALIST COUNTRY
INVOLVED IN A WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION FACES GRAVE DISADVANTAGES. WHAT
ARE THESE?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">a) They are not fighting in defence of their homeland; b)
they are fighting in an unfamiliar terrain; c) they are hated and
opposed by the mass of the people in the occupied country: d) they are
weaker in manpower resources on the spot; e) their lines of supply are
more extended; f) the puppet troops on which they depend are unreliable;
g) they are opposed at home, and in their own armed forces, by
politically conscious workers. <br />
<br />
</span></div>
<h2 style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>CLASS EIGHT :</b> HOW SOCIALISM WORKS </span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">1. WHAT IS SOCIALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The social system constructed by the working people, led by the
working class, after their seizure of political power in a socialist
revolution. It is a social system in which the exploitation of man by
man has been abolished and in which production is centrally planned with
the aim of maximising the welfare of the working people.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2. HOW ARE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION OWNED IN A SOCIALIST SOCIETY?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Collectively, 1) either by the state, representing the working people as
a whole, or 2) by cooperatives, representing the working people of
particular enterprises.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">3. WHAT IS SOCIALISATION?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The taking over into the ownership of the socialist state (i.e., the
machinery of force by which the working people rule over the rest of
society) of an enterprise formerly owned by a capitalist or a capitalist
firm. It must be distinguished from nationalisation in a capitalist
society, where a formerly private enterprise is taken into the ownership
of the capitalist state, i.e., the machinery of rule of the capitalist
class as a whole).<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">4. WHAT IS COLLECTIVISATION? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The bringing together of a number of small enterprises (which are
economically inefficent individually) into a single large cooperative of
peasants or artisans. In order to retain the poor petty bourgeoisie as
allies of the working class during the building of socialism,
collectivisation must always be voluntary. Collectivisation is a step on
the way to the socialisation of the enterprises of the peasants and
artisans, which transforms the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie into
rural and urban members of the working class. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">5. HOW IS PRODUCTION REGULATED UNDER SOCIALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since profit (the motive and regulator of production under
capitalism) has been abolished, production is regulated under socialism
by centralised state planning, based on maximum democratic consultation
with consumers so as to secure the maximum possible satisfaction of the
needs of the working people.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">6. WHY IS IT NECESSARY, UNDER SOCIALISM, FOR THE PRODUCTION OF MEANS
OF PRODUCTION TO EXPAND MORE RAPIDLY THAN THE PRODUCTION OF CONSUMER
GOODS? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Because consumer goods (by which the needs of the working people are
directly satisfied) are produced with the aid of means of production.
Consequently, a continuing expansion of the production of consumer goods
depends on the production of means or production expanding more rapidly
than the production of consumer goods. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">7. ON WHAT BASIS ARE CONSUMER GOODS DISTRIBUTED IN A SOCIALIST SOCIETY? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Since, at this stage of economic development, the needs of the
working people cannot be met in full, some form of rationing is
necessary. And since it is desired to bring about the speediest possible
development of production, this rationing system must be one which
stimulates productive effort on the part of the working people. But the
mass of the working people have entered have entered socialist society
with outlooks and attitudes inherited from capitalist society, and one
of the most significant of these is that increased productive effort
justifies increased personal material reward. For all these reasons, the
distribution of consumer goods under socialism is related to the
quantity and quality of work performed. This principle is embodied in
the slogan of socialist society: 'FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO
EACH ACCORDING TO HIS WORK!'.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">8. IS THIS BASIS OF DISTRIBUTION FAIR? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Not competely. It is certainly fairer than the basis of distribution
under capitalist society, which is based on the exploitation of the
working people and on the amount of surplus- value-producing property
which happens to be owned (often as a result of inheritance). But it is
unfair to the extent that the quantity and quality of the work performed
by a worker may depend on factors outside his control (e.g., he may
have more dependents than his neighbour, he may have some physical
disability). Although this unfairness may be mitigated by social
services, it cannot be entirely eliminated as long as the socialist
principle of distribution is maintained.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">9, HOW CAN THIS UNFAIRNESS BE ELIMINATED? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Only by the replacement of socialism (defined as 'the first stage of
communism') by true communism. Under communism, this unfairness is
eliminated by the adoption of the principle of distribution according to
need. This principle is embodied in the slogan of communist society:
'FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEEDS!'. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">10.WHAT ARE THE ESSENTAL PREREQUISITES FOR THE TRANSITION FROM SOCIALISM TO COMMUNISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, a vast increase in the production of material wealth,
sufficient to meet all the essential needs of all the working people,
without rationing; and secondly, a change in the outlook and attitudes
of the mass of the working people, in that they have come to accept work
as a natural obligation, performed according to ability without
economic compulsion, and in that they have come to take from
distribution centres only what they need. The adoption under socialism
of the principle of distribution according to work performed is
necessary in order that the first prerequisite of commmunism—a vast
increase in the production of material wealth—may be attained as soon as
possible. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">11. WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS OF THE SOCIALIST STATE?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, to suppress the overthrown capitalist class and its
supporters in order to prevent counter-revolution: and secondly, to
defend the country from attempts at outside military intervention by
capitalist states: and thirdly, to direct socialist economic
construction and to educate the people in a Marxist-Leninist outlook. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">12. WHAT IS THE CLASS CHARACTER OF THE SOCIALIST STATE? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is 'the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the workng class',
just as the capitalist state is 'the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie'. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">13. SINCE THE SOCIALIST STATE IS A CLASS DICTATORSHIP, CAN IT BE REGARDED AS DEMOCRATIC? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In the sense that the socialist state serves the interests only of
the working people and suppresses the interests of the former capitalist
class, its democratic character may be regarded as limited. But in the
original meaning of the term 'democracy' as 'the rule of the common
people', 'the dictatorship of the working class' is democratic.
Certainly, since the capitalist class forms only a small minority of the
population, it is infinitely more democratic than the capitalist state.
<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">14. 'THE SOCIALIST STATE WILL EVENTUALLY WITHER AWAY'—FRIEDRICH ENGELS. EXPLAIN. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As the members of the overthrown capitalist class die out and their
descendants are assimilated into the working people and acquire their
outlook, there ceases to be any class which must be suppressed for the
security of socialism. Thus, the internal repressive function of the
socialist state is no longer necesary and dies away. And as the working
people in other capitalist countries proceed to seize political power
and construct socialism on a world scale, the danger of external
military intervention also disappears. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Thus, the external defence
function of the state also ceases to be necessary and dies away.
Eventually, therefore, the socialist state—as a machinery of rule—ceases
to exist, being tranformed into a completely democratic apparatus for
the administration of society. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">15. IS A MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY NECESSARY UNDER SOCIALISM? <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is essential. Just as the working class cannot spontaneously
overthrow the political power of the capitalist class, but requires the
leadership of a vanguard party whose strategy and tactics are based upon
Marxism-Leninism, so it requires the leadership of this vanguard party
to maintain its political power and construct a socialist society.
Eventually, however, as the socialist state withers away and as the
political consciousness of the whole working people has been raised to a
high level, the need for such leadership no longer exists and the Party
too withers away. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">16. IS SOCIALISM, ONCE ESTABLISHED, PERMANENT?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Only if the working people are led by a Marxist-Leninist Party.<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">For this reason, the enemies of socialism strve in every way to
pervert the Marxist-Leninist Party into a revisionist party—a party
which (at first) pays lip-service to Marxism-Leninism but in fact adopts
policies which, under the guise of 'modernisation' and
'democratisation' move the country towards the restoration of
capitalism. <br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">17. WHAT HAVE BEEN THE PRINCIPAL EFFECTS OF THE TRIUMPH OF REVISIONISM IN THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST MOVEMENT?<br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> In all the countries where socialism had been established, the
capitalist system has been restored. The restoration of capitalism goes
through a number of stages. The role of centralised economic planning is
reduced; a market economy based on the profit motive is introduced; the
managers of the enterprises are given such a disproportionate share of
their profits (on the grounds of their 'responsibility') that they
effectively become state captalists exploiting the working class; the
party and state leaders become corrupt bureaucrats administering what
is, essentially, a bureaucratic dictatorship over the wortking class.
When the working people have become sufficiently hostile to these
developments, the final stage is to mobilise the people to destroy the
spurious 'socialism' which is causing them so much distress and restore a
normal free-enterprise capitalist system. In developed capitalist
countries, the triumph of revisionism in the international communist
movement has transformed the old communist parties into political
instruments of monopoly capital, into social-democratic parties which
have repudiated revolutionary socialism in favour of the illusory
'peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism'. Such parties may take their
place within the parliamentary framework when needed by the capitalist
class as instruments for the deception of working people. These
developments, tragic setbacks for the working people as they are, do not
solve but, in the long run, accentuate the social problems of the
working people. There is no solution for these problems but socialism.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">THE HISTORIC TASK FACING THE WORKING PEOPLE OF ALMOST EVERY COUNTRY AT
THE PRESENT TIME, THEREFORE, IS THE RECONSTITUTION OF MARXIST-LENINIST
PARTIES, PURGED OF AND INSULATED AGAINST EVERY REVISIONIST TREND, AND
THE RECONSTITUTION OF A MARXIST-LENINIST INTERNATIONAL AS THE VANGUARD
OF THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE WORLD. <br />
<b></b></span></div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-40456365956755593842012-06-30T21:30:00.000-04:002012-08-27T11:43:33.214-04:00Arab Jacobins? The Rebirth of Hope in Arabia Felix<div style="text-align: left;">
<b>by </b><b>Raza Naeem</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>The writer is an independent writer and
communist activist living in Lahore, Pakistan and presently at work on
a political and cultural history of post-Arab Spring Yemen. He can be
reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The 2011-2012 Arab uprisings, which have succeeded in toppling tyrants
in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and a genuinely popular leader in Libya,
are still in a state of flux. However, what cannot be doubted is the
importance of this seminal event in the history of a still-young 21st
century, both for the internal dynamics of these countries as well as
Western (read United States) imperial influence there. It must be
remembered also that this is not the first time that popular
mobilisations have occurred in the Arab world: in the 1950s and 1960s,
beginning with Egypt, it was the nationalist military which emancipated
the country from foreign domination as well local clients of the
latter, while popular mobilisations happened later; the pattern was to
be repeated across the Arab world in Iraq, Syria, (North) Yemen and
Libya, and given added impetus and support by the success of the
Algerian resistance against the French, and victory for the communists
in South Yemen against the British.<br />
Yet while the <i>key </i>difference
between the events of the 1950s and 1960s and what is happening now in
the Arab world as we meet is that in the latter case, it is now the
people themselves who are liberating themselves from the militarised
model of a one-party state that came to dominate the Arab world since
the last four decades. So, these uprisings are as much the result of
the failed nationalist uprisings in the Arab world in the middle of the
twentieth century as a reaction to dictatorship and the Western support
that buttressed it for decades. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In the author’s opinion, the Arab
uprisings are more reminiscent of the revolutions of 1848 that struck
fear in the hearts of every European monarch from the Bourbons to the
Austro-Hungarian empire. This comparison is more apt, for example, than
the preferred comparison in the mainstream Western media with the
anti-communist uprisings of Eastern Europe in 1989. The reason is that
the 1848 revolts, like the Arab revolts, occurred in long cycles over
decades; in the case of the former, the <i>longue duree </i>from
the time of the French Revolution in 1789 to 1848 adopted liberty,
equality and fraternity as its slogans, while in the latter case, the
period in Arab history which inaugurated the uprisings of the 1950s has
now come full circle with the Arab Spring uprisings. Also, like their
European counterparts, the Arab Spring uprisings are also about
liberty, equality and fraternity: the Arab masses want freedom from
decades of oppressive dictatorship, want social and economic justice
from the immiserising policies of the World Bank, IMF and EU imposed by
these dictatorships and want so for all the Arab people beyond national
frontiers. This last is exemplified by the rapidity and spontaneity
with which the revolutionary infection spread from Tunisia to Egypt and
across the Arab east, including the Gulf States. The uprisings of 1989,
on the other hand, reversed many of the progressive achievements of the
communist regimes of Eastern Europe to institute the dictatorship of
capital, which though allowing for multi-party elections, has opened up
these countries to the mercy of the neo-liberal market system. [1]
Also, like in the European revolts of 1848, the first round of the Arab
Spring has gone to the people: and like the former, the
counter-revolution has asserted itself in the shape of the imperialist
invasion of Libya, the brutal crushing of the uprising in Bahrain and
the continuing control of the military in Egypt. [2]</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
So when and how did the Arab Spring begin? It began in Tunisia, which
for most of the twentieth century, remained largely on the periphery of
the Arab world. [3]
In 1989, the founding father of modern Tunisia Habib Bourguiba was
pushed aside by his Interior Minister Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, with the
support of the French and Italian secret services. He proceeded to set
up a police state in the country, banning all opposition and dissenting
media, and opened up the country to the World Bank and EU, and in so
doing became the poster-child of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus.
While the tourists could only see the tranquillity of the country’s
Mediterranean beaches and liberated women, Ben Ali’s policies destroyed
the self-sufficiency of the Tunisian peasant and made the country a
sort of empty shell where more and more Western and Arab elite poured
money, but which ended up benefitting a tiny elite surrounding the
extended Ben Ali family. [4]
As a result, and especially in the wake of the worldwide recession
following the Wall Street crash of 2008-2010, Tunisia became more
dependent on international loans. [5]
The tragedy of the vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi, who burnt himself
to death to protest against drastic conditions of unemployment, was a
case in point. [6]
Following his death, people spontaneously came out in the major towns
and cities to protest the death, which soon became an anti-regime
uprising. Despite an offer of French mercenary help, the despot fled to
Saudi Arabia. [7]
What had helped was the fact that the post-independence Tunisian
nationalist elite had managed to educate a big layer of the population,
which helped in the emergence of a sizeable middle class. [8] Also, Ben Ali had deliberately kept the size of the army small, for fear of a military coup against him. [9]
This latter eventually worked to the benefit of the protesters. Since
the ouster of the despot, elections have been won by the Islamist
al-Nahda party, which has had a different evolution in contrast to the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its various variants across the Arab
world. [10]
So far, the party has been making all the right noises to the Western
media about its democratic credentials, but its recent pronouncements
on banning of alcohol have been making the emancipated women and the
middle class very uncomfortable. However apart from its conservative
social vision, it remains to be seen whether the party has an
enlightened economic and political programme to redress the excesses of
the Ben Ali regime.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<sup> </sup></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
The stakes are even higher in Egypt, which has
historically been one of the lynchpins of Western foreign policy in the
region. [11]
In contrast to Bourguiba’s Tunisia, Egypt has always been central to
the Arab cause for most of the twentieth century, more so during the
long period of Gamal Abdel Nasser. [12]
Nasser’s defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israel war spelled the end of Arab
nationalism as a progressive mobilising force for the Arabs [13] and gave way to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region as a
whole and Egypt signing a peace treaty with Israel as well as
abandoning the most progressive aspects of Nasser’s regime. First,
Anwar Sadat and then Hosni Mubarak slowly dismantled the welfare state
which had existed in the country in Nasser’s time; their embracing of
Israel was rewarded generously by their Western patrons with military
and economic aid. [14] As a result of Mubarak’s <i>infitah </i>policies,
the majority became progressively poorer and the chief beneficiary of
the latter’s support became the opposition Muslim Brotherhood; [15]
the Brotherhood has a history of collaborating with the Egyptian regime
against the leftist and communist groups in the past, with Western
patronage. When the uprising finally broke out, Mubarak and his coterie
was assured of another rigged election victory as well as the expected
succession of Mubarak’s son, Gamal. An ineffectual opposition movement
called <i>Kefaya </i>and a more powerful labour movement had been
active since 2006 to challenge the status quo; but it was only when the
army withdrew its support from one of their own that Mubarak was
toppled. [16]
So what made it possible? The week Ben Ali was toppled in Tunisia, a
national conversation sparked off in Egypt: How had the Tunisians done
it? Surely if <i>they </i>could do it, the Egyptians could also do it! [17]
Mubarak was swiftly replaced with a hastily-appointed Vice-President,
General Omar Suleiman, by most respectable accounts, a torturer. [18]
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood was not part of the initial protest
wave against Mubarak, and only reluctantly joined in at the prodding of
some of their younger members. They also benefitted from having opened
a secret channel of diplomacy with the US State Department since a
decade ago and with the military-led Supreme Council of Armed Forces
(SCAF), which replaced Suleiman. As expected, the Brotherhood won the
elections amid an increasingly insecure atmosphere dominated by the
SCAF, with thousands of people being arrested [19]
and deliberate targeting of the Coptic minority. So far the Brotherhood
has not come up with an economic and social programme to alleviate
Egypt’s problems, although the military regime has applied to the IMF
for another loan. The former have also assured Israel and the West that
the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty would not be altered. [20]
However the model which several top leaders of the Brotherhood have
advocated is the Turkish model, and not just because an Islamist
government is in power there, which is a member of NATO, does mostly
what Washington tells them to do and where the army is still a dominant
presence in national affairs. [21] So Thomas Friedman and his like need not worry too much.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
While the mainstream media in the West continue to take an interest in
the fate of the Arab Spring in the bigger states like Tunisia, Egypt,
Syria and Libya, in at least two cases, reporting on the uprising and
the oppression inflicted against the protesters has totally vanished.
One of these cases is Yemen. [22] The poorest Arab state, it is sometimes unfairly mentioned as the birthplace of al-Qaeda. [23] The country until recently was ruled by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had
been little more than a Saudi-American client in his entire tenure.
When protests spontaneously broke out against his regime following the
victorious uprising in Tunisia, the dictator responded by brutally
crushing the protest movement on one hand and dallying over handing
over power to a successor. He had by then become so unpopular that
Yemen quickly became the only Arab country where protests became a <i>daily </i>occurrence. [24]
However most of the mainstream media whitewashed the history of the
country to paint it as a land of beards, burqas and tribes. Yemen was
two countries before its re-unification in 1990: the north was Ottoman
territory before the collapse of the latter which gave way to a
medieval imamate which ruled with an iron hand claiming divine
sanction; while the south was a British colony. In both parts of Yemen,
however, democratic uprisings attempted to overthrow the imam and the
British, respectively, in the 1940s and 1950s. [25]
Both the struggles bore fruition, first, in 1962 in the North when the
imam was overthrown by Nasserist army officers while in 1967,
communists took over the leadership of the nationalist struggle and
threw out the British, proclaiming a Marxist republic in the country.
While the North soon descended into a tribalist republic, in the south
serious reforms were carried out like female emancipation, land reform
and free provision of health, education and housing. However partly as
a result of factional struggles and partly as a result of Saudi
interference, no serious alternative to the status quo took place in
Yemen, and a hasty ‘re-unification’ of the country was brought
about with Saudi and American blessing to counter the plucky little
godless people’s republic in the south; Saleh came along with the
package deal. I decided to visit Yemen in 2010 after reading of
frequent reports in the mainstream Western media about a massive
al-Qaeda presence in the country. Prior to my visit I had warned
against the ahistoric and grossly generalised depictions of the country
that became a staple of mainstream media in the West following the
arrest of a Nigerian bomber who wanted to bomb a flight to Detroit and
who had spent time in Yemen. [26] I got a chance to visit the country in May that year, on the eve of the
20th anniversary of the country’s reunification. I was warned by
several friends not to travel to the south, due to ‘security reasons’,
but I chose to disregard it and went to Aden, the south’s biggest city.
I was not prepared for what I saw upon my arrival. There were hardly
any women to be found on the streets, except the ones in burqas. [27] I later questioned the leaders of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) [28]
about the scale of this retreat and they confessed their helplessness
to defending even their own legacy in the south in the face of Saudi
clerics sent from across the border, with Saleh’s encouragement. In
fact, there is now an open secessionist mood in the south owing to the
fact that ‘reunification’ simply meant the importation of the
Northerners into the south and their subsequent takeover of land,
property and colonial villas belonging to southerners. This scepticism
extends to the uprising against Saleh in the north, which has not
really addressed the plight of the south so far. I then asked around
about the al-Qaeda presence and was told off politely. However when I
persisted in my enquiry, a deputy to the YSP leader beckoned me to come
nearer and whispered in my ear, <i>‘The office of al-Qaeda in Yemen is located in a tiny building next to the presidential compound ‘</i>.
In other words, Saleh blackmailed the West regarding al-Qaeda in return
for money; the al-Qaeda presence in the country is no more than a few
hundred people. In fact, during the last days of his dictatorship, the
army deliberately laid down arms in many southern areas to let this
exaggerated al-Qaeda presence capture whole towns to create an image of
chaos. Despite reneging on earlier promises to step down, Saleh agreed
to allow elections to be held in mid-February 2012 to pave the way for
a successor in return for immunity from prosecution for himself and his
family. This was the preferred Saudi-American solution to ensure that a
real structural transformation does not take place; and there is
considerable distrust regarding both the Saudi and American roles in
destabilising democracy in Yemen on the streets of Sana’a, especially
among the youth. At the time of this writing, the Islamist Islah party
constituted the largest opposition party and looked set to win the
maximum seats in the upcoming elections, like its counterparts in
Tunisia and Egypt. However, it is unclear what else elections will
achieve apart from electing an incumbent Vice President as the
country’s next leader, someone who had been part of the dictator’s
coterie. An interesting footnote to this situation was provided late
last year when the Nobel Peace Prize recognised the efforts of one of
Yemen’s leading protesters, Tawakkol Karman, and made her a
co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. [29]
Whoever wins power in Yemen as a result of the Arab Spring has an
urgent task of healing the country, since it is still possible for the
country to go the Bangladesh route and for the south to become an
independent country. As I have warned before, Yemen has a history of
uprisings and revolutions, both in the north and south, and the agendas
of both the republican (in the north) and socialist revolutions (in the
south) yet remained unfulfilled; it is the only way the promise of
unity can be realised short of pandering to Saudi-US plans of
continuing with its protectorate status under Saleh. The people of the
country will not be content for a very long time, and it is this
promise which gives hope that the country may not yet turn into another
Saudi vassal state.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Events in the Arab world therefore are in a
state of flux but what cannot be denied is the fact that the Arabs have
a long and deep historical consciousness; they maybe oppressed, jailed,
beaten, tortured and humiliated, but they will always eventually rise
up against those who do so. To paraphrase the great Syrian poet Adonis:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>A time between ashes and roses is coming<br />
When everything shall be extinguished<br />
When everything shall begin</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br />
<h2>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Notes:</b></span></h2>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">1 It is interesting to note how the same failed
system is now under siege from mass protests in England, Greece, Spain
and Portugal, which were never part of the communist bloc.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">2 Some over-ambitious commentators have even labeled the election
victories of Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia as a
counter-revolution and ‘hijacking’. This then naturally leads them on
to pine for the dictatorial era.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">3 The way in which the Tunisian founding father Habib Bourguiba cut
deals with the French and threw in his lot with the Israelis and Saudis
rather than Nasserism in the 1950s and 1960s largely contributed to
that reputation.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">4 The full story of the kleptocracy of the Ben Ali family is told in Beatrice Hibou’s perceptive recent study <i>The Force of Obedience</i>. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">5 According to WikiLeaks, Ben Ali’s family owned 50% of Tunisia’s productive economic assets.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">6 Sidi Bouzid, where Bouazizi died, is a small town of about 50,000
people of which up to 50% of the population between the age of 15 and
21 were unemployed. Two more suicides had occurred in Tunisia before
Bouazizi’s, but were not reported in the Tunisian media.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">7 Saudi Arabia is always a good place for these tyrants because
their bank accounts can be easily accessed there, and there are regular
flights between Riyadh and Geneva. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">8 The literacy rate in Ben Ali’s Tunisia was 75%, and the middle class was estimated to be about 80% of the population.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">9 The army’s size is about 30-40,000.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">10 Al-Nahda is untainted by having collaborated with the former
regime in its oppression, since all of its leadership was in exile; but
the same cannot be said of the tainted parent in Egypt as well as its
surrogates in Jordan, Syria, Yemen and Libya, all of which have
wilfully collaborated in the past with the regime or the West, or both
when it suited the latter’s interests. Only Hamas acquits itself more
honourably (it is the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">11 The other three states are Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, not strictly in that order.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">12 He was also the last Arab leader to attempt to unite the Arab
world, for which the West never forgave him, even unsuccessfully trying
to topple him in 1956. It wasn’t called ‘regime change’ then.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">13 However, the more serious reasons had to do with the fact that he
maintained a one-party state in the country in a top-down model without
serious opposition. Even the communists dissolved their independent
organisation to join his party, with disastrous consequences.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">14 Egypt has been receiving $1.5 billion annually in military aid from the US, the highest such aid for any country.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">15 The Muslim Brotherhood also has a comprehensive welfare program
for provision of free food, medicine and education among their
constituencies, which provides a powerful alternative to a state which
has steadily been withdrawing from providing the same.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">16 In fact, the prominence of the Egyptian labour movement in the
anti-Mubarak protests has been noted not just by leftist commentators,
but by Robert Fisk. It also helps challenge the dominant narrative of
the uprising as being a middle-class ‘Facebook/Twitter’ phenomenon.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">17 The Tunisians have always been regarded in the Arab world as
incredibly soft Arabs, lotus-eaters and pleasure-seekers, while
Egyptians have a proud history of insurrection: 10 major uprisings in
the last 130 years, contrary to the image presented in the mainstream
media of the latter being very <i>patient </i>people.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">18 The most comprehensive account of Gen Suleiman’s renditionary exploits can be found in Jane Mayer’s book <i>The Dark Side</i>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">19 Some 13,000 people have been detained by SCAF since the toppling
of Mubarak, which is more than the number detained during the Mubarak
dictatorship.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">20 This humiliating treaty forbids Egyptian soldiers from moving inside Egyptian territory without Israeli permission.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">21 Plus the fact that NATO’s Islamists are very comfortable with
Israel, despite a few occasional noises, as well as actively blessing
and aiding the counter-revolution in Libya and Syria, and the fact that
the mass movement was repeatedly crushed in Turkey following coups in
1960s and 1980s.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">22 The other case being the gas station of Bahrain. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">23 It could be counter-argued with equal fairness that Osama bin
Laden was a Saudi citizen, having renounced his Yemeni ancestry long
ago.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">24 Even when someone helpfully fired a rocket which injured the
dictator and forced him to leave for treatment to Saudi Arabia, it was
not enough to prevent him from making a return. Added to that is the
fact that the first seven presidents of Yemen have all been
assassinated. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">25 In 1948 a constitutionalist uprising in the North led to the
assassination of the imam, followed by other uprisings in the 1960s; in
the south massive strikes were led by the strong trade-union movement
against the British in Aden.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">26 That article, <i>Yemen’s Memories of Resistance and Revolution</i>
was published in January 2010 in the US, India, Pakistan, Yemen and
even South Africa, and merited two radio interviews on alternative
media in the US.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">27 And this was a country where in 1960s emancipated women publicly burnt the burqas and were derided as ‘prostitutes’. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">28 The successor to the National Liberation Front communists in the south.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">29 Karman is an ex-member of the Islah party and while her social
vision remains conservative, the Nobel Prize helped to shatter for the
time being the stereotypes of the country in the mainstream Western
media. Prior to being honoured, Karman had been camping out in Sana’a’s
main square in opposition to Saleh and had not seen her family for the
last nine months. It would be interesting to see in the coming months
whether she attempts to become a part of the country’s political
process and charms her way to challenge the rich and powerful elite,
like her powerful predecessor, the Biblical Bilquis, Queen of Sheba.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<sup> </sup></div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-88270259623049081382012-06-30T21:00:00.000-04:002012-08-27T11:30:50.023-04:00Che Guevara and the Political Economy of Socialism<b>by Rafael Martinez</b><br />
<br />
Che Guevara is widely known to the world as the
romantic-idealist revolutionary. The economic thought of Che Guevara has not
really been widely publicised as the Argentinean born revolutionary is commonly
known for his works on the guerrilla warfare, whose underlying idealist and
voluntarist approaches to the struggle of the oppressed masses against
capitalism and imperialism have been exposed and rejected altogether by the
Marxist-Leninists. It is most appropriate, however, to pay special attention to
Guevara’s economic works, as his contribution to the economic transformation of
Cuba during the early stages of the revolutionary process was central and was
highly criticised by the ideologists of modern revisionism, both within and
outside the country.<br />
<br />
Che participated in making up the agrarian reform law in
1959. In October 1959 he was appointed director of the Department of
Industrialisation, which was created by INRA (Instituto Nacional de la Reforma
Agraria or National Institute of the Agrarian Reform). At that time most of the
industry was still in the hands of private owners. Guevara undertook the task of
studying the economy of the island and establishing the guidelines of building
up Cuban industry. According to Orlando Borrego, author of ‘Che el camino del
fuego’ (Imagen Contemporanea, Havana 2001), the department started off without a
single industry under its jurisdiction nor a ‘budget of its own to finance
supplies, investments and other expenses’ to manage the few companies that
passed to its jurisdiction later in the year. In November 1959 Guevara was
appointed head of the National Bank, although he never stopped overseeing the
work of the department of industrialisation to where he returned within the next
year.<br />
<br />
It is not till October 1960, when the Cuban Government
decrees the immediate nationalisation of commercial and industrial enterprises
including the sugar cane industry, that the Department of Industrialisation
becomes a full-fledged body for the organisation of industrial production on a
massive scale. His leadership in the Department of Industrialisation led Guevara
to become the Cuban minister of industry in February 1961, which had the task to
organise state industry following massive nationalisation.<br />
<br />
At this point Guevara faces the challenging task to organise
most of the country’s industrial production on the basis of an ill-defined (from
the point of view of socialist construction) revolutionary process. Despite the
success of the anti-imperialist struggle undertaken by the Cuban Revolution, its
leadership lacked knowledge of the political economy of Marxism-Leninism. Che
Guevara, without any doubt, is the member of the Cuban leadership who takes most
seriously the study of political economy, which he did in parallel to all the
administrative and organisational tasks that he was assigned by the Cuban
Revolution. The study of Marxist political economy and the economic discussions
that were triggered during the process of organisation of the Cuban industry
become the central topic in Guevara’s life during the first half of the ‘60s.
This period of exploration and creativity comes for the most part to an end
when, in 1965 Che renounces his responsibilities as the Minister of Industry,
following a heated economic debate, referred to by many as the ‘Great Debate’,
which reached its climax in 1963-1964.<br />
<br />
Strong divergences between the pro-Soviet economic line and
Guevara’s plan of industrialisation brought to an end the participation of the
Argentinean revolutionary in the internal affairs of the Cuban revolution.
Guevara embarks on a ‘quixotic’ military campaign to aid and create
revolutionary processes in Africa and Latin America, which concludes with his
assassination in Bolivia, in 1967.<br />
<br />
Castro remembers Che in a well-known speech given in 1987, in
the midst of the so-called process of rectification, by denouncing a number of
gross deformations in the economic life of the island and corruption of moral
standards. Castro calls upon the population with an appeal of the highest moral
standards embodied by the life of the great revolutionary, and admits to the
negative consequences of departing from Che’s economic thought:<br />
<br />
<i>‘Che was radically opposed to using and developing capitalist
economic laws and categories in building socialism. He advocated something that
I have often insisted on: Building socialism and communism is not just a matter
of producing and distributing wealth but is also a matter of education and
consciousness’ </i>(Fidel Castro in<i> ‘Che Guevara, Economics and politics in
the transition to socialism’, </i>Pathfinder, New York, 2003, p. 39).<br />
<br />
In the midst of open appeals to revive what many in Cuba call
the ‘Che’s dream’ a lot of confusion is fostered about the interpretation and
originality of Guevara’s economic thought. Twenty years after his assassination,
Cuban scholars Fernando Martinez Heredia, and specially, Carlos Tablada, revived
the discussions concerning Guevara’s contribution to the practice of socialist
construction in Cuba and to the economic theory of the transitional epoch in
general. Unfortunately, most scholars in Cuba consider Guevara’s economic
thought in isolation from the theory of political economy of socialism developed
before the revisionist political economy became widely accepted in the Soviet
Union and the former People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe in the 1960s.<br />
<br />
Outside the country, efforts have been made to reconcile
Guevara’s economic thought with Trotskyism and neo-Trotskyite tendencies.
Neo-Trotskyite elements around the world, not without encouragement from within
Cuba, try to portray Guevara’s economic thought as a reaction to the economic
line imposed by the bureaucratic castes in the Soviet Union, by completely
ignoring, more correctly suppressing, Guevara’s open support to Stalin in
questions of the construction of socialism. It is silenced that Guevara quoted
Stalin on multiple occasions in his economic works published in Cuba and the
fact that the core of his economic theory, the budgetary finance system, bears
strong similarities to the economic ‘model’ of development, which had become
‘standard’ in the former People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe during the
post-war period up until Stalin’s death. Trotskyism, neo-Trotskyism and many in
Cuba exacerbate Guevara’s idealist mistakes present in both his political and
economic thoughts and turn Che into some sort of humanist socialist, who <i>de
facto</i> suppressed the weight of the objective character of the economic laws
of socialism in favour of a leading role of socialist education and
consciousness (which, unfortunately, is true to a considerable degree).<br />
<br />
Discussions about the controversial role of Che Guevara in
the Cuban revolution during the early stages of the construction of the new
economy have been revived in recent years. More and more unpublished documents
are slowly coming to light. One of the most significant efforts developed in
this direction is led by the Centro de Estudios Che Guevara, based in Havana and
located in the house where Guevara and his family used to reside during the
first half of the sixties. This association possesses direct access to Guevara’s
personal library, which contains numerous volumes in which he used to make
annotations. Ambitious plans have been revealed to publish nine volumes with
materials covering numerous aspects of the political life of Che Guevara, which
hopefully will throw important light on the evolution of Guevara’s thought as a
Marxist.<br />
<br />
One of the most enlightening documents published in recent
years corresponds to a letter sent by Che, while based in Tanzania, to Armando
Hart Dávalos on the need to publish in Cuba works on philosophy. The
authenticity of this letter does not seem to be controversial as it was
published in a Cuban journal and made available to the public. In this letter
Guevara outlines a basic plan for the publication of texts in philosophy,
subdivided into 8 groups:<br />
<br />
<i>‘In Cuba there is nothing published, if one excludes the
Soviet bricks, which bring the inconvenience that they do not let you think; the
party did it for you and you should digest it.</i><br />
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>It would be necessary to publish the complete works of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Stalin </i>[underlined by Che in the original]<i> and other great
Marxists. </i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>Here would come to the great revisionists (if you want you
can add here Khrushchev), well analyzed, more profoundly than any others and
also your friend Trotsky, who existed and apparently wrote something </i>(Che
Guevara,<i> Letter to Armando Hart Dávalos </i>published in <i>Contracorriente</i>,
Havana, September 1997, No. 9).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i> </i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In the present article we will try to briefly cover the main
elements of Guevara’s economic thought by means of establishing analogies with
the Marxist-Leninist economic theory of the transitional society. Further, we
will discuss the absurd allegations of Trotskyism that the Soviet revisionist
leadership inflicted on Guevara. We will conclude with a brief exposition of
what are, in our opinion the two major mistakes committed by Guevara in his
economic works: idealism and mechanicism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<b>Budgetary System versus Financial Self-Management</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
At the centre of Guevara’s economic thought stands the
budgetary system, which Che implemented in the enterprises organised by the
ministry of industry between 1961 and 1964. The budgetary system is formulated
by Guevara as a reaction against what had been established in the Soviet Union
and the former People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe under the system of
economic accounting (usually referred by us as market-like economic accounting,
in order to distinguish it from the more generic concept of economic
accounting), which the followers of post-Stalin Soviet revisionism posed as a
model of development in Cuba. It is within the context of the revision of the
Marxist-Leninist principles of the political economy of socialism by the Soviet
revisionist leadership that the study of Guevara’s budgetary system needs to be
analysed and appreciated. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Despite strong elements of mechanicism and schematism
inherent to Guevara’s presentation for a case in favour of the centralisation of
industrial production and the establishment of forms of management and
interrelations between individual producing subjects and the state, the
budgetary system embodies the means, however primitive, which served the purpose
for the application and success of the centralised planned principle of the
economic development in a backward country. This is the rationale behind
Guevara’s formulations, which represents in the main the basic prerequisite for
a more or less rapid industrialisation of the island, which he considered to be
the highest priority within the process of socialist construction. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Many in Cuba portray Guevara’s budgetary system elaborated
for the specific conditions of Cuba, which in a sense Che ‘invents’ a particular
model that suits his more or less utopian view of the transition to the
socialist society. Thus Guevara’s thinking is studied in isolation from the
historical epoch, which corresponds to the epoch of the restoration of
capitalism in the Soviet Union and the former People’s Democracies. At most,
Guevara’s economic thinking is viewed as an alternative to the ‘neo-Stalinist’
command-administrative system undertaken by the Soviet leadership. This view was
revitalised in Cuba towards the end of the 1980s when the Soviet economy and the
whole so-called ‘socialist’ system showed clear signs of decomposition. It is
enlightening, however, to see that some leading economists in the island do
admit that Guevara’s economic thought did not come out of the blue:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘In retrospective, the budgetary system is a contribution of
great value. We would not say – and you know it well – that Che invented the
budgetary system. It already came from the socialist countries; in the Soviet
Union for a period of time the budgetary system ruled many aspects of the
economy’. </i>(Carlos Rafael Rodriguez in <i>‘Che Guevara, Cuba and the Road to
Socialism’</i>, New York, 1991, pp. 39-30. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Needless to say Rodriguez refers to the socialist economic
model developed under Stalin. Rodriguez, however, wrongly attributes to Guevara
the view that in the transition to higher forms of socialism, or full socialism,
the budgetary system could be applied to the entire economy; the entire economy
could allegedly function as one big enterprise, with one social fund to meet the
needs of production and distribution. Much to the contrary, Guevara formulates
the budgetary system as a means to meet the immediate needs posed by the
organisation of the State industry and, as will be seen in the next section,
admits to the existence of commodity-money relations between the state and other
production objects, hence he admits the existence of forms of production other
than state owned. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The budgetary system is conceived by Che as an opposite of
the model established in the Soviet Union and the former People’s Democracies of
Eastern Europe after Stalin’s death. Guevara exposes the basic differences
between the budgetary system and the market-type of economic accounting or
so-called financial self-management, as early as in 1961, i.e. the very early
stages of the socialisation of industry in the country. Guevara’s thinking in
favour of the centralisation of the State industry predates the ‘Great Economic
debate’, and it is clear to us that Che had conceived the budgetary system long
before he sees himself engulfed in a heated discussion with the numerous
supporters of financial self-management in the island. We have every reason to
believe that he was in some more or less systematic way acquainted with the
history of the Soviet economy and the general elements of the socialist economy
during Stalin’s times.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara rejects from the very beginning the concept of free
enterprise within the socialist sector, which is embodied by the ability of the
individual economic subject to act as a more or less independent producer, since</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘…in the socialist countries, the enterprise possesses a bank
credit, acquires money, produces with the money that it receives, sells its
production, and then grants to the State part of the profit and part of this
profit is preserved for internal needs. The difference is that our company does
not sell, but delivers products and workers are awarded through the State’ </i>
(Che Guevara,<i> Conference ‘Economy and Plan’ of the People’s University, </i>
1961. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In Guevara’s system the enterprise does not sell, as the
commodity-money becomes effective both in form and content only when the product
is alienated by an independent producer or the individual consumer. Guevara
understands the retribution of the worker in the socialist enterprise as an
operation, in which in essence the socialist toiler establishes an
employer-employee relationship with the socialist state, bypassing the
enterprise. We believe he considers this relationship from the point of view of
the essence of the labour relationship, as in reality this relationship has
unavoidably to take the form of employment via the individual enterprise. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As opposed to the revisionist system of financial
self-management, labour circulates among the individual enterprises of the state
sector and between the enterprises and the State via the form of allocation or
assignments according to contracts stipulated by the socialist plan: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘To elaborate a budget through which the enterprise will be
assigned necessary funds by the state to make effective contracts…; and also to
transfer to public accounts the revenue from sales.’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit.
in<i> ‘Collective Discussion: Unique Decision and Responsibility’</i>, p. 3.
Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In Guevara’s system the enterprise functions as an aggregate
of a larger enterprise, which does not possess financial resources with which to
make its own decisions in terms of production and reproduction. Since the
socialist enterprise:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The company does not have resources of its own; therefore
its income is transferred to the national budget’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i>
‘Considerations on Expenses’,</i> p. 46. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara is adamantly opposed to any form of exchange among
socialist enterprises in the socialist sector other than allocation of
resources. The circulation of labour within the socialised sector is viewed by
Guevara as an aggregation of labour in a complex productive chain. In this
system the enterprises are not able to establish labour exchange independently
from the plan, since the entire productive activity of the enterprise is
dictated by it. The state, in the form of the State Bank is the beginning and
the end of labour flow concerning the productive activity of the socialist
enterprise: it acquires the necessary financial means to acquire the means of
production and it deposits the revenue in the Central Bank. These resources are
then utilised by the socialist planning system to provide for extended
reproduction of the individual productive unit, for capital investment or
non-productive social needs. In this sense the enterprise does not extract
profit <i>per se</i>; it transfers a positive balance between the production
cost and the income and it is the socialist state which makes the final decision
according to the plan as to the fate of this positive balance. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The concept of socialist planning in Guevara’s system is
closely linked to the concept of profitability of the whole productive system.
The effectiveness of the socialist economy is not the results of the mechanical
summation of individual enterprises. A positive balance in the arithmetic sum of
individual profits is possible in the capitalist system during times of
expansion, although it becomes negative in times of recession. Regardless of the
fact that the socialist productive system does not know recession or crises, the
socialist productive system displays the greatest rates of growth not just
because the arithmetic aggregation of individual profitability amounts to a
positive balance. The advantage of the socialist mode of production over
capitalism lies in the planned character of the economy, that the socialist
state is in a position to decide at the scale of the whole productive system,
not the coordination of individual producers but the regulation of labour flow
among socialist enterprises. While it is of paramount importance that the
productive unit be most profitable by means of maximum reduction of production
costs, the efficiency of the economy needs to be assessed as a whole.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Since this system is based on the central control of the
economy, the relative efficiency of an enterprise would become just an index;
what really matters is the total profitability of the entire productive system’
</i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i> ‘Considerations on Expenses’, </i>p. 48.
Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
This concept, which is a more complex concept with respect to
the profitability of the individual enterprise, had been stated explicitly by
Stalin in Economic Problems. In arguing against the right-wing deviationists,
the only way to understand that certain sectors of the economy may function
without profit or even producing losses over a certain period of time is to
introduce a more complex concept of profitability of the whole socialist
economy:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘If profitableness is considered not from the standpoint of
individual plants or industries, and not over a period of one year, but from the
standpoint of the entire national economy and over a period of, say, ten or
fifteen years,… then the temporary and unstable profitableness of some plants
and industries is beneath all comparisons with that higher form of stable and
permanent profitableness which we get from the operation of the law of balanced
development of the national economy and from economic planning…’ </i>(J.V.
Stalin,<i> Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, </i>Foreign Language
Publishing House, Moscow 1952, pp. 28-29.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Many have been led to believe that the establishment of
socialised planning in certain areas of the State-owned sector during the
transitional economy is a dangerous utopia. The transition to NEP is commonly
used as a historical example, which allegedly illustrates that socialised forms
of organisation do not correspond to the economic conditions given in a
backward, agricultural country. Much to the contrary, not only the
implementation of market-like economic accounting in the State industry is a
relatively short-lived phenomenon in the economic history of the Soviet Union,
it was soon realised that the NEP-style approach could lead to catastrophic
consequences if the market-like economic accounting were to be imposed on all
the areas of the State sector. Since the first stages of the transition from the
economy of War Communism to the liberalisation of the Soviet economy, the Soviet
leadership expressed worries that Lenin’s plans for the industrialisation of the
country would be jeopardised if market relations were to be made effective in
all the State-owned sectors. Already in 1923, the XII Congress of the Russian
Communist Party (Bolshevik) expressed ample concerns:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘On the other hand, heavy industry, which has barely entered
in contact with the market and which depends completely on State contracts,
needs for its reconstruction large and well-calculated financial resources from
the State. This also applies to a great degree to railway and sea transport.’
(Decisions of the Soviet Government on Economic Questions,</i> Moscow 1957,
Volume 1, p. 380. Translated from Russian.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Despite what right-wing revisionism led many to believe, the
Soviet government since the early stages of the NEP established a line of
demarcation within the sectors I and II of the economy. While light industry
displayed significant growth during the early stages of the liberalisation of
the economy, mostly due to the revival of market relations, heavy industry
showed little or no signs of flourishing under the conditions of market-style
economic accounting. If the market-type economic accounting were to be imposed
on heavy industry, if the Soviet plan, regardless of the level of development of
the forces of production and the correlation of forces within the various
sectors of the economy and the weight of non-socialist forms of production, were
to deny heavy industry large long-term financial assistance for a sustained
process of re-production, this sector would be forced into recession. The plans
for the speedy industrialisation of a vast and backward (both technically and
culturally) country would be doomed and with it collectivisation and socialist
construction. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The interrelations between light and heavy industries cannot
be resolved by means of the market, as this would threaten to liquidate heavy
industry in the next few years; heavy industry could recover, but this time as a
result of the anarchic development of the market and on the basis of private
property. </i>(Ibid. p. 382. Translated from Russian.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The socialist law of development, according to which the
industry of means of production should develop faster than light industry and
agriculture, necessarily leads a more or less significant fraction of the forces
of production owned by the socialist state to operate according to laws of
labour distribution and organisation different from those inherited from the
capitalist form of production. While market relations to a considerable degree
were temporarily allowed by the NEP to regulate production and labour
distribution among more or less disseminated and independent economic units in
the State industry, the Soviet State was forced since the beginning to define
the concretisation of this law of socialist production, in a sense breaking with
NEP itself. The establishment of socialist planning on the basis of the
socialised mode of production in certain sectors of the economy holds absolute
character. This principle holds regardless of the level of development of the
forces of production in the economy of the country in transition to socialism as
a whole. The level of socialisation of the State sector does strongly depend
upon the concrete-historical conditions of the country in transition. However,
the State is bound since the very beginning to establish a socialist planned
principle to operate in a direct, socialised way (not by means of the market) on
certain sectors of the economy, primarily on the sector I. This is the basic
principle of the transitional economy that Guevara tried his best to uphold by
advocating the budgetary system, as a system opposed to the system of
market-type economic accounting proposed by the followers of Soviet revisionism
in the island.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As will be touched upon in more detail, Guevara’s economic
thought, the budgetary system that he advocated is completely opposed to
Trotsky’s concealed right-wing economic theories. Trotsky opposed since the
early stages of NEP, all the way till the end of his political career the
establishment of a genuine planned principle in certain sectors of the State
sector, by advocating the absolute and universal character of NEP:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘But the New Economic Policy does not flow solely from the
interrelations between the city and the village. This policy is a necessary
stage in the growth of state-owned industry. Between capitalism, under which the
means of production are owned by private individuals and all economic relations
are regulated by the market –I say, between capitalism and complete socialism,
with its socially planned economy, there are a number of transitional stages;
and the NEP is essentially one of these stages.</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>Let us analyze this question, taking the railways as a case
in point. It is precisely railway transportation that provides a field which is
prepared in the maximum degree for socialist economy… The railway lines, not
only those privately owned, but also the state-owned lines, settled their
accounts with all the other economic enterprises through the medium of the
market. Under the particular system this was economically unavoidable and
necessary because the equipment and development of a particular line depends
upon how far it justifies itself economically. Whether a particular railway is
beneficial to the economy can be ascertained only through the medium of the
market.’ </i>(L.D. Trotsky, <i>‘The First Five Years of the Communist
International’,</i> Volume 2, New Park Publications, London, 1953, pp. 233-4.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara’s budgetary system is the means for the
industrialisation of Cuba. One of the fundamental principles of the socialist
economy is based on the development of industrial production, mainly heavy
industry, as the basis and engine of the development of the socialist economy.
Imperialist domination is based upon the concentration of industry and
technology in the hands of imperialist corporations. Exploited countries are
deprived of the means and necessary knowledge to secure the development of
labour productivity, a key element to sustained development of the forces of
production. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In order to overcome economic backwardness and the relations
of dependence on the imperialist countries, i.e. the ultimate goal of a genuine
process of national-liberation, it is imperative to turn around the character of
economic relations with the outside world. This implies a deep re-structuring of
the economies, which for long years have been geared towards fitting the
economic needs of the imperialist countries, and to turn these countries into
self-sufficient and prosperous socialist industrial ones. Genuine independence,
true anti-imperialism is no more than rhetorical statements without massive
policies of socialist industrialisation, which is the material basis for
long-term and sustained independence. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Over a hundred years of national liberation movements have
taught us that the socialisation of the means of production, as opposed to
half-measures disguised by pseudo-socialist phraseology, is the only way towards
national independence. Here lies the essence of the internationalist policies of
the Soviet State during the post-war period. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The economies of dependent countries, such as Cuba back in
the 1950s, are based upon the extraction and the early stages of manufacturing
of raw materials. The main source of revenue of Batista’s Cuba was the export of
sugar, whose price in the international market was out of the control of the
country and, as repeatedly pointed out by the leaders of the Cuban revolution,
undershot the actual value.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The only possible way that economically and culturally
backward countries can attain economic and sustained political independence,
lies in the development of heavy industry, which is the only possible way to lay
the foundations for sustained economic growth. This fundamental point of the
socialist construction lies at the centre of attention of Guevara’s economic
thought and to it he devoted most of his practical and theoretical efforts while
remaining in office. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>Commodity-Money Relations and the Law of Value</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In this section we will briefly cover Guevara’s understanding
of the role of commodity-money relations and the law of value in the socialist
industry. At this point we lack written materials to throw light on his attitude
towards the agrarian reform performed during the early stages of the Cuban
revolution. His understanding of the collectivisation of the large mass of petty
producers is also unknown to us, although we hope that in the near future
archival materials may be made available to the public in Cuba. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As illustrated in the previous section, at the centre of
Guevara’s economic thought stands the model of budgetary system. This system is
intimately related to Guevara’s understanding of the role of plan, which, as
discussed, fundamentally differs from that envisioned by right-wing revisionism
in the Soviet Union and the former People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe. Much
to the contrary, it bears close resemblance to the conception of economic
planning, which prevailed in the Soviet Union before Stalin’s death and stands
in line with the economic policies that had become ‘standard’ in the former
People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe in the period of 1948-1953. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara’s attitude to the role of market categories and
relations are consistent with his understanding of plan and are very close to
Stalin’s formulations in <i>Economic Problems</i>. Guevara explicitly denies the
need for commodity exchange between socialist enterprises and categorically
denies the commodity character of the means of production. He supports the
correct view that commodity exchange involves change of ownership. Commodity
exchange between state enterprises is viewed by the Argentinean as a
contradiction <i>per se,</i> since in the budgetary system the socialist
enterprise is an organic element of a bigger enterprise, the State. Within this
system the labour among enterprises does not adopt the form of commodity
exchange. Means of production, financial resources are not owned by the
socialist enterprise, as the latter lacks its own account and revenue is
automatically deposited in a socialised account. In this system, the means of
production are allocated to a given production unit according to the needs and
future perspective of economic development and dictated by a centralised plan.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara does not deny the existence of commodity production
and the coexistence of different modes of production. He supports Stalin’s views
that commodity relations are not inherent to the socialist sector but that their
existence is due to the presence of different forms of property within the Cuban
economy. As opposed to the Soviet Economy in Stalin’s time, the Cuban
countryside had not undergone the process of collectivisation of the petty
producer. In the concrete-historical situation of Cuba, the incipient socialist
industrial sector had to coexist with a large mass of independent producers.
However, this concrete-historical circumstance does not prevent the socialist
sector, however small and poorly organized, to operate under a different
regulator of production than that operating in the countryside. Guevara writes:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘We believe that the partial existence of the law of value is
due to the remnants of the market economy, which also manifests itself in the
type of exchange between the State and the private consumer’ </i>(Che Guevara,
op. cit. in <i>‘On the Budgetary </i>System’<i>,</i> p. 95. Translated from
Spanish).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
This statement is very close to Stalin’s well-known statement
given in <i>Economic Problems</i>:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘But the collective farms are unwilling to alienate their
products except in the form of commodities, in exchange for which they desire to
receive </i>the<i> commodities they need… Because of this, commodity production
and trade are as much a necessity with us today as they were thirty years ago…’
</i>(J.V. Stalin,<i> Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, </i>Foreign
Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1952, p. 19-20.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In addition, as pointed out by Guevara, there remains the
need for commodity-money bonds between the State and the private producer, as
the worker in socialism still receives a significant fraction of the social fund
for the satisfaction of individual needs in money terms. The exchange between
the state and the individual producer is performed under the form of a commodity
exchange, as </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘…this transfer occurs when the product leaves the state
sector and it becomes property of an individual consumer’ </i>(Che Guevara, op.
cit. in<i> ‘Considerations on Expenses’,</i> p. 46. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
With the socialisation of all the means of production and the
liquidation of individual and collective forms of production, there would be no
need for commodity-money exchange in socialism. As a matter of fact, the
realisation of the socialist principle of distribution does not necessarily
imply the existence of commodity-money relations, as a category of production.
These views were ‘exposed’ and refuted by Soviet economists, who after a series
of discussions re-wrote chapters in the <i>Manual of Political Economy</i>
regarding the political economy of socialism. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Naturally, these views were also not shared by many
economists in Cuba, as manifested in a more or less full-fledged controversial
discussion during 1963-1964. For instance, Alberto Mora (Minister of Foreign
Trade during that time) in 1963 openly attacked Guevara’s views, by comparing
them with Stalin’s, which were published in <i>Economic Problems</i>. He
rejected Guevara’s theses on the grounds that the most serious ‘scientific’
discussions held in the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1950s and
early sixties indicated that Stalin’s views were wrong, that the law of value
operates in socialism as a regulator of production, as the products in the
socialist economy remain and will remain commodities all the way till communism:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘When some comrades deny that the law of value operates in
the relations among enterprises within the State sector, they argue that the
entire State sector is under single ownership, that the enterprises are the
property of the society. This, of course, is true. But as an economic criterion
it is inaccurate. State property is not yet fully developed social property that
will be achieved only under communism.’ </i>(A. Mora, in<i> ‘On the operation of
the law of value in the Cuban Economy’, </i>published in<i> Man and Socialism in
Cuba</i>, Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 227).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The well-known Trotskyite economist, Ernest Mandel, who was
very active during what he called the ‘Great Debate’ in Cuba, enters into a
long-standing controversy with Charles Bettelheim, a French right-wing
revisionist scholar. The latter also became active during the economic debate,
this time as a fervent supporter of the ‘socialist-market’ conception advocated
by the pro-Soviet economists in the island. Despite Mandel’s views that means of
production in the socialist economy do not circulate as commodities, he is very
keen on exposing Stalin’s views advocated by Guevara with regard to the causes
of the law of value in the socialist sector. In the section of the ‘Historical
conditions leading to the extinction of mercantile categories’ of a well-publicised
article in Cuba, he states:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Although we have criticized several of comrade Bettelheim’s
positions, we agree with him completely in rejecting Stalin’s theory that the
basic reason for the mercantile categories in the Soviet economy is the
existence of two forms of socialist property: ownership by the people (that is,
the State) and ownership by more limited social groups (essentially the
Kolkhozy)’. </i>(E. Mandel, in<i> ‘On the operation of the law of value in the
Cuban Economy’, </i>published in<i> Man and Socialism in Cuba, </i>Atheneum, New
York, 1973, p. 70.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Mandel has an opinion of his own and does not need to refer
to the Soviet pseudo-science to ‘expose’ Guevara’s ‘primitivism’. The author
advocates that only the abundance of consumer goods, which are closely linked to
the development of forces of production, will create the objective conditions
for the abolition of commodity-money relations in the sphere of private
consumption. Moreover, he seems to be proud that</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The new program of the CPSU, approved by the XXII congress,
incorporated this idea as set forth in our Traite d’Economie Marxiste’ </i>(E.
Mandel, in<i> ‘On the operation of the law of value in the Cuban Economy’, </i>
published in<i> Man and Socialism in Cuba, </i>Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 71).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara advocated the correct view that the law of value does
not operate within the socialist sector as a regulator of production. He is able
to grasp, unlike his detractors, a crucial element in the political economy of
socialism:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘We insist on the analysis of the cost, since part of our
conception refers to the fact that it is not strictly necessary that cost of
production and price coincide in the socialist sector’.</i> (Che Guevara, op.
cit. in<i> ‘Considerations on Expenses’</i>, p. 47. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara understood that the price setting in the socialist
sector, as a quantifier of the flow of labour circulating among different
subjects of the state industry, does not necessarily have to coincide with the
cost of production. If the labour exchange between different sectors of the
socialist economy were to be governed by the exchange according to equal value,
less profitable or even not profitable enterprises would not be able to survive
and the process of extended reproduction of the socialist economy would be
brought to its knees. If the law of value is forced to operate as a regulator of
the proportions of labour exchanged between enterprises in the socialist sector
it would not be possible to overcome the disproportions between sectors of the
economy, which are inherited from capitalism, let alone colonialism and
neo-colonialism. This consequently leads to a more complex concept of
profitability of the socialist economy, which was touched upon in the previous
section, which Stalin formulated in <i>Economic Problems</i> and which Guevara
embraces wholeheartedly. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is true that the abstract formulation that prices in the
socialist sector do not necessarily correspond to the cost of production
contains within itself a strong potential and it represents a serious step
forward in the evolution of the understanding of political economy of socialism.
This statement represents a tremendous step forward with respect to the theories
of right-wing revisionism, which does not conceive labour exchange outside the
boundaries of commodity-money relations. However, this statement does solve
right away the most intricate problem of the political economy of socialism,
which is to concretise what are the actual proportions of labour that correspond
to the historical-concrete situation and the development of the forces of
production and forms of management of a given country. This is a titanic task
that needs to be resolved by the revolutionaries of a given country, which
Guevara genuinely and with the best of his abilities tried to solve for the
concrete conditions of Cuba. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara is an advocate of the strictest economic accounting,
for the same reasons that Stalin criticised many Soviet managers and plan making
for neglecting the operation of the law of value as a strong instrument for
economic accounting in socialism. Indeed, accounting in value terms proves a
powerful tool to evaluate the effectiveness of the socialist enterprise, and
this is most appreciated by Guevara: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The cost would yield an index of the management of the
enterprise; it is irrelevant that these prices are higher or lower than the
prices in the socialist sector, or even, in some isolated cases, than those
prices used to sell the product to the people; what matters is the sustained
analysis of the management of the enterprise…, which is determined by its
success or failure to reduce costs’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i>
‘Considerations on Expenses’, </i>p. 49. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
At the end of the day, one of the fundamental goals of the
enterprise in socialism as well as in communism </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘…reduces to a common denominator…: the increase of labour
productivity as the fundamental basis for the construction of socialism and
indispensable premise for communism.’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i>
‘Considerations on Expenses’</i>, p. 51. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In Guevara’s budgetary finance system, money within the
socialist enterprise is used primarily as means of calculation, as a strong
algebraic tool for determining the effectiveness of the enterprise, the
correctness of the use of the resources granted by the State to the enterprise,
a means to determine if the enterprise is doing enough to reduce costs, etc… In
his very important article, ‘About the Budgetary System’ he exposes one of the
most prominent differences between his conception and the role given to money by
the pro-Soviet economists in Cuba within the so called ‘Economic Accounting’
system:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Another difference is the way money is used; in our system
money operates as arithmetic money, as a reflection, in prices, of the
management of the enterprise, which the central organs will analyze in order to
control the functioning of the latter.’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i> ‘About
the Budgetary System’, </i>p. 80 Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara’s views are consistent with the well-known exposure
of Notkin’s ‘marketist’ views by Stalin:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Why, in that case, do we speak of the value of means of
production, their cost of production, their price, etc.? …</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>Firstly, this is needed for purposes of calculation and
settlement, for determining that the enterprises are paying or running at a
loss, for checking and controlling the enterprises. …’ </i>(J.V. Stalin, op.
cit, p. 58-59.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As the economic discussion in Cuba progresses and the
contradictions between Guevara’s line and the pro-Soviet economists (including
Charles Bettelheim) on the one hand, and the Trotskyite elements in Cuba (Cuban
nationals as well as foreigners) on the other, Che has unavoidably to clash with
the economic conception advocated by the Soviet revisionists. Towards the end of
this discussion, in 1964 Guevara expresses himself in a more and more explicit
and eloquent way regarding the differences between his model and the
‘market-socialist’ type of development advocated by the revisionists. The
exposition of the differences, which at first, in 1961 Guevara had put in rather
mild, almost academic terms, turns controversial and bitter in 1964, leaving no
doubt that the contradictions had become irreconcilable and that the Cuban
leadership would have to take a stand sooner rather than later. Whether the
Soviet revisionist leadership demanded Guevara’s removal from his posts in the
economy of the island, as a pre-requisite to sustained economic aid, or whether
his detractors in Cuba played a leading role in the events that followed the
economic discussions, remains a matter of speculation. Regardless, it is clear
to us that Guevara engages in an important theoretical debate till the very end
and was never curbed by the overwhelming wave of criticism triggered by his
writings, which he faced almost alone. In addition, we can only imagine how
upsetting to pro-Soviet and Trotskyite elements in the island it would be to
accept that the leading economist, a holder of a key command position in the
Cuban economy, dares, not once, not twice, but at least three times that we are
aware of, to cite and defend Stalin’s works as an authoritative reference
against his opponents.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Che openly and in print criticises the revisionist manual of
political economy published in the Soviet Union in the early sixties, with
regards to the insistence of the Soviet revisionists on developing
commodity-money relations in socialism, let alone the transition to socialism.
After a series of gradual changes operated in the economic literature of the
1950s followed by crucial economic discussions held towards the end of that
decade, the Soviet economists published a new manual of political economy under
the editorship of a leading economist, Ostrovitianov. In this important document
all the products in socialism are proclaimed to be commodities, including the
means of production (with the utterly inconsistent exemption of labour force),
and the law of value, which is used in a conscious way by the socialist plan,
operates as the regulator of proportions of labour among enterprises, whether
state owned or cooperatives. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As opposed to Stalin’s plans for the gradual shrinkage of the
sphere of operation of the commodity-money relations and categories, the Soviet
revisionists envisioned a plan to further enhance the role of these in the
economy and to provide the enterprises with more independence. The operation of
the law of value will disappear only when the highest stage of communism is
accomplished in a more or less distant future. Guevara rebels against the new
theses advocated by the Soviet revisionist economists by rejecting altogether
the plans for developing commodity-money relations in socialism, which are
treated by us as a departure from the political economy of socialism developed
by Lenin and Stalin: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Why develop? We understand that the capitalist categories
are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be
predetermined, but the characteristics of the period of transition are those of
a society that is throwing off its old bonds in order to move quickly into the
new stage.</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>The tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast
as possible the old categories, including the market, and, therefore, material
interest – or better, to eliminate the conditions of their existence’ </i>(Che
Guevara, in<i> Man and Socialism in Cuba, </i>Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 142).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is unfortunate, however, that Che’s reasoning is plagued
with idealist assertions, according to which commodity-money relations allegedly
embody within themselves the ideological burden of the capitalist society. As
will be touched upon the next section, Guevara equates to a great extent
commodity-money relations and categories with the concept of material incentive,
which he understands as a mechanism aimed at motivating and enhancing labour
productivity by the same means as used in capitalism. Material incentive and
consciousness appear in Guevara’s thought as two poles of one of the main (if
not the most relevant) contradiction in the process of socialist construction. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara should not be accused of a left-wing attitude with
regard to the role of commodity-money relations in socialism. Nowhere in Che’s
writings can one find appeals to implement the policies of war communism in the
Cuban economy. Much to the contrary, he is aware of the need to retain
commodity-money relations for an undetermined period, as a result of the
presence of a large mass of individual producers. Despite glaring idealist
elements in Guevara’s thought we need to give him credit for identifying
correctly the sphere of application of commodity-money relations and the
fundamental reasons leading to the inevitability of the latter in the socialist
transition in general and in the Cuban revolutionary process, in particular. In
summarising the increasing contradictions between the line of thought and the
economic reforms accomplished under his office, and the push for market
relations advocated by the ‘marketists’ in Cuba Guevara states:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘We deny the possibility of consciously using the law of
value, in the conditions that a free market does not exist, which expresses
directly the contradiction between producers and consumers; we deny the
existence of the commodity category in the relation among state enterprises and
we regard them as part of one big enterprise, the State (although in practice it
does not happen yet in our country).’ </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i> ‘On the
Budgetary System’</i>, p. 96. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
When Guevara admits to the fact that the state sector in Cuba
does not function as a ‘one big enterprise’ he is most likely referring to the
coexistence of the Ministry of Industry, the INRA and the Ministry of Foreign
Trade, the latter two lead by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez and Alberto Mora,
respectively, both rabid ‘market-socialists’. The latter had expressed their
disagreement with Guevara’s plans for industrialisation of the island based on
the argumentation that Cuba was not prepared for forms of economic relations
consistent with developed stages of socialisation of the labour process.
Rodriguez states as late as in 1988:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The budgetary system is closer to the future society… this
system requires conditions that we will not be able to achieve in a long time’
</i>(Carlos Rafael Rodriguez in<i> Che Guevara, Cuba y el camino al socialismo,
</i>New International, New York, 2000, p. 42. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
By arguing that Cuba was never (not even after 30 years of
revolution) ready for higher forms of exchange between state enterprises,
Rodriguez openly polemicises in 1988, as he used to do 25 years before, with
Che’s assertion that products exchanged between state enterprises do not adopt
the form of commodities. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara to the very end sticks to his conception that the
commodity-money relations are not inherent to the socialist economy, and
especially to the socialised sector, which he tried so hard to build up since
the very early stages of the Cuban revolution. Market relations come about as a
result of the presence of important remnants of private producers and they are
bound to disappear with them (both in form and content). Even though, Guevara
refrains (to the best of our rather sketchy and fragmental knowledge of the
evolution of Guevara’s thinking) from referring openly to his opinion with
regards to the plans of collectivising the private producer, we believe that he
would have advocated for a ‘Soviet-style’ type of bond between the socialised
sector and the collective farms. As an advocate of retaining the main means of
production outside the operation of commodity-money relations (i.e. means of
production are not treated as commodities in content, regardless of the need to
use value categories to assess the amount of labour involved in them), it seems
natural that Guevara would have envisioned a concept pretty much like the
machine tractor stations, as a main factor for the increase of labour
productivity. We believe this statement is substantiated since the rational core
of Guevara’s economic thought, despite strong elements of idealism and
mechanicism, remains very close to the economic forms adopted in the Soviet
Union under Stalin, which had become standard and were successfully applied with
whatever modifications in the countries of People’s Democracies in Eastern
Europe between the end of the 1940s and Stalin’s death. We have every reason to
believe that Guevara was to a certain extent acquainted with Stalin’s <i>
Economic Problems</i> and the basic differences of principle between the
so-called Stalin model and the model of ‘market-socialism’ advocated by
Rodriguez, Mora et al. in Cuba.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In probably his last article <i>‘Man and Socialism in Cuba’</i>
a letter addressed to Carlos Quijano, editor-publisher of the Uruguayan weekly
<i>Marcha</i>, written in early 1965, Guevara reiterates his position once more,
leaving us no doubt that he stood for his principles till the very end.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Pursuing the chimera of achieving socialism with the aid of
blunted weapons left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell,
profitability, and individual material interests as levers, etc.) it is possible
to come to a blind alley’ </i>(Che Guevara, in<i> Man and Socialism in Cuba, </i>
Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 342).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Unfortunately, Guevara does not give up certain elements of
idealism that make his economic thought so distinct as well as vulnerable and
inconsistent. This side of Guevara’s economic thought has been publicised the
most both in Cuba by his detractors and outside Cuba by Trotskyism and
neo-Trotskyism. The clear connection between a significant number of Guevara’s
statements on political economy and the so-called ‘Stalinist’ model of socialist
construction is very much silenced. Che’s writing are twisted by picturing his
economic thought as a continuation of his idealist and voluntarist stand in
questions regarding the interrelation between the masses, the party and the
guerrilla warfare, for which he is most commonly known.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>On Guevara’s Alleged Trotskyism</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara soon entered into conflict with the Soviet
revisionist leadership. As we have seen above, Che acknowledges differences of
principle, as early as 1961, between the economic model established in what he
used to call socialist countries, and the plans for industrialisation he was
advocating. Guevara’s economic reforms were bound to clash with the character of
the agrarian reform and the plans suggested by the Soviet Union that Cuba was to
remain primarily a sugar cane producer for longer than anticipated by Che. As
the character of the Cuban revolution consolidated and the Cuban leadership
accommodated to the economic relations between the island and the Soviet Union,
it was necessary that Cuban economists align with the new political economy
created by the revisionists. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara’s plans soon met glaring resistance within Cuba. Due
to the worsening of Guevara’s relations with the Soviet leadership, many in Cuba
felt a great deal of embarrassment. According to several of Guevara’s
biographers, the Soviets accused Che’s economic views of Trotskyism. It was just
a matter of time before Che is to leave his post of Minister of Industry and
that his plans for industrialisation of the island are to be revised in favour
development based on the sugar cane industry.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky is usually portrayed as a ‘radical left-wing’, as an
advocate of extreme measures with regard to resolution of contradictions both in
politics and economics. Trotsky’s alleged push for the militarisation of the
economy has led many to believe that Trotskyite economic theories are opposed to
the politics of the New Economic Policy (NEP) with regard not only to the
relations between the individual producer and the state sector but also with
regard to the liberalisation of the state sector. In this section we will try to
substantiate the fact, that Trotsky’s economic theory cannot be classified as
left-wing; much to the contrary, it does not deviate significantly from the
right-wing revisionism in questions of socialist construction and the role of
commodity-money relations during that period. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The myth about Trotsky’s alleged leftist stand in resolving
contradictions in the transitional period, conceals the true essence of
Trotskyism in economic questions. Guevara’s economic thought has nothing to with
Trotsky’s attitude to commodity-money relations and categories in the
transitional period; their views are completely opposed to each other. Such
allegations with regards to Guevara’s economic thought are unfounded and
preposterous, to say the very least. As covered above, Guevara’s economic
thought does suffer from serious elements of mechanicism, which does not make
him a Trotskyite, as such mistakes were common to many economists in the Soviet
Union during the Stalin period.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is very interesting to observe how the Russian bourgeoisie
is willing to appreciate in Trotsky the ‘virtues’ of a ‘market-socialist’, which
many in the left movement do not seem to be able to grasp. To commemorate the
125th anniversary of Trotsky’s birth, a leading economic journal, <i>Voprosi
ekonomiki (‘Questions of Economy’)</i> published an article under the title
‘Economic views of L.D. Trotsky’. In this article the authors attribute
Trotsky’s heavy-handedness during the revolution and the civil war to the
historical circumstances of that time, that in fact Trotsky had become one of
the first to push for the liquidation of the policies of war communism and the
liberalisation of the economy by allowing several forms of property to coexist
for an indefinite period of time. The authors draw the bourgeois reader’s
attention to Trotsky’s true and poorly publicised merit as being one of the
first to advocate a mixed economic model for the transition to socialism:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The transition to NEP significantly changed Trotsky’s
economic views. In a number of his works during that time he agitates in favour
of the development of market relations, material stimulation, the understanding
of the plan, as rigorous management in the sense of foreseeing and synchronising
various sectors of social production. During the period of NEP Trotsky
formulated a number of very important, even original ideas, namely: about the
incompatibility of the methods of war communism in the conditions of NEP, about
the need for each enterprise to have its own accounting balance, about the
objective limitations to transferring resources from the agrarian sector to
industry…’ </i>(M. Voeikov and S. Dzarasov,<i> ‘Economic Views of L.D. Trotsky’
</i>in<i> Voprosi Ekonomiki </i>No. 11, 2004, p. 152).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotskyite economic doctrine seriously overlaps with
Bogdanovism/Bukharinism in the understanding of the essence of the plan.
Trotsky, in his renowned work <i>‘The Soviet Economy in Danger’</i>, written in
late 1932, starts off by equating one of the economic laws of the socialist
economy and the transition to socialism, the planning principle with
preconceived harmony of economic proportions:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘However, light-minded assertions to the effect that the USSR
has already entered into socialism are criminal. The achievements are great. But
there still remains a very long and arduous road to actual victory over economic
anarchy, to the surmounting of disproportions, to <b>the guarantee of the
harmonious character of economic life</b>.’ </i>(<i>The Soviet Economy in
Danger, </i>in<i> ’Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932’</i>, Pathfinder Press, New
York, 1973, p. 260. Our emphasis.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The famous and infamous principle of equilibrium and harmony
of the proportions of labour in the socialist economy is advocated by Trotsky in
a rather unambiguous way. Within the eclectic framework of Trotskyism,
centralisation of the economic policy alters the abstract principle of harmony
of the economic processes. Trotsky, in his attempt to oppose the transition of
the Soviet economy towards higher forms of economic organisation, comes around
as a full-fledged right-wing revisionist, adding no more substance to the right
wing opposition led by Bukharin/Rykov. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘It is impossible to create a priori a complete system of
economic harmony. The planning hypothesis could not but include old
disproportions and the inevitability of the development of new ones. Centralized
management implies not only great advantages but also the danger of centralizing
mistakes, that is, of elevating them to an excessively high degree. Only
continuous regulation of the plan in the process of its fulfillment, its
reconstruction in part and as a whole, can guarantee its economic effectiveness’
(loc. cit.).</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky’s ‘continuous regulation’ is the back door to
substantiating his rebuff of the party’s line to shrink the operation of the
commodity-money relations in the economy, which leads to the liquidation of
capitalist exploitation in the country and the consolidation of the socialist
economic laws. Once opponents, Bukharin and Trotsky converged into Bogdanovism
as the construction of socialism progressed in the Soviet Union.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i> </i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
When Trotsky appeals to the impossibility ‘to create a priori
a complete system of economic harmony’ it is implied that the central economic
organs, are not in a position to undertake the tasks of centralised economic
management, regardless of the development of the forces of production and the
socialisation of the means of production. Deformations of the socialist economy
inevitably take place as centralised decision-making overpowers workers’
democracy and a caste of administrators takes over as a ‘communist bureaucracy’.
Once more, the objective character of the economic laws in general and the
economic laws of socialism in particular, is overruled and loses its <i>raison
d’etre </i>in the economic thinking of right-wing revisionism. Instead, Trotsky,
as a poorly concealed right-wing revisionist, appeals on and on to the need for
establishing harmony between the different branches of the socialist economy,
which lies at the basis of his political economy.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky’s Bogdanovism is not a phenomenon of the 1930s; much
to the contrary, it is inherent to his economic thinking from the very early
stages of economic reforms in Soviet Russia. In summarising the developments in
Soviet Russia since the victory of the October revolution, Trotsky states that
the period of war communism had to end in order to restore equilibrium in labour
exchange between the peasantry and the working class and between branches of the
state sector, as:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i> </i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Every economy can exist and grow only provided certain
proportionality exists between its various sectors. Different branches of
industry enter into specific quantitative and qualitative relations with one
another. There must be a certain proportion between those branches which produce
consumer goods and those which produce the means of production. Proper
proportions must likewise be preserved within each of these branches. In other
words, the material means and living labor power of a nation and of all mankind
must be apportioned in accordance with a certain correlation of agriculture and
industry and of the various branches of industry so as to enable mankind to
exist and progress.’ </i>(L.D. Trotsky,<i> ‘The First Five Years of the
Communist International’, </i>Volume 2, New Park Publications, London, 1953, pp.
228.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The postulate about proportionality of portions of labour
among branches of the economy was conceived as a general, non-historic law that
would apply to all economic systems. Marx’s considerations about the need for
the establishment of certain proportions in which labour is exchanged in every
economic system, and revised in a mechanical fashion by Bogdanov/Bukharin had a
simple consequence in practice: the application of the law of value as a
regulator of production was to be perpetuated in the socialist economy under the
abstract consideration about the need for proportionality. This abstract concept
is shared by Bukharin and Trotsky:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The problem of the proportionality of the elements of
production and the branches of the economy constitutes the very heart of
socialist economy’. </i>(<i>The Soviet Economy in Danger</i>, p. 265.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The ultimate goal of right-wing revisionism in questions
concerning the transition to socialism is to provide every possible ideological
means to perpetuate the economic relations of capitalism and to undermine the
process of socialisation of the relations of production. In doing so, right-wing
revisionism creates eclectic forms, Trojan horses in political economy. The
postulate about the need of proportionality proved a euphemistic attack against
the party line to curtail the operation of the law of value in the socialist
sector and capitalist exploitation in the Soviet economy. By appealing to an
abstract concept of proportionality without, leaving its concretisation as a
loose end in the economic thinking, naturally leads to the perpetuation of
relations of production existing hitherto. Abstract formulations in general, and
in political economy in particular, without a concretisation within the
concrete-historical framework inevitably render hollow abstractions,
double-edged swords in the hands of revisionism. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Certainly, Trotsky casts out his disguise of a left-wing
revisionist by bluntly stating: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The innumerable living participants in the economy, state
and private, collective and individual, must serve notice of their needs and of
their relative strength not only through the statistical determinations of plan
commissions but by the direct pressure of supply and demand. <b>The plan is
checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market</b>.’ </i>(<i>The
Soviet Economy in Danger, </i>p. 275. Our emphasis.) </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Here, Trotsky makes an open appeal to the implementation of
market relations as the ‘judge’ of the correctness or effectiveness of the
economic policies developed by the plan makers. In other words, in the
transitional economy the market is the beginning and the end of the economic
system, the medium in which the struggle between the planned and market
principles evolves into higher forms of development. It is within the market and
according to the rules of the market that the superiority of the socialisation
of the means of production is supposed to be put to the test. At some point in
time the capitalist and petty bourgeois forms of productions will collapse under
the inevitable overwhelming economic pressure of the socialised sector, at the
time when it is able to develop higher forms of labour productivity. Trotsky, as
a vulgar right-wing economist, therefore stands against what had been usually
referred to by them as extra-economic measures to suppress the market principle
in the economy, advocating instead a gradualist approach to the resolution of
the contradictions between the socialist and other economic forms. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky’s economic thought is plagued with metaphysics; the
metaphysical division of the economic system of the transitional society into
the planned system and the market system holds a prominent place in the economic
works of Trotskyism. This anti-dialectical approach to the economic processes
had been already exposed in the mid 1920s in the Soviet Union by the majority of
the party, including Bukharin/Rykov. But despite these differences, the
left-wing and right-wing opposition agreed on the main proposition: let the
market be the regulator of the labour exchange not only between industry and the
countryside, but within the economic subjects of the socialist sector. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The idealist, metaphysical and non-historic postulate of
proportionality of the elements of production is at the basis of the right-wing
theories of Trotsky/Bukharin and gives them a certain semblance of
self-consistency. The market represents the realm where the law of value, which
is the concretisation of the postulate of proportionality, regulates the flow of
labour among economic subjects, whether socialised or not. Needless to say,
Trotsky is not the first to concretise the postulate of proportionality, which
he had recently embraced, nor he was the first to establish such a line of
thought. The appeal to preserve the commodity-money relations in the form that
existed during NEP clearly predates Trotsky’s assertions about the need for
proportionality. While we have to give credit to Bogdanov/Bukharin for their
pioneering work in the descending line of modern revisionism, Trotsky does not
deserve such an honour, as his contribution does not go beyond popularising the
vulgar political economy of right-wing revisionism. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Apart from the metaphysical as well as mechanical
idiosyncrasy of Trotskyite thought, which does not deserve to be the main topic
of the present discussion, it is useful to bring out quotations like the
following:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘In this connection three systems must be subjected to a
brief analysis: (1) special state departments, that is, the hierarchical system
of </i>plan commissions<i>, in the center and locally; (2) trade, as a system of
market regulation; (3) <b>Soviet democracy, as a system for the living
regulation by the masses of the structure of the economy.</b>’ </i>(<i>The
Soviet Economy in Danger</i>, p. 273. Our emphasis.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Far from sticking to left-wing orthodoxy, Trotsky sounds more
like a Yugoslav Titoite, more like a pro-Western market liberal than anything
else. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky takes a right-wing stand with regard to the role of
NEP in the transition to socialism. Despite earlier attacks on the party to
strengthen and develop further the economic and political link between the
working class and the peasantry, Trotsky turns into a fervent advocate of the
early forms of the transition to socialism adopted by the party. Moreover, he
accuses the latter of liquidating the union between the working class and the
peasantry. As a vulgar ‘market-socialist’, Trotsky considers the NEP as an
inevitable step due to the significant weight of petty private production in the
countryside, regardless of the concrete-historical conditions of revolutionary
Russia:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The need to introduce the NEP, to restore market
relationships, was determined first of all by the existence of 25 million
independent peasant proprietors. This does not mean, however, that
collectivization even in its first stage leads to the liquidation of the
market.’ </i>(<i>The Soviet Economy in Danger, </i>p. 275.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The need for a transition to market relations between
industry and the peasantry holds absolute character. According to Trotsky, due
to the backwardness of the Russian peasantry and the level of mechanisation of
labour in the countryside, the only possible form of peasant production with
other producers is inevitably commodity-money relations. Trotsky’s mechanical
and metaphysical thinking does not conceive of the socialist state and the
individual peasant engaging in other forms of exchange, as well. Trotsky views
the process of collectivisation as a forced administrative measure to
unnaturally suppress the commodity-money bond between the city and the
countryside. It is only through the evolution of the market, that certain
conditions are created that the peasant feels it is more profitable to produce
as a member of a larger production unit rather than remaining an individual
producer. Hence it is believed that collectivisation should be performed by the
forces of the market, that the market will suppress itself in a natural way.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Trotsky’s inevitability of market relations as the dominating
bond between production agents during the transition to socialism does not
reduce only to the interrelations between industry and the peasantry, much to
the contrary: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘This policy </i>[NEP, our note]<i> is a necessary stage in
the growth of state-owned industry. Between capitalism, under which the means of
production are owned by private individuals and all economic relations are
regulated by the market – I say, between capitalism and complete socialism, with
its socially planned economy, there are a number of transitional stages; and the
NEP is essentially one of these stages’ </i>(L.D. Trotsky,<i> ‘The First Five
Years of the Communist International’, </i>Volume 2, New Park Publications,
London, 1953, pp. 233).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
NEP involved far more than the realisation of peasant
production in a free market and the establishment of economic ties between the
countryside and industry based on supply-demand. Never mind the cohabitation of
the socialist sector with state capitalism and petty capitalist exploitation in
both the countryside and the city; NEP introduced broad pro-market reforms
within the socialist sector based on commercial accounting. It is true, however,
that the expansion of commodity-money relations was seriously curtailed in the
socialist sector in the second half of the twenties, which Trotsky viewed as a
bureaucratic-administrative attack on the principles upon which Lenin allegedly
conceived the path to socialist construction. It is here, where Guevara rebels
against right-wing revisionism by advocating the right of the socialist state to
determine the character of the relations of production and to regulate the
proportions of labour exchange between branches of the state sector according to
the global needs of the socialist state rather than the profitability of
individual enterprises. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Much against Guevara’s views, Trotsky during the very early
stages of NEP, during the transition from ‘war communism’ advocated the de-centralisation
of the state sector:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The policy of a centralized bureaucratic management of
industry excluded the possibility of a genuine centralized management, of fully
utilizing technical equipment along with the available labor force.’ </i>(L.D.
Trotsky<i>, ‘The First Five Years of the Communist International’, </i>Volume 2,
New Park Publications, London, 1953, pp. 230.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
As a result of the efforts to de-centralise state industry in
1921, especially light industry, as advocated by Trotsky, negative effects were
felt soon, such as:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘…violation of plan discipline, separatism; some state
officials tried to replace the state plan organisation – VSNKh – by some ‘social
organization of industry’’ </i>(P.I. Lyashchenko,<i> History of the People’s
Economy of the USSR</i>, Moscow 1956, Volume III, p. 153. Translated from
Russian.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara supported the correct view that economic calculation
does not necessarily imply market relations as factors determining production in
the state sector, that economic accounting is not necessarily tied to
commodity-money relations, as advocated by the supporters of the Soviet-style
model in Cuba. Trotsky takes sides with Soviet revisionism:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>After the administrative suppression of the NEP, the
celebrated ‘six conditions of Stalin’ – economic accounting, piecework wages,
etc. – became transformed into an empty collection of words. <b>Economic
accounting is unthinkable without market relations</b>." </i>(<i>The Soviet
Economy in Danger, </i>p. 276. Our emphasis.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The history of the political economy of socialism has exposed
the intimate link between the postulate of proportionality in the exchange of
labour among different branches of the economy and the mechanical transportation
of market relations to socialism. Metaphysics and mechanicism, common to the
economic thought of right-wing revisionism, are closely interrelated with vulgar
and superficial understanding of economic categories, which impels the
ideologists of right-wing revisionism to equate exchange to commodity exchange
and economic equilibrium to the operation of the law of value. The vulgar
economic thought advocated by Trotsky and the right-wing opposition does not
conceive another form of economic exchange other than commodity-money relations.
It is not conceivable that the socialist state could establish a different
content in the economic ties among objects of the socialist economy, which may
violate the rigid principle of profitability of the individual enterprise. The
ability of the planning bodies to establish labour exchange among socialist
enterprises, which violates that principle, is viewed as a deformation, as a
disproportion. Right-wing revisionism is unable to grasp and appreciate the
great power in the hands of socialist planning to establish certain proportions
of labour exchange that fit the needs and growth perspectives of the socialist
economy, regardless of the overall level of socialisation of economy. In this
sense, right-wing economists conceive the plan as a corollary of subjective
(aprioristic, according to Trotsky) measures to organise, rationalise the labour
exchange among profit-making individual enterprises. Guevara wholeheartedly
rejects such a vulgar view of the plan, by advocating the right of the socialist
planning to establish a different character of economic relations among the
state enterprises, which does not necessarily follow the principle of
profitability of the individual enterprise as the leading criterion for economic
effectiveness. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara openly exposed the view advocated by Trotsky and the
ideologists of modern revisionism that economic accounting ‘is unthinkable’
without commodity money relations. Much to the contrary, Che advocated strict
accounting, based on centralised responsibility and accountability of the
management of the socialist enterprise, as a key element of the budgetary
finance system, which lies at the centre of this economic thought. In his
economic system economic accounting in the socialist sector is dissociated from
the essence carried by commodity-money relations. Even though Guevara does not
seem to grasp the dialectical evolution of market categories in socialism, his
thought contains the basic elements to arrive at this understanding. Guevara’s
accepts the correct view that the price, despite being a category inherited from
the market economy, may be used within the socialist sector for calculation
purposes. Hence, he does not reject the use of the form of market categories,
which brings him closer to the Marxist-Leninist understanding developed by
Lenin-Stalin. On the other hand, it is not clear to us that Guevara understood
the evolution of the principle of economic accounting, which was introduced in
1921, through the NEP all the way to the massive collectivisation and the
consolidation of the economic basis of socialism in the 1930s, all the way to
the publication of Stalin’s <i>Economic Problems</i>. An analysis of the
category of economic accounting shows that a deep change in the content had
taken place which, despite the fact that the term was in use in the 1930-50s,
reflected a different type of management to which Guevara’s budgetary system
bears strong resemblance.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
According to Tablada and Borrego, Che Guevara paid special
attention to the analysis of the causes which led to the abolition of the war
economy and the establishment of NEP. This issue is covered on multiple
occasions in their books and has been the topic of a great deal of speculation,
including allegations that Guevara accused Lenin of going too far in the
development of market relations during the early stages of the NEP. Regardless
of speculations, Che makes a strong case out of Lenin’s statements, in which NEP
is considered as a retreat in the practice of the revolutionary process like the
peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is evident, despite the wealth of confusion fostered
by Guevara’s bourgeois, Trotskyite and neo-Trotskyite biographers, that Guevara
does not consider NEP as an inevitable step in the transition to socialism, as a
general and universal statement, but rather, a product of the
historical-concrete conditions of revolutionary Russia. After quoting Marx,
Lenin and Stalin (this article was written in 1964, when anti-Stalinism was
already solidly established in the Soviet Union and the former People’s
Democracies in Eastern Europe, with the exception of Albania), Guevara
concludes:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘As we see, the retreat that Lenin mentioned was due to the
economic and political situation of the Soviet Union. These policies may be
characterised as a practice, which is closely linked to the historical situation
of the country, and, therefore, they do not hold universal character.’ </i>(Che
Guevara,<i> ‘Che y la Economia’</i>, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Habana,
Cuba 1993, p. 74. Translated from Spanish.) </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The argumentation in favour of NEP-type of economic reforms
as an unavoidable step in the transition process between capitalism and
socialism is a fundamental element of the economic theory of right-wing
revisionism, including Trotskyism, which Guevara rejected altogether. A
historical example, which refutes NEP as a compulsory stage for new
revolutionary states, is served by the first steps adopted by the People’s
Democracies in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1953. The governments of the
People’s Democracies set an economic course based on the priority of heavy
industry over other sectors of the economy. The policies of what bourgeois
ideologists called the Stalinist economic model resulted in a spectacular growth
of the socialist industry, a <i>conditio sine</i> <i>qua non</i> for a massive
process of socialisation of means of production both in the city and the
countryside. Even a vicious anti-communist publicist, such as F. Fejto, a
Hungarian-born journalist based for a long time in France, admits:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘Between 1949 and 1953, the industrial production of the six
Comecon countries rose by 114 per cent, and in certain countries, like Hungary,
where the ambitious planners knew no limits the results had been even more
spectacular. Heavy industrial production increased fivefold; the engineering
industry was seven times more productive in 1953 than in 1938. </i>(F. Fejto,<i>
A History of the People’s Democracies, </i>Penguin Books, 1977, p. 362.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Further, Fejto elaborates on the very interesting case of the
transition to socialism in Hungary, especially the events that followed the
abrupt change of ‘gears’ imposed by the Soviet leadership weeks after the death
of Stalin. In 1949 Hungary’s party, led by Matyas Rakosi, one of the most
fervent supporters of Stalin’s policies, launched a campaign of collectivisation,
which, although far from finalised, was well underway towards 1953. With
Stalin’s death a swift change in the character of the Soviet leadership took
place. The new Soviet leadership, at first initiated most likely by Beria,
imposed on the leaders of the fraternal parties in Eastern Europe a line of
forcible de-Stalinisation. The revisionist leadership ordered Eastern European
leaders to slow down the tempo of industrialisation and to basically liquidate
the process of ‘forcible’ collectivisation. In a number of countries, peasants
were allowed to desert the collective farms (‘de-collectivisation’) if they
wished to; private exploitation of land together with the restoration of the
artisan class and private business. It was argued that the ‘Stalinist’ economic
reforms had gone too far, that allegedly broad masses of the peasantry and the
working class in those countries were frustrated at seeing that the
unquestionable economic growth did not result in meaningful enhancement of the
standards of living of the population, including that of the working class.
There is no question that the ideological and organisational chaos induced by
the policies of forcible ‘de-Stalinisation’ encouraged anti-communist elements
within the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie and workers aristocracy to
demonstrate compulsively, while entire party organisations proved hopeless, in
disarray. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The Hungarian leader, Matyas Rakosi, did his best to stand up
against Soviet revisionism and its supporters in the country; he succeeded in
remaining in office till July 1956, when he was basically forced into exile by
the Soviet leadership. Following orders from the Soviet revisionist leadership,
in July 1953 Rakosi was forced to give up the post of Prime Minister, which
passed to Imre Nagy, who even in the words of Fejto:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘…revived Bukharinist ideas that had gone underground in
Stalin’s lifetime’</i> (F. Fejto,<i> A History of the People’s Democracies, </i>
Penguin Books, 1977, p. 363).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Certainly, Nagy was a fervent advocate of NEP-style treatment
of the economic contradictions between the socialist sector, the peasantry and
other petty producers. Soon after he gains office in July 1953, he launches a
set of ‘liberalising’ measures, which became known as the ‘New Course’. In his
last work, written in 1955, he states:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘In a socialist society, when determining the tempo of
economic development and the ratio between the various economic branches, the
proportion between production and consumption and between consumption and
stockpiling must be in harmony with the requirements of the basic economic law
of socialism, guaranteeing a gradual advance of society’ </i>(I. Nagy,<i> ‘On
Communism’, </i>Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1957, p. 98).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Nagy advocated <i>ad nauseam</i> the need for harmonic
balance between the resources spent on sector A and sector B of the economy. The
well-known concept of certain harmonic proportions invented by Bogdanov/Bukharin
and plagiarised by Trotsky comes out again and again, as the back door to the
development of commodity-money relations both in the socialist and non-socialist
sectors, as a regulator of production. It is interesting, that unlike Bukharin/Trotsky,
he uses Stalin’s citations of the mid twenties to substantiate the need to have
NEP-style relations in the transitional economic system. In fact, by ‘basic
economic law of socialism’ Nagy implies the well-known formulation given by
Stalin in <i>Economic Problems</i>. This, however, does not prevent Nagy from
remaining a vulgar right-wing economist, which Guevara’s economic thought has
nothing to do with.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
According to Nagy, the only bond that the socialist sector
and the private producer can have in the early stages of the transition from
capitalism to socialism is the market. It is only through the market that the
process of socialisation of production can prove its advantages over capitalist
forms of management and production. Nagy is explicit:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘‘<b>The NEP policy must be carried out unconditionally</b>,<u>
</u>as it means the establishment of increasingly closer relations in the
exchange of goods between the city and the village, between the socialist
industry and the system of small holdings producing for the market, facilitating
the switch to a socialist system of agricultural farms on a large scale.’ </i>
(I. Nagy, op. cit., p. 82. Our emphasis.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Nagy on and on bitterly complains about the staggering
disproportions and ‘distortions’ inflicted on the Hungarian economy by Rakosi’s
‘clique’, referring to the fast development of heavy industry with respect to
light industry, and especially the countryside. Nagy’s attack on Rakosi’s
‘clique’ becomes even more acute when touching upon the treatment of individual
peasants and the collectivisation. He initially refers to Rakosi’s ‘clique’ as
adventurous, later on as open left-wing ‘fanatics’ and deviationists. Finally,
while quoting Lenin and Stalin’s works in the 1920s, taking their writings out
of context, Nagy establishes a parallel between Rakosi’s struggle to uphold the
principles of Marxism-Leninism, regardless of whatever mistakes in its
implementation, and the Trotskyite left-wing opposition in the Soviet Union in
the 1920s by appealing to:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>‘The resolutions of the Bolshevik Party in the Fifteenth
Congress, which were forged in the battle against the extreme ‘left-wing’
Trotskyist opposition…’</i> (I. Nagy, op. cit., p. 82.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is not the first time that right-wing opportunism portrays
the struggle for the basic principle of centralisation of means of production in
the construction of socialism as a left-wing, Trotskyite deviation. These
allegations of Trotskyism that were thrown at Guevara are to be understood in
the historical context, which corresponds to the time when right-wing
revisionism, led by the revisionist leadership of in the Soviet Union, disbanded
the ‘Stalinist’ plans for the socialisation of the means of production in
industry and the countryside. Modern revisionism turned the state sector in the
People’s Democracies into an aggregation of independently producing enterprises,
which engage in labour exchange with other enterprises and the state via
commodity-money relations; in the countryside the process of collectivisation
was halted and reversed, and in some countries farm cooperatives were turned
into independently producing enterprises, following the model imposed by the
revisionists in the Soviet Union. It is in this context, that Guevara’s fight
against followers of the Soviet economic model in Cuba, despite his mechanical
and idealist mistakes, renders a substantiated critique against right-wing
revisionist theories for the construction of socialism. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara’s plans for the industrialisation of the Caribbean
island need to be understood within the historical-concrete situation
corresponding to the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the
People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe. Despite elements of idealism and
mechanicism, Guevara’s model of budgetary finance system and his refusal to
implement commodity-money relations and the law of value as the regulator of
proportions among state enterprises bears strong resemblances with the economic
system existent in the Soviet Union during the 1930-50s. Hence, it was natural
that Guevara’s plans for industrialisation faced fierce resistance by Soviet
revisionism and its followers in the island. It is evident to us, that
allegations of Trotskyism or left-wing deviationism thrown by right-wing
revisionists are utterly unfounded. Nevertheless, more investigation is needed
to throw light on Guevara’s ideological evolution in the 1950s and early 1960s
and on how he came to propose the budgetary finance system, as the fundamental
pillar for the industrialisation in Cuba.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>Idealism and Mechanicism in Che’s Economic Thought</b></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Despite the progressive character of Guevara’s economic
thought, and its invaluable positive impact on the economic discussion held in
Cuba during the first half of the 1960s, which represents a courageous and more
or less consistent and substantiated struggle against modern revisionism, Che’s
thinking needs to be considered critically. Notwithstanding the substantiated
struggle against the right-wing theories of socialist construction, which makes
Guevara’s works most relevant materials for the study of questions related to
socialist transformation, he is plagued with serious mistakes. Guevara’s
eclecticism is inherent to his thought in general, and cannot be neglected when
evaluating Guevara’s role in the Cuban revolution and the theory of socialist
transformation. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Guevara’s mistakes in political economy can be classified
into two groups: idealism and mechanicism. Idealist mistakes were committed by
Guevara when evaluating the role of consciousness in political economy. When we
refer to mechanicism in Guevara’s economic thought we mainly imply his failure
to grasp the dialectical evolution of economic categories involved in
commodity-money relations during the transitional epoch. Needless to say,
Guevara’s mistakes have been extensively used by the bourgeoisie and the
representatives of revisionist tendencies, such as Trotskyism and neo-Trotskyism
to mystify the revolutionary and rip his contribution to the political science
and political economy from its Marxist logical core and divorce it from a number
of Marxist-Leninist principles, which Guevara tried to uphold in a more or less
consistent manner. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Guevara’s mistakes in political economy have been used inside
and outside the island to consider Guevara’s contribution to the economic
transformations in the early stages of the Cuban revolution in isolation from
the principles of socialist transformation adopted by the People’s Democracies
during the post-war period, so demonised by modern revisionism. Guevara’s
thought is portrayed by many as a specific phenomenon of the Cuban revolution,
thus completely ignoring its strong links with the so called ‘Stalinist’
economic theories and <i>modus operandi</i> during the transitional period.
Although we do not wish to portray Guevara’s economic thought as a faithful
concretisation of the principles of Marxism-Leninism in the conditions of
revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s, we feel it would be a serious mistake not to
evaluate Guevara’s thought within the concrete-historical epoch corresponding to
systematic violation of the principles of Marxism-Leninism, which led to the
restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the liquidation of socialist
construction in Eastern Europe. While evaluating critically Guevara’s economic
thought and identifying areas of inconsistency, we feel compelled to appreciate
and value the positive and progressive that Che upheld under very difficult
conditions of struggle against imperialism and revisionism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Idealism is present throughout Guevara’s works all the way
till his last published work, ‘Man and Socialism in Cuba’. It leads Guevara to
proclaim consciousness and education as primary with respect to the study of
relations of production in the transitional economy, including the construction
of communism. Impressed by the early philosophical works of young Marx, Guevara
states:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘The word conscious is emphasized because Marx considered it
basic in stating the problem. He thought about man’s liberation and saw
communism as the solution to the contradictions that brought alienation – but as
a conscious act. That is to say, communism cannot be seen merely as the result
of class contradictions in a highly developed society, contradiction that would
be resolved during a transitional stage before reaching the crest. Man is a
conscious actor in history. <b>Without this consciousness, which embraces its
awareness as a social being, there can be no communism.’</b> </i>(Che Guevara,
in<i> ‘On the budgetary finance system’, </i>published in<i> Man and Socialism
in Cuba, </i>Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 124. Our emphasis.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
The role of consciousness and education is ubiquitously
stressed by Guevara in his economic works as the leading factor in the
transition to higher forms of economic organisation. In Guevara’s system
political economy ceases to be an independent discipline, the objective
character of the economic laws of the transitional society is secondary to the
cultural formation of the new man. The economic laws of socialism, like those of
capitalism, exist and evolve with the development of the forces of production
and the historical conditions at times independently from the level of
consciousness of the masses. In fact, in certain historical situations, the
masses as a whole remain unaware of the economic essence of both revolution and
counter-revolution. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
The role of consciousness and education undoubtedly play a
fundamental role in the construction of the new society. However, political
economy remains an independent discipline and the study of the objective laws
that govern it remains a titanic effort. Only scientific analysis and synthesis
of the relations of production can make possible the sustained economic
development necessary for the construction of the socialist and communist
societies. As opposed to capitalism, during the course of the transition to
socialism, objective and subjective conditions are given for the masses to
participate consciously in the construction and scientific analysis and
synthesis of the socialist construction. It is clear that the more conscious and
active participation of the working class in the socialist construction, the
more solid are the foundations of the socialist formation. It is clear too, that
the more conscious the working class is about the essence of the economic
transformation, the more robust is the economic development and the less
influential are the forces of counter-revolution. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Economic development under socialism and the development of
consciousness and socialist culture – two phenomena which go hand in hand.
Generalisation on the basis of the history of the Soviet Union indicates that
consciousness and socialist culture require a material basis, without which
further economic development and further development of consciousness. However,
according to Guevara consciousness and socialist education are supposed to be
the primary engines of economic development in socialism:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘The hopes in our system </i>[budgetary finance system – our
note]<i> point to the future, towards a more rapid development of consciousness,
and through consciousness, to the development of the productive forces’</i>.<i>
</i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i> ‘Socialist plan: its meaning’</i>, p. 147.
Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
In Guevara’s system, socialist economic development is not
really the engine of consciousness, but the other way around, consciousness is
the source of socialist economic development. Guevara’s idealism turns
voluntarist. In this respect, Che’s idealism may be compared to Mao’s idealist
views in political economy, despite the fact that Guevara displays a
significantly more progressive stand with respect to commodity-money relations
than the latter. Mao, in his critique of Stalin’s <i>Economic Problems</i>,
bitterly complains about the fact that the latter does not include the study of
the superstructure in the analysis of the socialist economy:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
‘Stalin’s book from first to last says nothing about the
superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things not people… </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
They speak only of the production relations, not the
superstructure nor politics, nor the role of the people. Communism cannot be
reached unless there is a communist movement’. (Mao Tsetung, <i>A Critique of
Soviet Economics</i>, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1977, pp.
135-136.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Guevara supports the wrong idealistic view that
commodity-money relations <i>per se</i> and in general are a manifestation of
the alienation of the human being in the process of production. Guevara
interprets mechanistically and metaphysically the role and place of economic
forms inherited from capitalism in the socialist economy: </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘The alienated human individual is bound to society as a
whole by an invisible umbilical cord: the law of value. It acts upon all facets
of his life, shaping his road and his destiny. </i>(Che Guevara in<i> ‘Man and
Socialism in Cuba’, </i>Atheneum, New York, 1973, p. 340.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
One of the major and profound mistakes displayed by Guevara’s
economic thought, a mistake common to many others who have genuinely claimed
allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, is his failing to grasp Lenin’s and Stalin’s
teachings with regards to the dying off of economic categories inherited from
capitalism. These teachings may be succinctly expressed in Stalin’s well-known
assertion in <i>Economic Problems</i>. In his answer to A. Notkin, Stalin
stresses:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘The fact of the matter is that in our socialist conditions
economic development proceeds not by way of upheavals, but by way of gradual
changes, the old not simply being abolished out of hand, but changing its nature
in adaptation to the new, and retaining only its form; while the new does not
simply destroy the old, but infiltrates into it, changes its nature and its
functions, without smashing its form, but utilizing it for the development of
the new. This, in our economic circulation, is true not only of commodities, but
also of money, as well as of banks, which, while they lose their old functions
and acquire new ones, preserve their old form, which is utilized by the
socialist system.’ </i>(J.V. Stalin<i> ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the
USSR’, </i>Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1952, p. 59.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Guevara commits the colossal mistake, which has been more or
less successfully exploited by neo-Trotskyism and other bourgeois ideologies, of
mechanically and metaphysically extrapolating the character of the economic
categories implemented during the NEP to later stages of the socialist
construction in the Soviet Union. Guevara, <i>de</i> <i>facto</i> blames the
adoption of such economic forms as economic accounting, profit, credit, etc.
implemented in the 1920s for the right-wing deviationist economic theories that
he was fighting in the 1960s, without appreciating the profound changes that
operated in the content of those categories during the 1930-50s:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘In the Soviet Union, the first country to build socialism,
and those who followed its example, determined to develop a planning process
that could measure broad economic results by financial means. Relations among
enterprises were left in a state of more or less free play. This is the origin
of what is now called economic calculus (a poor translation of the Russian term,
that might better be expressed as auto-financing, or, more precisely, financial
self-management).</i></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>Roughly speaking, then, financial self-management is based on
establishing broad financial control over the enterprise activities, banks being
the principal agencies of control. Suitably designed and regimented material
incentives are used to promote independent initiative toward maximum utilization
of productive capacity, which translates into greater benefits for the
individual worker or the factory collective. Under this system, loans granted to
socialist enterprises are repaid with interests in order to accelerate product
turnover’. </i>(Che Guevara, in <i>‘On Production Costs and the Budgetary
System’</i>, published in<i> Man and Socialism in Cuba, </i>Atheneum, New York,
1973, p. 114.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
It is clear that, the transition to socialism in the Soviet
Union, which followed the implementation of market-type economic relations in
most of the economy, had to carry within itself certain economic forms, which
are inevitably inherited from capitalism. However, Guevara apparently fails to
grasp the fact that the concept of economic accounting evolved dramatically over
the years, as the character of the economic relations evolved. The concept of
economic accounting never disappeared from the Soviet economic literature;
however, its content evolved in time in order to accommodate the planned
principle of the economy on the basis of socialised property and the liquidation
of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forms of production. The economic accounting of
the more or less disseminated production subjects confined to the Soviet artels
in the 1920s bears little resemblance with the economic accounting of highly
concentrated Soviet industry in the 1930-50s. The character of the labour
exchange among the different production subjects during the 1930-50s bear close
resemblance to that of the budgetary finance system advocated by Guevara in the
1960s. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
It is not clear to us, to what extent Guevara is able to
appreciate the qualitative changes that operated in the interpretation of the
content of economic categories over the history of the political economy of the
Soviet Union. It is unclear whether Guevara sees the preservation in the Soviet
Union of economic forms such us, economic accounting, profit, credit, banks,
etc… as a sign of economic backwardness, or rather as a sign of the concrete
historical conditions under which the transition to socialism took place in the
Soviet Union. For instance, Guevara advocated the liquidation of the concept of
credit in socialism, even though the form of credit was never liquidated in the
Soviet Union:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘In our system </i>[the budgetary system – our note.]<i> the
Bank supplies a certain amount of resources to the enterprises according to the
budget; here the interest rate is not present’. </i>(Che Guevara, op. cit. in<i>
‘Considerations on Expenses’</i>, pp. 45-46. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
The same applies to the economic category of profit, which
was never liquidated in the Soviet Union but was categorically denied by Guevara
within the context of the budgetary finance system in Cuba. Guevara seems to
understand mechanically the economic relation of the State with socialised
production subjects:</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
<i>‘…because the State Enterprise in the conditions of Cuba, is
just a centre for production. It has a budget, a budget for production; it
should meet the goals of production and deliver its product to the Ministry of
Domestic Commerce, or to other state industries. Thus, the enterprise does not
have profit, does not have money; all the profit, all the difference between
what was sold and the cost belongs to the Cuban state. The enterprise is reduced
to production.’ </i>(Che Guevara,<i> Conference ‘Economy and Plan’ of the
People’s University, 1961</i>. Translated from Spanish.)</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
As a matter of fact, the history of the political economy of
the Soviet Union has demonstrated that the principle of socialist planning on
the basis of socialised forms of production does not contradict the
implementation of such economic forms as profit, as long as the latter do not
express the relationship between independent producers, but on the contrary is
used as one of the indexes of economic effectiveness, etc… To state that profit
is not the leading economic criterion in socialist industry is generally
speaking correct. However to interpret the sole presence of the concept of
profit, regardless of its relative weight in the definition of economic
effectiveness, as a sign of economic backwardness is strictly speaking
incorrect. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
In his article ‘Bank, Credit and Socialism’ Guevara
brilliantly exposes the vulgar and fetishist economic views of those in Cuba who
did not understand the need to re-define the role of banks in a socialist
economy and that the economic functions of the banks in capitalism cannot be
mechanically transported to socialism. His conclusions are generally speaking
correct, correct in the sense of abstract formulations. So are his conclusions
with regard to commodity-money relations and the role of the law of value in the
transitional economy. However, they are correct in the abstract and may turn
dangerous if applied mechanically to concrete-historical conditions. </div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<br />
Unfortunately, the evaluation of Guevara’s economic thought
is confusing and inconclusive since the budgetary finance system is conceived as
a result of the struggle with right-wing economic theories, which absolutise the
role of commodity-money relations. The budgetary finance system is without a
doubt a reaction against right-wing economic theories and needs to be
appreciated as such. Further investigations, possibly on the basis of archival
materials, will hopefully throw valuable light on the role of mechanicism and
metaphysics in Guevara’s economic thought.<i> </i> </div>
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-25498757927003199202012-06-30T20:30:00.000-04:002012-08-27T01:37:34.279-04:00Moni Guha: Collapse of Socialism<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
The subject matter of our study is “Collapse of Socialism”. But socialism never did collapse; it was usurped. This is a historical fact which is being denied. What collapsed in 1990 in Eastern Europe and in 1991 in the Soviet Union was market socialism of the revisionist regimes, not the Marxian socialism of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And everybody knows that market socialism and revisionism are bourgeois ideology and practice in Marxist garb.<br />
<br />
Of course, some self-styled Marxists, here and elsewhere, continued to consider the U.S.S.R. as a socialist state notwithstanding its revisionist leadership. They have, with aplomb declared against Khruschovite revisionism, but had kept a studied silence on the question of relation between the dictatorship of the proletariat and revisionist leadership, identifying the revisionist ruled Soviet state and market socialism with Marxian socialism is nothing but prettifying both market socialism and revisionism or worse, playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. When one speaks of problems of revisionist ruled Soviet Union and its market socialism as problems of Marxian socialism, he seeks to tar Marxian socialism with the same black brush by which Khruschov tarred Marxian socialism. Revisionist take over of the party and the state can mean nothing but the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Consequently, Marxian socialism is the logical casualty. The revisionist take over can only mean that bourgeios ideology and practice have gained the upperhand, proletarian leadership has been toppled. It means restructuring of the property relationships in favour of private property ownership and exploitation of man by man.<br />
<br />
As such, the subject matter of our study should have been named “Collapse of market socialism”. It would have been scientific and in conformity with historical fact.<br />
<br />
However, I shall discuss here the economic policy of the Soviet Union of the two periods viz. the period of Marxian socialism and the period of market socialism keeping myself confined to the Soviet Union’s relation with the world market and imperialism.<br />
<br />
I hope the question of collapse will be clarified in the course of our study.<br />
<br />
<b>1. Socialism in One Country and the World market</b><br />
<br />
The October Socialist Revolution put an end to the undivided rule of the world system of capitalist economy. A new economic system, the socialist economic system came into existence. When the construction of the socialist economy in the very young Soviet state was in its initial stages, Lenin said:<br />
<br />
“We are now exercising our influence on the international revolution through our economic policy. Once we solve this problem, we shall have certainly and finally won on an international scale.” (C. W. Vol. 32, P-439)<br />
<br />
Did Lenin’s prophetic words come true? Was the economic policy of the Soviet Union “certainly and finally won on an international scale”?<br />
<br />
It really did win.<br />
<br />
What was the economic policy of Lenin?<br />
<br />
With the inception of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, Lenin formulated three basic guidelines, viz. (I) a comprehensive national economic plan, (ii) Socialist ownership of the means of production, and (iii) Independent growth with emphasis on heavy industries. After the death of Lenin, Stalin meticulously following these guidelines, concretised and implemented them. He pursued the policies of centrally planned economy which made progress depending almost exclusively on the domestic resources and the home market. Foreign trade sector, or, foreign market, it may be noted with special care, played a very subsidiary and therefore, a minor role, in the development activity, as trade was chiefly confined to importing some technology from the world imperialist market. Export was considered a sin for obvious reasons, while import was generally favoured, since it was conducive to improve the material balance and technological base of the Soviet economy. It may also be noted that there had been monopoly control of the socialist state over the foreign trade. In general, foreign trade was not at all a dynamic sector of the Soviet economy, even in the period of socialism in several countries, till the death of Stalin.<br />
<br />
Why the foreign trade sector or foreign market was not a dynamic one?<br />
<br />
It is well known that capitalism develops international economic relations of a capitalist character, that is of exploitative and coercive character. Such international relations of production, once they emerge, acquire a certain independence and exert enormous influence as an objective law, on the internal development of the countries drawn into their orbit, independent of man’s will. In the capitalist world this intensifies the unevenness of the development of different states, some countries outstrip others, there emerge ruling and sub-ordinate countries, and the latter become, in one way or another, dependent on the former. This essentially coercive and exploitative process has produced international division of labour under which the world is divided into industrially advanced and industrially backward and weak countries, and under which the backwardness of the latter is perpetuated. A socialist state cannot be the partner to this coercive and exploitative process of the international trade relations.<br />
<br />
Taking cognisance of this process the Soviet Union co-operated in a very limited way, but did not integrate itself into the imperialist dominated world market in the sphere of competition through imports and exports of goods or capital. That is why the economic policy of Soviet Union was independent but not autarkic. A state which takes part in the coercive and exploitative process of capitalism and world economy and whose leitmotif is earning profit from the competitive capitalist market cannot be a socialist state.<br />
<br />
Let me quote a policy statement of the Soviet Union, issued in 1938, on the objects of exports and imports. It said:<br />
<br />
“…. Imports into the U.S.S.R. are planned so as to aid in quickly freeing the nation from imports….<br />
<br />
“… In the execution of the plan for socialist industrialisation, it is necessary to import most finished equipments and newest machines for the construction of ‘giants’ for the organisation of our own production of these very machines to secure our economic technical independence from capitalist nations..<br />
<br />
“The basic task of Soviet exports is to earn foreign exchange reserves of the country.. The U.S.S.R. exports its goods only in order to pay for comparatively small quantities of imported goods, which are necessary for the speedy execution of national economic plan, therefore the dynamics of quantity of exports is defined by the plan which is constructed with the planned volume of imports..” (D. D. Mishustin. ed. Vneshniaia Torgovlia Sovietskogo Souza, U.S.S.R., Moscow, 1938, P-9).<br />
<br />
It logically follows from the above policy statement that the U.S.S.R. throughout the whole period of Marxian socialism and Stalin, upto his death, stressed for a balanced trade with much limited quantities of exports and imports. The trade proved to be much less commercial in nature, since it did not exploit foreign trade for “profits”. Thus, little did the question of importing or exporting capital arise in the Soviet economy.<br />
<br />
This was the Soviet economic policy during socialism in one country in relation to the world economy. Form this you can very well judge that the superiority of the socialist economy was not the superiority in commercial and trade competition in the world market. It was a political, economic and moral superiority of the socialist economic system over the capitalist economic system on the question of exploitation of man by man.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>2. Socialism in Several Countries</b><br />
<br />
The emergence of Peoples’ Democracies in several countries necessitated their mutual co-operation on the economic field so that the socialist camp as a whole would be strengthened. Of course, that did not mean any change in the independent economic policy of the Soviet Union – the policy of non-integration with the coercive and exploitative process of the imperialist dominated world economy.<br />
<br />
In order to determine Soviet economic policy towards the countries of Peoples’ Democracies, a conference of delegates from the countries of Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was held on January, 1949 and a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or CMEA was formed.<br />
<br />
It was found in that conference that the member countries of CMEA differed greatly as to their levels of industrialisation. In a certain sense, only in a certain sense, the economic relations between the national republics of the U.S.S.R. were a prototype. The border lands and colonies of Tsarist Russia, which before the revolution were backward in comparison with the central regions, had become powerful industrial-agrarian republics under socialism. It was the policy of socialist in content and national in form which was a guarantee to overcome the backwardness, to even out their levels of economic development and to reach the most advanced level, with enormous growth of the productive forces. Only this policy did inspire the trust and confidence for voluntary and conscious co-operation on the basis of equality.<br />
<br />
So, the principal tasks of the CMEA countries was directed towards evening out of the crying disproportions of the countries of the socialist camp.<br />
<br />
The main achievements of CMEA during the period of 1949-1953 were:<br />
<br />
(1) The conclusion of long term bi-lateral trade agreements, which was approved at the second session of CMEA in August, 1949.<br />
<br />
(2) The provision of technical documents free of charge and the exchange of technical-scientific personnel between the member countries, so that experience would be exchanged, these countries would benefit from one another and the most backward ones would be helped to industrialise and develop their economics.<br />
<br />
(3) The trade and economic exchanges between any two member countries were carried out NOT ON THE BASIS OF WORLD PRICES, but on the basis of an estimated price reached after extensive analysis.<br />
<br />
(4) CMEA member countries refused co-operation with ‘Marshal Aid’ and agreed not to integrate into the coercive and exploitative process of the imperialist dominated world market.<br />
<br />
As a result of this policy the volume of industrial production in 1954 as against 1938 (pre-war) increased as follows: Poland-4.6 times; Czechoslovakia-2.3 times; Rumania-4.7 times; G. D. R.- nearly 2 times (against 1939); Bulgaria-4.9 times and Hungary-3.5 times (against 1939).<br />
<br />
Due to the blockade and non co-operation of the world economy a parallel world socialist market was then, a fact. We are not sure what would have happened had Stalin been alive. Stalin died in March, 1953.<br />
<br />
You have seen that the superiority of the socialist economy was not the superiority in trade competition in the world market, it was a political, economic and moral superiority of the socialist economic system over the capitalist economic system. Even in the 1930s when the capitalist world was submerged in a deep crisis, the Soviet Union went ahead with its five year plan without any crisis and had already solved the problem of the reserve army of the unemployed. That in the 1930s the Soviet economic policy did demonstrate its superiority over capitalist economy was proved by several examples:<br />
<br />
You know why and how Keynes hurried to amend and repair the bourgeois economic theory of automatic equilibrium of demand and supply, which Marx criticised in his Capital long, long ago. Keynes had to admit that state intervention in the management of economy was necessary. You know how and why the theory of ‘Mixed economy’ of the bourgeoisie became the order of the day. You know that the tremendous influence of the success of the five year plans of the Soviet Union, how the solid camp of the bourgeois-economists was disintegrated and disarrayed and various schools, viz. Keynesian, Robinsonian and Sweezy-Baran etc. emerged with some tinge of Marxian economy. Lenin said:<br />
<br />
“In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system. Communism is the higher productivity of labour – compared with that existing under capitalism – of voluntary, class conscious and united workers employing advanced technique”. (C. W. Vol. 29, P-427).<br />
<br />
Even bourgeois economists could not deny the relatively high rate of growth of labour productivity in the Soviet Union during the period of Stalin and Marxian socialism. Between 1930 and 1940 the average rate of growth of the gross industrial output of the Soviet Union was 16%. Whereas, during the period of industrialisation in the U.S.A. between 1870 and 1880, the average yearly rate of growth of manufacturing industry was 7% only.<br />
<br />
The growth rate of labour productivity was also higher in the U.S.S.R. In the U.S.A. labour productivity was 113% higher in 1949 than 1939, while, in the U.S.S.R. it was 137% higher in 1950 than in 1940 and 144% higher in 1953 than in 1950.<br />
<br />
What then? Marxian socialism and Stalin are not to be blamed for the collapse. Marxism Socialism and Stalin left the Soviet Union together with the Peoples’ Democracies a great world power and victor over fascism. In Stalin’s time industrialisation of the country and the collectivisation of agriculture were carried out, and a true multinational family of the Soviet family of the Soviet peoples were created. Marxian socialism and Stalin awakened the Soviet Union, pulled it out of poverty and hunger and made it an advanced country in all directions and thus awakened the world. The world people, together with the Soviet people have a vivid and indelible recollection of that period when there was neither unemployment or inflation nor crisis or social differentiation.<br />
<br />
So, the canard of collapse of socialism is a Goebblesian lie from interested quarters, who are bent on re-writing history completely erasing the period of market socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the pages of history.<br />
<br />
Let us now, pass to economic policy of market socialism and its collapse.<br />
<br />
<b>3. Economic Policy of Market Socialism</b><br />
<br />
What is Market Socialism and what are its differences and similarities with Marxian socialism? From the ideo-political and economic standpoint, the theory the Market Socialism and its various variants, from the times of Proudhon and Duhring, is an open negation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its role in the management of economy, a negation of socialist ownership over the means of production and the planning of the socialist economy.<br />
<br />
In their ‘socialism’ elements of private ownership, market freedom and competition in trade and commerce on the one hand, co-exist with elements of social ownership and planning on the other. Their ‘socialism’ is a hybrid society and economy which is regulated and functions through the co-operation, conditioning and mutual complementing of both the elements of spontaneous distribution of labour sources and material values and the elements of state regulation of reproduction process, of both the spontaneous operation of the market mechanism and direct state planning.<br />
<br />
These are the similarities and dissimilarities. It is an admixture of elements of capitalism and elements of socialism.<br />
<br />
The concept of Market Socialism in its fullest form was worked out and implemented in practice, with the so-called reforms in the countries where the modern revisionists came to power. This concept lies at the basis of entire retrogressive process of complete restoration of capitalism and the integration of the economy into the system of world capitalist economy, which took place in the Soviet Union immediately after the death of Stalin.<br />
<br />
The usurpation of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the market socialists may appear “sudden” to someone, but it was a long drawn struggle inside the CPSU. In the 30 years between the death of Lenin and the death of Stalin, revisionism in the CPSU went through three definite phases of development : Trotskyism in the mid twenties; Bukharinism in the late twenties and the development that ultimate took the form of Khruchovism. The eminent representative of the latter in Stalin’s life time was N. Voznesensky.<br />
<br />
In the struggle against Trotskyism, the issue of market socialism was not central. Trotsky, however, belonged to the ranks of the market socialists. He joined them with his pamphlet “Soviet Economy in Danger” (1933), in which he made categorical statement that “Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations”.<br />
<br />
Market socilism was an issue in the struggle against Bukharin. Bukharin and his cohorts were for the free development of capitalist elements both in the city and in the countryside, for the free market as a regulator of the economy and against socialist industrialisation and collectivisation.<br />
<br />
In 1948, N. Voznesensky, the chairman of the state planning commission and member of the Politbureau of of the Central Committee of the CPSU, published his “War Economy of the USSR” where he stated that:<br />
<br />
“The commodity in socialist society is free of conflict between the value and use-value so characteristic of commodity capitalist society where it springs from private ownership of the means of production”. (P-97)<br />
<br />
“The law of value has been transformed in Soviet Economy”. (P-116), etc. He was for increasing the role of the law of value in the Soviet Economy whereas the problem on the agenda was progressive restriction of the sphere of the role of the law of value.<br />
<br />
Voznesensky instituted an “economic reform” in Leningrad area designed to bring industrial production increasingly within the market.<br />
<br />
In July 1950, the market socialists suffered a setback when Voznesensky was arrested and executed. But in 1953 after the death of Stalin, the market socialists once again raised their heads and managed to consolidate their position.<br />
<br />
This is a history of the usurpation of Marxian socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx pointed out in his Capital (Vol.-1) that commodity is the basic economic cell of bourgeios society. And since Khurhchovite revisionists took the course towards this society and restored capitalism in the Soviet Union, they had to work out a ‘theory’ of the category of commodity which enabled them to get rid of all limitations which prevented the free and broad operation of the market in the Soviet economy. In the first place, they had to reject the Marxist-Leninist thesis on the restricted character of commodity production in socialism and to extend commodity production to all the products of labour. So, they had to include the means of production, the whole economic circulation of the country in the category of commodity. And this was done in order to realise their aim, for as Marx has written: “The commodity form of product of labour or the value form of commodity is the form of economic cell of the bourgeois society”.<br />
<br />
Acceptance of this ‘conclusion’ that commodity production in socialism extends both to the sphere of production of consumption goods and to the sphere of production of the means of production would eventually lead, as it really did, to the other conclusion that the law of value operated directly in the sphere of production as well. The law of value is bound to operate without limitation whenever there is unrestricted commodity production.<br />
<br />
Acceptance of the thesis on the unlimited operation, outside any control, of the law of value, willy-nilly leads, as it really led, to acceptance of the other thesis on the role of law of value as a regulator of socialist production. The unlimited operation of the law of value in socialism, leads, in this manner, and actually led, to restriction of the sphere of operation of the law of planned, proportionately developed economy.<br />
<br />
As a result, instead of production for the fulfilling the growing needs of the working people, production in the countries of market socialism had profit as its only motive like those of capitalist countries.<br />
<br />
What is the fundamental difference between the planned economy of Marxian socialism and market socialism?<br />
<br />
Industrial production takes place in a complex of factories. If production in the various factories is determined by a national plan of production, and, if the whole of complex of factories is directly allocated among various demands on it, then the production process – though it is physically broken up into various factories is NOT, from a social view point, private. But, if the various factories themselves decide what to produce, and if the total products of all factories is allocated among the various demands on it (among the various factories and its individual consumers) through the medium of market, then, from the social viewpoint, the production process is fragmented into private producers. The private character of production does not, in the least, depend on a little deed which formally vests the ownership of each factory in some individual.<br />
<br />
If we judge from the above view point, what were the relations between the factory and factory after the New Economic Reform in the Soviet Union by the market socialists? Was it private or socialised let us see.<br />
<br />
“Everything they produce, they sell either to other enterprises or to the population. The money thus received covers not only production costs, but ensures a certain margin of profit. The profit goes to finance the needs of enterprise itself and part of it goes to the state budget.” (V. Dayachenko: “Econometry, the Market and Planning”; Novosti Press Agency Publishing House; Moscow; 1971).<br />
<br />
The above quotation besides stating the private character of the factory, states also that the profit is earned enterprise wise and it goes to the needs of a particular enterprise. The enterprise profit does not and cannot represent allocation of total social profit of the total socially necessary labour. Hence, it is not social profit of a socialist society but profit of the individual enterprise, like that of capitalist profit.<br />
<br />
“Under the new economic system of economic management and planning each enterprise itself negotiates with its trading partners as the size and terms of deliveries of the goods, it manufactures and consumes”. (Ibid; P-87)<br />
<br />
It means the production process is private.<br />
<br />
Herein lies the difference between Marxian socialism and market socialism. And we should not present the problem of market socialism as a problem of Marxian socialism.<br />
<br />
This mush so far as the internal economy of Market socialism of the Soviet Union was concerned. Let us pass on to its international relations.<br />
<br />
Stalin died in 1953. in 1954 U.S.S.R. put emphasis on the foreign trade sector. The official Political Economy published in 1954 stated:<br />
<br />
“Foreign trade under socialism is used for the fuller satisfaction of the growing needs of society. It serves as an additional resource base for the development of production and improvement of the supply of the population with the objects of consumption”.<br />
<br />
This is an outright rejection of the policy of Marxian socialism pursued by Stalin and leads to integration of the Soviet economy into the coercive and exploitative process of the world economy.<br />
<br />
N. N. Inozemtsev, Director of the Institute of world economy and International Relations of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, in his article entitled “Socialism and International Co-operation”, concluded that the U.S.S.R. would gain “from developing external economic ties in general and with the capitalist countries in particular” (Pravda, Moscow; 16 May, 1973).<br />
<br />
The Soviet Union concluded trade and economic co-operation treaties with the U.S.A. in October, 1972 and with Federal Republic of Germany in May 1973.<br />
<br />
All this means a free entry of the imperialist capital in the U.S.S.R. against which the brave and valiant workers of the Soviet Union had fought tooth and nail.<br />
<br />
Have you ever thought why such stress was laid on foreign economic relations in a socialist country which had a glorious and historic development by depending on domestic resources, internal innovation, home market and which refused to avail of the Marshal Aid even after the great devastation it suffered during the second world war?<br />
<br />
This is because the Soviet Union was no longer a socialist country, because it was a country of market socialism.<br />
<br />
Let us now pass to U.S.S.R.’s economic relations with the COMECON countries and developing countries.<br />
<br />
“In no way whatever does the socialist international division of labour imply autarky on the side of socialist camp.. The more developed the socialist division of labour, the greater the opportunities for exchange between two systems….<br />
<br />
“The fact that world prices are used as the first basis for price formation on the socialist would market indicates that the socialist and capitalist market are part of a single world market”. (World Marxist Review”; The International division of labour; December, 1958). It has always been held by Marxists that socialism would abolish the accursed division of labour. Marx said:<br />
<br />
“With the division of labour in which all these contradictions are implicit… is given simultaneously the distribution and indeed, unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative of labour and its product, hence property…. the division of labour implies the possibility, nay, the fact, that intellectual and material activity – enjoyment and labour, production and consumption – devolve on different individuals and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour”. (German Ideology)<br />
<br />
While Marx said that in order to end the contradictions inherent in the division of labour it was necessary to negate the division of labour itself, the market socialists say “the more developed the socialist division of labour, the greater the opportunities for exchange between the two systems”. Not only that. That market socialist “theory” further says that the “socialist international division of labour” “frees the division of labour from the antagonistic from” (“World Marxist review”, ibid).<br />
<br />
This is the difference between Marxian and market socialism.<br />
<br />
And what are the world prices which were “used as the first basis for price formation” by the market socialists?<br />
<br />
According to Marxist economics, world prices pattern puts only developed countries in a position of exploiting less developed ones. The totality of exchange relations between a developed country, which exchange manufactured goods and a backward country, which exchange primary products, has been organized by the imperialists in such a way as to work systematically to the disadvantage of the backward country and to the advantage of the developed country. The difference in the level of productivity between two types of countries – less productive and less skilled on the part of backward country and more skilled and more productive on the part of developed country is a fact. As a result, more labour of the backward country is exchanged with less labour of developed country. This is what is called “unequal exchange”. It is an unequal exchange between the developed and backward country by which the capitalist class (and the market socialists) of the developed country gains at the expense of the people of the backward territory, even if it is sold cheaper by one of the developed countries than an other developed country. It is capitalist exploitation, pure and simple.<br />
<br />
Marx drew the attention to such unequal exchange:<br />
<br />
“Capitals invested in foreign trade are in a position to yield a higher rate of profit, because, in the first place, they come in competition with commodities produced in other countries with lesser facilities of production so that an advanced country is enabled to sell its goods above their value even when it sells cheaper than the competing countries”. (Capital. Vol. 3) The market socialists of the Soviet Union, rejecting and repudiating the Marxian socialist economic policy of non-involvement and non-integration into the coercive and exploitative process of world market and following the capitalist international labour based on imperialist world market prices as the first basis for the price formation was gaining at the expense of COMECON and backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America capitalistically competing with the imperialist competitors.<br />
<br />
Thus, the Soviet Union lost its socialist character.<br />
<br />
Who, then, is to be blamed for the collapse?<br />
<br />
The blame lies squarely with all those revisionist leaders who have led the Soviet Union over these 40 years since the death of Stalin, the blame lies with the renunciation of socialism and Marxism-Leninism, and the restoration of capitalism, which were initiated by Khruschov at the notorious 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.<br />
<br />
No, Socialism did not collapse, what collapsed was market socialism.APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-2665464047731586882012-06-30T20:15:00.000-04:002012-08-27T01:34:45.190-04:00Lenin: A Liberal Professor on Equality<b>by V.I. Lenin</b><br /><br />
Liberal Professor Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky is on the war path
against socialism. This time he has approached the question, not from the
political and economic angle, but from that of an abstract discussion on
equality (perhaps the professor thought such an abstract discussion more
suitable for the religious and philosophical gatherings which he has
addressed?).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“If we take socialism, not as an economic theory, but as
a living ideal,” Mr. Tugan declared, “then, undoubtedly, it is associated
with the ideal of equality, but equality is a concept ... that cannot be
deduced from experience and reason.” </blockquote>
This is the reasoning of a liberal scholar who repeats the incredibly
trite and threadbare argument that experience and reason clearly prove that
men are <em>not</em> equal, yet socialism bases its ideal on
equality. Hence, socialism, if you please, is an absurdity which is
contrary to experience and reason, and so forth!<br />
<br />
Mr. Tugan repeats the old trick of the reactionaries:
first to misinterpret socialism by making it out to be an absurdity, and
then to triumphantly refute the absurdity! When we say that experience and
reason prove that men are <em>not</em> equal, we mean by equality, equality
in <em>abilities</em> or <em>similarity</em> in physical strength and
mental ability. <br />
<br />
It goes without saying that in this respect men are <em>not</em>
equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But <em>this
kind</em> of equality has <em>nothing whatever</em> to do with
socialism. If Mr. Tugan is quite unable to <em>think</em>, he is at least
<em>able</em> to read; were lie to Lake the well-known work of one of the
founders of scientific socialism, Frederick Engels, directed against
D'uhring, he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity
of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the
<em>abolition of classes</em>. But when professors set out to refute
socialism, one never knows what to wonder at most—their stupidity, their
ignorance, or their unscrupulousness. <br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="v20pp72:145">
</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="v20pp72:145">
</a><br />
Since we have Mr. Tugan to deal with, we shall have to start with the
rudiments. <br />
<br />
By political equality Social-Democrats mean <em>equal rights</em>, and
by economic equality, as we have already said, they mean the <em>abolition
of classes</em>. As for establishing human equality in the sense of
equality of strength and abilities (physical and mental), socialists do not
even think of such things <br />
<br />
Political equality is a demand for equal political rights for
<em>all</em> citizens of a country who have reached, a certain age and who
do not suffer from either ordinary or liberal-professorial
feeble-mindedness. This demand was first advanced, not by the socialists,
not by the proletariat, but by the <em>bourgeoisie</em>. The well-known
historical experience of all countries of the world proves this, and
Mr. Tugan could easily have discovered this had he not called
“experience” to witness solely in order to dupe students and workers, and
please the powers that be by “abolishing” socialism. <br />
<br />
The bourgeoisie put forward the demand for <em>equal</em> rights for
all citizens in the struggle against medieval, feudal, serf-owner and caste
privileges. In Russia, for example, unlike America, Switzerland and other
countries, the privileges of the nobility are preserved to this day in all
spheres of political life, in elections to the Council of State, in
elections to the Duma, in municipal administration, in taxation, and many
other things.<br />
<br />
Even the most dull-witted and ignorant person can grasp the fact that
individual members of the nobility are <em>not</em> equal in physical and
mental abilities any more than are people belonging to the “tax-paying”,
“base”, <span class="sic">‘</span>low-born” or “non-privileged”
peasant class. But in <em>rights</em> all nobles are <em>equal</em>, just
as all the peasants are equal in their lack of rights. <br />
<br />
Does our learned liberal Professor Tugan now under stand the difference
between equality in the sense of equal rights, and equality in the sense of
equal strength and abilities?<br />
<br />
We shall now deal with economic equality. In the United States of
America, as in other advanced countries, there are no medieval
privileges. All citizens, are equal in political rights. But are they equal
as regards their <em>position in social production</em>? <br />
<br />
No, Mr. Tugan, they are not. Some own land, factories and capital and
live on the unpaid labour of the workers; these form an insignificant
minority. Others, namely, the vast mass of the population, own no means of
production and live only by selling their labour-power; these are
proletarians.<br />
<br />
In the United States of America there is no aristocracy, and the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat enjoy <em>equal</em> political rights. But
they are <em>not</em> equal in <em>class</em> status: one class, the
capitalists, own the means of production and Jive on the unpaid labour of
the workers. The other class, the wage-workers, the proletariat, own no
means of production and live by selling their labour-power in the market. <br />
<br />
The abolition of classes means placing <em>all</em> citizens on an
<em>equal</em> footing with regard to the <em>means of production</em>
belonging to society as a whole. It means giving all citizens
<em>equal</em> opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of
production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories,
and so forth. <br />
<br />
This explanation of socialism has been necessary to enlighten our
learned liberal professor, Mr. Tugan, who may, if he tries hard, now grasp
the fact that it is absurd to expect <em>equality</em> of strength and
abilities in socialist society. <br />
<br />
In brief, when socialists speak of equality they always mean
<em>social</em> equality, equality of social status, and not by any means
the physical and mental equality of individuals. <br />
<br />
The puzzled reader may ask: how could a learned liberal professor have
forgotten these elementary axioms familiar to anybody who has read any
exposition of the views of socialism? The answer is simple: the
<em>personal</em> qualities of
present-day professors are such that we may find among them even
exceptionally stupid people like Tugan. But the <em>social</em> status of
professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold
such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to
utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle
against the socialists. The bourgeoisie will forgive the professors all
this as long as they go on “abolishing” socialism.<br />
<br />
<em>Transcription by </em><i><a href="http://www.marxists.org/admin/volunteers/biographies/rcymbala.htm">R. Cymbala</a> for <span class="infobloc_copyleft">Marxists Internet
Archive.</span></i><em> </em><br />
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/index.htm#volume20" tabindex="-9"><em>Lenin
Collected Works</em></a>,
Progress Publishers,
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/v20pp72.txt">1972</a>,
Moscow,
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/volume20.htm#1914-mar-11" tabindex="-8">Volume 20</a>,
pages <span class="pages">144-147</span> <br />
APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-56765758809401141572012-06-30T19:46:00.000-04:002012-08-27T01:24:19.218-04:00Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform - Part 1<b>by Grover Furr </b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
1. This article outlines Joseph
Stalin's attempts, from the 1930s until his death, to democratize
the government of the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
2. This statement, and the article,
will astonish many, and outrage some. In fact my own amazement
at the results of the research I'm reporting on led me to write
this article. I had suspected for a long time that the Cold War
version of Soviet history had serious flaws. Still, I was unprepared
for the extent of the falsehoods I had been taught as fact.<br />
<br />
3. This story is well known
in Russia, where respect for, even admiration of, Stalin is common.
Yuri Zhukov, the main Russian historian who sets forth the paradigm
of "Stalin as Democrat" and whose works are the most
important single source, though far from the only one, for this
article, is a mainstream figure associated with the Academy of
Sciences. His works are widely read.<br />
<br />
4. However, this story and the
facts that sustain it are virtually unknown outside Russia, where
the Cold War paradigm of "Stalin as Villain" so controls
what is published that the works cited here are still scarcely
noted. Therefore, many of the secondary sources used in this
article, as well as all the primary sources of course, are only
available in Russian. [1]<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref1"></a><br />
5. This article does not simply
inform readers of new facts about, and interpretations of, the
history of the USSR. Rather, it is an attempt to bring to a non-Russian
readership the results of new research, based on Soviet archives,
on the Stalin period and Stalin himself. The facts discussed
herein are compatible with a range of paradigms of Soviet history,
just as they help to disprove a number of other interpretations.
They will be utterly unacceptable -- in fact, outrageous -- to
those whose political and historical perspectives have been based
upon erroneous and ideologically motivated "Cold-War"
notions of Soviet "totalitarianism" and Stalinist "terror." [2]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref2"></a><br />
<br />
6. The Khrushchevite interpretation
of Stalin as power-hungry dictator, betrayer of Lenin's legacy,
was created to fit the needs of the Communist Party's <i>nomenklatura</i>
in the 1950s. But it shows close similarities, and shares many
assumptions, with the canonical discourse on Stalin inherited
from the Cold War, which served the desire of capitalist elites
to argue that communist struggles, or indeed any struggles for
working-class power, must inevitably lead to some kind of horror.<br />
<br />
7. It also suits the Trotskyists'
need to argue that the defeat of Trotsky, the "true revolutionary,"
could only have come at the hand of a dictator who, it is assumed,
violated every principle for which the revolution had been fought.
Khrushchevite, Cold-War anti-communist, and Trotskyist paradigms
of Soviet history are similar in their dependence on a virtual
demonization of Stalin, his leadership, and the USSR during his
time.<br />
<br />
8. The view of Stalin outlined
in this essay is compatible with a number of otherwise contradictory
historical paradigms. Anti-revisionist and post-Maoist communist
interpretations of Soviet history see Stalin as a creative and
logical, if in some respects flawed, heir to Lenin's legacy.
Meanwhile, many Russian nationalists, while hardly approving
of Stalin's achievements as a Communist, respect Stalin as the
figure most responsible for the establishment of Russia as a
major industrial and military world power. Stalin is a foundational
figure for both, albeit in very different ways.<br />
<br />
9. This article is no attempt
to "rehabilitate" Stalin. I agree with Yuri Zhukov
when he writes:<br />
<blockquote>
I can honestly tell you that I oppose the rehabilitation of
Stalin, because I oppose rehabilitations in general. Nothing
and no one in history should be rehabilitated -- but we must
uncover the truth and speak the truth. However, since Khrushchev's
time the only victims of Stalin's repressions you hear from are
those who took part in them themselves, or who facilitated them
or who failed to oppose them. (Zhukov, <i>KP</i> Nov. 21 02)</blockquote>
Nor do I wish to suggest that, if only Stalin had had his
way, the manifold problems of building socialism or communism
in the USSR would have been solved.<br />
<br />
10. During the period with which
this essay is concerned, the Stalin leadership was concerned
not only to promote democracy in the governance of the state,
but to foster inner-party democracy as well. This important and
related topic requires a separate study, and this essay does
not centrally address it. However the concept of "democracy"
is understood, it would have to have a different meaning in the
context of a democratic-centralist party of voluntary members
than in a huge state of citizens where no basis of political
agreement can be presupposed. [3]<br />
<br />
11. This article draws upon
primary sources whenever possible. But it relies most heavily
upon scholarly works by Russian historians who have access to
unpublished or recently-published documents from Soviet archives.
Many Soviet documents of great importance are available only
to scholars with privileged access. A great many others remain
completely sequestered and "classified," including
much of Stalin's personal archive, the pre-trial, investigative
materials in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38, the investigative
materials relating to the military purges or "Tukhachevskii
Affair" of 1937, and many others.<br />
<br />
12. Yuri Zhukov describes the
archival situation this way:<br />
<blockquote>
With the beginning of <i>perestroika</i>, one of the slogans
of which was <i>glasnost'</i> . . . the Kremlin archive, formerly
closed to researchers, was liquidated. Its holdings began to
be relocated in [various public archives -- GF]. This process
began, but was not completed. Without any publicity or explanation
of any kind in 1996 the most important, pivotal materials were
again reclassified, hidden away in the archive of the President
of the Russian Federation. Soon the reasons for this secretive
operation became clear; it permitted the resurrection of one
of the two old and very shabby myths. (6)</blockquote>
By these myths Zhukov means "Stalin the villain,"
and "Stalin the great leader." Only the first of these
myths is familiar to readers of Western and anti-communist historiography.
But both schools are well represented in Russia and the Commonwealth
of Independent States.<br />
<br />
13. One of Zhukov's books, and
the basis of much of this article, is titled <i>Inoy Stalin</i>
-- "a different Stalin," "different" from
either myth, closer to the truth, based upon recently declassified
archival documents. Its cover shows a photograph of Stalin and,
facing it, the same photograph in negative: its opposite. Only
rarely does Zhukov use secondary sources. For the most part he
cites unpublished archival material, or archival documents only
recently declassified and published. The picture he draws of
Politburo politics from 1934 to 1938 is very "different"
from anything consistent with either of the "myths"
he rejects.<br />
<br />
14. Zhukov ends his Introduction
with these words:<br />
<blockquote>
I make no claim to finality or incontrovertibility. I attempt
only one task: to avoid both preconceived points of view, both
myths; to try to reconstruct the past, once well known, but now
intentionally forgotten, deliberately unmentionable, ignored
by all.</blockquote>
Following Zhukov, this article also attempts to steer clear
of both myths.<br />
<br />
15. Under such conditions all
conclusions must remain tentative. I've tried to use all materials
judiciously, whether primary or secondary. In order to avoid
interrupting the text I have put source references at the end
of each paragraph. I have employed traditional numbered footnotes
only where I think longer, more explanatory notes are needed.<br />
<br />
16. The research this article
summarizes has important consequences for those of us concerned
to carry forward a class analysis of history, including of the
history of the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
17. One of the very best American
researchers of the Stalin period in the USSR, J. Arch Getty,
has called the historical research done during the period of
the Cold War "products of propaganda" -- "research"
which it makes no sense to criticize or try to correct in its
individual parts, but which must be done all over again from
the beginning. [4]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref4"></a> I agree
with Getty, but would add that this tendentious, politically-charged,
and dishonest "research" is still being produced today.<br />
<br />
18. The Cold War-Khrushchevite
paradigm has been the prevailing view of the history of the "Stalin
years." The research reported on here can contribute towards
a "clearing of the ground," a "beginning all over
again from the beginning." The truth that finally emerges
will also have great meaning for the Marxist project of understanding
the world in order to change it, of building a classless society
of social and economic justice.<br />
<br />
19. In the concluding section
of the essay I have outlined some areas for further research
that are suggested by the results of this article.<br />
<br />
<b>A New Constitution</b><br />
<br />
20. In December 1936 the Extraordinary
8th Congress of Soviets approved the draft of the new Soviet
Constitution. It called for secret ballot and contested elections.
(Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 307-9)
<br />
<br />
21. Candidates were to be allowed
not only from the Bolshevik Party -- called the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolshevik) at that time<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#note5">5</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref5"></a>
-- but from other citizens' groups as well, based on residence,
affiliation (such as religious groups), or workplace organizations.
This last provision was never put into effect. Contested elections
were never held.<br />
<br />
22. The democratic aspects of
the Constitution were inserted at the express insistence of Joseph
Stalin. Together with his closest supporters in the Politburo
of the Bolshevik Party Stalin fought tenaciously to keep these
provisions. (Getty, "State") He, and they, yielded
only when confronted by the complete refusal by the Party's Central
Committee, and by the panic surrounding the discovery of serious
conspiracies, in collaboration with Japanese and German fascism,
to overthrow the Soviet government.<br />
<br />
23. In January 1935 the Politburo
assigned the task of outlining the contents of a new Constitution
to Avel' Yenukidze [6]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref6"></a> who,
some months later, returned with a suggestion for open, uncontested
elections. Almost immediately, on January 25, 1935, Stalin expressed
his disagreement with Yenukidze's proposal, insisting upon secret
elections. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 116-21)<br />
<br />
24. Stalin made this disagreement
public in a dramatic manner in a March 1936 interview with American
newspaper magnate Roy Howard. Stalin declared that the Soviet
constitution would guarantee that all voting would be by secret
ballot. Voting would be on an equal basis, with a peasant vote
counting as much as that of a worker [7]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref7"></a>; on a territorial basis, as in the West, rather
than according to status (as during Czarist times) or place of
employment; and direct -- all Soviets would be elected by the
citizens themselves, not indirectly by representatives. (<i>Stalin-Howard
Interview</i>; Zhukov, "Repressii" 5-6)<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Stalin</i>: We shall probably adopt our new constitution
at the end of this year. The commission appointed to draw up
the constitution is working and should finish its labors soon.
As has been announced already, according to the new constitution,
the suffrage will be universal, equal, direct, and secret. (<i>Stalin-Howard
Interview</i> 13)</blockquote>
25. Most important, Stalin declared
that all elections would be contested.<br />
<blockquote>
You are puzzled by the fact that only one party will come
forward at elections. You cannot see how election contests can
take place under these conditions. Evidently, candidates will
be put forward not only by the Communist Party, but by all sorts
of public, non-Party organizations. And we have hundreds of them.
We have no contending parties any more than we have a capitalist
class contending against a working class which is exploited by
the capitalists. Our society consists exclusively of free toilers
of town and country -- workers, peasants, intellectuals. Each
of these strata may have its special interests and express them
by means of the numerous public organizations that exist. (13-14)</blockquote>
Different citizens' organizations would be able to set forth
candidates to run against the Communist Party's candidates. Stalin
told Howard that citizens would cross off the names of all candidates
except those they wished to vote for.<br />
<br />
26. He also stressed the importance
of contested elections in fighting bureaucracy.<br />
<blockquote>
You think that there will be no election contests. But there
will be, and I foresee very lively election campaigns. There
are not a few institutions in our country which work badly. Cases
occur when this or that local government body fails to satisfy
certain of the multifarious and growing requirements of the toilers
of town and country. Have you built a good school or not? Have
you improved housing conditions? Are you a bureaucrat? Have you
helped to make our labor more effective and our lives more cultured?
Such will be the criteria with which millions of electors will
measure the fitness of candidates, reject the unsuitable, expunge
their names from candidates' lists, and promote and nominate
the best. Yes, election campaigns will be lively, they will be
conducted around numerous, very acute problems, principally of
a practical nature, of first class importance for the people.
Our new electoral system will tighten up all institutions and
organizations and compel them to improve their work. Universal,
equal, direct and secret suffrage in the U.S.S.R. will be a whip
in the hands of the population against the organs of government
which work badly. In my opinion our new Soviet constitution will
be the most democratic constitution in the world. (15)</blockquote>
27. From this point on, Stalin
and his closest Politburo associates Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei
Zhdanov spoke up for secret, contested elections in all discussions
within the Party leadership. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 207-10; <i>Stalin-Howard
Interview</i>)<br />
<br />
28. Stalin also insisted that
many Soviet citizens who had been deprived of the franchise have
it restored. These included members of former exploiting classes
such as former landlords, and those who had fought against the
Bolsheviks during the Civil War of 1918-1921, known as "White
Guardists", as well as those convicted of certain crimes
(as in the USA today). Most important, and probably most numerous,
among the <i>lishentsy</i> ("deprived") were two groups:
"kulaks," the main targets during the Collectivization
movement of a few years before; and those who had violated the
1932 "law of three ears" [8]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref8"></a>
-- who had stolen state property, often grain, sometimes simply
to avoid starvation. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 187)<br />
<br />
29. These electoral reforms
would have been unnecessary unless the Stalin leadership wanted
to change the manner in which the Soviet Union was governed.
They wanted to get the Communist Party out of the business of
<i>directly</i> running the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
30. During the Russian Revolution
and the critical years that followed, the USSR had been legally
governed by an elected hierarchy of <i>soviets</i> (="councils"),
from local to national level, with the Supreme Soviet as the
national legislative body, the Council (= <i>soviet</i>) of People's
Commissars as the executive body, and the Chairman of this Council
as the head of state. But in reality, at every level, choice
of these officials had always been in the hands of the Bolshevik
Party. Elections were held, but direct nomination by Party leaders,
called "cooptation," was also common. Even the elections
were controlled by the Party, since no one could run for office
unless Party leaders agreed.<br />
<br />
31. To the Bolsheviks, this
had made sense. It was the form that the dictatorship of the
proletariat took in the specific historical conditions of the
revolutionary and post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Under the
New Economic Policy, or NEP, [9]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref9"></a>
the labor and skills of former and current exploiters were needed.
But they had to be used only in service to the working-class
dictatorship -- to socialism. They were not to be permitted to
rebuild capitalist relationships beyond certain limits, nor to
regain political power.<br />
<br />
32. Throughout the 1920s and
early 1930s the Bolshevik Party recruited aggressively among
the working class. By the end of the 1920s most Party members
were workers and a high per centage of workers were in the Party.
This massive recruitment and huge attempts at political education
took place at the same time as the tremendous upheavals of the
first Five-Year Plan, crash industrialization, and largely forced
collectivization of individual farms into collective (<i>kolkhoz</i>)
or soviet farms (<i>sovkhoz</i>). The Bolshevik leadership was
both sincere in its attempt to "proletarianize" their
Party, and successful in the result. (Rigby, 167-8; 184; 199)<br />
<br />
33. Stalin and his supporters
on the Politburo gave a number of reasons for wanting to democratize
the Soviet Union. These reasons reflected the Stalin leadership's
belief that a new state of socialism had been reached.<br />
<br />
34. Most peasants were in collective
farms. With fewer individual peasant farms every month, the Stalin
leadership believed that, objectively, the peasants no longer
constituted a separate socio-economic class. Peasants were more
like workers than different from them.<br />
<br />
35. Stalin argued that, with
the rapid growth of Soviet industry, and especially with the
working class holding political power through the Bolshevik Party,
the word "proletariat" was no longer accurate. "Proletariat,"
Stalin averred, referred to the working class under capitalist
exploitation, or working under capitalist-type relations of production,
such as existed during the first dozen years of the Soviet Union,
especially under the NEP. But with direct exploitation of workers
by capitalists for profit now abolished, the working class should
no longer be called the "proletariat."<br />
<br />
36. According to this view,
exploiters of labor no longer existed. Workers, now running the
country in their own interest through the Bolshevik Party, were
no longer like the classic "proletariat." Therefore,
the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was no longer
an adequate concept. These new conditions called for a new kind
of state. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 231; 292; Stalin, "Draft"
800-1)<br />
<br />
<b>The Anti-Bureaucracy Struggle</b><br />
<br />
37. The Stalin leadership was
also concerned about the Party's role in this new stage of socialism.
Stalin himself raised the fight against "bureaucratism"
with great vigor as early as his Report to the 17th Party Congress
in January 1934. [10]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref10"></a>
Stalin, Molotov and others called the new electoral system a
"weapon against bureaucratization."<br />
<br />
38. Party leaders controlled
the government both by determining who entered the Soviets and
by exercising various forms of oversight or review over what
the government ministries did. Speaking at the 7th Congress of
Soviets on February 6, 1935 Molotov said that secret elections
"will strike with great force against bureaucratic elements
and provide them a useful shock." Yenukidze's report had
not recommended, or even mentioned, secret elections and the
widening of the franchise. (Stalin, Report to 17th P.C.; Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 124)<br />
<br />
39. Government ministers and
their staffs had to know something about the affairs over which
they were in charge, if they were to be effective in production.
This meant education, usually technical education, in their fields.
But Party leaders often made their careers by advancement through
Party positions alone. No technical expertise was needed for
this kind of advancement. Rather, political criteria were required.
These Party officials exercised control, but they themselves
often lacked the technical knowledge that could in theory make
them skilled at supervision. (<i>Stalin-Howard Interview</i>;
Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 305; Zhukov, "Repressii" 6)<br />
<br />
40. This is, apparently, what
the Stalin leadership meant by the term "bureaucratism."
Though they viewed it as a danger -- as, indeed, all Marxists
did -- they believed it was not inevitable. Rather, they thought
that it could be overcome by changing the role of the Party in
socialist society.<br />
<br />
41. The concept of democracy
that Stalin and his supporters in the Party leadership wished
to inaugurate in the Soviet Union would necessarily involve a
qualitative change in the societal role of the Bolshevik Party.<br />
<blockquote>
Those documents that were accessible to researchers did allow
us to understand . . . that already by the end of the 1930s determined
attempts were being undertaken to separate the Party from the
state and to limit in a substantive manner the Party's role in
the life of the country. (Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i> 8)</blockquote>
Stalin and supporters continued this struggle against opposition
from other elements in the Bolshevik Party, resolutely but with
diminishing chances for success, until Stalin died in March 1953.
Lavrentii Beria's determination to continue this same struggle
seems to be the real reason Khrushchev and others murdered him,
either judicially, by trial on trumped-up charges in December
1953, or -- as much evidence suggests -- through literal murder,
the previous June.<br />
<br />
42. Article 3 of the 1936 Constitution
reads, "In the U.S.S.R. all power belongs to the working
people of town and country as represented by the Soviets of Working
People's Deputies." The Communist Party is mentioned in
Article 126 as "the vanguard of the working people in their
struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system and is
the leading core of all organizations of the working people,
both public and state." That is, the Party was to lead <i>organizations</i>,
but not the legislative or executive organs of the state. (1936
Constitution; Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i> 29-30)<br />
<br />
43. Stalin seems to have believed
that, once the Party was out of direct control over society,
its role should be confined to agitation and propaganda, and
participation in the selection of cadres. What would this have
meant? Perhaps something like this.<br />
<blockquote>
- The Party would
revert to its essential function of winning people to the ideals
of communism as they understood it. <br />
<br />
- This would mean the end of cushy
sinecure-type jobs, and a reversion to the style of hard work
and selfless dedication that characterized the Bolsheviks during
the Tsarist period, the Revolution and Civil War, the period
of NEP, and the very hard period of crash industrialization and
collectivization. During these periods Party membership, for
most, meant hard work and sacrifice, often among non-Party members,
many of whom were hostile to the Bolsheviks. It meant the need
for a real base among the masses. (Zhukov, <i>KP</i> Nov. 13
02; Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i>)</blockquote>
44. Stalin insisted that Communists
should be hard-working, educated people, able to make a real
contribution to production and to the creation of a communist
society. Stalin himself was an indefatigable student. [11]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref11"></a><br />
<br />
45. To summarize, the evidence
suggests that Stalin intended the new electoral system to accomplish
the following goals:<br />
<blockquote>
- Make sure that
only technically trained people led, in production and in Soviet
society at large;<br />
- Stop the degeneration of the Bolshevik
Party, and return Party members, especially leaders, to their
primary function: giving political and moral leadership, by example
and persuasion, to the rest of society;<br />
- Strengthen the Party's mass work;<br />
- Win the support of the country's
citizens behind the government;<br />
- Create the basis for a classless,
communist society.</blockquote>
<b>Stalin's Defeat</b><br />
<br />
46. During 1935, under the aegis
of Andrei Vyshinski, Chief Prosecutor of the USSR, many citizens
who had been exiled, imprisoned, and -- most significantly for
our present purposes -- deprived of the franchise, were restored.
Hundreds of thousands of former <i>kulaks</i>, richer farmers
who were the main target of collectivization, and of those who
had been imprisoned or exiled for resisting collectivization
in some way, were freed. Vyshinsky severely criticized the NKVD
(People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, including internal
security) for "a series of the crudest errors and miscalculations"
in deporting almost 12,000 people from Leningrad after the December
1934 assassination of Kirov. He declared that from then on the
NKVD could not arrest anyone without prior consent of the prosecutor.
The enfranchised population was expanded by at least hundreds
of thousands of people who had reason to feel that State and
Party had treated them unfairly. (Thurston 6-9; Zhukov, <i>KP</i>
Nov. 14 & Nov. 19 02; Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 187; Zhukov, "Repressii"
7)<br />
<b> </b><br />
47. Stalin's original proposal
for the new constitution had not included contested elections.
He first announced it in his interview with Roy Howard on March
1, 1936. At the June 1937 Central Committee Plenum Yakovlev --
one of the CC members who, together with Stalin, worked most
closely on the draft of the new constitution (cf. Zhukov, Inoy
223) -- said that the suggestion for contested elections
was made by Stalin himself. This suggestion seems to have met
with widespread, albeit tacit, opposition from the regional Party
leaders, the First Secretaries, or "partocracy," as
Zhukov calls them. After the Howard interview there was not even
the nominal praise or support for Stalin's statement about contested
elections in the central newspapers -- those most under the direct
control of the Politburo. <i>Pravda</i> carried one article only,
on March 10, and it did not mention contested elections.<br />
<br />
48. From this Zhukov concludes:<br />
<blockquote>
This could mean only one thing. Not only the 'broad leadership'
[the regional First Secretaries], but at least a part of the
Central Committee apparatus, Agitprop under Stetskii and Tal',
did not accept Stalin's innovation, did not want to approve,
even in a purely formal manner, contested elections, dangerous
to many, which, as followed from those of Stalin's words that
<i>Pravda</i> did underscore, directly threatened the positions
and real power of the First Secretaries -- the Central Committees
of the national communist parties, the regional, oblast', city,
and area committees. (<i>Inoy</i> 211)</blockquote>
49. The Party First Secretaries
held Party offices, from which they could not be removed by defeat
in any elections to the Soviets they might enter. But the immense
local power they held stemmed mainly from the Party's control
over every aspect of the economy and state apparatus -- kolkhoz,
factory, education, military. The new electoral system would
deprive the First Secretaries of their automatic positions as
delegates to the Soviets, and of their ability to simply choose
the other delegates. Defeat of themselves or of "their"
candidates (the Party candidates) in elections to the soviets
would be, in effect, a referendum on their work. A First Secretary
whose candidates were defeated at the polls by non-Party candidates
would be exposed as someone with weak ties to the masses. During
the campaigns, opposition candidates were sure to make campaign
issues out of any corruption, authoritarianism, or incompetence
they observed among Party officials. Defeated candidates would
be shown up to have serious weaknesses as communists, and this
would probably lead to their being replaced. (Zhukov <i>KP</i>
Nov. 13 02; <i>Inoy</i> 226; cf. Getty, "Excesses"
122-3)<br />
<br />
50. Senior Party leaders were
usually Party members of many years' standing, veterans of the
really dangerous days of Tsarist times, the Revolution, the Civil
War, and collectivization, when to be a communist was fraught
with peril and difficulty. Many had little formal education.
Unlike Stalin, Kirov or Beria, it seems that most of them were
unwilling or unable to "remake themselves" through
self-education. (Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i> 37; Dimitrov 33-4; Stalin,
<i>Zastol'nye</i> 235-6).<br />
<br />
51. All of these men were long-time
supporters of Stalin's policies. They had implemented the harsh
collectivization of the peasantry, during which hundreds of thousands
had been deported. During 1932-33 many people, perhaps as many
as three million, had died by a famine that had been real rather
than "man-made," but one made more severe for the peasantry
by collectivization and expropriation of grain to feed the workers
in the cities, or in armed peasant rebellions (which had also
killed many Bolsheviks). These Party leaders had been in charge
of crash industrialization, again under harsh conditions of poor
housing, insufficient food and medical care, low pay and few
goods to buy with it. (Tauger; Anderson & Silver; Zhukov,
<i>KP</i> Nov. 13 02).<br />
<br />
52. Now they faced elections
in which those formerly deprived of the franchise because they
had been on the wrong side of these Soviet policies would suddenly
have the right to vote restored. It's likely that they feared
many would vote against their candidates, or against <i>any</i>
Bolshevik candidate. If so, they stood to be demoted, or worse.
They would still get some Party position, or -- at worst -- some
kind of job. The new "Stalin" Constitution guaranteed
every Soviet citizen a job as a <i>right</i>, along with medical
care, pensions, education, etc. But these men (virtually all
were men) were used to power and privilege, all of which was
threatened by defeat of their candidates at the polls. (Zhukov,
<i>KP</i> Nov. 13 02; 1936 Const., Ch. X; cf. Getty, "Excesses"
125, on the importance of religious feeling in the country).<br />
<br />
<b>Trials, Conspiracies, Repression</b><br />
<br />
53. Plans for the new constitution
and elections had been outlined during the June 1936 Plenum of
the Central Committee. The delegates unanimously approved the
draft Constitution. But none of them spoke up in favor of it.
This failure to give at least lip service to a Stalin proposal
certainly indicated "latent opposition from the broad leadership,"
a demonstrative lack of concern." (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 232,
236; "Repressii" 10-11)<br />
<br />
54. During the 8th All-Russian
Congress of Soviets meeting in November-December 1936 Stalin
and Molotov again stressed the value of widening the franchise
and of secret and contested elections. In the spirit of Stalin's
interview with Howard, Molotov again stressed the beneficial
effect, for the Party, of permitting non-communist candidates
for the Soviets:<br />
<blockquote>
This system . . . cannot but strike against those who have
become bureaucratized, alienated from the masses. . . . will
facilitate the promotion of new forces . . . that must come forth
to replace backward or bureaucratized [<i>ochinovnivshimsya</i>]
elements. Under the new form of elections the election of enemy
elements is possible. But even this danger, in the last analysis,
must serve to help us, insofar as it will serve as a lash to
those organizations that need it, and to [Party] workers who
have fallen asleep. (Zhukov, "Repressii" 15).</blockquote>
55. Stalin himself put it even
more strongly:<br />
<blockquote>
Some say that this is dangerous, since elements hostile to
Soviet power could sneak into the highest offices, some of the
former White Guardists, kulaks, priests, and so on. But really,
what is there to fear? 'If you're afraid of wolves, don't walk
in the forest.' For one thing, not all former kulaks, White Guardists,
and priests are hostile to Soviet power. For another, if the
people here and there elected hostile forces, this will mean
that our agitational work is poorly organized, and that we have
fully deserved this disgrace. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 293; Stalin,
"Draft").</blockquote>
56. Once again the First Secretaries
showed tacit hostility. The December 1936 Central Committee Plenum,
whose session overlapped with the Congress, met on December 4th.
But there was virtually no discussion of the first agenda item,
the draft Constitution. Yezhov's report, "On Trotskyite
and Right Anti-Soviet Organizations," was far more central
to the C.C. members' concerns. ("Fragmenty" 4-5; Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 310-11).<br />
<br />
57. On December 5 1936 the Congress
approved the draft of the new Constitution. But there had been
little real discussion. Instead, the delegates -- Party leaders
-- had emphasized the threats from enemies foreign and domestic.
Rather than giving speeches of approval for the Constitution,
which was the main topic reported on by Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov,
Litvinov, and Vyshinski, the delegates virtually ignored it.
A Commission was set up for further study of the draft Constitution,
with nothing fixed about contested elections. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
294; 298; 309)<br />
<br />
58. The international situation
was indeed tense. Victory for fascism in the Spanish Civil War
was only a question of time. The Soviet Union was surrounded
by hostile powers. By the second half of the 1930s <i>all</i>
of these countries were fiercely authoritarian, militaristic,
anti-communist and anti-Soviet regimes. In October 1936 Finland
had fired across the Soviet frontier. That same month the "Berlin-Rome
Axis" was formed by Hitler and Mussolini. A month later,
Japan joined Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to form the "Anti-Comintern
Pact." Soviet efforts at military alliances against Nazi
Germany met with rejection in the capitals of the West. (Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 285-309).<br />
<br />
59. While the Congress was attending
to the new Constitution, the Soviet leadership was between the
first two large-scale Moscow Trials. Zinoviev and Kamenev had
gone on trial along with some others in August 1936. The second
trial, in January 1937, involved some of the major followers
of Trotsky, led by Yuri Piatakov, until recently the deputy Commissar
of Heavy Industry. [12]<br />
<br />
60. The February-March 1937
Central Committee Plenum dramatized the contradiction within
the Party leadership: the struggle against internal enemies,
and the need to prepare for secret, contested elections under
the new Constitution by year's end. The gradual discovery of
more and more groups conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government
demanded police action. But preparing for truly democratic elections
to the government, and to improve inner-party democracy -- a
theme stressed over and over by those closest to Stalin in the
Politburo -- required the opposite: openness to criticism and
self-criticism, secret elections of leaders by rank-and-file
Party members, and an end to "cooptation" by First
Secretaries.<br />
<br />
61. This Plenum, the longest
ever held in the history of the USSR, dragged on for two weeks.
Yet almost nothing was known about it until 1992, when the Plenum's
huge transcript began to be published in <i>Voprosy Istorii</i>
-- a process that took the journal almost four years to complete.<br />
<br />
62. Yezhov's report about the
continuing investigations into conspiracies within the country
was overshadowed by Nikolai Bukharin, who, in loquacious attempts
to confess past misdeeds, distance himself from onetime associates,
and assure everyone of his current loyalty, managed only to incriminate
himself further. (Thurston, 40-42; Getty and Naumov agree, 563)<br />
<br />
63. After three whole days of
this, Zhdanov spoke about the need for greater democracy both
in the country and in the Party, invoking the struggle against
bureaucracy and the need for closer ties to the masses, both
party and non-party.<br />
<blockquote>
The new electoral system will give a powerful push towards
the improvement of the work of Soviet bodies, the liquidation
of bureaucratic bodies, the liquidation of bureaucratic shortcomings,
and deformations in the work of our Soviet organizations. And
these shortcomings, as you know, are very substantial. Our Party
bodies must be ready for the electoral struggle. In the elections
we will have to deal with hostile agitation and hostile candidates.
(Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 343)</blockquote>
64. There can be no doubt that
Zhdanov, speaking for the Stalin leadership, foresaw real electoral
contests with non-party candidates that seriously opposed developments
in the Soviet Union. This fact alone is utterly incompatible
with Cold-War and Khrushchevite accounts.<br />
<br />
65. Zhdanov also emphasized,
at length, the need to develop democratic norms within the Bolshevik
Party itself.<br />
<blockquote>
"If we want to win the respect of our Soviet and Party
workers to our laws, and the masses -- to the Soviet constitution,
then we must guarantee the restructuring [<i>perestroika</i>]
of Party work on the basis of an indubitable and full implementation
of the bases of inner-party democracy, which is outlined in the
bylaws of our Party."<br />
And he enumerated the essential
measures, already contained in the draft resolution to his report:
the elimination of co-optation; a ban on voting by slates; a
guarantee "of the unlimited right for members of the Party
to set aside the nominated candidates and of the unlimited right
to criticize these candidates." (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 345)</blockquote>
66. But Zhdanov's report was
drowned in the discussions of other agenda items, mainly discussions
about "enemies." A number of First Secretaries responded
with alarm that those who were, or might be expected to be, preparing
most assiduously for the Soviet elections were <i>opponents</i>
of Soviet power: Social-Revolutionaries, the priesthood, and
other "enemies." [13]<br />
<br />
67. Molotov replied with a report
stressing, once again, "the development and strengthening
of self-criticism," and directly opposed the search for
"enemies":<br />
<blockquote>
"There's no point in searching for people to blame, comrades.
If you prefer, all of us here are to blame, beginning with the
Party's central institutions and ending with the lowest Party
organizations." (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 349)</blockquote>
68. But those who followed Molotov
to the podium ignored his report and continued to harp on the
necessity of "searching out 'enemies,' of exposing 'wreckers,'
and the struggle against 'wrecking.'" (352) When he spoke
again, Molotov marveled that there had been almost no attention
paid to the substance of his report, which he repeated, after
first summarizing what <i>was</i> being done against internal
enemies.<br />
<br />
69. Stalin's speech of March
3 was likewise divided, returning at the end to the need for
improving Party work and of weeding out incapable Party members
and replacing them with new ones. Like Molotov's, Stalin's report
was virtually ignored.<br />
<blockquote>
From the beginning of the discussions Stalin's fears were
understandable. It seemed he had run into a deaf wall of incomprehension,
of the unwillingness of the CC members, who heard in the report
just what they wanted to hear, to discuss what he wanted them
to discuss. Of the 24 persons who took part in the discussions,
15 spoke mainly about "enemies of the people," that
is, Trotskyists. They spoke with conviction, aggressively, just
as they had after the reports by Zhdanov and Molotov. They reduced
all the problems to one -- the necessity of searching out "enemies".
And practically none of them recalled Stalin's main point --
about the shortcomings in the work of Party organizations, about
preparation for the elections to the Supreme Soviet. (Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 357)</blockquote>
70. The Stalin leadership stepped
up the attack on the First Secretaries. Yakovlev criticized Moscow
Party leader Khrushchev, among others, for unjustified expulsions
of Party members; Malenkov seconded his criticism of Party secretaries
for their indifference to rank-and-file members. This seems to
have stimulated the C.C. members to stop speaking temporarily
about enemies, but only in order to begin defending themselves.
There was still no response to Stalin's report. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
358-60)<br />
<br />
71. In his final speech on March
5, the concluding day of the Plenum, Stalin minimized the need
to hunt enemies, even Trotskyists, many of whom, he said, had
turned towards the Party. His main theme was the need to remove
Party officials from running every aspect of the economy, to
fight bureaucracy, and to raise the political level of Party
officials. In other words, Stalin upped the ante in the criticism
of the First Secretaries.<br />
<blockquote>
"Some comrades among us think that, if they are a Narkom
(=People's Commissar), then they know everything. They believe
that rank, in and of itself, grants very great, almost inexhaustible
knowledge. Or they think: If I am a Central Committee member,
then I am not one by accident, then I must know everything. This
is not the case." (Stalin, Zakliuchitel'noe; Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
360-1)</blockquote>
72. Most ominously for all Party
officials, including First Secretaries, Stalin stated that each
of them should choose two cadre to take their places while they
attended six-month political education courses that would soon
be established. With replacement officials in their stead, Party
secretaries might well have feared that they could easily be
reassigned during this period, breaking the back of their "families"
(officials subservient to them), a major cause of bureaucracy.
(Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 362)<br />
<br />
73. Thurston characterizes Stalin's
speech as "considerably milder," stressing "the
need to learn from the masses and pay attention to criticism
from below." Even the resolution passed on the basis of
Stalin's report touched on "enemies" only briefly,
and dealt mainly with failings in party organizations and their
leaderships. According to Zhukov, who quotes from this unpublished
resolution, not a single one of its 25 points was mainly concerned
with "enemies." (Thurston, 48-9; Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
362-4) [14]<br />
<br />
74. After the Plenum the First
Secretaries staged a virtual rebellion. First Stalin, and then
the Politburo, sent out messages re-emphasizing the need to conduct
secret Party elections, opposition to co-optation rather than
election, and the need for inner-Party democracy generally. The
First Secretaries were doing things in the old way, regardless
of the resolutions of the Plenum.<br />
<br />
75. During the next few months
Stalin and his closest associates tried to turn the focus away
from a hunt for internal enemies -- the largest concern of the
CC members -- and back towards fighting bureaucracy in the Party,
and preparing for the Soviet elections. Meanwhile, "local
party leaders did everything they could within the limits of
party discipline (and sometimes outside it) to stall or change
the elections." (Getty, "Excesses" 126; Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 367-71)<br />
<br />
76. The sudden uncovering in
April, May and early June 1937 of what appeared to be a broadly-based
<i>military</i> and <i>police</i> conspiracy caused the Stalin
government to react in a panic. Genrikh Yagoda, head of the security
police and Minister of Internal Affairs, was arrested in late
March 1937, and began to confess in April. In May and early June
1937 high-ranking military commanders confessed to conspiring
with the German General Staff to defeat the Red Army in the case
of an invasion by Germany and its allies, and also to being linked
to conspiracies by political figures, including many who still
occupied high positions. (Getty, "Excesses" 115, 135;
Thurston, 70, 90, 101-2; <i>Genrikh IAgoda</i>) [15]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref15"></a><br />
<br />
77. This situation was far more
serious than any the Soviet government had faced before. In the
case of the 1936 and 1937 Moscow Trials, the government took
its time to prepare the case and organize a public trial for
maximum publicity. But the Military conspiracy was handled far
differently. A little more than three weeks passed from the date
of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky's arrest in late May to the trial
and execution of Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking military
commanders on June 11-12. During that time hundreds of high-ranking
military commanders were recalled to Moscow to read the evidence
against their colleagues -- for most of them, their superiors
-- and to listen to alarmed analyses by Stalin and Marshal Voroshilov,
People's Commissar for Defense and the highest ranking military
figure in the country.<br />
<br />
78. At the time of the February-March
Plenum neither Yagoda nor Tukhachevsky had yet been arrested.
Stalin and the Politburo intended that the Constitution be the
main agenda item, and were set on the defensive by the fact that
most of the CC members ignored this topic, preferring to stress
the battle against "enemies." The Politburo planned
that the Constitutional reforms be the central agenda item at
the upcoming June 1937 Plenum also. But by June the situation
was different. The discovery of plots by the head of the NKVD
and most prominent military leaders to overthrow the government
and kill its leading members, entirely changed the political
atmosphere.<br />
<br />
79. Stalin was on the defensive.
In his June 2 speech to the expanded session of the Military
Soviet (which met June 1-4) he portrayed the series of recently
uncovered [16] conspiracies
as limited, and largely successfully dealt with. At the February-March
Plenum too, he and his Politburo supporters had minimized the
First Secretaries' overriding concern with internal enemies.
But, as Zhukov notes, the situation was "slowly, but decisively,
getting out of his [Stalin's] control." (Stalin, "Vystuplenie";
Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> Ch. 16, <i>passim</i>; 411).<br />
<br />
80. The June 1937 Central Committee
Plenum [17]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref17"></a> began with
proposals to exclude, first, seven sitting C.C. members and candidates
for "lack of political trustworthiness," then a further
19 members and candidates for "treason and active counterrevolutionary
activity." These last 19 were to be arrested by the NKVD.
Including the ten members expelled on similar charges before
the Plenum by a poll of the C.C. members (including those military
commanders already tried, convicted, and executed), this meant
that 36 of the 120 C.C. members and candidates as of May 1 had
been removed.<br />
<br />
81. Yakovlev and Molotov criticized
the failure of Party leaders to organize for independent Soviet
elections. Molotov stressed the need to move even honored revolutionaries
out of the way if they were unprepared for the tasks of the day.
He emphasized that Soviet officials were not "second-class
workers." Evidently Party leaders were treating them as
such.<br />
<br />
82. Yakovlev exposed and criticized
the failure of First Secretaries to hold secret elections for
Party posts, relying instead on appointment ("cooptation").
He emphasized that Party members who were elected delegates to
the Soviets were not to be placed under the discipline of Party
groups outside the Soviets and told how to vote. They were not
to be told how to vote by their Party superiors, such as the
First Secretaries. They were to be independent of them. And Yakovlev
referred in the strongest terms to the need to "recruit
from the very rich reserve of new cadre to replace those who
had become rotten or bureaucratized." All these statements
constituted an explicit attack on the First Secretaries. (Zhukov,
<i>Inoy</i> 424-7; <i>Tayny</i>, 39-40, quoting from archival
documents)<br />
<br />
83. The Constitution was finally
outlined and the date of the first elections was set for December
12, 1937. The Stalin leadership again urged the benefits of fighting
bureaucracy and building ties to the masses. However -- to repeat
-- all this followed the equally unprecedented, summary expulsion
from the C.C. of 26 members, nineteen of whom were directly charged
with treason and counter-revolutionary activity. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
430)<br />
<br />
84. Perhaps most revealing is
the following remark by Stalin, as quoted by Zhukov:<br />
<blockquote>
At the end of the discussion, when the subject was the search
for a more dispassionate method of counting ballots, [Stalin]
remarked that in the West, thanks to a multiparty system, this
problem did not exist. Immediately thereafter he suddenly uttered
a phrase that sounded very strange in a meeting of this kind:
"We do not have different political parties. Fortunately
or <i>unfortunately, we have only one party</i>." [Zhukov's
emphasis] And then he proposed, but only as a temporary measure,
to use for the purpose of dispassionate supervision of elections
representatives of all existing societal organizations <i>except
for the Bolshevik Party</i>. . . . The challenge to the Party
autocracy had been issued. (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 430-1; emphasis
added; <i>Tayny</i> 38)</blockquote>
85. The Bolshevik Party was
in severe crisis, and it was impossible to expect that events
would unroll smoothly. It was the worst possible atmosphere during
which to prepare for the adoption of democratic -- secret, universal
and contested -- elections. Stalin's plan to reform the Soviet
government and the role within it of the Bolshevik Party was
doomed.<br />
<br />
86. At the end of the Plenum
Robert Eikhe, First Secretary of the West Siberian Krai (region
of the Russian republic) met privately with Stalin. Then several
other First Secretaries met with him. They probably demanded
the awful powers that they were granted shortly afterward: the
authority to form "troikas," or groups of three officials,
to combat widespread conspiracies against the Soviet government
in their area. [18]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref18"></a> These
troikas were given the power of execution without appeal. Numerical
limits for those to be shot and others to be imprisoned on the
sole power of these troikas were demanded and given. When those
were exhausted, the First Secretaries asked for, and received,
higher limits. Zhukov thinks that Eikhe may have been acting
on behalf of an informal group of First Secretaries. (Getty,
"Excesses" 129; Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 435)<br />
<br />
87. Who were the targets of
these draconian trials-by-troika? Zhukov believes they must have
been the <i>lishentsy</i>, the very people whose citizenship
rights, including franchise, had recently been restored and whose
votes potentially posed the greatest danger to the First Secretaries'
continuance in power. Zhukov largely discounts the existence
of real conspiracies. But archival documents recently published
in Russia make it clear that, at the very least, the central
leadership was constantly receiving very credible police accounts
of conspiracies, including transcripts of confessions. Certainly
Stalin and others in Moscow believed these conspiracies existed.
My guess at this point, <i>pace</i> Zhukov, is that some, at
least, of the conspiracies alleged actually existed, and that
the First Secretaries believed in them. (Zhukov, <i>KP</i> Nov.
13 02; <i>Inoy</i>, Ch. 18; "Repressii" 23; <i>Lubianka</i>
B)<br />
<br />
88. A further hypothesis is
that anyone who was currently, or had ever been, involved in
any kind of opposition movement was likely to be viewed as an
"enemy," and subject to arrest and interrogation by
the NKVD, one of whose members always made up part of the troika.
Another group were those who openly expressed distrust or hatred
towards the Soviet system as a whole. Thurston cites evidence
that such people were often arrested immediately. However, those
who simply expressed criticisms of local Party leaders, especially
at criticism meetings called for this purpose, were not arrested,
while those whom they criticized, <i>including</i> Party leaders,
sometimes were. (Thurston, 94-5)<br />
<br />
89. Contrary, then, to those
who argue that the conspiracies were phantoms of Stalin's paranoid
mind -- or worse still, lies concocted to strengthen Stalin's
megalomaniac hold on power -- there is a lot of evidence that
real conspiracies existed. Accounts of conspirators who were
later able to get out of the USSR agree. The sheer volume of
police documentation concerning such conspiracies, only a little
of which has yet been published, argues strongly against any
notion that all of it could have been fabricated. Furthermore,
Stalin's annotations on these documents make it clear that he
believed they were accurate. (Getty, "Excesses" 131-4;
<i>Lubianka</i> B)<br />
<br />
90. Getty summarizes the hopeless
contradiction in this way:<br />
<blockquote>
Stalin was not yet willing to retreat from contested elections,
and on 2 July 1937 <i>Pravda</i> no doubt disappointed the regional
secretaries by publishing the first installment of the new electoral
rules, enacting and enforcing contested, universal, secret ballot
elections. But Stalin offered a compromise. The very same day
the electoral law was published, the Politburo approved the launching
of a mass operation against precisely the elements the local
leaders had complained about, and hours later Stalin sent his
telegram to provincial party leaders ordering the kulak operation
[vs. the <i>lishentsy</i> -- GF]. It is hard to avoid the conclusion
that in return for forcing the local party leaders to conduct
an election, Stalin chose to help them win it by giving them
license to kill or deport hundreds or thousands of "dangerous
elements." ("Excesses" 126)</blockquote>
91. Whatever the history of
these purges, extra-judicial executions, and deportations, Stalin
appears to have believed that they were <i>creating</i> preconditions
for contested elections. Yet all of this activity really sabotaged
any possibility for such elections.<br />
<br />
92. The Politburo at first tried
to limit the campaign of repression by ordering that it be completed
within <i>five days</i>. Something convinced, or compelled, them
to permit the NKVD to extend the period for <i>four months</i>
-- August 5-15 to December 5-15. Was it the large numbers of
those arrested? The conviction that the Party faced a widespread
set of conspiracies and a huge internal threat? We don't know
the details of how, and why, this mass repression unfolded as
it did.<br />
<br />
93. This was exactly the period
during which the electoral campaign was to take place. Even though
the Politburo continued preparation for the contested elections,
with rules about how voters were to indicate their choices, and
how officials should handle runoff elections, local officials
actually controlled the repression. They could determine what
opposition, if any, to the Party -- which meant, in great part,
to themselves -- would be considered "loyal," and what
would lead to repression and imprisonment or death (Getty, "Excesses,"
<i>passim.</i>; Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 435)<br />
<br />
94. Primary documents show that
Stalin and the central Politburo leadership were convinced that
anti-Soviet conspirators were active and had to be dealt with.
This is what the regional Party leaders had asserted during the
February-March Plenum. At that time the Stalin leadership had
minimized this danger and had kept focusing attention back to
the Constitution, and the need to prepare for new elections and
the replacement of "bureaucratized" and old leadership
with new.<br />
<br />
95. By the June Plenum the First
Secretaries were in a position to say, in effect: "We told
you so. We were right, and you were wrong. Furthermore, we are
<i>still</i> right -- dangerous conspirators are still active,
ready to use the electoral campaign in their attempt to raise
revolt against the Soviet government." Was this how it happened?
It seems plausible. But we can't be certain.<br />
<br />
96. Stalin and the central leadership
had no idea how deep these conspiracies extended. They did not
know what Nazi Germany or fascist Japan would do. On June 2 Stalin
had told the expanded Military Soviet meeting that the Tukhachevsky
group had given the Red Army's operational plan to the German
General Staff. This meant that the Japanese, who were bound in
a military alliance (the "Axis") and an anti-communist
political alliance (the "Anti-Comintern Pact" -- really,
an anti-Soviet pact) with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, would
no doubt have it too.<br />
<br />
97. Stalin had told the military
leaders that the plotters wanted to make the USSR into "another
Spain" -- meaning, a Fifth Column within coordinated with
an invading fascist army. Given this horrendous danger, the Soviet
leadership was determined to react with brutal decisiveness.
(Stalin, "Vystuplenie")<br />
<br />
98. At the same time much evidence
suggests that the central (Stalin) leadership wanted both to
restrain the "troika" repressions demanded by the First
Secretaries, and to continue to implement the new Constitution's
secret and contested elections. From July 5 to 11 most First
Secretaries followed Eikhe's lead in sending in precise figures
of those whom they wanted to suppress -- by execution (category
1) or imprisonment (category 2). Then,<br />
<blockquote>
suddenly on 12 July, Deputy NKVD Commissar M.P. Frinovskii
sent an urgent telegram to all local police agencies: "Do
not begin the operation to repress former kulaks. I repeat, do
not begin." (Getty, "Excesses" 127-8)</blockquote>
99. Local NKVD chiefs were recalled
to Moscow for conferences, after which was issued Order No. 00447.
This very long and detailed instruction both expanded the kinds
of people subject to repression (basically including priests,
those who had previously opposed Soviet power, and criminals),
and -- usually -- lowered the "limits" or numbers requested
by the provincial secretaries. [19]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref19"></a>
All this vacillation suggested disagreements and struggles between
the "center" -- Stalin and the central Politburo leadership
-- and the First Secretaries in the provincial areas. Stalin
was clearly not in charge. (Order No. 00447; Getty, "Excesses"
126-9).<br />
<br />
100. The Central Committee Plenum
of October 1937 saw the final cancellation of the plan for contested
elections. A sample ballot, showing several candidates, had already
been drawn up; several of them have survived in various archives. [20]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref20"></a> Instead, the Soviet
elections of December 1937 were implemented on the basis that
the Party candidates would run on slates with 20-25% of nonparty
candidates -- in other words, an "alliance" of sorts,
but without a contest. Originally the elections were planned
without slates; voting was to be only for individuals -- a far
more democratic method. Zhukov has managed to locate in the archives
the very document that Molotov signed, on October 11 at 6 p.m.,
canceling contested elections. This represented a huge but inevitable
retreat for Stalin and his supporters in the Politburo. (Zhukov,
<i>KP</i> 19 Nov. 02; Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i>. 41; <i>Inoy</i> 443)<br />
<br />
101. It was also at the October
C.C. Plenum that the first protest against the mass repressions
was uttered by Kursk First Secretary Peskarov:<br />
<blockquote>
"They [the NKVD? The troika? -- GF] condemned people
for petty stuff . . . illegally, and <i>when we . . . put the
question to the C.C., comrades Stalin and Molotov strongly supported
us and sent a brigade of workers from the Supreme Court and Prosecutor's
office to review these cases</i>. . . . And it turned out that
for three weeks' work of this brigade 56% of the sentences in
16 <i>raiony</i> were set aside by the brigade as illegal. What's
more, in 45% of the sentences there was no evidence that a crime
had been committed." (Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i>, 43; emphasis
added)</blockquote>
102. At the January 1938 Plenum
Malenkov delivered a blistering criticism of the huge numbers
of Party members expelled and citizens sentenced, often without
even submitting a list of names, but only of the numbers sentenced!
Postyshev, First Secretary of Kuybyshev, was removed as candidate
member of the Politburo for insisting that there was "scarcely
a single honest man" among all the Party officials.<br />
<br />
103. It seems that the NKVD
was out of control, at least in many local areas. No doubt the
First Secretaries were too. (Zhukov, <i>KP</i> 19 Nov. 02; <i>Tayny</i>,
pp. 47-51; Thurston 101-2; 112) However, the Politburo leadership
was still concerned that there were real conspirators that had
to be dealt with. The full extent of NKVD abuses was not recognized.
As Zhukov notes, Malenkov's report, blaming careerists within
the Party for massive expulsions and arrests, was followed by
Kaganovich and Zhdanov who stressed the struggle against enemies
and gave only slight attention to "naivetÈ and ignorance"
in the work of "honest Bolsheviks."<br />
<br />
104. <i>Pravda</i>, under the
direct control of the Stalin leadership, was still calling for
removing the Party from direct control over economic affairs
and for the need to promote non-party people into leading roles.
(Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i> 51-2) Meanwhile Nikita Khrushchev, who
had in 1937 called for power to execute 20,000 unnamed people
when Party head in Moscow, was transferred to the Ukraine from
where, within a month, he asked for authority to repress 30,000
people. (Zhukov, <i>Tayny</i> 64, and see n. 23 below)<br />
<br />
105. Nikolai Yezhov, who had
taken over the NKVD from Genrikh Yagoda in 1936, seems to have
been in close alliance with the First Secretaries. [21]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref21"></a> The mass repression of 1937-38 has become so
associated with his name that it is still called the "Yezhovshchina."
Yezhov was talked into resigning on September 23, 1938 [22]
and in November 1938 was succeeded by Lavrentii Beria.<br />
<br />
106. Under Beria many of the
NKVD officers and First Secretaries responsible for thousands
of executions and deportations were tried and often executed
themselves for executing innocent people and using torture against
those arrested. Transcripts of the trials of some of these policemen
who used torture have been published. Many people convicted and
either imprisoned, deported, or sent to the camps were freed.
Beria reportedly said later that he had been called on to "liquidate
the Yezhovshchina." Stalin told aircraft designer Yakovlev
that Yezhov had been executed for killing many innocent people.
(<i>Lubianka</i> B, Nos. 344; 363; 375; Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i>
637; Yakovlev)<br />
<br />
107. Incalculable damage had
been done to Soviet society, the Soviet government, and the Bolshevik
Party. This, of course, has been long known. What has <i>not</i>
been understood until now is that the setting up of the troikas,
and large quotas for executions and deportations, was initiated
at the insistence of the First Secretaries, not of Stalin. Zhukov
believes that the close connection between this and the threat
of secret, contested elections, and the fact that the Central
Committee succeeded in forcing the Stalin leadership to cancel
contested elections, suggests that getting rid of the "threat"
of contested elections may have been a major reason for the mass
arrests and executions of the "Yezhovshchina." [23] (Zhukov, <i>KP</i>)<br />
<br />
108. Nothing can absolve Stalin
and his supporters of a large measure of responsibility for the
executions -- evidently, several hundred thousand [24]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref24"></a> -- that ensued. If these people had been imprisoned
rather than executed, almost all would have lived. Many would
have had their cases reviewed and been released. For our purposes
here, however, the key question is: Why did Stalin give in to
the First Secretaries' demands that they be given the life-and-death
"troika" powers? Though there are no excuses, there
were certainly reasons.<br />
<br />
109. No government can ever
be prepared against simultaneous treason by the highest-ranking
military commanders, high-ranking figures in both the national
and important regional governments, and the head of the secret
and border police.<br />
<br />
110. A serious set of conspiracies,
involving both current and former high-level party leaders who
had ties all over the vast country, had just been uncovered.
Most ominous was the involvement of military figures at the very
highest levels, with the disclosure of secret military plans
to the fascist enemy. The military conspirators had had contacts
all over the USSR. The conspiracy also involved the very highest
levels of the NKVD, including Genrikh Yagoda, who had headed
it from 1934 till 1936 and had been second-in-command for some
years before 1934. It simply could not be known how widespread
the conspiracy was, and how many people were involved. The prudent
course was to suspect the worst. [25]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref25"></a><br />
<br />
111. The Politburo and Stalin
himself were at the apex of two large hierarchies, of both the
Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government. What they knew about
the state of affairs in the country reflected what their subordinates
told them. Over the course of the next twelve months they repressed
many of the First Secretaries, over half of whom were arrested.
For the most part, the precise charges against most of these
men, and the dossiers of their interrogations and trials, have
yet to be declassified, even in post-Soviet, anti-communist Russia.
But we now have enough of the investigative evidence that reached
Stalin and the Politburo to get some idea of the alarming situation
they faced. (<i>Lubianka</i> B)<br />
<br />
112. The Bolshevik Party was
set up in a democratic centralist fashion. Despite his status
and popularity in the country, Stalin (like any Party leader)
could be voted out by a majority of the Central Committee. He
was in no position to ignore urgent appeals by a large number
of C.C. members.<br />
<br />
113. To illustrate Stalin's
inability to stop the First Secretaries from flouting the principles
of democratic election Zhukov quotes one incident from the still
unpublished transcript of the October 1937 C.C. Plenum.<br />
<blockquote>
I.A. Kravtsov, First Secretary of the Krasnodar <i>kraikom</i>
[regional committee -- GF] was the only one to acknowledge, and
in detail, what his colleagues had been doing on the sly for
some weeks already. He outlined the selection of only those candidates
for deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR who suited the interests
of the 'broad leadership'.<br />
<blockquote>
"We put forth our candidates to the Supreme Soviet,"
Kravtsov stated frankly. "Who are these comrades? Eight
are members of the Party; two are non-Party members or members
of the Komsomol [Communist Youth Organization]. That way we held
to the per centage of non-Party members indicated in the draft
decision of the CC. By occupation these comrades are divided
in this way: four Party employees, two Soviet employees, one
kolkhoz chairman, one combine driver, one tractor driver, one
oil worker . . .<br />
Stalin: Who else, aside from the combine drivers?<br />
Kravtsov: Among the ten is Yakovlev, the First Secretary of the
<i>kraikom</i>, [and] the chairman of the <i>krai</i> executive
committee.<br />
Stalin: Who advised you to do this?<br />
Kravtsov: I must say, comrade Stalin, that they advised me here,
in the CC apparatus.<br />
Stalin: Who?<br />
Kravtsov: We in the C.C. assigned our <i>krai</i> executive committee
chairman, comrade Simochkin, and he got the approval in the C.C.
apparatus.<br />
Stalin: Who?<br />
Kravtsov: I can't say, I don't know.<br />
Stalin: A pity that you don't say, you were told wrong."
(Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i> 486-7)</blockquote>
</blockquote>
114. Evidently all the First
Secretaries were doing what only Kravtsov openly stated -- ignoring
the principle of secret Soviet elections, a principle they themselves
had voted for at previous Plenums, but clearly never agreed to.
This marks Stalin's final defeat on this issue, the Constitutional
and electoral system reforms he and his central leadership had
been championing for over two years.<br />
<br />
115. Democratic reform was defeated.
The old political system remained in place. Stalin's plan for
contested elections was gone for good. "Thus the attempt
of Stalin and his group to reform the political system of the
Soviet Union ended in total failure." (Zhukov, <i>Inoy</i>
491)<br />
<br />
116. Zhukov believes that, if
Stalin had refused the appeals of the First Secretaries for the
extraordinary "troika" powers, he -- Stalin -- would
have most likely been voted out, arrested as a counter-revolutionary
and executed. ". . . [T]oday Stalin might be numbered among
the victims of the repression of 1937 and 'Memorial' and the
commission of A.N.Yakovlev would have long since been petitioning
for his rehabilitation." (Zhukov, <i>KP</i> 16 Nov. 02)<br />
<br />
117. In November 1938 Lavrentii
Beria effectively replaced Yezhov as head of the NKVD. The "troikas"
were abolished. Extra-judicial executions stopped, and those
responsible for many of the terrible excesses were themselves
tried and executed or imprisoned. [26]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref26"></a> But war was approaching. The French government
refused to continue even the very weak version of the Franco-Soviet
alliance they had agreed to (the Soviet Union wanted a much stronger
one). The Allies yielded Czechoslovakia to Hitler and the Polish
fascists piecemeal, without a struggle. Nazi Germany had a military
alliance with fascist Poland aimed at an invasion of the USSR.
The Spanish Civil War, which the Soviets had done so much to
support, was lost. Italy invaded Ethiopia, and the League of
Nations did nothing. France and Britain were clearly encouraging
Hitler, with most of Eastern Europe behind him, to invade the
USSR. (<i>Lubianka</i> B, No. 365; Leibowitz)<br />
<br />
118. Japan, Italy and Germany
had a mutual defense treaty and an "Anti-Comintern"
pact, both directed expressly against the USSR. All the European
border countries -- Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- were fascist-style military
dictatorships. A 1938 Japanese attack at Lake Khasan cost the
Red Army about 1,000 dead. The next year a far more serious Japanese
assault was repelled by the Red Army at Khalkin-Gol. Soviet casualties
were about 17,000, including almost 5,500 killed -- no small
war. As it turned out, this war was decisive, and the Japanese
never messed with the Soviets again. But the Soviet government
could not know this in advance. (<i>Rossiia I SSSR v Voynakh</i>)<br />
<br />
119. After 1938 the Stalin government
did not try again to implement the democratic electoral system
of the 1936 Constitution. Did this failure reflect a continued
stalemate between the Stalin leadership and the First Secretaries
on the Central Committee? Or an estimate that, with war rapidly
approaching, further efforts towards democracy would have to
await more peaceful times? The evidence available so far does
not permit a firm conclusion.<br />
<br />
120. However, once Beria had
replaced Yezhov as head of the NKVD (formally, in December 1938;
in practice, perhaps a few weeks earlier) a continuous stream
of rehabilitations took place. Beria liberated over 100,000 prisoners
from camps and prisons. Trials followed of NKVD men accused of
torture and extra-judicial executions. (Thurston 128-9)<br />
<br />
<center>
<b>Notes</b></center>
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref1">1</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note1"></a> Leon Trotsky's version
of Soviet history preceded Khrushchev's, and has dovetailed into
it as a kind of "left" version of the latter, though
little credited outside Trotskyist circles. Both Khrushchevite
and Trotskyist accounts portray Stalin in an extremely negative
light; the word "demonize" would scarcely be an exaggeration.
On Trotsky, see McNeal.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref2">2</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note2"></a> The widespread use
of the term "terror" to characterize the period of
Soviet history from roughly mid-1937 to 1939-40 can be attributed
to an uncritical acceptance of Robert Conquest's highly tendentious
and unreliable 1973 work <i>The Great Terror</i>. The term is
both inaccurate and polemical. See Robert W. Thurston, "Fear
and Belief in the USSR's 'Great Terror': Respose To Arrest, 1935-1939."
<i>Slavic Review</i> 45 (1986), 213-234. Thurston responded to,
and critiqued, Conquest's attempt to defend the term in "On
Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives, and Lousy
Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest." <i>Slavic Review
</i>45 (1986), 238-244. See also Thurston, "Social Dimensions
of Stalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941."
<i>Journal of Social History</i> 24, No. 3 (1991) 541-562; <i>Life
and Terror</i> Ch. 5, 137-163.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref3">3</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note3"></a> Marxist-Leninist
political thought rejects capitalist "representative democracy"
as essentially a smokescreen for elite control. Many non-Marxist
political thinkers agree. For one example, see Lewis H. Lapham
(editor of <i>Harper's Magazine</i>), "Lights, Camera, Democracy!
On the conventions of a make-believe republic," <i>Harper's
Magazine</i>, August 1996, 33-38.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref4">4</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note4"></a> Quoted by Yuri Zhukov,
"Zhupel Stalina," <i>Komsomolskaia Pravda </i>Nov.
5 2002. Prof. Getty confirmed this in an email to me.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref5">5</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note5"></a> The Party's name
was changed to Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref6">6</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note6"></a> Yenukidze, an old
revolutionary, fellow Georgian, and friend of Stalin's, had long
occupied a high position in the Soviet government and never been
associated with any of the Opposition groups of the '20s. At
this time he was also in charge of the Kremlin Guard. Within
a few months he was one of the first to be exposed as a member
of the plan for a "palace coup" against the Stalin
leadership. Zhukov (<i>KP</i> 14 Nov. 02) notes that this must
have been especially upsetting to Stalin.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref7">7</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note7"></a> Part II, Chapter
3, Article 9 of The Soviet Constitution of 1924, the one in force
at this time, gave urban dwellers a far greater influence in
society -- one Soviet delegate to 25,000 city and town voters,
and one delegate to 125,000 country voters. This was in conformity
to the far greater degree of support for socialism among workers,
and with the Marxist concept of the state as the dictatorship
of the proletariat.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref8">8</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note8"></a> This is actually
not a law but a "decision of the Central Executive Committee
and the Council of People's Commissars" -- i.e. of the legislative
and executive branches of government. The fact that it is commonly
called a "law" even in scholarship simply shows that
most of those who refer to it have not actually read it at all.
It is printed in <i>Tragediia Sovetskoy Derevni. Kollektivizatsiia
I Raskulachivanie. Documenty I Materialy. 1927-1939. Tom 3. Konets
1930-1933</i> (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), No. 160, pp. 453-4, and
in <i>Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii Raboche-Krest'ianskogo
Pravitel'stva SSSR, chast' I, 1932</i>, pp. 583-584.. My thanks
to Dr. G·bor T. Rittersporn for this last citation.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref9">9</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note9"></a> To build up the
economy as quickly as possible after the devastation of the Civil
War and subsequent famine, the Bolsheviks permitted capitalism
to flourish and encouraged profit-seeking businessmen, though
under government scrutiny. This was called the New Economic Policy.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref10">10</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note10"></a> Stalin, "Report
to 17th P.C.," 704, 705, 706, 716, 728, 733, 752, 753, 754,
756, 758.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref11">11</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note11"></a> This is not widely
known, nor its significance understood. Our view of Stalin has
been largely shaped by those who hated him (McNeal 87). Stalin
had been an excellent student at the seminary in Tblisi, Georgia,
to which his mother had sent him. Devoting his life from his
teenage years to the working-class revolutionary movement, he
had never had the opportunity for higher education. But he was
highly intelligent, and a voracious reader whose learning ranged
from philosophy to technical subjects like metallurgy. Contemporary
records attest to his attention to details and thorough knowledge
of many technical areas. A Russian scholar who has studied Stalin's
library gives impressive figures: 20,000 volumes at Stalin's
dacha after the war; many of the 5,500 taken to the Institute
of Marxism-Leninism after his death are annotated and underlined.
(Ilizarov). Roy Medvedev, who hates Stalin, grudgingly admits
Stalin's considerable reading. (Medevedev, "Lichnaia")<br />
<br />
Many of the people whom he picked
as his closest associates reflected this same dedication to self-improvement.
Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party leader and close ally of Stalin's
who was assassinated in 1934, was noted for his wide reading
in literature. (Kirilina 175). "When Kirov was killed, experts
from the investigation photographed everything that could aid
the investigation including the top of Kirov's work desk. To
the right lay H¸tte's engineering manual, on the left a
pile of scientific and technical journals, the top title of which
was 'Combustile Shale.' Wide indeed was the sphere of interests
of this party worker -- as Stalin's was." (Mukhin <i>Ubiystvo</i>
625)<br />
<br />
In 1924 Lavrenty Beria, fresh
from several years of very dangerous underground revolutionary
work, some of it as a Bolshevik infiltrator in violent anti-communist
Caucasian nationalist groups, wrote his Party autobiography.
His purpose in listing his deeds -- he had been awarded the rank
of general at the age of 20 -- was to plead, not for a cushy
job, as most "Old Bolsheviks" demanded and usually
got, but to be allowed to return to his engineering studies,
so he could make a contribution to the building of a communist
society. (<i>Beria: Konets Kar'ery</i>, 320-325)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref12">12</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note12"></a> Thurston, Chapters
2 through 4, is the best single summary, as of the early '90s,
of the evidence concerning the Moscow Trials. This article will
not deal directly with these trials, the trial and execution
of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other top-ranking military leaders
in June 1937, or the interrelationship among all the anti-Soviet
conspiracies alleged in them. As documents from the Soviet archives
make clear, Stalin and other top Soviet leaders were convinced
that the conspiracies existed, and the charges at the Moscow
Trials, plus those against the military leaders, were, at least
in large part, accurate.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref13">13</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note13"></a> Getty notes that
CC members pointedly refused to respond to Zhdanov's speech,
putting the Chair, Andreev, into confusion ("Excesses"124).
Zhukov places less emphasis on this, as Eikhe and other First
Secretaries did reply at the next session, while emphasizing
the struggle against "enemies." (<i>Inoy</i> 345)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref14">14</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note14"></a> For the Resolution,
see Zhukov, Inoy 362-3; Stalin, Zakliuchitel'noe. Like the resolution
(which remains unpublished), Stalin's speech touches only very
briefly on the subject of "enemies," and even then
to warn the CC against "beating" everyone who had once
been a Trotskyist. Stalin insists that there are "remarkable
people" among former Trotskyists, specifically naming Feliks
Dzerzhinsky.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref15">15</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note15"></a> This volume (<i>Genrikh
IAgoda</i> ) consists mainly of investigators' interrogations
of Yagoda and a few of his associates, and Yagoda's confessions
of involvement in the conspiracy to carry out a <i>coup</i> against
the Soviet government; Trotsky's leadership of the conspiracy;
and, in general, all that Yagoda confessed to in the 1938 Trial.
There is no indication that these confessions were other than
genuine. The volume's editors deny that any of the facts cited
in the interrogations are accurate, and declare the interrogations
themselves "falsified." But they do not give any evidence
that this is the case. Jansen and Petrov, p. 226 n. 9, though
very anti-Stalin, cite this volume as evidence and without comment.
Furthermore, there is good evidence that this was so in fact
-- that these conspiracies did exist, that the confessions given
at the public trials were genuine rather than coerced, and that
the major charges against the defendants were true. Another large
volume of primary documents published in 2004 contains a great
many NKVD reports of conspiracies and texts of interrogations
(see <i>Lubianka</i> B). The most plausible explanation for the
existence of all this evidence is that some of it, at least,
is true.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref16">16</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note16"></a> Called the <i>klubok</i>,
or "tangle," by the NKVD investigators at the time
and by Russian historians today.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref17">17</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note17"></a> No transcript
of the June 1937 Plenum has ever been published. Some authors
have claimed that no transcript was kept. However, Zhukov quotes
extensively from some archival transcript unavailable to others.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref18">18</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note18"></a> The order for
setting up a "troika" in Eikhe's Western Siberian region
exists. Eikhe's request has not been found, but he must have
made such a request, either in writing or orally. See Zhukov,
"Repressii" 23, n. 60; Getty, "Excesses"
127, n. 64.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref19">19</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note19"></a> Getty, Excesses
131-134 discusses some statistics about this. See Order No.00447.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref20">20</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note20"></a> The sample ballot
is reproduced in Zhukov; <i>Inoy</i>, 6th illustration.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref21">21</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note21"></a> As late as February
1, 1956, less than four weeks before his "Secret Speech"
to the XX Party Congress, Khrushchev was still referring to Yezhov
as "undoubtedly not to blame, an honest man." <i>Reabilitatsia:
Kak Eto Bylo. Mart 1953-Febral' 1956</i> (Moscow, 2000), p. 308.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref22">22</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note22"></a> His resignation
was not formally accepted until November 25, 1938; see Lubianka
B Nos. 344 and 364.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref23">23</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note23"></a> Khrushchev requested
"to execute 20,000 people", Zhukov, <i>KP</i> 3 Dec.
02. Yakovlev's criticism of Khrushchev's massive expulsions is
quoted above. Eikhe was arrested in October 1938, tried, convicted,
and executed in February 1940. According to Khrushchev, Eikhe
repudiated his confession, saying he had given it after being
beaten (i.e. tortured). Zhukov's analysis suggests that the real
reason for Eikhe's fate may have been his leading role in the
mass executions of 1937-38. See Jansen and Petrov, 91-2. The
Politburo and January 1938 Plenum began to attack party secretaries
who victimized rank-and-file members (Getty, <i>Origins</i> 187-8).
The full record of Eikhe's investigation and trial is still classified.
A desire to deflect attention and blame away from himself and
his fellow First Secretaries of the time is one of the bases
of Khrushchev's lies in his "secret speech."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref24">24</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note24"></a> Getty ("Excesses"
132) cites evidence that 236,000 executions were authorized by
"Moscow," meaning the Stalin leadership, but that over
160% of that number, or 387,000 people, were in fact executed
by local authorities.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref25">25</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note25"></a> At the 1938 Moscow
Trial Yagoda confessed to involvement in the plot for a <i>coup
d'Ètat</i> against the Soviet government, to the murders
of Maxim Gorky and his son, and other heinous crimes, but vigorously
rejected the prosecution's accusation that he was guilty of espionage.
The fact that the charge of espionage was still raised over a
year after Yagoda had been arrested shows, at least, that the
Soviet government thought he might have given such information
to a foreign enemy (Germany, Japan, Poland). As the head of the
Ministry of the Interior, including the secret police and border
police, Yagoda would have been able to do incalculable harm to
Soviet security if he had given information to foreign governments<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#ref26">26</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note26"></a> Thurston has the
best discussion in English of this in <i>Life and Terror</i>
128 ff.<br />
<br />
<center>
<b>Additional Notes</b></center>
<br />
<b>Note on Yuri Zhukov's work:</b><br />
<br />
To date there has been one extended scholarly attack on Zhukov's
thesis -- that by Prof. Irina V. Pavlova, "1937: Vybory
kak mistifikatsiia, terror kak real'nost'," <i>Voprosy Istorii</i>
10, 2003 19-36. Pavlova is a strident anti-communist of the "totalitarianism"
school whose ideological hostility to communism undermines her
historical research. For example, she has lied about Getty's
research in order to try to discredit him. Pavlova is writing
propaganda, not history.<br />
<br />
Pavlova refers only to Zhukov's articles in <i>KP</i>; she
wrote it before the publication of <i>Inoy Stalin</i>. Pavlova's
criticism relies on the assumption that the Moscow Trials and
that of Tukhachevskii et al. were frame-ups, and the whole constitutional
and electoral campaigns a deliberate "cover" for this
repression.<br />
<br />
Pavlova also asserts that, because the Supreme Soviet did
not have real political power in 1936, contested elections for
it would not have given it any power either. If by "power"
Pavlova means the ability to unseat the Bolshevik Party from
its dominant position in the USSR and to undo socialism, she
is undoubtedly right: surely Stalin had no intention of allowing
a counter-revolution through constitutional means. Nor is this
permitted in any bourgeois democratic country. But if she means
"power" to influence state policies and exert pressure,
within limits, on the specific social policies and on the Bolshevik
Party itself -- that is, the kind of powers determined by elections
in bourgeois democracies -- then she cannot possibly be right.<br />
<br />
<b>Note on Iuri Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo Stalina i Beriia</i>:</b><br />
<br />
This book of Mukhin's is often dismissed by those unsympathetic
to his conclusions on the grounds that he has made remarks that
can be construed as anti-semitic. It should be noted that Mukhin
makes remarks opposing anti-semitism in this same book. This
paper does not draw upon any of the passages in which anti-semitic
statements can be alleged.<br />
<br />
Mukhin has also taken eccentric positions on some subjects
not dealt with in this book. I do not draw upon any of those
works either.<br />
<br />
The same thing could, and should, be said when anti-communist
scholars are cited -- the fact of their anti-communist prejudices
does not mean that they cannot, on occasion, have some valuable
insights. And, of course, anti-communism is normally closely
aligned with anti-semitism. Neither a communist nor Jewish, Mukhin
shows some hostility to both, but is neither a conventional anti-communist
nor a conventional anti-semite.<br />
<br />
Mukhin's analysis of primary and secondary sources is often
very sharp, and I use, and cite, it where I find it helpful.
Naturally, citation of those of Mukhin's analyses that the author
thinks are useful does not imply agreement to parts of his analysis
which are not cited. Nor is Mukhin responsible for any use I
have made of his research..<br />
<br />
I have checked every reference made by Mukhin and all other
scholars cited here, except in the case of primary sources available
only to those who work in the archives.<br />
<br />
<center>
<b>Bibliography</b></center>
<br />
(I have included URLs to online versions of the texts cited
whenever I have been able to locate them -- GF.)<br />
<br />
Alikhanov, Sergei. "Bagazh na brichke." <i>Kontinent</i>.
At <<a href="http://www.kontinent.org/art_view.asp?id=2020">http://www.kontinent.org/art_view.asp?id=2020</a>>.<br />
<br />
<i>Beria: Konets Kar'ery.</i> Moscow: Izd. Politicheskoy Literatury,
1991.<br />
<br />
Beria, Lavrentii. Speech, at Stalin's funeral. At <<a href="http://leader.h1.ru/beria.htm">http://leader.h1.ru/beria.htm</a>>.
Mukhin cites the original published version in <i>Komsomolskaya
Pravda,</i> No. 59, 1953, pp. 1-3 (Ubiystvo, 282). I have not
been able to see this version, but the passages Mukhin quotes
from it are identical to the on-line version cited here). Cited
as "Beria, Speech."<br />
<br />
Beria, Sergo. <i>Moy Otets Lavrentii Beria</i>. Orig. ed.
Moscow: Sovremennik, 1994. At <<a href="http://www.duel.ru/publish/beria/beria.html">http://www.duel.ru/publish/beria/beria.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Bivens, Matt, and Jonas Bernstein. "Part 2: The Russia
You Never Met." <i>Johnson's Russia List</i> #3068, 24 February
1999. At <<a href="http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3068.html">http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3068.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Brandenberger, David. "Stalin, the Leningrad Affair,
and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism," <i>Russian Review</i>
63 (2004), 241-255.<br />
<br />
Constitution of 1924: in Russian, <<a href="http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/cnst1924.htm">http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/cnst1924.htm</a>>.
In English: in Rex A. Wade ed., <i>Documents of Soviet History,
vol. 3 Lenin's Heirs 1923-1925</i>. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic
International Press, 1995; at <<a href="http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/ussr1924.html">http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/ussr1924.html</a>>
(many scanning errors).<br />
<br />
Constitution of 1936: in Russian, <<a href="http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/cnst1936.htm">http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/cnst1936.htm</a>>.
In English, <<a href="http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html">http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov. Poluderzhavniy Vlastelin. Moscow:
OLMA-Press, 2000.<br />
<br />
Dimitrov, Georgi. <i>The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1949</i>,
ed. & intro. Ivo Banac. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2003.<br />
<br />
Dobriukha, Nikolai. "Za Chto Lavrentiy Beria Vyshel iz
Doveria." <i>Izvestia Nauka</i>. February 26, 2004. At <<a href="http://www.inauka.ru/history/article38205.html">http://www.inauka.ru/history/article38205.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
"Fragmenty stenogramy dekabrskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b)
1936 goda" (Fragments of the Transcript of the December
1936 Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolshevik), 1936), in <i>Voprosy Istorii</i> No. 1, 1995,
3-22.<br />
<br />
<i>Genrikh IAgoda. Narkom Vnutrennikh Del SSSR</i>. Sbornik
documentov. Kazan', 1997.<br />
<br />
Getty, J. Arch."'Excesses are not permitted': Mass Terror
and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s." <i>The Russian
Review</i> 61 (January 2002), 113-138.<br />
<br />
- - - , <i>Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist
Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. </i>London & New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1985.<br />
<br />
- - - , "State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions
and Elections in the 1930s." <i>Slavic Review</i> 50, 1
(Spring 1991), 18-35.<br />
<br />
Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. <i>The Road to Terror:
Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939</i>.
New Haven: Yale U.P., 1999.<br />
<br />
Ilizarov, B.C. "Stalin. Shtrikhi k portretu na fone ego
biblioteki i arkhiva." <i>Novaia i Noveyshaia </i><br />
<br />
<i>Istoriia</i>,
N. 3-4, 2000. At <<a href="http://vivovoco.nns.ru/VV/PAPERS/ECCE/STALIB.HTM">http://vivovoco.nns.ru/VV/PAPERS/ECCE/STALIB.HTM</a>>.<br />
<br />
Jansen, Mark, and Nikita Petrov, <i>Stalin's Loyal Executioner:
People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895-1940.</i> Stanford: Stanford
U.P., 2002. At <<a href="http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/ezhov.html">http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/ezhov.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Khaustov, V.N, V.P. Naumov, N.C. Plotnikova, eds., <i>Lubianka:
Stalin i Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosbezopasnosti NKVD. 1937-1938.</i>
Moscow: "Materik", 2004. (Cited as "<i>Lubianka</i>.")<br />
<br />
Khinshtein, Aleksandr. "Proshchai, Beria!" ('theft'
of Beria trial materials from archive) <i>Moskovskii Komsomolets</i>
Jan. 9, 2003. Retrieved at <<a href="http://nadzor.pk.ru/articles/showart.php?id=8579">http://nadzor.pk.ru/articles/showart.php?id=8579</a>>;
verified with original at <<a href="http://www.mk.ru/newshop/bask.asp?artid=59319">http://www.mk.ru/newshop/bask.asp?artid=59319</a>>.<br />
<br />
Khlystalov, Eduard. "Predateli s marshal'skimi zvezdami,"
<i>Literaturnaia Rossia</i>, No. 12, 28 March 2003 and No. 13,
4 April 2003. At <<a href="http://www.litrossia.ru/litrossia/viewitem?item_id=18376">http://www.litrossia.ru/litrossia/viewitem?item_id=18376</a>>
and <<a href="http://www.litrossia.ru/litrossia/viewitem?item_id=18394">http://www.litrossia.ru/litrossia/viewitem?item_id=18394</a>>.
Reprinted at <<a href="http://www.hrono.ru/text/2003/hly_predat.html">http://www.hrono.ru/text/2003/hly_predat.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' has been printed many times;
I used the edition in <i>Izvestiia TsK. KPSS</i> No.3, 1989.
At <<a href="http://www.zvenigorod.ru/library/history/cccpsun/1989/3/128.htm">http://www.zvenigorod.ru/library/history/cccpsun/1989/3/128.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Kirilina, Alla. <i>Neizvestnyi Kirov</i>. StP & Moscow:
"Neva"/ OLMA-Press, 2001. (Includes text of her earlier
book <i>Rikoshet</i>.)<br />
<br />
Kokurin, A.I and Pozhalov, A.I. "'Novyi Kurs' L.P. Beria",
<i>Istoricheskiy Arkhiv</i> 4 (1996), 132-164.<br />
<br />
Knight, Amy. <i>Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant</i>. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993.<br />
<i>Lavrentiy Beria. 1953. Stenograma iul'skogo plenuma TsK
KPSS I drugie dokumenty</i>. Eds. V.<br />
<br />
Naumov, Iu. Sigachov. Moscow:
Mezhdunarodniy Fond "Demokratiia," 1999. Cited as "<i>Beria</i>."<br />
<br />
Leibowitz, Clement. <i>The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal.</i> Edmonton:Editions
Duval, 1993.<br />
<br />
<i>Lubianka. Stalin I VChK GPU OGPU NKVD. Ianvar' 1922-dekabr'
1936. Documenty</i>. Moscow: 'Materik', 2003. (Cited as "<i>Lubianka</i>
A")<br />
<br />
<i>Lubianka. Stalin I Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosbezopasnosti NKVD
1937-1938.</i> Moscow: 'Materik', 2004. (Cited as "<i>Lubianka</i>
B").<br />
<br />
McNeal, Robert. "Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalin."
<i>Canadian Slavonic Papers</i> 3 (1961), 87-97.<br />
<br />
Medvedev, Roy. Medvedev, <i>Let History Judge: The Origins
and Consequences of Stalinism</i>. New York: Knopf, 1971.<br />
<br />
- - -, "Lichnaia biblioteka 'Korifeia vsekh nauk'."
<i>Vestnik RAN</i>. No. 3 (2001), 264-7. At <<a href="http://russcience.euro.ru/biblio/med01vr.htm">http://russcience.euro.ru/biblio/med01vr.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Medvedev, Zhores. "Sekretnyy naslednik Stalina."
<i>Ural</i> (Yekaterinburg). 1999, No. 7. At <<a href="http://www.art.uralinfo.ru/LITERAT/Ural/Ural_7_99/Ural_07_99_09.htm">http://www.art.uralinfo.ru/LITERAT/Ural/Ural_7_99/Ural_07_99_09.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Mukhin, Iu. <i>Ubiystvo Stalina i Beria</i>. Moscow: Krymskii
Most-9D, 2003.<br />
<br />
Nekrasov, V.F. <i>Beriia: Konets Kar'ery.</i> Moscow: Politizdat,
1991.<br />
<br />
Nevezhin, V. A. <i>Zastol'nye Rechi Stalina. Dokumenty i Materialy.</i>
[Stalin's Table Talk] Moscow: AIRO-XX; St. Petersburg: Bulanin,
2003.<br />
<br />
O'Meara, Kelly Patricia. "Looting Russia's Free Market."
<i>Insight</i>, 2002. At <<a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_32_18/ai_91210681">http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_32_18/ai_91210681</a>>.<br />
<br />
Order No. 00447: in <i>Lubianka </i>B , No. 151, 273-281;
also at <<a href="http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/370730.htm">http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/370730.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Pavlova, Irina V. "1937: vybory kak mistifikatsiia, terror
kak real'nost'." <i>Voprosy Istorii</i>. No. 10, 2003, pp.
19-37.<br />
<br />
<i>Politburo TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR 1945-1953.</i>
Ed. Khlevniuk, O., et al. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002.<br />
<br />
Pyzhikov, Aleksandr. "Leningradskaia gruppa: put' vo
vlasti (1946-1949)", <i>Svobodnaia Mysl'</i> 3 (2001), 89-104.<br />
<br />
<i>Rossiia I SSSR v voynakh XX veka. Potery vooruzhennykh
sil. Statisticheskoe issledovanie. </i>Moscow, 'OLMA-Press',
2001. Also at <<a href="http://www.soldat.ru/doc/casualties/book/">http://www.soldat.ru/doc/casualties/book/</a>>.<br />
<br />
Simonov, Konstantin. <i>Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia.
Razmyshleniia o I.V.Staline</i>. Moscow: Novosti, 1988.<br />
<br />
Stalin, Joseph. "Vystuplenie I.V. Stalina na Rasshirennom
Zasedanii Voennogo Soveta pri Narkome<br />
Oborony," <i>Istochnik</i>
3 (1994), 72-88. A slightly different version is in <i>Lubianka</i>,
No. 92, 202-209.<br />
<br />
- - -, "On the Draft of the Constitution of the USSR."
In Russian: <i>Collected </i>Works, vol. 14. At <<a href="http://stalin1.boom.ru/14-21.txt">http://stalin1.boom.ru/14-21.txt</a>>;
in English, in J.V. Stalin, <i>Problems of Leninism</i>. Foreign
Languages Press, Peking 1976, 795-834, at <<a href="http://ptb.lashout.net/marx2mao/Stalin/SC36.html">http://ptb.lashout.net/marx2mao/Stalin/SC36.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
- - - , <i>The Stalin-Howard Interview</i>. NY: International
Publishers, 1936. At <<a href="http://stalin1.boom.ru/14-2.htm">http://stalin1.boom.ru/14-2.htm</a>>
(in Russian).<br />
<br />
- - - , Report to 17th Party Congress, January 26, 1934. At
<<a href="http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/7345/stalin/13-27.htm">http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/7345/stalin/13-27.htm</a>>
(in Russian); English edition in J.V. Stalin, <i>Problems of
Leninism</i>. Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1976, 671-765;
also at <<a href="http://ptb.lashout.net/marx2mao/Stalin/SPC34.html">http://ptb.lashout.net/marx2mao/Stalin/SPC34.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
- - -, Zakluchitel'noe slovo na plenume tsentral'nogo komiteta
VKP(b) 5 marta 1937 goda (stenograficheskii variant). At <<a href="http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/7345/stalin/14-9.htm">http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/7345/stalin/14-9.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
- - -, <i>Zastol'nye Rechi Stalina. Dokumenty i Materialy</i>.
[Stalin's Table Talk] Moscow: AIRO-XX; St. Petersburg: Bulanin,
2003.<br />
<br />
- - -, Rech' I.V. Stalina Na Plenume TsK KPSS 16 Oktiabria
1952 goda. (Speech at Plenum of the Central Committee of the
KPSU October 16 1952). Unofficial publication at <<a href="http://www.kprf.ru/analytics/10828.shtml">http://www.kprf.ru/analytics/10828.shtml</a>>.<br />
<br />
Starkov, Boris. "Sto Dney 'Lubyanskogo Marshala,'"
<i>Istochnik</i> 4 (1993), 82-90.<br />
<br />
Sukhomlinov, Andrei. <i>Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria? Neizvestnye
stranitsy ugolovnogo dela</i>. Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2004.<br />
<br />
Thurston, Robert W. "Fear and Belief in the USSR's 'Great
Terror': Response To Arrest, 1935-1939." <i>Slavic Review</i>
45 (1986), 213-234.<br />
<br />
- - -, "On Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives,
and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest." <i>Slavic
Review </i>45 (1986), 238-244.<br />
<br />
- - -, "Social Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and
Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941." <i>Journal of Social History</i>
24, No. 3 (1991) 541-562.<br />
<br />
- - -, <i>Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia.</i> New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996.<br />
<i>Tragediia Sovetskoy Derevni. Kollektivizatsiia I Raskulachivanie.
Documenty I Materialy. 1927-1939. Tom 3. Konets 1930-1933</i>.
Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001.<br />
<br />
Williamson, Anne. "The Rape of Russia." Testimony
before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the
U.S. House of Representatives, September 21, 1999. At <<a href="http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm">http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Yakovlev, A.S. <i>Tsel' Zhizni. Zapiski Aviakonstruktora</i>.
M. 1973. Chapter 20, "Moskva v oborone," <<a href="http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/yakovlev-as/20.html">http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/yakovlev-as/20.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Zakharov, Aleksandr. "'Prigovor privedion v ispolnenie.'"
<i>Krasnay Zvezda</i> Dec. 20, 2003. At <<a href="http://www.redstar.ru/2003/12/20_12/6_01.html">http://www.redstar.ru/2003/12/20_12/6_01.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Zhukov, Iurii. <i>Inoy Stalin. Politicheskie reformy v SSSR
v 1933-1937 gg</i>. Moscow:"Vagrius," 2003.<br />
<br />
- - - , "Iosif Stalin: diktator ili liberal?" <i>Komsomolskaya
Pravda</i>, Dec. 3, 2002. Transcript of telephone Q&A based
on series "Zhupel Stalina." At <<a href="http://www.kp.ru/daily/22927/9/print/">http://www.kp.ru/daily/22927/9/print/</a>>.
See below.<br />
<br />
- - - , "Kul'tovaia mekhanika," <i>Literaturnaya
Gazeta</i> No. 9, March 5-11 2003. At <<a href="http://www.lgz.ru/archives/html_arch/lg092003/Polosy/art15_1.htm">http://www.lgz.ru/archives/html_arch/lg092003/Polosy/art15_1.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
- - - , "Stalin ne nuzhdalsia v partii vlasti,"
<i>Politicheskiy Zhurn</i>al, Arkhiv No 15 (18) 26 April 2004.
At <<a href="http://www.politjournal.ru/index.php?action=Articles&dirid=50&tek=1114&issue=31">http://www.politjournal.ru/index.php?action=Articles&dirid=50&tek=1114&issue=31</a>>.<br />
<br />
- - -, "Repressii I Konstitutsiia SSSR 1936 goda."
<i>Voprosy Istorii</i>. 2002, No. 1, pp. 3-26.<br />
<br />
- - -, <i>Tayny Kremlia: Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov.</i>
Moscow: Terra-Knizhnyy Klub, 2000.<br />
<br />
- - -, "Zhupel Stalina", <i>Komsomolskaya Pravda</i>,
November 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 2002. Also widely available
on the Internet, e.g. at <<a href="http://www.x-libri.ru/elib/smi__958/">http://www.x-libri.ru/elib/smi__958/</a>>.<br />
<b> </b>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-90953805250181093332012-06-30T19:45:00.000-04:002012-08-27T01:22:10.873-04:00Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform - Part 2<b>by Grover Fur</b><br />
<br />
<b>During the War</b><br />
<br />
1. Toward the end of the Second
World War Stalin and his supporters on the Politburo made one
more attempt to get the Bolshevik Party out of direct control
over the Soviet government. Here is how Yuri Zhukov describes
this incident:<br />
<blockquote>
In January 1944 . . . for the first time during the war there
was a joint convocation of both the [Central Committee] Plenum
and a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Molotov and
Malenkov prepared a draft of a Central Committee decree according
to which the Party would be legally distanced from power. It
would retain only agitation and propaganda; no one would deprive
it of these normal party matters, and participation in the selection
of cadres, which was also completely natural. <i>But it simply
forbade the Party from interfering in economics and the working
of the organs of the state</i>. Stalin read the draft, changed
six words in it, and wrote "Agreed" on it. What happened
next remains a mystery. . . .<br />
. . . This was a new attempt to lead the Party into the State
stable, retaining for it only those functions it really fulfilled
during the war. The draft has five signatures: Molotov, Malenkov,
Stalin, Khrushchev, Andreev. There was no stenographic record,
and we can only guess how others voted. Alas, even the all-powerful
State Committee for Defense, with all four members in the Politburo
of the Central Committee, could not shatter the old order of
things. <i>This proves yet one more time that Stalin never had
the power that both anti-Stalinists and Stalinists attribute
to him</i>. (Zhukov, Kul'tovaia; emphasis added) [1]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref1"></a></blockquote>
2. We do not know how this "distancing"
of the Party from economics and the state was to have been effected.
Presumably, though, some other method of staffing the state organs
would have been envisaged. Would this have meant a return to
elections as specified in the 1936 Constitution?<br />
<br />
3. Whatever the answers to these
questions, it seems likely that the Central Committee, made up
largely of Party First Secretaries, once again rebuffed the Stalin
leadership's plans for fundamental change in the Soviet system.
In his "Secret Speech" Khrushchev denied that any such
Plenum had taken place at all! Since most of the C.C. members
in the audience had to have known this was a lie, it may be that
the purpose of this lie was to tacitly signal them that this
dangerous move against their power was now formally "buried."<br />
<br />
<b>After the War</b><br />
<br />
4. As we've seen, Stalin believed
an important problem for both the USSR and the Bolshevik Party
was the situation of "dual power." The Party, not the
government, really ruled society. Increasingly, the Party officials
exercised control by oversight, or supervision, rather than as
managers of production.<br />
<br />
5. Getting the party out of
direct control of the state would serve a number of purposes:<br />
<br />
- It
would institute the 1936 Constitution and strengthen the ties
of the Soviet population to the Soviet state.<br />
- It
would return the running of state institutions to those who were
really qualified.<br />
- It
would save the Party from degenerating -- in its upper levels
-- into a caste of parasitical and corrupt careerists.<br />
<br />
6. Until the war the Politburo
had met at least twice a week. In May 1941 Stalin became the
official head of the Soviet state, replacing Molotov as Chairman
of the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom, the official
executive body of the government of the USSR.<br />
<br />
7. But during the war the USSR
was in reality run neither by this body nor by the Party, but
by the State Committee for Defense composed of Stalin and three
of his closest associates. During the war the Central Committee
held only one Plenum, while not only during the war, but also
after it, the Politburo met rarely. According to Pyzhikov, "the
Politburo, for all practical purposes, did not function."
Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev believes that the Politburo
met only 6 times in 1950, 5 times in 1951, and 4 times in 1952. [2] That is, Stalin took the
Politburo out of the running of the state (Pyzhikov, 100; Medvedev,
Sekretnyi).<br />
<br />
8. Stalin seems to have neglected
his role as head of the Party. CC Plenums became rare. No Party
Congress was held for the thirteen years between 1939 and 1952.
After the war Stalin signed joint decisions of the Party and
government simply as Chairman of the Council of Ministers (the
renamed Council of Peoples' Commissars), leaving one of the other
Party secretaries, Zhdanov or Malenkov, to sign on behalf of
the Party (Pyzhikov 100)<br />
<br />
9. The Party's authority remained
high. But perhaps this was so only because Stalin was still General
Secretary of the Party. He was the only Allied leader to remain
in office after the war: Roosevelt had died, and Churchill was
voted out of office in 1945. It is no exaggeration to say that,
among working people, Stalin was the most famous, and most respected,
person in the world. The communist movement he headed was the
hope of hundreds of millions of people. It had expanded tremendously
as a result of the victory over fascism. Stalin's great prestige
as head of state gave authority to the Party apparatus (Mukhin,
Ubiystvo 622; Ch. 13 <i>passim</i>).<br />
<br />
10. Stalin's actions suggest
that he was still trying to remove the Party from direct rule
over the state. However, if this was so he went about it cautiously.
Perhaps we can infer some reasons for this caution:<br />
<br />
- Showing
an unwarranted lack of trust in the Party would be a bad example
to the other countries of the world, where the Communist Parties
had not seized power yet.<br />
- The
Central Committee and <i>nomenklatura</i> would oppose it, as
they had before the war.<br />
Therefore, this would have to be done quietly, with as little
disruption as possible. (Mukhin, Ubyistvo 611)<br />
<br />
<b>The 1947 Draft of the Party Program</b><br />
<br />
11. There is probably more to
the Stalin leadership's plans for democratization than we know
about today. Aleksandr Pyzhikov, a very anti-communist and anti-Stalin
historian, has quoted tantalizing selections of a 1947 draft
of a Party program to promote further democracy and egalitarianism
in the USSR. This fascinating and hitherto utterly unknown plan
has never been published and is, evidently, not yet available
to other researchers.<br />
<br />
12. Here is the section quoted
verbatim by Pyzhikov:<br />
<blockquote>
The development of socialist democracy on the basis of the
completion of the construction of a classless socialist society
will increasingly convert the dictatorship of the proletariat
into the dictatorship of the Soviet people. As each member of
the whole population is gradually drawn into the day to day management
of state affairs, the growth of the population's communist consciousness
and culture, and the development of socialist democracy will
lead to the progressive dying out of forms of compulsion in the
dictatorship of the Soviet people, and to a progressive replacement
of measures of compulsion by the influence of public opinion,
to a progressive narrowing of the political functions of the
state, and to the conversion of the state into, in the main,
an organ of the management of the economic life of society.</blockquote>
Pyzhikov summarizes other sections of this unpublished document
as follows:<br />
<blockquote>
In particular [the draft] concerned
the development of the democratization of the Soviet order. This
plan recognized as essential a universal process of drawing workers
into the running of the state, into daily active state and social
activity on the basis of a steady development of the cultural
level of the masses and a maximal simplification of the functions
of state management. It proposed in practice to proceed to the
unification of productive work with participation in the management
of state affairs, with the transition to the successive carrying
out of the functions of [state] management by all working people.
It also expatiated upon the idea of the introduction of direct
legislative activity by the people, for which the following were
considered essential: </blockquote>
<blockquote>
a) to implement universal voting
and decision-making on the majority of the most important questions
of governmental life in both the social and economic spheres,
as well as in questions of living conditions and cultural development; </blockquote>
<blockquote>
b) to widely develop legislative
initiative from below, by means of granting to social organizations
the rights to submit to the Supreme Soviet proposals for new
legislation; </blockquote>
<blockquote>
c) to confirm the right of citizens
and social organizations to directly submit proposals to the
Supreme Soviet on the most important questions of international
and internal policy. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Nor was the principle of election
of managers ignored. The plan of the Party program raised the
issue of the realization, according to the degree of development
towards communism, of <i>the selection of all responsible members
of the state apparatus by election</i>, of changes in the functioning
of a series of state organs in the direction of converting them
increasingly into institutions in charge of accounting and supervision
of the economy as a whole. For this the maximum possible development
of independent voluntary organizations was seen as important.
Attention was paid to the strengthening of the significance of
social opinion in the realization of the communist transformation
of the population's consciousness, of the development, on the
basis of socialist democracy among the broad popular masses,
of "socialist citizenship," "the heroism of work,"
and "valor of the Red Army." [emphasis added, GF]</blockquote>
13. Again according to Pyzhikov,
Zhdanov reported on the work of the planning commission at the
February 1947 Central Committee Plenum. He proposed convening
the 19th Party Congress at the end of 1947 or 1948. He also set
forth a plan for a simplified order of convocations of party
conferences once a year, with "compulsory renewal"
of not less than one-sixth of the membership of the Central Committee
per year. If put into effect, and if "renewal" actually
resulted in more turnover of C.C. members, this would have meant
that First Secretaries and other Party leaders in the C.C. would
have been less entrenched in their positions, making room for
new blood in the Party's leading body, facilitating rank-and-file
criticism of Party leaders (Pyzhikov 96).<br />
<br />
14. This bold plan echoes many
of the ideas of the "withering away of the state" envisaged
in Lenin's seminal work <i>The State and Revolution</i>, which
in its turn develops ideas Lenin found in Marx and Engels. In
proposing direct democratic participation in all vital state
decisions by the Soviet people and their popular organizations,
and "renewal" -- with at least the possibility of replacement
-- of no less than 1/6 of the Central Committee every year through
a Party Conference, this Party plan envisaged the development
of democracy from below in both the state and in the Party itself.<br />
<br />
15. But this plan came to nothing.
As with the previous proposals for democratization of the Soviet
state and Party outlined previously, we don't know the details
of how this happened. Probably it was rejected at the Central
Committee Plenum. The 19th Party Congress was postponed until
1952. Again, we do not know why. The nature of the draft Party
plan suggests that opposition from the Central Committee -- the
First Secretaries -- may have been responsible. [3]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref3"></a><br />
<br />
<b>The Nineteenth Party Congress</b><br />
<br />
16. It appears that the Stalin
leadership made one last effort at separating the Party from
direct control over the State at the 19th Party Congress in 1952
and the Central Committee Plenum immediately following it. Beginning
with Khrushchev, the Party <i>nomenklatura</i> tried to destroy
any memory of this Congress, and moved immediately to eradicate
what was done at it. Under Brezhnev the transcripts of all the
Party Congresses up through the 18th were published. That of
the 19th Congress has never been published to this day. Stalin
gave only a short speech at the Congress -- which was published.
But he gave a 90-minute speech at the Central Committee Plenum
that followed it immediately. That speech has never been published,
except for very short extracts, and neither has the transcript
of this Plenum. [4]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref4"></a><br />
<br />
17. Stalin called the Congress
to change the status of the Party and its organizational structure.
Among those changes:<br />
<br />
- The
Party's name was officially changed from "All-Union Communist
Party (Bolshevik) to "Communist Party of the Soviet Union."
This mirrored the names of most other communist parties in the
world, tying the Party to the state. [5] <br />
- A
"Presidium" replaced the Politburo of the Central Committee.
This name denoted the representatives of another representative
organ (the C.C.) -- like, for example, the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet. It also got the "political" out of the name
-- after all, the whole Party was political, not just the leading
body.<br />
<br />
18. No doubt it also better
suggested a body that rules the Party only, not party and state.
The Politburo had been a body of mixed membership. It had included
the Chairman of the Council of Ministers (the head of the executive
body of the state -- that is, head of state); the Chairman of
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of the legislative
body); the General Secretary of the Party (Stalin); one or two
more Party secretaries; and one or two government ministers.
Decisions of the Politburo were effective for both government
and party. [4]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref4"></a><br />
<br />
19. Therefore, in comparison
to the Politburo's virtually supreme position in the country,
the role of the Presidium was greatly reduced. Since the head
of state and head of the Supreme Soviet did not have reserved
seats in it, the Presidium was to be the leading body of the
Communist Party only.<br />
<br />
20. Other changes were made:<br />
<br />
- The
post of General Secretary -- Stalin's own post -- was abolished.
Now Stalin was only one of 10 Party secretaries, [6]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref6"></a> all of whom were in the new Presidium, which
now contained 25 members and 11 candidate-members. This was much
larger than 9-11 members of the former Politburo. Its large size
would make it more of a deliberative, interim body, rather than
one in which many executive decisions could be routinely and
swiftly made.<br />
- Most
of these Presidium members seem to have been government officials,
not top Party leaders. Khrushchev and Malenkov later wondered
how Stalin could even have heard of the people whom he suggested
for the first Presidium, since they were not well-known Party
leaders (i.e. not First Secretaries). Presumably, Stalin nominated
them because of their positions in the State -- as opposed to
the Party -- leadership. [7]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref7"></a><br />
<br />
21. Stalin followed up his resignation
as General Secretary of the Party, which took place at the 19th
Congress, with his proposal, at the CC Plenum right after it,
to resign from the Central Committee altogether, remaining only
as Head of State (Chairman of the Council of Ministers).<br />
<br />
22. If Stalin were not in the
Central Committee, but were only Head of State, government officials
would no longer feel they had to report to the Presidium, the
Party's highest body. Stalin's act would remove authority from
the Party's officials, whose "oversight" role in the
State was unnecessary, in terms of production. Without Stalin
as the head of the Party the Party leadership, the <i>nomenklatura</i>,
would have less prestige. Rank-and-file Party members would no
longer feel compelled to "elect" -- that is, to merely
confirm -- the candidates recommended by the First Secretaries
and the Central Committee.<br />
<br />
23. Viewed in this light Stalin's
resignation from the Central Committee might be a disaster for
the <i>nomenklatura</i>. They might have felt that they were
protected from merciless criticism by rank-and-file communists
only by "Stalin's shadow." It would mean that, in future,
only intelligent and capable people would survive in the Party
<i>nomenklatura</i>, as in the State apparatus (Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i>
618-23).<br />
<br />
24. The lack of a published
transcript suggests that things occurred at this Plenum, and
Stalin said things in his speech, that the nomenklatura did not
wish to make public. It also indicates -- and it's important
to stress this -- that Stalin was not "all-powerful. For
example, Stalin's serious criticism of Molotov and Mikoian at
this Plenum was not published till long after his death. [8]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref8"></a><br />
<br />
25. The famous Soviet writer
Konstantin Simonov was present as a C.C. member. He recorded
Malenkov's shocked and panicked reaction when Stalin proposed
a vote on freeing him from the post of secretary of the Central
Committee. (Simonov, 244-5) Faced with vociferous opposition,
Stalin didn't insist. [9]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref9"></a><br />
<br />
26. As soon as they possibly
could do so the Party leadership took steps to annul the decisions
of the 19th Party Congress. At its meeting of March 2, with Stalin
still alive though unconscious, an abbreviated Presidium -- essentially,
the old Politburo members -- met at Stalin's dacha. There they
made the decision to reduce the Presidium back to 10 members,
instead of 25. This was, basically, the old Politburo again.
The number of Party secretaries was reduced once again to five.
Khrushchev was made the "coordinator" of the secretariat,
and then, five months later, "first secretary." Finally
in 1966 the name Presidium was changed back to Politburo.<br />
<br />
27. During the rest of the history
of the USSR the Party continued to rule Soviet society, its upper
ranks becoming a corrupt, self-selected, self-aggrandizing stratum
of privileged elitists. Under Gorbachev this ruling group abolished
the USSR, giving itself the economic wealth and political leadership
of the new capitalist society. At the same time it destroyed
the savings of, and stole the social benefits from, the Soviet
working class and peasants, whose labor had built everything,
while it appropriated the immense publicly-created wealth of
the USSR. This same former <i>nomenklatura</i> continues to run
the post-Soviet states today.<br />
<br />
<b>Lavrentii Beria</b> [10]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref10"></a><br />
<br />
28. Beria is the most calumniated
figure in Soviet history. Therefore the reversal of historical
judgment about Beria's career that began abruptly after the end
of the Soviet Union has been even more dramatic than the scholarly
re-evaluation of Stalin's role that is the main subject of these
articles.<br />
<br />
29. Beria's "Hundred Days"
-- really, 112 days, from Stalin's death on March 5 1953 to Beria's
removal on June 26 -- witnessed the inception of a large number
of dramatic reforms. Had the Soviet leadership permitted these
reforms to fully develop, the history of the Soviet Union, the
international communist movement, the Cold War -- in short, of
the last half of the 20th century - would have been dramatically
different.<br />
<br />
30. Beria's reform initiatives
included at least the following, all of which merit, and some
of which are now receiving, special study even while the Russian
government keeps most vital primary sources about them closed
even to trusted researchers:<br />
<br />
- The
reunification of Germany as a non-socialist, neutralist state,
a step that would have been wildly popular among Germans, and
one distinctly unwelcome to the NATO allies, including the USA.<br />
- Normalization
of relations with Yugoslavia, which promised to pull it back
from its tacit alliance with the West towards the Cominform.<br />
- A
nationalities policy that opposed "russification" in
the recently-annexed areas of Western Ukraine and the Baltic
states, together with the goal of reaching out to some, at least,
of the nationalist émigré groups. A reformed nationalities
policy in other non-Russian areas including Georgia and Belorussia.<br />
- Rehabilitations
and compensation for those unjustly convicted by special judicial
bodies (<i>troikas</i> and the NKVD "Special Commissions")
during the 1930s and 1940s. Under Beria this process would have
been done very differently from the way it was later carried
out under Khrushchev, who "rehabilitated" many who
were unquestionably guilty.<br />
<br />
31. Some of Beria's other reforms
were largely carried out, including<br />
- Amnesty
for a million of those imprisoned for crimes against the state.<br />
- An
end to the investigation of the "Doctors' Plot;" together
with admission that the accusations had been unjust and punishment
of the NKVD officials involved, including the removal of Kruglov,
former NKVD head, from the Central Committee altogether. [11]<br />
- Curbing
the authority of the "Special Commission" of the NKVD
to sentence people to death or long prison terms. <br />
- In
a move not only against the Stalin "cult" but against
"cults" of leaders generally, forbidding the display
of portraits of leaders at holiday rallies. This was rescinded
by the Party leadership shortly after Beria's removal.<br />
<br />
<b>Beria's Moves towards Democratic Reform</b><br />
<br />
32. Officially, Beria was arrested
by his fellow Politburo members plus some generals on June 26,
1953. But the details of this supposed arrest are murky, and
contradictory versions exist. [12]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref12"></a>
In any event, during the July 1953 CC Plenum devoted to accusing
Beria of various crimes, Mikoyan said:<br />
<blockquote>
When he [Beria] made his presentation on Red Square over the
grave of Comrade Stalin, after his speech I said: 'In your speech
there is a place in which you guarantee each citizen the rights
and freedoms foreseen in the Constitution. Even in the speech
of a simple orator that is no empty phrase, and in the speech
of a minister of internal affairs -- that is a program of action,
you must fulfill it.' He answered me: 'And I will fulfill it.'
(Beria 308-9; Mukhin 178)</blockquote>
33. Beria had said something
that had alarmed Mikoyan. Apparently it was the fact that, at
this crucial place in his Red Square speech and with reference
to the Constitution, Beria omitted any reference to the Communist
Party, and spoke only about the Soviet government. Beria spoke
second after Malenkov, a public sign that he was now the second-ranking
person in the Soviet state. He had said:<br />
<blockquote>
The workers, the kolkhoz peasants,
the intelligentsia of our country can work peacefully and with
confidence, knowing that the Soviet Government will diligently
and untiringly guarantee their rights as written in the Stalin
Constitution. . . . And henceforth the foreign policy of the
Soviet Government will be that of the Leninist-Stalinist policy
of the retention and strengthening of peace . . . (Beria, Speech).</blockquote>
34. Mukhin suggests the following
plausible understanding of this passage:<br />
<blockquote>
The simple people hardly understood the meaning of what Beria
said, but for the Party <i>nomenklatura</i> this was a sharp
blow. Beria intended to lead the country ahead without the Party,
i.e. without them; he promised the people to guard their rights,
which were not given them by the Party, but by some Constitution!
(Mukhin, 179)</blockquote>
35. At this same June 1953 Plenum,
Khrushchev said<br />
<blockquote>
Remember, then Rakosi [Hungarian Communist leader] said: I'd
like to know what is decided in the Council of Ministers and
what in the Central Committee, what kind of division there should
be. . . . Beria then carelessly said: What Central Committee?
Let the Council of Ministers decide, and let the Central Committee
concern itself with cadre and propaganda. (Beria 91)</blockquote>
36. Later at this same Plenum
Lazar Kaganovich expanded on Khrushchev's point:<br />
<blockquote>
The Party for us is the highest thing. No one is permitted
to speak as that scoundrel [Beria] said: the Central Committee
[for] cadres and propaganda, not political leadership, not the
leadership of all life as we, Bolsheviks, understand it. (Beria
138)</blockquote>
37. These men seem to have believed
that Beria intended to get the Party out of the process of directly
running the country. This was very similar to what Stalin and
his associates had struggled for during the Constitutional discussions
of 1935-37. One can discern it again in the 1947 draft Party
program and in Stalin's restructuring of the Bolshevik Party
during the 19th Party Congress and succeeding Central Committee
Plenum only a few months before.<br />
<br />
38. Beria's son Sergo asserts
that his father and Stalin agreed about the need to get the Party
out of direct management of Soviet society.<br />
<blockquote>
My father's relations with the
Party organs were complicated. . . . [H]e never hid his
relations with the Party apparatus. For example, he told Khrushchev
and Malenkov directly that the Party apparatus corrupts people.
It was all appropriate for earlier times, when the Soviet state
had just been formed. But, my father asked them, who needs these
controllers today?<br />
He had the same kind of frank
talks with directors of industries and factories who, naturally,
did not care at all for the do-nothings from the Central Committee.<br />
Father was just as frank to
Stalin too. Joseph Vissarionovich agreed that the Party apparatus
had removed itself from responsibility for concrete matters and
had nothing to do but talk. I know that a year before his death,
when Stalin presented the new makeup of the Presidium of the
Central Committee, he gave a speech in which the main point was
that it was necessary to find new forms of running the country,
that the old ways were not the best. A serious discussion took
place at that time about the Party's activity. (Sergo Beria,
<i>Moy Otets Lavrentii Beria</i>)</blockquote>
39. Beria's planned restructuring
of the State-Party relationship would have probably been very
popular with rank-and-file communists, to say nothing of the
majority of non-party Soviet citizens. But to the <i>nomenklatura</i>
it was very threatening.<br />
<br />
40. Mukhin puts it this way:<br />
<blockquote>
Beria did not hold back in putting into people's minds the
idea that the country ought to be ruled, in the center and in
the localities, by the Soviets, as the Constitution provided,
and the party ought to be an ideological organ that would, through
propaganda, guarantee that by its aid the deputies of the Soviets
at all levels would be communists. Beria proposed to resurrect
the functioning of the Constitution in its full sense, its slogan
-- "All Power to the Soviets!" While Beria was operating
exclusively in the sphere of ideas, this might have been unpleasant
for the <i>nomenklatura</i>, but hardly frightening. Since they
had power, they would have selected delegates to the Supreme
Soviet and instruct them in such a way that Beria's ideas could
not be put into effect. But, if Beria did not permit the secretaries
and the Central Committee to direct the elections and the session
of the Supreme Soviet, then what kind of decisions would the
deputies reach? (<i>Ubiystvo</i> 363-4)</blockquote>
41. Logically this would have
seriously alienated Beria from most of the Party <i>nomenklatura</i>.
(<i>Ubiystvo</i><span style="color: blue;"> </span>380) Khrushchev
led, and represented the interests of, this group or, at the
very least, of a large and activist part of it. And Khrushchev
had quite a different concept of "democracy." Famous
film director Mikhail Romm recorded Khrushchev's words at a meeting
with intellectuals:<br />
<blockquote>
Of course all of us here have listened to you, spoken with
you. But who will decide? In our country the people must decide.
And the people -- who is that? That is the Party. And who is
the Party? That is us. We are the Party. That means that we will
decide. I will decide. Understand? (Alikhanov)</blockquote>
42. As Mukhin puts it: "The
Party, as an organization of millions of communists, was at an
end. The group of people at its summit became the Party."
(Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i> 494)<br />
<br />
<b>Deaths of Stalin and Beria . . . and Others?</b><br />
<br />
43. In addition to the mysterious
circumstances of Beria's death there is considerable evidence
that Stalin was either left to die on the floor of the office
in his dacha after suffering a stroke or, perhaps, even poisoned.
We don't have time or space to summarize this question here.<br />
<br />
44. However, for our present
purposes it is not necessary. The wide circulation and credence
given to these stories among Russians of all political camps
show that many Russians believe Stalin's and Beria's deaths were
all too convenient for the <i>nomenklatura</i>. The evidence
that Beria, like Stalin, wanted a communist <i>perestroika</i>
-- a "restructuring," albeit of political, not economic,
power, instead of the capitalist super-exploitation and fleecing
of the country that has gone under that name since the late 1980s
-- is quite independent of any evidence that they may have been
murdered.<br />
<br />
45. The immediate result of
Stalin's and Beria's failures at democratization was to leave
the USSR in the hands of the Party leadership. No workers' democracy
came to pass in the Soviet Union. Top Party leaders continued
to monopolize all important positions, including those in the
state and the economy, and developed into a fully parasitical,
exploitative stratum with strong similarities to their counterparts
in frankly capitalist countries.<br />
<br />
46. In a real sense this stratum
is still in power today. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and the rest
of the leaders of Russia and of the post-Soviet states are all
former members of the Party leadership. They long milked the
Soviet Union's citizens as super-privileged functionaries. Then,
under Gorbachev's leadership, they presided over the privatization
of all the collectively-produced property that belonged to the
working class of the USSR, impoverishing not only the workers,
but the large middle class in the process. This has been called
the greatest expropriation in the history of the world. [13]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref13"></a> The Party <i>nomenklatura</i> destroyed the
Soviet Union. (Bivens & Bernstein; O'Meara; Williamson)<br />
<br />
47. To cover up their own roles
in the massive executions of the 1930s, their successes in frustrating
Stalin's attempts at democratization, their refusals to implement
Stalin's and Beria's reforms -- in short, to cover up their refusal
to democratize the Soviet Union -- Khrushchev and the top party
leaders blamed Stalin for everything, lying about the existence
of serious conspiracies in the USSR in the 1930s, and covering
up their own roles in the mass executions that ensued.<br />
<br />
48. Khrushchev's "secret
speech" of 1956 was the single greatest blow to the world
communist movement in history. It gave encouragement to anti-communists
everywhere, who decided that for once here was a communist leader
they could believe. Documents released since the end of the USSR
make it clear that virtually every accusation Khrushchev leveled
at Stalin in this speech was a lie. This realization, in turn,
compels us to inquire into Khrushchev's real reasons for attacking
Stalin the way he did. [14]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="ref14"></a>
Russian researchers have already shown that the "official"
charges against Beria cited by Khrushchev and his cohorts in
the Soviet leadership are either false, or wholly lacking in
evidence. Beria was judicially murdered for reasons that his
murderers never revealed. The "bodyguard of lies" surrounding
both of these events compel us to ask: What was <i>really</i>
going on? The present essay suggests one answer.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions and Future Research</b><br />
<br />
49. Given that Stalin explicitly
ruled out competing political <i>parties</i> in his plan for
contested elections, it is fair to ask: How "democratic"
would the result have been, if Stalin had had his way? Answers
to questions about democracy have to begin with another question:
"What do you mean by 'democracy'?"<br />
<br />
50. In the industrial capitalist
world it means a system where political parties compete in elections,
but in which all the political parties are controlled by elite,
extremely wealthy, and highly authoritarian, people and groups.
Nor does "democracy" mean that capitalism itself could
ever be "voted out" of power. This "democracy"
is a <i>form</i> and a <i>technique</i> of capitalist class rule
-- in short, of "lack of democracy."<br />
<br />
51. Could contested elections
among citizens and citizen groups, within the limits of acceptance
of working-class rule, have worked in the USSR? Could they work
in some future socialist society? What is the role of "representative
democracy," that is, of elections, in a society that aims
at classlessness? Because these provisions of the 1936 Constitution
were never put into effect in the USSR, we can never know what
the strengths and weaknesses of this proposal would have been.
Marx and Engels made important deductions about the nature of
proletarian democracy based upon their study of the practice
of the Paris Commune. It is a tragedy that we do not have a parallel
experience of contested elections in the Soviet Union in Stalin's
time. No doubt there would have been both strengths and weaknesses,
from which we could have learned much.<br />
<br />
52. Scholars motivated by political
anti-communism will continue to breathe life into the old and
false, but not yet sufficiently discredited, Khrushchev / Cold
War "anti-Stalin" paradigm. But the process of re-interpreting
the history of the Soviet Union in the light of the flood of
formerly secret Soviet documents has long since begun in Russia.
It will soon take hold elsewhere. A primary purpose of this essay
is to introduce others to this development.<br />
<br />
53. One point will strike almost
every reader right away. According to the "cult of personality,"
of adulation that surrounded Stalin, we have been conditioned
to think of Stalin as an "all-powerful dictator." This
foundational falsehood of the Cold War / Khrushchevite historical
paradigm, exploded by the research reported here, has fatally
distorted our understanding of Soviet history. In fact, Stalin
was never "all-powerful." He was stymied by the combined
efforts of other Party leaders. He was never able to attain his
goal of constitutional reforms. Nor was he able to control the
First Secretaries and the local NKVD.<br />
<br />
54. The "cult" disguised
these political struggles. Transcripts of Central Committee Plena
show that, though at times Bolshevik leaders did directly disagree
with Stalin, this occurred rarely. Political disputes could not
be brought out into the open and resolved. Instead they were
dealt with in other venues. Some of these venues were informal,
as evidently in the case of the First Secretaries in July 1937.
Some were dealt with by police methods, political disagreement
being interpreted as hostile opposition.<br />
<br />
55. Whatever the mechanism,
the effect of the "cult" was authoritarian, and deeply
anti-democratic. Stalin seems to be one of the few Soviet leaders
to have understood this to a degree. Throughout his life he condemned
the "cult" many times. [15]
Clearly, though, he never fully recognized how harmful it would
inevitably be.<br />
<br />
56. The conclusions reached
here, almost entirely on the basis of others' research, suggest
a few important areas for further exploration.<br />
- What
form can "democracy" take in a socialist society with
a goal of developing towards a classless society? Would the implementation
of the 1936 Constitution as envisaged by Stalin have worked,
both to democratize the Soviet Union, and to restore the Bolshevik
Party to its original role, as an organization of dedicated revolutionaries
whose primary job was to lead the country towards communism?
Or did this model already incorporate so many aspects of bourgeois
capitalist concepts of democracy that it might have hastened,
rather than impeded, the evolution of the USSR towards capitalism?<br />
- What
is the proper role of a communist party in such a society? What
are the specific forms of political leadership that are compatible
with democratic empowerment of the working class? What forms
of political (and economic) leadership are in contradiction with
these goals?<br />
<br />
57. Once we question the idea
that elections and "representative" government are
sufficient to make the state express the interests of the workers
and peasants, it follows that the 1936 Constitution, even if
implemented, would not have accomplished this either. This might
suggest that the "solution" is not to make the state
stronger and the Party weaker -- as it appears Stalin and Beria
thought. Marxists believe that the state will be run by some
class or other, so if a new ruling class arises from the top
stratum of the Party, or from any other part of society, it will
rule, and will change the state to make that rule more effective.
This in turn suggests that the Party -- State distinction is
artificial and deceptive, and should be done away with.<br />
<br />
- The
term "bureaucratism" / "bureaucracy," while
it points to one kind of problem, conceals others. I suggest
that the two questions above -- democracy and the role of the
party -- indicate more fruitful, and more materialist, ways of
thinking about the problem of the relationship between the organized,
politically conscious part of the population of a socialist or
communist society, and the less organized and politically conscious,
but still economically productive majority. <br />
- The
Bolsheviks generally and Stalin specifically made a big distinction
between politics and technical skill or education. But they never
dealt adequately with the contradiction between "Red"
and "expert," as this dilemma was termed during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. The idea shared by virtually all
socialists that political "oversight" or "supervision"
could be separated from technical knowledge and production reflected,
in part, the mistaken notion that "technique" -- science
-- was politically neutral, and that if done efficiently, economic
production itself was politically "left" or "communist."
The dilemma of the State -- Party contradiction followed from
this.<br />
- What
does "inner-party democracy" mean in the context of
a communist party? In the USSR, many of the oppositional forces
whose views were defeated at the Party Conferences and Congresses
of the 1920s developed into conspiracies, ultimately aiming at
assassination of the Party leadership, a <i>coup d'état</i>,
and collaboration with and espionage for hostile capitalist powers.
At the same time, local Party leaders developed dictatorial habits,
which alienated them from the Party rank-and-file (and of course
from the much more numerous non-communist population as well),
while guaranteeing them material privileges.<br />
<br />
58. The material benefits of
high Party office must have played an important, even a decisive,
role in the development of the stratum called the <i>nomenklatura</i>.
Likewise, Stalin's evident goal of removing the Party from <i>direct</i>
rule and returning it to "agitation and propaganda"
might suggest some awareness of this contradiction by Stalin
himself, and perhaps by others too. To what extent were large
pay differentials essential to stimulate industrialization in
the USSR? If they were essential, was it an error to permit Party
members access to material privileges -- high pay, better housing,
special stores, etc.? The political context in which these decisions
were made, in the late '20s and early '30s, needs to be more
fully explored. The discussions, now unavailable, around ending
the "Party Maximum" wage sometime in the early '30s,
need to be discovered and studied.<br />
<br />
59. Zhukov and Mukhin seem to
believe that the tactic they perceive, and attribute to Stalin
and Beria -- that of getting the party leaders out of the business
of running the state -- was indeed the best chance of preventing
the Party from degenerating. As I suggest above, perhaps the
real cause of degeneration is the defense of their own privileges,
rather than the "Red vs expert" contradiction in itself.<br />
<br />
60. Of course, material incentives
had been thought necessary, first, to recruit skilled but bourgeois,
anti-communist and anti-working-class intellectuals into helping
build the USSR's industrial base. From there it could be argued
that higher pay was necessary to encourage technically-skilled
people (including skilled workers) to join the Bolshevik Party;
or, to work hard under adverse living and working conditions,
often at danger to one's health and at the cost of sacrificing
one's family life. From there the whole panoply of capitalist-like
inequalities could be, and were, justified.<br />
<br />
61. Maybe Stalin and Beria believed
that returning the Party alone to a "purely political"
function could have prevented its degeneration. Since this plan
-- if it was theirs -- was never put into effect, we can't really
know. But I suspect that the issue of "material incentives,"
i.e. economic inequality, is the fundamental one. In conversations
with Felix Chuev the aged Molotov mused about the need for more
and more "equalization," and worried about the future
of socialism in the USSR as he saw inequality increasing. Molotov
did not trace the roots of this development back into Stalin's
or Lenin's day. In fact Molotov, like Stalin, was unable to look
at Lenin's legacy critically, though the need to preserve and
expand inequalities in order to stimulate production can be traced
at least to Lenin, if not to the Marx of the <i>Critique of the
Gotha Program.</i><br />
<br />
62. The questions one asks inevitably
reflect and expose one's own political concerns, and mine are
no exception. I believe that the history of the Bolshevik Party
during Stalin's years -- a history obfuscated by anti-communist
lies and as yet to be written -- has a lot to teach future generations.
Political activists who look to the past for guidance, and politically-conscious
scholars who believe their greatest contributions towards a better
world can be made through study of such struggles in the past,
have a great deal to learn from the legacy of the Soviet Union.<br />
<br />
63. Like medieval mariners whose
maps were more imagination than fact, we have been misled by
canonical histories of the USSR that are mainly false. The process
of discovering the real history of the world's first socialist
experiment has scarcely begun. As any reader of this essay will
realize, I believe this is of immense importance for our future.<br />
<br />
<center>
<b>Notes</b></center>
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref1">1</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note1"></a> Full text of the
resolution is in Zhukov, Stalin. See also Zhukov's earlier treatment
in Tayny<i> </i>270-276, where the text is also reproduced.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref2">2</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note2"></a> Another reading
of the archives suggests the numbers might be 6, 6 and 5. See
Khlevniuk O., et al. eds, <i>Politburo TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov
SSSR 1945-1953.</i> Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002, 428-431.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref3">3</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note3"></a> Pyzhikov attributes
this democratic strain to Leningraders, especially to Voznesensky.
(See also his article "N.A. Voznesenski" at <<a href="http://www.akdi.ru/id/new/ek5.htm">http://www.akdi.ru/id/new/ek5.htm</a>>).
This would imply Zhdanov's support for it too, although Zhdanov's
sponsorship would not "fit" Pyzhikov's theory about
the most pro-capitalist forces -- Voznesenskii and his fellow
"Leningraders" -- being the most "democratic."
Nor, since the "Leningraders" remained strong through
1947, does it explain why the draft was not adopted. Nor does
it indicate, much less prove, any necessary connection between
the pro-capitalist and "consumer-goods" orientation
Voznesensky was famous for, and political democracy. Finally,
it certainly does not indicate that Stalin did not support it.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref4">4</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note4"></a> According to Zhores
Medvedev, Stalin's personal archive was destroyed immediately
after his death (Medvedev, Sekretnyi). If so, it's reasonable
to assume, as Mukhin does (<i>Ubiystvo</i><span style="color: blue;">
</span>612) that some of his ideas must have been thought very
dangerous, and among them, the ideas expressed at these two meetings.
My analysis here and below mainly follows Mukhin, Ch. 13 and
Medvedev, op. cit.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref5">5</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note5"></a> It was surely meant
as a unifying measure. Each of the constituent Republics in the
USSR retained its own Party: the Communist Party of the Ukraine,
of Georgia, etc. This had led some Party leaders to think that
Russia, the largest of the Republics but the one that had no
Party "of its own," was at a disadvantage. Apparently
one of the most serious charges against the Party leaders tried
and executed in the postwar "Leningrad Affair" was
that they were planning to set up a Russian Party and moving
the capital of the Russian Republic (not the USSR itself) to
Leningrad. Arguably this might have made Russia even more powerful
and exacerbated Great Russian chauvinism, when what was needed
was to cement the various Soviet nationalities closer together.
See David Brandenberger, "Stalin, the Leningrad Affair,
and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism," <i>Russian Review</i>
63 (2004), 241-255.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref6">6</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note6"></a> The post of "First
Secretary" was only created after Stalin's death, for Khrushchev.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref7">7</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note7"></a> Cited in Mukhin,
<i>Ubiystvo</i><span style="color: blue;"> </span>617.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref8">8</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note8"></a> The earliest publication
I have found is in the leftwing newspaper <i>Sovetskaia Rossiia</i>
of January 13, 2000, at <<a href="http://www.kprf.ru/analytics/10828.shtml">http://www.kprf.ru/analytics/10828.shtml</a>>;
in English, at <<a href="http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc0004/stal1952.htm">http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc0004/stal1952.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref9">9</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note9"></a> Mukhin believes
this was a fatal mistake. He argues that it was in the interest
of the Party nomenklatura that Stalin die while still both a
secretary of the Central Committee (though he was no longer "General
Secretary") and Head of State -- in other words, while he
still united, in one person, head of the Party and head of the
whole country. Then his successor as secretary of the C.C. would
most likely be accepted by the country and the government as
head of state as well. If that happened, the movement to get
the Party nomenklatura out of running the country would be at
an end (Mukhin<i>, Ubiystvo</i>, 604 & Ch. 13 passim].<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref10">10</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note10"></a> I have drawn
on the longer treatments of Beria's reforms, both those effected
and those he proposed, in Kokurin and Pozhalov, Starkov, Knight,
and Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i>. All the recent books on Beria cited
in the Bibliography discuss them as well.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref11">11</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note11"></a> In his "Secret
Speech" Khrushchev also denounced the "Doctors' Plot"
as a frameup. But he had the effrontery to put the blame on --
Beria, who had in fact liquidated the investigation, while praising
Kruglov, the NKVD head in charge of this frameup, whom Khrushchev
restored to C.C. membership and who was seated in the audience
as Khrushchev spoke.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref12">12</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note12"></a> There is much
evidence to suggest that Beria was in fact murdered on the day
of his arrest. His son Sergo Beria, in his own memoirs, states
he was told by officials at the "trial" that his father
was not present. Mukhin says that Baybakov, the last living C.C.
member from 1953, told him Beria was already dead at the time
of the July 1953 Plenum, but the members did not know it at the
time (Sergo Beria; Mukhin, <i>Ubiystvo</i><span style="color: blue;">
</span>375). Amy Knight, p. 220, reports that Khrushchev himself
twice stated Beria had been killed on June 26, 1953, but later
changed his story. Meanwhile, the Beria trial documents are said
to have been "stolen" from their archive, so even their
existence cannot be verified (Khinshtein 2003). However some
researchers, like Andrei Sukhomlinov (pp. 61-2), continue to
find the evidence for Beria's murder unconvincing.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref13">13</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note13"></a> This term, "the
greatest theft in history," is widely used to describe the
"privatization" of the collectively-created and, formerly,
collectively-owned, state property of the USSR. For a few examples
only, see "The Russian Oligarchy: Welcome to the Real World,"
<i>The Russian Journal</i> March 17 2003, at <<a href="http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=36013">http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=36013</a>>;
Raymond Baker, Centre for International Policy, "A Clear
and Present Danger," Australian Broadcasting Corp, 2003,
at <<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s296563.htm">http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s296563.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref14">14</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note14"></a> As of November
2005 I am preparing an article documenting Khrushchev's lies
in the "Secret Speech," with publication planned for
February 2006, the 50th anniversary of Khrushchev's speech.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html#ref15">15</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7103109451095789865" name="note15"></a> Roy Medvedev,
<i>Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism</i>,
quotes a number of passages in which Stalin does this. See pp.
150, 507, 512, 538, 547 of the 1971 Knopf edition. Still others
have come to light since the end of the USSR. For an example,
see <i>The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1949</i>, ed. &
intro. Ivo Banac (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003),
66-67.<br />
<br />
<center>
<b>Supplemental Bibliography for Part Two</b></center>
<center>
(Note: <a href="http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#bibliography">Click here</a>
for the extensive bibliography at the end of Part One.)</center>
<br />
Chilachava, Raul'. <i>Syn Lavrentiia Beria rasskazyvaet</i>
Kiev: Inkopress, 1992.<br />
<br />
Dobriukha, Nikolai. "Otsy I otchimy 'ottepeli'."
<i>Argumenty I Fakty</i>, June 18 2003. At <<a href="http://www.aif.ru/online/air/1182/10_01">http://www.aif.ru/online/air/1182/10_01</a>>.<br />
<br />
Koshliakov, Sergei. "Lavrentiia Beria rasstreliali zadolgo
do prigovora." <i>Vesti Nedeli</i> June 29, 2003. At <<a href="http://%20www.vesti7.ru/archive/news?id=2728">http:// www.vesti7.ru/archive/news?id=2728</a>>.<br />
<br />
Prudnikova, Elena. <i>Beria. Prestupleniia, kororykh ne bylo</i>.
St. Petersburg: Neva, 2005.<br />
<br />
Prudnikova, Elena. <i>Stalin. Vtoroe Ubiystvo</i>. St.Petersburg:
Neva, 2003.<br />
<br />
Pyzhikov, A. "N.A. Voznesenskii o perspektivakh poselvoennogo
obnovleniia obshchestva." At <<a href="http://www.akdi.ru/id/new/ek5.htm">http://www.akdi.ru/id/new/ek5.htm</a>>.<br />
<br />
Rubin, Nikolai. <i>Lavrentii Beria. Mif I Rea'nost'. </i>Moscow:
Olimp; Smolensk: Rusich, 1998.<br />
<br />
Service, Robert. <i>Stalin. A Biography</i>. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2004.<br />
<br />
Smirtiukhov, Mikhail. Interview, <i>Kommersant-Vlast' </i>February
8, 2000. At <<a href="http://www.nns.ru/interv/arch/2000/02/08/int977.html">http://www.nns.ru/interv/arch/2000/02/08/int977.html</a>>.<br />
<br />
Sul'ianov, Anatolii. <i>Beria: Arestovat' v Kremle</i>. Minsk:
Kharvest, 2004.<br />
<br />
Toptygin, Aleksei. <i>Lavrentii Beria</i>. Moscow: Yauza,
Eksmo, 2005.APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-81302886033104182412012-06-30T19:30:00.000-04:002012-08-26T23:52:40.796-04:00Thoughts About the Class Roots of Counter-Revolution in the Territory of the Soviet Union<b>by Alexei Danko</b><br />
<br />
I will not try to give a solid and complete answer to the
question posed above given the shortness of this article and the lack of proper
preparation. However, I feel obliged to at least draw the attention of
revolutionary proletarians to the need to study this question deeply and
scientifically for the benefit of the future class struggle of the Russian and
international proletariat. Moreover, if we call ourselves Marxists we should not
‘close our eyes to reality’, regardless of how bitter and tough this truth may
be for us. We need to clarify the truth and its fundamental essence among the
proletarians so that the workers are not deceived by the tricks of the
bourgeoisie. It is necessary to explain the essence scientifically from the
point of view of dialectical and historical materialism so that the working
class can see itself as the maker of historical progress and so that it does not
leave all the class responsibility to the vanguard or its leaders.<br />
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In the conditions of the bourgeois system the working class
is the progressive class, which develops the revolutionary class struggle
against the reactionary class of capitalists. The Communist Party is essentially
the political vanguard, the most advanced section of the working class. In the
process of class struggle political leaders arise, i.e. the cadre who are best
prepared and capable for revolutionary struggle, ‘the best of the best’ of a
small group of professional revolutionaries.</div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>In correspondence to the Marxist-Leninist teachings, the
leading force of the revolution is the most advanced class in the concrete stage
of historical development, which opposes the decadent system and the class that
embodies it. The role of the individual in the process of revolutionary struggle
(including any political leader) is undoubtedly great, but can become
determining only in particularly tense moments of the struggle, i.e.
temporarily.</b></div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Therefore it would be fundamentally wrong to state that the
dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union depended mainly on the
leadership and political activity of comrade Stalin, and that the
counter-revolution in the country after the death of comrade Stalin was
successful as a result of a conspiracy and the will of a bunch of Soviet
revisionists who took over political power (the so-called ‘Khrushchevites’).</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
During the period of socialism, after the proletarian
revolution and the suppression of the open class resistance of the bourgeoisie
and the most obvious class enemies, for a long time there remain
non-antagonistic, non-belligerent classes and social strata, as well as remnants
of capitalism and certain social inequalities. As a result of this it is natural
that under socialism the class struggle continues to exist in different
manifestations and forms and, given certain negative class conditions,
counter-revolution may become a real threat. The main revolutionary force
capable of preventing counter-revolutionary threats or suppressing
counter-revolutionary activities, as before, is the working class led by its
political vanguard – the communist party. Therefore the most important task of
the party is to establish a tight and relentless control over the purity of its
members and to develop a continuous ideological struggle against
anti-proletarian ideologies and political ‘teachings’ – a tenacious dictatorship
against any counter-revolutionary expression and for a general political party
line aimed at the liquidation of remnants of capitalism.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The essence of the existence of the party consists in that it
becomes the brains of the working class and essentially becomes a monolithic
organism together with the working class. If it is isolated from the working
class, the Communist party ceases to be its political vanguard and necessarily
degenerates from the class point of view; the party should be able to predict
the social-class issues in society, to understand them in a timely manner and to
recommend to the working class the most effective methods to ‘cure them’.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The petty-bourgeois ideology and its consolidation in society
is particularly dangerous for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The
intelligentsia (including officers of the army and whatever repressive organs)
and the peasantry are objectively massive conductors of the petty-bourgeois
psychology. The influence of petty-bourgeois ideology on the working class is
also significant, since the working class to a sufficiently large degree
includes recruits from the petty-bourgeoisie and it is not separated from it by
a ‘Chinese Wall’. At the time of the Great Patriotic War (most commonly known as
the Second World War, <i>editor’s note</i>) the working class suffered
tremendous losses especially in terms of old party cadre who had experience in
the class struggle and a stable class psychology. They were replaced by youths
without sufficient class solidity.</div>
<br />
<b>The proletarian ideology and the petty-bourgeois ideology
express different class interests.</b> Therefore it is necessary to have a very
clear conception about the differences between the interests of the
petty-bourgeoisie and the interests of the working class<br />
<br />
<b>It is the petty-bourgeois masses who reproduce bourgeois
aspirations in socialist society and who engender a new bourgeoisie. To neglect
the struggle against the petty-bourgeois ideology and to lose revolutionary
awareness of this cowardly enemy of the proletariat may become a mortal danger
for the interests of the proletarian revolution and socialism.</b><br />
<br />
Under capitalism a certain fraction of the petty-bourgeoisie
becomes an active ally of the proletariat, especially when the contradictions
between large capital and that of the petty owner deepen. Under socialism the
petty-bourgeoisie, in conformity to its class essence and its class ambiguity,
may become a dangerous counter-revolutionary force when the struggle against the
petty-bourgeois ideology by the communist party and the working class loses
momentum. The petty-bourgeoisie then goes on the offensive when opportunities
for personal profiteering exist and when certain goods or services become
scarce. The petty-bourgeois easily change their class attitude depending on the
situation and due to the selfish class interests of the petty owners since they
function only according to considerations of the individual or family, purely
animal instincts and they cannot think about social life in perspective, in
global terms. The attitude and political activity of the petty-bourgeoisie often
even becomes irresponsible and rather aggressive.<br />
<br />
The realisation of petty-bourgeois aspirations under
socialism happens through the necessary preservation of certain elements of
capitalism and the application of the ‘bourgeois right’, which it is impossible
to liquidate in a short period of time. For instance, take the distribution
according to labour, which necessarily results in income differentiation and the
existence of significant differences between mental and manual labour and
between the city and the countryside. A concrete expression and source of
petty-bourgeois aspirations are the existence of private peasant plots, private
real estate and dachas, goods of excessive luxury, the special status of
managerial and intellectual labour, the existence of commodity-money relations
in the sphere of distribution of products, commodities and services of broad
demand and so forth. These elements can only be eliminated by means of gradual
liquidation of ‘bourgeois right’ in the process of the progressive development
of the material and technical basis of socialism. Only in this way can the
conditions which reproduce the petty-bourgeois system with all its negative
manifestations be liquidated.<br />
<br />
The forms of class struggle are diverse: from the ideological
struggle to armed struggle including civil war. Marxists acknowledge all forms
of class struggle. In order to secure victory in the class struggle as a whole,
Leninist Bolsheviks should first attain victory in the ideological struggle. At
that time they became victorious. Nevertheless the ideological struggle
continued. The ideological struggle between petty-bourgeois ideology, which has
a multiplicity of forms, and proletarian ideology continued in different forms
during the years of proletarian socialism: at times it weakened; at times it
became more prominent. The thesis of comrade Stalin about the continuation of
the class struggle in the process of construction of socialism is convincingly
confirmed by real practice, by real life, since the only criterion of truth is
practice.<br />
<br />
<b>Marxism-Leninism teaches that the pre-conditions for the
change of one social system to another develop within society long before the
revolutionary events.</b> I am convinced that this fundamental thesis also
applied to the case of counter-revolution in the socialist country.<br />
<br />
Since we are dealing here with the victory of
counter-revolution and the defeat of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the
USSR, therefore in the Soviet Union during the post-war period decisive changes
in the correlation of class forces took place, not in favor of the proletarian
forces, especially within the Bolshevik party. As a result of the class struggle
these anti-proletarian forces took over. No other interpretation here is
possible if we are to stick to the science of classes and class struggle.<br />
<br />
The invasion by fascist Germany of the socialist Soviet Union
should not be considered in a primitive fashion, from the point of view of a
regular aggression of one country against another. In this deadly conflict two
irreconcilable class forces faced each other: the most reactionary forces of
capitalism siding with fascist Germany and the progressive communist forces
represented by the Soviet Union, which made a breakthrough in the future of
world civilisation and was dangerous for capitalism as a whole. While paying the
price of countless victims and sacrifices, the Soviet people led by the
Bolshevik party defended the independence of the proletarian state, expelled the
aggressor from the territory of its socialist country and crushed the fascist
beast in its own lair. The working class of the Soviet Union ferociously
defended its revolutionary conquests against the same reactionary forces of
world capital. However, at the same time the class enemy managed to inflict a
mortal wound on the Bolshevik party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in
the Soviet Union from which later the power of the working class and proletarian
socialism died in the USSR.<br />
<br />
The Bolshevik party was the vanguard of the working class of
the Soviet Union not only as a result of its specific political position. The
Bolshevik party continuously directed its best party cadre to the most difficult
and responsible sections of practical work, where they outstandingly
demonstrated the high level of authority and respect enjoyed by party members
among non-party comrades due to success in concrete practical deeds. In the
years of the Great Patriotic War the Bolshevik party directed its best party
cadre and the best representatives of the working class to the hardest sections
of the front and the rear. The communists were the first to enter battle and the
first to die. Therefore the losses among party cadre were extremely severe,
especially during the first years of the war. However, the party membership
grew, its ranks filled to a great degree by heroes of the front since heroism in
the front was not only a mass phenomenon but an obvious one and the communists
were the best of those heroes. Therefore the title of communist became a special
distinction.<br />
<br />
The fact that the overwhelming majority of new party cadre
did not have party and political experience helped to dilute the class content
of its ranks. As a result of this development especially during the years of the
war, the party suffered a significant qualitative damage in the political sense
of the word. Nevertheless, this should not be considered an error or lack of
political foresight by the Bolshevik party. During the war the fate of the
proletarian state was being decided at the front. Therefore the most important
political goal, slogan and task at the time was: EVERYTHING FOR VICTORY. All the
politics and life of the Bolsheviks were devoted to the latter. Therefore, by
virtue of this the heroes of the front were not only heroes but were the
political vanguard in the most advanced aspect of the practice of the class
struggle, i.e. they essentially made up the base of the party under those
conditions. This completely conformed to the politics of the party and the class
demands of the war period, but it had within itself the threat of
petty-bourgeois degeneration of the party ranks especially due to peasants and
intellectuals.<br />
<br />
During wartime the consciousness of the peasant masses was
dominated by the psychology of the peasant-labourer. Why? The proletarian
revolution and the success of socialism greatly improved the standards of living
of the peasantry. The proletarian power provided the peasants with land and the
necessary means, modern agricultural technique under preferential conditions
through the creation of the machine-tractor stations (MTS), support in case of
poor crops, many social-cultural benefits, it liberated the peasantry from the
dangers of chaotic market relations when realising their production, etc. Under
the tsars, the peasants could not even dream about such things. Therefore
soldiers from peasant background displayed great heroism in the front lines,
defending their class interests, and through this, the defence of the
proletarian revolution and the proletarian state from the belligerence of the
fascist invaders. Because of this the communist psychology dominated in the
consciousness of the peasant-labourer during the years of the war, compelling
many peasants to join the Bolshevik party, which defended the interests of the
peasantry at the cost of many lives of the best children of the party.<br />
<br />
In the post-war period the situation fundamentally changed.
Having returned from the front, the peasantry faced significant material
difficulties. The kolkhozes, many of which were destroyed during the war, could
barely fulfill the state contracts. Industry faced the need to accommodate to
the requirements of peaceful times and could not provide the peasants with the
necessary industrial goods and technique rapidly enough, while at the same it
justly demanded that the peasants increase the production of food and
agricultural products. The private plots of peasants were not productive enough;
food, clothing and many other necessary means for a modest family life were
scarce. Those who fought in the front had already suffered severe scarcity,
enjoyed war glory and many dreamed of a better life. This impelled the peasantry
to focus on its own material interests, <b>and that included taking advantage of
the glory earned in the war and the party membership.</b> These factors
encouraged the peasantry to develop strong elements of private thinking in their
consciousness. However, as a result of the duality of the peasants’ psychology,
the psychology of the petty owner and the psychology of the labourer, most of
the peasant masses trusted the Bolshevik party with regard to the construction
of communism since they were already convinced of the economic benefits brought
by socialism. On the other hand, with regard to questions of everyday life and
activity, the peasants as a rule gave priority to their private interests over
the interests of society.<br />
<br />
<b>Such is the dialectics of the psychology of the peasant, a
petty owner and a labourer at the same time. This psychology was inherited and
further propagated even more aggressively by city inhabitants originally coming
from the peasantry.</b><br />
<br />
To defend the party ranks from the dangerous contaminations
from elements with the psychology of the petty owner was already a very
complicated task. Firstly, such elements already had become a large section of
the party. Secondly, these elements had war achievements in serving the
socialist Fatherland and this prevented other comrades from exposing them.<br />
<br />
<b>The intellectuals, by virtue of their social position, always
serve the dominating class regardless of the social system. </b><br />
<br />
Under capitalism the intellectuals, on the one hand also
relate to the exploited class. On the other hand, the intellectuals, as a result
of their social functions, participate in the accomplishment of the exploitation
of the workers and peasants, since it is though the intellectuals that the
capitalist class exerts and regulates its direct domination, i.e. the
intellectuals are used as tools for the exploitation of the workers and
peasants.<br />
<br />
Under socialism the intellectuals are bound to execute the
will of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Many intellectuals see themselves
unwillingly forced to offer such a ‘service’, since they have to serve the
interests of the workers and peasants whom the intellectuals had traditionally
considered as lower classes. The standard of living of the intellectuals depends
on their social position in society. This explains the tendency of the
intellectuals to indulge in such social illnesses as careerism, bureaucratism,
idealism, overestimation of their social role and the will to have a special
position in society. To a great degree this explains the tendency of the
intellectuals to join the Bolshevik party. As a result of their social-class
specifics, the duality of their class position, the intellectuals are easy
targets for petty-bourgeois influence and decomposition.<br />
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is common to the intellectuals and peasants, who are
influenced by individualism, to make the country’s leadership responsible for
the organization of social life and the party.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
In the post-war period the Bolshevik party was dangerously
infiltrated by such petty-bourgeois elements.</div>
It is necessary to note that ‘if we do not close our eyes to
reality we must admit that at the present time the proletarian policy of the
Party is not determined by the character of its membership, but by the enormous
undivided prestige enjoyed by the small group which might be called the Old
Guard of the Party. A slight conflict within this group will be enough, if not
to destroy this prestige, at all events to weaken the group to such a degree as
to rob it of its power to determine policy’ (V.I. Lenin Collected Works, 4th
English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966, volume 33, page 257).<br />
<br />
As a result of the class struggle during the war and in the
post-war period this ‘small group … of the Old Guard of the Party’ also suffered
great losses and became even smaller and after the death of Stalin ‘slight
conflicts within this group’ weakened it to the extent that it did not have the
‘power to determine policy.’<br />
<br />
The war and the severe military consequences inflicted
tremendous losses on the Soviet Union not only from the class, material point of
view and in terms of population, but also strengthened a number of dangerous
tendencies for the dictatorship of the proletariat.<br />
<br />
The war period demanded that the economy re-direct the focus
of the development of the forces of production and the efforts of all of society
on the needs of the struggle against the fascist aggression. In the course of
accomplishing this goal the production relations also suffered changes toward a
strictly top-down structure. This shift took place not only in the organisation
of the economy but in all fields of social life including politics. The need to
liquidate the most severe consequences of the war also required a speedy
economic restoration and the development of the forces of production under a
regime of general mobilisation.<br />
<br />
The development of production relations seriously lagged
behind the development of the forces of production as a result of these extreme
measures and conditions, and not only as a result of the inertia so
characteristic of production relations in general.<br />
<br />
Under the pressure and the disguise of these and other
adverse conditions the functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
development of proletarian democracy were significantly hampered. The
dictatorship of the proletariat was then applied from top to bottom, mostly as a
result of the activity and authority of the leading organs of the Bolshevik
party, and the development of proletarian democracy in society was basically
reduced to endorsing the government and party decisions produced at the top.<br />
<br />
The strictly top-down character of the management of economic
and social life seriously weakened the class control from below of the activity
of the apparatus and the intellectual elite. This lack of control from below led
to the social alienation and petty-bourgeois decomposition of the apparatus. As
a result, the petty-bourgeois interests and actions of the managers and
intellectual elites began to diverge from the class interests of the
proletariat.<br />
<br />
The situation worsened from the class-political point of view
due to the replacement of managerial cadre as the result of personnel losses
during the war. The replacements came mostly from demobilised army cadre and
specialists of war industry who traditionally, in virtue of the organisational
specifics of their previous activity, resisted the development of proletarian
democracy in production and social relations, and even most probably did not
understand the danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism
concealed in their actions.<br />
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The class and social-economic phenomena described above
represented a substantial danger for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but
while Stalin was alive the proletarian forces within the party managed to
maintain the political situation under control in the party and in society. How
can this be explained?</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The most honest and deepest trust of the Soviet people
towards the Bolshevik party and the proletarian power was engendered by real
life and was tested to death during the years of the war. It was specifically
the monolithic class unity of the Bolshevik party and the working class in
alliance with the labouring masses (non-party members) of the Soviet Union that
was one of the most determining factors that made possible the successful and
rapid development of practical life of the socialist society. <i>Therefore it is
disturbing and laughable when today bourgeois ideologists claim that the
Bolsheviks and their leadership allegedly usurped power and remained in power
with the help of mass violence and terror. Such ignorant garbage and irreverent
slanders would be denied by even the most vicious enemy of the Bolsheviks and
the dictatorship of the proletariat.</i></div>
<i>
</i><b>
</b><br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>When we say Lenin we mean the party.</b> By analogy, the name
of Stalin incorporated the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union
during the so-called Stalinist period. This was related not only to Stalin’s
greatest contributions to the Bolshevik party and the working class. This
phenomenon also has a social-class explanation. The victory of the proletarian
revolution and the tremendous success of socialism during the dictatorship of
the proletariat under the leadership of the Bolshevik party created a strong
morale among the masses and their hopes for a bright future. The dreams of a
better life turned into reality in a planned and rapid fashion. The
petty-bourgeois consciousness, first of all of the peasants and the
intellectuals, was used to link the good and the bad in their lives, victory or
defeat, with the name of a given leader and not with the politics of the leading
class; in the concrete historical case we are dealing with the dictatorship of
the proletariat led by the Bolshevik party. This way it was easier for the
petty-bourgeois consciousness to understand, and the successes of the country
were indeed legendary. Therefore while Stalin was alive, through such
manifestations, the influence of the proletarian nucleus in the party was
further strengthened by the authority of the party attained during the epoch of
the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Marxist-Leninist line of the party did
not suffer changes and the party <b>formally</b> displayed class unity among its
members; <b>this all corresponded to the post-war period while comrade Stalin
was still alive.</b></div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
After the death of comrade Stalin the petty-bourgeois forces
within the party (the Soviet revisionists, the so-called ‘Khrushchevites’)
worked hard to seize the key party positions, since to achieve control in the
party structures gave them the chance to take over political power and
ideological control. However, in order to change the politics of the CPSU
towards the opposite class direction, i.e. to bring it in correspondence with
the real power, <b>it was necessary to discredit the Stalinist dictatorship of
the proletariat and to isolate it from the Leninist party of the Bolsheviks, </b>
even though the Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat solidly followed the
Leninist party of the Bolsheviks.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It was because of this that the 20th Congress of the CPSU had
to replace the class dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard role of
the Bolshevik party with the ‘cult of personality of Stalin’, it had to replace
the class struggle with the unilateral dictate of the leader and to slander his
name after his death. This completely contradicts Marxism-Leninism as a science
of classes and class struggle and the whole world practice of class struggle,
but it is easily comprehended by primitive petty-bourgeois consciousness.</div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>The 20th Congress of the CPSU should be considered as the
date that formally marks the defeat of the dictatorship of the proletariat in
the USSR and the execution of a counter-revolutionary coup.</b></div>
<b>
</b><i>
</i><br />
<i>
</i>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>The counterrevolution did not hesitate to resort to slanders,
intrigues, terror and threats to use the armed forces directly in order to
attain power.</i></div>
<i>
</i>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
It is true that not all the party leaders agreed with the
concrete actions of the class enemy. In particular Malenkov, Kaganovich,
Molotov, Shepilov and other party members tried to remove Khrushchev after a
while. But their actions were not reflected in the class struggle and were more
like a struggle for power among the high party echelons, as if their actions had
nothing to do with the class struggle and the class enemy and were a result of
private organisational inner-party discussions. It is due to this that their
‘struggle’ did not become an example of revolutionary class struggle. Khrushchev
and his supporters declared this group ‘anti-party’ and expelled them from the
party leadership in their entirety.</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Power in the territory of the Soviet Union fell completely
into the hands of the new class forces forged in the petty-bourgeois medium who
defeated the dictatorship of the proletariat in the class struggle.</div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<b>These were communists only in words, but capitalists in
practice. </b>The new party leadership was obliged, above all, to transform the
party documents according to the new essence of power and the real situation in
society. Fundamental class concepts such as the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’, ‘class struggle’, the ‘political vanguard of the working class’
and other concepts which make up the basics of the Marxist-Leninist teachings
simply disappeared. At the same time theses about the ‘complete and final
victory of socialism in the USSR’ were introduced, which pointed without proof
to the impossibility of restoring capitalism and excluded the possibility of
class struggle, about the ‘party of the whole people’, etc. In other words,
Marxism-Leninism was subject to open and conscientious petty-bourgeois revision.
However, the external attributes of the CPSU remained untouched; the party
preserved its communist name; the state was still called socialist and the party
propaganda still called for loyalty to Marxism-Leninism. This was also
consistent with the psychology of the rank-and-file Soviet petty-bourgeois of
that time. The revision of Marxism-Leninism also had another hidden aspect: the
revisionists concealed their true (bourgeois) selves using Lenin.</div>
<i>
</i>
<br />
<i>
</i>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>Lenin was transformed by them into an icon for mass oration,
which was harmless for the new power, and Marxism-Leninism was transformed into
a petty-bourgeois pseudo-science under the excuse of ‘creative development’ and
ceased to inspire revolutionary action among the working class and the
communists. </i></div>
<i>
</i><b>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The representatives of the petty-bourgeois forces, who seized
power and destroyed the dictatorship of the proletariat, took over all the
socialised means of production; therefore de facto they became corporate owners,
i.e. capitalists. From this point on we are dealing here with a bourgeois state
and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.</div>
</b>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
Now the corporate capitalist, by virtue of the main economic
law of capitalism, the law of maximum profit, should distribute the means of
production accordingly. These class aspirations force changes in the economic
basis at all levels with respect to ownership of the means of productions and
the corresponding state policies.</div>
<i>
</i>
<br />
<i>
</i>
<br />
<div align="JUSTIFY">
<i>A fundamental example of such transformation in the basis is
the decision to liquidate the machine-tractor stations (MTS). The liquidation of
the MTS represents the liquidation of social property of the means of production
in the countryside, the return to group property of the machine stations and
their inclusion in the system of commodity-money relations. That is a
fundamental turning point in the essence of the economic relations between
industry and the countryside towards capitalist relations. </i></div>
<i>
</i><b>
</b><br />
<b>
<div align="JUSTIFY">
The dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie determines the existence of socialism or capitalism; there is no
intermediate step between them.</div>
</b><br />
<b>Leningrad<br /> </b><br />
<b>Published in Proletarskaya Gazeta, No. 26 <br />
</b>APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-84685723265830425142012-06-30T18:30:00.000-04:002012-08-26T23:53:35.822-04:00The Alleged Collapse of Marxism and Socialism<i>The analysis of the world situation which follows is taken from `Interview
with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey (TDKP)' (Istanbul, 1993).</i><br />
<br />
"There has been a despicable campaign going on for some time, centred on
the claims that Marxism and socialism have collapsed; that capitalism is
superior to socialism. This campaign, which has been launched by the world
bourgeoisie and global reactionary forces with the full support of old and new
revisionism, constitutes the most direct and undeterred attack on Marxism and
socialism in the current period....<br />
<i> </i><br />
What phenomena and processes are cited as the basis for the failure and
collapse of socialism, as well as for the supremacy of capitalism?<br />
<br />
The phenomena and processes experienced in the Soviet Union as the country of
the first successful proletarian revolution and in Eastern European countries
where, after World War II, regimes of people's democracy were established and
the construction of socialism was initiated". (p.1-2).<br />
<i> </i><br />
<b>Spurious Socialism and Spurious Marxism-Leninism</b><br />
<br />
"Countries such as Cuba, China, Angola and even Algeria... proclaim
themselves to be socialist in spite of the fact that the proletariat in those
countries had never become organised as the hegemonic class and captured power
and that socialism construction had never taken off." (p. 2)<br />
<br />
"The countries that until recently have proclaimed themselves as
socialist... have undergone an all-round crisis in the 1980s.... Another fact
which cannot be denied is the loss of support for most of those allegedly
Communist or Marxist-Leninist parties.... These parties find themselves engulfed
in a huge ideological and organisational crisis, some abolishing themselves and
some trying to maintain their existence by changing their names and transforming
themselves into typical social-democratic parties which openly reject
Marxist-Leninist ideology that at one time they pretended to defend."
(p. 3)<b> </b><br />
<br />
"Countries such as Cuba and China... presented themselves as socialist,
but never entered the path of socialist development." (p. 4)<br />
<br />
"Let us concentrate on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe....
Bourgeois-revisionist propaganda is based on the assumption that the class base
and socialist features of those countries, as well as parties, remained intact
and along the same lines until the 1980s...<br />
<br />
This analysis and its assumptions do not reflect the substance of the process
and phenomena involved". (p. 4)<br />
<br />
<b>The Process of Disintegration of Socialism</b><br />
<br />
"The process leading to the destruction of socialism and the
transformation of the communist parties in the former socialist countries (apart
from Albania) into bourgeois-reformist parties... started right after World War
II.... It may sound puzzling to argue that the above-mentioned process began
just at a time when great victories were won.... This, however, is not a
confusing and complicated argument. It is inspired by the Marxist thesis that
has been vindicated by the history of all revolutions. The advance of
revolutions is associated with an increasing possibility of
counter-revolution"....<br />
<br />
The process following, World War II was... a process where the advancement of
the revolution was associated with the development of counter-revolution".
(p. 6)<br />
<br />
<b>Albania</b><br />
<br />
"Albania was the only country where the process of socialist
construction was uninterrupted until the 1980s, despite tremendous difficulties
and sacrifices....<br />
<br />
This is one of the facts that must be established if we ever want to analyse
correctly the phenomena and processes involved and derive truly scientific
conclusions". (p. 5)<br />
<br />
"During and after the 1950s,... true communists, under the leadership of
the Party of Labour of Albania (PLA), led by Enver Hoxha, have continuously
argued that socialist construction was interrupted in all countries except
Albania.... Our Party too has defended this line since its establishment".
(p. 8-9)<br />
<br />
"The collapse of socialism in Albania (the only socialist country in the
world since the 1960s) towards the end of the 1980s, was the last link in the
defeat inflicted in the second half of the 1950s and constitutes the latest
victory of the bourgeoisie and imperialism". (p. 9)<br />
<br />
"Albania, as a small socialist country, skillfully exploited the
opportunities provided by the conflict between the two imperialist blocs from
the 1960s to the mid-1980s. It managed to maintain socialist construction in
spite of its small size.<br />
<br />
The agreement that was concluded in the mid-1980s between the Gorbachevite
revisionist bourgeoisie and the western capitalist bourgeoisie was a
straightforward conclusion against the proletariat, the peoples and
socialism....<br />
<br />
The new global conditions left Albania face to face with a unified
imperialist blockade, siege, isolation and aggression....<br />
<br />
But the PLA did not understand the global changes that had been going on for
a long period of time... and the PLA leadership did not display the skills
needed for a revolutionary outcome from these grave conditions.... On the
contrary, they panicked. They tended to assume an opportunistic position which
succumbed to imperialist pressure and threat, and to reactionary internal
uprisings. Obviously, this orientation meant taking the road leading to the
destruction of socialism.... Socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat
were liquidated". (p. 18-20)<br />
<br />
<b>The Role of US Imperialist Dominance</b><br />
<br />
"One of the most significant results of World War II was the emergence
of US imperialism as a superior power and the establishment of its hegemony....
Under these conditions, conflicts among imperialist powers did not disappear.
Imperialist forces, however, became able to act under a single command with a
common strategy and tactics....<br />
<br />
Global imperialist and reactionary forces, having suffered heavy blows right
after World War II, unified all their forces under the leadership of US
imperialism... and developed a perspective of life-and-death struggle against
the socialist camp and the revolutionary and socialist struggle".<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>The Development of Revisionism</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"It was under these conditions that new opportunist tendencies began to
show up in the ranks of the revolutionary working class movement and the
Communist Parties, trends which later developed into modern revisionism.... They
emerged as an international phenomenon". (p. 7)<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>The Role of the 20th Congress of the CPSU</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"The 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 constitutes a turning point...
for the whole of the international communist movement.... The process of the
hegemony of modern revisionism, the clear division within the ranks of the
international communist and labour movement and the restoration of capitalism in
the socialist countries (with the exception of Albania) began in the second half
of the 1950s and was completed in the 1960s....<br />
<br />
During and after the 1950s, the modern revisionists, resorting to the pretext
of new phenomena and developments, deviated from socialism and
Marxism-Leninism".<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>The Form of the Process of Capitalist Restoration</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"The liquidation of socialism was not the result of an open clash
between the socialist and capitalist camps or a straightforward move by the
overthrown classes.... The restoration of capitalism did not begin by the
recapture of power by the old classes.... The economic basis of socialism had
already been established and the exploiting classes eradicated even
though some residues survived towards the end of the 1930s. Given this
fact,... the reversal process had to rely on the overthrown, but not completely
eradicated remnants of the exploiting classes. The fact that state ownership of
the basic means of production, deformed planning procedures and socialist forms
in the superstructure were maintained was an inevitable result of this type of
reversal process....<br />
<br />
This situation was one of the factors which determined the course of
capitalist restoration in other socialist countries too. In fact, the modern
revisionists who put the Soviet Union on the road to restoration were against
the unfolding of the restoration process in other socialist countries under
straightforward capitalist forms. They even entered into armed intervention, as
was the case in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They became the most powerful
supporters and advocates of capitalist restoration under `socialist'
forms". (p. 11-13)<br />
<br />
"The restoration process in socialist countries (apart from Albania) led
simultaneously and inevitably to the emergence of the Soviet Union as an
imperialist superpower and the formation of a new imperialist bloc headed by it.
The differences between this new superpower on the one hand and the imperialist
bloc headed by US imperialism on the other were related not to substance but to
form". (p. 13)<br />
<br />
"It is a common assumption that central planning, state ownership of the
fundamental means of production, etc., in what was the Soviet Union remained
unchanged from the 1950s. It is also assumed that the transition to... a
capitalist economy (described as a market economy) took place in the 1980s with
the Gorbachev period. In fact, the rise to hegemony of the Khrushchevite modern
revisionists in the USSR and other socialist countries was also the beginning of
radical reforms in areas like central planning.... These reforms were later
continued as the Liberman `reforms'.<br />
<br />
Whilst, on the one hand, the sphere of central planning was reduced and the
powers of managers with respect to exchange of products increased under
catch-phrases like `autonomy' and `initiative', on the other hand production for
the satisfaction of social needs and for the balanced of the economy was
replaced by production for the market.<br />
<br />
These few examples provide enough evidence that socialist forms were not
replaced by openly capitalistic ones in an abrupt way....<br />
<br />
Developments since the late 1980s in the USSR and other Eastern European
countries are the final stages in the process of transition to classical
capitalist formations.... That is why the developments in the USSR and the
Eastern European countries in the 1980s came as no surprise to the truly
Marxist-Leninist parties and forces". (p. 4-15)<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>The Collapse of Revisionism, not Socialism</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"Russia..., its proletariat and its peoples realised an unprecedented
development which was rapid and balanced and not based on the expLoitation of
other countries. The gap between Russia and advanced capitalist countries was
bridged at a rapid rate. It became an advanced industria] country with no
unemployment, hunger or crises. Its people participated actively in political
life, and their living and cultural standards improved.<br />
<br />
After the second half of the 1950s, when socialist construction was
interrupted and capitalist restoration began, the Soviet Union and the Eastern
European countries entered a new period which was completely different in terms
of its political, economic, cultural and social aspects. First the rate of
growth of social production as a whole declined. The balanced and stable
development of all economic sectors, and especially industry and agriculture,
was replaced by an unbalanced and unstable process of development. This was
followed by the typical features of capitalist economic development -
stagnation, crisis, unemployment and militarisation of the economy. The results
of deviating from Marxist-Leninist principles, from the road laid down by the
Great October Revolution, from socialist construction, became obvious -
crises, collapse, conflicts between nationalities, unemployment, impoverishment
of the working people, ideological and moral decay, and the concentration of
wealth in the hands of a small minority....<br />
<br />
It was not socialism, not Marxism-Leninism, that failed and collapsed in the
Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries.... The collapse and failure
were those of a capitalism that corresponded to specific historical
conditions". (p. 16-17)<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>The Prospects for Socialist Revolution</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"The objective basis and causes of the October Revolution, and the other
revolutions which followed, have not disappeared or become weaker. On the
contrary, they have expanded and become strengthened. The material basis for
socialism is now more mature than in 1917.... The centralisation of capital and
the concentration of social production in the hands of the monopolies and an
increasingly narrowing oligarchy at both national and international levels are
much more pronounced when compared with the situation in the 1910s or 1950s.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, global reactionary forces and imperialism are on the verge
of exhausting all the advantages derived from liquidating socialism as a
system.... Instead of enjoying a relative and temporary period of stability, the
imperialist-capitalist system is going through an increasingly deepening
crisis....<br />
<br />
The rates of growth in world production and trade are continuously declining.
The most powerful economy, that of the USA, is going through the most severe
crisis in its history since World War II. As the second power, the Japanese
economy is suffering from declining growth rates and indications of stagnation
are increasing. It is no longer a secret that the third largest power, the
German economy, is stagnating and the stagnation is set to continue. This is
acknowledged even by the representatives of German imperialism. The situation in
the economies of Russia and the Eastern European countries has deteriorated
further with the process of transition to market economies. The crisis in these
countries is deepening.... Now the former Yugoslav and Soviet republics are
caught in civil and national wars. They are countries where people kill each
other and thereby they are transformed into arenas where the new division of the
world is being effected. Stability in the Middle East proved an elusive quest in
spite of all the agreements reached and declarations made. Asia, Africa and
Latin America are regions where civil wars are permanent.<br />
<br />
The decline in the growth rates of the major imperialist-capitalist economies
is accompanied by a rise in unemployment and inflation, a deterioration of the
living and working conditions of the working class, a fall in real wages, and an
increase in reactionary policies and militarism. These developments are observed
not only in underdeveloped countries, but also in advanced capitalist countries
which have been models of welfare-statism.... Strikes in those countries are
becoming widespread, while xenophobic and neo-Nazi movements are on the
increase.<br />
<br />
It is clear that the world capitalist economy will not be able to achieve the
growth rates of previous decades and that it is moving towards a general crisis
engulfing all countries.<br />
<br />
The inevitable result of the tendency of the world capitalist economy to
enter a new stage in its general crisis is the intensification of
inter-imperialist conflicts as well as conflicts between the imperialists and
the oppressed peoples and between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat".
(p. 25-28)<br />
<b>
<br />
For the Present Socialism no longer exists<br />
</b>
<br />
Although they proclaim themselves `socialist' and try to present the
contradictions between themselves and great imperialist powers as contradictions
`between socialism and capitalism', countries like Cuba, North Korea and China
are not socialist. Socialism as a social system no longer exists in today's
world. With the process sustained recently, socialism has collapsed in Albania
too - the only socialist country since the 1960s". (p. 21)<br />
<br />
<b>
</b>
<b>A New `Broad' International</b><br />
<b>
</b>
<br />
"It is not possible for the truly communist parties... and the old
revisionist, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois `socialist' parties to come together
to form a unified socialist movement at either the national or international
level. That is because the ideological differences between the truly communist
parties and the revisionist and petty bourgeois socialist currents are not
artificial differences arising out of `historical sectarianism' or 'mistakes'.
On the contrary, they are related to the substantive differences between
proletarian socialism and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois `socialism'.... These
contradictions and ideological differences cannot be accommodated within the
political party of the proletariat.... These contradictions and differences are
not declining or weakening; on the contrary, they are increasing and becoming
more pronounced. Therefore, the period in front of us is going to be one of
intense and comprehensive ideological struggle between these trends - not
one of rapprochement and unification.<br />
<br />
We know that, over the last year, there has been an international `revival'
concerning these relations.... This `revival' went hand in hand with the
emergence of a bipolar concentration at the international level. One of these
groupings involves 'communist' or `popular' parties from Europe, Asia and Latin
America and some old or new parties from the old `Eastern Bloc'; it is based on
the thesis of defending `socialism' in China, North Korea and Cuba. They
recently held a meeting and published a declaration. The second of these
groupings is reflected in a meeting announced by parties that supported the old
Soviet Union, but which disintegrated as a result of the Gorbachev period and
reshaped themselves along Khrushchevite-Brezhnevite lines.<br />
<br />
These two international socialist groupings... are in an ideological and
political mess and lack any principle.... These international groupings have no
future whatever....<br />
<br />
It is impossible to argue for ideological rapprochement and unity between
proletarian socialism and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois `socialism' without
opening the door to opportunism and bourgeois liberalism and committing
betrayal". (p. 61-66)<br />
<b>
<br />
A New Communist International?<br />
</b>
<br />
"There is general agreement that the proletariat is an international
class, that its theoretical and practical movement is an international one, that
proletarian revolution is international in character and that socialism is an
international system.... The First and Second Internationals... were formed
under and shaped by the conditions of their periods. The First International
became outmoded and dysfunctional. Therefore, it was replaced by the Second
International. The Second International... betrayed the proletariat. The Third
International (Comintern) was born in the period following the First Imperialist
War and the 1917 Proletarian October Revolution.... The transformation of the
Communist Parties in the Soviet Union and Europe - with the exception of the
Party of Labour of Albania - into bourgeois parties led to the disintegration of
the international Communist movement. Most of the proletarian parties
degenerated into tools of the bourgeoisie....<br />
<br />
The Party of Labour of Albania, and other Marxist-Leninist Parties
established in the 1960s and 1970s, did not surrender to revisionism and
social-imperialism.... They kept proletarian internationalism alive and
represented it.<br />
<br />
For the last forty years, the international communist movement has had no
international organisation implying... a centralised leadership of the
international proletarian movement.... Sister parties are independent in their
decisions and in running their own organisations....<br />
<br />
Our Party considers this format of proletarian internationalism as compatible
with current conditions, provided that it is developed, perfected and
stabilised. Our Party does not, however, preclude the possibility that the world
proletariat may need a democratically centralised international organisation (in
the sense of a world party of the proletariat) when and as the current
conditions change as a result of the proletarian movement being transformed into
a socialist movement in one or several countries.... This international
entity... will emerge when revolutionary communism has been integrated with the
broad masses of the proletariat in one or several major countries and the
authority of this international entity is consequently justified in the eyes of
other sections of the world proletariat and oppressed people. (p. 71-74)APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7103109451095789865.post-44995061448874458752012-06-30T18:10:00.000-04:002012-08-26T23:41:06.952-04:00Raymond Lotta and the Political Economy of Socialism<b>by<i> </i>Sunil Sen</b><br />
<br />
<b>Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to
Communism: The Shanghai Textbook on Socialist Political Economy Edited with an
Introduction and Afterword by Raymond Lotta (Banner Press USA, 1994)</b><b> </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
This book is part of a larger work published in China in December, 1975 under
the title <i>Fundamentals of Political Economy. </i>The first part which dealt
with the political economy of capitalism and imperialism has been omitted.
However, the reprint includes the opening chapter of the original as it deals
with the "content and method of political economy". From the second
part of the original, a chapter on China's external economic relations has been
deleted. The publisher tells us that this chapter was "less a continuation
of the work's theorization of socialist society than it was an accounting of
certain diplomatic, aid and trade policies during the early and mid-1970s, and
the presentation of the class nature and possibilities for economic development
of independent Third World states (which) departed in significant ways from the
theoretical framework of the rest of the book." The deletion of this
chapter robs us, especially those of the so-called Third World, of an
opportunity to have a look at Maoist China's external relations with "third
world" states, the presentation of their class nature, etc., particularly
so in the light of the controversial and once highly influential "theory of
three worlds." It would have lent us an insight into the way in which China
looked upon and discharged its internationalist duties, as, in the words of
Lotta, "a 'base area' to support and spread the world proletarian
revolution."<br />
<br />
This book, in our opinion, merits a close attention and one can hardly give
it a summary treatment. An at length discussion would be outside the scope of a
single article. Here we will exclusively focus on the 'Introduction' by Raymond
Lotta (a leader of the<i> Revolutionary Communist Party </i>(USA) and the <i>Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement</i>) which is as much a brief critique of Soviet
Socialism of the Stalin period.<br />
<br />
In contrast to the 'productivist' Stalin, Lotta is full of concern for men
and wears his lofty sentiments on his sleeves. Here he is - "A liberating
economics? You will search in vain in bourgeois economics for concern with, much
less solutions to, great social problems such as poverty, inequality or
environmental degradation." (iv)<br />
<br />
Lotta's concerns are very much "addressed" by bourgeois economics:
'development economics', 'growth with equity' and 'environmentalist' concerns,
'sustainable development' and what have you. In fact, we Marxist-Leninists of
the so-called third world are awash with such sentimentalese. Lotta's sentiments
are in league with such crap as say, for instance, E.F. Schumacher's <i>Small
is beautiful: A Study of Economics as if people mattered.... </i>The
sentimental drivel goes on:<br />
<br />
"This (Chinese socialist experience) was a socialism that dared
challenge not only the brutal profit-above-all calculus and stultifying methods
of organisation of capitalism but its whole 'me first' mind-set as well. 'Serve
the people' was not just a slogan...; it was an ideological benchmark against
which tens of millions judged themselves and others. This was a revolution that
promoted initiative, creativity and daring... but for the sake of the
collectivity not for oneself." (vii)<br />
<br />
Now let us listen to Marx and Engels:<br />
<br />
"...Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to
egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its
sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its
material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not
preach <b>morality</b> [we use bold letters for emphasis in the
original] at all... They do not put to people the moral demand: love one
another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that
egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary
form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means
want,... to do away with the 'private individual' for the sake of the 'general',
selfless man... They (communists) know that this contradiction is only a <b>seeming</b>
one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is
constantly being produced by the other side, private interest and in relation to
the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history -
so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced.
Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two
sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the
preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the
disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity, also
disappears <i>(The German Ideology, </i>CW-5, p.247)<br />
<br />
It is exactly to the materially determined mode of life of individuals that
Marx and Engels draw our attention. And it is to the important change in the
materially determined mode of life that the Soviet Union (we speak here of the
Soviet Union of the Lenin and Stalin period) directed its efforts and did not
replace sentimentalese for the genuine conditions of socialist transformation.
For Lotta, "the conscious activism of the labouring people, not the capital
stock <i>(sic) </i>or level of technology" "are important for
socialism". Very r-r- revolutionary that this 'conscious activism' may
sound it is but mere phrase-mongering. Socialism is a system and not a 'mental
state'. Lotta's lofty state of mind cannot tolerate mundane Stalin and 'his'
socialism which as an economic system challenged the most advanced capitalist
countries. In his 'socialist' transmutation of bourgeoisdom's propaganda phrase
against Soviet success - "Man does not live by bread alone", Lotta
accuses Stalin of seeing "things not people". In his solicitous
concern about <i>man </i>Lotta goes back from communism to humanism, i.e. he
talks of abstract men, not <i>real, historical </i>men. So he keeps on with
his incessant chatter about men, about the antithesis of their collectivity and
individuality and wants to have the collectivity but not the individuality. But
such lack of (or suppression of) individuality can only be found in the
pre-capitalist epoch. As Marx says - "Man becomes individualised through
the process of history." (For a complete exposition see <i>Grundrisse, </i>ME/CW-28/p.
399 et seq.)<br />
<br />
The Soviet Union in its magnificent and glorious efforts to build socialism
thought it only fit to create the material prerequisites of socialism i.e., one
only on which could be based that <i>higher </i>socio-economic formation
(socialism). To contrapose moral ends to this is to smuggle in sentimentalism
for a scientific basis of socialism. Marxist political economy keeps morality
out of consideration and for it socialism is a historical necessity, a system
which supercedes capitalism. Marx criticised Sismondi who held that
"political economy is not simply a science of calculation but a moral
science." (We will return to this point again). It is in this sentimental
vein that Lotta carries on his tirade against Soviet socialism and Stalin.<br />
<br />
Lotta wants to subject growth to social and political criteria (xi). What
does this mean? It means that he considers growth in the abstract and not under
definite historical social relations. He criticizes the hankering after
efficiency, wants to take care of the distributive aspects etc. Rather we would
be more precise if we say that when Lotta talks of growth he can visualise it
only as <i>capitalist </i>growth because to him development can only take
place in a contradictory form (as under capitalism). Just as capitalist
development produces misery, want, poverty, degradation, apathy etc. so also
must all development. He takes the contradictory form in which social labour
manifests itself in the capitalist world as eternal. Naturally Lotta with his
humanistic concern wants to subject growth to political and social criteria,
thinks efficiency can only worsen the worker's lot as it does under conditions
of alienation in capitalism. Alter having got into this contradiction he can
wriggle out of it only by appealing to morality. His recurring theme is that
socialism is a mental, moral idea. He cannot differentiate between the laws of
capitalist development and the political economy of socialism. He cannot think
of the laws of socialist development existing independently of the will of man.
It was this aspect that Stalin emphasized when he penned his <i>Economic
Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.</i> henceforth <i>Economic Problems</i>)
(More on this later).<br />
<br />
Maligning Soviet socialism under Stalin forms the <i>leitmotif </i>of the
'Introduction'. So here are some of Lotta's pearls of wisdom:<br />
<br />
"...once production is taken as the key link in moving society forward
and the 'most efficient' methods of production become the all important
yardstick, then what sets in is production for its own sake, the domination of
dead labour (means of production produced by previous labour) over living
labour... and that puts you on the capitalist road. Once planning is construed
as a technical activity of administering and controlling, then the plan begins
to dominate the proletariat rather than the other way around... and that puts
you on the capitalist road." (xxxiv)<br />
<br />
And Lotta in a footnote in fine print puts Stalin in the dock (in fact, this
fine print runs through out the 'Introduction'):<br />
<br />
"Stalin veered very much in the direction of these erroneous approaches
and many of the economic policies he promoted gave oxygen to the forces of
capitalist restoration." (xxxiv) But then he has some sops for poor Stalin:<br />
<br />
"...for all his mistakes Stalin was attempting to build socialism <b>not</b>
capitalism..." - ln short, Stalin's policies were building capitalism, but
then for all his misdeeds, he was a man of Lotta's moral fibre and intended to
build socialism (Stalin must be turning in his grave at such a compliment).<br />
<br />
Now, what is this "domination of dead labour over living labour"
etc. that Lotta speaks of here? Dead labour is nothing but the products of
previous useful work which serve as means of production, as objects of labour,
instruments of labour and means of subsistence. All this is used by living
labour under any system, under any given relations of production. When dead
labour confronts the worker as capital it "dominates living labour".
What has using "most efficient methods" of production got to do with
this? "Most efficient methods" of production are methods of the labour
process and unless and until the conditions of labour confront the worker as
alienated conditions, as relations of capital, they cannot "put you on the
road to capitalist restoration." All efficiency is but economy of time
(Here Lotta is obviously not referring to efficiency in the use of material - in
fact, he quite unjustifiably calls pre-Khrushchevite Soviet planning wasteful).
Perhaps socialist society is lackadaisical in its approach to efficiency?
Socialist society must promote efficiency. In this again, Marx cannot measure up
to the great communist Lotta:<br />
<br />
"Ultimately, all economy is a matter of economy of time. Society must
also allocate its time appropriately to achieve a production corresponding to
its total needs.... Economy of time, as well as the planned distribution of
labour time over the various branches of production, therefore, remains the
first economic law if communal production is taken as the basis. It becomes a
law even to a much higher degree. <i>(Grundrisse,</i> CW-28; p. 109).<br />
<br />
Not only was efficiency promoted, it was the outcome of the "conscious
activism" of the masses. Tremendous mass enthusiasm was witnessed and
recorded by very many writers on the Soviet Union - both communists and
bourgeois intellectuals. The "shock-work team" movement was initiated
in 1926 by workers and greatly increased productivity. The Stakhanovite movement
succeeded it and not only reorganised labour and developed teamwork but also
improved technique and technology leading to great increase in productivity and
quality output. And all this took place at the initiative of the workers and
over the objections of conservative engineers and technical personnel -
bourgeois experts. Such a great increase in productivity under capitalism would
have resulted in unemployment but in the Soviet Union unemployment had become a
thing of the past. Then there was 'counterplanning' by the workers who revised
the plans. This was mass initiative; this was mass enthusiasm which could mean
the fulfillment of the 5-year Plan in 4-years at which the revisionists would
shout - "away with shrieking enthusiasm".<br />
<br />
Lotta must be well aware of all this and yet... Earlier, bourgeois economists
thought that anything like a socialist economy just couldn't. They produced
tomes showing the impossibility of efficient economic calculation under
socialism. Right from the 1920s Ludwig Von Mises, Brutzkus and other bourgeois
economists raised this question again and again. Later, the revisionist
economists of the Soviet Bloc - Oskar Lange, Ota Sik, Voznesensky, Liberman <i>et
al </i>took this up in order to advocate the restoration of the market, without
which, they opined, economic calculation (and efficiency) was not possible. The
socialist restriction of the operation of the law of value was dubbed as
"bureaucracy." Charles Bettelheim in his <i>Economic Calculation and
Forms of Property </i>also raised this 'problem' saying that socialist society
had not developed "concepts adequate for the measurement- of social labour,
which is never given in the dimension of physical labour." Later, this same
Bettelheim veered to a "Leftist" position like that of Lotta. It is
well known that Von Mises and his ilk had believed that socialism would engender
inefficiency. But when the Soviet Union came up with a highly efficient,
technologically advanced society, moreover, one in which development had not
taken a contradictory form as under capitalism, the whole world looked in
disbelief. It was living propaganda and agitation against bourgeoisdom. It gave
the lie to the bourgeois claim that capitalism was the ultimate system and the
only one which promoted the development of the productive forces. Bourgeoisdom
had to malign this success. Various propaganda themes were taken up - we were
told that man's soul was killed, there was no liberty, no spiritual life in the
Soviet Union and so forth. We in the "third world" also heard that old
people were systematically exterminated in the Soviet Union because they
couldn't work and hence, promoted inefficiency! It is in keeping with this
propaganda that the Bettelheims discovered that this efficiency was not
socialism. Socialism was a high moral state of mind! This insidious anti-Stalin,
anti-Soviet propaganda can be found in most of the writings of these 'leftists'.
Here is a specimen: <br />
<br />
"...Liu and others stressed the need to focus all energies on promoting
the productive forces. This they did in a way deeply marked by the Soviet model
of development." And "From its (CPC's) founding in 1921, conflicts
within the party have in one way or another been linked <i>to individuals who
favoured the orthodox Russian conception </i>of revolution. The defeat of Li
Li-san in the 1930s, Wang Ming in the 1940s, Kao Kang (Gau Gang) and P'eng
Te-huai (Peng Deh-huai) in the 1950s, and Liu Shao-Chi in the 1960s have all
entailed controversies over the nature and applicability of the Soviet
model." (Emphasis added) - (In short, all the revisionists in China in one
way or the other owe their revisionism to the Soviet and 'Stalinist' conception)<br />
<br />
(See James Peck's 'Introduction' to Mao Tse tung's <i>A Critique of Soviet
Economics </i>published by <i>Monthly Review Press; </i>pp. 16-17&8)<br />
<br />
As for the insinuation "...once production is taken as the key link in
moving society forward" and the goal being rationally organising the
productive force", here is the debate that took place in the Soviet Union
and Stalin's reply as laid down in <i>Economic Problems</i><br />
<br />
Yaroshenko held views similar to those which Lotta here rails against:<br />
<br />
In socialist society "men's production relations become part of the
organisation of the productive forces, as a means, an element of their
organisation". (Quoted from <i>Economic Problems; </i>p.61).<br />
<br />
"...under socialism the basic struggle for the building of a communist
society reduces itself to a struggle for the proper organisation of the
productive forces. and their rational utilisation in social production...."
(ibid; pp.61-62)<br />
<br />
[Mark it, dear author, you are imputing these ideas to Stalin]<br />
<br />
Stalin comes down heavily on Yaroshenko and says:<br />
<br />
"...Comrade Yaroshenko reduces the idea to an absurdity, to the point of
denying the role of the production, the economic, relations under socialism; and
instead of a full-blooded social production what he gets is a lopsided and
scraggy technology of production...." (ibid; p.65)<br />
<br />
For Stalin relations of production, classes and their contradictions are very
important and there can be no question of production being the key link and the
goal - "rationally organising the productive forces."<br />
<br />
Before we deal with the real significance of Stalin's understanding we must
clear up the matter regarding 'Stalinist' Soviet Union's one-sided emphasis on
productive forces and production. Here is Stalin:<br />
<br />
Criticizing Yaroshenko, he says:<br />
<br />
"The aim of socialist production" is not profit, but man and his
needs..." "maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and
cultural requirements of the whole of society is the <b>aim</b> of
socialist production; continuous expansion and perfection of socialist
production on the basis of higher technique is the <b>means</b> for
the achievement of the aim" (ibid; pp. 79 & 80)<br />
<br />
And Stalin emphasizes the need for cultural re-education of society. (p. 68)<br />
<br />
It is alleged that Stalin did not see any contradiction between productive
forces and relations of production, whereas in his <i>Economic Problems </i>he
explicitly says:<br />
<br />
"There certainly are, and will be, contradictions, seeing that the
development of the relations of production lags, and will lag, behind the
development of the productive forces". (p. 69)<br />
<br />
In fact, Stalin's last work dealt with the problem of changing the production
relations. Of course, Stalin did not view the whole affair in a petty-bourgeois
manner but posed the question scientifically. We will have occasion to deal with
this again.<br />
<br />
Lotta conjures up the following conception of socialism which he attributes
to Stalin - "...socialism was equated with the attainment of a certain
level of development of the productive forces under public ownership."
(xxiv)<br />
<br />
"And the destruction of the legal basis of private property in the major
means of production and the establishment of state ownership were seen as the
guarantee that the process of industrialisation would serve working class
rule." (xxiv)<br />
<br />
Lotta's 'Introduction' is to introduce us to the political economy of what he
calls "a visionary and viable socialism". Though he has omitted the
first part of the original work, he has retained its first chapter, the <i>Introduction</i>
(not to be confused with Lotta's 'Introduction') to the whole book,
deliberately. This chapter avers:<br />
<br />
"The form of ownership of the means of production is the most important
aspect of the relations of production and the basis of production
relations." (p.2)<br />
<br />
And yet Lotta says not a word on it. Engels held the view that:<br />
<br />
"The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of
production into state property." <i>(Socialism: Utopian & Scientific; </i>ME-SW-3.
p.146)'<br />
<br />
Again Engels writes:<br />
<br />
"By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character
of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialised character
complete freedom to work itself out". (ibid; p.151)<br />
<br />
This is the importance of public ownership, which is the only form in which
their character as capital can be ended. But we Marxists of course do not remain
content with the legal aspect.<br />
<br />
Marxists consider property relations not in "their <b>legal</b>
aspect as <b>relations of volition</b> but their real form, that is,
as <b>relations of production.</b>" (Marx to Johann Baptist
Schweitzer; January 24, 1865)<br />
<br />
That is not to forget that Lotta makes a one-sided presentation, it appears
that he wants to say public ownership under the bourgeois state is no different
from that under the proletarian state. The form may appear to be the same, but
the content is different and the whole essence is in the difference. State
ownership in the pre-Khrushchevite Soviet Union meant ownership under the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat can give to its common
interests only this <i>form</i>, "the state really constitutes itself the
representative of the whole of society", as Engels put it. (op. cit; p.147)<br />
<br />
The dictatorship of the proletariat is decisive in this regard and that
includes everything that this concept involves. Lotta chooses not to talk of
state ownership under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but of state
ownership in general, in the abstract. More, he contraposes state ownership with
the interests of working class rule! A dictatorship of the proletariat which
works against working class interests. The working class ensures its interests
through the dictatorship of the proletariat, its own state. Lenin was sanguine
regarding even state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat (see
Reports to the 11th Congress of RCP(B)) but strict Lotta would have none of it.<br />
<br />
As we have seen, Marxists do not cling to the legal aspect of property
relations. Marx wanted to study property relations in their real form, as
relations of production. He warned against juridical illusions. May we remind
Lotta that Stalin in his discussion of <i>Economic Problems </i>warned that
the laws of political economy, which deal with the social relations of men in
production i.e., the relations of production, should not be confused with laws
made by governments which have only "juridical validity." What is but
public ownership in this case? It is the legal recognition of the fact that the
means of production belong to the proletarian state. Under the socialist system
of ownership, they no longer remained commodities (Stalin; op. cit.; p. 53).
Thus Stalin considers means of production and their ownership in terms of
relations of production. Commodity relations are relations of production and
reach their apogee under capitalism. (Marx calls the commodity, the basic cell
of capitalism). Stalin here notes that means of production are no longer held by
this relation of production. This was the meaning of their state ownership under
socialism. Stalin was forthright in his understanding that if the means of
production were to behave as commodities it would lead to the regeneration of
capitalism (op. cit.; p. 96).<br />
<br />
Contrary to assertions of the "Leftists" Stalin made no fetish of
state ownership under socialism and viewed the matter in the process of its
change and development. We quote:<br />
<br />
"The fact is that conversion into state property is not the only, or
even the best, form of nationalization, but the initial form of nationalization,
as Engels quite rightly says in <i>Anti-Duhring. </i>Unquestionably, so long
as the state exists conversion into state property is the most natural initial
form of nationalization. But the state will not exist forever. With the
extension of the sphere of operation of socialism in the majority of the
countries of the world the state will die away, and, of course, conversion...
into state property will consequently lose its meaning... Hence, the heir of the
public property will then be not the state, which will have died away, but
society itself, in the shape of a central, directing economic body."
(op.cit.; pp.90-91)<br />
<br />
Let us make a slight digression and briefly deal with the question of the
dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. "Socialism is inconceivable
unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC", wrote
Lenin. And further, "politics is the concentrated expression of
economics." "Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue
otherwise is to forget ABC of Marxism". (<i>Once Again on the Trade
Unions,</i> CW-32: p. 83)<br />
<br />
If we say that the question of socialism means the question of relations of
production (or what is their legal aspect the question of property relations) -
the relations of producers to the means of production and with each other, then,
it implies the abolition of property, of progressive restriction of the
operation of law of value, etc. For that the domination of the proletariat is
necessary. Only this class can in its own class interests establish the new
relations of production through the instrument of its dictatorship. This
involves the fiercest struggle of the classes. The class struggle is the
political struggle. Hence "politics must take precedence over
economics". Again, "without a correct political approach to the matter
the given class will be unable to stay on top, and, <b>consequently</b>,
will he incapable of solving its <b>production problem</b>
either." (ibid.; p. 84) Yes, the production problem also requires that the
correct political approach be taken. It essentially involves the question of
class domination, whether the proletariat can organise production on socialist
lines or whether capitalism will triumph. Putting the whole thing in context:<br />
<br />
"One of the fundamental differences between bourgeois revolution and
socialist revolution is that for the bourgeois revolution, which arises out of
feudalism, the new economic organisations are gradually created in the womb of
the old order, gradually changing all the aspects of feudal society. The
bourgeois revolution faced only one task - to sweep away, to cast aside, to
destroy all the fetters of the preceding social order. By fulfilling this task
every bourgeois revolution fulfills all that is required of it: it accelerates
the growth of capitalism.<br />
<br />
"The socialist revolution is in an altogether different position. The
more backward the country which, owing to the zigzags of history, has proved to
be the one to start the socialist revolution, the more difficult is it for that
country to pass from the old capitalist relations to socialist relations: New
incredibly difficult tasks, organisational tasks are added to the tasks of
destruction. <i>(Seventh Congress of RCP(B), </i>CW-27; p. 89)<br />
<br />
Hence the utmost importance of politics - that the task of the conscious
domination of the proletariat is ensured. Lotta also talks of politics, but like
the petty-bourgeoisie he wants to smuggle in morality, certain standards from
without into the development process. For the Bolsheviks and Stalin it was a
question of acting according to <i>necessity,</i> not that of importing
"criteria" into blind necessity. Of this later<br />
<br />
Lotta repeatedly brings up the above-discussed charge in his short
'Introduction'.<br />
<br />
For instance, he says:<br />
<br />
"For the Soviet leadership, socialism came to be identified with two
things; the elimination of antagonistic classes, and the establishment of
modern, large-scale industry under state ownership." (xxiii)<br />
<br />
Yes, Lenin was also guilty of this sin. This mechanical productivist man
reduced Lotta's lofty communist vision to:<br />
<br />
<b>"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole
country.</b>" (CW-31, p. 516. Emphasis in the original.)<br />
<br />
And<br />
<br />
"Indeed the power of the state over all large scale means of production,
political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this
proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasantry, etc. - is
this not all that is necessary to build a complete, socialist society out of
co-operatives, out of co-operatives alone..." (CW-33; p. 468)<br />
<br />
Actually, the original sin was committed by Marx and Engels when they ate out
of the tree of historical materialism, and we will discuss that shortly. What
emerges out of Lenin's 'conception' of socialism? One could hook on to any of
the above statements and blast Lenin. It is in this vein that Stalin has been
condemned for coining slogans like 'cadres decide everything' and 'technique
decides everything'. These slogans like that of Lenin's were slogans of the day
and meant to figure out and emphasize the chief tasks of the time. Can one draw
one-sided conclusions from them and deliberately hammer out a 'thesis' or
'conception' of 'Leninist' or 'Stalinist' socialism? Yet, that is how Stalin is
defamed - "he knew only technique, only cadre, no masses" and so on.<br />
<br />
Of course, one finds the stress on productive forces and state power in all
the above statements. Why this so-called emphasis on productive forces? For that
we must recount the features of the materialist conception of history. Before we
do that we must point out that Lotta takes a dualist position. For him on the
one hand there is development of the productive forces, and on the other, the
masses; the spirit of the masses must enter this development to usher in
socialism. For Marxists socialism is a system which supersedes capitalism and
its very political economy should reveal the essential unity of the process -
the "conscious activism" of the masses and the "capital
stock" or developmental process are not in contradiction to each other.
Under capitalism, the conditions of labour confront the labourer as alienated
conditions, hence alienation of labour, disinterest in work, work as burden.
Under socialism, the means of production belong to society, do not confront the
worker as alienated conditions and hence the mass enthusiasm. The
"conscious activism" of the masses is not to be imported from without.<br />
<br />
In passing we must note some of the features of the materialist conception of
history which have an important bearing on our discussion. In his famous <i>Preface
</i>to <i>A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy</i>, Marx says:<br />
<br />
"In the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into
definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relation of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness... At a certain stage of development, the material productive
forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production
or - with the property relations within the framework of which they have
operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution...."<br />
<br />
So the relations of production are determined by the character of productive
forces at the given stage of development of society. In the words of the <i>Shanghai
Political Economy</i> - "the form of production relations is not
determined by man's subjective will but by the level of development of the
productive forces." (p. 3) Marx in a letter to Engels put it this way
"...our theory (is) that the organisation of labour is determined by the
means of production..." (July 7, 1866).<br />
<br />
And Marx put it starkly in his <i>Poverty of Philosophy</i>:<br />
<br />
"In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production,
and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their
living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society
with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial
capitalist." (CW-6; p. 166). The historical necessity of socialism, its
scientific basis derives from the fact that the productive forces can no longer
develop under the capitalist relations of production, that they have turned into
fetters. Hence the necessity of the socialist revolution. So said productivist
Marx and Stalin. One thing that may he pointed out here is that it is Lotta who,
in criticising Stalin's alleged "theory of productive forces", forgets
that Stalin also considered men as part of productive forces. In his <i>Dialectical
and Historical Materialism</i> Stalin says:<br />
<br />
"The instruments of production wherewith material values are produced,
the people who operate the instruments of production and carry on the production
of material values thanks to a certain <b>production experience</b>
and <b>labour skill</b> - all these elements jointly constitute the
productive forces of society."<br />
<br />
So this 'productivist' is also concerned with man, of course, not Lotta's
humanistic man, i.e., abstract man, but historically posited man - one involved
in production and at a given stage of society.<br />
<br />
Marx also speaks of property relations ("expressing the same thing in
legal terms"). He also speaks of the conformity of the relations of
production to that of the productive forces as Stalin mechanically underlined
("from forms of development of the productive forces"). Stalin also
did not mean absolute conformity as he outlined in his <i>Economic Problems. </i>Productive
forces are the most mobile element of production and productive relations lag
behind.<br />
<br />
For Stalin, socialism is based on higher productive forces and their growth
which Lotta finds reprehensible:<br />
<br />
"But (yes, that infamous but which means no matter what, you are
decidedly wrong) by and large the political economy had a decidedly productivist
and technicist edge to it... the most rapid expansion of state industry resting
on modern technique... was seen as the underlying foundation of socialism."
(xxvii)<br />
<br />
This charge of 'productivism' crops up again and again. Literature by
'creative' Marxists (Marxists who don't think much of Marx's historical
materialism) speaks of the orthodox Marxist view of productive forces and
production relations as 'productivist', 'economistic' and 'mechanical', so let
us hear Marx himself holding forth on this:<br />
<br />
"...in the degree in which large-scale industry develops, the creation
of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour-time and the quantity of
labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion during labour
time (By agents Marx means science and technology).<br />
<br />
"The <b>theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present
wealth,</b> appears to be a miserable foundation compared to this newly
developed one, the foundation created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as
labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labour
time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must
cease to be the measure] of use value. <b>The surplus labour of the masses</b>
has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as
the <b>non-labour of a few</b> has ceased to be the condition for the
development of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production
based upon exchange value collapses, and the immediate material production
process itself is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism. Free
development of individualities, and hence the not the reduction of necessary
labour time in order to posit surplus labour, but in general the reduction of
the necessary labour of society, to a minimum to which then corresponds the
artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the
time thus set free and the means produced for all of them." <i>(Grundrisse,
</i>CW-29, p. 90&91)<br />
<br />
How vividly Marx lays down the scientific basis of socialism arising from the
development of the productive forces, from the use of science and technology. It
is not man in general, but historical men that he refers to, he shows the
possibilities of the growth of artistic, scientific and other faculties of the
masses. No wonder then that Soviet socialism appears to Lotta to be
'productivist' and 'technicist'. One finds the blossoming of the arts and the
sciences with mass participation in the Soviet Union. The very growth of
productivity was accompanied by mass enthusiasm. The various 'movements' that we
talked about became possible because of changed <i>material conditions, </i>the
fact that the conditions of labour no longer confronted the workers as alien
conditions. Stalin accounted for the roots of the Stakhanovite movement thus:<br />
<br />
l) "the radical improvement in the material welfare of the
workers";<br />
<br />
2) "people do not (have to) work for exploiters for the enrichment of
parasites, but for themselves, for their own class, for their own Soviet
Society";<br />
<br />
3) new modern technique and cadres.<br />
<br />
(<i>Speech at the First Conference of Stakhanovites</i>; 17 Nov. 1935)<br />
<br />
We see that this mass enthusiasm was based on the changed material conditions
of life and not on moral exhortation. Moral exhortation, technique of work
motivation, "scientific" management techniques abound in bourgeois
society. They try to offset and fight work alienation among the workers. Lotta
wants to replace the genuine material conditions of socialist transformation by
the moral preaching of the bourgeoisie - be selfless, work hard for a better
society and so on.<br />
<br />
Do the communists then reject all morality? Communists definitely reject all
supra-class or eternal concepts of morality. For us, all morality is historical
i.e. based on the concrete conditions of the time. We do not speak of eternal
moral concepts which abstract from the material conditions of time. As Engels
says, "all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last
analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as
society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class
morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling
class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has
represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of
the oppressed. (<i>Anti-Duhring</i>, p.111)<br />
<br />
Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the
proletariat. This morality is very different from Lotta's abstract moral
preaching which we have criticised. Our moral precepts are based on the material
conditions of life and the demands of the class struggle therein. Let us
illustrate our point - We communists stand for a classless, stateless society.
We envisage a society where there is no need for violence against people in
general, against the subordination of one man to another. But we do not think
that we can conjure up all this at the twinkle of an eye. We can think of
achieving such a state of affairs only when there is a new generation reared in
"new, free social conditions", when people would have become
"accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without
violence and without subordination." And we can achieve this only on the
economic basis of communism. Unlike Lotta we cannot demand the morality of the
'New Man' any day. We should remember all this when we discuss bourgeois right.<br />
<br />
It is in this moralising vein that Lotta speaks of subjecting growth and
development to social and political criteria. He wants to take care of the
distributive aspect, says "mere increase in productive forces (economic
development) will not in and of itself eliminate exploitative relations"
(xxx); and upbraids Stalin:<br />
<br />
"Stalin recognised the need to overcome such differences as between town
and country and mental and manual labour. But he approached the problem mainly
from the standpoint of developing production. The task of restricting these
differences and relations to the greatest degree possible within the existing
material conditions... was not sufficiently grasped (xxviii-xxix)<br />
<br />
Let us first deal with distribution. It is well known that distributive
justice is the slogan of the bourgeoisie which wants to <i>socially engineer </i>and
reduce the differences in wealth. This bourgeois slogan which appears to be very
appealing to the petty-bourgeoisie, wants to fight exploitation by
redistribution of wealth. The bourgeois decrees the capitalist mode of
production as eternal and then wants to fight its "ill-effects". It
wants to subject growth and development to social and political criteria. But
all such efforts come to nought.<br />
<br />
Marx has pointed out that "the particular mode of men's participation in
production determines the specific form of distribution, the form in which they
share in distribution."<br />
<br />
We have seen that all sorts of redistributive mechanisms adopted by the
Indian state has not prevented greater and greater concentration of wealth in
the hands of a few - the result of the capitalist relations of production. The
stringent Anti-Trust laws in Lotta's own country has not been able to prevent
monopoly. Marx had this comment to make:<br />
<br />
"Vulgar socialism... has taken over from the bourgeois economists the
consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of
production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on
distribution." <i>(Critique of the Gotha Programme; </i>ME, SW-3. p. 20)<br />
<br />
As we have pointed out Lotta imagines a growth which takes place outside the
social relations. He talks of exploitative relations without reference to these
social relations. Capitalist relations of production are exploitative, i.e.
extractive of surplus value is the aim here. So the growth of productive forces
under capitalism cannot eliminate exploitation. What exploitation does Lotta
speak of outside of, and abstracting from, all relations of production, nay
outside of all production because no production can take place outside certain
social relations.<br />
<br />
As for the need to overcome the differences (we should properly say
antithesis) between town and country and mental and manual labour that Lotta
speaks of, we must take into account the restrictive material conditions. That
would mean a short excursion into the concept of bourgeois right.<br />
<br />
Marx speaks of the existence of bourgeois right in the first phase of
communist society (or socialist society as we call it) Marx writes:<br />
<br />
"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has <b>developed</b>
on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it <b>emerges</b>
from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally
and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from
whose womb it emerges." <i>(Critique of the Gotha Programme)</i><br />
<br />
The first phase of communist society or socialist society inevitably carries
"the birth marks of the old society" and Marx makes us aware of this
limitation. We cannot impose upon it economic, moral and intellectual
"standards" which do not take into account these material conditions.<br />
<br />
In socialist society means of production belong to the whole of society.
Every member of society, after performing a certain part of the socially
necessary work, receives from society, after deductions are made of the amount
of labour which goes to the various heads of the public fund (for wear and tear
of means of production, expansion of production, common needs as health,
education, insurance, etc., etc.), as much as he has given to it. This
corresponds to the exchange of equivalents, the principle which regulates the
exchange of commodities.<br />
<br />
Marx remarks,<br />
<br />
"Hence, <b>equal right</b> here is still in principle <b>bourgeois
right...</b> this <b>equal right</b> is still constantly
stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is <b>proportional</b>
to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is
made with an <b>equal standard,</b> labour" (ibid) and<br />
<br />
"This <b>equal</b> right is an unequal right for unequal
labour. It recognises no class differences because everyone is only a worker
like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and
thus productive capacity as natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of
inequality, in its content like every right." <i>(ibid.)</i><br />
<br />
It applies an equal measure for <i>different</i> people, who are not alike.
One is strong, another weak; one has a large family, another is unmarried and so
on. So even with an equal share in the social consumption fund received on
account of equal performance of labour one receives more than another, one will
be richer than another and so on. So Marx comments - "To avoid all these
defects, the right instead of being equal, would have to be unequal..." <i>(ibid.)</i><br />
<br />
Marx is well aware of the limitations inevitable in socialist society.
Differences will be there and society is "compelled to abolish at first <b>only</b>
the "injustice" of the means of production seized by individuals,
and... is <b>unable</b> at once to eliminate the other injustice,
which consists in the distribution of consumer goods "according to the
amount of labour performed, (and not according to needs)" (Lenin)<br />
<br />
From Lotta we learn: "Restricting bourgeois right in the realm of
distribution under socialism involves such measures as developing more social
forms of consumption; providing vital services like health care, regardless of
individual income, taking social initiatives to overcome inequalities between
men and women, and narrowing wage differentials." (xliii)<br />
<br />
The whole statement is quite inane. Firstly, as an insinuation against Soviet
socialism it comes up against facts which call his bluff. Services like
education, health care, child care, recreational facilities were of a very high
standard in the USSR and from day one, this expenditure, this part of the social
product grew in proportion. Can Lotta controvert the accounts of various authors
and observers on the Soviet Union? The 1936 Soviet Constitution also bears
testimony to this and all this advancement was based on higher material
production. The provisions of the 1936 Constitution were not of a declaratory
nature. That is why Stalin said of this constitution that it was "the
registration and legislative embodiment of what has already been achieved and
won in actual fact."<br />
<i><br /></i>
What does Lotta mean by his statement regarding bourgeois right in the
"realm of distribution"?. Marx in his <i>Critique of the Gotha
Programme </i>from where Lotta has picked up his "bourgeois right"
criticized Lassalle for making a fuss about distribution. "Any distribution
whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution
of the conditions of production themselves," Marx observed. And all talk of
bourgeois right takes place "after all the deductions from the social
product" for the above-mentioned public funds have been made. But Lotta
muddles all this up.<br />
<br />
He wants to cross this bourgeois right in the realm of distribution
regardless of the conditions of production, he rails against relating the over-
coming of this bourgeois right with the growth of production.<br />
<br />
But Marx opines that:<br />
<br />
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labour and therewith also the
antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished after labour has
become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive
forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and
all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society
inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs!" <i>(ibid.)</i><br />
<br />
But revolutionary Lotta can only heap scorn at such a productivist view.
Stalin also linked the abolition of the antitheses between town and country and
mental and manual labour with the growth of productive forces along with
cultural re-education. He did not take a subjective idealist view. Engels
pointed out to the exact material basis of the abolition of the antitheses of
mental and manual labour, and town and country in criticizing Duhring's economic
communes. That Stalin was well aware of the problem can be seen from the
measures taken in the Soviet Union with the steadily rising technical and
cultural standards of the people and the life in the collectives. Khrushchev
proved to be a greater revolutionary and sought to abolish the anti-thesis
between town and country with his agri-towns. (Khrushchev suggested that the
existence of small villages be done away with and the population of the villages
transferred to large "agri-towns" where whole families would live
together <i>communally </i>in large houses. He proposed the <i>immediate </i>nationalisation
of the collective farms. Khrushchev gave these suggestions in his capacity as
Chairman of the <i>Special Council for Collective Farm Affairs</i>. His
proposals were first sounded out in <i>Izvestia,</i> 22 November, 1950. Later,
his article with the above proposals appeared in <i>Pravda,</i> 4 March, 1951.
Subsequently. an editorial in the newspaper (dated 5 March, 1951) made it clear
that the ideas expressed were Khrushchev's personal views. Following criticism
in the Party, he made "self-criticism" which appeared in <i>Pravda, </i>29
September, 1952.)<br />
<br />
But Stalin, the kill-joy, immediately shot the idea down calling it a leftist
mistake and bullied Khrushchev into self-criticism. But Khrushchev was not to be
cowed down, with the twentieth Congress, he came on top and saw his agrarian
expertise put to good use. (One of Khrushchev's first steps for the restoration
of capitalism was the sale of state-owned <i>Machine Tractor Stations </i>(MTS)
which provided the use of latest, modern agricultural machinery and other
agronomic services to the collective farms. Stalin had opposed the sale of MTS
to the collective farms as that would mean strengthening the private element,
creating a deeper gulf between public property and collective farm property.
With the collectives becoming the owners of the basic instruments of production
a gigantic quantity of the means of production would come within the orbit of
commodity circulation. It would enlarge the sphere of operation of the law of
value which the Soviet Union was then progressively restricting. It would mean
the restoration of capitalism.) Only this time it was in the 'Right' direction
revealing the eternal kinship of the Rightists and the ultra-Leftists.<br />
<br />
Then what is this "greatest degree possible"? (See quote above) A
mere phrase? Or does it mean something else? It only means a sort of crude
communism, a leveling down. Marx speaks of this communism - of restricting
differences and relations to the "greatest degree possible" within the
existing material conditions as a "leveling-down proceeding from the <b>preconceived</b>
minimum. It has a <b>definite limited</b> standard. How little this
annulment of private property is an appropriation is in fact proved by the
abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the
regression to the <b>unnatural</b> simplicity of the <b>poor</b>
and crude man who has few needs..." <i>(Economic & Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844)</i><br />
<br />
Lotta praises revolutionary China for what he calls a developmental
strategy... "utilising simple and intermediate technologies" which
along with people's creativity could "achieve sustainable and balanced
growth." (xi) All this was in the nature of a<b> "visionary and
viable socialism</b>" in contrast to 'Stalinist' unviable and affluent
Soviet socialism. So, the concern of the modern petty-bourgeois economists (and
even the World Bank) for simple technology and sustainable development is also
addressed by Lotta's visionary socialism. (We have an Indian alternative -
Gandhian socialism: simple technology and sustainable development with the
remoulding ("change of heart") of the masses)<br />
<br />
lt is this petty-bourgeois socialism that Stalin fought against. Let us take
for example, the question of the agricultural <i>artel </i>and the
agricultural <i>commune </i>in the Soviet Union. He criticised the leveling
"achieved" by the commune and showed why it was doomed in practice. He
showed that the real content of the communist demand for equality is the demand
for the <i>abolition of classes. </i>He said that "equalization in the
sphere of requirements and personal, everyday life is a reactionary
petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of some primitive sect of ascetics but not of a
socialist society organised on Marxist lines...." and "the future
commune will arise on the basis of a more developed technique and of a more
developed artel, on the basis of an abundance of products." (See <i>Report
to the XVIIth Party Congress)</i><br />
<br />
The same Stalin who gave the above report in 1934 suggested measures for the
elevation of the collective farms into public property, into a higher level of
socialist organisation in keeping the <i>advance in productive forces </i>and
through measures relating to the progressive restriction of the sphere of
operation of commodity circulation, of the sphere of operation of the law of
value, in 1952 (See his <i>Economic Problems)</i><br />
<br />
In all this Stalin was following the materialist conception of history as
outlined by Marx and Engels. As we have pointed out he warned against confusion
of laws by governments, which have juridical validity, with laws of political
economy, which were <i>independent of the will of man.</i> He knew that
communism cannot be decreed and that:<br />
<br />
<i>"Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society
and its cultural development conditioned thereby</i>" (Karl Marx, <i>Critique
of the Gotha Programme</i>)<br />
<br />
Lotta again and again criticizes Soviet planning:<br />
<br />
"...planning tended to be approached as technical activity... mainly as
a means of rationally organising the productive forces..." (xxvii) and
"Stalin in his 1952 essay, 'Economic Problems of Socialism' defined
planning as a practical, policy-oriented enterprise, as opposed to political
economy, a theoretical pursuit." (xxx)<br />
<br />
This is what Stalin said:<br />
<br />
"The rational organisation of the productive forces, economic planning,
etc., are not problems of political economy, but problems of the economic policy
of the directing bodies... political economy investigates the laws of
development of men's relations of production. Economic policy draws practical
conclusions from this, gives them concrete shape, and builds its day-to-day work
on them." <i>(Economic Problems; </i>pp. 74-75)<br />
<br />
The political economy of socialism, by discovering the objective laws, can
utilise them in the interests of society. These laws cannot be created or
transformed i.e.. they have objective validity, they are <i>independent of the
will of man. </i>These laws do not depend on the sweet will of the proletariat
or any class but they must be discovered and utilised so that one can move in
the desired direction. Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. Only by
cognising this necessity (laws) can we utilise them in the interests of the
proletariat. As Engels says - 'As long as we obstinately refuse to understand
the nature and the character of these social means of action - and this
understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and
its defenders - so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition
to us, so long (as) they master us...<br />
<br />
But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the
producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing
servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity
in the lightning of the storm and electricity under command in the telegraph and
the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration and fire working in the
service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the
productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a
social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of
the community and of each individual." (<i>Anti-Duhring</i>; pp. 320-21)<br />
<br />
Engels was criticising subjective idealism in political economy that Duhring
peddled in view of the "economic communes", Lotta wants to subject
planning to political and social criteria without reckoning with <i>necessity</i>,
the objective laws of political economy. He thinks that freedom precludes this <i>necessity</i>.
By arguing for planning as conscious activity which can have the force of
objective laws he is betraying his kinship with the Soviet revisionists (look
how the ultra-leftists veer around to the rightist positions). Voznesensky
(Nikolai Voznesensky was Chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). He
advocated the expansion of the sphere of operation of the law of value.
Subsequently, this revisionist was dismissed from all his posts, arrested and
executed. Stalin's <i>Economic Problems</i> contains a critique of his views.
He was posthumously rehabilitated by Khrushchev.) averred:<br />
<br />
"the state plan has the force of a law of economic development... is in
itself a social law of development and as such a subject of political
economy." <i>(War Economy of the USSR in the Period of the Patriotic War</i>;
pp. 115 & 120)<br />
<br />
It is this view that Stalin was fighting against when be said that the <i>5-year
Plans </i>ought to be a reflection of the laws of political economy of society.
Neither the Soviet State nor the masses of the USSR could give state plans the
force of an "economic law". Economic laws are, to be cognised and
utilised and then plans can be drawn on this basis.<br />
<br />
Explaining his point Stalin wrote - "It is said that some of the
economic laws operating in our country under socialism, including the law of
value, have been 'transformed', or even 'radically transformed', on the basis of
planned economy. That is likewise untrue. Laws cannot be 'transformed', still
less 'radically' transformed... The thesis that laws can be 'transformed' is a
relic of the incorrect formula that laws can be 'abolished' or 'formed'.... The
sphere of action of this or that economic law may be restricted... but it cannot
be "transformed" or "abolished" (<i>Economic Problems</i>;
pp. 7-8)<br />
<br />
In view of the tremendous successes achieved by the Soviet Union there was a
feeling that the Soviet government could of its conscious will create, abolish
or transform economic laws. This view was strengthened due to the specific role
that the Soviet government had to play. The Soviet government had to abolish
exploitation and to that end it had to create new, socialist forms of economy,
the ready-made rudiments of which were nearly absent in that country. It did not
mean that the Soviet Union could do away with objective economic laws working
independently of the will of man. Stalin struggled against the prevalent
subjective idealist views on political economy.<br />
<br />
But the deeper significance of Stalin's criticism became clear when the
Khrushchevite revisionists came to power. It was asserted that the state plan
could by its own, conscious activity transform the law of value. Such
transformed laws made possible the existence of "transformed" economic
categories of capitalism - socialist commodity, socialist profit and so on. It
actually meant that the economic laws of capitalism had freedom to work
themselves out and the state plan having the force of an economic law would
transform them into socialist categories. For instance, commodity production
would exist, but there would be no conflict between the use value and the
exchange value of the commodity (as Voznesensky had earlier asserted). That is
to say commodity production would not lead to its inevitable results under
socialist planning. Socialism would be achieved by importing political and
social criteria from without, by the "conscious action" of the state
organs and the masses!<br />
<br />
Such "conscious action" was in fact bowing to blind necessity. For
necessity is blind in so far as is it is not understood. To Stalin, conscious
action did not preclude necessity. It was through discovering the objective laws
(necessity) and utilizing them in the interests of the proletariat, that he
could provide leadership to the masses in building socialism, in taking up the
key links at crucial turns and thereby leading the class struggle.<br />
<br />
Lotta accuses Stalin of not drawing the masses into the political struggle
against bourgeois forces. It is said that he did not wage ideological struggles
and thought that "the transformation of social relations, division of
labour and ideologies inherited from class society... (were expected to follow
almost as automatic adjustments to socialist industrialisation." (xxiv)<br />
<br />
It is well known that the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU (1934) gave the
call "to overcome the survivals of capitalism in economic life and in <i>the
minds of the people.</i>" Stalin pointed out that a classless socialist
society "has to be achieved and built by the efforts of all the working
people, by strengthening the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by
intensifying the class struggle, by abolishing classes, by eliminating the
remnants of the capitalist classes, and in battles with enemies both internal
and external." And he criticised the theory of<i> "spontaneity</i>"
in socialist construction. <i>(Report to the XVIIth Party Congress. Emphases
added)</i><br />
<br />
Inspite of all this, Lotta says that the "political and ideological
struggle was not recognised as the essential aspect". And he writes -
"Motivationally, the system relied too much on material incentives..."
(xxix) Whereas Mao writes:<br />
<br />
"In the time of Stalin there was excessive emphasis on collective
interest; individual gain was neglected.... Now they have gone to the opposite
extreme overemphasizing material incentive, neglecting collective
interest". <i>(A Critique of Soviet Economics</i>, p. 94)<br />
<br />
'Stalinist' Soviet socialism is accused of political passivity. Can it be
asserted that the task of socialist industrialisation, the great Stakhanovite
movement, collectivisation of agriculture, victory in the 'Great Patriotic War',
the struggle for the restriction of the sphere of operation of the law of value
etc. took place apart from the class struggle? That there was no politics
involved? What is the dictatorship of the proletariat? Why doesn't Lotta say
that there was no dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union?<br />
<br />
Perhaps Lotta calls the 'Stalin period' politically passive because large
slogan shouting masses were not seen converging on Red Square in Moscow. But
then Gorbachev effectively fits the bill - we witnessed huge demonstrations for
peace all over the Soviet Union during his 'Peace Initiative'!<br />
<br />
How can Lotta account for the fact that in 1956 the leading communist parties
in the world criticized Stalin for fanning the class struggle? Here is the
Communist Party of China's criticism:<br />
<br />
"After the elimination of the exploiting classes one should not continue
to stress intensification of the class struggle, as was done by Stalin, with the
result that the healthy development of socialist democracy was hampered. The
Communist Party of Soviet Union is quite right in resolutely correcting Stalin's
mistakes in this respect." (at the 20th Congress). <i>(Once More on the
Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; </i>p. 30)<br />
<br />
And inspite of all the class struggles waged in China we learn from Lotta:<br />
<br />
"China's socialist revolution met defeat and came to an end in 1976 when
a <i>military coup</i> overthrew working class power". (iii; emphasis
added)<br />
<br />
How very prosaic! After earth-shaking class struggles, an overthrow <i>a la </i>Soviet
Union "bypassing" the class struggle!<br />
<br />
Let us not delude ourselves by phrase mongering. The problem of restoration
of capitalism in the socialist countries should not be dealt speculatively and
through thesis-mongering. Up to now we have had quite a number of accounts
describing the process, but this description does not give a full explanation.
This task remains for us and cannot be replaced by a few answers which are more
ingenious than profound. We must stand on the shoulders of the Soviet
experience.<br />
<br />
<b><i>'Proletarian Path,' New Series, Vol. III, No. 1, Calcutta, December,
1996.</i></b><i> </i> APLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13958381303097610301noreply@blogger.com