Ideological Fightback - Spring 2014

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” —V.I. Lenin

IDEOLOGICAL

FIGHTBACK Continuing the ideological work of The Communist - founded in 1927

Leninism and Revisionism In In the the Fundamental Fundamental Questions Questions of of Theory Theory and and Practice Practice of of Socialism Socialism by

by V.A. V.A. Tyulkin Tyulkin & & M.V.Popov M.V.Popov

W hat is the Role of Private Production in Getting to Socialism?

O ctober 1917: What does it mean today?

Miguel Urbano Rodrigues

Asad Ali

Hermann Glaser-Baur

Amiri Baraka

O bituary: Henri Alleg

Stephen Paulmier

7 Points of Marxist-Leninist Unity

The Rings

Volume 2 Issue 1

Price:

$4. http://ideologicalfightback.com Ioanna Karatzaferi

Winter/Spring 2014

Volume 2 Issue 1

C o n t en t http://ideologicalfightback.

The articles in this magazine, unless otherwise specified, are the opinions of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the collective views of the NCCUSA

The Official Voice of the National Council of Communists, USA To contact, email us at: ideologicalfightback@gmail.com Phone: 917 597 0169 EDITORIAL BOARD: STEPHEN PAULMIER - EDITOR; GEORGE GREENE - ASSISTANT EDITOR; JESSICA COCO, DR. ANGELO D’ANGELO, JOSEPH HANCOCK, KITTY EDEN, FIONA FAIRCHILD, ANGEL MARTINEZ

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NCC’s 7 Points of Marxist-Leninist Unity October 1917: What does it mean today?

By Hermann Glaser-Baur

Leninism and Revisionism In the Fundamental Questions of Theory and Practice of Socialism

by V.A. Tyulkin & M.V.Popov

The Rings Obituary:

By Ioanna Karatzaferi

Henri Alleg

A Vanguard party

By Miguel Urbano Rodrigues By stephen paulmier

Declaration of the Foundation and Principles of the Party of Labour of Austria What is the Role of Private Production in Getting to Socialism?

By Asad Ali Honor & praise:

amiri baraka

By stephen paulmier

Letters Page 31

Editorial Page 35

7 Points of Marxist-Leninist Unity 1) Marxism-Leninism We apply the science of Marxism-Leninism as the means to achieve supremacy of the working class.

2) Vanguard Role – Cadre Party We hold that the role of the party, as laid out by the Bolshevik example, is that of a Vanguard workers’ Party, which opposes and organizes against the Bourgeois state and its surrogate parties. Such a party acts as the general staff of the working class, educating, organizing and leading the Proletariat in its struggle for liberation. To that end, the Party must develop and train strong cadres to lead the struggle.

3) Dictatorship of Proletariat We hold, as Marx and Lenin wrote, that organizing a class conscious working class is the only way to achieve liberation from Bourgeoise; – and that due to the inevitability of the class struggle and the nature of the state as the tool of suppression of one class upon another – only the overthrow of the Bourgeois State by the proletariat, and the active suppression of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat, may consolidate power for working class interests and bring about a Socialist State.

4) Proletarian Internationalism We support the international working class, and the struggle of oppressed groups for liberation from Imperialist domination and exploitation, both within this county and around the world, and oppose all forms of Imperialism which oppress it working class world-wide, fighting especially against the mechanisms of Imperialism created and maintained by the current Bourgeois regime in our own country, and will actively oppose and work to end its wars of Imperialist adventurism around the globe.

5) Support for real existing socialism of the 20th Century We support and uphold the legacy and lessons of the Socialist revolutionary movements of the 20th century, and the contributions of Lenin, Stalin and other leading Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. We will defend that legacy against defamation by Revisionists, Capitalists, Trotskyites, social democrats, anarchists, cold war liberal bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois ultra-left radicals who undermine the revolutionary history and struggle of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. We reject the so-called “21st Century Socialism” and euro-communism as revisionist attempts to promote reformism and “market socialism” over true revolutionary struggle and Socialist collectivization.

6) Continuing Lenin’s opposition to Right Opportunism and Revisionism inside the world communist movement We oppose all forms of Right Opportunism and Revisionism to supplant Marxist Leninist ideology in the world communist movement, historically and especially found in the CPUSA, We identify this revisionism as an intrusion of bourgeois ideology that weakens and distorts our theory and purpose, leading to class-collaboration and counter-revolution.

7) Historically, Revolution is the sole means of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and a scientific socialist society.

We hold that class conscious struggle through revolution is the only means of achieving liberation for the working class. That any measure of reformism, collaboration, or conciliation with the bourgeoisie serves only to undermine and prolong the workers struggle, leading to the further consolidation of Capitalist power and dominance. “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter II, paragraph 7] National Council of Communists USA

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October 1917: What does it mean today?

by Hermann Glaser-Baur

From Unity, Organ of The Communist Party of Ireland 22 September 2007

s communists the world over honor and celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the question will be asked by many: Is it more than remembering a date in history? What do the October Revolution and the conclusions of it mean for the working-class movement of today?

A

All communists of the present day are being guided by the lessons of the October Revolution; all reformists and others in the working-class movement who have more or less bowed to bourgeois politics will play down its historical importance and try to distance themselves for one or another reason. The historical truth is on our side.

The October Revolution forced the capitalist system, for the first time in history, to accept an opposite pole in a world it had completely dominated prior to 1917.

This new situation led to conditions under which the working class in capitalist countries was able to successfully fight for rights previously unknown.

All aspects of the social system of today, such as a national health system, public education, a fixed retirement age, culture for the working class etc. were first realized in the socialist state, and the capitalists and their governments had to make concessions to the struggle of the working class.

The October Revolution’s victory was the main ignition for the development of the communist movement in all parts of the world. Many communist parties were founded, and the Communist (Third) International was established in 1919. The Socialist (Second) International had betrayed working-class interests, and the Comintern soon developed into the centerpiece of worldwide revolutionary politics.

The October Revolution proved that even the strongest and most established system can be overthrown by the working people if they are led by a revolutionary vanguard. It also rubbished the old (and recently “reborn”) reformist theory that socialism cannot be achieved in just one country at a time. Despite its weaknesses, the Soviet system survived the

(Comrade Lenin Cleanses the World of Filth)

intervention by sixteen imperialist countries and the murderous attack by fascism in the Second World War. Ernst Thälmann, German communist leader and Hitler’s “most important prisoner” for eleven years, used a slightly simplified phrase when he appealed to the revolutionaries from his death cell: “Stalin is going to break Hitler’s neck.” Socialism is stronger than capitalism, even in its most aggressive form, was the meaning behind it; history proved him right.

In the Soviet Union itself the victorious revolution led to the most radical changes in the economy and social continued on next page

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system that any country in the world had ever experienced. Unemployment disappeared within a few years. The five-day working week, the seven-hour working day, pensions for all, pension age of sixty for men and fifty-five for women, equal rights for women—all those achievements, which are being destroyed by the capitalist system today, were results of working-class power after the Russian Revolution.

The new working-class state tackled reactionary nationalism and racism. The Soviet Union accepted the right of every people to be sovereign, and supported respect and equality as the basic principles between the nations. The underlying basis of all its foreign policies was proletarian internationalism, “the only principle which can really guarantee respect for cultural, linguistic and ethnical differences between the peoples . . .” (quoted from the Greek Communist Party’s statement on the anniversary of the October Revolution, May 2007).

The deviation from the path of proletarian internationalism in connection with increasing internal problems in the Soviet Union, and serious mistakes in trying to solve these, were used by the imperialists to undermine the socialist system. The fall of the socialist world was clearly a counter-revolution, because it led to a huge social step-back.

Imperialist propaganda is trying to lay the blame for the disaster on the socialist system itself and its

economy, using such terms as the “collapse of socialism,” which disguise the counter-revolutionary nature of the events and attempt to make them look like a necessary result of socialism’s failed politics.

Communists all over the world are exposing these lies.

Recognizing that socialism was put into practice in the Soviet Union and the other socialist states means recognizing that socialism is possible in practice, despite all the mistakes in the socialist countries: that it is “doable,” that it is far more than just an idea. This crucial knowledge is one of the most up-to-date lessons from the October Revolutions.

Despite the counter-revolutionary overthrow between 1989 and 1991, we are living in the period of changeover from capitalism to socialism.

No new system became dominant at once, neither capitalism itself nor feudalism before it.

In the struggle for socialism today it is one of the major tasks of communists to spread the truth about socialism in the twentieth century: not painting a rosy picture, not overlooking its mistakes, but free of the lies of bourgeois propaganda.

The working class and poor people will not remain tied to the past; they need a socialist-communist future. It is the only answer to mounting problems, and it is the only solution imperialism fears—as much today as in 1917.

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Contents Egypt’s Second Revolution, Raza Naeem The Deindustrialisation of Contemporary Russia, Tahir Asghar Gujarat’s Growth: Myth and Reality, Damodar The Many Perils of Borrowed Prosperity, Prasenjit Bose An Open letter to the ‘Hindu Nationalist’, Narendra Damodardas Modi Ji, Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shamsul Islam Statement Delivered to the International Conference for Human Rights and Peace Held in the Philippines, 19th-21st July 2013, in Quezon City, Dr. Malem Ningthouja British Policy Regarding the Untouchable Castes, A.M. Dyakov. Introduction by C.N. Subramaniam Obituary: Ghulam Abbas Daha, Shaukat Ali Choudry Obituary: Jagjit Singh Lyallpuri (1917-2013), Vijay Singh Rosa Luxemburg’s Attitude towards the Russian Revolution after the November Revolution in Germany, Clara Zetkin. Introduction by George Gruenthal

Vol. X

IX, N

o. 2 Septe

mber

2013

Enver Hoxha in the Face of Khrushchev’s Treachery, Nexhmije Hoxha A Critique of Neo-Trotskyism: Commodity, Value and the Law of Value under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Ubaldo Buttafava Correspondence: Letter from a Political Prisoner To My Papi and His Comrades, Jhoselyn Brazil: Nationalisation of Public Transport Now! RCP Turkey: On the Recent Events, Labour Party Meeting of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations of Europe (June 23rd 2013) Statement of the Meeting of Marxist-Leninist Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean (July 2013) Final Declaration of the 17th International Seminar Problems of the Revolution in Latin America (July 19th 2013) On the Question of the Journals ‘Zvezda’ and ‘Leningrad’, (9th August 1946), J.V. Stalin Marxist Aesthetics and the Socialist Realism of Geli Korzhev, Vitaly Pershin Independence Day, Saadat Hasan Manto

For a copy, send $6 in check or money order (made out to George Gruenthal), or cash, to: 192 Claremont Ave., 5D New York, NY 10027, USA

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International Communist Review Issue 3 July 2012 http://www.iccr.gr

Leninism and Revisionism. In the Fundamental Questions of Theory and Practice of Socialism (The dictatorship of the proletariat, its organizational form and economic entity) V.A. Tyulkin, first secretary of the Russian Communist Workers’ Party - Revolutionary Party of Communists, M.V.Popov, doctor of philosophy, professor, president of the Fund of Working Academy Representatives of the journal of RCRP-RPC “Soviet Union” In 2009, the Fund of the Workers’ Academy that promotes a learning course for workers in Russia, published a collection “The main idea of Leninism“, which has incorporated major Lenin’s views on the class approach to the analysis of social phenomena and the dictatorship of the proletariat.1 Acquaintance with this collection helps to understand the defection, apostasy of those of CPSU leaders, who took the revisionist stance on major issues of Marxism-Leninism at the XXII CPSU Congress. This stance was fixed in the CPSU program which, at most, predetermined the subsequent dissipation of the party and the destruction of the country. The above is proved in this article. The authors have tried to draw particular attention to the fact that most inventions, excuses and “modern” arguments presented by current opportunists and renegades were answered by Lenin long ago, at the time of the his fight against opportunists and those perverting Marxism during the Second International and the establishment of the Soviet power in Russia.

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The class character of the state The fact that every state has a class character is the ABC of Marxism, and Lenin constantly stressed it. In his article “The Petty-Bourgeois Stand on the Question of Economic Disorganization” Lenin wrote: “to distinguish which class the state serves, whose class interests it stands for”.2 And in the book “The State and Revolution” Lenin emphasizes, that “according to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule”.3 In the article “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” Lenin asks: “And what is the state?” and gives the following answer: “It is an organisation of the ruling class”.4 The same idea Lenin explains in his article “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?”: “The state, dear people, is a class concept. The state is an organ or instrument of violence exercised by one class against another”.5 In the Report at the Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress, January 20, 1919, Lenin stresses more categorically: “There is and can be only one alternative: either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, disguised

IDEOLOGICAL FIGHTBACK

by constituent assemblies, all kinds of voting systems, democracy and similar bourgeois frauds that are used to blind fools, and that only people who have become utter renegades from Marxism and socialism all along the line can make play of today—or the dictatorship of the proletariat”.6 It is therefore logical that the Program of the RCP(b) developed by Lenin states clearly: “As opposed to bourgeois democracy, which has been hiding the class character of the state, the Soviet government openly acknowledges the inevitability of the class character of any state. This class character will exist until the division of society into classes will disappear completely together with any respective state authority”.7 In the brochure “Letter to the Workers and Peasants Apropos of the Victory Over Kolchak”,

Lenin stresses the class character of the state in the strongest terms: “Either the dictatorship (i.e., the iron rule) of the landowners and capitalists, or the dictatorship of the working class.

There is no middle course. The scions of the aristocracy, intellectualists and petty gentry, badly educated on bad books, dream

of a middle course. There is no middle course anywhere in the world, nor can there be. Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (masked by ornate SocialistRevolutionary and Menshevik phraseology about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and the like), or the dictatorship of the proletariat. He who has not learned this from the whole history of the nineteenth century is a hopeless idiot”.8

The essence of the socialist state In his Concluding Speech on the Report of People’s Commissars, January 12 (25) January, 1918 at the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies Lenin said: “Democracy is a form of bourgeois state championed by all traitors to genuine socialism, who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who assert that democracy is contrary to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the revolution transcended the limits of the bourgeois system, we were for democracy; but as soon as we saw the first signs of socialism in the progress of the revolution, we took a firm and resolute stand for the dictatorship of the proletariat”.9

In the brochure “The Successes and the Difficulties of the Soviet power”, Lenin simply made fun of the unfortunate communists who rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. He wrote: “We, of course, are not opposed to violence. We laugh at those who are opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, we laugh and say that they are fools who do not understand that there must be either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Those who think otherwise are either idiots, or

are so politically ignorant that it would be a disgrace to allow them to come anywhere near a meeting, let alone on the platform”.10

Lenin defended the same idea in the Report on the Domestic And Foreign Situation of the Soviet Republic at the Extraordinary Plenary Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Red Army Deputies on April 3 1919: “either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the power and complete dictatorship of the working class; no middle course was ever of any use, nothing came of it”.11 In “The dictatorship of the proletariat” Lenin wrote the following: “1. The chief reason why the ʻsocialistsʻ do not understand the dictatorship of the proletariat is that they do not carry the idea of the class struggle to its logical conclusion (Cf. Marx, 1852) The dictatorship of the proletariat is the continuation of the class struggle of the proletariat in new forms. That is the crux of the matter, and that is what they do not understand.

The proletariat, as a special class, alone continues to wage its class struggle. 2. The state is only a weapon of the proletariat in its class struggle. A special kind of cudgel, rien de plus! [Nothing more.— Editor.]”.12

In his Speech Delivered at The AllRussia Congress of Transport Workers, March 27, 1921 Lenin once again explained that the question is put “either-or”: “The class that took political power did so in the knowledge that it was doing so alone. That is intrinsic to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It has meaning only when one class knows that it is taking political power alone, and does not deceive others or itself with talk about “popular government by popular

consent through universal suffrage”.

You all know that there are very many-far too many-people who love to hold forth on that subject, but, at any rate, you will not find them among proletarians, because they have realised that theirs is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and they say as much in their Constitution, the fundamental law of the Republic”.13

In his brochure “The Tax in Kind” Lenin stressed quite simply and briefly: “At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC”.14

The concept, the objectives, and the historical boundaries of the dictatorship of the proletariat In his article “Fear of the Collapse of the Old and the Fight for the New” Lenin notes: “What dictatorship implies and means is a state of simmering war, a state of military measures of struggle against the enemies of the proletarian power”.15 With that, in his article “Greetings to the Hungarian workers” he emphasizes: “But the essence of proletarian dictatorship is not in force alone, or even mainly in force. Its chief feature is the organisation and discipline of the advanced contingent of the working people, of their vanguard; of their sole leader, the proletariat, whose object is to build socialism, abolish the division of society into classes, make all members of society working people, and remove the basis for all exploitation of man by man”.16 Lenin explains that “the abolition of classes requires a long, difficult and stubborn class strugcontinued on next page

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gle, which, after the overthrow of capitalist rule, after the destruction of the bourgeois state, after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, does not disappear (as the vulgar representatives of the old socialism and the old SocialDemocracy imagine), but merely changes its forms and in many respects becomes fiercer”.17 In his brochure “The Great Beginning” Lenin gives the following definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat: “If we translate the Latin, scientific, historico-philosophical term “dictatorship of the proletariat” into simpler language, it means just the following: Only a definite class, namely, the urban workers and the factory, industrial workers in general, is able to lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes. (Let us observe in parenthesis that the only scientific distinction between socialism and communism is that the first term implies the first stage of the new society arising out of capitalism, while the second implies the next and higher stage.)

The mistake the “Berne” yellow International makes is that its leaders accept the class struggle and the leading role of the proletariat only in word and are afraid to think it out to its logical conclusion. They are afraid of- that inevitable conclusion which particularly terrifies the bourgeoisie, and which is absolutely unacceptable to them. They are afraid to admit that the dictatorship of the proletariat is also a period of class struggle, which is inevitable as long as classes have not been abolished,

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and which changes in form, being particularly fierce and particularly peculiar in the period immediately following the overthrow of capital.

The proletariat does not cease the class struggle after it has captured political power, but continues it until classes are abolished—of course, under different circumstances, in different form and by different means.

“And what does the ʻabolition of classes’ mean? All those who call themselves socialists recognise this as the ultimate goal of socialism, but by no means all give thought to its significance. Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.

Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers. This requires a very long period of time”.18

Lenin in his article “Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” continues to define the boundaries of the dictatorship of the proletariat and highlights the impact of the dictatorship of the proletariat throughout the whole phase of the socialism:

“Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.

Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms”.19

It should be stressed that Lenin specifically lists these forms for the communists of all countries and of the times to come, in his book “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder”: “The dictatorship of the proletariat means a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative – against the forces and traditions of the old society”.20 Under socialism there is a sharp class struggle against the powers and traditions of capitalist society. At the first place this struggle is aimed against the “petty-bourgeoisness” and against the petty-bourgeois manifestations on the part of representatives of classes and the layers of social society. In particular this struggle is aimed against the pettybourgeois aspirations to give to society as little as possible and to give to society not the best things while attempting to take from society the best things and as much as possible.

This struggle takes part in the working class, in the party itself and the mind of almost any man.

How long is the dictatorship of the proletariat indispensable? In the Theses on Tactics of the RCP report at the III Congress of the Communist International Lenin answers this question as follows: “The dictatorship of the proletariat does not signify a cessation of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new weapons. This dictatorship is essential as long as classes exist, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, intensifies tenfold its attacks on socialism on an international scale The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean the cessation of the class struggle”.21 And since, as highlighted in the Report on the tactics of the RCP at the III Congress of the Communist International of July 5, 1921, “The aim of socialism is to abolish classes “, the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat shall include the entire first phase of communism, i.e. the entire period of socialism.22

The organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat The essence of any state is the dictatorship of the ruling class. At the same time, this dictatorship rarely openly acts on the surface of political life. Each type of dictatorship (with all its deviations and temporary retreats) has a definite stable form of display. This form of display, as the organizational form, shall be adequate for the dictatorship of the particular class. This form corresponds to the dictatorship of the given class and provides for the preservation of the dictatorship of such class in the best possi-

ble way. The immanent, i.e. the inherent organizational form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is parliamentary democracy founded on elections based on the principal of territorial districts. The organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is Soviet power, with elections based on factories’ and plants. In his “Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” at the I Congress of the Communist International of March 4, 1919, Lenin wrote: “The old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organized that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from the machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organized as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organization of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units—the factory”.23

As mentioned in the Lenin’s brochure “Letter to the Workers and Peasants apropos of the Victory Over Kolchak”, “Soviet power—that is what the “dictatorship of the working class” means in practice.”24 Lenin in his article “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” emphasizes explicitly: “Soviet power is nothing but an organisational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.25 Analysis of organizational forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (in its most stable modification – the bourgeois democracy) and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of councils (i.e. soviets)

demonstrates that the stability and functioning of the mentioned dictatorships is provided for by the objective grounds. The formation of the power is based on such objective grounds. The formation of parliamentary democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is based on the monetary resources of the capitalists, on the institution of private capitalist property. The formation of parliamentary democracy uses the bourgeois ideology which is dominant in society (as the being of society determines its conscienceness). Proletarian democracy is based on the objective self-discipline of the working class in the course of their working class’ labour at the factories and plants. Such factories and plants become the electoral units (districts) of the Soviets. This is not about the title, but about the form of organization of power which is characteristic of Soviet power (the power ensuring the dictatorship of the working class).

Changing the organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat Soviets emerged in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1905 as organs of strike and organs of self government of the working class formed at the factories and the plants in accordance with the labour collectives’ principle. The Soviets were at that time elected at factories and plants.

In 1917 the Soviets were formed throughout the whole of Russia.

The constitutive principle of the continued on next page

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Soviets is the election of deputies at factories and plants, as this provides for the possibility to control the activities of Soviet deputies and the feasibility of their being recalled and replaced at the discretion of the labour collectives. This principle was formalized in Program of the RCP(b) adopted by the VIII Congress of the Party of Lenin: “The Soviet state also brings the state apparatus together with the masses by establishing that the electoral unit and the basic unit of the state shall be the production unit (plant, factory), not the territorial district”.26 Contrary to this program’s provision, in 1936 (in connection with the adoption of the new, supposedly more “democratic” constitution) the transition to elections based on the territorial principle took place.

Such a principle of election is typical of a bourgeois democratic system. This principle makes it impossible to recall the deputies who turned away from the people. The statements made by Stalin at that time on the alleged broadening of democracy due to the adoption of the Constitution of 1936 shall be

12

acknowledged as incorrect. It would have been more correct to say that a step toward the transition from Soviet, proletarian democracy to parliamentary, bourgeois democracy was actually made. Such parliamentary, bourgeois democracy implies formal equality and ignores actual inequality. A formal onetime extension of voting rights to former members of the exploiting classes could not actually broaden democracy. Soviet democracy (the democracy of the working people) gradually leads to all people voting on the basis of the gradual withdrawal of the former members of the exploiting class at the historical stage due to the elimination of any exploitation. The renunciation of the principle of elections through labour collectives at factories and plants (such principle is a characteristic principle of the Soviets) and the shift to election in accordance with the principle of territorial districts is equivalent to a retreat. It is the retreat from the Soviets to parliamentarism and, hence, to the weakening of real democratism.

It is interesting to recall that Lenin, while preparing the second Program of the RCP(b), considered the possibility of changing the form of the Soviets only as the result of a general retreat in the struggle under the pressure of the circumstances and the forces of the enemy. He did not consider such change as the move to develop the democracy of workers (proletarian or workers’ democracy). In the Resolution on Changing the Name of the Party and the Party Programme of the Seventh Congress RCP (b) Lenin wrote:

“The change in the political part of our Programme must consist in the most accurate and comprehensive definition possible of the new type of state, the Soviet Republic, as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and as a continuation of those achievements of the world workingclass revolution which the Paris Commune began. The Programme must show that our Party does not reject the use even of bourgeois parliamentarism, should the course of the struggle push us back, for a time, to this historical stage which our revolution has now passed. But in any case and under all circumstances the Party will strive for a Soviet Republic as the highest, from the standpoint of democracy, type of state, as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of abolition of the exploiters’ yoke and of suppression of their resistance”.27

Everything seems to be explicit.

However, a move to bourgeois democracy was made. Since then, due to the liquidation in practice of the possibility of recalling the deputies that betrayed the trust of the voters organized as labour collectives, the process of more and more intensive contamination of the state machine by the bureaucracy and careerism started. It is also within the framework of this process that the party-and-state machine bred Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs.. The state machine became soiled with careerists and bureaucrats for whom their own interests were the priority compared to the common interests. The title “Soviets” remained but the essence of the soviets started to blur. The dictatorship of the proletariat, having been deprived of its inherent organizational form, was put at risk. After the principle of election on the basis of the labour collectives was eliminated, the proletari-

an character of the bodies of the power (they still bore the name “soviet”) was only provided for by the still preserved elements of their connection with labour collectives.

This connection took place through labour collectives recommending the candidates, through occasional reporting of the deputies to the labour collectives, through the regulation of the social contingent of the soviets by the party. This connection also took place on inertia due to the proletarian character of the party contingent. But even at the time of Stalin (who vowed to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat by the coffin of V.I. Lenin and who fought for the strengthening of the proletarian dictatorship throughout his life) the anti-worker majority began gradually accumulating in the Central Committee of the party. This antiworkers’ majority opportunism, evolving into revisionism, would alter the class nature of the state after Stalin’s death.

The change of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the change of Marxism A kind of artillery preparation for the direct attack on the main idea of Marxism was held at the Twentieth Party Congress. By the efforts of Khrushchev’s revisionist group everything positive done under Stalin’s leadership was libelously questioned. This Khrushchev revisionist group also applied to the revision of the key provisions of Marxism on the class struggle and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, Lenin’s program of the RCP(b) was still in effect and,

therefore, Khrushchev’s supporters began the preparation for the replacement of this program by a different one that would eliminate the very essence of Marxism-Leninism. A thesis of the final victory of socialism in the USSR (an unwinding and demobilizing thesis for communists, the working class and all working people) was put forward by the CPSU First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in his report at the XXII Congress “On the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”.28 The report stated that the class struggle is confined only to the transitional period towards the socialism.29 Throughout the whole report socialism was understood not as a phase of the communism, but as a separate formation. Accordingly, instead of the typical socialist goal of complete elimination of classes at the first phase of the classless society the goal of building the classless society was put forward. At the same time a purely anti-Marxist, revisionist goal was declared: “From the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the people’s state”.30 It was stated that, allegedly “the working class of the Soviet Union on its own initiative, based on the tasks of building communism, transformed the state of its dictatorship into the people’s state… It is for the first time that we have formed a state which is not based on the dictatorship of any class ... the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer indispensable”.31 The party, in contradiction to Lenin’s concept of a political party as the vanguard of the class, was also declared to be not the party of the working class but the party of the whole people.

These revisionist ideas were not resisted at the Congress. The Congress unanimously adopted the revisionist, essentially anti-Leninist and essentially anti-Marxist program. According to this program, allegedly “the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historical mission and, in terms of the goals of internal development, has ceased to be indispensable in the USSR. The state which has emerged as the dictatorship of the proletariat, at this new, modern stage, has become a people’s state... As the party understands, the dictatorship of the working class ceases to be indispensable before the state withers away”.32 To appraise this position in more detail let us once again turn to Lenin.

In his book “The State and the Revolution” Lenin stressed the class character of every state (as long as such state continues to exist), the necessity to destroy the old state machine and the necessity to create the new state apparatus which would be able to solve the problems of the proletarian dictatorship for the purpose of the victory of the proletarian revolution; he also decontinued on next page

Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

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veloped a number of provisions that have to be observed so that the state (which is the weapon of the working class, the means of ensuring its political domination) would not become the power dominating the working class. In this book and also in the notebook “Marxism on the State” Lenin clearly pursues the idea that the state withers away only with the complete elimination of classes (i.e. while classes still remain, the state, as the body of the politically dominating class, remains as well). He cites and develops the idea of Engels about the State: “When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary”.33 Lenin, as if responding to all the doubters, to all those who are hesitant and indecisive, emphasizes: “Only he is a Marxist who

extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested”.34 In his work “The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University of June 11, 1919. Lenin points out that it is the capitalist state which “proclaims liberty for the whole people as its slogan, which declares that it expresses the will of the whole people and denies that it is a class state”.35

Notes:

[12] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 93-104.

[13] Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pages 272-284.

[14] Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pages 329-365.

[15] Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 400-403 [16] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 387-391 [17] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 387-391.

[18] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 409-434.

[19] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 107-117.

[20] Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 31, Progress Publishers, USSR, 1964 p. 17—118.

[21] Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pages 451-498.

[22] Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pages 451-498.

[1] The main idea of Leninism. Lenin on class approach to the analysis of social phenomena / Comp. Dr. Ph. Sc. M.V. Popov. - St.: Polytechnic Univ. Press, 2009. – 311 p. http://rpw.ru/ [2] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pages 562-564.

[3] Lenin Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 381- 492.

[4] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 25, pages 323-369.

[5] Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87- 136.

[6] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 28, pages 412-428.

[7] Lenin. Complete Collected Works, Volume 38, p.

424.

[8] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 552-560.

[9] Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 453-482.

[10] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 55-88.

[11] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 255-274.

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tatorship whose absence makes the development of socialism into communism impossible), eventually altered the goals of the development of production and society.

The above is worth considering in more detail. continued in next issue

The Khrushchev revisionist group, having disoriented, having actually deceived the party and the people with respect to the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the dic[23] Lenin Collected Works, Volume 28 (p. 455477).

[24] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 552-560.

[25] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 27, pages 235-77.

[26] Lenin. Complete Collected Works, Volume 38, pp. 425 – 426.

[27] Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 27, 1972, pages 85-158 [28] XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 17 – 31 October 1961. Verbatim record. M. Gospolitizdat, 1962. Vol. I, p.151.

[29] Ibid. p. 166.

[30] Ibid. p. 209.

[31] Ibid. pp. 210 – 211, 212.

[32] XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 17 – 31 October 1961. Verbatim record. M. Gospolitizdat, 1962. Vol. III. p. 303.

[33] Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 381492.

[34] Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 381492.

[35] Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 470-488.

The Rings

Ioanna Karatzaferi

We were a few friends, fifty years ago, that we used to meet every Friday at the MOMA, at 53rd Street, in Manhattan, and talk about Art, Movies included, for the sake of Hy Simon, who was a cinematographer.

All this happened when in America the black people were called Negroes, the gays –homosexuals, the same sex marriage was unthinkable and the term “politically correct” didn’t exist.

Another friend was an editor for a very well known Publishing Co., who actually discouraged me to send over to them my first novel, entitled Furnished Rooms, that had just being published in Athens, Greece.

In half century’s time many things have happened and have been accepted some times unquestionably and some other times were refused, en mass or individually.

He said that the manuscripts in his office were packed from floor to ceiling. I couldn’t argue. He knew better than any other in our small circle. Besides, I was rather young and timid.

The MOMA was not as big as it is now and the visitors were in smaller numbers than now.

What is the identity of each man and why he/she has to defend their skin’s color, the first language they spoke, the name of the God they worship, the tattoo on their body, some have a Madonna or a cross, or a stripteaser or an animal, the favored base ball player or team, a snake or a flower or any other abstract design which disclose all the above mentioned?

I used to sit at the same place from where I could see Picasso’s Guernica all the time I was there.

Why should one defend his taste on his outfit or the style of his hat?

One day Hy walked in and at a moment, out of the blue, he took out of his pocket a small pretty box, opened it, and showed two rings, saying that they were made on his order, one for him and the other for me.

Do all the above identify the individual? It’s a big question.

It was so sudden and unexpected that I didn’t know what to say. He asked for my hand and passed through my fingers the ring, saying that the signs on both rings were in Hebrew and meant: I will love you for ever.

Henry, the editor, took my hand looked at the ring and in a very austere tone of voice asked: Why one has to make visible his religion, his origin, or whatever refers to his personality? Are you Jewish? he asked me.

For the time being we know that a hood can provide the excuse of profiling the person has on his head walking in the streets of this big free country which we all insist we love.

For 50 years Ioanna Karatzaferi has written for Rizospastis, central organ of the Communist party of Greece Picasso’s Guernica

I was born a Christian orthodox, but not really practicing, I answered.

I felt that I wanted to leave.

Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

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Henri Alleg (July 20, 1921 – July 17, 2013)

Obituary Miguel Urbano Rodrigues

Born Harry Salem to Polish-Jewish parents in London, who soon moved to Paris, was a French communist who, living in Algeria, became editor of the pro-liberation Alger Republicain in 1951. He is best known internationally for his pamphlet, La Question (The Question or Torture), which describes his month of torture — a torture practiced systematically against Algerian patriots — after being arrested by the French forces occupying Algeria. Miguel Urbano Rodrigues is a veteran Portuguese communist and journalist and former editor of Avante, the newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party. The article is translated from the Portuguese by John Catalinotto.

I had been awaiting the news of Henri Alleg’s death.

ing the door to a friendship that grew stronger every year.

He died yesterday, Wednesday (July 17), but to all intents and purposes had stopped living last year when, on holiday on a Greek island, he suffered a cerebral vascular accident. His brain was so damaged that recovery was impossible.

Henri, after the April 25, 1974, revolution in Portugal, was the correspondent for L’Humanité in Lisbon. At that time we hadn’t the opportunity to meet. But in the last quarter century, he visited Portugal many times. The publishing company Caminho published three of his books (“SOS America,” “The Great Leap Backwards” and “The Century of the Dragon) and Mareantes launched the Portuguese translation of “La Question” (“La Tortura”), the book that made him famous and helped to hasten the end of the Algerian war for liberation from France.

He remained semihemiplegic and spent the last months in a clinic, progressing to the end in an almost vegetative state. He could recognize his children and say a few words, but his speech had become chaotic.

I was bound to this man with a friendship so deep that I have difficulty defining it.

At age 90, he spent a week with me and my companheira in Vila Nova de Gaia, and then gave a conference at the Popular University of Porto on Algeria and the events that shook African Islam. His historical knowledge and lucidity impressed all who heard him then.

I admired him long ago when I first met him in Bulgaria, in 1986, during an international congress.

Our empathy was immediate, open-

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He loved Portugal, especially the Alentejo of the Left Bank of the River Guadiana, and admired the Portuguese Communist Party.

He participated in different international meetings in Portugal, and in one of his visits to Lisbon he was received by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Assembly of the Republic, where he held discussions on the great problems of our time with members of Parliament from all parties and was later applauded by the full session of Parliament.

Henri Alleg

photo:Odiario

I also recall the exceptional interest aroused by his trips to Brazil and Cuba, where I accompanied him on his visits to those countries.

The complexity of the sense of wonder that Henri Alleg inspired in me led me to write more pages about him and his books than I devoted during my life to any other writer. They appear in my books and articles published in newspapers and magazines in many countries. I’ll thus avoid repetition.

I recall that when I read “La Grande Aventure d’Alger Republicain” (“The Great Adventure of Alger Republicain”) the shock — that was the right word — was so strong that I suggested at a conference that the study of this book should be included in the program of all colleges of journalism in the world.

What was it I found that made Henri Alleg different?

Reflecting on the fascination that this man had on me, I concluded that my admiration was based on the strength of his ideological choices, his Spartan courage and a rare sense of ethics.

More than once I told him that I saw in him the model set by the Bolsheviks of 1917.

Henri appeared to me as the full, pure, almost perfect communist. I have not met one with whom I identify so harmoniously in the debate of ideas.

It is regrettable that “Mémoire Algérienne” (“Algerian Memoir”) has not been translated into Portuguese.

In this memoir, which is much more than that, Henri, in the final chapters, allows the reader to imagine the suffering of a communist who experiences the rapid disappearance, after independence, among the leaders of the FLN, of the principles and values that had led the Algerian revolutionaries to victory over French colonialism.

He paid a high price for the authenticity that distanced him from power regarding Alger Republicain, his daily newspaper, which was closed down by Houari Boumedienne, hero of the independence struggle.

He also paid a heavy price in France, where, after his return to Europe, he was managing editor of L’Humanité, then the organ of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party.

From the onset, Henri Alleg denounced the wave of eurocommunism that hit the French, Italian and Spanish parties, among others.

He criticized openly the strategy that led the PCF to participate in the governments of the Socialist Party, which practiced neoliberal policies.

In the excellent book he wrote about the destruction of the USSR and the re-establishment of capitalism in Russia, he lashed out at intellectuals who, renouncing Marxism, passed in rapid metamorphosis to become defenders of capitalism and anti-Soviet positions. He did not hesitate to criticize even the very general secretary of the PCF, Robert Hue, as he considered the orientation then imposed on the PCF as incompatible with their revolutionary traditions as a MarxistLeninist organization.

But, unlike some other comrades, he carried on his combat as a communist activist within the Communist Party.

I had the opportunity in France at communist meetings I attended to recognize the enormous respect that Henri Alleg inspired when he spoke. I found that even the leaders he criticized admired his clarity, the roots of his reasoning and the dignity of his critical speech.

In recent years, despite his frail health, he appeared on television programs, returned to Portugal and revisited Algeria, where he was received with enthusiasm and excitement. In the U.S., his conferences raised ideological debates of unusual depth, with the participation of communists and progressive academicians. And almost to the moment the CAV struck him, he toured France, responding to invita-

tions from communist federations and other organizations. The youth, especially, greeted him with tenderness and admiration.

The death of his life partner, Gilberte Serfaty, in 2010, was a devastating blow for him.

“I no longer can feel the joy of living,” he answered when I asked him about the burden of being alone. An Algerian, she was also an exceptional communist. She contributed greatly to organize with the party his complicated escape from the French prison in Rennes, where he had been transferred from Algeria.

Often, when I visited France, she hosted me in their home in Palaiseau, in the suburbs of Paris.

Henri, who was a gourmet and a great cook, welcomed me with authentic feasts, preparing a wonderful couscous, accompanied by Algerian wines.

On the last visit to Palaiseau before his illness, my companheira and I attended an unforgettable dinner.

We were five: we, Henri, Gilberte and Henri’s son, Jean Salem, who is a Marxist philosopher with international prestige.

I remember that night we reviewed the state of the world. Henri radiated energy; fraught with the present grim condition of humanity, he spoke of the future with the hope of a young Bolshevik.

I repeat: Henri Alleg was a revolutionary and an exemplary communist.

Vila Nova de Gaia, July 18, 2013 Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

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Welcoming a fraternal anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist Party to the World Communist Movement

Declaration of the Foundation and Principles of the Party of Labour of Austria Preamble The Austrian workers' movement has an honorable and fighting history. Its milestones are the foundation of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) in 1888/89 and the Communist Party (KPÖ) in 1918. In 1918 the Austrian workers' movement was on the verge of a possible over- throw of capitalism. In 1934 it rose up against the Austro-fascist putsch. It bore the main bur- den of the fight against the two fascist dictatorships between 1934 and 1945 and in the nation- al liberation struggle from 1938 to 1945. In the first and second Austrian republics it won important reforms and democratic and social improvements. It was the pacemaker for social progress, for peace and democracy.

The present is different. The leadership of social democracy switched to the side of capitalism, imperialism and counter-revolution a century ago. Today in essence the SPÖ is a capitalist party that itself represents an important support and profit-oriented participant in state- monopoly capitalism in Austria. It still only mistakenly has its support and core membership in the working class, namely above all to deceive, dupe and repeatedly betray them. It wears only a mask of friendship to the working class while in its actual policies and its political, economic and personal involvement in the system it is repeatedly revealed as the party of capital. Nevertheless, it should be recognized that there are upright and honest social democrats and socialists in its base who hope to be able to change this party for the better again, that is for the social and the socialist. But the result of these efforts has been the same for many years: it is not these members with the best intentions who change the party but the party changes the members and their intentions. And anyone who does not fit in will sooner or later have no influence any longer and will be removed from their seats and functions.

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The smaller workers' party, the KPÖ, has reached the zero point of social relevance as a national party – and it also bears the responsibility for this itself. Inasmuch as it has abandoned the working class, the class struggle, revolution and thereby also socialism as a point of reference, it is today indeed critical of capitalism but otherwise it is a party that is completely alienated from the working class, ideologically arbitrary, a general left party that hopes for the transformation of capitalism into a "society of solidarity" and propagates erroneous, petty- bourgeois and reformist ideas. This is neither something that addresses the working class nor what the class needs, and neither in content or strategy is it an expression of the revolutionary workers' movement and its scientific world view, from which the KPÖ consciously distances itself. Nevertheless, in parts of the KPÖ there are thoroughly practically committed and theoretically well-grounded members who stand for honest working-class politics, antiimperialist positions and revolutionary aims. But they form a clear minority, whose influence in the party is and will remain limited to regions or municipalities, their honest commitment will continue to have no effect on the policies of the KPÖ, they will become worn down and resigned.

It may be regrettable that the two classical previous workers' parties of Austria no longer correspond to their original character, indeed, no longer wish to correspond to it, that they are therefore hardly of any use to the working class any more. But that is their decision, more or less to position themselves as integral parts of the bourgeois party spectrum, and this has to be recognized. However, precisely as a result of this, the need arises to fill the gaps that are left – not primarily but also because otherwise right-wing and extreme right-wing groups, although they are in reality spearheads of capital, are attempting to present them-

selves as the representatives of the "ordinary people" and to mislead workers with false promises and demagogic lies and to incite them against one another, so that they are diverted and are no longer active against the real enemy, capitalism.

The main fact, however, is that the present situation already and certainly the future demand a independent, fighting and ultimately revolutionary party of the working class again, which bases itself on class struggle instead of on "class harmony" subjugation to capital. A party that bases itself on the mobilization and self-activity of workers, instead of proxy politics, on effective social and labour struggle instead of "social partnership" pleading in the face of capital, on social progress instead of asocial counter-reformism, on honesty and truthfulness in- stead of opportunism, on internationalism instead of anti-national cosmopolitanism. Which bases itself on anti-imperialism instead of chauvinistic EU Europeanism, on peace policy in- stead of militarism and on the realization of socialism instead of on the perpetuation of crisis capitalism. – Such a party is necessary. The working class needs it.

It is time to take up the best traditions of the Austrian workers' movement once again and to take them forward.

It is time to reorganize and form the workers' movement under the changed conditions of the 21st century.

It is time take up again and consistently wage the struggle of the workers' movement against capitalism and imperialism and their destructive effects.

It is time for workers and the allied strata of the population to have a fighting and revolutionary party for these ends.

Read the complete document at: http://parteiderarbeit.at/?page_id=656

A Vanguard Party Of The Working Class Stephen Paulmier - Editor The founding of a communist party activates the yeast in the mass body politic. Building the party grows out of the necessity for leadership in a working class struggling to discipline itself with the maxim to each according to their work.

Ideologically grounding the party and the working class is the articulation of historic, present and strategic knowledge to produce a tactically superior class adversary.

Nationally mature, culturally lucid and socially adept, ready to lead the working class along the full spectrum of human agency.

The strategic target of empowering working people in the class struggle begins with the participation of cadre in mass organization, recruitment, action and consolidation. The trade union movement, the struggle for civil and human rights, the electoral arena and the building of an ideological educational structure that will develop a Marxist/Leninist scientific discipline raising the consciousness of the class are all necessary components of the party’s work. Our organs, reading material, meetings, forums and rallies must play a living role in the functioning of the party. Emphasis must apply equally on the importance of each of these facets of our work, working class emancipation hinges on the balance of this approach.

Marxism/Leninism provides us with generous quantities of ideological wisdom to occupy and structure our educational task. A

thorough study of this library of knowledge deserves a significant portion of our energies. Equally important, as a source of wisdom, must be the recruitment of comrades from basic industrial production, manufacturing, resource exploitation, transport and construction, with special attention given to the most oppressed and exploited sections of the working class. People of color, women and youth offer critical experiencebased perspectives on the class struggle that are essential to the communist party. The vanguard of the working class is authentic because it develops a disciplined pattern of recognizing and utilizing these vast reservoirs of wisdom in the service of working class emancipation.

Young people are an exploited and oppressed population that warrant recruitment and educational resources as it is these comrades who test and synthesize our strategic and tactical methods, advance our science and ultimately apply it to reality effecting human justice. In this task our own practice of study and education will be tested. The sharpness and robust energy of the young accepts only the most rigorous discipline, helping to keep the party true to its responsibility.

As an exploited and oppressed population women bring to bear a tenacity in struggle to produce, refine and promote social consciousness. The shackles of

paternal social caste and stereo-type woven into de jure and de facto normative structures of capitalist control have tempered these heroic peoples with an authority and power for class struggle unsurpassed.

It is impossible to overestimate the contribution to the class struggle of the African American community.

Time and again, generation upon generation, this group has produced wisdom, built the strategic foundation for, articulated a moral and cultural fabric of, working class authority. In practice, defining consistency and leadership while inspiring courage and modeling solidarity. As a result, people of color have always been targeted by the bourgeoisie. This is the genesis of the myth of superiority and fog of lies used to produce the ideology of racism. The history of working class struggle against its pernicious seepage reads as the epic battle of righteousness over venality. A communist party stakes its legitimacy on this axiom.

Communists rise from and are part of the working class. Proletarian experience, maturity and wisdom endow the party with leadership, discipline, discernment and courage that guide and advise the working class in the revolutionary activity of building a just society through relentless combat in the class struggle. Some argue we have entered a new “post industrial� era of service based employment that continued on next page

Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

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requires a strategic adjustment for recruiting in the working class. The tactical manipulations of the power structure to short circuit revolutionary process by shopping out the productive machinery, denying populations contact with the forces of production, serve only to accent the essential nature of workers in those productive processes. People ravaged by these tactics are steeled in the experience of capital management, cast aside, replaced by their brethren in locations isolated by the uneven progress of historic material development. These populations are reservoirs of leadership potential, seething with the energy of social understanding born of industrial concentration. The science of socialism the only ingredient

missing to transform that potential into revolutionary action.

The partyʻs critique and unending pursuit of ever more rational methods of scientific socialism are essential to effecting progressive social change. Confidence in our class distinguishes the party and inspires the flowering of working class agency. Mistakes and diversions must be methodically identified and exposed. Our challenge is to make of them opportunities for learning; a resistance to the ideologically arrogant backwardness of faux criticism. The bourgeoise count on infecting our ranks with this virus, encouraging skepticism and cynicism, underestimating or discounting the prowess of our

class, even to deny its intelligence and solidarity. Genuine self critical analysis tempers the class, inspiring the working class to a patriotic allegiance for socialism, vaporizing the shackles of wage slavery by monopoly capital.

Clear headed mastery of the productive process, using the science of Marxism/Leninism combined with fearless analysis of interest based economic relations and a strategic class-grounded plan for tactical engagement, prepares an organized resistance to ensconced bourgeois structures of oppression and exploitation. This mastery is to define the meaning of a vanguard party of the working class.

“I know what this Bolshevism means, Bill— it means us.”

20

Poster, Vote Communist, 1924.

Hugo Gellert

U.S. Friends of the Soviet People is dedicated to supporting struggles to restore socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

USFSP is the U.S. affiliate of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with the Soviet People.

The International Council carries on the traditions of the “Hands Off Russia” committees that were established internationally in 1918 to help protect the young Soviet Republic from foreign intervention.

The aim of all Friends of the Soviet People is international cooperation in building socialism and solidarity with the anti-imperialist forces of the world who are struggling against U.S. imperialism — the main enemy of humanity.

USFSP acts as a unifying force to help consolidate and coordinate the antiimperialist forces of the world with the ongoing movement to restore the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as socialist states.

We act as a united front, but are not a forum for ideological debates. The peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe themselves will choose their paths toward socialism.

U.S. Friends of Soviet People – Membership Form To become a member of USFSP, please include your name, address, city, state, zip, phone and email and send it by postal mail to: U.S. Friends of Soviet People P.O. Box 140434 Staten Island, NY 10314-0434 with the appropriate amount in check or money order. ___ $10 regular, ___ $5 low income, ___ $25 contributing, ___ $50 patron, ___ $100 donor. |_| Send me a special 3-months subscription to Northstar Compass for $3.

PAID ADVERTISEMENT

Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

21

mltoday.com

What is the Role of Private Production in Getting to Socialism?

How would these questions be answered in a less economically developed country?

vate production with centrallyplanned large-scale state-owned production.

After a socialist revolution how exactly would Canada become socialist?

These are questions about the transition to socialism from capitalism and remnants of even older production methods such as subsistence farming, small-scale crafts, and in some cases feudalism.

I will also show how the Soviet transition to socialism after Lenin was a direct continuation of Lenin’s policies and in fact was key in defeating the Nazi German invasion.

In “The Leninist Heritage of the Socialist Market Economy” (The Spark #20) C.J. Atkins says that using a socialist market economy to get to socialism can be traced to the policies Lenin introduced in the Soviet Union.

His article was originally published as a longer piece in 2007 in Political Affairs, the CPUSA’s magazine, where some have even suggested that some socialist countries abandoned the market too quickly and should have read Lenin “more accurately” (“Democracy Matters: an interview with Sam Webb”, Political Affairs, Jan. 2004).

Would a new government take over all businesses? Would all products would be centrally distributed to everyone? Would there need to be a transition period, and if so what would such a transition look like?

Would a post-revolution Canada still be socialist if some production were privately owned?

How much private production would mean Canada is still a capitalist country? Would the government plan all production, or is that best left to individual enterprises?

22

The Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries that made up a socialist system of states had ongoing debates about the question of transition and were able to build the world’s first socialist states, but also were later overthrown.

Some in the Communist movement say this is partially because their economy was too centralized and was not run on a profit basis.

The view of the Communist Party of China is that Marxism is, above all ,about production and out-producing the old capitalist system (see “Building socialism with a specifically Chinese character,” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 3, p 48, Jun. 30, 1984), and that profit-oriented private production should continue under socialism to keep growing the economy.

In this article I will show that , although Lenin was in favor of increasing private production for post-war economic recovery, he was at the same time advocating destroying this same small and pri-

IDEOLOGICAL FIGHTBACK

I will also show how this debate was never finally settled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe .Experiments with de-centralized and private production continued.

I will then show how China’s economic policies not only don’t have a Leninist heritage, which even the Chinese leaders disclaim, but are in fact making the transition to socialism increasingly distant.

I will also discuss how it was possible for Atkins and myself to get the almost exact opposite understanding of Lenin based on reading the same texts.

Clarifying the Issues The separate issues of centralization vs. decentralization and direct exchange of products vs. market exchange of commodities are often confused as the same.

The first issue is about whether, under socialism, there should be one unified economic plan, including setting prices centrally, or whether it is better to leave key aspects of

the economy to be determined by individual enterprises.

The second issue is about whether under socialism everyone should directly produce what they can and take from what is socially produced, or whether production should be for sale as commodities to be bought on the market.

Atkins confuses these issues when for example he contrasts production based on supply and demand with “the decree of a central planning authority”. Even under capitalism production and pricing are determined by decrees (of management), see for example R.M. Cyert and J.G. March’s 1955 study of US department-store pricing “Organizational structure and pricing behavior in an oligopolistic market” (American Economic Review, Vol. 45 p 129-139). The issue of whether the decisions are centralized or de-centralized is separate from production of commodities for the market or of products for direct exchange.

As detailed in the book USSR State Industry During the Transition Period by Y. Avdakov and V. Borodin (Progress Publishers, 1977, downloadable for free at http://leninist.biz/en/1977/USITP299/index.ht ml), central planning and pricing in

the Soviet Union during the transition to socialism was an interactive process of individual enterprises formulating plans; elected officials as well as representatives of labor unions, technical experts, and managers reviewing them and setting the overall direction; and a central administration to propose longterm plans and provide oversight.

Retail networks and consumer cooperatives predicted demand, and adjustments to the plan were constantly made based on market events. Workers who thought they could do better than their enterprise’s plan produced counter-plans and exceeded production targets, which is an important example of how central planning does not necessarily hold back local initiatives.

Counter-plans were also featured later in Brezhnev’s 1979 economic reforms, and by 1981 workers at 7% of enterprises adopted counterplans (Ideology and rationality in the Soviet model: a legacy for Gorbachev Kristian Gerner and Stefan Hedlund, Routledge 1989, p. 249).

The erroneous idea that centralized production planning and pricing (not just general planning) is the opposite of production for commodity exchange (market supply and demand) is an enduring one. In 1931 the All Union Conference of Workers in Socialist Industry and in 1932 the Seventeenth Party Congress of the CPSU explicitly rejected the idea that the transition to socialism meant direct product exchange and the disappearance of money, which is a feature of communism and not socialism. Yet as late as 1951 Stalin found it was necessary to answer critics within the Soviet Union who were saying that commodity production (producing for sale on the market) should have been abandoned after nationalization: “Commodity production is older than capitalist production. It existed in slave-owning society, and served it, but did not lead to capitalism. It existed in feudal society and served it, yet, although it prepared some of

the conditions for capitalist production, it did not lead to capitalism.

Why then, one asks, cannot commodity production similarly serve our socialist society for a certain period without leading to capitalism, bearing in mind that in our country commodity production is not so boundless and all-embracing as it is under capitalist conditions, being confined within strict bounds thanks to such decisive economic conditions as social ownership of the means of production, the abolition of the system of wage labor, and the elimination of the system of exploitation?”(J.V. Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, 1952, based on a talk in 1951).

In the same work Stalin answers those who cite Engels’s AntiDuhring to argue that commodity production should be done away with after the means of production have been seized, by pointing out that in the Soviet Union “not all (original italics), but only part of the means of production have been socialized” and that agriculture still included cooperatives and “small and medium owner-producers”.

This also shows how Atkins’s suggestion that the Soviet Union adopted “total public ownership of all sectors” after Lenin is based on clichés rather than facts. Elizabeth Clayton’s paper “Crop response to price in the Soviet Union” in Economic analysis of the Soviet-type system (Judith Thornton, Cambridge University Press Archive, 1976) shows how as late as the period 1953-59 the private sector played a significant role in agriculture and its prices behaved independently of state sector prices for the same crops (p. 360, Table 4: Estimates of crop supply elasticity USSR). continued on next page

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Lenin’s Solution to the Transition to Socialism in Russia The best description and defense Lenin gave of his solution to the transition to socialism is in his pamphlet The Tax in Kind, also translated as The Meaning of the Agricultural Tax, published in April 1921 soon after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The clearest English translation I have found is by R.J. Rutgers published in his book The New Policies of Soviet Russia, available for free download online at http://www.archive.org/details/newpoliciesofsov00leni.

In The Tax in Kind Lenin credits War Communism, which included direct requisition and exchange of goods but also had some private production, with helping defeat the capitalist and landlord counter-revolutionaries in the Civil War, but points out that it was only a temporary measure and could not solve the problems of transitioning to socialism.

Lenin pointed out that there were five production systems in Russia in 1921: (1) subsistence farming, (2) small commodity production, (3) private capitalism, (4) state capitalism (defined by Lenin in the Soviet context as state-owned privately operated production, although there are several definitions), and (5) socialism, and that these five systems were in a life and death struggle. The dominant conflict Lenin pointed out was between small production and private capitalism against state capitalism and socialism. Lenin answered critics 24

who were saying he was capitulating to state capitalism by pointing out: “Between whom is this struggle conducted? Is it between the fourth and the fifth elements in the order in which I have enumerated them above? Certainly not. It is not a struggle between State Capitalism and Socialism, but a struggle of the petty bourgeoisie plus private Capitalism fighting against State Capitalism and Socialism. The petty bourgeoisie resists every form of State interference and control, no matter whether it is State Capitalism or State Socialism. This is an absolutely indisputable fact, and the failure to understand it lies at the root of quite a number of economic errors. ... The speculator is our chief enemy from within, and works against every form of Soviet economic policy. ... We know that the million tentacles of petty bourgeoisism grasp, in many places, certain sections of the workers themselves.

Those who do not see this reveal by their blindness their servitude to the petty bourgeois prejudices.” (p. 1213 of Rutgers)

small and private production to provide goods for agriculture that the socialist sector could not provide until economic recovery, this would lead to the agricultural goods needed to grow industry (2) at the same time use state capitalism and socialism to break up this very same small and private production to make larger-scale production with centralized planning (“national accounting and control”) that would lay the technical basis for socialism, specifically the first stages of electrification.

Lenin is clear in The Tax in Kind about the limited objectives about allowing small production: “In this connection we must also bear in mind that our poverty and ruin is such that we cannot immediately (original italics) establish large State Socialist Factory Production. ... This means that it is necessary to a certain extent to assist the re-establishment of small industry, which does not require machinery, which does not require large Government stocks of raw material, fuel and food, and which can immediately give certain assistance to agriculture and raise its productivity.” (p 24 of Rutgers).

Lenin is clear that once agricultural productivity increases, “State Socialist Factory Production” (original capitalization) would be possible and desirable. Lenin is also clear about using state-owned privately operated capitalism (one form of State Capitalism) to destroy this very same and necessary small and private production:

Lenin’s answer on how socialism could win in this fight between 5 systems has two parts: (1) use

“Everybody now agrees that concessions are necessary, but not everybody fully appreciates the significance of concessions. What are concessions in a Soviet system from the point of view of socioeconomic strata and their inter-relations?

They are a treaty, a block and alliance of the Soviet, i. e., the proletarian, State with State Capitalism, against small private ownership (patriarchal and petty bourgeois). A concessionaire is a capitalist. He (sic) conducts capitalist business for the sake of profits. He (sic) agrees to make a treaty with a proletarian government in order to receive extra profits, or for the sake of securing such raw materials as he otherwise would not be able, or would find it very difficult, to secure. The Soviet Government secures the advantage in the form of the development of productive forces, and an increase in the quantity of products available immediately or within a short period.

We have, say, hundreds of enterprises, mines, forests, etc.; we cannot develop them all, we have not enough machinery, food, or transport. For the same reasons we will develop badly the remaining sections. As a consequence of the bad or insufficient development of large undertakings we get the strengthening of this small private ownership movement with all its consequences: the deterioration of suburban (and later of all) agriculture, frittering away of its productive forces, decline of confidence in the Soviet Government, speculation, and mass and petty (the most dangerous) speculation.

In “planting” State Capitalism in the form of concessions, the Soviet Government strengthens large production against small production, the advanced against the backward, machine production against hand production, it increases the quantity of products of large industry in its hands and strengthens the State regulation of economic relations as a counterbalance to the petty bourgeois anarchic relations. The moderate and cautious introduction of a policy of concessions (to a certain and not very great extent) will rapidly improve the state of industry and the position of the workers and peasants—of course, at the price of a certain sacrifice, the surrender to the capitalists of tens of millions of

poods of most valuable products.”

(Rutgers p 28-30)

Atkins has instead mixed-up the small private production used for economic recovery with the state capitalist production used for developing what the socialist sector could not develop, to say that private production should be used to develop the economy in general.

He does this for example when he quotes Lenin saying starvation should be feared more than the petty bourgeoisie, ignoring that while Lenin did say that he also pointed out the dangers of the petty bourgeoisie as the “chief enemy within” and his solution of destroying it with large-scale state-controlled production.

One of the consequences is that economic recovery gets confused with economic development, the true role of State Capitalism to counter and destroy private and small production is then taken out of the New Economic Policy and seen only as a tool for economic development, and small private production is left alone even after it has served its recovery purpose. A further consequence is that Atkins can then suggest that the “economic model of socialism based on the centralized plan and total public ownership of all sectors may have been instituted prematurely in the past”.

In fact centralized planning and ever-increasing (but never total, as Atkins suggests) public ownership of all sectors was a key feature of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, even though at the same time under the NEP private de-centralized production was used for recovery.

USSR State Industry During the Transition Period details how from Lenin’s time until the collectivization of agriculture there was constant amalgamation of enterprises into trusts and sales syndicates which were with careful preparation involved in increasingly largerscale planning by Union, Republic, and local level Soviets and state agencies.

These changes were begun within a year of the introduction of the NEP, 2-3 years before Lenin died in 1924. The Supreme Economic Council’s Central Commodity Exchange was setup in December 1921. In February 1922 a congress of representatives from textile trusts and raw materials committees of Soviets centralized state textile sales and pricing with the AllRussia Amalgamated Textile Syndicate. At the end of 1923 some managers in the Red Director’s Section of Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Business Club proposed that enterprises have the freedom to open plants and procure raw materials outside of the economic plan, and that trusts of state enterprises be turned into joint-stock companies.

This proposal was not picked up because it was the opposite of Lenin’s solution of centralizing production, as suggested by the authors of USSR State Industry During the Transition Period.

The Philosophical Basis of the Different Approaches to Socialist Transition Lenin’s view of the economy as described in The Tax in Kind, in which five production systems are continued on next page

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in a life and death struggle that can be used to establish the foundations of socialism, is dialectical because the economy develops into a socialist one through the struggle of the competing systems.

The view described by Atkins of private production developing the economy while under state regulation is mechanical, ignoring the antagonism between private and state production other than the regulation of the former by the latter. One of the problems with the mechanical view is that it does not answer the question of how exactly we will transition to socialism, and I will show in this article how this mistake is putting socialism increasingly further out of reach in China.

How would the economy be nationalized once it is fully developed by private production, maybe on a Great Revolutionary Day? Lenin’s approach of taking advantage of private production to jump-start the economy but using state-owned sometimes privately operated production to concentrate and centralize production and planning shows a clear and realistic path to a socialist economy.

one development to socialism from the conditions Russia was in during the socialist revolution.

During the end of World War I and the Civil War, some requisition and direct exchange had to be used, as there was no other way to meet military needs given the ruined state of the economy. After the Civil War small private production was used to jump-start the economy to pre-War levels, while at the same time state-owned production in collaboration with capitalist operators was used to develop large-scale production that would make socialism possible.

Once elements Lenin described as the technical basis for socialism, namely economic recovery especially with agriculture; electrification; the education of technical specialists; and the concentration of industry had been achieved, the transition to socialism could be completed as a continuation of centralizing and planning processes started during the revolution and continued through the NEP years.

The mechanical view leads to the appearance of the different Soviet economic policies of war communism, the NEP, and five-year plans with the collectivization of agriculture as opposite systems, a switch back and forth from centralization to de-centralization and back to centralization again.

Small and private production, including private agriculture, could now be brought into the socialist system. To freeze the process at the stage of economic recovery, with the view that the economy can just keep being developed by private production, misses the point of the transition process to socialism that must bring private production into social ownership.

The dialectical view, illustrated by Lenin’s own words and then the decisions of the Communist Party after his death, show that the three systems were different stages of

The temporary use of state capitalism was not an after-thought to War Communism, but was advocated by Lenin as early as May 5, 1918, early in the Civil War, in his pamphlet

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“‘Left-wing Childishness’ and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality”.

In the same work Lenin criticizes Bukharin, who later wanted to “continue” the NEP after it had served its role, for understanding the NEP as “renouncing the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie” rather than recruiting capitalist experts “into our service against small proprietary disintegration”, and went to say in this Bukharin displayed “a total incapacity to think out the economic tasks of socialist construction”.

Soviet Central Planning Put to the Test Although the discussion of how socialism in the Soviet Union was overthrown is still continuing within and outside the world Communist movement, Mark Harrison of the University of Warwick’s Economics Department asked in a 2001 paper “Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?” He points out that many expected the Soviet Union to collapse as Russia had done in its war with Germany during World War I, even more so because this time the German army was more successful. Harrison shows that the Soviet government’s economic decisions in the mid-1930s, made possible by increased centralized economic planning, accelerated military production beyond what was possible in the 1920s. The Soviet Union was then able to make production decisions in the early 1940s that enabled it to systematically out-produce Germany, even with only 70 percent of the resources. Allied aid to the Soviet Union played a

necessary but minor part, making up only 5 percent of GNP in 1942, and 10 percent in 1943 and 1944.

Soviet and East European Experiments after World War II

Neville Panthaki’s 1998 thesis The Reichsmark & The Ruble discusses how Germany did try to implement central planning in the middle of the war but was unsuccessful. Even so, by using increased centralization to counter enterprise-level decisions Albert Speer increased war producion by 230% with only a 28% increase in labor and 50% increase in iron.

It is outside the scope of this article to discuss in detail some of these experiments, however it is important to realize that the question of centralized vs. decentralization production was continuously debated and different answers were tried out.

While Soviet economic growth for the first half of the 20th century was unprecedented in history according to some scholars (e.g. History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, E.K. Hunt, M.E. Sharpe 2002, p. 448), this does not mean that the central planning and production methods did not have problems that would be pose a bigger problem in the future. Examples from USSR State Industry During the Transition Period of how planning problems were solved in the 1930s include how the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party noted that some of the industrial amalgamations were unwieldy and inefficient.

However, the solution adopted was not to de-centralize or privatize production. Instead, the problems of inefficiency were solved by increased centralization of planning while also re-organizing amalgamations into a greater number of increasingly specialized branches and committees. A different direction was taken in some of the experiments after World War II.

(2) In early 1964 two ready-to-wear clothing manufacturers were released from the government plans in an experiment where they would organize their own sales and supplies and make their own production decisions based on consumer demand (“The “Bolshevichka” and “Mayak” Experiment Spreads Rapidly”, K. Bush, Radio Liberty, Jan. 25 1964, accessed at http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/623-272.shtml). One plan target they

were released from was profitability, which had been set at a norm of 9% but the first firm could only achieve 5.6% at the beginning experiment. The fact that there was a profitability norm to begin with belies the spurious claim that the Soviet Union prematurely abandoned commodity-relations and the market.

(A) Soviet Union Three examples: (1) Under Khrushchev some centralization of planning was reversed, for example in 1955 cooperative farms were released from state plans (“K’s plan to reorganize nature”, Radio Liberty [of the CIA] background report, Dec. 6, 1961, accessed at http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/594-195.shtml), and government min-

istries devolved overall planning into Republic-level organizations (“Gosplan and the Sovnarkhozy”, Radio Liberty background report, Jan. 17 1958, accessed at www.osa.ceu.hu/files/holdings/300/8/3/text/55 -2-272.shtml).

These experiments were based on ideas first proposed by Yvsei Liberman in 1948 during a 12-year economics debate, which involved hundreds of economists. These reforms were opposed by notable leaders such as Aleksandr Zverev, USSR Finance Minister, whose article “Against Oversimplication in Solving Complex Problems” (Questions in Economics, 1962, #11, in Planning, Profit and Incentives in the USSR Vol. 1, The Liberman Discussion, ed. Myron E. Sharpe, International Arts and Sciences Press, 1966, p. 141) pointed out that profit rates cannot be even across enterprises but depend on specific conditions of capital equipment and investment, that basing prices on prices of production which is necessary under capitalism but not under socialism, and that Liberman’s “understanding of continued on next page

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profitability and profit contradicts generally accepted theoretical concepts, according to which profit is the main part of the surplus product created by the workers’ surplus labor” (p. 148). However the Liberman experiments, also known as the Kosygin reforms, were expended to over 700 enterprises. These reforms were ended by 1978 when it became clear that having profit as the only target for enterprises prevented central planning of labor, investment, and (3) The 1986 program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called for enterprises to make their own investment decisions, and for direct ties between “consumer enterprises and manufacturers” (p 28).

background report, Jan. 24, 1974, accessed at www.osa.ceu.hu/files/holdings/300/8/3/pdf/44-3-46.pdf).

(D) Czechoslovakia The Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee’s Action Program of 1968 called for independence of enterprises from the state and for the Communist Party to satisfy various interests rather than the interests of the working class alone.

This experiment was actually started in 1965, and as is well-known, was ended when some Political Bureau members requested Warsaw

(B) German Democratic Republic (East Germany) In 1963 Democratic Germany adopted the “New Economic System” which devolved planning to enterprises without review from the centre (“The GDR since 1949”, Radio Liberty background report, Oct. 16, 1979, accessed at http://www.osa.ceu.hu/files/holdings/300/8/3/t ext/26-9-44.shtml). This system was

ended under Erich Honecker.

Pact intervention (an on-line copy of the request is available at http://li-

(C) Poland

brary.thinkquest.org/C001155/documents/doc6 7.htm). The Czechoslovak econo-

In 1973 20 percent of the factories, employing one million people altogether, were launched into a pilot project where enterprises could make changes to central production plans that their directors thought would increase profitability, and wages were tied to plant efficiency (“Gierek’s three years: entrenchment and reform”, Radio Liberty

mists M. Fremer and F. Kolacek describe some of these reforms and its economic performance in “Reasons for the appearance of revisionism and opportunism in economic theory and practice”, which is Ch. 23 in Right-Wing Revisionism Today (Progress Publishers, 1976, downloadable for free at http://leninist.biz/en/1976/RWRT554/index.txt).

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(E) Hungary In the same year, 1968, Hungary launched the “New Economic Mechanism” (NEM) which again devolved planning to where enterprises could make planning decisions independent of central planning authorities. At the November 1972 plenum of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (HWSP) Central Committee, however, the working class through the labor unions and Marxist-Leninists in the HSWP were able to halt and reverse the reforms in what is called a counterreform, which belies the cliché that the reversals of socialism was not opposed by the working class or that the labor unions were unable to defend the working class. By 1975 Reszo Nyers, the main ideologist of the NEM and HSWP General Secretary, was dropped from the Political Bureau. However, by 1982 the NEM was re-implemented and continued until the overthrow of socialism (Hungary’s negotiated revolution: economic reform, social change, and political succession 1957-1990, by Rudolph L Tokes, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pgs 102 -114). By 1989 15% of industry had been privatized as part of the New Economic Mechanism (“Eastern Europe: the shock of reform”, G.J. Church, D. Benjamin Graff, and W. Mader, Time, Feb. 17, 1992).

A 1970s debate between G. Vorus, a professor and editor who called decentralization “neo-liberalism” and said “market socialism” is incompatible with Marxism, and D. Bonifert of the City Planning Institute who responded by accusing Vorus of name-calling and said that

only indirect regulation from central bodies is effective rather than “administrative intervention”, is covered in a Radio Liberty background report “An Important Controversy on Economic Management”, accessible at http://www.osaarchivum.org. I have found this debate as well as others in the examples cited here to be very similar to the debate going on today.

According to the Swedish article “Hungary, the Laboratory of Socialism – This Little Country Plans for a Thousand Million” by Sven Lindqvist in Dagens Nyheter (Jul. 20, 1986, p. 4, translated into English by the US Joint Publication Research Service, Eastern Europe Report, Aug. 26 1986, downloadable at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/), the initial ideas for Chinese reforms were borrowed from Hungary, and several top Chinese economists spoke fluent Hungarian to study the NEM after their first economic visit in 1979.

(F) Bulgaria From 1966-1968 Bulgaria launched a “New Economic System”, and then in 1979 a “New Economic Approach” in agriculture which was extended to the whole economy in 1982 as a “New Economic Mechanism”, where enterprises would be allowed to keep only profits from economic efficiency and not from price increases; wages would be based on enterprise economic performance and individually reviewed by the work collective; more flexible central planning indexes with supplemental planning at the enterprise and work collective levels; construction design would be competitive; scientific or-

ganizations would be rewarded only on their project’s financial impact; producers would have more direct contact with consumers; ministerial economic organizations would be broken up into independent organizations; municipalities would be funded by municipal enterprises and rent from state enterprises; and collective management agency positions would be elected (“Grisha Filipov on the New Economic Mechanism”, by R. N., Radio Liberty background report, Jan. 26, 1982, accessed at http://www.osa.ceu.hu/files/holdings/300/8/3/t ext/8-10-73.shtml).

Most of the sources I have cited are from Radio Liberty background reports, which are interesting to read also because they complain about “anti-reformers” who wanted to solve economic and planning problems with increased instead of decreased planning, as was done in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

China’s Solution to the Transition to Socialism Perhaps the first person to reject Atkin’s argument that China’s Socialist Market Economy (the Chinese government’s term) has a “Leninist” heritage would be Deng Xiaoping himself, who declared that “none of the works of Karl

Marx or of Lenin offers a guide for building socialism in China, and conditions differ from one country to another, each having its own unique experience.” (excerpt from a talk with President Chissano of Mozambique, May 18, 1988, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 3, p. 171). Conditions certainly vary from country to country but the general problems of the transition to socialism are common ones.

For example, Nepal’s Maoist finance minister Baburam Bhattarai’s 1998 paper “The Politico-economic Rationale for Peoples War In Nepal”, written before his party was elected into power, acknowledges a problem similar to the one Russia and China faced: “...because of the backward semifeudal state and a very low level of development of productive forces in Nepal, the principal form of the new production relations would not be socialism at the outset but of a capitalistic type and only after going through a transitional stage that a socialist transformation would be carried out. In the New Democratic stage big and basic industries and financial companies would be under social ownership of the state, some of the larger means of production would be jointly owned by the state and the individual and in agriculture, the largest sector of the economy, there will be private ownership by the peasants and in small and medium industry and trade there will be ownership by the industrialists and traders.”

Both Lenin and Deng advocated the use of foreign investment and private production to grow the economy, and both claimed that it would not lead to capitalism as long as, as Atkins points out, the commanding heights of the economy were kept socialist. However, as discussed above Lenin saw the continued on next page

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transition to socialism as the growth of state-controlled largescale production as well as increased central planning to actually get to socialism. China’s policies have gone in the opposite direction, where small enterprises are proliferating instead of being consolidated into larger state-controlled enterprises.

The National Bureau of Statistics of China’s yearbook, available on the internet, shows for 1999 data that “super” and large-scale enterprises made up 5% of all enterprises, whereas by 2006 large enterprises were 1% of all enterprises (there was no longer a category of “super”). In1999 43% of gross industrial output value was produced by “super” and large-scale enterprises, but in 2006 it had fallen to 35%. Enterprises funded by foreigners in 1999 made up 1% of all enterprises and 16% of gross industrial output value, whereas in 2006 they made up 10% of all enterprises and 21% of output value. (“Main Economic Indicators of All Industrial Enterprises”). According to the OECD’s China Summary for 2005, the private sector’s share in value added in businesses grew from 53.5% in 2001 to 63.3% in 2003, and economy-wide from 50.4% to 59.2%.

Publicly owned sectors of the economy are being chipped away, for example in the steel industry in 2007 Arcelor Mittal became the first foreign company to take control (73%) of a Chinese steelmaker, allowed by the government because technically the Chinese company is registered in Bermuda, even though all of its steelmaking operations are in China (“Arcelor Mittal buys control of Chinese steel mill”, A. Leung, Reuters, Nov. 22, 2007).

In agriculture China has also moved in the opposite direction, where local governments have expropriated land not for collective or state farming but for selling usage rights to private developers for municipal revenue, (“Peasant land tenure security in China’s transitional economy”, M. RosatoStevens, Boston University International Law Journal, Vol. 26, Spring 2008, p 108). A 2004 constitutional amendment made private property inviolable (“Private property amendment hailed by Chinese”, Xinhua, Jan. 12, 2004).

In contrast to the transition to socialism in the Soviet Union, these trends move China further and further from being able to achieve socialism. The trends are showing an economy where small and private

production is not only dominant, as Lenin described Russia in 1921, but where private production is winning the struggle over other forms of production, which is the danger Lenin warned about when he proposed enlisting State Capitalism to counter the small production that was necessary at the time for economic recovery. Arguably the government may still control the commanding heights, but the economy is moving further and further away from socialism.

Marxism-Leninism cannot be simply reduced to developing the economy through private production, but shows how private and public ownership have an interactive and antagonistic relationship that must be used to develop a socialist economy and that production problems can be solved with correspondingly increasingly centralized planning rather than de-centralization.

The mechanical interpretation of Lenin advocated by Atkins and others that relies on de-centralized private production for economic development will push socialism further away rather than showing a realistic transition to socialism.

Asad Ali is a Canadian Marxist economist

The National Council of Communists declares its solidarity with the Cuban Five We demand their immediate release and return to Cuba without restrictions and with the full acknowledgement of their heroism and sacrifice for the Cuban and American people.

We salute their courageous efforts in the struggle for justice.

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AMIRI revolutionary sentiment expressed by our class always penetrates individual members as the cultural expression of love such is the lexicography of peoples science nurtured and cultivated by the wordsmith amiri baraka maturity, often associated with advancing chronological age, has an inverse relationship with creative energy few mortals transcend this maxim. our stars burn brightly, shooting across the sky, leaving only the memory of a tail this one is a comet. prophecy informs us of the orbital nature comets possess. describing gravity on a universal scale revolution is the calibration of gravity on a human scale, communication articulating the degrees of g-force invested to attain justice poetry pronouncing the syllables of truth to make the promise of death a courageous consequence of social change comes the artist. mawkish sensibility invades the workers realm seeping in through cracks too microscopically thin to perceive Wall Street Speculators As Wall Street speculators are busy manipulating another overvalued market,workers in the U.S. are still trying to recover from the last bubble of 5 years ago.U.S. corporations and finance capital are sitting on tons of cash in offshore accounts and monies invested abroad to raise profit rates and to avoid the U.S. tax system.

The NCC salutes Comrade Amiri Baraka and expresses its condolences to his family and friends with revolutionary solidarity

diversion its intent, reaction its chaotic result, havoc played on discipline learned. myth supplants truth ripping language fabric apart it is the artists razor that makes this boil bleed. singing our song of love, supreme, announcing through an elevated riff, the notes unplayable. the critics eye, the debater's trap, the philosopher's quiver of ideas in struggle along side the mass of humanity. we hold these truths to be evident in our interests. the power to say no to the few exploiting the many. the audacity to intend a dictatorship of working class interests. a life dedicated to the profundity of purposeful curiosity. a fatal commitment to love. a man, music, syncopated rhythm of the off beat. yes, always this answer to the plaintiff question from youth, why? yes, and again leading by example. responsible, paternal, grandpaternal. 79 years. a short comet with a long tail. coming back.

Stephen Paulmier

Letters I’ve heard of all kinds of descriptions of the unnecessary and blighting crisis including the “Zombie Theory” where corporations and companies making less profits are “slowing growth” rather than creating important stability for workers and their families.Now,even those practices abroad are under scrutiny.

Developing countries that were

doing better due to U.S. investments are now going under due to decreasing monies from abroad seeking higher profit rates elsewhere.For U.S. workers though,this still is arbitrary as incomes stagnate or disappear.

Due to pressure on the housing market to show growth, workers rents are increasing as are property continued on next page

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values. Its just another looming disaster for the working class.More and more workers in the U.S. are being forced out of the housing market and they are less able to pay for food and rent.

Wages haven’t gone up substantially in 40 years and the minimum wage has not doubled to make up for the losses that have been incurred under the sorry parade of Administrations and Congresses.Housing is only speculation and investment.Many low paid workers in places like Wall Mart and nursing homes have to apply for food stamps and section 8 housing.

This country has more wealth than created by any nation at anytime in the past and yet there are at least 50

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million below the poverty line whose numbers grow every day.

What happened to massive federal job and welfare programs needed to combat poverty during recessions?Who prospers from unemployment and homelessness?

It is very disturbing that people have been denied a critical voice in Washington.Where is our leadership in the communities and unions?Have they all turned tail like the CPUSA and Sam Webb?What do we have to do or what is to be done?

Fredrick Douglas said,”agitate!agitate!agitate”! We need to organize.We must educate and form picket lines.We must build a real workers movement with a true Communist or

Worker’s Party.We must be involved as activists on the streets in a true sense.

We can not wait for things to happen in other countries. We must create a fightback here.Things are never going to be right abroad until they are corrected here at home.The US is the number one imperialist country. Solidarity is proven with a commitment to change this country and resist U.S.wars abroad. This is our number one priority.

It is time we begin to construct a solid movement built with honesty and a commitment to create socialism in the U.S. as only Communists know how to do.

Kelly McConnell Los Angeles

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On the Death of Nelson Mandela All the bourgeois press has been crying crocodile tears over the death of Nelson Mandela, the longtime leader of the South African National Congress (ANC) and first president of post-apartheid South Africa. But they mostly neglect to mention that Mandela was arrested in 1962 based on intelligence information from an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency inside the ANC, that the ANC was considered a terrorist organization, and that the U.S. government had to grant a waiver for him to come to the U.S. for the first time in 1990, when he was given a hero’s welcome in the streets of Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and elsewhere in New York and around the country. They also did not like the fact that South Africa’s liberation was aided by other antiimperialist and revolutionary countries, such as Libya under Muammar Gadhafi and Cuba under Fidel Castro, aid that Mandela continued to extol during his visit to the U.S. While they hypocritically decry Mandela’s 27 years in prison, they do not mention such political prisoners in the U.S. as Mumia AbuJamal, who has already spent 32 years in prison, Leonard Peltier now imprisoned for 37 years, Oscar Lopez Rivera imprisoned for 32 year, Affia Siddiqui, captured in Pakistan in 2003 and kidnapped to the U.S. where she is serving a sentence of 86 years, David Gilbert imprisoned for 32 years, or Lynne Stewart who has already served over 4 years of a 10 year sentence.

The bourgeois press also praised Mandela for “peacefully freeing”

South Africa from white minority rule, while condemning President Mugabe of Zimbabwe who not only freed his country from white minority rule through armed struggle, but went on, at the end of the 20-year period mandated by the British-imposed Lancaster Agreement, to take over white-owned plantations and divide them up among landless African peasants.

For this Zimbabwe has been placed under sanctions by the U.S. and Western Europe, and Mugabe himself has been demonized by the bourgeois press and its Trotskyite hangers-on.

There are further reasons why the bourgeois press praises Mandela and the ANC government. The agreements ending apartheid in South Africa, accepted by the ANC, included clauses saying that the major corporations in that country, owned by white South Africans and British and U.S. capitalists, could not be nationalized. At best, a few members of the African elite were put on the Boards of Directors of these corporations (similarly to allowing token representatives of unions on the Boards of Directors of U.S. corporations, such as Doug Fraser, then head of the UAW, who served on Chrysler’s Board of Directors). In doing this they violated the provisions of the Freedom Charter, adopted by the ANC in 1955, which stated: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;” and that “Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those

who work it to banish famine and land hunger.” (http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=72) The fact that there has been no genuine change in white imperialist property relations in South Africa has led to the continuing poverty of the African masses, which has led to increasing revolts in recent years, especially among the miners.

The ANC, while it played the largest role in the fight against white minority rule, was never the only liberation movement. One cannot forget the Black Consciousness Movement, founded by Steve Biko, who was killed in prison in 1977 by the apartheid regime, or the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the South African Communist Party (SACP), with the support and solidarity of the Comintern, took up a revolutionary position, calling for an “independent native [Black] South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic with full, equal rights for all races.” (See the Resolution of the Comintern on the South African Question, at: www.RedStarPublishers.org/sacp1928.doc) However, for decades the SACP, following the revisionist line of “peaceful transition,” has in my opinion become a thoroughly revisionist party that has abandoned the fight against the imperialist bourgeoisie in South Africa. In this connection it is worth examining the pamphlet by Joe Slovo, then General Secretary of the SACP, “Has Socialism Failed?” available at: http://www.sacp.org.za/docs/history/failed .html continued on next page

Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

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The gains of bourgeois democracy, in oppressed nations as well as in imperialist countries, are important to the working class because they clear the way for the further development of the class struggle, as Lenin frequently pointed out. This is clearly seen in the Black liberation movement in the U.S. Here, it was particularly after the formal defeat of Jim Crow with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965,

that the movement moved beyond the demand for peaceful reforms. It was the Harlem rebellion of 1964, the rebellions in Detroit and Watts in 1967, and the hundreds of rebellions that broke out throughout the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that marked the high-points of the movement here.

The petty-bourgeois left in the U.S., including the anti-imperialist left, confines itself to praising

Mandela, while making no criticism of the accommodations made by him and the ANC with the white-led ruling class there. This is another example of their failure to provide any leadership in training proletarian and anti-imperialist revolutionaries in understanding current events along the road to a socialist revolution in the United States.

George Greene New York, NY

Art Young - The Masses, 1912-1918

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Against Opportunism by the American CP Factionalists There are many personalities that belong to the Webb-DellaPiana faction that has usurped power. but don't speak up. They seem to be intellectually lazy or intimidated by these thugs. People who had shown solidarity with the beleaguered Soviet communists in the former USSR (like the organization U.S. Friends of the Soviet People ) now go along with the anti soviet positions of the current mis-leadership, Webb and company! These folks who instinctively knew the truth about the importance of Soviet reality, now no longer see the need to defend the Soviet experience. Our discipline is to study all aspects of Marxism-Leninism, especially the barbarity of capitalism! Now the Webbite factional group has decided that the best way to a better society is through ‘a more humane type of capitalism’ by supporting one of the bourgeois parties. Now

these renegades are calling for the working class to accommodate the class struggle by ‘begging for crumbs’ from the table of the capitalists. These are just ‘go along to get along’ clichés. Without taking a vanguard role in any day to day struggle of working people, these “born again” socialdemocrats have hitched their star to the Obama Administration and have become the tail of the Labor Aristocracy .Where once communists were the leaders of militant rank and file caucuses in the trade union movement (Trade Unionists for Action & Democracy- TUAD) now the factionalists are asking communists to be cheer leaders for the AFLCIO hierarchy. The new policy is to replace militancy with “apple pie and Mom” platitudes. It is much easier to support social justice movements that are sanctioned by the petite-bourgeois liberal

establishment, rather than organizing from scratch militant formations such as the Unemployed Councils of the past.

In other words, link up to a larger movement where all the ground work has already been done and just tag on under the guise of some amorphous “coalition”. Thus, the perception to the outside world and party rank and file is that the “Party” is an equal partner in a ‘grand coalition’. The reality loudly proclaims that because of dwindling numbers, the “Party” has become irrelevant and fails to have any effect on social justice or labor coalitions. I wonder what attracts people to a communist party when they don't want to be Communists, it must be the decorative coffee mugs and lapel pins.

Joseph Hancock Los Angeles, CA.

EDITORIAL 21st Century Ideological Struggle How to define the present leadership of the CPUSA. They fall victim to the seepage of bourgeois, “no struggle” ideology. Their company includes Jay Lovestone in the 20s, Browder in the 40s, Gates in the 50s, Healey in the 60s, Rubin and Davis in the 80s and Gorbachev in the 90s. Sam Webb and Libero Della Piana strut this revisionism into the twenty-first century now. Their script is the same, soft peddle the class struggle

and liquidate the Communist Party.

Their faulty reasoning creates in our cadre a confusion between loyalty to a structural form (the party) and loyalty to an ideology (Marxism/Leninism). In this case we have pretenders, holding high the torch of progress using the reputation of the working class struggle (the name Communist Party) to espouse a logic wedded with the politic of the bourgeoisie.

Tailing the corrupt, Taft/Hartley

‘leadership’ of the AFL/CIO, married to the Democratic Party machine unable to raise even a whisper of critique to the largest sellout of worker equity in history and the brutal lethal repression of world wide impoverished populations by US imperialism.

The present mis-leadership of the CPUSA stands naked, unable to blush they are so thoroughly empty of working class content.

Editorial Board Volume 2 Issue 1 / Winter 2014

35

Wake Up to the Smell of Class Struggle

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