The Komintern – a vanguard workers’union

La Nouvelle Vie Réelle

By Daniel Paquet

Angelo and I met in Toronto in 2011 at the International solidarity meeting with the Soviet peoples.  We started to establish the embryo of a new World Association of Communists, which could be eventually the nucleus of a new Komintern.  This association will be based on the heritage of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

Already in the past existed other workers’ international associations.  In Canada, the conservative elements (especially the Catholic Church in the Province of Québec), opposed themselves to such movements arguing that they were ‘atheist’ by nature.

Confronted to such an attitude, Marxists answered that “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness.  The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.  The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”  (Marx, Karl, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:  Introduction.  Tucker, Robert C., The Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, New-York-London, 1978, page 54).

Religion appeared to be a support of capitalism, an ideological support for Capital.

“Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are utilised in order to produce new raw materials, new instruments of labour and new means of subsistence.  All these component parts of capital are creations of labour, products of labour, accumulated labour.  Accumulated labour which serves as a means of new production is capital.”  (Ibidem, Wage Labour and Capital, page 207).

“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is the extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent.  (…)

The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but is, at the same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits.”  (Ibidem, Captital, Volume I, page 385).

“The market is a category of commodity economy, which in the course of its development is transformed into capitalist economy and only under the latter gains complete sway and universal prevalence.  (…)

The basis of commodity economy is the social division of labour.  Manufacturing industry separates from extracting industry, and each of these subdivides into small varieties and subvarieties which produce specific products, as commodities, and exchange them for the products of all the others.  Thus, the development of commodity economy leads to an increase in the number of separate and independent branches of industry; the tendency of this development is to transform into a special branch of industry the making not only of each separate product, but even of each separate part of a product – and not only the making of a product, but even the separate operations of preparing the product for consumption.” (Lenin, V.I., Development of capitalism in Russia, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956, pages 11-12).

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.  It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

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.”  (The Marx-Engels Reader, Manifesto of the Communist Party, page 474).

Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto in 1848.  Before them, in the XVIIIe century, industrial revolution was neither on the order of the day, nor the proletariat.  Thus, the famous philosopher, David Hume, could just say: “It is evident that there is a principle of connexion between the different thoughts or ideas of the mind, and that, in their appearance to the memory or imagination, they introduce each other with a certain degree of method and regularity. (…)

And even in our wildest and most wandering reveries, nay in our very dreams, we shall find, if we reflect, that the imagination ran not altogether at adventures, but that there was still a connexion upheld among the different ideas, which succeeded each other.”  (Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding/Philosophic Classics, Kaufman, Walter, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., MCMLXI, page 329).

“With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as it at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk factors of a real revolution.  Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms come in collision with each other.  (…) 

A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis.  It is, however, just as certain as this crisis.”  (Ibidem, The Class Struggles in France, page 593).

“What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation.  During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. (…)

At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this ‘doctoring’ of Marxism.  They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul.”  (Lenin, V.I., The State and Revolution, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1970, page 3).

“… if indeed we succeeded in reaching a point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees, local groups and circles actively took up work for the common cause, we could, in the not distant future, establish a weekly newspaper that would be regularly distributed in tens of thousands of copies…. This newspaper would become a part of an enormous pair of smith’s bellows that would fan every spark of class struggle and popular indignation into a general conflagration. (…)

That is what we should dream of.” (Lenin, V.I., What is to be done, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1973, page 21 /Reprinted by Red Star Publishers, U.S.A., 2014, page 56).

“When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end.   But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end.  (…)

Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them (i.e. communists), but a fact of life and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”  (Ibidem, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pages 99-100).

“… we are fighting not only to win socialism for us, not only to ensure that our children shall recollect capitalists and landlords as prehistoric monsters; we are fighting to ensure that the workers of the whole world shall triumph together with us.

And this First Congress of the Communist International, which has established the point that throughout the world the Soviets are winning the sympathy of the workers, show us that the victory of the international communist revolution is assured. (…)

The comrades present in this hall saw how the first Soviet republic was founded; they now see how the Third, Communist International (i.e. Komintern) has been founded, and they will all see how the World Federative Republic of Soviets is founded.”  (Lenin, V.I., On the International Working-Class and Communist Movement, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, pages 277-278).

“It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years.  Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of ‘super-revolutionary’ acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats.  The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and re-mould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.”  (Stalin, J.V., The Foundations of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975/Reprinted in the United States, 2010, pages 40-41).

Further, “it has already been said that the sphere of operation of commodity production is restricted and placed within definite bounds by our system.  The same must be said of the sphere of operations of the law of value.  Undoubtedly, the fact that private ownership of the means of production does not exist, and that the means of production both in town and country are socialized, cannot but restrict the sphere of operation of the law of value and the extent of its influence on production.

In this same direction operates the law of balanced (proportionate) development of the national economy, which has superseded the law of competition and anarchy of production.   In this same direction, too, operate our yearly and five-yearly plans and our economic policy, generally, which are based on the requirements of the law of balanced development of the national economy.” (Stalin, J.V., Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972/Reprinted in the U.S.A., 2012, pages 18-19).

Nowadays, world-wide, the working-class (in Britain with ‘Brexit’ and elsewhere) is reorganising its ‘armies’.  For instance, the World Federation of Trade-Unions (WFTU), on the occasion of the International Workers’ Day – 1^st of May 2016 –conveyed a militant salute to all men and women of the working class, and to its 92 million members (in 120 countries around the world):

‘Men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed, migrants and refugees, the WFTU wishes you strength, determination, and courage in your struggles, however big they are. (…)

Multinationals, reactionary governments, neo-fascist and racist elements, Imperialism, all of them dread May Day, being the symbol of internationalism, struggle, and class unity.  These are our most powerful weapons in our struggles for a better life, against poverty, and against wars generated by capitalist Barbarism.’  (WFTU, Statement on May Day 2016, published in Northstar Compass, Toronto, page 8; WFTU can be reached at:  40, Zan Moreas Street, Athens 11745, Greece).

And finally, what about the workers in Québec?  The vast majority still ignores the existence of WFTU and any other international organization for that matter.  But it will come…  Angelo and I set up a written newspaper which turned out to be Ideological Fightback on Internet.

Blog:  La Nouvelle Vie Réelle, www.lnvr.blogspot.com

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Courriel:   dpaquet1871@gmail.com