From now on, La Nouvelle Vie Réelle will have a blog sister, Communist News.  Articles in English language will be published in this column, while articles in French and or in other languages will continue to appear in the French blog.

The following article deals with the political development towards communist society;  it is especially accurate nowadays, as a response to the ideological tsunami that left peoples and its youth defenseless, and generally unequipped theoretically in their opposition to big capitalism and imperialism, that reversed socialism  in Soviet Union and other countries (like the people’s democracies in Europe; threatening populations with fascism that became reality in some countries and including  USA . Actually, this is the role of Donald Trump in the last presidential race; this appalling circumstance is more or less developed within the Democrats in USA. In a nutshell, they are not any better…

So let us start! 

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to              change it.”[1]

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself.  We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.  The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.  Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly  precarious  position of labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition.  The proletariat can thus only have a ‘world-historical’ existence.  World-historical existence of individuals, i.e., existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.”[2]

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little it is ‘the reality of the ethical ideal,’  ‘the image and reality of reason,’ as Hegel maintains.  Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage  of development, it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble  contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms, which , classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.”[3]

“(Free competition inside the nation itself had everywhere to be conquered by a revolution - 1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France).  Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under protective duties.  Big industry universalized competition in spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralization of capital.  By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost.”[4]

“The working class will have learned by experience that no lasting benefit whatever can be    obtained for them by others, but that they must obtain it themselves by conquering, first of all, political power. They must see now that under no circumstances have they any guarantee for bettering their social position unless by Universal Suffrage, which would enable them to seat a Majority of Working Men in the House of Commons.”[5]

“Even where there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers  must put their own candidates in order to preserve  their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint.”[6]

“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society ; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”[7]

In the 1850s, a group of workers, among them quite a few Germans, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, founded the Communist League.  Here is the chief goal of this association:

“The aim of the Communist League is to bring about the destruction of the old society – and the       overthrow of the   bourgeoisie – the spiritual, political and economic emancipation of the proletariat, the communist revolution, using all the resources of propaganda and political struggle towards this goal.  In the various stages of development through which the struggle of the proletariat has to pass, the League shall represent at all times the interest of the movement as a whole, just as it shall seek at all times to unite and organize all the revolutionary forces of the proletariat within itself; as long as the proletarian revolution has not attained its ultimate goal the League shall remain secret and indissoluble.”[8]

“The bourgeois state is nothing more than the mutual insurance of the  bourgeois class against its individual members, as well as against the exploited class, insurance which will necessarily become increasingly expensive and to all appearances increasingly independent of bourgeois society ever more difficult.”[9]

At last (and it will suffice for today!)  “… the state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding  down the peasant serfs and  bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital.”[10]

 

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[1] Tucker, Robert C., The Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, New York-London, 1978, page 145

[2] Ibidem, Tucker, page 162

[3] Ibidem, Tucker, page 752

[4] Ibidem, Tucker, page 185

[5] Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works, International Publishers, New York, 1978, page 275

[6] Ibidem, Collected Works, page 284

[7] Ibidem, Collected Works, page 529

[8] Ibidem, Collected Works, page 634

[9] Ibidem, Collected Works, page 333

[10] Ibidem, Collected Works, page 753

[11] Marx, Engels, Lenin, Historical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, pages 474-475

[12] Ibidem, Historical Materialism, page 475

[13] Stalin, J., The Foundations of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975-Reprinted in the USA, 2010, page 67

[14] Ibidem, The Foundations of Leninism, page 68