dimanche 14 octobre 2018





MARXISM-LENINISM TODAY




By Daniel Paquet

Montréal, July 16th, 2017












I
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!



Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire