By Daniel Paquet dpaquet1871@gmail.com
Mid-October 2016, a few weeks before the end of the current presidential race, The New York Times complains:”Can the U.S. really win the election?” And again like most of the time, it relates to US imperialism. But what is it all about? “We have to begin with as precise and full a definition of imperialism as possible. Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is three-fold: imperialism is (1) monopoly capitalism; (2) parasitic or decaying capitalism; (3) moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts – the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks – three , four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America (including the Big Six of Canada :Royal Bank, Bank of Montréal, etc., -Ed.), France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it ‘amicably’ among themselves – until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed.” [1]
“If we will have indulged in almost two years of electoral entertainment and pathos just to end up back where we were, only worse, with even more venomous gridlock in Washington, it won’t just be emotionally depressing; we’ll really start to decline as a nation. When we forfeit governing our country strategically at the national level for this long, inevitably the roof will start to leak and the floors will start to buckle. (…)
For starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die. I don’t say that as a partisan. I say that as a citizen who believes that America needs a healthy center-right party that offers more market-based solutions to problems; keeps the pressure on for deregulation, freer trade and smaller government; and is willing to compromise. But today’s version of the G.O.P. is not such a problem-solving party.”[2]
Further, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, does not contribute to morally reinsure most of the U.S. voters. However, “A day after Mr. Trump defended himself at the second presidential debate for making vulgar comments about women, amid a wave of polls showing an increasing lead for Hillary Clinton, thousands of Trump supporters turned out with undimmed fervor for the Republican nominee and optimism about his electoral respects.”[3]
“Yet Mr. Trump himself, having been rejected in recent days by dozens of Republican elected officials, has indicated that he will make any separation an exceptionally messy and painful ordeal for the party. (…)
Even the drastic step of denouncing Mr. Trump may not be enough to shield Republicans from this unpopularity. In a conference call on Tuesday with the Democratic caucus, Representative Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that party polling found voters drawing scant distinction between Republicans who endorsed Mr. Trump and those who abandoned him out of political expediency according to people who participated in the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was supposed to be private.”[4]
As for international tensions, several US personalities fear the worse. “Donald J. Trump is of a radically different ilk and temperament from past presidents. If I were back in the launch chair, I would have little faith in his judgment and would feel alienated if he were commander in chief. I am not alone in this view. A vast majority of current and former launch officers in my circle of friends and acquaintances tell me they feel the same.”[5]
“Republicans across the US are struggling with whether to support or abandon Donald Trump as they try to defend the party’ Senate and House majorities, which have been put at risk by the latest controversies surrounding the presidential candidate. (…)
The Republican infighting has distracted form revelations emerging from the leaked emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman. Over the past five days, WikiLeaks has released more than 6,000 of Mr Podesta’s hacked emails, with the group claiming there are more than 43,000 emails still to be released.(…)
The emails have fanned tension between Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and supporters of Bernie Sanders, her former rival for the Democratic nomination, who believe Mrs. Clinton will not be as tough on Wall Street as she has claimed.
Yet several bankers suggested the political climate had shifted to such an extent in recent years that it would be hard to imagine Mrs. Clinton adopting a softer policy towards Wall Street, given the new power of the Democratic Party’s anti-bank faction, led by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.”[6]
“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (…)
(And) the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[7]
“The dictatorship of the proletariat arises not on the basis of the bourgeois order, but in the process of the breaking up of this order after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, in the process of the expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, in the process of the socialization of the principal instruments and means of production, in the process of violent proletarian revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a revolutionary power based on the use of force against the bourgeoisie. The state is a machine in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies. In this respect the dictatorship of the proletariat does not differ essentially from the dictatorship of any other class, for the proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie. But there is the substantial difference. This difference consists in the fact that all hitherto existing class states have been dictatorships of an exploiting minority over the exploited majority, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the exploited majority over the exploiting minority.”[8]
Since we opened the door for Stalin, let us see what was thought about him by a different source than Western’s main stream.
At that time, “the Chinese Communist Party came up with one answer. They believed that Khrushchev and his allies wanted to lead the USSR onto a sharply different political trajectory than they believed it had taken under Stalin. We have briefly alluded to some economic and political policies instituted under Khrushchev that the CCP leadership saw as an abandonment of basic Marxist-Leninist principles. (…)
The origins of these policies, now identified with Khrushchev and his epigones Brezhnev and the rest, lie in the immediate post-Stalin period, long before Khrushchev came to dominate the Soviet leadership. In fact many of them can be traced back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, the ‘late Stalin’ period.
It is difficult to discern to what extent Stalin himself supported or opposed these policies. In his last years he was less and less active politically. Periodically it seems as though Stalin did try to assert a different path towards communism, - in his last book Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952), for example, and at the 19th Party Congress in October 1952. Later, Mikoian wrote that Stalin’s late views were ‘an incredibly leftist deviation’. But immediately Stalin died the ‘collective leadership’ all agreed on dropping all mention of Stalin’s book and on dumping the new system of Party governance.
Khrushchev used his attack on Stalin and Beria as a weapon against the others in the ‘collective leadership’, especially Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich. This course was fraught with risk, however. How could he have known that they would not accuse him equally, or even more so? Part of the reason must have been that Khrushchev was able to rely on allies like Pospelov , who helped him, ‘purge’ the archives of documentation of his own participation in mass repressions.(…)
… At the very end of a Central Committee Plenum, the post of First Secretary of the Party was reinstated (until 1934 it had been called ‘General Secretary’) and Khrushchev was elected to it. It is hard not to see this as the Party nomenklatura’s reward for ’their man.’”[9]
Yes, Khrushchev was a moron and a rogue, and he is equal to Mr. Trump into this regard. “We already knew that Trump, apart from being a bigot, a liar and a xenophobe, was a sexist and a misogynist, on record as viciously calling women pigs, dogs and slobs, rating their bodies and making crude sexual references to his own daughter Ivanka. (…)
… The Republican nominee bragged to a television personality while riding on a bus that because he was a star he could do anything he wanted to a woman, including ‘grab her by the p—y’, went well beyond sexism and into sexual assault.”[10]
The crux of the matter is not that Russia had politicians like Khrushchev, or that now US have contenders like Trump or… Clinton; the fact is that no mass Communist Party can now paves the way for the working class’s struggles (up and including socialism); it is currently true in Russia and maybe worse in USA. For instance, working-class papers like Iskra (during the Tsarist era) said: “We Russian Social-Democrats (that took back ‘Communist s’ title following Marx in 1848 – the year of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, -Ed.) must unite and direct all our efforts towards the formation of a strong party which must struggle under the single banner of revolutionary Social Democracy. (…)
The emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself. All the other classes of present-day society stand for the preservation of the foundations of the existing economic system. The real emancipation of the working class requires a social revolution – which is being prepared by the entire development of capitalism – i.e. the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, their conversion into public property, and the replacement of capitalist production of commodities of articles by society as a whole, with the object of ensuring full well-being and free, all-round development for all its members.
We need unification based on a strict singleness of principles which must be consciously and firmly arrived at by all or by the vast majority of committees, organizations, and groups, of intellectuals and workers, who act in varying circumstances and under varying conditions and have sometimes achieved their Social-Democratic convictions along the most diverse paths. (…)
The main cause of the Party crisis is …the wavering intellectual and petty-bourgeois elements, of which the worker’s party had to rid itself; elements who joined the working-class movement mainly in the hope of an early triumph of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and could not stand up to a period of reaction. Their instability was revealed in theory… and in tactics… as well as in Party organization. The class-conscious workers repelled this instability, came out resolutely against the liquidators, and began to take the management and guidance of the Party organizations into their own hands.”[11]
Such is the story of the Communist party of Québec, which absorbed hundreds of former members deceived by the nationalist and social-democratic Parti québécois, that initiated most of the policies in the Province of Québec for almost 30 years; and many amongst those people were sadly confused by the reintroduction of capitalism in Soviet Union. But, ce n’est que partie remise…
[1] Lenin, V.I., Imperialism and the split in socialism, Collected Works, vol. 23, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, page 1
[2] Friedman, Thomas L., Can the U.S. really win the election?, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, Front Page
[3] Wilkes-Barbe, PA., Trump sliding? Die-hards don’t buy it, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page 5
[4] Burns, Alexander; Martin, Jonathan, Republican split may tilt states, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page 5
[5] Blair, Bruce G., Trump and the nuclear keys, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page 16
[6] Weaver, Courtney; McLannahan, Ben, Republicans in Trump quandary, Financial Times, New York, Thursday 13 October 2016, page 2
[7] Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1970; Reprinted in the U.S.A., 2012, pages 26, 28
[8] Stalin, J.V., The foundations of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975, pages 42-43
[9] Furr, Grover, Khrushchev lied, Erythros Press and Media, Kettering –Ohio-, 2011, page198-199
[10] Timson, Judith, A key moment in fight against sexism, Toronto Star, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page T5
[11] Lenin, On the organizational Principles of a Proletarian Party, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1972, pages 68-69, 88-89, 104-105, 187-188
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