Enver Hodja on Eurocommunism

“In a situation when the European bourgeoisie is in great difficulties because of the grave economic and political crisis, when the revolt of the masses against the consequences of this crisis and capitalist oppression and exploitation is mounting to ever higher levels, nothing could serve it better than the anti-Marxist views and anti-worker activity of the Eurocommunists. Nothing could give greater assistance to the strategy of imperialism for the suppression of the revolution, the undermining of liberation struggles and domination of the world than the revisionist, pacifist, capitulationist, collaborationist trends, including Eurocommunism.”

— Enver Hodja, “Eurocommunism is Anti-communism”

CPUSA Job Interview

Prelude to Genocide: How Capitalism Caused the Balkan Wars

The U.S. claims that the Balkan people are gripped by irrational hatreds. And that the U.S. (the self-appointed “cop of the world”) and their allies have no choice but to step in, bomb, impose, threaten and dictate. The imperialists insist that the people of the Balkans need outside forces to dominate them–to save them from themselves! It is an imperialist self-justification–based on crudely turning history upside down. It blames the people for the suffering imposed on them by capitalism.

The Balkan region of southeastern Europe is a complex “jaguar skin” of different nationalities. The Catholic northern part of Yugoslavia–including Slovenia and Croatia–had longstanding links to Austria and Germany to the north. The southern part of Yugoslavia had long historical ties eastward toward Greece, Turkey and the northern Slavic countries of Bulgaria and Russia.

History has created pockets of national hatreds here–the same way some towns or counties in the U.S. are known as white racist towns. But the hatreds of these rural backwaters did not need to infect and polarize the whole country. But over the last ten years, waves of war have washed over the Balkans, subjecting the masses of people to “ethnic cleansing” by death squads and now large-scale bombing by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

The origins of this warfare are not ancient–they are quite modern. These wars are caused by the capitalist rivalries of various ruling classes of the republics of former Yugoslavia–coldly egged on, armed, and backed by imperialist powers, like Germany, the U.S. and Russia.

This article looks at the history of Yugoslavia since its founding after World War 2. It shows that capitalist development caused tensions and inequalities within Yugoslavia and how reactionary war emerged from the power grabs of various bourgeois nationalist forces there.

Behind the Civil War

The nationalities living in the Balkan mountain area can unite–and they proved it. These peoples created a powerful multinational guerrilla movement during World War 2 to defeat the German Nazis and Italian fascists who occupied the region for three years. The peoples of Yugoslavia pinned down many divisions of Nazi troops–and ultimately freed themselves, guns in hand, in a communist-led resistance war. Modern Yugoslavia was build out of that unity–bringing together six nations and several other significant nationalities.

There was no reason why a new, progressive, multinational unity could not have been built. The key would have been uniting on the basis of the interests of the masses of people–along the road of socialism and proletarian internationalism.

But there was, unfortunately, never any real socialist transformation in Yugoslavia. The leaders of the new Yugoslavia, headed by Josef Broz Tito, betrayed the revolution and took the capitalist road–straight into the embrace of U.S. imperialism. This laid the seeds for the wars of today.

The Titoites broke the Yugoslav economy into small independent units. In agriculture, early experiments in collectivization were reversed–by 1957 virtually all the farms were in private hands. Nationalized industry was “privatized.” Individual factories were officially operating under “workers’ self-management.” But the policy was set by directors, and the real control was exercised by the market mechanism of capitalism. Without socialist planning, profit decided where investments flowed, what was produced, and who got to work. In reality “worker self-management” meant that wages were tied to factory profits–they were a form of piecework. Factories, industries and whole regions were competing with each other and profit was in command. And, more importantly, the proletariat did not have state power. It was impossible for them to revolutionize society.

The World’s First Experience with “Capitalist Roaders in Power”

By 1948 Tito was sharply criticized by the world communist movement, then led by Joseph Stalin. Meanwhile Tito was praised and supported by the imperialists–who were waging all kinds of warfare against revolutionary and socialist forces around the world. Tito claimed that he would walk a “non-aligned” path between East and West. But in fact, his Yugoslavia quickly became dependent on the imperialists–politically, economically and militarily–tied to the world capitalist market while he huddled under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.”

For the first time in history a victorious armed movement led by supposed communists had come to power, but it set up a capitalist society. This was the first experience with “revisionism in power”–meaning a capitalist ruling class that claimed to be leading a socialist society.

The development of Yugoslavia was closely studied by revolutionaries like Mao Tsetung. In 1955, Khrushchev, a top leader in the Soviet Union, visited Yugoslavia and praised Tito. Within a year, Khrushchev himself had seized complete power in the Soviet Union and took it too down the capitalist road.

In 1963 under Mao’s leadership, the Chinese Communist Party sent an open letter called–Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?–to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In that polemic, Mao’s forces wrote: “The restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia will make all Marxist-Leninists see better and enable people to realize more keenly the necessity and urgency of combating modern revisionism. So long as imperialism exists, there is apparently no ground for saying that the danger of the restoration of capitalism in the socialist countries has been eliminated.”

Capitalist Roots of National Antagonisms

Under the weight of growing debt to the West, the Titoites carried out new “reforms” in 1965. They moved to make their currency convertible to Western currencies–so that investments could more easily flow in and profits could more easily flow out. After 1968, foreign capitalists could invest directly in the private sector. Yugoslavia became the first revisionist country to set up a stock market. These innovations of the capitalist road are now being carried out in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Yugoslav proletarians were sent off as cheap labor for northern Europe–they basically became an “export commodity.” By 1971, over a million Yugoslavs were immigrant workers, over half of them in West Germany.

According to World Bank statistics, the wealthiest 5 percent of Yugoslav households earned 25 percent of the national income in the 1970s, while the poorest 20 percent of the population earned less than 7 percent. This was one of the most extreme income gaps in Europe–in fact, according to the World Bank, even India’s income distribution gap was not as big!

The northern nations of Yugoslavia–Slovenia and Croatia–were more highly developed industrially and agriculturally. The three southern national areas–Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Albanian region of Kosovo–were far more undeveloped and poor. Serbia, the largest national grouping, is in between North and South and is also a relatively poor area. These divisions within Yugoslavia got even more acute because of the capitalist development pursued by Yugoslavia. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Over decades, this created a powerful basis for antagonism between the nationalities of the country and for the growth of reactionary nationalism.

Investment flows where the profits are greatest. The industrial northern nations developed rapidly after 1945, while the poorer southern republics stagnated. When the 1990s started, per capita production in Slovenia was three times as high as it was in poorer regions like Macedonia. By 1970 the per capita income of the average Slovene was over six times that of the average Kosovar. Kosovo lives in Third World conditions–comparable to Bolivia or Morocco–while in Slovenia the standard of living is closer to that of neighboring Austria.

The villages in the poorer peasant regions of the south emptied. People went north for lousy jobs and barrack-like living conditions as “guest workers”–within the supposedly “equal” Yugoslav federation. These “guest workers” make up 15 to 20 percent of the Slovenian workforce and are treated like dirt.

The old phony-communist system of Yugoslavia was based on state capitalism and a complex system of balancing bourgeois national interests. Inevitably, that old federation became strained. Bourgeois forces leading each republic tried to shift wealth toward “their” nations.

Inequality Gives Rise to Political, then Military Conflict

In the 1980s the conflicts intensified because of classic “IMF crisis.” Yugoslavia sank deeply into debt to the International Monetary Fund and other international imperialist lenders–to the tune of $1.8 billion. The lenders demanded that capitalist Yugoslavia take “austerity” measures to pay back the debt, and this inflamed the conflict in the country.

The masses themselves were not especially gripped by national hatreds–certainly not at the beginning. Large parts of the population had intermarried. In urban areas people moved away from religion–which had been a form through which national hostilities had been expressed. Many people no longer identified with one or another nationality–but simply considered themselves “Yugoslavs.” Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia was famous for this kind of multicultural fusion. Today, the masses of people there still fondly remember the days when people lived and worked together peacefully.

Meanwhile, under the surface, the inequalities between Yugoslavia’s regions and the rival ambitions of the different national capitalist forces within Yugoslavia created conditions for an eruption.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, and imperialist power shifted in Europe, it tore old Yugoslavia apart. Warring bourgeois camps sprang out–claiming to protect the survival of different national groups–while they pursued their own interests and sought to divide the people along national lines.

After Tito died, an extremely reactionary movement won the leadership of the state-capitalist forces in Serbia. Led by Slobodan Milosevic, this political current insisted that the time had come for the Serbian nation (meaning the Serbian national bourgeoisie operating within the larger Yugoslavian state) to grab for itself–and impose its will by force. Milosevic, like most ruling class figures in the former Yugoslavia, was a former revisionist–meaning that he had been part of the ruling Yugoslavian party, the “League of Communists,” which was a phony communist, state capitalist government institution.

Some forces argue that the U.S. is attacking Serbia to enforce economic privatization and the elimination of “socialist” remnants in Yugoslavian society. These analyses are completely off the mark.

There is no socialism in Yugoslavia today and there never was. Yugoslavia has been controlled by running dogs of the U.S. and enemies of real communism for its whole history. Yugoslavia built its economy along capitalist and free-market lines over 40 years ago. And today, there is certainly nothing socialist at all about the economy of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation or the politics of local capitalist-nationalist reactionaries like Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic is the top representative of the Serbian capitalist ruling class which is attempting a reactionary power grab in the region–and has collided with some larger interests of NATO’s imperialist/capitalists –especially those ruling Germany, Britain and the U.S.

In 1989 Milosevic made Kosovo a symbol and a starting point of this regional power grab. As he came to power within the Yugoslavian federation he revoked the autonomy that Kosovo had exercised within Serbia. He started to systematically impose a Serbian domination on the Albanian majority of Kosovo. He brutally suppressed a powerful strike among the Kosovo miners, expelled Albanians from the universities, imposed Serbian police and troops on the province–and generally made it clear that his government intended to drive Albanians from Kosovo. There were repeated incidents of police murder, as the cops acted like an occupying force.

All this signaled that military force was being applied to turn Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia. It greatly accelerated the development of separatist sentiments among the ruling classes of the other nationalities (like Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia). The masses of people feared that they would soon be targeted for their nationality.

The capitalist forces controlling Slovenia and Croatia thought they could get a better deal outside of the Yugoslavian federation. They were encouraged, backed, and armed by newly reunited German imperialism. Once Croatia and Slovenia seceded, the Yugoslavian federation started to unravel. The Federal army command, dominated by Serbian officers, emerged more and more as the real power holding the Yugoslav federation together. Warfare erupted in waves.

First came war between the Serbian-dominated Yugoslavian army and the governments of Croatia and Slovenia that declared independence from Yugoslavia. That war ended with independence for both Croatia and Slovenia.

Then, a three-sided war erupted within the most multinational republic, Bosnia, as Serbian and Croatian militias fought to drive other nationalities out, and annex parts of Bosnia to their republics.

Both the Croatian and Serbian nationalists developed death-squad like forces that carried out “ethnic cleansing”–murderous terror campaigns designed to force the masses of people to flee multinational areas and group with their own nationality.

With major German and U.S. military backing, the Croatian forces were able to fight the Serbian/Yugoslavian army to a stalemate–inside and outside Bosnia. This led to the 1995 Dayton Accords where the U.S. and Milosevic together imposed a defacto partitioning of Bosnia between Croatian and Serbian forces–and cut the very ground out from underneath the Bosnian Muslims (who the U.S. claimed to be helping).

The third wave of fighting has now erupted in Kosovo–as Milosevic moved to defeat the armed Albanian forces resisting his reactionary nationalist moves. The campaigns of suppressing Albanians accelerated. Serbian death squad forces, like “Arkan’s Tigers,” made their appearance with high-level government support. This fighting is particularly troublesome for U.S. interests because it threatens to destabilize Macedonia–and carried a great risk of disrupting U.S./NATO alliances in this region.

This bitter series of Balkan wars is a living example both of how capitalism leads to the domination of one nation over another and how imperialism inflames conflicts among the people into reactionary war.

Reactionary Polarizations

The bitter events of years of civil war and ethnic cleansing have deepened painful chasms between the peoples of various nationalities that can only be overcome through tremendous struggle and revolutionary leadership. Progressive sentiments, opposition to ethnic cleansing and desires for unity are often heard among the masses of people throughout this whole region–along with considerable hatred of reactionary nationalist forces leading the governments of Serbia and Croatia. However, despite that, the political and military initiative has remained in the hands of those bourgeois nationalist forces.

Within these intense and often many-sided conflicts–there are forces who have been fighting for just causes. In particular, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians of Kosovo have been fighting in self-defense, and have raised just demands for self-determination and independence to guarantee the security of persecuted peoples.

The whole situation in the Balkans cries out for an armed, determined multinational force with a internationalist vision of solidarity between the peoples and a program for defeating reactionaries and building a new society. Unfortunately, there is no Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party in the Balkans today to lead such an armed struggle. One will have to be built. There is no shortcut out of this situation. Support for imperialist intervention and occupation will only deepen the divisions, confusions and sufferings among the people–and it will only strengthen the position of imperialism in the world as a whole to impose its interests on oppressed people.

Many millions all over the world are watching the bitter sufferings of the Balkan people. And there is a way for them to help create the conditions for something better. It is to firmly and forcefully oppose the interventions and intrigues of the U.S. and NATO. It would be a great contribution to the future of the Balkan peoples to make it as difficult as possible for the Great Powers to bomb and occupy, infiltrate local movements and governments, build up their favorite local reactionaries, and impose their interests over the bones of the people.

Source

Communist League: The Influence Of Rosa Luxemburg on the CPG

Appendix to Revisionism In Germany: to 1922 by the Communist League; January 1977.

The dominant theoretical influence on the Communist Party of Germany in its early years was that of Polish-born Rosa Luxemburg, who moved to Germany in 1897:

“Rosa Luxemburg has left behind deep traces in the German and Polish Communist movement. One can say without exaggeration that for a considerable number of years.. both parties grew up under the influence of her ideas and guidance”.

(D. Manuilsky: “The Bolshevisation of the Parties;” in: “Communist International”, No. 10; 1925; p. 59).

“All the -new leaders fully subscribed, (to) the guiding lines of policy laid down by Rosa Luxemburg in the foundation document of the, CPG and subsequent policy statements in ‘Rote Fahe’. On nearly all subjects her word was law . . . . And even after the personal element of tribute had gradually died away,, her work was still the fount of all orthodoxy in Germany”.

(J.P. Nettl: “Rosa Luxemburg”, Volume 2; London; 1966; P. 787-8).

In her work “The Accumulation of Capital“, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg put forward the view that a capitalist society could solve the problem of capital accumulation only by expanding into pre-capitalist economies.. and that when these areas had been absorbed, capitalism would break down“:

“The day-to-day history of capital becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by persistent economic catastrophes or crisis, accumulation can go on no longer . . . .
Capitalism . . . strives to become universal.. and, indeed,, on account of this, it must break down”.

(R. Luxemburg: “The Accumulation of Capital”; London; 1951; p. 467).

Lenin’s marginal notes to “The Accumlation of Capital”, are full of comments such as “False!” and “Nonsense!”, and he described her main thesis as a “fundamental error”. (V.I. Lenin: Notes on R. Luxemburg’s Book; “The Accumulation of Capital”, in: “Leniniski Sbornik”, Volume 22; Moscow; 1933; p.343-6).

In accordance with this thesis, Rosa Luxemburg saw no revolutionary potential in the peoples of the colonial-type countries and denied the possibility of genuine wars of national liberation under imperialism. In her pamphlet “The Crisis of German Social Democracy, written in 1915 under the pseudonym of “Junius” and published in 1916, she declares:

“In the present imperialistic milieu there can be no wars of national self-defence”.

(R. Luxemburg: “The Crisis of German Social-Democracy”; in: “Rosa Luxemburg Speaks”; New York; 1970; p. 305).

Commenting on her opposition to the Polish national-liberation movement, against the domination of tsarist Russia, Lenin said:

“In her anxiety not to ‘assist’ the nationalistic bourgeoisie of Poland, Rosa Luxemburg by her denial of the right of secession in the programme of the Russian Marxists, is, in fact assisting the Great Russian Black Hundreds (i.e., fascist-type organisations of the Russian landed aristocracy – Ed)”.

(V.I. Lenin: “On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”; in: “Selected Works”, Volume 4; London; 1943; p. 266).

After the socialist revolution in Russia in November 1917 Rosa Luxemburg condemned the national policy of the Bolsheviks as “counter-revolutionary”:

“The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact that the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and a breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or something which was really implicit in this slogan – the disintegration of Russia.
One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly-granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against Revolution as its mortal enemy and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself. . .
The Bolsheviks.. by their hollow nationalistic phraseology Concerning the ‘right of self-determination to the point of separation’ . . . . . . . did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution. .
The Bolsheviks provided the ideology which masked this campaign of counter-revolution; they strengthened the position of the bourgeoisie and weakened that of the proletariat”.

(R. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution”, in: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks”.; New York; 1970; p. 378, 380, 382).

Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg failed to see, even in a country where the bourgeois-democratic revolution, had not been carried through, the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, regarding it as, in the long run, a reactionary force — a view which became a cornerstone of the Trotskyite theory of “permanent revolution“:

“Rosa Luxemburg declared that Lenin . . . overlooked the . . . fact that it (i.e., the peasantry Ed.) would certainly, and probably very soon.. go over again, into the camp of reaction”.

(P. Frohlich; “Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work”; London; 1940; p. 113).

On the basis of this view, after the socialist revolution in Russia in November 1917 she condemned the Bolshevik policy of redistributing the land among the peasantry as “counter-revolutionary“:

“The slogan launched by the Bolsheviks, immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants. .. piles up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian relations . . . .
Now after the ‘seizure’ . . . . . there is an enormous, newly developed and powerful mass of owning peasants who will defend their newly won property with tooth and nail against every socialist attack of the future socialisation of agrarian economy. . . . has now become a question of opposition and struggle between the urban proletariat and the mass of the peasantry. . . .
Now that the Russian peasant has seized the land with his own fist, he does not even dream of ‘defending Russia and the revolution to which he owes the land.
The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism in the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners”.

(R.Luxemburg: “The Russian Revolution in: “Rosa Luxemburg Speaks”; New York; 1970; p. 376, 377, 378).

Rosa Luxemburg saw the mass strike with economic aims as the decisive form of the revolutionary struggle of the working class:

“The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle. . . . Strike action is the living pulse-beat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving wheel. The mass strike. . . is . . . the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle, in the revolution. . . . In this general picture the purely political demonstration strike plays quite a subordinate role. . . The demonstration strikes which, in contradistinction to the fighting strikes, exhibit the greatest mass of party discipline, conscious direction and political thought, and therefore must appear as the highest and most mature form of the mass strike, play in reality the greatest part.. in. the beginnings of the movement. . . .
The pedantic representation in which the pure political mass strike is logically derived from the strike as the ripest and highest stage. . . is shown to be absolutely false . . . .
The movement on the whole does not proceed from the . . .. economic to the political struggle. . . Every great political mass action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes. And that applies not only to each of the great mass strikes, but also to the revolution as a whole”.

(R.Luxemburg: “The Mass Strike and the Trade Unions”, in: “Rosa Luxemburg Speaks”; New York; 1970; p. 182, 183, 184, 185).

But the economic strike, which to Rosa Luxemburg, was the decisive form of the revolutionary struggle of the working class, is predominantly spontaneous in character:

“The mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest social-democratic party. . . . .
The element of spontaneity plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception. .
The element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them”.

(R. Luxemburg: ibid, p. 187, 188).

On the basis of the view of the predominantly spontaneous character of “the decisive form of the revolutionary struggle of the working class, Rosa Luxemburg opposed as “dangerous” and “Blanquist” Lenin’s concept of the necessity for a disciplined vanguard party based on firm democratic centralism. In her article “Organisational Questions of Social Democracy“, first published in 1904 as a review of Lenin’s “What Is to be Done?” she writes:

“Lenin’s centralism . . . is a mechanical transposition of the organisational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of the socialist working class . . . His conception of socialist organisation is quite mechanistic.. . . The tendency is for the directing organs of the socialist party to play a conservative role.. . . Granting, as.. Lenin wants, such, absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ. . . The ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit. Lenin’s concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party — to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify it. In the present situation such an experiment would be doubly dangerous to Russian social democracy. . . We can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than, Lenin’s plan of organisation. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straitjacket, which will immobilise the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee“.

(R. Luxemburg: “Organisational Questions of Social Democracy”, in: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks-”; New York; 1970; p. 118, 119, 121, 122., 126-7).

Rosa Luxemburg shared with Leon Trotsky anti-Leninist views not only on the question of the role of the peasantry and on the question of the organisation of the party of the working class, but also on the question of the possibility of building socialism in a single country:

“Of course, even with the. greatest heroism the proletariat of one single country cannot loosen this noose”.

(R. Luxemburg: “The Old Mole”, in: ‘Selected Political Writings”; London; 1972; p. 227).

“The awkward position that the Bolsheviks are in today, however, is together with most of their mistakes, a consequence of the basic insolubility of the problem posed to them by the international, above all the German, proletariat. To carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution in a single country surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule and in the fury of the bloodiest world war in human history — that is squaring the circle. Any socialisst , party would have to fail in this task and perish.”

(R. Luxemburg: “The Russian. Tragedy”, in’: Ibid.; p.241-2).

And like Trotsky, she strived during the years before the First World War to bring about a reunification of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks i.e., to obliterate the dividing line between Marxism-Leninism and’ revisionism:

“The other plan was proposed by Rosa Luxemburg. . . . according to that plan. . a ‘unity conference’ (Einingungskenferenz) was proposed “in order to restore a united party”. . . . This last plan . . . . was only an attempt on the part of Rosa Luxemburg to smuggle in the ‘restoration’ of the sadly notorious ‘Tyszko circle’ (‘Tyszko’ was the pseudonym of Leo Jogiches — Ed.)

(V.I. Lenin: “A Good Resolution And a Bad Speech”, in: “Selected Works”, Volume 4; London’; 1943; p. 209).

Holding these views, Rosa Luxemburg could not but be hostile to the Soviet regime established in Russia under the leadership of the Bolsheviks in November 1917.

“Freedom of the press, the rights of association and assembly … have been outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime. . . . Without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblages the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable…. Freedom only for the supporters of the government . . . .is no freedom at all. . . .
Lenin is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconic penalties, rule by terror – all these things are but palliatives. It is rule by terror which demoralises. . . .
With the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule . . . .
At bottom, then, a clique affair — a dictatorship to be sure; not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians. . . . Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalisation of public life.”

(R.Luxemburg: “The Russian Revolution”, in: “Rosa Luxemburg Speaks”; New York; 1970; p. 389, 391).

Following Stalin‘s statement that many of the serious political mistakes committed by the Communist Party of Germany were the result of Social-Democratic survivals which must be eliminated (September 1924), the “Theses on the Bolshevisation of the Parties of the Comintern“, adopted by the Fifth Plenum of the ECCI March/April 1925, drew special attention to the harmfulness of Luxemburgism:

“The genuine assimilation of Leninism and its practical application in the construction of Communist parties throughout the world is impossible without taking into consideration the errors of very prominent Marxists who strove to apply Marxism to the conditions of a new epoch, without being wholly, successful in so doing.
Among these errors must be included those of Rose Luxemburg. The nearer these political leaders are to Leninism, the more dangerous are those of their views which, being erroneous, do not coincide with Leninism”.

(Theses on the Bolshevisation of the Parties, of the Comintern, 5th. Plenum ECCI, in: “International Press Correspondence”; Volume 5, No. 47; June 4th., 1925; p.616).

The theses described the most important errors of Luxemburgism as follows:

“a). The non-Bolshevik method of presenting the question of ‘spontaneity’, ‘consciousness’, ‘organisation’, and the ‘mass’ . . which frequently hampered the revolutionary development of the class struggle, prevented proper understanding of the role of the Party in the revolution;
b) the under-estimation of the technical side of preparing for revolt hampered, and in some cases even now hamper, the proper presentation of the question of ‘organising’ revolution’;
c) the error in the question of the attitude towards the peasantry;
d) equally serious were the errors committed by Rosa Luxemburg in the national question. The repudiation of the slogan of self-determination, (to support the formation of independent states) on the ground that under imperialism it is ‘impossible’ to solve the national question, led in fact to a sort of nihilism on the national question which extremely hampered Communist work in a number of countries;
e) The propagation of the party-political character of trade unions. . . was a great mistake which evidenced the failure to understand the role of the trade unions as organs embracing all the workers. This mistake seriously hampered, and still hampers, the proper approach of the vanguard to the working class as a whole;
f) while paying just tribute to the greatness of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the founders of the Communist International, the Comintern believes that it will be acting in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg herself if it will now help the Parties of the Comintern to draw the lessons from the errors made by this great revolutionary.
Without overcoming the errors of Luxemburgism, genuine Bolshevisation is impossible”.

(Ibid.; p.616).

In November 1931, Stalin’s letter to the journal “Proletarian Revolution” was published, under the title of “Some Questions concerning the History of Bolshevism”. This reiterated in stronger terms the criticism made of the theory and practice of Luxemburgism:

“Organisational and ideological weakness was a characteristic feature of the Left Social-Democrats not only in the period prior to the war. As is well known, the Lefts retained this negative feature in the post-war period as well. Everyone knows the appraisal of the German Left Social-Democrats given by Lenin in his famous article ‘On Junius’s (i.e., Rosa Luxemburg’s –Ed.) Pamphlet’, written in October 1916, in which Lenin, criticising a number of very serious political mistakes committed by the Left Social-Democrats in Germany, speaks of ‘the weakness of ALL German Lefts, who are entangled on all sides in the vile net of Kautskyan hypocrisy, pedantry, ‘friendship’ for the opportunists; in which he says that ‘Junius has not yet yet freed herself completely from the ‘environment’ of the German, even Left Social-Democrats, who are afraid of a split, are afraid to express revolutionary slogans to the full’. . . The Lefts in Germany. . . time and again wavered between Bolshevism and Menshevism. . . .
In 1903 . . . . the Left Social-Democrats in Germany, Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg, came out against the Bolsheviks. They accused the Bolsheviks of ultra-centralist and Blanquist tendencies. Subsequently, these vulgar and philistine epithets were caught up by the Mensheviks and spread far and wide. In 1905. . . . Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg . . . invented the utopian and semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution (a distorted representation of the Marxian scheme of revolution) which was permeated through and through with the Menshevik repudiation of the policy of alliance between the working class and the peasantry, and opposed this scheme to the Bolshevik scheme of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Subsequently, this semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution was caught up by Trotsky and transformed into a weapon of struggle against Leninism. The Left Social-Democrats in the West developed the semi-Menshevik theory of imperialism, rejected the principle of self-determination of nations in its Marxian sense (including secession and formation of independent states), rejected the theses that the liberation movement in the colonies and oppressed was of great revolutionary importance, rejected the theses that a united front between the proletarian revolution and the movement for national emancipation was possible, and opposed this semi-Menshevik hodge-podge, which was nothing but an underestimation of the national and colonial question, to the Marxian scheme of the Bolsheviks. It is well known that this semi-Menshevik hodge-podge was subsequently caught up by Trotsky who used it as a weapon in the struggle against Leninism. Such were the universally known mistakes committed by the Left Social-Democrats in Germany.
I need not speak . . . . of the mistakes they committed in appraising the policy of the Bolsheviks in the period of the October Revolution. . . .
Of course. . . they also have great and important revolutionary deeds to their credit. . . .
But this does not cannot remove the fact that the Left Social-Democrats in Germany did commit a number of very serious political and theoretical mistakes; that they had not yet rid themselves of their Menshevik burden”.

(J.V. Stalin: ”Some Questions concerning the History of Bolshevism”, in: “Leninism”; London; 1924; p. 390, 391-2, 393-4).

The letter was attacked immediately by the open revisionists, such as Leon Trotsky:

“There is included in it a vile and bare-faced calumny about Rosa Luxemburg. This great revolutionist is ‘enrolled by Stalin into the camp of centrism! . . . Stalin should proceed with caution before expending his vicious mediocrity when the matter touches figures of such stature as Rosa Luxemburg”.

(L. Trotsky: “Hands off Rosa Luxemburg”, in: R. Luxemburg: “Rosa Luxemburg. Speaks”, New York; 1970; p. 441, 446).

When the concealed revisionists threw off their mask in 1956, they too strongly denounced Stalin’s Letter:

“Through it, sectarian views., especially on Social-Democracy and its left wing, were fostered in the CPG”.

(“‘Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Chronik”, Volume 2; Berlin; 1966; p. 278)

Trotsky, in the article mentioned above, was also indignant that in his letter Stalin had “credited” Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus (i.e., Alexander Helphand) with having invented the theory of “permanent revolution”, and pointed out that in “On the Problems of Leninism”, published in 1926, Stalin had “credited” Parvus and Trotsky with having first put the theory forward. Stalin clarified his position in January 1932:

“It was not Trotsky but Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus who invented the theory of ‘permanent’ revolution. It was not Rosa Luxemburg but Parvus and Trotsky who in 1905 advanced the theory of ‘permanent’ revolution and actively fought for it against Lenin. Subsequently Rosa Luxemburg, too, began to fight actively against the Leninist plan of revolution. But that was after 1905″.

(J.V. Stalin: Reply to Olekhnovich and Aristov, in: “Works”, Volume 13; Moscow; 1955; p.133, 134)

On January 8th., 1932, the organ of the. Communist Party of Germany “Rote Fahne” carried an article endorsing Stalin’s letter and declaring that the influence of Luxemburgism had been “the greatest obstacle” to the development of a Marxist-Leninist Party in Germany:

“The Communist Party of Germany welcomes Comrade Stalin’s letter as a document which calls upon the German Communists to wage a fierce struggle against all social-democratic influences within the revolutionary movement, against the remnants of Centrism and Luxemburgism within the Party. . . . The failure on the part of the German Left Radicals in regard to the question of a complete break with opportunism and Centrism had an adverse effect upon the whole course of the Spartacus League during the war. Its after-effects were to be seen in the vacillations and the actions of the various liquidatory and oppositionist tendencies in the CP of Germany and rendered difficult a clear fulfilment of the role of the Party. Thus this failure of the German Lefts became the greatest obstacle to the development and victory of the revolutionary movement of the German proletariat”.

(“Comrade Stalin’s Letter and the CP of Germany”, in: “International Press Correspondence”, Volume 12, No, 4; January 28th., 1932; p. 73).

An article written by Fritz Heckert and published later in January 1932 to commemorate the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder, followed the same lines:

“Under the ideological leadership of Rosa Luxemburg there arose the fundamentally false idea regarding the nature of imperialism, which led to the theory of the mechanical collapse of capitalism. From this again there followed the theory of the spontaneity of the masses, who would wrest themselves from the errors and crimes of the social-democratic leaders in order to rally round the revolutionary leadership. This also was the reason why no steps were taken to found an independent revolutionary party. It was not recognised that the party can be only the advance-guard of the proletariat, its most progressive, energetic and clearest part. These false ideas are connected with other errors of equally great importance.. such as the failure to recognise the role of revolutionary violence and the errors regarding the national and the peasant questions.
It is thanks to the after-effects of the social-democratic trends in the Communist Party of Germany that such big mistakes were committed in 1921 in the March action and in 1923 in the October movement,, and that the Party was long prevented from developing into a real Bolshevist Party owing to the actions of a large number of renegades in its ranks. The eradication of all false ideas is indispensably necessary necessary for every Bolshevik Party. Only recently.. Comrade Stalin again urgently called attention to this . . . .
It would be a profanation of the two great Dead if we sought to vie with the renegades in conserving their errors”.

(F. Heckert: “January 15, 1919″, in: “International Press Correspondence”, Volume 12, No. 2; January 14th., 1932; p. 29).

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PCMLE: Enver Hoxha – Builder and Defender of Marxism

From En Marcha, the newspaper of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE).

Enver Hoxha and the Party of Labor of Albania, unmasked and confronted the different types of revisionists, fought against the Yugoslavists, confronted the Titoists and fought the Maoists.

Enver was born in Albanian Gjirokastra the October 16, 1908 and died in Tirana on April 11, 1985, his studies were done at Paris (France), University of Montpellier, a place where he came into contact with Communist circles . Collaborated with the communist newspaper L’Humanité exposing the Albanian monarchy. In 1936 he returned to Albania and began working as a teacher. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, as part of the International Brigades. Thereafter participated in the Albanian opposition to the king Zog I and the Italian invasion of April 7, 1939.

Hoxha communist group joined the “Labor” and actively involved in the formation of the National Liberation Front, which was his first political commissar. After the Italian occupation of the country in April 1939, c. Enver was fired from his job and Korça communist organization sent him to the capital, Tirana, which soon became an important center of the communist movement and the anti-fascist resistance. On November 8, 1941 Communist Party was founded as a product of the merger of several communist groups in this process played an important role Enver, which made him one of the references to 1943, during World War II, was elected leader of the PTA.

On November 29, 1944 Albania was liberated from all the invaders and installed a new government led by Labour Party of Albania, having Hoxha as the main party leader. This was the result of a hard struggle of workers and Albanian peoples, “the Albanian revolution triumphed through armed uprising and the creation of people’s armed forces. In the first phase laid the foundation through core guerrilla detachments and regular battalions, detachments of volunteers, self-defense areas, moral and political preparation of the masses for the armed uprising, in a second phase, the fight became general uprising popular, organized the National Liberation Army, the third phase, the general popular uprising led to the expulsion of the occupants and the complete liberation of the country, the destruction of the organization and the reactionary armed forces as an instrument of the invaders and complete destruction of the state apparatus of the occupiers and traitors. “

After conquering the power and drive out the fascists in their territory, major changes were made as to nationalize mines, banks and foreign companies and established state control over production and labor, while multiplied consumer cooperatives . In August 1945 began land reform, distributing among poor peasants and laborers nearly all arable land were owned by landlords.

After the victory in World War II solidified a provisional government and Enver Hoxha became Prime Minister. On January 11, 1946 was proclaimed by the Constituent Assembly’s Republic of Albania, abolish the monarchy and beginning the construction of socialism in the country.

On several occasions the class enemy attempted to regain power and to divert the revolutionary path through which marched the Albanian people in that mission Josep Tito, leader of Yugoslav revisionism, played a nefarious role. But discipline and conviction of the PTA confronted and exposed the enemy’s strategy and the July 1, 1948 Albania broke off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia. During the following months the c. Enver Hoxha and the PTA faced all currents and elements for the government to Titoites Albanian.

With Enver Albania at the head of five-year planning was encouraged to develop production in this country, but at the same time it promoted the building of socialism and got great transformations, the bourgeoisie and imperialism sought every way to hit the block degenerate socialist and revolutionary achievements. Thus, in countries where the communists and the working classes down their guard and kept the revolutionary vigilance and discipline, revisionism and opportunism were able to take over the leadership of communist parties and socialist states.

In that scenario and Enver Hoxha of Albania Workers Party unmasked and confronted the different ranges of revisionists, fought against the thesis of the XX Congress of the CPSU in which the principles were felt Juschovistas, faced the Titoist and fought the thesis of the three worlds of Maoism.

Enver Hoxha’s so leaves an important legacy as a fighter communist, a fighter who faced the reaction and opportunism in all its facets, which exposed the revisionism and fearlessly defended Marxism-Leninism.

…………………..

Long live the fortieth anniversary of Socialist Albania, N.11 political magazine, pg. 76

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More photos from PAME-”K”KE stance on October 20

Members of "K"KE-PAME in front of police forces uphold the Greek Parliament using sticks and helmets

Members of "K"KE-PAME attacked protesters during the second day of the 48-hour general strike (October 19-20)

None of these photos were published in "Rizospastis". newspaper of "K"KE

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The reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME: Impact force of the capital upheld the reactionary bourgeois parliament

Surprised thousands of workers striking protesters and anti-fascists of various political orientations and members-but fans of “K” KE-PAME who were in Constitution Square the second (20 Ochtovri) day of 48-hour strike they first saw the reformist leaders to assume stewardship the reactionary bourgeois parliament and ensuring the “Order and Security”, ie the imposition of bourgeois legality, with the “excuse” the safeguarding of “own” ie that the concentration of PAME, apparently replacing the police and the civilian Army who uses the bourgeoisie when the police are inefficient and unable to fulfill this “pious” work ie to defend the reactionary bourgeois regime.

The surprise, of course, thousands of demonstrators strikers are entirely justified, because this phenomenon is completely new to the action of right-wing opportunists antistalinikon-antizachariadikon leaders and such a shameful act anepanastatiki happens for the first time in the history of the local political process chroustsofikis social democracy: to take the reformists leaders of the “K” KE-PAME’s role and work of the Police ie guard the bourgeois parliament and ensure that civil legitimacy and the full replacement. But this ignominious fate of the reformist leaders was not a random and isolated incident, nor was an error estimate: instead it was expected and inevitable, is not new, and perhaps the last link in a long chain in the course of constant betrayal of social democratic Khrushchev “K” JV starting from the mid-50 when protosygkrotithike (March 56), after the violent revolutionary Communist Party from the brutal intervention of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, etc. therein, from the Soviet treacherous chroustsofiki group as an outset antistaliniko antizachariadiko-urban, social democratic type party.

For antistalinikous-antizachariadikous opportunist leaders of the new reformist “K” KE (56) are the words of Lenin’s old social democracy, “the factors of the labor movement who belong to the opportunist trend are the best defenders of the bourgeoisie, despite themselves bourgeoisie “(Lenin), and” there just is the starting point and the current counterrevolutionary role of the reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME open civil defense system by challenging employees to uphold the reactionary bourgeois parliament, evolution surprise for thousands of workers and protesters has the background to – default but from the chroustsofiki direction – two important stages, before it reaches the end-Ochtovri of 2011, which is essential to fully brief report that will highlight the best and convincingly Today’s revolutionary energy and their inevitable outcome, over a period of sharpening class struggle.

1.Dekaetia of 80: the disgraceful stewardship of the Embassy of the U.S. imperialists with the Police

When in November 1980, the state University, the Government of monarcho-fascists party SW (Prime Minister G. Rallis) ordered the police to attack protesters who tried to “break” the fascist prohibition on the road to the American Embassy, ​​with the result that many hundreds of injured protesters and murder of a young laborer Stamatia Kanellopoulos and Cypriot student James Koumi, leader of bourgeois party PASOK and Papandreou that the social democratic “K” KE X. Florakis instead condemn the government of murderers denounced the demonstrators and attributed to these bloody episodes caused by the fascist police attack, with instructions of Prime Minister G. Rallis (son of worthy collaborators father Ioannis Rallis occupation Prime Minister appointed from the German conquerors).

In another time, in 1981, won the elections PASOK bourgeois, and the then new Prime Minister has allowed for the first time the continuation of trajectories in the American Embassy (as in 1981 banned the marches by the government of New Democracy party monarcho-fascists in the U.S. Embassy, ​​allowed only as the Constitution).

From the very first time the Embassy of U.S. imperialists not only patrolling the police and members-fans of “K” KE was always lined up in front in chains and behind them stood fully armed riot police, a practice that continued for decades. Many of the members-fans (unfortunately employees-naive victim of a treacherous policy) of the “K” KE guarded fanatically, synofryomenoi and scowl, the Embassy of the United States, ready to “sacrifice” for not done any ” provocation “and” abandoned “the notorious ‘parliamentary’ road to the” great change “and” socialism “they promised at the time the twin policies apateoniskon Papandreou Florakis.

This was the first time that chroustsofikoi leaders “K” KE guarding a stranger – not Greek – capitalist building (U.S. Embassy) and even the building, symbol of sovereignty in our country of the U.S. imperialists, the biggest and most bloody imperialist power of our time, and that the name of “cancellation” of any “provocation” by taking a role and fulfilling a mission that was-always belongs to the Police and the Army rather than urban workers – these two key institutions of the bourgeois state and the main supports of the power of the reactionary bourgeoisie.

2. December 2008: by the mighty uprising of the student youth and the side of the reactionary bourgeoisie

The cold-blooded murder, in December 2008, from the Police Karamanliki the young 15 year old student Alexis Grigoropoulos sparked a known militant and the glorious uprising of student youth from end to end the country’s murderous violence against police and police terror – a monumental and unprecedented rebellion panicked and terrorize the whole bourgeoisie (all bourgeois and reformist parties) but also disrupted for nearly one month across Europe (“the risk that the insurrection in Greece to xaplothei and the rest of Europe,” says representatives capital in different countries of the EU, the strong echo of came as Latin America.

Then, maybe some remember the panic Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and Ministers of the reactionary government had disappeared for nearly a month of politics and life of the bourgeoisie had to retrieve that month the Papariga-Karatzaferis elevating the records to government representatives and ministers of Public Order with statements claiming that the daily events of those days was a “project abroad”, ie that this magnificent uprising of youth motivated and guided by supposedly “external enemies” or else: Papariga ” masked the nucleus has been designed abroad, “Karatzaferis’ patrons Parakentro abroad behind the attacks”, etc. or even Papariga “draft domestic and foreign centers riots» («Real news »21/12/2008, p. 1), etc. etc. – reactionary statements, misleading and defamatory in nature, at the expense of the great uprising of the student youth, published in the bourgeois and fascist type of those days (” Today’s “,” Adesmeftos Type “, etc.) with fasistofyllada” Today’s “praise and public headlines, the” audacity “, meaning the betrayal of the leadership of social democratic” K “KE:” Only the Communist Party dared to clash openly with the nuclei of which praktoriskon perform the dirty destabilization plan “(” Today’s “15/12/2008, p. 1).

After Papariga along with the entire leadership of Khrushchev “K” KE shifted provocative aproschimatista and fiercely against the mighty uprising of the student youth, disparaging the extra in the most vulgar and reactionary way, and passed off with its policy stance on camp of reactionary bourgeoisie – at a time sharpening of class struggle - the guy leading the bourgeois fasistofyllada the “Today’s” invited directly to use in practice members, fans of the urban “K” KE as IMPACT FORCE for smashing the rebellion the Young and “restoration of order of democracy”: “If the police are unable to take their … CITIZENS OR KKE restore order of democracy” (“AVRIANI” 19/12/2008, p. 1).

Despite the appeals section of the urban type led by “Today’s” leaders “K” KE did not dare to “commit suicide” so early (knowing that they have to offer future services, and difficult moments in this chapter as available), downloading the streets of Athens, batter kranoforon armies to suppress the rebellion of youth, members of the IR “K” KE preferred to “roost”, the entire December, the ‘fortress’ of Perissa (no one disagreed) as katatromagmena chicks, looking for warmth, tranquility and comfort beneath the decrepit icy trembling wings panicked sosialimokratissas A. Papariga, perhaps feeling some relief and joy listening to all-night prayers, prayers to “God” and religious melodies of reactionary neo-orthodox theousas ethnikistrias L. Kanellis to “exorcize” at every opportunity the “possessed” and unruly pupils and begged the “Almighty” to the “enlightenment” to finally stop the protests and leave off the “great evil” and “disaster “he found the country. “Heeded,” ultimately, melodic prayers from the “Almighty” that saw be born “divine child” on December 25 (= school holidays and early closure) and thus ended the protracted “tragedy” of the country ie “tragedy” of panic reactionary bourgeoisie that had fitness and military units prepare for surgery at the center of Athens. Already he had failed to lock-outs of the Karamanlis government to close schools-schools that had then promoted from the reformist leaders of the “K” KE through “K” Ne (“Announcement of press office of PA KNE”, 7 / 12/2008) on the affected than those student-student youth to ‘shut down schools and colleges, the universities and colleges, the vocational training institutes and schools of OAED, night schools “(” P “9/12/2008, p. . 15), ie to become practice that required by the reactionary government of Karamanlis attitude forced to leave the familiar “Press Release of the Association of Teachers of Panteion University ‘:” This morning (11.12.08), the Panteion University ended with initiative Panspoudastikis students who relied decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Throughout the post-dictatorship period has not happened close to University decision partisan institution …. “ These are some of the few” exploits “in those days the lackeys of capital reformist leaders of the” K “KE, along of course with that, completely forgotten today, fascist inspiration and content anekdiigito “story” titled “The wrong call a murderer” (“P” 28/12/2008, “7 days together”) reminiscent of the Nazis as-fascist propaganda of Hitler period in Germany.

3. Ochtovris 2011: ensure-imposition of bourgeois legality – upholding the reactionary bourgeois parliament

The stewardship of the U.S. Embassy along with the Police from the early 80′s by the leadership (Florakis) of the Social “K” KE and fiercely hostile attitude toward leadership Papariga grand uprising of the student youth (in December 2008 ) are the two most important before the 48-hour strike of October (2011), a landmark anepanastatikis action of this Civil Party, because in the first case noted, first, converting members of supporters of the “K” KE on army police soldiers guarding the embassy of an imperialist country, while in the second case mentioned, the political attitudes of leadership, open passage into the camp of the bourgeoisie – a passage that rightly led the bourgeois press (the most blatant example fasistofyllada “Today’s”) to called because of the inability of the police, led by “K” KE to download members-supporters to the streets to quell violent with armies batter-kranoforon the rebellion of youth, ie to use them as shock troops of the capital, substituting Police and city army.

If this day of 48-hour strike (19-20 Ochtovri 2011) the effect of PAME had two important characteristic aspects: a) that permanent scabs mechanism of urban governments (ND-PASOK) with scabs separate character disruptive concentrations (systematic and permanent division in favor of capital, strikes urging the reformist leaders of GSEE-ADEDY) and b) that of worship and apotheosis of bourgeois legality, ie the voluntary acceptance of the covered behind the so-called “safeguard the paths’ PAME, for which the leadership posts whenever the congratulations and praise of the respective governments and the leadership of Police, and recently, for the umpteenth time, the bourgeois “NEW” fully justified, they note that “the safeguarding of the paths GO get ‘excellent’ by the Police” and “senior officer ELAS says features “that” together we have peace of mind, we know how to protest and will not open nostril, rarely cause episodes “to mark the bourgeois tabloid : “the police presence more often than is typical” (“NEW”, 22-23/10/2011, p. 27), the last day of the 48-hour strike (20 Ochtovri) appeared, added a third new and very important but also much more dangerous for the workers and trade union movement: that of defending the act of reactionary bourgeois regime and safeguard-enforcement of bourgeois legality, in consultation with the government of PASOK and the direct cooperation of the police.

And now to the question of safeguarding the civil parliament and ensuring the “Order and Security”, ie the imposition of bourgeois legality of the last day of a 48 hour strike.

First two issues are not disputed by any one, nor from the reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME: 1) that the “encirclement of the House” and 2) that the “encirclement” of the House “had nothing to do with preventing Members enter the House. “

On the first, the reformist Social Democrat G. Perros, a leading member of PAME, protested Wednesday (19.10.2011) the concentration of Concorde, “everyone in the encirclement of the House from all sides from all roads’ ( “P” 20/10/2011, p. 10) and “now encircle the House from all sides” (“P” 20/10/2011, p. 8), etc. etc..

On the second, a commentary by former partner and like-minded social democrats of Khrushchev (member of the JV period Koligianni), and current Deputy Prime Minister I. Pangalos, who said in a televised broadcast that “Aleka Papariga invites people to encircle Thursday the House to prevent Members to arrive at Parliament for the enactment of polynomoschediou,” the ” Rizospastis’ response, apologoumenos and angry, he wrote the truth: “this is a lie and slander drawn. PAME, organized this mobilization is not intended as p m e d i m in a (Signed ours) for Members to vote “(” P “18/10/2011, p.6), then cites Papariga extract statement the previous day: “to clarify the following: the encirclement and exclusion of the House decided by unions and other organizations, which support and will support, has nothing to do with preventing members from entering the House “(” P “18/10/2011, p.6) – an” intelligent “in koutoponiria proposal-energy (at the suggestion apparently consulting the bourgeoisie), but first and foremost, and this is important, highly e u INVITATION d e t r-action proposal for the government of PASOK, the reactionary bourgeoisie and all parties in a moment of great and deep crisis of the bourgeois political system and the sharpening of class struggle. Therefore, “the encirclement of the House from all sides from all roads’, and d e d a m n emphasis is ensuring attendance of Members of Parliament (under the protection of kranoforon-batter PAME), no was to protect the reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME to ‘thousands of toil who marched with flags’ and’ the movement itself “(” P “21/10/2011, p. 10), ( those of PAME is their right, but because truth and “the movement itself?” Who authorized them to do so? whether the “Almighty” Ave Kanellis?), but to guard from all sides and from all streets the bourgeois parliament ie to defend the reactionary bourgeois regime and to ensure, enforce the same civil legitimacy, in cooperation with the leadership of Police – a collaboration that could not be hidden nor A. Papariga when asked if PAME had cooperation with the police, admitted public saying: “in my opinion is correct, I would say that time can not interfere with the police” (“P” 21/10/2011, p. 3) and confirmed the “new” officer of the Headquarters of ELAS: “We asked the demonstrators not to intervene PAME” (“News” 21/10/2011, p.8).

But the “excuse” of “Rizospastis’ and social democratic leaders of the” K “KE-PAME that” encirclement and exclusion of the House “supposedly aimed” to bring the popular mobilization of such pressure, to reject the bill “to achieve “more MPs to vote against the bill” (“P” 18/10/2011, p. 6), is completely punched and completely indefensible. True because there were even greater pressure to be all strikers protesters gathered in one room and in front of Constitution Square and were supposedly “more pressure” scattered in the surrounding streets “circling” the House, probably by reducing the size, volume of the demonstration?

Regarding “K” KE-government cooperation is clearly confirmed, furthermore, from the shameful logydrio Papariga of the House (and even after the unfortunate death of trade union PAME), which is monumental, and xetsipoti proklitikotati support and rotten a deep crisis of civil status.

With great satisfaction accepted the stewardship of parliament from the leaders of the “K” KE-PAME Members of all parties, who generously bestowed praise on GO, including the deputy prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who in the cabinet said the “Communist Party contributed to the management and maintenance of order,” as other series and Adonis Georgiadis, member of the Nazi-fascist LAOS, who said: “Today the Communist Party of Greece impressed. Firstly because the regime has behaved perfectly protecting the Parliament by hooded. I applaud this act. All through the House say fortunately there PAME around and is experienced yesterday’s »(« Alter », main news, 20/10/2011), but many journalists in the central news as Hadjinicolaou N. J. Pretenteris, etc. etc.

Finally, in conclusion briefly, the antistalinikoi-antizachariadikoi reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME to the “encirclement of the House from all sides from all roads” passed in the course of their counter-revolutionary action – a period of intensification of class struggle – for the first time in a completely new phase: first, upholding the bourgeois parliament, second, safeguarding it, defended the reactionary bourgeois regime, third, secured-imposed the “Order and Security” ie bourgeois legitimacy with batter- kranoforous of PAME in cooperation with the Police, the fourth in the enforcement effort of bourgeois legality substituted the Police-Urban Army, taking-fulfilling their duties, fifth, replacing Police-Urban Army, evolved, transformed in practice for the first time in IMPACT POWER Capital, dragging in this revolutionary and extreme dangerous urban direction thousand employees shall-believers with the vanguard of batter-kranoforous PAME (had so much discredited in the eyes of striking workers in the Constitution, but nationwide, that neither ” radical “dared leaves 21.22 and 23/10/2011 to publish photographs of” young men “thugs batter-kranoforon of PAME and has published and 3 leaves a host of other photographs).

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KKE 1918-55: The reformist leaders of the “K” KE-PAME: Impact force of the capital upheld the reactionary bourgeois parliament

Photo: Members of PAME in the role of Riot police uphold the Parliament using sticks and helmets

Thousands of workers who were striking and protesting, anti-fascists of various political orientations, even members and followers of “K”KE and PAME in Syntagma Square outside the Greek Parliament the second day (October 20) of the 48-hour general strike were surprised when they saw the reformist leaders to assume stewardship of the reactionary bourgeois parliament and ensuring the “Order and Security”, i.e the imposition of bourgeois legality, with the “excuse” of safeguarding their “own” concentration (ie that the concentration of PAME), apparently replacing the riot police and the civilian Army which is used by the bourgeoisie when the police is inefficient and unable to to defend the reactionary bourgeois regime.

The October issue of Anasintaxi has an article with our position on the matter in Greek which can be found in http://anasintaxi.blogspot.com/2011/11/80-2011.html

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KKE 1918-1955 – PAME: at the service of capital, the divisive and strikebreaking role of its reformist leaders

On the occasion of its 3rd Panhellenic Conference

In the reformist “Announcement-call” of PAME (=”All Workers’ Militant Front”) (“Rizospastis”, 27/5/2007) on the occasion of its third panhellenic conference, it is mentioned that the founding of PAME, in 1999, is “an accomplishment of the working class” and that PAME acts according to the line of “class struggle”.

First of all it has to be clarified from the beginning that PAME is not a trade union and therefore it cannot initiate a struggle like calling a strike. As its name suggests, it is rather a coordination platform set up by various associations and trade unionists. Even so, both of the claims mentioned above are utterly demagogic and bear absolutely no relation to reality, that is, to the nature of PAME which is not revolutionary but a reformist trade-union platform as it is shown below. Consequently, PAME neither constitutes an accomplishment of the working class, nor adheres to the line of the “revolutionary class struggle” for the “fulfillment of the tasks corresponding to the needs of the working class” as most falsely its leaders purport for the sake of disorientating and deceiving the workers.

It must be emphasized that the truly revolutionary trade unions were schools of class struggle and schools of socialism-communism, in other words, they were always linking: a) the struggle for the economic and social demands with the political demands, giving priority to the latter and b) the anti-imperialist with the revolutionary struggle for the abolition of the exploiting capitalist system and the establishment of socialism-communism.

The revolutionary trade unions, as organs of struggle against the capital have permanently and constantly inscribed on their flag the revolutionary slogan of Marx: “abolition of the wages system”. As Marx emphasized: “the trade unions are the schools of socialism. In trade unions, the workers are shaped into socialists, because the struggle against the capital is carried out, on daily basis, before their very eyes” and Lenin also said that: “the working class limiting itself to the economic struggle, loses its political independence, allows itself to be dragged by other political parties, betrays the great emblem: the emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the workers themselves”

In complete contradiction to the above, PAME was founded from the very beginning, in 1999, as a reformist trade union platform guided ideologically by Khrushchevian revisionism that is opposite and hostile to the proletarian revolution and the whole Marxist concept of socialism. It continues along the reformist course of the World Trade Union Organization (WTO) which despite the fact that followed a revolutionary line, from its creation (October 1945) until the mid-50s, after the final dominance of Khrushchevian revisionism (1956) it degenerated into a reformist trade union organization abandoning the revolutionary and anti-imperialist line for good.

It is precisely the line of WTO, promulgated during the period of Khrushchev – Brezhnev – Gorbachev, which the PAME (“K”KE) reformist leaders follow today as well as its fraternal trade union organization A.P. (SYN). The reformists of PASKE (PASOK) are the same whereas the DAKE (ND) fascists were always representatives of the employers’ trade unionism. All these factions, participate in the Executive Committee of the reformist General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) and the Higher Union of Civil Servants (ADEDY).

The PAME leaders are reformist not only because they have abandoned the line of revolutionary struggle and follow the line of class co-operation and limiting the struggle to economic demands but because they have also resigned from the immediate economic demands such as the salary payment for the 1st of May and the return of all the money stolen from the Insurance Institutions. Moreover they play a divisive and strikebreaking role through the separate rallies they organize. Concerning the imperialist war against Iraq, they showed, like the “K”KE leadership, a pro-American and pro-imperialist attitude because, during the war demonstrations: a) they adopted the slogan “Greece out of the war”(!) instead of the right anti-imperialist one: “Anglo-American imperialist occupation forces out of Iraq” not blaming thus the Anglo-American imperialists and b) they supported and continue to support the Quislings of the fraternal Iraqi “C”P that welcomed the invasion and participated in the first puppet government installed by the Anglo-American forces.

A. The divisive role of the PAME reformists

During the last years, the PAME leaders organize, on permanent basis, separate rallies on the of 1st May causing thus a split in the trade union movement not only on the higher but also on intermediate level across the country. Their excuse for doing this is that these divisive rallies offer allegedly by themselves the possibility to break away from the reformists and they are, therefore, of revolutionary character. It is, of course, obvious that the separate rallies neither distance the workers from reformist nor do they have by themselves an anti-imperialist and revolutionary character. On the contrary, the features that make the revolutionaries and the reformists essentially distinct and give the revolutionary content of a trade unionist rally are two: first, the general anti-imperialist and revolutionary line in combination with the violent overthrow of capitalism second, the revolutionary line of class struggle that defends the class interests of the workers and the wide masses maintaining an unbreakable unity between economic and political demands and always subdued to the general revolutionary direction.

If the separate rallies were by themselves revolutionary, devoid of the corresponding content, then, following this “criterion” of the PAME reformists, one would make the preposterous conclusion that this year’s separate rally for the 1st of May organized by the DAKE fascists was also a “revolutionary” one! Of course it was a counter-revolutionary and pro-capitalist rally apart from divisive.

A quick reference to the two separate PAME rallies on the occasion of the 1st of May (in 2005 and 2007) will show much better not only the divisive role of the PAME leaders but the abandonment of the defense of, even, basic reformist demands. Both rallies were reformist, in their content, because of the general Khrushchevian line and also because they didn’t satisfy the second condition, that is the defense of the current interests of the working class.

In the rally of the 1st of May 2005, the PAME reformists came up with the false dilemma: “1st of May, strike or bank holiday?” The harm of such a slogan to the interests of the working class can be properly understood if one considers the fact that in Greece the working class has accomplished, through a long struggle, so that the 1st of May is also a paid bank holiday besides a day of strike. This hasn’t diminished the size of the 1st of May rallies at all. However the reactionary Karamanlis government decided to abolish the bank holiday, that year and, thus, the leaders of PAME, using the above slogan were, in essence, completely identified with this decision. The result was that hundreds of millions of Euros went to the capitalists and the bourgeois state instead of the working people. On the contrary, in the rally organized by the GSEE-ADEDY reformists, the central slogan was “pay the working people” a fact that permitted the president of GSEE to criticize, from the left, the PAME leaders and accuse them of being at the service of capitalist interests. In the same separate rally for the 1st of May, the PAME reformists leaders didn’t defend even this particular economic interest-accomplishment of the working class but the interests of the bourgeois class, since, through their treacherous attitude, they made easier for the capitalists to pocket the millions of Euros that should have been paid to the working people.

In fact, the PAME reformist leaders, due to their treacherous attitude supporting the abolition of the 1st May bank holiday, placed themselves to the right not only of the reformists of GSEE-ADEDY-A.P. but also of the DAKE fascists; the latter, fearing the political cost, didn’t dare to express in public their approval of the government’s decision to abolish the 1st of May bank holiday: “DAKE issued an announcement whereby calls the government to move the bank holiday from the 1st to 11th of May, as had been done in the past”. So, the only trade union organization that supported this reactionary decision of the government was PAME. This was the reason why the PAME leaders were warmly congratulated by the fascist ND cadre A. Andreoulakos.

This rally of PAME wasn’t only a divisive rally but also a rally in favor of the abolition of 1st May bank holiday, in other words, it was a pro-government rally supporting the reactionary decision of the Karamanlis government.

In 2007’s rally for the 1st of May, the reformists leaders of GSEE-ADEDY had rightly adopted as central slogan the following: “return all the stolen money back to the Insurance Institutions” (as a response to the government-backed embezzlement of Insurance funds) whereas in their separate, divisive, rally the PAME leaders not only didn’t adopt the above slogan as the central one but not at all. Instead, they put forward the pro-governmental request voiced by the DAKE fascists asking for the return of all the money stolen from the Insurance Institutions since 1950 (!), that is to say, never. In this way, the leaders of PAME were aligned-identified with: a) the DAKE fascists and b) the reactionary Karamanlis government both of whom were against the return of the stolen money back to the Insurance Institutions.

In this case too, the reformists of GSEE-ADEDY were at the left of the reformist leaders of PAME.

The two above mentioned separate rallies organized by PAME on the occasion of the 1st of May clearly show that not only they were not revolutionary rallies but they didn’t seek to defend not even the concrete and rightful economic demands of the working people: a) to receive the payment for the bank holiday of the first of May (2005) b) to have all the stolen money from the Insurance Institutions returned (2007). These rallies of PAME were, therefore, reformist, divisive and pro-governmental.

On the 1st of May 2006, the reformist leaders of PAME committed an almost unprecedented treason since they didn’t appeal for a struggle against industrial capitalists and capital in general but only against the reformist leaders adopting the slogan: “Turn your back to the compromised trade unionists”.

Not surprisingly, PAME faces serious problems due to its divisive tactics. One of the its founding cadres, and a long-term member in its Executive Secretariat, T. Fotopoulos, mentioned the following in his resignation letter: “In OTE (Greek Telecom) the ESK (the “C”PG representatives) allied with ASSE (the K.A. representatives – a small group participating in PAME as well) and both went to the elections under a common slate called A.M. But the next day, having secured the election of its own members, ESK remained a separate faction and not a part of A.M although these people were elected as nominees of the latter!

PAME doesn’t take part in the anti-globalization actions except in WTO which they strive to resurrect by establishing a European Buro where they are the…sole members. The persistence of “K”KE and PAME to hold separate rallies has caused frictions with the few small groups with which formed or is forming an alliance like DIKKI or K.A

B. The strikebreaking role of the PAME leaders

The whole activity and the role of PAME is not only divisive – in the framework, of course, of reformism that dominates the trade union movement today – and in favor of capital; it has become, in addition, during the last years, something much worse in relation to working people strikes: PAME has become, with its separate rallies, the number 1 strikebreaking force in the reformist trade union movement. This because, on permanent and systematic basis – and not by mistake – it causes a split in the strike mobilization of the working people undermining its massiveness from the beginning.

Let’s take for example the latest strikes of sailors, schoolteachers, university teachers and university students.

In the case of the sailors’ strike, the trade union leaders of PAME, apart from breaking the strike, they also organized separate rallies that weren’t simply divisive but were, first and foremost, strikebreaking clearly aiming at the split of the sailors unity and the weakening of their struggle. They were strikebreaking rallies in complete coordination with the governmental strikebreaking mechanisms, in the framework of “K”KE-ND cooperation. Their attitude was so shamelessly pro-governmental that, while the barbarous police was attacking the rally held in solidarity to the tailors, the PAME reformist Manusogiannakis appeared on television not to condemn the fascist police assault but to distance the position of PAME from the event stating that the people beaten up by MAT (the infamous special police forces) didn’t belong to PAME!!!

In the case of the schoolteachers’ great and continuous strike that shook up the whole country, the PAME trade unionists in the Primary School Teachers Federation (DOE) not only rejected the strike and tried to prevent it but, when this started and for the duration, they were systematically undermining it through separate rallies of strikebreaking character. We pointed out at the time:

“Only the reformist trade union factions (PASKE-A.P-P.) voted for the five-days strikes of the school teachers that shook up the whole country, as it is mentioned in “Rizospastis” in relation to the strikebreaking attitude of ESAK-DEE (the PAME representatives in the DOE): “the votes of PASKE, A.P and P. added up and the program of action was decided” (“R”, 7/7/2006, p. 18).

The reformist leaders of ESAK-DEE, having initially rejected and sabotaged the decision for the repeated 5-days strikes, went on to slander them claiming that they allegedly serve very well the pre-election needs of PASOK, few days before the October municipal elections (“R”, 7/7/2006, p.18). When the great strike began, they directly undermined the unity of the striking struggle by organizing separate rallies, merging, thus, with the DAKE reactionaries into a unified strikebreaking mechanism in the service of the government. It is more than obvious, and the PAME leaders cannot fail to realize, that without unity it’s impossible to achieve the massiveness of the struggle, a necessary condition for its successful completion” (“Anasintaxi”, No. 236, 15-30 October 2006, p.3).

Finally, the leaders of PAME came up against of the university teachers and students struggle; they openly opposed to the schools’ occupations by the students and the continuous strike of the university teachers. When the struggle began, they tried desperately to thwart it and then, after their failure to achieve this, they undermined it by organizing separate strikebreaking rallies. As a matter of fact the leaders of PAME went so far to place their rally stand next to the one of POSDEP-OLME-DOE in one of the great rallies held by the latter in Syntagma square. We wrote then about that rally:

“The only “note of discord”, the only negative and harmful event in that rally was the separate, strikebreaking rally in Omonia square organized by the reformist leaders of PAME. But this time they weren’t limited to the separate demonstration but they made a further step: they provocatively set up, obviously under instructions by the Karamanlis government, a second platform in Syntagma next to the one of POSDEP-OLME-DOE, not confronting the government but the Teachers Federation leading the struggle.

That the strikebreaking activity of the PAME leaders is carried out under the instructions of the Karamanlis government and in the framework of “K”KE-ND cooperation, was shown once more by the fact that also in this rally the blocs of PAME were small (numbering about 1000 people) (“PRIN”, 14/1/2007, p.13). The blocs were consciously and purposefully kept small in size in order to fulfill the goals agreed on with the government: a) the PAME leaders act in a strikebreaking way at the service of the government’s strikebreaking tactics b) avoid to put pressure on the government (a greater number of participants in the blocs would increase the pressure on the government upsetting the “K”KE-ND agreement)

Just imagine what would have been the picture if the other reformist trade union organizations had also set up their own platforms or what would have happened if the Teachers Federations POSDEP-OLME-DOE, as the leadership of the struggle, had rightly demanded the removal of the PAME reformists” (“Anasintaxi”, No 242, 15-31 January 2007, p.1).

From the above, it is evident that PAME is a reformist trade union organization which not simply follows the line of class cooperation but, at the same time, it plays a divisive and strikebreaking role, in the framework of the trade union movement, and in certain cases, like the ones mentioned above, its position is on the right wing of GSEE-ADEDY. This strikebreaking role is fully integrated-aligned with the strikebreaking mechanisms of the Karamanlis reactionary government.

C. Only the path of unity in struggle can stop the capital’s attacks

In their “Announcement-call”, the PAME leaders mention that their trade union platform “unites the working people into a unified class fighting capital and its agents”. This claim is utterly false and it only aims at the disorientation and the deception of the working class since the UNITY of the working class presupposes an anti-imperialist and revolutionary line in the trade unions, which doesn’t exist in the case of PAME because its activity is guided by the reformist social democratic Khrushchevian views, that is, the reformist line that dominated WTO from the mid-50s onwards. PAME, as a reformist trade union platform, is dividing the working class, just like in the older times, the social democratic reformist trade unions did and today GSEE, ADEDY.

PAME is not dividing only the working class but also the reformist camp with its separate rallies. Moreover, with the separate rallies of strikebreaking character during any striking mobilization, they, from the very beginning, cause a rift in the unity of the working class, the MASSIVENESS of the mobilization making it unavoidably INNEFECTIVE.

The class conscious and revolutionary workers cannot but raise the following fundamental question: “Is the working class able to repel the capital’s attacks given the absence of revolutionary trade unions and, if yes, how?”

The answer to this, fundamental and vital for the working class struggle, question has been already provided by life itself in the past but also at the present and it constitutes the answer of the revolutionary Marxism. The working class is indeed able – despite the absence of revolutionary trade unions – to repel the capital’s attacks. This can be achieved only along the path of UNITY that secures the maximum MASSIVENESS, two absolutely necessary conditions that can guarantee the EFFECTIVENESS of the mobilization and yield victory for the working people. The case in which the Insurance Bill was withdrawn in 2001 (by the Simitis government) after the massive panhelenic strike (at that time PAME wisely didn’t dare to organize a separate rally) and that of great, massive mobilization of students and working people against the Contract of First Employment (CFE) introduced by the right-wing government of Dominique de Villepin in France show the only right PATH. The same is shown by the great, massive mobilization of students and university students in Greece that prevented the reactionary revision of the Constitution’s article 16.

Moreover, the massive popular mobilization in Latin America countries – despite the absence of revolutionary trade unions and revolutionary communist parties – not only repelled the attacks coming from the indigenous capital, the IMF, the International Bank but also repeatedly ousted whole governments in a number of subcontinent countries.

Finally, it is a common knowledge that the sporadic acts of mobilization organized by PAME didn’t repel any attack from the capital, didn’t have and couldn’t have had absolutely no result; they were simply acts that served the petty-party and propaganda purposes of the PAME-“K”KE reformist leaders and aimed at the deception of the working people.

D. Further developments

After the massive rally organized by GSEE-ADEDY on the12th of December 2007 in Athens and in other Greek cities, the social democrat G. Marinos (new member of the “K”KE Politburo), hiding the fact that the panhelenic strike was called by the reformist leaders of GSEE-ADEDY, seems to worry very much about the size (5 times larger than the one of PAME) and the large participation of working people, including “a great number of employees in Olympic airways, lawyers, engineers, journalists and doctors” in the massive rally in Athens. Then, ridiculing himself he invites the working people to “think twice” about the fact they joined their trade unions rallies and urges them not to participate in theses but to the divisive, strikebreaking, progovernmental ones of the reformist PAME. At the same time, he advertises it as an allegedly “class force” which follows “the line of class struggle” that secures “the unity of the working class”!!!

Source

KKE 1918-1955: On the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Greek Democratic Army

Article published in Revolutionary Democracy Vol. XIII, No. 2, September 2007.

In the end of spring of 1945, coming back to Greece from the German concentration camp in which he was imprisoned, Nikos Zachariades, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Greece, came across and faced a specific reality.

a) A large political, progressive popular movement, predominating in every part of the Greek territory, inspired by the political and ideological principles and the epic of the fighting resistance of the Communist Party of Greece and the National Liberation Front. At the same time, he faced a movement ‘tired’ and ‘disappointed’ by the contradictory and compromising policies of its leadership, blocked by the political accords with local reaction – the instruments of English imperialism – political accords of defeat and laying down the victorious arms of the Popular Army and the popular democratic movement in general (Lebanon, Plaka, Gazerta, Varkiza etc.). Moreover, the leader of the CPG faced the negative situation created by the military defeat of the Left in the battle against the English in Athens in December 1944. This was a battle fought under unacceptable political and military conditions, with strange and spur-of-the-moment methods – as proven by the evidence – and fought also under the leadership of Georges Siantos, the party’s Secretary General at the time of the German occupation, who was later accused by the party of being an agent of the Intelligence Service.

b) A CPG highly regarded by the Greek people, which however during the occupation had been transformed by its leadership from a politically innovative party (around 450,000 members) into an enormous, loose political body lacking a role, objectives, spirit and orientation; not a leading party but a party that allowed in any supporter. The party also included leading members who became known and were recognised by the people through the fight of the NLF, and at the same time leading members who were unable to complete their revolutionary mission, dominated and bound by the spirit of political compromise that they themselves had cultivated within the movement through their choices; dominated also by petit bourgeois self-satisfaction and pride deriving from the greatness of the movement, of which they were leading. After all, these cadres distorted the line of N. Zachariades as it was expressed in his historic letter of October 1940 when Greece was attacked by Italian fascism, a guiding letter of the leader of the CPG and at the same time the last public statement only shortly before he was handed over by the Italians and their Greek collaborators to the Germans and was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp until the liberation of Germany by the Red Army. In the last paragraph of this historic letter, N. Zachariades related in a categorical way the anti-fascist fight to the fight for social liberation, stressing:

‘The prize for the working people and for the current fight must be and will be a new Greece, a Greece of labour, of liberty, purged of any dependence on imperialism, with a truly popular culture’.

The leadership of the CPG during the occupation, with its political choices, disconnected the anti-fascist war from the general political perspective of the working people who should be fighting for national independence and social liberation.

c) Because of this political and leadership team of the CPG, strong conditions began to emerge which were favourable for the rapid reconstruction of the reactionary right-wing pro-English state. Bands of fascists committed murders in the villages and towns, thousands of fighters were arrested, terrorism dominated all over the country, the Treaty of Varkiza led to the disarmament and destruction of the glorious People’s Army of the National Liberation Front and the fighters of the countryside went up to the mountains once again to escape from the killing spree of the fascist bands.

This in brief was the situation that Nikos Zachariades, the leader of the CPG, had to deal with from the summer of 1945 onward, and on the basis of these very conditions he was called to take political and organisational initiatives, while the cycle of World War 2 had not yet been completed and the game of diplomacy concerning the global post-war situation was in a critical phase.

In the debates that have taken place – and still are going on – in Greece, in the scientific papers of historians and researchers, in the personal testimonies of leading Left members of that period, as well as on the other side too, in the long-term political and ideological controversy within the context of the Greek Left, many and often contrasting or consciously distorted evidence about the conditions under which the Civil War began and about the CPG’s leadership’s actions when Nikos Zachariades was at the head, have always been discussed. The slanderous and distorting efforts were developed and are still maintained with the same intensity, reinforced by the participation and behaviour of a large circle, of a front of ‘dark’ forces consisting of people united around the above objective. For half a century now, with the same mania, the ‘dark’ front keeps on with the same false arguments and consciously distorting tactics. In this front the most varied sectors of Greek society participated. Monarchist-fascists (of old and new types), revisionists of all kinds, social-democrats and Trotskyists play, directly and indirectly, the main role in slandering Nikos Zachariades’ personality and leading figure, with an obvious political-ideological goal: to deprive the Greek left and democratic movement of its own revolutionary and fighting traditions, as well as of its scientific and theoretical leading role that Nikos Zachariades played within the Greek movement and the CPG. The destructive force of the ‘dark’ propaganda was strongly reinforced after the absolute predominance of the forces of N. Khrushchev and L. Brezhnev in the international movement and particularly, after Nikos Zachariades’ assassination in Siberia in August 1973 after he had completed 17 years of exile there. This act had been pre-programmed by the KGB in collaboration with the leading team of the CPG (H. Florakis, K. Loules, K. Tsolakis etc.) to which the Soviet revisionists had assigned the leadership of the Greek party. The reason for the assassination of the head of the Greek Left was obviously to prevent his return to Greece after the forthcoming fall of the dictatorship, a fact that would disclose to the Greek people the political treason and would change – in favour of revolutionary opinion – the interrelations within the Greek movement. At the same time, however, Zachariades’ return to Greece as a political refugee would constitute a world-wide base for denouncing the revisionist Soviet party as well as the international state of affairs. At this point, we should refer to and emphasise the fact that under these bad conditions, the absolute predominance of the alliance of the ‘dark’ front, for decades and still until today, in the Greek left and popular movement there have been and still are forces resisting the reactionary anti-revolutionary front. The historic initiative of the anti-revisionist fight had been the tens of thousands of partisans, all refugees in the Eastern countries, the vast majority of whom (from 85% to 95%) stood by Nikos Zachariades’ side until the end, fighting against the violent anti-revolutionary intervention in the Greek Communist Party, facing unbelievable persecution, suffering, even imprisonment and exile.

The arguments against Nikos Zachariades that relate to his actions at the beginning of the Civil War, to the policy and strategy followed by the party during the second partisan fight, present not only an absolute lack of essential documentation, but also a range of varied and contradictory elements. Paradoxically the arguments are more or less the same in the reactionary and progressive circles. The overlapping opinions, which have different points of departure, reveal their real objectives; they aim to withhold the truth and to degrade Nikos Zachariades’ fighting stance and leadership abilities. In this document, we will not deal with the propaganda of the reactionary circles but rather with the reactionary and anti-historic arguments of those who talk in a ‘left’-wing manner and in the name of the Left:

1) The argument that Nikos Zachariades delayed the preparation and beginning of the armed rebellion.

This is a conscious distortion of the truth. The leader of the CPG, returning to Greece from Dachau, was faced with both a specific international and a domestic reality. He was informed, as soon as possible, of the international and domestic situation and he undertook very specific initiatives which were oriented towards:

a) The reconstruction of the CPG through the re-organisation of the party forces, the reinforcement of the political-educational work and its rapid transformation from a loose to a fighting, revolutionary workers’ party. He moved in this direction through the meetings of both the Plenary Sessions of the Central Committee and the 7th Conference, in which the issue of the international policy in these conditions and the complete scientifically documented programme for People’s Democracy were discussed. Furthermore, the strategy of connecting the party to the large workers’ and agricultural unions through many massive democratic processes put them quickly under the control of the party’s forces. He implemented the policy of reinforcing collaboration with the Agricultural Party and other co-operating parties of the democratic alliance. He implemented constant contact with the cadres of middle and lower rank and boosted their fighting conviction, which had fallen due to the compromising policies of the party’s leadership during the German occupation. During this period, Nikos Zachariades accrued information about the forces and possibilities of the movement, but also about the probable influence that enemy forces exerted within the CPG and the democratic front. It was also evident, that any decision in that period could not be made without taking into account the particular conditions in the greater Balkans area, since there were three new people’s democracies (Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria) which bordered Greece and were facing specific problems: their existence was intertwined with the unstable post-war transitional regime and was reflected both in Greece and in the Greek left movement. In addition, the CPG’s leadership, under those circumstances, could not ignore either the opinions of the regional left-wing parties or the opinions of Communist Party of Soviet Union, since the preparation of the armed rebellion – in order not to be considered an adventurous act – demanded in that very phase, many necessary political, technical and military preconditions.

b) The revolutionary, popular rebellion and conflict with British imperialism that was dominant in Greece during that period. The leadership of the CPG and Nikos Zachariades moved in this direction with a clear plan. Within a few months after his return to Greece, the line of mass popular self-defence against the reactionary groups was put into action and the formal battle cry of the Left, ‘English out of Greece’, which raised the fighting spirit of the Greek people, was heard for the first time. In this way, the perspective of struggle was cultivated in the people’s mind, since the Greek people knew by their experience during all those months, that the English and the Greek reaction had decided to exterminate the Greek popular left movement, preventing any perspective of reconciliation and resolution of the political problem through fair elections. At the same time, N. Zachariades and the leadership of the CPG and the international relationships ensured the political and military conditions for the popular rebellion that was coming. The political and organisational reconstruction of the movement that N. Zachariades undertook, took 8 months, beginning with his return to the country and the CPG’s leadership and ending with the milestone decision of the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the CPG on November 12, 1946, the anniversary of the Treaty of Varkiza. This decision made clear that the armed fight was unavoidable and led to the first military plans.

We can rebut the false arguments that Nikos Zachariades did not have a clear line for the armed fight and that he delayed going into the mountains – arguments absolutely irrelevant to the particular conditions of this specific period – with much evidence. We will refer however only to two characteristics:

1) Nikos Zachariades’ refusal to leave Athens and the leadership of the party’s apparatus before the departure abroad of G. Siantos (Secretary General of the party during the period of the German occupation who was responsible for the compromising political defeat of the Left), something that Siantos avoided doing despite the orders he was given. The opening of the CPG’s files from that period, which has been almost completed today and published in historic papers, although they are available to any researcher, highlights that situation and reveals to any honest fighter, researcher and historian the real facts. It was clear that Nikos Zachariades thought that within the political team of the movement there was a problem of vigilance and unity, a problem that he could not ignore. A series of telegrams from N. Zachariades to other cadres of the party who were on missions abroad proves this fact.

2) The testimony of Kostas Koligiannis (a leading cadre of the CPG), which he gave at the 3rd Conference of the CPG in October 1950, is testimony among tens of others with the same content. Kostas Koligiannis’ testimony is very interesting because he became the Soviet revisionists’ favourite; they named him Secretary General in N. Zachariades’ place, after the anti-democratic overthrow of the legal leader of the CPG. Kostas Koligiannis said:

‘In order for Markos Vaphiades to free himself from responsibilities, he claimed that the party did not start the fight in order to win with strength and determination, that the fight was waged under illusions and inconstancies and for this reason we did not win. Apart from the fact that everybody knew how the party’s decision was initially made, I want to say something that refutes M. Vaphiades’ claim. In July 1946, N. Zachariades himself told me, when I was departing to Epirus, that we should create a massive armed movement. He also said specifically that we should start from the region of Konitsa and Zagori with North Epirus and Tzoumerka as bases of operation and Western Macedonia and Thessaly behind us and to proceed further maintaining these two bases of operation. If we formed small groups in order to use them as a means of restraint in the handling of the situation, as M. Vaphiades says, then what would the mass partisan group – that the party asked us to form since June 1946 – serve for? I went there with the decision-making responsibility of the political office, because I went as the secretary of the party’s organisation. And why would the party give this order to us and another order to other organisations? I think that what M. Vaphiades says constitutes an attempt to free himself from some extremely serious responsibilities, the principal ones, because we lost the chance to resolve, in the end of 1946 and in 1947, the problem of reserves that decisively and determinatively affected the evolution of the armed fight.’ (1)

The above testimony concerning the responsibilities and inefficiencies of the General of the Democratic Army of Greece, Markos Vaphiades, a man who has been in the circle of protagonists in the slander against N. Zachariades and who later co-operated with K. Koligiannis, solves the puzzle and leads to objective conclusions.

2) The abstention from the general elections in March 1946.

The second mistake, a ‘determinative’ one as the cadres of the anti-Zachariades chorus characterised it, was the abstention of the CPG and the other parties of the democratic alliance from the general elections that the English and their vassal reactionary government of Athens organised on March 20, 1946. The ‘chorus’ claims that the Left should have taken part in the elections, although they knew that these elections had been held under the awful conditions of unbelievable terrorism, of thousands of arrests of left citizens, of hundreds of murders just within that month, and with no guarantees for a normal, legal and transparent holding of the elections. The supporters of this ‘view, even in this case, artificially separated the elections not only from these specific conditions but also from the movement’s perspective. They criticised the question of elections from a static view. They pretended that they do not know or they hid the fact that:

(a) all the non-CPG parties and organizations of the democratic alliance were intensively and insistently in favour of abstention;

(b) one month before, in February 1946, the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the CPG had realised that the march toward an armed fight was unavoidable, since Greek reaction and the English had decided to proceed towards it.

Participation in the rigged elections would have legalised the reactionary front and would have reinforced the electoral illusions of the Greek people, whereas the election result under no circumstances would have expressed honestly and clearly the people’s political conviction and the real political influence of the Left.

Participation in the election would have led the people, the popular movement and the CPG, into a vicious circle of contradictions and inequality, similar to that of 1944-1945 which was the cause of the political ‘capture’ and defeat of the movement. Nikos Zachariades in his last authorised text titled ‘Problems of the CPG’s crisis – contribution to the political discussion’, written in 1962 in exile in Siberia, referred to a great extent to the question of abstention and among other things he stressed:

‘In the decision taken during the 8th Conference [after Nikos Zachariades’ overthrow], it was said that abstention is a terrible mistake with serious consequences for the party and the democratic movement. The decision does not explain the content of this ‘terrible mistake’, but the meaning is clear. If we participated in the elections we would secure a peaceful evolution for Greece! Where to? It was similar to the essentially opportunist plan of Partsalides [revisionist leader] that was part of the policy of appeasing reaction and submitting to it. So Partsalides was trying, after what happened, to justify also the treason of Varkiza [the treaty of disarmament of the People’s Army that he signed]. In 1946, elections could under no circumstances play an important role other than to reinforce reaction. Only an opportunist to the bone could declare that if we had participated in the elections the whole evolution of Greece would have been different. This was not the truth. The English, with the support of the Committee of the United Nations which supervised the elections [the Soviet Union refused to participate in this committee, perhaps because she knew what was in the air], wanted to mislead us as to the rigged elections which they were preparing, in order to legalise through the parliament, with the people’s vote, the intervention of December 1944 and the issue of Varkiza and thus to impose the monarchist-fascist regime. This is the truth. The following is noteworthy too: The Committee of the UN allocated us 9.3% abstention votes. If we had participated in the elections it would have given us generously three times more. Thus, it would have secured the people’s stamp of approval in favour of monarchist-fascism and the occupation forces. Partsalides was pushing the movement in this direction, towards the ratification of the Treaty of Varkiza. Our weakness [Zachariades goes on] during that period was a different and decisive one. The masses hesitated because we laid down our arms; no other European movement did something so shameful. We betrayed them in December in Athens and in Varkiza; we betrayed Greece and the National Resistance. For this reason, today the Xians [fascist band named X] beat us up on the streets and keep us hidden in our holes. The whole attempt to recreate the party from the 12th Plenary Session [on 25th-27th of June 1945] (2) was leading exactly to this: to arouse the movement and the CPG again in order for them to fall in line with the historical demands of that critical period and the party did it until the 2nd Plenary Session in February [1946]. (3) Let us not forget that the party’s leadership at that time, even after December, still did not have any policy for the English which was worthy of the people and the CPG and as a result, regarding the English, the policy of submission of Plaka, Gazerta, Varkiza was continued. The battle cry ‘English Out Of Greece’ was heard only when the party was reconstructed in order to extricate itself from the shame that the Treaty of Varkiza attributed to us’.

N. Zachariades expressed, clearly and revealing the truth, his opinion on the issue of abstention from the elections of 1946. This position helps anyone who wants to draw more general conclusions on the situation, on the role and orientation of each individual. We think that through these two cases to which we referred – the most important ones of that period and the most important ones regarding the political controversy within the movement – clear and useful conclusions can be drawn; conclusions concerning the lines within the CPG, the revolutionary and the opportunist line. This conflict between lines has determined the facts for the next two decades and until now, in the contemporary epoch, and is related to the need and duty of reconstructing the movement on the basis of the principles of scientific socialism of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin.

Endnotes:

1. 3rd conference of the CPG from October 10-14, 1950, Introductions, Speeches, Decisions.

2. The Plenary Sessions were meetings of the Central Committee of the CPG between the Congresses. The numbering of the Plenary Sessions restarts in the event of a congress. The 12th Plenary Session of June 1945 took place between the 6th and the 7th Congress of the CPG. The 7th Congress took place in the autumn of 1945.

3. The 2nd Plenary Session took place exactly a year after the treacherous Treaty of Varkiza.

The Political Committee of the Movement of the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-1955

Source

PCMLV: Che – Marxist-Leninist

A year ago we published the article with the name “News of Che and the struggle against opportunism” in our newspaper Revolutionary Steel. Today, we celebrate 4 years of the existence of our glorious party under the motto Marxist-Leninist Che! We feel the need to rewrite, adding some elements that because of time we were forced to ignore or at least playing in lines then general without going into them.

Now, it is necessary to delve into what we consider three cardinal aspects of the attitude of M-L Ernesto Guevara. Their struggle for Marxist-Leninist party building at that time entitled “The anarchists” struggle against revisionism that we called “the Trotskyists” and now added a new chapter called “The Marxist-Leninist philosophy of Che” these being special interest since the various currents neo-rrevolucionarias, neo-Marxist and all sorts of postmodern trash (and old revisions with new hair) lack of historical subject and trying to claim a scientific tool and patented the figure of the Argentine revolutionary.

Che Guevara, is a world figure who was traded by the bourgeoisie to turn it into a harmless icon. Thus, all the streams mentioned in the article, trying to castrate the content of discourse and Che’s Marxist-Leninist revolutionary practice. In this sense, not missing those who distort and decontextualized some phrases, speeches and writings of Che for their benefits revisionists. The literature and practical revolutionary legacy of Che, when we approach from the scientific perspective with a serious study leaves no doubt of his position consistent with the principles of proletarian ideology, which is none other than the Marismo Leninism.

44 years ago, died on guerrilla Ernesto Guevara de la Serna known as “El Che.” Since imperialism through their lackeys in Bolivia, cowardly murdered this great fighter, many misrepresentations have been made about its revolutionary quality. From the anarchists, petty bourgeois, even the Trotskyists have tried to capture the image of Che for opportunistic benefits, so much so that ideologists of Trotskyism integers have written essays on a thick volume called “current of thought and vision of Trotsky Che and Latin America “, in turn alienate the anarchist communism che and try to say it was a fighter for the abolition of any discipline and the spontaneous struggle of the masses.

This October, while commemorating the anniversary of Che’s death, we denounce all revisionist groups, and claim the real Argentine revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism as a genuine. Just read the work of Che to observe its high fidelity to Leninism and Marxism, communist oriented itself exposes all the revisionist nonsense they preach.

Other types of cutting equipment or Armando Néstor Kohan Haart, trying to seize, in patented for himself to this great revolutionary, so does the “arch-Trotskyite” Alan Woods, who (not having anything else to do) is dedicated to write long texts on Che (In line with Trotsky of course), the style of Thomas Aquinas with Aristotle, with its 5-way to nothing included or what is the same as their “permanent revolution.”

To address the design of Che party, we must study about key works, such as speech called “party building”, where he played key issues jettisoned any attempt, not only of the anarchists, but all kinds of revisionists who deny the Marxist-Leninist character must be a revolutionary party if you really want to build socialism. For this reason, in this section called “The anarchists’, we decided to replace the name” The conception of Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Che, “that we do because we believe that” The anarchists “limits the depth of the subject study and gives a unilateral, that although at that time was necessary for reasons of space, now we have to address, giving a more general, making clear the positions of the Che Marxist Leninist unquestionable.

The same it is necessary to this article is a section devoted to the philosophy of Ernesto Che Guevara. Today fashion has entered the bourgeois philosophical theories of existentialism. Certain currents of socialism in the XXI century are demanding reactionary thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger and his so-called “philosophy of life.” The reasons for this mutation was found in the fear of death that pervaded the Venezuelan leader Chavez after an illness.

The philosophy of existentialism is made to attack the man of the bourgeois era with this pessimism and fear of the unknown.

It is here where the reactionaries who run the party and the Venezuelan government have encouraged their “ideologues” or rather, all his sycophants to a gross mismatch between the new man and Che Marxist-Leninist, with the “superman”, individualistic , bourgeois and timid of Nietzsche.

The conception of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Che

Now, when large shaking movements throughout Latin America and the world at large, we see how the masses rise up against the neoliberal measures that are trying to carry on the workers the consequences of the crisis of capitalism.

In that scenario, tens of conceptions abound all struggling against capitalism, without horizon clear, historical subject and no scientific theory. Many of them are stuck in struggles merely vindictive, leaving aside the political struggle of the proletariat and the seizure of power, the only solution to eliminate the ravages of capitalism in the villages.

One of those many “new” ideas is called “socialism of the XXI century” which has its highest expression in our country. This so-called Bolivarian revolution is just a bourgeois democratic model center has chosen to various social programs that benefit the masses, has been charged with forming a scaffolding wrapped around a socialist but that denies the most fundamental elements of it.

We will not expose all the features of this model, we confine ourselves to what concerns us, which is the conception of the party. We stop a little in Venezuela and its very nice revolution, because it is awarded as his figure of Che, but in practice is diametrically the opposite.

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), between the figures of Simon Bolivar and Che Guevara Rodriguez lies, ignorance or manipulation ¿? This game is first multiclass scaffolding where there is no clear revolutionary subject and program progress to socialism is even fuzzier. Although there is a departure from the word bourgeois writer Heinz Dieterich, its politics, especially the economic one remains the same as the “intellectual” plasma in his book dedicated to socialism sigloventiunero.

The party of Che Guevara, in his conception is deeply communist and Marxist-Leninist. We will not focus solely on the program or the principles of the PSUV, because we all know and it is not the only party of petty nature in Latin America will try to give an outline broadly opposing party’s conception of Che to the reformist ideas of these parties and organizations (although it sounds paradoxical) anarchists.

Marxist Leninist conduct Guevara, faithfully expresses his theories on how it should be the true party of the revolution. In his speech “party building” tells us: “In the general scheme of design of the Party, puts it firmly at the head of the proletarian state, and guide their actions, by example, with its sacrifices, with the depth of his thought and the boldness of his deeds, each moment of our revolution. “later says:” The militant party of revolution is a Marxist Marxism must know and must consistently apply in its analysis dialectical materialism to interpret the world fully, “” We (told later), we hope that all our people go to a single rate, with a single step, that their vanguard have to fight and walk very fast with many difficulties to overcome our shortcomings. That is our task. ”

These passages cited from Che, pulverize any attempt to find a basis of unsubstantiated theories of spontaneity and discipline does not comply with the anarchists seek to manipulate the figure of Che.

As for the petty-bourgeois parties, would only take a look at Che’s speech quoted above about the match. Che says, “And in this new era we live in the stage of building socialism, where all forms of discrimination and sweep is just as unique and determining the dictatorship, the dictatorship of the working class as a class organized on the other classes which have been defeated, and the preparation of a long road that will be filled with many struggles, many troubles still perfect society is a classless society, a society where all differences disappear, not at this time can support another kind of dictatorship than the dictatorship of the proletariat as a class ”

We know that obviously the bourgeois parties that abound in the processes that are developing in Latin America openly renounce the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is one of the fundamental contradictions of them to the theory of Argentine revolutionary party. This is not only based on those games, but of the “communist” parties traditional most of our countries who still cling to Jhrushevismo and opinions of the XX Congress of the U.S. PC, reject the idea of ​​Marxist-Leninist dictatorship the proletariat and she opposed a “popular state”, a “state of all the people” that is just crazy because, while antagonistic social classes exist, the state repressive apparatus will respond to the interests of one . In a society divided between exploiter and exploited, there is no third alternative, or dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat, the exploiters oppress the exploited or vice versa, those who try to go off on tangents, only justify the current dictatorship, ie of the bourgeoisie.

A game where you mix the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat together is not a revolutionary party that we’re clear, a revolutionary party in the first place, it must be a cadre party, a vanguard where are the best elements of the working class revolutionary party is a fundamental requirement that its members do not live other people’s work and have no great interest to operators.

Open the doors of the party to “anyone who wants to register” is a demonstration of the bourgeois character of the same. From management to the foundation of it will have serious and irresolvable contradictions that can only be overcome with the seizure of power by the working class. For example, if converging operators and their representatives in the party, socialism is not viable, because they hinder one of the fundamental rules to move towards this, which is making the basic means of production, the elimination of private ownership the same, the nationalization of banks, the socialization of the land, industrialization and modernization of the country, eliminating the differences between city and countryside, and so on. What do you get with this?, The test have latent in Venezuela and collided with it every moment: the capitalists and landlords are exploiting, killing and crushing the workers and peasants, protected, supported and applauded by the glorious party here exists.

In it, Che was quite clear and precise. The Cuban revolution at first nationalized the major means of production, something very different has happened in other processes petty bourgeois of our continent.

In the Trotskyist

Another revisionist groups that try to deface the image of Che as a revolutionary, are Trotskyists. In this regard, emphasize discourse and compare the attitude of Ernesto Guevara with Leon Trotsky and even a supposed defense and identification of Che with the revisionist Russia. Nothing could be farther from reality, we must answer this with Guevara’s own words against revisionism, Trotskyism and Leninism claim. In 1966, in a speech said: “I have come to Communism by Stalin Dad, I’ve been reading Marxist Stalin, and nobody can tell me not to read his work. I read it even though it was considered very bad read. And since I am a person not too bright and headstrong also continue reading. “In other words:” My duty as a Marxist-Leninist Communist is to expose the reaction behind revisionism, opportunism and Trotskyist comrades and teaching (both in act as in power) should not accept as valid judgments against Stalin formulated by bourgeois, social or other lackeys of the reaction pseudocommunity whose real purpose is to blow up the labor movement from within. ”

In 1953, Ernesto Guevara wrote: “In crossing over the vast dominions of the United Fruit. Again I could convince me that these miserable capitalists are criminals. On a portrait of old and dear Comrade Stalin, I swore not to give me any rest while the miserable capitalists have been destroyed. In Guatemala I will perfect myself to achieve to be a real revolutionary”

These words of Che enough to descend from the clouds to the revisionists and reflect the character and quality of Ernesto as a true Marxist-Leninist who must serve as an example in our efforts to emancipate the working class from the yoke of capitalism in its imperialist phase . Today Che is more relevant than ever because it is the expression of the classic works of Marxism-Leninism.

For Trotsky, we need to analyze who was this character, his attitude to the Russian revolution, against Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the work of the workers in power to develop the technical and industrial base in the country of the Soviets. To accomplish this analysis meet Che incompatibility with this pro-fascist traitor and called for Russian destruction of the Soviet intelligence services with German and Japanese in the prewar period.

From the moment Hitler took power in Germany, the international counter became an integral part of the Nazi plan of world conquest. In every country, Hitler mobilized the counterrevolutionary forces during the last fifteen years had been organizing in the world. These forces then became “fifth columns” of Nazi Germany, organizations of treason, espionage and terror. These “fifth columns” were the secret vanguard of the German Wehrmacht.

One of the most powerful and important of these “fifth columns” acted within Soviet Russia, headed by a man who was perhaps the most notable political renegade in the history of mankind. His name was Leon Trotsky.

When was the Third Reich, and Leon Trotsky was the head of anti-Soviet international conspiracy which had powerful forces within the Soviet Union. Trotsky in exile plotting to overthrow the Soviet government to return to Russia and assume the supreme power, which had once been almost within reach of his hand. Are documented all meetings of the German command Trotsky and Tukhachevsky, former tsarist general.

This anti-communist name Lev Bronstein, was known within the Bolshevik party as the “Red Napoleon”, the explanations are superfluous. It is known that this character was a bitter enemy of Lenin for over 14 years, the most concrete evidence of this was written called “Our task,” where Trotsky poured a lot of accusations and slander against Lenin, similar to the later use against Stalin. When Trotsky warned that the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks is imminent, in August 1917, joins them in the most opportunistic as only he knew how.

Lenin Trotsky never had confidence, and in more than one occasion expressed views about the opportunist. Here are some comments made periodically by Lenin and Trotsky on their activities in the Russian revolutionary movement:

1911: “People like Trotsky, with his words … they are now swollen condition of the time … everyone who supported Trotsky group supports the policy of lies and deceit … workers Trotsky special mission is to throw dust in the eyes of workers, it is not possible to discuss essential things Trotsky because he has no opinions, we just report it as an argument menial.”

1911: “In 1903, Trotsky was a Menshevik, left the Mensheviks in 1904 and returned to them in 1905, boasting all over with phrases ultrarevolucionarias during that time, and again turned away from the Mensheviks in 1906 Trotsky plagiarism today … the ideas of a fraction, and tomorrow another, and so is considered superior to both … I have to declare that Trotsky represents only his own faction. ”

1912: “This group consists of lack of principles, hypocrisy and empty phrases … all under Trotsky ebcubre revolutionary phraseology that does not cost anything or commit you to anything.”

1914: “the old members of the Marxist movement in Russia are very familiar with Trotsky’s personality and not worth talking about it. But the new generation of workers do not know, and we need to let them know … these guys are characteristic fragments of the historical formations of yesterday, when the mass workers’ movement in Russia was still dormant. ”

1914: “Comrade Trotsky has not yet possessed definite opinion on a single issue serious Marxist, always has slipped through the gap opened by this or that discrepancy and has swung from side to side.”

1916: “Trotsky … as always, completely disagrees with the socialchauvinistas in principle, but brand around with them in practice.”

These are some of the opinions that Trotsky was Lenin in all the time Trotsky, Trotskyists is for today, what Jesus is for Christians in their teens.

We can say the killings are the leaders of the party by the clique that operated within the USSR was led by Trotsky. Dr. Leo Levin, a senior associate of Trotsky, infiltrated the Kremlin, was one of the major medical Bolshevik leaders, this man carried out under the guidance of Trotsky’s assassination and Menzhinsky important personages like Maxim Gorky, just to name two of the most emblematic. After the assassination of Menzhinsky was responsible for the GPU, its successor was Yagoda confessed Trotskyist who led the subsequent assassinations of important leaders, the most emblematic was the murder of writer Maxim Gorky, author of the landmark book “The Mother” with his son Peshkov.

Stanislav Rataichak, Trotsky service agent and head of the central administration of the chemical industry, confessed that when Germany was preparing his army hard mid-30, “three slides were prepared, a deviant act in Gorlovka workshops and two more landslides, one in the Nevsky workshops and other chemicals in the workshops combined Voskressensk ”

Yakov Borbnis, Trotsky group and workshop assistant chief Kamerovo said: “The plant was put district in such a condition that if in accordance with the demolition project was deemed necessary to do so, and gave the order, the mine could be flooded . In addition, we provided a coal from the technical point of view it was inappropriate for fuel, circumstances giving rise to numerous explosions. This was done deliberately … many workers are seriously injured ”

These small examples belong to a long chain of attacks, conspiracies and sabotage by anti-Soviet Trotsky and his group, to subvert the country’s industry and leave workers vulnerable to German attack was being prepared since Hitler and the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 and was fully aware that Trotsky.

All the anti-Soviet Trotsky plot detailed in a study published in the near future, we are making the necessary investigations for publication. Meanwhile, there is more than shown and in the eyes of anyone who figures Trotsky and Che Guevara are not only incompatible but totally contrary, the first anti-traitor, the second a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary. Asked Thinking of Trotsky and Che? Where?

Marxist-Leninist Philosophy of Che

The philosophical content of Che Guevara was none other than Marist-Leninist philosophy, it does not doubt any serious person who is dedicated to the study of South American revolutionary figure. However, from Venezuela, there has been a wave of charlatans making comparisons of Nietzsche and his “superman” with the new man of Che Guevara. Something that seems ridiculous, but it is extremely worrying, more so because these charlatans control state political spheres of power.

It is trying to manipulate the revolutionary masses to keep them out of Marxism-Leninism and abstracting the bourgeois pessimism expressed in the “philosophy of life” in the existentialism of Sartre, Nietzsche and Heidegger, which by the way, the last two are the parents the ideas of fascism in Germany. Let us study what is the “philosophy of life” or existentialism to draw the respective conclusions.

Existentialism or “philosophy of life” is one of the hottest trends today, irrationalist doctrine maybe more characteristic of the period of general crisis of capitalism, which more accurately expresses the spirit of pessimism and decadence that permeates bourgeois ideology of our day.

The most prominent representatives of this philosophy are, in Germany Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, in France, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in Italy, Nicola Abbagnano; in the United States, William Barret. Existentialism is the direct successor of the philosophy of Bergson and Nietzsche: His method has taken considerable part of the phenomenology of Husserl. Its basic ideas of the works of Søren Kierkegaard Danish mystic.

In Germany, the philosophy of life began to take shape after the First World War. The exasperation and despair engendered by the defeat of militarism kaiseriano, the fear of the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary movement in Germany, the dim hopes for a rematch and the hysterical frenzy of fascism gained strength, formed the political and spiritual he grew up “philosophy of existence”.

Existentialism in a nutshell is the fear of the bourgeoisie and its intellectuals to the rise of the labor movement and popular, all this fear was formed in existentialism reasons largely explain their receptivity in bourgeois circles.

After the Second World War, existentialism morphed into the familiar “philosophy of life” and spread throughout the capitalist world. It spread easily because in an individualistic society like the bourgeoisie, this philosophy is focused (and still focuses) on issues concerning the meaning of life, man’s destiny, choice and personal responsibility, the fear of death , all flows in the name of “philosophy of life.”

To those people, infected by all the prejudices of bourgeois society, who have failed to even make your choice and oscillate between the contending forces (bourgeoisie and proletariat), or try to put over them and feel overcome with bright ideas and at the same time, are aware of the sinking of their supports them just goes “philosophy of life.”

We can not imagine a Che Guevara preaching all the absurdities of bourgeois theory and pessimistic, which is nothing but the widow of capitalism, the justification of bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat and, above all, blame the blame for all ills system to the bad practices of individuals, selfishness, etc.., and not capitalism, only guilty of atrocities and the crisis which we live.

In the period of disintegration of bourgeois society and the spiritual crisis that the slab, the mood emphasize individualistic and become breeding grounds for the reaction against the collectivist ideas of the proletariat and Marxist-Leninist philosophy. This is precisely what we see in these times of turmoil, where social movements come to life as capitalism sinks into a gigantic bankruptcy is no coincidence that this philosophy emerges as the answer to Marxism-Leninism which undoubtedly is gaining momentum for its force and as the only tool capable of eliminating the causes of the crisis, ie the bourgeois mode of production. The Superman figure is without doubt the opposite of this “superman” existentialist just described.

We invite all comrades to study and deepen the figure of Che Guevara. We know your image, like that of Stalin has been corrupted and manipulated at the whim of the imperialists and those who make the game, it is our duty to vindicate Marxist Leninist all the characters have really fought for the emancipation of the proletariat.

Ramiz Alia, the Albanian Revisionist, Dies

Tirana, October 7 (EFE) .- The last communist president of Albania, Ramiz Alia, died today at age 85, according to medical sources.

Alia was hospitalized for several days in a sanatorium in Tirana due to lung disease.

Born in Shkodra, in northern Albania, Alia was a partisan leader who led the fight against the Nazi occupation of the country during the Second World War.

He graduated from Institute of Marxism-Leninism and was the successor  to Enver Hoxha in the Communist Party.

After Hoxha’s death in 1985, he became the leader of communist Albania, occupying the post of first secretary of Central Committee of the Party of Labor  of Albania.

From 1982 to 1992 he was also chairman of the NPC and thus head of state, a function at which he resigned after winning the 1992 parliamentary elections against the opposition Democratic Party.

In early 1990 introduced limited reforms towards a capitalist economy, announced a broad amnesty for political prisoners and called first multiparty elections in 1991.

In 1994 he was sentenced to prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, charges of which he was acquitted in 1997. EFE

Book Review: “Social Democracy: the Enemy Within” by Harpal Brar

BOOK REVIEW
‘SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, THE ENEMY WITHIN’

Harpal Brar 1995; ISBN 1-874613-04-4

INTRODUCTION

This book is a valuable contribution to the critique of social democracy and its counter-revolutionary role. The first half of the text is concerned with an examination of the origins of the Labour Party (the main party of social democracy in this country) and its record both in government and opposition. Time and again the views of the Labour Party are shown to have coincided with those of the British ruling class on every important issue affecting British imperial policy at home and abroad.

The stance of various revisionist and Trotskyite organisations which, one way or another, take a pro-Labour standpoint are examined in detail. In So doing, Harpal Brar directs effective and withering fire upon those who, whilst styling themselves as ‘revolutionaries’, insist on misrepresenting the Labour Party not only as a party which objectively serves the interests of the British working class, but also as being capable of bringing about the socialist transformation of society.

The author amply demonstrates the truth that the Labour Party is in reality both an imperialist party, and a ‘bourgeois labour party’, as characterised by Friedrich Engels, to whom this work is dedicated on the 100th anniversary of his death.

The second half of the book is comprised of articles from ‘Lalkar’, the paper of the Indian Workers’ Association, which comment upon the coal strike of 1984-5, various other economic struggles over the past fifteen years, and the relationship between social democracy and imperialist war. These illuminate the reactionary role played by the Labour Party in recent battles fought by the working class.

THE LABOUR PARTY SERVES THE INTERESTS OF MONOPOLY CAPITAL

Founded to give the working class a ‘voice’ in Parliament, the Labour Party has never been a true party of the working class, for such a party has to be revolutionary socialist in ideology. Anti-Marxist from its inception, the Labour Party preached the reformist theory that the state was a neutral apparatus which the working class could control in its own interests by obtaining a majority in Parliament. This denial of Marxian teaching on the nature of the state as an instrument of class rule also lies at the heart of those revisionist and Trotskyite organisations which offer support to the Labour Party – for example through such electoral slogans as”…. kick out the Tories and elect a labour government committed to Left policies”.

The Fabian ideology of Labour governments has always led them to operate along lines calculated to make capitalism work profitably during the (infinitely long) period of gradual, piecemeal, social reform. This illusory promise of reform has gained credence through real gains made by the working class. These have been due primarily to the rise in the value of labour power and the fact that the adjustment of wage levels to approach the higher level of the value of labour power have, by and large, been carried out through the reformist negotiating machinery.

The material basis for these gains over the past hundred and forty years have been (indirectly) the exploitation of the working people of the colonial-type countries by the British capitalist class. From the mid-nineteenth century some of the vast super-profits flowing in from colonial-type lands were used to pay an upper stratum of skilled craftsmen above the value of their labour power. This produced unions which rejected class struggle and socialist aims and confined their activities to bargaining on questions of wages, hours etc. However, despite the rise in real wages of the British working class over this period, the rate of exploitation of the workers has significantly increased. Had it not been for the ‘unofficial’ militant class struggle outside the reformist negotiating machinery, the rate of exploitation would have increased still more.

It should be emphasised that at no time has the mass of the British working class shared directly in colonial super profits. ‘Bribery’ of this kind has never affected more than a small upper stratum of the working class, and today this ‘labour aristocracy’ consists principally of the bureaucracy of the labour movement,

Despite the fact that its members are drawn mainly from the working class, and trade unions are affiliated to it, Harpal Brar clearly demonstrates that the Labour Party objectively serves the interests of monopoly capital. The abolition of ‘Clause 4′, the self-description of the party no longer as ‘left of centre’ but as ‘centre’, and the repudiation of all ‘make the rich pay’ programmatic points clearly show that the party’s appeal is directed now to all sections of the people who want a change in government, particularly to sections of the capitalist class who have suffered from the Tory policy of serving financial branches of finance capital, and not the industrial branches. It provides at present the principal reserve party of monopoly capital, which can safely be permitted to form a government at times when the Conservative Party has lost its electoral support.

TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE?

There remains the question of what a worker with a socialist consciousness should do when it comes to bourgeois elections, and here we differ from Harpal Brar, who is opposed to participation in elections.

We believe this position to be both mistaken and dangerous. Despite its limitations, “parliamentary democracy” provides a more favourable terrain for preparing socialist revolution than would exist under a fascist dictatorship, or even a corporate state. It is therefore essential for the working class to defend the democratic rights associated with “parliamentary democracy” against attempts to abolish them.

The right to vote, limited though it is, is one of the democratic rights associated with “parliamentary democracy”. To advise workers not to use this democratic vote is to imply it is of no value, and so to play into the hands of the fascist elements who seek – as part of the ideological preparation for the attempt, when objective conditions require it, to abolish “parliamentary democracy” – to inculcate the view that democratic rights are worthless. Advice to workers not to vote is harmful and reactionary.

WHICH PARTY OF THE CLASS ENEMY MOST ADVANCES THE SITUATION OF THE WORKING CLASS?

Where there is a division over policy between different sections of the monopoly capitalist ruling class, a political Party serving the interests of monopoly capital tends to become the vehicle of one or other of these antagonistic sections to put forward a policy which serves the interests of that section.

In 1970, for example, a minority of British monopoly capitalists had become convinced that their economic future lay in breaking the dependence upon United States imperialism, which had been the dominant feature of the international position of British imperialism since the second world war, and in joining the alliance of Western European powers which had been set up in the form of the European Economic Community. One of the reasons for the “dismissal” of the Labour government in 1970 was that it was tied to what had become a minority section of British monopoly capital which wished to continue the “special relationship” of dependence upon US imperialism.

These differences in foreign policy were overshadowed in 1974 by a more urgent difference in domestic policy brought to a head by the refusal of the miners to surrender to the government’s wage restraints. A majority of monopoly capitalists, now represented by the Labour Party, wanted to move away from the existing system of rigid wage restrictions and towards the building of a corporate state in which trade unions would be incorporated within the machinery of the capitalist state.

Even though the working class was not directly represented in the 1974 general election it was still able to achieve a tactical advantage by influencing the result. When the Heath government resigned, the unity of the miners in rejecting wage restraint, together with the refusal of the rest of The working class to blame the miners for hardship caused by the three-day working week brought about a split in the monopoly capitalist ruling class on this issue and forced a majority of the monopoly capitalists to organise a “dismissal” of that government. The new Labour government then instructed the National Coal Board to reach a settlement with the miners which proved a considerable advance upon what the Heath government had been prepared to allow.

To argue that policy differences amongst the monopoly capitalist class not only exist but have concrete implications for the working class is to accept that it cannot be a matter of complete indifference to the working class which party is elected to government. This is so even if there are only minor disagreements such as that relating to Value Added Tax on fuel regarding which the Tory Party was in favour and the Labour Party opposed.

The increase in cost of fuel would certainly preclude a proportion of elderly people from being able to heat their homes adequately and would undoubtedly, in turn, add to the already huge number of deaths related to hypothermia in winter months, If this became an election issue, a ‘don’t vote’ stance would ignore an issue of literally life and death significance to some sections of the working class. There may only be a shade of difference between the Labour and Conservative Parties, but that ‘shade of difference’ could represent the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people.

All genuine socialists must advise workers to use their democratic right to vote in an election in such a way as to create the best conditions of the advance of the working class to positions of class struggle and ultimately of revolutionary struggle, which alone can bring about the establishment of a socialist society.

Since the government at the next election will be either Conservative or Labour, both of which parties represent the interests of monopoly capital, both of which represent the interests of the class enemy of the working class, correct tactics require an analysis of whether the situation of the working class would be more advanced by the election of a Labour government or by the election of a Conservative government.

Should, as for example in 1974, the advice be to vote Labour, it must be associated with the categorical statement that the Labour Party is the political tool of big business and can never be anything else. This fact is amply documented in ‘Social Democracy: The Enemy Within’, and we warmly recommend the book to all those who wish to see the social emancipation of the working class.

Bill Bland on “Stalinism”

‘STALINISM’

An Address to the Sarat Academy in London

on 30 April 1999 by Bill Bland

I am grateful to the Sarat Academy for inviting me to speak to you on ‘Stalinism’.

However, your choice of subject presented me with some difficulty, since I am a great admirer of Stalin and the word ‘Stalinism’ was introduced by concealed opponents of Stalin – in particular by Nikita Khrushchev – in preparation for later political attacks upon him.

Today, in fact, ‘Stalinism’ has become a meaningless term of abuse employed to denote political views with which one disagrees. The Conservative press sometimes even describes Tony Blair as a ‘Stalinist’ -giving Stalin, were he still alive, ample grounds for a libel action!

Stalin always referred to himself modestly as ~a pupil of Lenin’ and shall follow his example and interpret the subject of ‘Stalinism’ as ‘Marxism-Leninism

Perhaps the nearest figure to Stalin in British history is Richard the Third, whom everybody ‘knows’ – and I put the word ‘knows’ in inverted commas – from their school history books and Shakespeare to have been a cruel, deformed monster who murdered the little princes in the Tower.

It is only comparatively recently that serious historians have begun to realise that the commonly accepted portrayal of Richard was drawn by his Tudor successors, who had seized the throne from him and killed him.

Naturally, they then proceeded to rewrite the chronicles to justify their usurpation of the throne – even altering his portraits to present him as physically deformed, as a physical as well as a moral monster. In other words, the picture of Richard which has become generally accepted today was the result not of historical truth, but of the propaganda of his political opponents.

It is, therefore, legitimate to ask: is the picture of Stalin presented to us by so-called ‘Kremlinologists’ historical fact or mere propaganda?

The ‘Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (the Soviet Union), which was constructed under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, no longer exists. Is it therefore true to say – as many people do – that this means that socialism in the Soviet Union failed?

I intend to quote here only one set of statistics. Tn his report to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in January 1939, Stalin cited figures from Western sources on the growth of industrial output in various countries as compared with 1913. These figures were:

Germany: —24.6%
Britain: —14.8%
USA: +10.2%
USSR: +291.9%

Indeed, it is an undisputed fact under the centrally planned economy instituted under Stalin, Russia was transformed in a few decades from a backward agrarian country into an advanced industrial country which by 1941— 45 had become powerful enough to defeat a German aggression able to draw upon the resources of the whole of Western Europe.

It is common to hear Stalin described as a ‘dictator.”

The strongly anti-Soviet American writer Eugene Lyons once asked Stalin directly: ‘Are you a dictator?’ Lyons goes on (and I quote:)

“Stalin smiled, implying that the question was on the preposterous side.

‘No’, he said slowly, ‘I am no dictator. Those who use the word do not understand the Soviet system of government and the methods of the Communist Party. No one man or group of men can dictate. Decisions are made by the Party”.

Series on Maoist Revisionism: The Anti-Leninist Theory of “three worlds” in Service to the Warmongering U.S.-China Alliance

The formation of the warmongering U. S.-China alliance is in complete accordance with and is the very fruit of the anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds”. This so-called “great strategic concept” of the Chinese revisionists is being put into full effect by the Hua Kuo-feng-Teng Hsiao-ping clique. It is the “three worlds” theory which guides their efforts to turn China into a superpower and justifies their alliances with the biggest imperialists and reactionaries against peace, socialism and national liberation.

Chinese revisionism with its “three worlds” theory is but the latest current of modern revisionism. It is a variant of Khrushchovite revisionism, a gross concoction made up of the most outrageous distortions of Marxism-Leninism. Like all the previous revisionisms – that of the American arch-revisionist Browder, Yugoslav Titoite revisionism, Khruschovite Soviet revisionism, and “Eurocommunist” revisionism – the “three worlds” theory is a flagrant renunciation of the revolution and is a line of open collaboration with imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular.

Leninism teaches us that we still live in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution, the epoch of the victory of socialism over capitalism. In this era, two contending forces are locked in mortal combat, labor against capital, the forces of socialism and freedom against the forces of capitalism and slavery. Since the Russian Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the new socialist system has been in existence without interruption. Despite the restoration of capitalism in the U.S.S.R. at the hands of the Khrushchovite revisionists following the death of J. V. Stalin, and despite the revisionist degeneration in China, genuine socialism continues to flourish in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania and socialism remains a powerful force. Nowhere on earth does the imperialist-capitalist system exist in peace and quiet, but everywhere it is in deep crisis, confronted by the forces of socialism, by the proletarian revolutionary movement and the anti-imperialist movement of the oppressed nations. Workers’ strikes, demonstration and protests, revolts, armed uprisings and national liberation wars of the oppressed masses are the order of the day. The problem of revolution is being taken up for solution in all countries. The two superpower the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., in the first place, along with the Chinese, Japanese and European imperialist are involved in deep rivalries over the division of the loot plundered from the toilers on all continents. These conflicts are dangerous and lead in the direction of war, but at the same time they tremendously weaken the world imperialist system and provide prospects for the revolution to breach the imperialist front.

However, according to the opportunist ravings of the “three worlders”, Leninism is no longer valid. Socialism, the working class movement and the national liberation movement and the very possibility of a successful revolution have all been written off as unfortunate misconceptions good only for a dim and distant past. The Chinese revisionists allege that the world is now divided in a different way – according to geography: that the so-called “third world” (the capitalist and neo-colonial states of Asia, Africa and Latin America) “now constitutes the motive force pushing world history forward”; and that the so-called “second world” (mainly the imperialist states of Europe and Japan) “can be won over to the third world in the common struggle against the hegemonism of the two superpowers”, the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

Futhermore, the Chinese revisionists look at the world through big power spectacles and consider the re-division of imperialist spheres of influence and not the revolution as the cardinal problem of the time.

The theoreticians of the “three worlds” theory in a warmongering fashion have proclaimed as “inevitable” a war between U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. They have declared that the proletariat and people cannot prevent such a war and that the revolution has been indefinitely postponed. Hence, the only thing left to do is to support one superpower or the other in the inter-imperialist slaughter they are preparing.

Therefore, regarding the two superpowers themselves, the theory of “three worlds” does not treat them as two imperialisms, equally the most barbaric and savage enemies of the people of the world, but instead makes an absurd distinction between the two. Allegedly, U.S. imperialism is the “declining “super-power” which has been placed “on the defensive” and therefore no longer an enemy but a bulwark of “peace” and “democracy” against the “one main enemy”, the superpower “on the offensive,” the Soviet New Tsars.

Thus, the “great strategic concept” of the Chinese revisionists is as far from the Marxist-Leninist class analysis as it could possibly be. Teng Hsiao-ping and Co. demand that the so-called “third world”, (the U.S. neo-colonial puppets such as the Shah of Iran, Mobutu of the Congo(K) and Pinochet of Chile unite with the imperialist and neo-colonialist states of the so-called “second world”. Of course this “united front” is to be under the direction of the self-styled “leader of the third world”, Chinese social-imperialism, which has its own neo-colonialist designs in this so-called “world”. As well, it is demanded that the “third” and “second” worlds unite under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and be left to the tender mercies of U.S. imperialism. This line could not be more reactionary. There is no better formula for the defense of the status quo and for collaboration with imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular than the theory of “three worlds”. The formation of the aggressive U. S.-China alliance is the greatest achievement of the “three worlds” theory to date.

The disgusting spectacle of the counter-revolutionary U.S.-China collaboration demonstrates the enormous significance for the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists to fight with all their strength against revisionism and opportunism of all hues. To not fight the Pentagon-socialist “three worlders”, the agents of Chinese revisionism in the U.S., is to take a non-revolutionary attitude towards U. S. monopoly capitalism and its state power. To fail to take an irreconcilable stand against the theory of “three worlds”, to adopt it as one’s own, means betrayal of the working class and going over to the side of world imperialism and reaction. Only by resolutely upholding the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, defending the immortal teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin against the distortions of the revisionists and opportunists of all hues, can the cause of the proletariat and working masses be advanced.

The Revisionists of “K”KE – Social-democrat Papariga: Prima Ballerina of the Greek capital and the EU monopolies

From KKE (1918-55)

“the ideas of perestroika correspond to the requirements of the reorganization of socialism, and contribute significantly to the development of the modern… theory of socialism, socialism has never been more attractive” (A. Papariga, “Pravda” June 25, 1991) (p. 8-9).

“As a concept, perestroika rendered invaluable services to the international movement. Of course, during its development certain difficulties arose about which we are concerned. At any rate, we agree that we should move forward and not go back. Our thesis consists in support and solidarity to CPSU.” (A. Papariga, Moscow, “Rizospastis” 21 June 1991)

Gorbachev-Papariga: The “brave kids” of Nikita Khrushchev (Moscow, June 1991)

Papariga-Kolozov-Trigazis went to Moscow in June 1991 to meet M. Gorbachev and hand him a statue of Hercules for “his herculean effort to build socialism in USSR”

“A solution outside the euro and return to the drachma in the present circumstances would be catastrophic” (A. Papariga, “Rizospastis” 31/5/2011, p.6)

A year and half ago when Papariga was asked by a reporter whether the withdrawal of Greece from the EU is in the moment “a solution”, she gave unequivocal answer with the revelatory “by itself is not a solution” (“Rizospastis” 5/3/2010, p.10), which was commented approvingly by the bourgeoisie media. Papariga trying to justify the stay of the country in the EU revealed that she chooses imperialist bosses, claiming that if Greece goes “outside the European Union,” then “we can go to agreement with the United States and go into another zone” (“Rizospastis” 5/3/2010, p. 10), but of course failed to revive her party’s bourgeoisie twaddle about “people’s power”.

Later in another interview she reiterated: “Now, Euro exit and return to drachma is not essential, moreover, is something the EU can do by itself, it suits EU” (“Rizospastis” 27/10/2010, p. 10) to turn recently in an open mouthpiece, spokesman of the local bourgeoisie, taking-on repeating the “disaster” position (30/5/2011 interview on journalist K.Papadakis): “A solution outside the euro and return to the drachma in the present circumstances would be catastrophic” (“Rizospastis” 31/5/2011, p. 6) – a statement that aired headlines in the capitalist press – and also in herald of the country’s dependence from ‘imperialist EU, along with SYN / SYRIZA and the other bourgeois parties.

Commenting on Papariga’s statement, Stavros Mavroudeas Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Macedonia, (and former associate of “Rizospastis”) correctly notes: “This statement has manifold problems. It was given in a situation that now even the polls show that the rejection of the euro and the EU tends to be a majority current in public opinion, and particularly to the lower classes. Especially when it is known how much damage did pro-Euro illusions which systematically cultivated the popular masses by the system for decades. The statement of A. Papariga acts as a brake on these positive developments.”

Abandoning the anti-imperialist slogan ” Greece out from the EU right now!”, the social democratic leadership of “K” KE has not only fully aligned with the big capital’s strategic choice to keep our country in the EU, but it has also resigned from the struggle against the imperialist EU. Finally, it went as as far as to raise in public the reactionary flag of the local big capital, the flag of “scaremongering”, crying that “A solution outside the euro and return to the drachma in the present circumstances would be catastrophic”.

Anasintaxi, issue 346 (15-31/5/2011)

Grover Furr stomps Kasama Liberals

Thanks for all the remarks! Here are a few replies. I’ll be brief.

Mike Ely wrote:

“Give us a short, simple list of your evidence for this global Trotsky-Bukharin-Nazi conspiracy. You can’t because it didn’t exist.”

Either you have not studied the materials or you don’t remember them.

There were a series of inter-related conspiracies. There’s a huge amount of evidence of this. Some of this evidence is unquestionable – e.g. Trotsky’s and his son’s correspondence about the “bloc” – their word – of Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and others. But there’s lots more too.

Re: Bukharin: he never claimed to have been in touch with Germans or Japanese. But he was for sure involved in a terrorist conspiracy.

See Furr and Bobrov, “Nikolai Bukharin’s First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka”, at http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Furr_Bobrov.pdf for the evidence just about Bukharin that was available a few years back.

There’s lots more evidence that does not directly concern Bukharin, who was only one figure among many.

We have lots of evidence about the Military conspiracy and its interrelationship with the other conspiracies. For non-Soviet evidence of this see the late Alvin Coox’s two-part article on Genrikh Liushkov and the Japanese in _Journal of Slavic Military Studies_, 1998.

Full references for this and other useful stuff is in my article, “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan”, at http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf

Mike Ely wrote:

“He is trying to prove something which is false, and there is mountains of evidence of many kinds about what actually happened.”

There is NO evidence that the Moscow Trials were frame-ups. None! ALL the evidence we have supports the hypothesis that these conspiracies were genuine.

Mike Ely wrote:

“For those interested in the actual history of this period, I would urge you to read J. Arch Getty’s book “Road to Terror”…”

Getty wrote this book 13-14 years ago. We have a huge amount more evidence, more documents from former Soviet archives, now than he had then.

Read it! You’ll learn something. And you will find nothing that disagrees with what I have written.

PatrickSMcNally wrote:

“The record of Bukharin’s performance at the trial shows that he attempted to give way on certain points while refusing to concede on others,…”

That’s true. But this isn’t:

“…and this was done in a way which strongly suggested a coerced confession.”

Had he been “coerced” he’d have confessed to everything. Instead he fights like hell on some points while confessing to other capital offenses.

Read the evidence in our article (cited above).

Bill Martin: Thanks for your sensible and supportive remarks! I don’t recall meeting you, but hope to have the opportunity before long.

One point: You wrote:

“Prof. Furr, on the other hand, at least contributes to our understanding of the complexity of the Stalin period, and to an understanding that there is more to what happened than the capriciousness of a one-person dictatorship.”

Stalin was not a “dictator” in any sense of the word. Wheatcroft, one of the very best historians of this period around, wrote an article almost a decade ago calling Stalin’s collective style of working “Team Stalin”.

“Dictator” is simply a shibboleth of respectability – you _have_ to say it, in order to be “acceptable” to anticommunists and Trotskyists.

PatrickSMcNally wrote:

“But the purges were an insane outburst of paranoia…”

No, they were not! You are ‘begging the question” – assuming that which must be proven.

You are voicing the “respectable anticommunist / Trotskyist viewpoint”. It’s completely wrong, and there has never been any evidence to support it.

PSM wrote:

“Stalin’s paranoid visions of Nazi agents everywhere…”

True nonsense! That there were, in fact, a large number of foreign agents in the USSR, is acknowledged by bourgeois historians. For example: Jeffrey Burds, in _Journal of Contemporary History_ 42 (2007), 267 ff.

“Furr’s thesis is only of utility as an example of how Leftists need to wary of getting sucked into a wish to confirm their old biases off of doctored versions of the past. That can’t lead anywhere towards the future, and a comparison with Creationism is entirely appropriate.”

PSM is not familiar with the research on these topics, but pretends that he is.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Anticommunist historians (and Trotskyist historians) do little but lie about Soviet history and Stalin.

Meanwhile, they all admire each other – yes, the anticommunists cite the Trots respectfully all the time, and the Trots return the favor. All are interested in anticommunist, and specifically in anti-Stalin lies.

Parallel with Mao: the same kind of thing is going on re: China and Mao. There’s a leapfront contact to “prove” Mao “killed” 20, 30 40, 45 million people in the famine, not to mention elsewhere.

The reality is this: I have been investigating “anti-Stalin” allegations intensively for the past decade. To this point, NOT A SINGLE ONE of them can be verified, and most can be DISproven.

That’s the situation. Obviously, many people on the “Left” find this inacceptable, intolerable.

To them I say: Think again! You are never, ever going to build a movement for a better society by basing yourself on anticommunist, anti-Stalin, pro-Trotsky and pro-capitalist lies.

Grover Furr defends research on Moscow Trials from Charlatan Mike Ely

-The following is a response written by Grover Furr on the Kasama Project website-

Someone brought to my attention that my research is being discussed here.

I asked Mike Ely if I could respond, and he agreed that I could. I welcome criticism! But to be valuable, it has to be accurate.

Here are some remarks that I believe are NOT accurate:

1. Mike E. wrote:

“Grover insists that he has proven that the Moscow Trials came to a justified verdict (i.e. that former leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) were spies and conscious agents of German and Japanese fascism (and Polish intelligence and in some cases British intelligence etc.) And he claims that this was proven by the confessions they gave at their trials, and by his own subsequent research.”

All evidence is relevant. Confessions are evidence. So it would be incorrect to ignore them.

The question is: Were these confessions “scripted” – written by the NKVD investigators? Or do they represent what the defendants wanted to say?

Note: NOT “were they truthful”. That’s a different question. We can say for sure that some of the defendants deliberately lied in their statements at trial, to mislead the authorities.

“But in fact (precisely because his work is pseudo-scholarship) the problem is at the level of method. In other words, his method is to try to discredit any fact that undermines his (preexisting) verdict. And his method is to inflate any detail that he can portray as document his (pre-existing) verdict.”

This is false.

My method is to be as objective as I possibly can, and get at the truth.

If Stalin “framed” people, I’d like to know about it. I’m not interested in “discrediting” those who disagree with me or “inflating” the evidence that I present.

2. Mike E. again:

“Similarly, Furr has decided to spend his life defending the disproven and discredited claims that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, Tomsky, Kamenev, the heads of the Soviet military and dozens of other leading Bolsheviks were paid agents of foreign powers,…”

This is false. I never wrote this. For the sake of brevity I’ll just make two points:

* I have never written that Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, Tomsky, or Kamenev were “paid agents of foreign powers.” There’s no evidence that they were.

* The Moscow Trials have never been “disproven”. No one has ever presented any evidence that the defendants’ testimony was compelled by torture or threats, or that the defendants were innocent of the crimes to which they confessed at trial. No one, ever.

3. Mike E. again:

“You can’t refute Grover Furr’s evidence, because he has no evidence of his claims. He offers piles of facts, statements, quotes, documents… but they do not prove his claims. They simply obscure the lack of proof of his claims.”

This is false. I present lots of evidence, and analyze it too.

4. Mike E. again:

“Grover Furr is attempting to say that the 1930s claims of the Soviet party and leadership (of a vast Nazi-inspired conspiracy of assassins, wreckers and spies led by Leon Trotsky from exile) is justified by historical evidence (and particularly by the material in the Soviet archives). None of this is true:…”

Mike is mistaken. The concrete claims I make in my articles and book are well demonstrated by the evidence I present.

5. Chegitz Guevara wrote:

“You do not have to be an expert on the USSR to point out that Furr has failed to make his case, since Furr uses invalid argumentation.”

No, I do not. I would appreciate it if you could give me one concrete example of my “invalid argumentation.”

Not Mike Ely’s, or somebody else’s, “summary” or “description” of what I write, but examples from my articles / book. That’s all I can be responsible for.

6. PatrickSMcNally wrote:

“Neither is Grover Furr. Furr is an English professor, not a historian by profession.”

Pardon me, but that is nonsense. I was trained in literary history. This is a branch of the study of history.

Please see the opening section of my interview with _Literaturnaia Rossiia_ back in 2008, where I briefly explain this, at

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/research/litrossiainterv0608_eng.html

7. Stiofan writes:

“Anyone who has the least familiarity with the work of Getty and Thurston know they do enot ven remotely support Grover’s conclusions as to the vast conspiracy of Trotskyite/Zhinovite wreckers doing the bidding of foreign intelligence agencies.”

EVIDENCE, not what X or Y says, is what we should be concerned about here!

I have a great deal of respect for both Arch and Bob. They are among the very best in what is unfortunately a field of study dominated by dishonest anticommunists and Trotskyists. But neither Getty nor Thurston presents any evidence that the conspiracies did NOT take place. Neither does anyone else.

As for the “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan” – the title of my 2010 article in _Cultural Logic_: to my knowledge no one else has ever bothered to find, collect, and study this material.

8. Carl Davidson writes:

“I thought his [Mike E.’s] critique of Furr’s ‘just so story’ method was pretty good…”

And

“Furr is not a ‘creationist dupe.’ He simply uses a similar flawed method, discounting whole categories of evidence as not really evidence.”

I think it is obvious that Carl D. has not studied my research at all. No one who has could ever call it a “just so” story!

9. Contrarian writes:

“Mike, having read Grover Furr’s work, and being a long time history of Soviet history, I tend to agree with you that he reaches false conclusions and that the problem is his method, including his disregarding of what Molotov wrote.”

I never “disregarded what Molotov wrote. I just sent Mike some evidence on this point.

Contrarian: I would appreciate some specific criticisms of specific passages in my research!

I do not agree in the least that there is anything faulty about the “method” I use. If you think there is, I’d appreciate your pointing it out to me.

10. Chegitz Guevara again:

“In fact, no need understand anything about the history of the USSR in order to be able to dismantle Furr’s work, because where it fails is not on facts, but on logic.”

Please point out a couple of examples of errors of logic in my published research.

_______________

In conclusion: I am grateful for all close, cogent criticism. Unfortunately, I don’t see any such criticism here, or on previous discussions of my work on Kasamaproject.

Feel free to email me privately with your criticisms, if you do not want to continue this thread.

Thanks for your time and attention, and thanks to Mike Ely for allowing me to post this response.

Sincerely,

Grover Furr

Why was Bukharin Executed?

Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich

(1888-1938): Publicist and economist, member of the Bolshevik Party since 1906. In the years of World War I (1914-1918) adopted an anti-Leninist position on the issues of the proletarian dictatorship, the State, the right of nations to self-determination and others. In 1917 he denied the possibility of the triumph of socialist revolution in Russia. After the October Revolution he was a member of the Politburo of the CC of the Bolshevik Party and the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and the editor of Pravda. He manifested himself repeatedly against the general line of the party: in 1918 he spearheaded the anti-party group of “Left Communists” which opposed signing of Brest-Litovsk Peace; in 1920-1921 he supported Trotsky during the discussion of unions. Bukharin was the major spokesperson for the turn to the rich peasants during the NEP. After 1928 had was a leader of the rightist opposition party. Dismissed the following year from the Politburo of the CC, as well as the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International; expelled from the party in 1937 for his anti-party activities and executed after the Third Moscow Trial in 1938.

Under Gorbachev, there was an attempt to rehabilitate Bukharin, seeking for a theoretical and historical justification for “market socialism.”

For more information on the charges of 1938, see the Trial Transcripts available in the PDF page.

Excerpts from: Enver Hoxha – Report to the 7th Congress of the PLA

Introduction

Dear Comrades!

It has been exactly five years since the Party met for its sixth Congress and adopted the guidelines for the economic and social development of the country for this period. The major tasks it undertook then have been successfully fulfilled. Today our Party comes together for its seventh Congress, prepared and determined to take on new, more difficult tasks in order to always victoriously advance the cause of socialism and communism in Albania.

The people and the Party come to this Congress full of vitality and dynamism, proud of the progress achieved and with an unshakable confidence in the future. Life has confirmed once again that the Marxist-Leninist course of the Party is entirely right, that the way on which it leads our people is the safe way of building socialism, the way to further strengthen the freedom and independence of the fatherland.

Our internal situation is good and unshakable in all fields and all sectors of the front. The Marxist-Leninist party line, the great achievements, the continuation of class struggle in the right way have strengthened the moral-political unity of the people and their unbreakable ties with the Party and created a lively revolutionary atmosphere.

Under the leadership of the Party the working class, the peasants and the people’s intelligentsia have successfully met the basic tasks set by the 6th Congress for the development of economy and culture in general. In the previous five-year plan the productive forces have developed in each sector, the material and technical basis of socialism has been strengthened and the socialist relations of production have been further improved.

Practice has shown that the program of the Party to build a complex heavy and light industry and to expand it with new lines of modern production was fully realised. Today we notice with satisfaction that the rapid industrialisation, the goal set by the party to transform Albania from an agricultural-industrial country into an industrial-agricultural country is coming closer. By the golden hands, the persistent will and talent of the workers the large metallurgical combine of Elbasan came into existence and began to cast the first steel in the history of Albania. The oil refinery in Ballsh will soon begin to operate and the oil of our rich soil will be transformed into products which are very much needed for the economy of the country. The hydropower plant at the river Drin close to Fierza will soon be completed like many other plants. With the new plants and factories, which have already commenced operations or will soon do so, also another major objective of the party will be successfully implemented in practice: to use, process and exploit our domestic resources as efficiently as possible.

We are all witness to the thorough change which our agriculture is currently undergoing. Answering the call of the Party the peasants of the collectives and workers of state farms this year for the first time met the demand of the country for bread wheat with flaming patriotism, tireless work and unwavering confidence in their powers. Due to the special care of the Party the mechanisation of agriculture and a rapid increase in the production of all vegetable and animal products were guaranteed. Following the directive of the 6th Congress agricultural cooperatives of a higher type were formed, the organisation and management of the agricultural economies were perfected. The measures taken by the Party have led to a further reduction of the differences between town and country. In our plains and on our mountains a huge remodelling work is under way in order to make them more fruitful and our country richer, more beautiful and stronger.

Maoism on Foreign Affairs vs. Pseudo-Marxist Geopolitical Pragmatism

This is an old book review by MIM (Maoist Internationalist Movement) of a work by Ludo Martens entitled, The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Causes and Lessons: For the Revolutionary Revival of the International Communist Movement. I am not a Third-Worldist or a Maoist, but this review has a principled theoretical stance regarding the International Communist Seminar and Brezhnevism as a whole.

I post it here despite misgivings about the defunct MIM, including their “defense” of Mao’s collaboration with U.S. imperialism and comparing a two-year non-aggression pact before killing Hitler to a decade of supporting Mobutu, Nixon and Pinochet.

Ludo Martens, while he has taken Marxist-Leninist stances in the past and has written some good works, since 1995 has chiefly worked in the service of “pan-socialism,” seeking to unity Marxist-Leninist and revisionist currents in a strategy that would make Ceaușescu blush.

This critique of Martens’ work and “pan-socialism” is a very important point to be made in the revolutionary struggle between revisionism and non-revisionist Marxism-Leninism and the teaching of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

It should be noted that they toss around the old Maoist canard “Hoxhaite” and claim that “certain sections of international Hoxhaism fell” for Gorby, without providing any evidence of such claims (and even tries to say that the M-L / revisionist struggle was chiefly Mao’s doing), although MIM does laugh at Gossweiler’s attempt to say Albania had “nationalist” reasons for opposing the Soviet Union, which earns them more credit than most American Maoist organizations.

The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Causes and Lessons: For the
Revolutionary Revival of the International Communist Movement

by the International Communist Seminar

Brussels, BELGIUM: 1998, 313 pp. pb

reviewed by International Minister, December, 2000

This book represents a triumph of the work of Ludo Martens and his Belgian PTB, a party seeking to reconcile with Castroites, Brezhnevites and Hoxhaites. Doing so, Ludo Martens is very close to the numerical center of gravity amongst those calling themselves communist in the world, since there are still many revisionists hanging on to their world views.

To the Maoists, Ludo Martens encourages “constructive engagement” with revisionist parties. By befriending the revisionist parties, one could receive the impression that the revisionists are gaining someone to talk to other than their revisionist selves. Such would be a tactical justification for a a Maoist to do what Ludo Martens does.

On the other hand, such a tactic cannot be justified beyond a certain price. Seminar participants are supposed to all uphold Stalin, but in fact, some Trotskyists hang about and the Castroites are allowed in and welcomed despite Castro’s many statements of praise of Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping. (See http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/5973/leftover.html )

Hence, it is one thing to have tactics of “constructive engagement,” but it is another thing to allow someone to call him or herself “Marxist-Leninist” when s/he does not truly defend Stalin. Yet, such is not surprising since Ludo Martens himself and a portion of international Hoxhaism fell for Gorbachev–that being another story about “Back to Leninism” for another time.

Thus the seminar supposedly unites to defend Stalin, but on page 10 we already learn that the vast majority of seminar participants welcomed the party representatives from Cuba and Korea and upheld “the defence of socialism in Cuba.” For MIM, that puts this conference of 136 organizations beyond the pale from a proletarian point of view.

Whenever MIM raises phony communist Cuba, we never hear about the mode of production in Cuba, but we always hear about the geopolitical necessity of defending Cuba against invasion. Such is the tell-tale sign that Marxism has taken the backseat to geopolitics.

There is nothing special about Cuba facing imperialist invasion. Panama saw Yankee troops. Somalia saw Yankees land and so did Iraq. None were “socialist” countries and still the Yankee invaded. Opposing Yankee invasion is not something we do only for countries like Cuba calling themselves “socialist.” Opposing Amerikan imperialism is an internationalist duty. Creating a “special deal” for Cuba and Korea despite their modes of production is an example of neo-colonialism, very typical of the kind of revisionism that would rather fight than switch to scientific Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is the ideology of those hoping to restore a Soviet social-imperialism and a new neo-colonial orbit.

Thus, from these forces it is as if nothing in the world has changed, largely because they wish to restore the Soviet social-imperialist realm. These parties cannot admit their own failures with regard to defending Stalin and so now they continue defending the same old politics without missing a beat. The collapse of the Soviet Union might as well have not happened, because these people are essentially not interested in the mode of production. They are communists in sentiment in some cases and manipulators of geopolitics in others, but they are not Marxist-Leninist in any case.

The first interesting essay in the book with something new in it is from Dr. Kurt Gossweiler of the former East German revisionist party. Gossweiler seems to realize that there might be some criticism that he is in for given the ruinous collapse in East Germany.

His analysis is that China was a large and independent country which was why its communist party was able to resist Khruschev revisionism. His analysis of Albania is that it had selfish reasons of self-defense against Yugoslavian annexation to oppose Khruschevite revisionism. However, such material analyses of the respective parties would be more persuasive if Gossweiler did not end up excusing the German party leaders essentially because of their geopolitical situation, something we hear about Castro all the time too.

We are told that because of the Western troops on its border and because of the force of the USSR, the leadership of the East German communists wanted to side with Mao but did not. “It would be wrong to call the SED a revisionist party. Under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht it put up the maximum resistance possible at that time to the revisionism of the Khruschev clique, and it did so to such an extent that in October 1964 its activities were suppressed.”(p. 83) This statement by Gossweiler is indeed something new in the world.

Because of Honecker’s anti-fascist role, Gossweiler also excuses him when he replaced Ulbricht at the request of the USSR. “It was more a question of exchanging one of the most gifted leaders, and one of the most seasoned in the German and international class struggle, for a well-meaning party functionary who was too easily led astray owing to his poor leadership qualities.”(p. 84)

Gossweiler also gives Honecker credit for repressing Gorbachev’s statements in East Germany and states that a violent repression of the pro-Gorbachev demonstrators would have missed the real counter-revolutionaries. Thus, overall, we have some notion that the party in East Germany deserves criticism, but we are told that the true inside story is that all that could be done was done under Ulbricht while Honecker was simply incompetent when he implemented revisionism.

Whether Cuba’s Castro, China’s Hua Guofeng or East Germany’s Ulbricht and Honecker, we are told there are good reasons not to hoist the banner of communism. Had Ulbricht done it, invasion would have resulted. Had Cuba not gone along with Khruschev, we are told Cuba would have been done in.

Essentially we hear again and again that the geopolitical situation demanded compromise of the mode of production itself without an open fight, without an open call to the people to attack revisionism.

To take such a stand is to put geopolitics in its own right above Marxism. It is one of the root reasons for the continued division of the revisionists from the genuine international communist movement; even though the Soviet Union is dead. The mere death of the Soviet Union did not erase all the fallacious pseudo-Marxist methods of thought ingrained in the Soviet Union’s revisionist followers. As long as geopolitics is put above the mode of production’s advance, Marxist-Leninists have no chance of uniting. It is Marxism’s attention to the material world that makes unity possible, while making cardinal principles of geopolitical calculation means endless division.

Next in the book follow some essays from the Castro brothers and North Korea–as if nothing has changed in the world and as if Gorbachev and Yeltsin could have occurred without some major betrayal in the Soviet CP. These people just go on singing the same old revisionist song.

After the grossly reactionary documents from Cubans and Koreans, we received another even more reactionary contribution from a Syrian Ammar Bagdache, who seemed hell-bent on being social-fascism incarnate. In the split between Khruschev and Mao, Ammar Bagdache still cannot discern one side being more correct than the other. (p. 174) Instead, it is clear that this particular persyn seeks the restoration of the Soviet empire. Like the Nazis before, Ammar Bagdache focuses his hatred of parasitism on the Jews. This would be one thing on the West Bank, but according to A. Bagdache, the Jews a.k.a “Zionism” were mainly responsible for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.(p. 165) Most of Khruschev’s advisers and the “main” force behind revisionism is supposedly Zionism.(p. 168)

While MIM is all for having Marxism-Leninism-Maoism take national forms, what Ammar Bagdache is doing is a violation of the universal aspects of Marxism-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It’s not surprising that this reactionary essay was also allowed in the book. Again, it is not focused on the mode of production, only how geopolitics–in this case Mideast geopolitics–intersects with capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. This geopolitical focus goes to such an extent that it wipes out the parasitic nature of imperialism except for the Jews. From the proletarian view, this is the class essence of Hitler’s ideology too–an attack on parasitism of the Jews in essence to cover for the parasitism of imperialism generally. It’s a sacrifice of some parasites to let the much bigger bloodsuckers off the hook. Anybody who thinks Amerikan imperialism would miss an imperialist beat if the United $tates had no Jews has major illusions. Such illusions create a major escape hatch for imperialism when it gets into trouble like Germany in the 1930s.

The DKHP-C Turkish comrades also have an essay in the book. Once again, the focus is geopolitical. “It is a matter of fact that it is much easier to create the conditions for open interventions and to put them into practice since the USSR is not a factor of balance anymore, and since the USA is the sole ‘superpower.’”(p. 256) This is exactly the kind of reasoning that says, “because the USSR is powerful in a geopolitical sense, we will call it socialist.” However, Lenin did not call the Kaiser socialist when the Kaiser gave him a railroad car to ride back to Russia.

Furthermore, we heard the traditional Brezhnevite and Trotskyite complaints about Mao from the DKHP-C: “The CP of China, who regarded the USSR as the ‘main enemy’, went even so far as to confront progressive and revolutionary movements, if they were supported by the USSR. The support for the counter-revolutionary FNLA and Unita in Angola, and even for Pinochet in Chile were consequences of this policy.”(p. 259)

On this point, DKHP-C is one of many parties that has adopted the white man’s double standard toward the Soviet Union and China, a standard so white that even some Trotskyists uphold it though it means giving some credence to Stalin. Almost without exception, these organizations accepted and defended the Stalin-Hitler pact, which included real material aid such as the shipment of raw materials from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, but let Mao so much as recognize Pinochet or shake hands with Nixon, and these hypocrites attack Mao with no shame–even seeing the obvious today of capitalist restoration in the USSR. If there were all these progressive and revolutionary forces backed by the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, these critics of Mao should show us one that has a socialist society to show for it. There aren’t any, because these forces were all revisionist. Furthermore, as MIM documents elsewhere, Mao supported all the anti-colonial forces in Angola. Perhaps the DKHP-C thought that exclusively supporting the Soviet side was more important than ejecting Portuguese colonialism! That’s how important neo-colonialism is for these people to make such a principle of it before colonialism is even done with!

[Please note the admin of this blog does not support Maoism, the "Three Worlds Theory," the idea that the social-imperialist Soviet Union was the "greater threat," or justify Mao's support of reactionary forces in the name of China's geo-political interests, and condemns MIM's pathetic attempts to equate Mao's support of U.S. imperialism with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.]

Entire parties have split around the world over the question of the Three Worlds Theory–that’s how much the pseudo-Marxists have managed to convince us that geopolitics is so cardinal instead of a matter of strategic calculation of the balance of forces, and not something that would come up in a conference first attempting to regroup around cardinal questions. In the realpolitik world of geopolitics-first thinking, it is not surprising that Great Russian nation interests come to the fore easily and without a second thought, while Mao has to justify himself several times over or entire parties will split. It’s exactly the kind of garbage that explains why the Soviet Union under Brezhnev was an equal superpower to the United $tates, but also an equally capitalist society. Pragmatist geopolitical considerations can in no way guide the revolutionary advance of society on a consistent basis. Doing that requires knowledge of the mode of production.

The essay by Harpal Brar does the most to discuss the actual economic conditions in the USSR, but on the whole, none of the essays in the book systematically cover the factual situation of the mode of production in the USSR. One last essay worth mentioning is so stuck in the past, it still has not theoretically admitted that the bourgeoisie in the party — not landlords or imperialists outside the party–restored capitalism in the USSR. The Iniziativa Comunista (Italy) would appear to be one of those organizations too far brain-dead to make sense of current events: “While acknowledging the non-antagonistic character of the contradictions amongst the internal classes, we have to be conscious of the antagonistic relationship that exists between the socialist countries and their capitalist counterparts.”(p. 302) Although Yelstin joined the Soviet CP in 1961, the Italian Stalinists have the nerve to tell us that there were no internal contradictions with the enemy in the Soviet Union!

Hello, hello, hello supposed Stalinists! It was not the landlord class or the imperialists or even the cultural intellectuals you mentioned who restored capitalism outright in the Soviet Union. It was Ramiz Alia, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev and Yeltsin who restored capitalism–the bourgeoisie in the party. Not in a single case did the imperialists invade or the landlords rise up in armed struggle to restore capitalism.

[...]

Yes, we must uphold Stalin’s last great work, the “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.” Without understanding this work, it is impossible to understand the material basis for capitalist restoration.

[...]

Why “social-fascism” and “social-imperialism”

In 1993, Ludo Martens of the Belgian PTB attended a conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong, a meeting very important in attempting to regroup Maoist parties, some of whom met for the first time and challenged each other with scientific issues not found in their own countries. At such a meeting, and indeed, at all international conferences of the moment, cardinal questions should be the order of the day.

It is often stated that for Mao Zedong, political line was merely a matter of intention. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Mao analyzed the superstructure and its connection to the mode of production, he did so scientifically and giving full accord to the economic base’s active role in determining the superstructure.

Today’s neo-revisionist and Brezhnevite critics of Mao dovetail because of their underlying combination of Menshevik views. One component of Menshevism is anarchist idealism or nihilism when it comes to the state or leadership under socialism. When it suits them, these Mensheviks criticize power-holders for holding power! How remarkable! The Mensheviks have discovered that people hold power and have self-interests! Such infantilism underlies much of the criticism of Mao Zedong with regard to the Soviet Union and foreign affairs.

Since the Soviet Union called itself “socialist,” but its mode of production was capitalist, Mao had no choice but to refer to the USSR as “social-imperialist.” Even more problematically for the critics of Mao — who in many cases, such as Ludo Martens or the now defunct “Communist Workers Party” of the U$A and countless others, believed that the political leadership of the Soviet Union was degenerate under Khruschev and Brezhnev–the critics admit that the Soviet Union after 1956 was not a bourgeois democracy. So what was it? The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, but of what class and in what form? Once again, it is the mode of production that prevails in deciding the question. If the mode of production is capitalist, but the superstructure is not bourgeois democratic and in fact is openly dictatorial, then “social-fascist” is the right term. Not for nothing the Nazis also claimed to be “socialists,” as a matter of historical coincidence.

In his 1993 speech, ” Mao Zedong et Staline,” (See http://www.wpb.be/doc/doc.htm) Ludo Martens (like many others in the world before and since) raised this question in an opportunist way. He said that Mao opposed the Soviet Union and called it the main enemy for a spell, because of China’s self-interests. Yet, here we are talking about something purely superstructural. Ludo Martens accuses Mao of “bourgeois nationalism,” and connects that to what he considers the incorrect “social-imperialist” thesis, but what national bourgeoisie is he referring to? Certainly he is not referring to the bourgeoisie in the Chinese party which wanted to follow the path of Khruschev and Brezhnev. It was not their self-interests creating this “bourgeois nationalism.” Then what is Ludo Martens talking about? He is talking about an idea detached from the mode of production, a nitpick if even 100% correct would have no business being raised as a cardinal question at an important conference marking Mao’s 100th birthday. Mao Zedong did not own any means of production. China did not have a mode of production driving it toward incorrect foreign affairs positions. That is the cardinal issue at stake.

At most if we accept all of Ludo Martens’s observations, some of which are historically jumbled (another subject for another date), we will prove that Mao made errors. These errors might even reach to the level of “deviation,” but these errors would not change the fact that the Soviet Union was social-imperialist and social-fascist. Strategic and tactical calculations do not change the mode of production in the Soviet Union and Mao’s errors were unconnected to a capitalist mode of production in China. Errors are not of cardinal importance. All leaders will make errors: that is guaranteed.

To say Mao did something against the Soviet Union to protect his own power is the anarchist strain of Menshevism. Mature Marxist scientists become tired of learning that people hold power, a truism as true as the rising sun each morning until the day of communism established internationally. It’s not interesting to us anymore to hear that people hold power.

We want to know about the mode of production, and the superficial nature of pseudo-Marxism stands exposed when geopolitics takes the main theoretical role in discussion. Geopolitics can only be the expression of underlying modes of production. If there are no capitalist relations of production there will be no imperialism, and that is the real cardinal question at hand, but Ludo Martens, the Workers World Party (USA), the Trotskyists, the defunct CWP and countless contributors in Ludo Martens’s seminars held in Brussels with parties from around the world say that geopolitics is decisive. It’s not just that Ludo Martens is saying political line scientifically arrived at is decisive. No, he and the other anti-Mao troopers are saying that geopolitics is decisive, and doing so, they seek to take us into a “lesser evils” world of foreign policy. In one of the few great errors in his life, W.E.B. Du Bois advised the Chinese in 1936 to abide by Japanese occupation as a lesser evil than European occupation and Mao subsequently proved that more was possible than this seemingly lesser evil. Yet, in 1936, Du Bois did not claim to be a scientific Marxist-Leninist yet. The geopolitical pragmatists masquerading as Marxist-Leninists have systematized Du Bois’s error and have called it Marxism-Leninism.

Although Ludo Martens did catch onto the idea of the “new bourgeoisie in the party” from Mao Zedong, he never really confronted the mode of production in the USSR. In fact, he and his party in 1993 could be heard saying that there was no unemployment in revisionist China, when even the social-fascist regime there was admitting 8 digit unemployment. That is how far removed from economic realities these geopolitics-is-decisive-folks are. If geopolitics or other sentiment demands it, these people are fully prepared to say there is no unemployment even when the regime in question does not say so. For this sort of superficial reason of geopolitics, Ludo Martens objected to the term “social-fascism.” Since Stalin and Dimitrov had established that fascism is the rule of the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie and with no pretense of democracy or civil liberties, and since the USSR was capitalist, Mao had no choice within Marxism-Leninism other than to refer to the USSR as “social-fascist.” Certainly it was not a bourgeois democratic society.

Like many others including many Trotskyists, Ludo Martens says that the leaders of the USSR were parasites on a mainly socialist economic foundation mostly in order to justify a certain easily understood line on foreign policy. “The socialist basis of society was not yet destroyed,” he says in his essay called “Balance of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, April 2, 1992.” A thing is always a unity of opposites, but one of the opposites is always principal. Never is there complete purity, so that in a struggle in the worst situation–bourgeois prison for instance–even in such circumstances, the enemy does not obtain 100% of what it wants and the proletariat does not obtain 100% of what it wants.

Hence, Ludo Martens wants to say that the economic base under Khruschev and Brezhnev was at least 51% socialist and somehow the superstructure was more reactionary and out of synch, so it needed to wait till Gorbachev to implement total capitalism. In this way, Ludo Martens justifies his and others’ belief that Chinese foreign policy should have been pro-Brezhnev, if not in reasoning, then in substantial alliance. What it means is that Ludo Martens is willing to ape Trotsky on a disjunction between the Soviet mode of production and the state and hold to such an idealist analysis for a generation or two of the Soviet Union’s existence, all so that he can defend a certain geopolitical approach that was popular in the 1960s to the 1980s and still exerts its influence on the minds of older revisionists Ludo Martens is seeking to reconcile with.

The problem with this understanding of having the superstructure out of synch with the mode of production for decades aside from its idealism and obvious Trotskyist origins–and this is true of his review of the USSR called “Balance of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, April 2, 1992″ and his 1993 remarks at the Mao Centennial organized by Joma Sison–is that it presents the Stalin era as having no new bourgeois elements despite the victories of class struggle. Yes, Stalin won out against the bourgeois lines of Trotsky, Bukharin and Tito. Yes, collectivization went forward. Yes, World War II was won. It is our duty to defend all these gains under Stalin. Yet, at the same time, our current dialectical materialist understanding must be that the new bourgeoisie did not disappear. Quite the contrary, many of the necessities in fighting the war involved a material basis for the new bourgeoisie.

[...]

A word on the creation of the new bourgeoisie under Stalin is not to be found in Ludo Martens’s discussion of cardinal subjects, only reference to the usual exploiters–the rich peasants, imperialist spies and so on that Stalin tended to.

Although we talk about many things in regard to Soviet history — Khruschev’s “three peacefuls” and capitulation to imperialism for instance–there was only one factor needed to push the new bourgeoisie over the top from dominated to dominating, and that was Khruschev’s loosening of the atmosphere in the party, his creation of the “dictatorship of the whole people.” The moment when the bourgeoisie in the party knows it will no longer face a strong possibility of being violently repressed is the moment it takes charge, not because the superstructure is decisive mainly, but because the new bourgeoisie is already in a very good position and getting a good portion of what it wants even under socialism. Perhaps it is determining 35% of what is going on and goes to 51% or 70% with Khruschev’s attack on Stalin. It is not a case that the new bourgeoisie started from no where and instantly became 51% as the Trotskyists like to caricaturize our views. So the superstructure is only decisive at a certain moment of time, that being the time when the new bourgeoisie no longer faces violent repression in the case of the USSR and China.

The bourgeoisie is not entirely “gutless.” This view is a mistake. One only need witness various intra-bourgeois civil wars to know that the leaders of the capitalist class will take risks for their rule, (even though the oppressed classes do most of the fighting in civil wars) and such is even more true when fighting socialist rule on behalf of the whole capitalist class. Hence, it takes considerable violence to keep the capitalist class underfoot.

Anyone who has stopped to consider the careerists in the CPSU, anyone who has read any anecdotes or talked to any of the common people of the Soviet Union knows that the state and the means of production attract careerists like flies. Such people mouth communism at the proper moment, but everyone knows that they don’t really know how or desire to apply communism in practice. These people protect their own interests and careers, but damage the interests of the proletariat, if they even know what they are since many have not studied politics in any systematic way. The only counterweight to such people in a society where there is yet a contradiction between leaders and led, the only counterweight to these careerists is violent repression, for they will certainly chance being criticized for implementing capitalism.

When a Khruschev comes to power almost by inertia (and only almost because he still did have to stage a coup), the reason is that the material situation of the bourgeoisie is already good. Layers and layers of the bureaucracy with access to the means of production in that peculiar superstructure known as socialism in the 20th century already exist ready and willing to follow and support a leader who will only “relax a bit,” maybe focus on making some goulash and taking off his shoes in the UN.

As the bourgeoisie has centuries of training leaders behind it and propertied ruling classes more than centuries, and because there is a shortage of trained proletarian leaders, and also because it is not easy to discern those with genuine socialist conviction and those mouthing phrases at the appropriate moments, “democracy,” “relaxation” and “free speech” become the excuses and battering rams of the new bourgeoisie seeking to oppress the proletariat in this era of imperialism. Once Khruschev erased the fear of a leader like Stalin, the new bourgeoisie implemented the things it always wanted to implement, and partially did implement under Stalin. The revisionists emphasize that it took more than a generation to restore capitalism, because they deny the role of force in history in addition to the fact that the new bourgeoisie does not have to start from scratch. The revisionists deny the role of Khruschev’s coup and use of the military against Molotov and Stalin’s other allies, and more importantly, they deny the role that the leadership has to play in violently repressing the would-be ruling bourgeoisie in the party, a group of people who do after all have access to the means of production once the government plans production under socialism (but not in the stages leading up to the socialist revolution unless there are base areas where the party is running the economy).

Conclusion

Recently we had a discussion with a member of the PTB who asked us about the band “Rage against the Machine” which had just done benefit concerts for Tibet. Ironically after discussing with us how many still put geopolitics above the mode of production, the PTB comrade asked why “Rage” did what it did. MIM answered that probably with all the watering down done by revisionism, no one ever talked to them about the mode of production. Hence, the “Rage against the Machine” did not understand the advance over slavery that the communists including communist Tibetan slaves brought to Tibet. Instead “Rage” adopted simpler political ideas with regard to the national question. It’s not surprising that people focussed on geopolitics will have no real answer to the “human-rights” and “free speech” for slaveowners point of view and even bands like “Rage” will be unpersuaded. We do not defend Mao’s work in Tibet just because the United $tates opposes it. The pseudo-Marxists consciously and unconsciously seeing geopolitics as decisive have led us down a pragmatist road to endless division and revisionism.

[To see the "International Communist Seminar" speak for itself, go to http://www.wpb.be/icm.htm%5D

The Experience of Nepal Summed Up

“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” –“The Communist Manifesto.”

“We do not believe that private property should be abolished.” –Prachanda, Interview with BBC on 09/03/2008.

Introduction

Perhaps you’ve heard the various communist parties claim that there has been a revolution in Nepal, and that the 21st century has finally seen its first socialist revolution. The sad reality is that the red flag is not flying in Nepal, and never was. What is happening is the reformation of bourgeois democracy and the disarming of the Maoist guerillas in order to construct a regime that cuddles up to imperialism. The revisionism coming out of Nepal has its fans, particularly charlatans on the American left and the international scene who have been working overtime to apologize for Prachanda and the reformist wing of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), otherwise known as the UCPN(M), as well as castigate any anti-revisionist who dares expose what’s really going on. The so-called “anti-dogmatists” are not worth refuting, and their arguments have little substance to criticize in the first place. This is not “dogma,” but science. The development in Nepal shows zero signs of heading toward socialism, let alone communism, and show many signs of capitalism, reformism and revisionism, which we shall examine at length below. There is no dictatorship of the proletariat and no socialism being built in Nepal, nor is it even anti-imperialist, having expressed their desire to have foreign private capital invade their country and become a pro-Chinese comprador neo-colony.

The expulsion of the former monarchist regime in Nepal must be applauded. Since then, the leadership of Nepal has come out as not Marxist, but revisionist, and not for the revolution in Nepal but for the so-called peaceful transition to socialism. The Nepali coalition government led by the Maoists has since come under fire from the more hardline wing of their own party and the international Maoist movement, not to mention from Marxist-Leninists. The American Party of Labor shall seek to offer justification and evidence for its perception of the events unfolding in Nepal.

A Brief History of the Situation in Nepal

From 1768 to 2008, the country of Nepal was ruled by an absolutist monarchy. Pushpa Kamal Dahal, more commonly known as Prachanda, led the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or the CPN (M), into an armed struggle against the government in 1996. Fighting continued until 2005. The costs paid by the Nepalese people for this armed struggle against the reactionary monarchy were very great—about 13,000 Nepalese died in this conflict. In 2005, the Party signed permanent peace agreements with a bourgeois-democratic alliance of the mainstream Nepalese parties opposed to the monarchy of King Gyanendra. Massive popular uprisings in the country soon followed in 2006 and a lengthy general strike led to clashes between protestors and the monarchy’s police.

Finally, in 2008 the civil war came to a head when the monarchy capitulated. Since then, the country has been known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal and has been led by the Nepalese Constituent Assembly. The CPN (M) then led the coalition government. In January 2009 it changed its name to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or UCPN(M) after fusing with the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre-Masal). It now claims adherence to a hybrid ideology known as “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachanda Path.” On May 4th 2009, Prachanda resigned as Prime Minister in a fight with elected President Ram Baran Yadav about Prachanda’s desire to fire the reactionary head of Nepalese Army, Rookmangud Katawal. The UCPN(M) continues to be the leading party in the bourgeois-democratic coalition government. Since then, there have been splits between the Maoist faction and the Prachanda faction over whether to form a People’s Republic or maintain the parliamentary bourgeois democracy.

Reformism & “Peaceful Paths to Socialism” in Nepal

The Maoist theory of “New Democracy” has halted the class struggle in its tracks in Nepal and allowed private capital to continue unabated. The fans of the UCPN(M) have claimed this is merely a “stage” of the revolution there and that the coalition government stage is merely a small step before the final socialist revolution in launched. However, Maoist China itself was never able to transcend the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution and still had a capitalist class up until Mao’s death (it was a policy of the state that the old bourgeoisie still received a quarter of its old profits from factories, for example). Like China, the Nepalese Maoists are not interested in socialism or the final goal of expropriating the bourgeoisie, but rather they aim to establish “socialist-oriented capitalist relations,” which amounts to social democracy.

The UCPN(M) is now dominated by rightist thinking that seeks a peaceful road to socialism in the name of the “creative application of Marxism adapted to Nepal’s conditions,” which is in practice a form of Eurocommunism, bourgeois pluralism and revisionism. As shown with the quote from the BBC interview that began this works, Prachanda supports private property instead of state property. As well, the UCPN(M) and the Prachanda leadership in particular does not support the revolutionary smashing of the capitalist state, but rather a “peaceful transition” to socialism. Referring to the efforts to build a People’s Republic, a term used for a socialist government, Prachanda said, “We [the party] will definitely attempt to establish a People’s Republic by institutionalizing [the] democratic republic and through the legitimate means like elections” (Mishra, BBC News interview). He continued on to say that his party had “concluded that socialism without multiparty competition and political freedoms cannot survive” (Mishra). The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has clearly not learned anything from revisionism in the USSR and the fascist coup in Chile, nor from Marx and Lenin’s thesis on the state.

The Nepalese party has also shown itself to support integration with the reactionary army of the former monarchy. Prachanda said publically in the same interview that, “[a]s long as everyone including the army, the police and the other officials remain committed to the people’s mandate on democracy, peace and change, no one needs to feel insecure. There will be no prejudice against any” (Mishra) and that “I never showed such distrust [toward the army]. I never wanted to show any bit of distrust towards NA [Gyanendra’s former troops] or police or PLA or armed police” (Mishra). In his interview with the Hindu in 2006, Prachanda said, “we are telling the parliamentary parties that we are ready to have peaceful competition with you all” (Varadarajan). The fusing with social democrats and capitalist democracy on the part of the Nepalese Maoists has become a theory of peaceful competition with reactionary parties, otherwise known as “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism. According to Prachanda, the party will “go for the goal of the people’s democracy through peaceful means. Today, we are talking of a democratic republic and our understanding with the parties is that the way to realise this is the constituent assembly” (Varadarajan). The Communist Party leadership even went so far as to say the ‘people’s war” they waged in Nepal for years was not directed against capitalism or imperialism, but rather merely to fight the remnants of feudalism on behalf of the bourgeoisie. “Three years ago we took a decision in which we said how are we going to develop democracy is the key question in the 21st century. This meant the negative and positive lessons of the 20th century have to be synthesised in order for us to move ahead. And three years ago we decided we must go in for political competition. Without political competition, a mechanical or metaphysical attitude will be there. So this time, what we decided is not so new. In August, we took serious decisions on how practically to build unity with the parliamentary political parties. We don’t believe that the people’s war we initiated was against, or mainly against, multiparty democracy. It was mainly against feudal autocracy, against the feudal structure” (Varadarajan). What is being built in Nepal is not socialism but a capitalist government led by “Marxists,” which according to Prachanda himself will be “under international supervision, either by the United Nations or some other international mediation acceptable to all” (Varadarajan).

Despite the lies and distortions of Nepal’s sycophantic followers, the Communist Party has made it crystal clear from the beginning that bourgeois democracy, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the preservation of capitalism at the expense of proletarian dictatorship is their true agenda:

“Varadarajan: Nowadays, we hear the phrase ‘The Maoists will sit on the shoulders and hit on the head.’ Does this mean your alliance with the parties is tactical rather than strategic, that when the head – the monarchy – is weakened or defeated, you might then start hitting the shoulder?

Prachanda: It is not like this. Our decision on multiparty democracy is a strategically, theoretically developed position, that in a communist state, democracy is a necessity. This is one part. Second, our decision within the situation today is not tactical. It is a serious policy. [.…] Of course, people still have a doubt about us because we have an army. And they ask whether after the constitutional assembly we will abandon our arms. This is a question. We have said we are ready to reorganise our army and we are ready to make a new Nepal army also. So this is not a tactical question” (Varadarajan).

Lenin said about such opportunism: “He who says that the workers must support the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction (and apparently this is being said by the Potresovs, Gvozdyovs. Chkhenkelis and also, all evasiveness notwithstanding, by Chkheidze) is a traitor to the workers, a traitor to the cause of the proletariat, to the cause of peace and freedom. For actually, precisely this new government is already bound hand and foot by imperialist capital, by the imperialist policy. […] For the only guarantee of freedom and of the complete destruction of tsarism lies in arming the proletariat, in strengthening, extending and developing the role, significance and power of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. All the rest is mere phrase-mongering and lies, self-deception on the part of the politicians of the liberal and radical camp, fraudulent trickery” (Lenin 306). To justify a collaborationist and bourgeois stance, the Nepalese party claims the mantle of Lenin, but doesn’t raise its revolutionary flag. On the contrary, Prachanda and his clique make Lenin into a common liberal by saying “if Lenin had lived another 5 or 10 years he would also introduce multiparty competition, this is my understanding” (Ely).

This assertion, of course, is patently ridiculous for everyone who has read Lenin’s works on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which were then enunciated by Comrade Stalin. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” said Stalin, “can be complete only when it is led by a party, the party of the communists, which does not and should not share the leadership with other parties” (Stalin, Concerning Questions of Leninism). The truth is that Lenin always put forward the Marxist-Leninist line on the capitalist state in relation to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism. Lenin said that there is no “halfway” or “hybrid” state possible—a state is either socialist or capitalist, either under the rule of the proletariat or the rule of the bourgeoisie. Lenin also maintained that “the emancipation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class” (Lenin, The State and Revolution). Both of these basic tenets of Marxism have continuously been denied by the Nepalese party.

Worse than this, the Prachanda leadership supports disarming the Indian Maoist guerillas in favor of his bourgeois “peaceful transition” strategy. This comes hot on the heels of the Indian state gearing up for a fascist war against the Naxalite/Maoist insurgents. Calling on the Naxalites to disarm against the machine guns of the government, Prachanda says, “We believe [bourgeois democracy] applies to them [the Indians] too. We want to debate this. They have to understand this and go down this route. Both on the questions of leadership and on multiparty democracy, or rather multiparty competition, those who call themselves revolutionaries in India need to think about these issues. And there is a need to go in the direction of that practice” (Varadarajan). It should be noted also that the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has previously exposed Prachanda’s revisionism and liberalism in several letters and polemics issued to them. The Revolutionary Communist Party USA and other RIM parties have as well.

Questionable Theoretical Stances & Praise of Trotskyism

The Maoist government of Nepal has lately been seeking favor with the American imperialists, the Chinese social-imperialists and the reactionary Indian state. This stems from their revisionist, anti-Marxist and anti-proletarian theories. This stems also from their chauvinist following of Maoism, which proclaims a thesis on “protracted people’s war” similar to the Shining Path’s. It proclaims that “the theory developed by fusion of protracted People’s War and insurrection has special significance and it has become universal” (quoted in Open Letter to the UCPN [Maoist] by the Communist Party of India [Maoist]). The UCPN(M) has also put forward that Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which they attempt to co-opt for Mao, is somehow “outdated” in the modern era, no doubt to pave the way for their collaboration with American and Chinese imperialism. The Worker, an organ of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), states that “[o]ur Party, under the leadership of Chairman Comrade Prachanda, believes that the analysis of imperialism made by Lenin and Mao in the 20th century cannot scientifically guide the Maoist revolutionaries to develop correct strategy and tactics to fight in the 21st century” (“The Worker,” 84).

Most troubling however, is the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s rehabilitation of the counterrevolutionary and anti-Marxist theory of Trotskyism. The summer issue of the journal “The Red Spark” (Rato Jhilko) has published an article by Dr. Baburam Bhattarai stating that, “Today, the globalization of imperialist capitalism has increased many-fold as compared to the period of the October Revolution. The development of information technology has converted the world into a global village. However, due to the unequal and extreme development inherent in capitalist imperialism this has created inequality between different nations. In this context, there is still (some) possibility of revolution in a single country similar to the October revolution; however, in order to sustain the revolution, we definitely need a global or at least a regional wave of revolution in a couple of countries. In this context, Marxist revolutionaries should recognize the fact that in the current context, Trotskyism has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat” (Bhattarai 10).

This speaker is not a small figure. Dr. Bhattarai is a politburo member of the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and is considered to be its leading theoretician. He is essentially the number two next to Prachanda and has served as Minister of Finance. Despite his disturbing assertion, the American Party of Labor and the communist movement in general have always exposed the reactionary nature of Trotskyism as an anti-Marxist theory. We realize that the Trotskyite theory of “Permanent Revolution” is irrelevant to today’s world. Trotsky’s theory is absolutist in that it is either permanent revolution or no revolution. However, Lenin and Stalin proved the case that socialism in one country is possible while maintaining that it is not the final victory of the proletariat.

“[T]he overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured.” Stalin says, “After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society. But does this mean that it will thereby achieve the complete and final victory of socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of only one country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention and, consequently, also against restoration? No, it does not. For this the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed. Therefore, the development and support of revolution in other countries is an essential task of the victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution which has been victorious in one country must regard itself not as a self-sufficient entity, but as an aid, as a means for hastening the victory of the proletariat in other countries” (Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism). Stalin’s thesis in turn supports Lenin’s thesis that the revolution must do “the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and awakening of the revolution in all countries” (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution & the Renegade Kautsky). Either Mr. Bhattarai is intentionally leaving out Stalin’s true position on Socialism in One Country so as to give kudos to Trotskyism or he is not aware of this passage. We are not inclined to believe the latter since its source is Stalin’s most prominent work.

Despite this statement, Trotskyism and Trotsky’s ideas are not relevant to today’s world and certainly not to Nepal. Trotsky was an opponent of guerrilla warfare, which has been the main vehicle of the armed struggle in the world and Nepal in particular. Trotskyism is also not significant anywhere, and especially not amongst the most oppressed sectors of the world. Bhattarai is trying to resurrect ideas that are Eurochauvinist and complete failures at initiating any insurrectionary tactics.

Surrendering Marxism in Words & Deeds

The line of the UCPN(M) on the theoreticians of Marxism is as questionable as their recent deeds in Nepal in stopping the people’s war. Prachanda once said that “Stalin had made a serious mistake of ideology, in philosophy, in science—and all of the workers movement has taken so much loss from this deviation from dialectical materialism” (Ely). Without going into too much detail defending the legacy of Stalin as a great Marxist and teacher, the APL must ask: does this mean Prachanda himself is not guilty of these same so-called mistakes? He is quoted as saying, “I am not an atheist […] do not take the Maoist Party as an atheist party” (“Telegraph Nepal”). Prachanda has admitted to the world that he is not an atheist, which Lenin himself said that every socialist must be as a rule, and which would show his complete denial of science and self-deluded embrace of idealism and would bar him from making any accusations of “deviating” from dialectical materialism. Prachanda also is quoted as not believing in the abolishment in private property, which leaves us to ponder how the UCPN(M) would create socialism by leaving bourgeois property intact.

The throwing out of the Soviet Union as a model of socialism and the leadership and theories of Joseph Stalin as one of the classics of Marxism does not stop there. Prachanda once said about his own party’s ideology: “[w]e are fully confident that we are developing the [Marxist] ideology from Lenin, not from Stalin” (Ely). Like many Maoists, the UCPN(M) adjusts their views on Stalin to suite their own ends, a strategy that is particularly disturbing in the wake of Bhattarai’s praise of Trotskyism. The leadership of Nepal has disgraced the memory of actually existing socialism in the service of the bourgeoisie, working overtime to apologize to reactionaries and bourgeois propagandists for Stalin, or just not to mention him at all in comparison to the Great Helmsman, or perhaps Prachanda himself. It has always been the position of the American Party of Labor since its founding that Joseph Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist who fought all his life for the interests of the working class and socialism. The non-revisionist communist parties in all countries have always upheld the experience of socialism under Stalin as a part of upholding the ideology of Marxism and always will. The APL views the ideologies, beliefs and practices of Lenin and Stalin as inseparable, and thus the idea of taking from Lenin and not Stalin, or from Stalin and not Lenin, is theoretically absurd.

Prachanda’s leadership has also proposed dropping the “Maoist” label from their party’s title to gain favor with foreign imperialist powers like China and the United States in wake of their fusing with revisionist and bourgeois parties at the behest of the revisionist and state-capitalist “Communist” Party currently ruling China. The Times of India reported that “Prachanda, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), and Nepal’s first revolutionary prime minister, capped the growing debate about the party at home and abroad Friday by telling journalists at the Nepalgunj airport, prior to kicking off a festival, that two months ago, he had proposed to the central committee of his party that the Maoist tag be jettisoned” (17-10-2008). It also reported that the “Chinese government […] advocated the unification of the communist parties in Nepal to form a single monolithic party like the Communist Party of China. The Maoists have taken the advice to heart” (17-10-2008).

Splits Within the UCPN(M)

Matrika Yadav, a former member of the Central Committee of the party, resigned last year from his post as Minister of Land Reforms and Management. He claims to have now quit the Maoist party for good after coming under fire from the Prachanda leadership for redistributing land to poor peasants, which the party labeled as anarchistic activity. About his resignation, he said ”Prime Minister [Prachanda] had the compulsion to ensure survival of the government. I had the compulsion to advocate in favour of landless people” (Nepal News”). He accused the UCPN(M) of being a revisionist and reformist party that was “no longer” a communist party and was capitulating to the class enemy by dissolving the PLA. Since then, Yadav has sought to form his own party to go against the dissolution of the PLA and to seize property from the feudalists and the regional bourgeois parties who act in the interests of local comprador landlords, which he vocally accused the party of compromising with. Yadav claimed in an interview that the “unified Maoist party is no longer a real communist party. Prachandaji has welcomed those people in the party who always criticized the decade-long armed struggle. He has close alliance with those reactionary forces. I have asked him to read his own articles about revolution and people’s liberation written in the past” (Ojha).

Yadav’s faction, which has since taken up arms, stated publically “the party also bowed down to the pressure of the parliamentary forces and agreed to return the land captured by the peasants and landless people during the conflict” (“NayaNews.com”). He accused Prachanda’s revisionist policies of leading “to the mushrooming of regional Madhesi parties who represent the landlords” (“NayaNews.com”). Regarding the dissolution of the PLA, Yadav spoke candidly about widespread criticism of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s handling of the situation. “The PLA combatants joined the war not for any personal gain. Many of them lost their relatives in the war. They want total liberation of the Nepali people. I have heard they are extremely frustrated now. They are saying their sacrifice has gone in vain” (Ojha). As if to prove him right, Prachanda announced that People’s Liberation Army is to become the national army and will be fully integrated with the reactionary bourgeois state. “Prachanda has said that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would not remain under the party from now onwards” (Mingxin). These moves are nothing less than tearing the teeth out of the Nepalese movement.

Support of Chinese “Market Socialism” & Foreign Imperialist Capital

Rather than a Marxist-Leninist path of development and the construction of socialism, Prachanda has endorsed leaving Nepal open to foreign capital and a Dengist path of development. China Brief reports that during an interview “Prachanda went on further to chide Western-style capitalism and praised China’s model of economic development as one that Nepal will emulate. ‘We will build special economic zones like China,’ Prachanda said. ‘The special economic zones stimulated China’s economic development, and we want to learn from China. China’s experience is really helpful for us.’ In the interview, Prachanda emphasized the geographic proximity between China and Nepal, and the high respect that Nepalese people have for China and Chinese people. ‘For Nepal’s national independence, it is critically important for Nepal to maintain intimate relations with China’” (quoted in Hsiao).

Some of the Nepal Maoists’ supporters have answered criticisms of these remarks by comparing this plan to the New Economy Policy in Soviet Russia. The idea that socialism has to beat capitalism and imperialism in terms of delivering commodities is a manifestation of the Theory of Productive Forces, a theory which history has proven wrong by the industrialization of small, isolated socialist nations in quick order. History has provided us with many examples of small, poor and backward countries that have had to defend themselves under very difficult conditions: Albania, Korea, Cuba, etc. In fact, it could be argued that these nations were in a much worse situation and much poorer and underdeveloped than Nepal (Korea was razed to the ground by the Korean War and Albania was a pre-feudal tribal society until the 1950s). There is historical precedent to consider on the question of industrialization.

These remarks endorse the state-capitalist ideology of the Chinese revisionist politician Deng Xiaoping, who once stated there was “no fundamental contradiction between socialism and a market economy. The problem is how to develop the productive forces more effectively. We used to have a planned economy, but our experience over the years has proved that having a totally planned economy hampers the development of the productive forces to a certain extent. If we combine a planned economy with a market economy, we shall be in a better position to liberate the productive forces and speed up economic growth” (Xiaoping). Prachanda wishes to build a modern Chinese-style state-capitalist government in Nepal, and considering Prachanda Path’s flimsy theoretical nature, we won’t hold our breath for socialism in Nepal anytime soon.

Conclusion

The American Party of Labor has long been mindful of the revisionism coming out of Nepal. The revolution in Nepal requires a party led by the science of Marxism, a party that stands for carrying out the class struggle to the end. As of right now, the Maoists under the leadership of Prachanda have become the puppets of reaction and imperialism. If a party like the UCPN(M) is unable to correct its revisionism it will not be able to lead to a socialist, much less a communist society. As the APL has said before, in terms of building a socialist society, only the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism has been successful.

Sources:

“I Am Not An Atheist: Nepal Maoist Chief Prachanda.” Telegraph Nepal 02 Sept. 2009: n. pag. Web.

“International Dimension of Prachanda Path.” The Worker. 10. 84. Print.

“Matrika rules out leaving CPN-M.” Nepal News. NepalNews.com, 24 Sept. 2008. Web.

“Matrika Yadav Rebels Against UCPN-Maoist.” NayaNews.com. N.p., 12 Feb. 2009. Web.

“Nepal Maoists ready to abandon Mao.” Times of India 17 Oct. 2008, Print.

Bhattarai, Baburam. The Red Spark. #1 (2009): 10. Print.

Ely, Mike. “Prachanda NYC Speech: A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal.” Kasama Project, 27 Sept. 2008. Web.

Hsiao, Russell. “Nepal Following China’s Economic Path.” China Brief. 8.14 (2008): Print.

Lenin, V.I. Collected Works. “Letters from Afar.” 4th English. 23. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964. 306. Print.

Lenin, V.I. The Proletarian Revolution & the Renegade Kautsky. 1st Ed. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972. 88. Print.

Lenin, V.I. The State and Revolution. 1st Edition. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970. 10. Print.

Mingxin, Bi. “Nepal’s UCPN-M army to become national army soon.” ChinaView 12 Feb. 2009, Print.

Mishra, Rabindra. “Prachanda’s first interview as Nepal PM.” BBC News South Asia. BBC News, 03 Sept. 2008. Web.

Ohja, Ghanashyam. “We will form our own army: Matrika Yadav.” República 01 March 2009, Print.

Stalin, J.V. Collected Works, “Concerning Questions of Leninism”. Vol. 8. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. 13-96. Print.

Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976. 38. Print.

Varadarajan, Siddharth. “Exclusive interview with Prachanda, Maoist leader.” Hindu 8-10 Feb. 2006: Print.

Xiaoping, Deng. “There is No Fundamental Contradiction Between Socialism and a Market Economy”. Selected Works Vol. 3. Beijing: People’s Daily, 1985. Print.

The Albanian People Will Stand By the Yugoslav Peoples

How did the Party of Labour of Albania under the leadership of Enver Hoxha look upon its role in the event of an imperialist attack upon Yugoslavia? The following excerpt from a ‘Zeri i Popullit’ Editorial of 1980 and which was broadcast by Radio Tirana on January 19th 1980 reminds us that in such an event Enver Hoxha had argued that the Albanian people would stand by the Yugoslav peoples.

No. 1

The Albanian people, who know the past of the Yugoslavian people well, have the unflinching conviction that they are not intimidated by any threat or blackmail, that if the necessity arises they will know how to fight with courage and bravery against any attack of the enemies no matter where it comes from: the Yugoslav peoples are not the sort who back down in the face of threats. They know how to fight with self-sacrifice to defend their freedom, won with so much bloodshed and sacrifice.

We Albanians have had and still have irreconcilable ideological differences with the Yugoslav leadership. We have always and will continue to criticize the anti-Marxist system of self-administration; we have fought and will fight determinedly against the Yugoslav and modern revisionism, for the defence of the purity of Marxism-Leninism; we have and will continue to interest ourselves in the rights which the Albanians of Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, should enjoy on the basis of the Yugoslav constitution.

World opinion knows and is clear on this stand of ours.

The foreign policy of our country in the stand towards our neighbours, continues Zeri i Popullit, has never and will never change. Our republic has made and will make all-round efforts for the normal development of trading, cultural and other relations with them. We have publicly stated that Albania will never permit foreigners to use its territory as a base against Yugoslavia or Greece, that we will support the Yugoslav and Greek peoples in the struggle for national freedom, independence and sovereignty. Hence not only will nothing bad come to them from Albania, but they will be aided. The peoples of the Balkans do not threaten anyone, but neither do they fear threats just as they do not fear aggressive war, which others may launch and which they know how to cope with successfully…

In the face of the threats of the Soviet, American and other imperialist aggressors against Yugoslavia, the Albanian people adhere to what comrade Enver Hoxha said at the Seventh Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, that in the case of an eventual attack by the Soviet Union or any power against Yugoslavia, the Albanian people will stand by the Yugoslav peoples.

Thus everyone can rest assured that if the question arises of the defence of freedom and independence from imperialist aggressors of no matter what kind, the Albanians and Yugoslavs will once more fight together against the common enemies as they fought in the past.

Historical facts prove this. Our divisions went and fought in Yugoslavia in the same trenches as the Yugoslav partisans, against German fascism and triumphed. We Albanians fight for freedom and justice and like brave fighters Albanians are cool-headed. But when anyone tries to trample them underfoot, then the rifle speaks.

From: ‘Socialist Albania’, journal of the India-Albania Friendship Association, July 1980, No. 14, pp. 3-5.

No. 2

Our policy towards Yugoslavia has not changed and will not change, provided that the Yugoslav government, too, is correct towards us. The declaration of the Party of Labour of Albania, that in case of any eventual aggression against Yugoslavia by the Soviet Union or some other power the Albanian people will stand by the Yugoslav peoples, will always hold good. But the Yugoslav side must respond to this stand of Albania with just and correct actions towards us.

From: Enver Hoxha ‘Report on the Activity of the C.C. of the Party of Labour of Albania’ submitted to the 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, November 1, 1976,Tirana, 1977, pp. 202-203.

The CPUSA a Revolutionary Party?

From the FAQ on the official website of the CPUSA:

Why does the Communist Party oppose Violence?

Communists believe that social change can only be accomplished through the united action of mass movements which express the majority will of the people. Peaceful methods of change are not only the right thing to do, they are the most effective way to unite and mobilize the greatest majorities.

Violence, on the other hand, is a tool of the big corporations and the governments they control. To preserve their power, they use violence against workers’ and people’s movements.

In contrast, Communists seek to change society peacefully. We work to expand every democratic and electoral avenue as part of our fight for working class political and economic power.

Our party believes that it is possible to make fundamental transformations using the electoral process, the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

Marx on the dictatorship of the proletariat:

“Political power … is merely the organized power of one [socio-economic] class for oppressing the other.”

“[The working class] must act in such a manner that the revolutionary excitement does not collapse immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must maintain it as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, such as sacrificing to popular revenge of hated individuals or public buildings to which hateful memories are attached, such deeds must not only be tolerated, but their direction must be taken in hand, for examples’ sake.”

“Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions (e.g. bourgeois democracy).”

“The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition should be carried out at once [and] the workers must … organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff. … [The aim is] that the bourgeois democratic Government not only immediately loses all backing among the workers, but from the commencement finds itself under the supervision and threats of authorities behind whom stands the entire mass of the working class. …As soon as the new Government is established they will commence to fight the workers. In order that this party (i.e., the democrats) whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the first hour of victory, should be frustrated in its nefarious work, it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat.”

Engels:

“But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

Lenin:

“It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: ‘for what class?’ Everyone knows, for instance (and Kautsky the ‘historian’ knows it too), that rebellions, or even strong ferment, among the slaves in ancient times at once revealed the fact that the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slave owners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everyhody knows that it did not.”

“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”

Enver Hoxha’s “Reflections on the Middle East”

Click to download PDF of Enver Hoxha’s “Reflections on the Middle East”

FOREWORD of the book:”Reflections on the Middle East”

FOREWORD

The book «Reflections on the Middle East» by Comrade Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, deals with political and social events which are linked with the Arab and non-Arab peoples of two continents, Africa and Asia, and with what is called the «Middle East crisis» in the international arena. Like the two volumes of the book «Reflections on China», published in 1979, it is part of the series of books of extracts from «The Political Diary on International Issues». The materials included in the book are some of the notes, outlines for articles, analyses and general reviews about the Middle East drawn from the «Political Diary» and refer only to events which belong to the period from 1958 to the end of 1983. These materials reflect some of the most important moments and events from the inhuman imperialist activities of the superpowers and Israel as well as aspects of the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples, the Afghan and Iranian peoples against the plots of the two superpowers.

From time to time the author has recorded some of his personal ideas and feelings, the grief which he has felt over the misfortunes and injustices which have been inflicted on these peoples as well as his great joy over their exemplary struggle for their freedom and national independence against the savage Israeli, imperialist and social-imperialist occupiers and enemies.

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For more than three decades the Middle East has been an arena of repeated acts of intervention and war.

From 1948 to 1983 a number of wars, the one bloodier than the other, have been waged there. In the materials which are published in this new book by Comrade Enver Hoxha the reader will find correct answers to why so many wars have been waged in that region of the world during this relatively short period; why the Middle East crisis has assumed today such large proportions as to the dangers and consequences inherent in it that it influences the entire world situation; what has transformed the Middle East into an extremely dangerous hotbed of endless conflicts; who are the open and secret enemies of the Arab peoples; and a series of other acute political issues.

While following the events as they have developed in the Middle East and writing about them at the moments when they have occurred, the author makes an all-round analysis of them, based on historical materialism and the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism, discloses their internal and external causes, their complexity and interconnection, and makes assessments and predictions the accuracy of which has been fully confirmed by the development of events in subsequent periods.

Although these analyses, assessments and predictions were made and written some years ago, many of them are of value for the present day. They include, for example, the notes analyzing the content and true aims of the global strategy of American imperialism in the Middle East pursued by all the American presidents before, during, and after the Second World War down to President Ronald Reagan, the unprecedented arrogance of the United States of America which has proclaimed the Middle East a sphere of its national interests and treats it as its domain. Proceeding from this strategy and this policy, time after time the United States of America has dispatched thousands of marines and hundreds of warships to the waters of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, etc., in order to subjugate the peoples of the countries of the Middle East by military force.

Passing from one article to the other, the reader will also see what place Israel occupies and the role it has played and is playing in the context of the anti- Arab general strategy of American imperialism, what efforts the United States of America has made and is still making to ensure «secure borders», that is, borders which include all the Arab territories occupied by armed force, for its «pistol» in this region. The basis of the American-Israeli friendship and the political, economic and military alliances between them has always been and still is their common hostility and wars against the Arab peoples.

Also of great current value are the articles in which, through many facts and arguments, the policy of the Soviet social-imperialists in the Middle East is unmasked. They present themselves as friends and saviours of the Arab peoples but at the most critical moments have betrayed these peoples and left them in the lurch.

Many materials show what features the policy of the Soviet social-imperialists has in common with the policy of the American imperialists, what brings these two superpowers together, and what has impelled them to collide in fierce open clashes, before the eyes of the world or behind the scenes for many years, and to trample on the freedom, independence and national and social interests of the impoverished and hard-working peoples of the countries of the Middle East.

In the book «Reflections on the Middle East» a prominent place is given to materials which assess the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist uprisings of the peoples of the Middle East, for instance the heroic struggle of the martyred Palestinian people, the Iranian popular revolution, the struggle of the Afghan people against the Soviet social-imperialist occupiers, etc. A special place in the book is devoted to the problem of the energy crisis and, in this context, to the role of the Middle-East countries which are some of the biggest oil producers in the world, in this crisis which has gripped all the capitalist and revisionist countries, and to stressing the power of oil as a weapon to defend the freedom and independence and assets of the Arab peoples from the imperialist powers.

In the materials included in this book the attitudes of the Party of Labour and of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania to all the problems which have to do with the Middle East crisis are expressed frankly; the firm principled stands of our country and people in favour of the struggle of the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples against Israel and the two imperialist superpowers, in favour of the Iranian people, the Afghan people and the freedom-loving African peoples are outlined. These stands have also been expressed in many other important documents of our Party and state as well as at various international forums such as UNO, etc., where our representatives have defended the struggle and the just cause of the fraternal Arab peoples. The esteem and assessments which are contained in this book are further proof of that warm and sincere friendship which has always linked the Albanian people with the Arab peoples and with all the freedom-loving and peace-loving peoplesof the world.

Why is Revisionism the Enemy?

Recently a group of revisionists tried to liquidate your author’s arguments and activism by bringing up his past history of being in a variety of revisionist parties and over time changing his ideology. It is precisely because I was a member of these revisionist groups that I see revisionism for what it is. I was personally shown the ropes. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t buy Trotskyism or Maoism, I couldn’t follow the liberal line, and eventually saw they were all hot air and no substance.

The propagation of revisionist theories is the advocacy of bringing knives to a gunfight. It revises fundamental principles of the theory and advocates for our slaughter. Liberalized “anti-dogmatism” in the vein of the Kasamaites, Titoites, Brezhnevites and Maoists doesn’t have the strength to stop an international genocide. The reason we have to combat revisionism is for the success of revolution, and the reason we must succeed is to stop what can only be described as a genocide.

All one has to do is think of one case of suffering, and then try to imagine it multiplied exponentially. The utter depravity of what world capitalism brings about is enough to make one physically sick. Revisionists advocate peaceful co-existance and collaboration with the forces responsible for this state of affairs. This is the hallmark of all revisionists from Tito to Kautsky to Kasama Project.