MARXISM-LENINISM
TODAY
By Daniel Paquet
Montréal, July 16th, 2017
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n 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Manifesto
of the Communist Party where they assessed in the preamble, that “a
spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” Today, we could just add that a spectre is
haunting the whole of the capitalist world; especially in its main fortress,
the United States of America.
Misconceptions are abundant in regard with
contemporary communism, scientific communism.
For our two young German revolutionaries, “communism is for us 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 abolished the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from
the premises now in existence. Moreover,
the mass of property-less 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 force of life – presupposes the
world market through competition. The
proletariat can thus only exist world-historically just as communism, its
activity, can only have a ‘world-historical’ existence.” (Tucker, Robert C., The
Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, New York-London, 1978,
page 162).
Obviously, the conditions of developed capitalism (for
instance in Canada) are present for the passage to Communism. However, the whole process is paralyzed;
Lenin wrote about it in 1909. He reflected
upon the shortcomings of the revolutionary development in Russia. “The main cause of the Party crisis is
indicated in the preamble of the resolution on organization. This main cause is the wavering intellectual
and petty-bourgeois elements, of which the workers’ party had to rid itself;
elements that 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 both in theory… and in tactics… as well as in Party organization.”
(Lenin, On the Organizational Principles of a Proletarian party,
Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1972, page 187).
Insidiously, several members of the Communist Parties,
including in the leadership abandoned the study of Marxism-Leninism; Marxism-Leninism
is a science and must be treated as such.
Once more… Lenin affirmed that “without a revolutionary theory there can
be no revolutionary movement. This
thought cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable
preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the
narrowest forms of practical activity.” (Lenin, V.I., What is to be done,
Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1973, page 21).
Joseph Stalin stressed later on that “instead of an
integral revolutionary theory, there were contradictory theoretical postulates
and fragments of theory, which were divorced from the actual revolutionary
struggle of the masses and had been turned into threadbare dogmas. For the sake
of appearances, Marx’s theory was mentioned, of course, but only to rob it of
its living, revolutionary spirit. (…)
Meanwhile, a new period of imperialism wars and of revolutionary battles
of the proletariat was approaching. The
old methods of fighting were proving obviously inadequate and impotent in the
face of the omnipotence of finance capital.” (Stalin, J.V., The Foundations
of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975, page 12).
Unrest is not yet on the agenda in Canada. “Economic activity has grown strongly in
recent quarters. While demand growth is
led by robust household spending, early signs that its sources are becoming
more balanced include recent pickups in exports and business investment. Growth is also broadening across regions and
sectors, with more than two-thirds of industries expanding. Over the projection
horizon, the Bank expects the economy to continue to absorb excess capacity by
expanding faster than potential output, albeit at a slower pace than in recent
quarters. Economic activity will be
supported by rising foreign demand, fiscal stimulus and accommodative monetary
and financial conditions. Increased
exports and investment will contribute to the anticipated broadening in the
composition of demand, helping to sustain economic expansion as growth in both
residential investment and household consumption slows.” (Bank of Canada,
Canadian Economy, Monetary Policy Report, Ottawa, July 2017, page 7).
For Friedrich Engels, “the materialist conception of
history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support
human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the
basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history,
the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or
orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the
products are exchanged. From this point
of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to
be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth
and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy,
but in the economics of each particular epoch.” (Tucker, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,
Ibidem, page 701).
Society is naked now with a State that supposedly
maintain the equilibrium between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. “As the state arose from the need to hold
class antagonisms in check, but as it arose, at the same time, in the midst of
the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful,
economically dominant class which, through the medium of the state, becomes
also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding
down and exploiting the oppressed class.
Thus 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. (…) The society that will organize production on the basis of a free
and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state
where it will then belong; into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the
spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” (Tucker, Engels, The Origin of Family, Private
Property, and State, Ibidem, page 753, 755).
The bourgeoisie has spread the illusion that things
may change in the ballot box where the working people are invited to vote for a
different system if he wishes so. For
Lenin, “the reason why the omnipotence of ‘wealth’ is better secured in a
democratic republic (i.e. Canada, and the Western countries in general) is that
it does not depend on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible
political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained
possession of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so
firmly, that no change, either of persons, of institutions, or of parties in
the bourgeois-democratic republic, can shake it. We must also note that Engels
is most definite in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois
rule. Universal suffrage, he says,
obviously summing up the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is the ‘gauge
of the maturity of the working class. It
cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state.’” (Lenin,
V.I., The State and Revolution, Foreign Languages Press, Peking,
1970, page 10).
“Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to
Communism suppression is still necessary; but it is now the suppression of the
exploiting minority by the exploited majority.
A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ’state,’ is
still necessary, but this is now a transitional state; it is no longer a state
in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of
exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so
easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the
risings of slaves, serfs or wage labourers, and it will cost mankind far
less. And it is compatible with the
extension of democracy to such an over whelming majority of the population that
the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear. The exploiters are naturally unable to
suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task,
but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine,’
almost without a ‘machine,’ without a special apparatus, by the simple
organization of the armed masses…” (Lenin, The State and Revolution, Ibidem,
page 77). By the way, some people think
that Communists want to suppress democracy; in fact, democracy originates from
two Greek words: Demos, the people (at
the time of Ancient Greece, this word meant the slave-owners or the
proprietors; while Kratos’ meaning is “power”; then power of the landlords.
Currently, the State serves the goals of the
bourgeoisie. “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, because
the oppression of the exploited class is becoming ever more difficult.” (Marx,
Karl; Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works, volume 10,
International Publishers, New York, 1978, page 333).
By the way, there is a Canada-wide campaign led by the
trade-union movement to raise the minimum hour wage to $15.00. Already, the
bourgeoisie claims that there will be an increase of prices, especially for the
daily commodities. Karl Marx already
refuted this argument.
“Year after year you will find that the value and mass
of production increase, that the productive power of the national labour
increase, and that the amount of money necessary to circulate this increasing
production continuously changes. What is
true at the end of the year, and for different years compared with each other,
is true for every average day of the year.
The amount or magnitude of national production changes continuously It is not a constant but a variable
magnitude, and apart from changes in population it must be so, because of the
continuous change in the accumulation of capital and the productive powers of
labour. It is perfectly true that if a
rise in the general rate of wages should take place to-day, that rise, whatever
its ulterior effects might be, would, by itself, not immediately change the
amount of production. It would, in the
first instance, proceed from the existing state of things. But if before the rise of wages the national
production was variable, and not fixed, it will continue to be variable and not
fixed after the rise of wages. (…) The will of the capitalist is certainly to
take as much as possible. What we have
to do is not to talk about his will, but to inquire into his power, the limits
of that power, and the character of those limits.”(Marx, Karl, Wages,
Price and Profit, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975- Reprinted by Red Star Publishers, New
York, 2014, page 2, 4).
Nevertheless, working people have really no time to
think about those issues. Lenin stressed
that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from
without, that is, only form outside of the economic struggle, from outside of
the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” (Lenin, What
is to be done, Ibidem, page 73).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concluded that “the
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the
language of real life. Conceiving,
thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appears at this stage as the direct
efflux of their material behavior. The
same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics,
laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite
development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding of
these, up to its furthest forms.
Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and
the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their
circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from the historical
life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical
life-process.” (Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology, On
Historical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, page 22).
If a problem emerged in the society, a labour dispute
for instance, union leaders will very often refer to a tribunal; and this is
not new. “That is why, when disputes
occur, people have recourse to a judge; and to do this is to have recourse to justice,
because the object of the judge is to be a sort of personified Justice. Also they look for a judge as an intermediary
between them (indeed in some places judges are called ‘mediators’) in the
belief that if they secure a mean they will secure what is just. So justice is a sort of mean, inasmuch as the
judge is one.”(Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Penguin
Books, Hazell Watson & Viney Limited, Harmondsworth, 1976, page 181).
Anyhow, ‘Justice’ could not replace a revolution and
the construction of communism, which shape up further on into planning. “If
profitableness is considered not form the stand-point of individual plants or
industries, and not over a period of one year, but from the standpoint of the
entire national economy and over a period of, say, ten or fifteen years, which
is the only correct approach to the question, then the temporary and unstable
profitableness of some plants or industries is beneath all comparison with that
higher form of stable and permanent profitableness which we get from the
operation and from economic planning, which save us from periodical economic
crises disruptive to the national economy and causing tremendous material
damage to society, and which ensure a continuous and high rate of expansion of
our 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, page 21).
In the capitalist world, they don’t predict the economic
future; they simply collect the data, the facts. However, they speculate and try to foresee
the ins and outs of the buoyant world economy.
“Global economic growth continues to strengthen and
broaden across countries and regions. The US economy is expanding at a moderate
pace, and there are signs of a more consistent pickup in activity across the
euro area. Growth has resumed in some
emerging-market economies (EMEs) that had been in recession. Both global trade and investment growth have
firmed, reflecting the more synchronous expansion worldwide and the
bottoming-out of the effects of the oil price shock. Global economic growth is expected to reach around
3 and half percent in 2017. Core
inflation has eased recently in some advanced economies, owing in large part to
temporary factors, while existing slack is being absorbed. A number of unknown, particularly with
respect to US trade policy, still cloud the outlook. While the global projection continues to incorporate
the judgment that such uncertainly will have a negative impact on trade and
investment decisions, these unknowns remain a downside risk to the projection”.
(Bank of Canada, Ibidem, page 1).
The main classes are the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat as we said above; but under capitalism, there are always elements
ready de facto to bring their luggage in one or the other class.
“Wherein lies its inevitability in capitalist
society? Why is it more profound that
the differences of national peculiarities and of degrees of capitalist
development? Because in every capitalist country, side by side with the
proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie, small
proprietors. Capitalism arose and is constantly
arising out small production. A number
of new ‘middle strata’ are inevitably brought into existence again and again by
capitalism (appendages to the factory, work at home, small workshops scattered
all over the country to meet the requirements of big industries, such as the
bicycle and automobile industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as
inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the petty bourgeois
world outlook should again and again crop up in the ranks of the broad workers’
parties.” (Lenin, Marxism and Revisionism, On Historical Materialism, Ibidem,
page 429).
The advanced strata of the proletariat must be aware
of this danger and it may be only by the mastering of the Marxist-Leninist
outlook. “Some think that Leninism is
the precedence of practice over theory in the sense that its main point is the
translation of the Marxist theses into deeds, their ‘execution’; as for theory; it is alleged that Leninism is
rather unconcerned about it. (…) Theory
is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its
general aspect. Of course, theory
becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice, just as
practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary
theory. But theory can become a
tremendous force in the working-class movement if it is built up in
indissoluble connection with revolutionary practice; for theory, and theory
alone, can give the movement confidence, the power of orientation, and an
understanding of the inner relation of surrounding events; and it alone, can help
practice to realize not only how and in which direction classes are moving at
the present time, but also how and in which direction they will move in the near
future.” (Stalin, J.V., The Foundations of Leninism, Foreign
Languages Press, Peking, 1975 – Reprinted in the United States, 2010, page 19-20).
Nothing whatsoever creates obstacles in their class
struggles. “The working classes will
have learned by experience that no lasting benefit 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.” (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Ibidem,
page 275). (…) The workers’ party can
use other parties and party factions for its own purposes on occasion but must
never subordinate itself to any other party.” (Marx-Engels, Collected Works,
Ibidem, page 373).
Eventually, the working-class (especially in French
Québec) needs a newspaper. “It is quite feasible for the proletariat to found a
political newspaper. Through the
proletariat the newspaper will reach the urban petty bourgeoisie, the rural
handicraftsmen and the peasants, thereby becoming a real people’s political
newspaper. The role of a newspaper
however is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political
education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective
propagandist and a collective agitator; it is also a collective organizer. In this last respect it may be likened to the
scaffolding round a building under construction and facilitates communication
between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the
common results achieved by their organized labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through
it, a permanent organization will naturally take shape that will engage, not
only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its
members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and
their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective
means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.” (Lenin, On
the Organizational Principles of a Proletarian Party, Ibidem, page 74).
The regular reader will exclaim: it is nice on paper, but did you ever try it?
Here are some souvenirs of the recent past:
“The Communist Party of America also had a local
organization in Montreal, not as big as ours in Toronto, but quite big, not as
tightly organized as ours, but more influential in the trade union movement and
in general political life. It operated
what was called the Montreal Labour College.
The Montreal Labour College carried on a lot of very active propaganda
work, has all sorts of prominent speakers, and classes going three and four nights
a week. They did a lot of very good work even to the point of
establishing liaison with a group of French Communists, French-Canadian
Communists. (…) My wife, Alice, was also
very active, also underground. She was
in charge of the newspaper. (…) Alice would work all day for a week, bundling
papers and putting them into packages or wrappers…” (Reminiscences of Tim Buck,
Yours
in the Struggle, NC Press, Toronto, 1977, pages 92-93).
In Canada, the Communists publish the bi-monthly
People’s Voice (from Vancouver).
La Nouvelle Vie Réelle
Communist News
marxistas-leninistas Latinas hojas
Le sourire de l’Orient
Archives:
La Vie Réelle
Pour la KOMINTERN now !
WORKING MEN
OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
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