Pagad – The Gangster’s Enemy (on YouTube)

From Pagad (online):

In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Mindful of our duty to the Creator as a Community, and in conformity with:

“You are the best of people evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right,

forbidding what is wrong and believing in the Creator…”

~ Al Quran: Surah 3 Verse 110

Therefore, all those persons who surrender themselves to the will of God are welded into a Community and the Society comes into being. Thus, this is an ideological Society; a Society radically different from those, which arise from accidents or races, colour or country. This Society is the result of a deliberate choice, commitment, effort and sacrifice.

Accordingly, it is the outcome of a contract, which takes place between human beings and their Creator.  Those who enter into this contract undertake to recognise and accept God as their Sovereign; His Guidance as Supreme; and His Injunctions as absolute Law. They further undertake to accept, without question, reservation or doubt, His classification of good and bad, right and wrong, the permissible and the prohibited.

In recognition and acceptance hereof, we hereby pledge to honour our Contract with Our Creator…

Gangsterism and Drugs are menaces and should be eradicated!

We all CAN & MUST do something about it!

Let’s organise ourselves and protect our children from the dangers they face every day!

Join other neighbours and establish a PAGAD Branch in your area.

Background Information (from www.sahistory.org):

People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) came into being in 1996 when communities on the Cape Flats, Cape Town decided to form an anti-crime organisation. The aim was to fight the drugs and violence plaguing their area. PAGAD began as a multi-religious organisation, but because its dominant membership was of Muslim people, it became an Islamic front. Later, PAGAD developed anti-government and Western sentiments, as

the organisation believes that the South African government poses a threat to Islamic values. It also aims to create better political representation for South African Muslims.

Due to its controversial vigilante tactics, the organisation has several front names like Muslims Against Global Oppression (MAGO) and Muslims Against Illegitimate Leaders (MAIL) under which it launches anti-

Western campaigns. PAGAD’s military wing is called G-Force, for Gun Force, and functions as small groups or cells. It is believed that G-Force has been responsible for acts of sabotage and violence akin to terrorism.

PAGAD has been implicated in episodes of urban terrorism in Cape Town since 1998, especially 9 different explosions in 2000. The groups attacks synagogues, gay nightclubs, moderate Muslims, tourist attractions and restaurants with Western associations, like the Planet Hollywood bombing in Cape Town on 25 August 1998. PAGAD denied any involvement in the event after subsequent raids on several members’ homes within 20 minutes of the explosion.

The organisation first came into the spotlight in 1996 when members shot and set alight Rashad Staggie, a notorious Cape Flats drug dealer. PAGAD felt that the police were not doing enough to stop drug related crimes in their communities and decided to take matters into their own hands.

Shots were fired at a group of Muslim men who converged on the Staggie residence and some of the vigilantes were wounded. Staggie tried to escape by car, but was prevented from doing so. He was shot and someone threw a firebomb at him and he burst into flames. Police officers doused the fire, but several masked men fired further shots and finally killed Staggie in a widely televised drama. Benny Gool, a photographer at the scene, captured the killing on film and had to go into hiding for fear of attacks from PAGAD. He was also not prepared to turn his footage over to the police. Rashied Staggie, the brother of the executed drug dealer, fled to a safer location, but swore revenge at his brother’s funeral.

It is estimated that PAGAD has several hundred members with G-Force probably consisting of less than 50 people. There are allegations that it has relationships with Middle Eastern fundamentalist groups, as well as with Osama bin Laden.

In 1998 the South African Police launched Operation Saladin, a campaign to curb the rampant vigilantism PAGAD was practicing. Two policemen laid charges of intimidation after they allegedly received death threats as a result of the operation.

It feels bad that the MDC today still preaches that the sanctions do not exist in Zimbabwe. It makes sad reading.

An undisputable fact is that, in general, black people are the indigenous people of Zimbabwe.

Let me borrow from an inspiring speech I have read elsewhere. Today I feel good to be a Zimbabwean led by people who would not tolerate oppression.

I owe the success of this country to the hills and valleys, the mountains, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that President Mugabe led, the patriots that Joshua Nkomo took to the battle and the soldiers that Josiah Tongogara taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom. I have learnt that the land reform process needed no patience.

Zanu-PF under the leadership of President Mugabe has done it all — it has proved to all Africans that Africa is capable of determining its own destiny.

Now that we are in some kind of a coalition government, Zanu-PF must be very careful to keep the spirit of the revolution alive because we know that the struggle for democracy did not start in 2000 as the MDC wants the nation to believe. The nation cannot be fooled.

President Mugabe is a land reformist, an anti-imperialist and a pan-Africanist of the highest order, leaving the international donors and MDC impaled on the horns of a dilemma.

History and events happening are testimony to this.

Zanu-PF has a proud history which we cannot afford to forget and as a Zimbabwean this is an achievement which I am proud of, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.

Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product of land reclamation is the unique creation of Zimbabwean hands and Zimbabwean minds.

But it also contributed to the loss of our mothers and fathers who today remain silent in their tombs. This should be a constant reminder to us.

Long live total sovereignty and long live President Mugabe.

1) There should not be an unnecesarily early development of sexual activity in the proletarian environment

2) It is necessary to abstain from sexual activity before marriage; marriage is to be had only when social and biological maturity is reached (20-25 y.o.)

3) Sexual connection is only a final stage of deep multi-faceted sympathy and attachment to the object of sexual love

4) Sexual intercourse must only be a final link in the chain of deep and complicated issues which connect the lovers during the current moment

5) Sexual intercourse must not repeat often

6) Do not change the sexual object often. Less sexual diversity

7) Love must be monogamous, monandric (one wife, one husband)

8 ) With each sexual intercourse, it is necessary to always remember of possible birth of a child — basically remember about offspring

9) Sexual selection must be built on the line of social [class] revolutionary proletarian expediency. No flirting, courting, coquetry and other elements of sexual conquest must be a part of intersexual relationships

10) There must not be jealousy

11) There must not be sexual perversions

12) Society [class], in the interests of revolutionary expediency, has a right to intervene with the sexual life of its members: the sexual should always obey the social [class], never be a problem for the latter, serve it in all ways.

The Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) has recently launched a new section to its website, entitled “Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism.”

Though not comprehensive, it does provide a decent collection of works documenting the growth of the Anti-Revisionist movement, its history, as well as a few primary texts. Still a work in progress, but definitely a worthwhile resource.

You can visit the “Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism” by clicking on the link above. The site has also been linked in our “Marxist-Leninist Resources” section (left-hand column).

Anybody vaguely familiar with Marxism-Leninism knows that our position on these questions should be determined by close, thoughtful scientific analysis, and not as opportunities to simply regurgitate tired slogans or maxims. In fact, maxims are antithetical to Marxism. Denouncing the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran is in no way, shape or form different from endorsing US imperialism. To say that you support peaceful regime change inside Iran, but oppose US imperialism, is a contradiction. The United States, through its foreign intelligence services, in the past have shown absolutely no qualms when it comes to interfering in the internal affairs of a country it deems “hostile.” 

Similarly, the expression of perceived “discontent” by these riotous protesters in Iran’s capital are fomented in part by a desire for less stringent government regulations on the economy (a desire for economic liberalization) and in part fomented by British and US intelligence services (Iranian judiciary organs have already exposed the degree to which British and French intelligence serves have attempted to undermine the Islamic Republic following the June 12 Presidential election). Therefore, supporting this movement is disadvantageous to the Iranian proletariat, who at the current time, is bound to the Iranian bourgeoisie in a defensive struggle against imperialism.

Likewise, there is nothing more obnoxious than when self-described Marxists mistakenly take the view that only those organizations or Parties that fight directly for socialism should be supported. This is idealist and fundamentally in contrast to Marxist dialectical materialism. Stalin argued this point perfectly in Foundations of Leninism, where he argued that the anti-imperialist struggle of the Emirate of Afghanistan versus British imperialism was progressive, in that it both undermined contemporary British imperialism and furthered the cause of proletarian revolution. It should also be known that Stalin argued that the national struggle of the people of Afghanistan should be supported by workers, independent of any perceivedreactionary tendencies within the Emirate’s ideological position. This is how a Marxist analyzes geo-political events.

It’s on this same token that genuine Marxist-Leninists support the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran, the Taliban mujahideen resistance forces in occupied Afghanistan, Islamic resistance to US interference in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, national resistance forces in occupied Iraq and anywhere else where national resistance against an imperialist aggressor takes form.

Didn’t Lenin advocate that socialism can only be achieved through internationalist revolution? Wasn’t Trotsky’s permanent revolution more in line with true, classical Leninism?

Trotskyite falsifiers have often contended that Leon Trotsky’s so-called theory of “permanent revolution,” was wholly consistent with Lenin’s position on whether or not socialism could be constructed in one country. This myth has permeated through Trotskyite circles for decades, despite being categorically proven false long ago.

If we go straight to the works of Lenin himself, we can see that indeed, the very notion of the possibility of socialism in one countries is 100 per cent consistent with the ideas expressed by Marx, Engels and Lenin.

“…Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world.” (On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, 1915, V.I. Lenin).

Lenin further demonstrated the possibility of establishing socialism in one country during  a1918 speech before the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet on May 14, where he said:

“I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.” (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.).

Another historical obfuscation committed far too regularly by the Trotskyites, is the claim that Stalin falsely believed that the “final victory” of socialism could be attained within the Soviet Union, without proletarian revolution abroad. Stalin himself smashed this revisionist lie in his own words, when clarifying the problems involved in this particular question:

1. The problem of the internal relations in our country, i.e., the problem of overcoming our own bourgeoisie and building complete Socialism; and

2. The problem of the external relations of our country, i.e., the problem of completely ensuring our country against the dangers of military intervention and restoration.

To the first problem, Stalin correctly noted that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the socialization of the means of production (and the corresponding relations to production within the Soviet Union), demonstrated the possibility of the victory of socialist construction in one country.

“We have already solved the first problem, for our bourgeoisie has already been liquidated and Socialism has already been built in the main. This is what we call the victory of Socialism, or, to be more exact, the victory of Socialist Construction in one country.”

By final victory, Stalin clarified that the Great October Bolshevik Revolution would require international revolution as a full guarantee against capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union:

“…the support of our revolution by the workers of all countries and still more, the victory of the workers in at least several countries, is a necessary condition for fully guaranteeing the first victorious country against attempts at intervention and restoration; a necessary condition for the final victory of socialism.” (On the Final Victory of Socialism, 1938, J.V. Stalin)

FMP also created a video that addresses this question (see below):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

–Originally Published at NorthStar Compass

The ideological struggle of the Albanian communists against revisionism began already in the postwar period, in a harsh confrontation with Tito’s revisionist clique.

Winston Churchill, in his Memoirs, recalled how he was directly interested in placing Tito and his group in the service of the imperialist powers.

In May of 1944, he personally met Tito in Naples; in his Memoirs, Churchill wrote that Tito was ready to state publicly that “communism would not be established in Yugoslavia.”

During the war there were 140,000 members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and another 360,000 before the middle of 1948. Tens of thousands of kulaks and bourgeois joined the party. The party did not have a normal internal life, it did not have internal political discussions, and the leaders were not elected but co-opted.

In June of 1948, Information Bureau of the Communist Parties (Cominform), which was made up of eight communist parties, published a resolution which criticized the Yugoslav party. The resolution states that, starting from a bourgeois nationalist position, The Yugoslav Party had split the united socialist front against imperialism. “Such a line cannot but lead to the degeneration of Yugoslavia into an ordinary bourgeois republic.”

“Tito unleashed a mass purge. All the Marxist-Leninist elements were expelled from the Party. Two members of the Central Committee, Zujovic and Hebrang, were arrested in April of 1948. General Arso Jovanic, chief of the partisan army, was arrested and killed, as was General Slavo Rodic.”¹

The Times reported on numerous arrests of communists who supported the Cominform resolution and considered that the number of people imprisoned was . between 100,000 and 200,000.

Even before the split with the Soviet Union and the countries of people’s democracy had been completed, huge quantities of economic and military from the imperialist powers, particularly the United States, began to arrive in Yugoslavia. Between 1948 and 1970. the government of the United States invested $7 billion in “socialist Yugoslavia.”

In his work, Imperialism and the Revolution, the Secretary General of the Albanian Party of Labor, Enver Hoxha, stated: “This aid was supplied only on condition that the country would develop on the capitalist road. The imperialist bourgeoisie was not against Yugoslavia maintaining its outward socialist forms. On the contrary, it was greatly in its interest that Yugoslavia should keep its outward socialist color, because in this way it would serve as a more effective weapon in the struggle against socialism and the liberation movements.”²

The future of Socialism-Communism cannot be separated from the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!

Enver Hoxha recalled that in 1945, the Titoites entered the region that had been liberated by Albanian and Kosova fighters to eliminate the national liberation councils and to launch mass terror against the Albanians.

“These unprecedented reprisals of the Titoites quite rightly caused a great popular revolt which put the “new Yugoslavia” in doubt, because the people of Kosova were not seeing any difference from what they had suffered under the “old Yugoslavia….

“The terror imposed on the Albanians steadily mounted. Masses of people were imprisoned, killed, tortured and thrown into the terrible concentration camps of Rankovic.”³

Moreover, Tito had annexationist plans in the confrontation with Albania, which was to become – according to his protégés – the seventh Yugoslav republic.

To this end he was successful in infiltrating his agents into the Political Bureau of the Albanian Communist Party (which later took the name of Party of Labor of Albania). These agents presented a proposal of realizing “a economic and military union with Yugoslavia,” of course under the leadership of Tito.

After the plot of the Titoites in Albania was thwarted, a meeting took place in Bucharest in which Enver Hoxha, in the presence of the representative of the Rumanian Communist Party, Dej, met the representative of the Bolshevik Party, Andrey Vyshinsky.

“While pointing out that behind the efforts for a “Balkan Federation” lurked the chauvinist aims of the Tito clique to dominate the Balkans, I outlined to the comrades the anti-Marxist chauvinist policy pursued by the Belgrade leadership towards Kosova and the other Albanian regions in Yugoslavia, both during and after the war…

“In the meeting I made it quite clear to the comrades present that during this struggle our Party had very frequently found itself alone, and therefore, needed to be and should have been helped to a greater extent, more openly and with greater trust.

“As soon as I had finished, we took a break, after which Vyshinsky gave the conclusions of the meeting.” Among other things, he said: “We are not mistaken in the estimation we have made of the activity of these renegades and draw conclusions that this is a protracted political and ideological struggle. The Bolshevik Party approves the correct actions and persistent struggle in defense of Marxism-Leninism by the Communist Party of Albania, its Central Committee and Comrade Enver Hoxha. We must bear in mind that this clique will go even further in its hostile actions against our socialist camp. The Titoites will commit… provocations to deceive opinion inside and outside Yugoslavia and to justify their policy of betrayal and links with the capitalist states.”⁴

The Struggle against Khrushchev Revisionism

In February of 1956 the infamous 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took place in Moscow, the so-called congress of “de-Stalinization.”

Enver Hoxha commented on the coup d’état of the Khrushchevites:

“The ‘new’ leaders, who were the same as in the past, with the exception of Stalin, were posing as liberals in order to say to the people: ‘Breathe freely, you are free, you are in genuine democracy because the tyrant and the tyranny has been eliminated…

“The cult of Khrushchev was being built up by the tricksters, the liberals, the careerists, the lickspittles and the flatterers. The great authority of Stalin, based on his immortal work, was undermined inside and outside the Soviet Union. His place and authority was usurped by that charlatan, clown and blackmailer.”⁵

Analyzing the cause that led to Nikita Khrushchev’s coup d’état, Enver Hoxha stated that: “After the Great Patriotic War some negative phenomena appeared in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union….

“This party had a great reputation, and had achieved colossal successes in the course of its work, but at the same time it had started to lose the revolutionary spirit and was becoming infected by bureaucracy and routine. The Leninist norms, the teachings of Lenin and Stalin, had been transformed by the apparatchiki into stale platitudes and hackneyed slogans devoid of operative worth….

“It was not the ‘wrong’ line of Stalin which held up the progress. On the contrary, this line was correct and Marxist-Leninist, but it was frequently applied badly and even distorted and sabotaged by enemy elements….

“These elements disorganized the revolution while organizing the counter-revolution, displayed ’severity’ against internal enemies in order to spread fear and terror in the party, the state and the people….

“If a detailed analysis is made of the political, ideological and organizational directives of Stalin in the leadership and organization of the party, the war and the work, in general, mistakes of principle will not be found, but if we bear in mind how they were distorted by the enemies and applied in practice, we will see the dangerous consequences of these distortions and it will become obvious why the party began to become bureaucratic… The party became covered by a heavy layer of rust, by political apathy, thinking mistakenly that the head, the leadership, operates and solves everything on its own….

“The apparatus and the officials became ‘omnipotent’, ‘infallible’ and operated in bureaucratic ways under the slogan of democratic centralism…. There is no doubt that in this way the Bolshevik Party lost its former vitality. It lived on with correct slogans, but they were only slogans; it carried out orders, but did not act on its own initiative….

“Careerism, servility, charlatanism, unhealthy cronyism, anti-proletarian morality, etc., began to spread. These evils eroded the party from within, smothered the feelings of class struggle and sacrifice and encouraged seeking the ‘good life’, with comforts, with privileges, with personal gains and the least possible work and effort….

“Not only did the apparatuses misinform Stalin, and bureaucratically deform his correct directives, but they had created such a situation among the people and in the party that even when Stalin went among the masses of the party and the people, to the extent that his age and health permitted, they did not inform him about the shortcomings and mistakes which were occurring, because the apparatus had implanted the opinion amongst the communists and the masses that ‘we must not worry Stalin’.”⁶

Once in power, the Khrushchevites devoted themselves to consolidating that power not only in the USSR but also in the other socialist countries, where they were pre-occupied with clamping down on all those who would not openly line up with the new course.

Meanwhile, they were preparing the split in the international communist movement, attacking any party that had not embraced the revisionist platform of the 20th Congress. In 1960 some differences arose between the CPSU and the Chinese Communist Party, The CPSU proposed to hold a meeting in Bucharest of the parties of the socialist camp to fix a date and place for a future conference of all the communist parties.

Having received the invitation, the Party of Labor of Albania sent one of its leaders, Hysni Kapo, to Bucharest to discuss the date of the future conference and to participate, as had been agreed, in a free exchange of views on the problems of the international situation.

But the Khrushchevites really had in mind something very different; they intended to adopt a series of decisions in order to go “all united” to the conference, all united behind the Khrushchevites’ theses.

The meeting in Bucharest had been convened to fix a date but it had been transformed into a crusade. Khrushchev insisted that during the meeting they should discuss the differences between the USSR and China, in a manner that was convenient to him.

Khrushchev maintained that they should make a decision at that meeting and asked the other parties to take a position on the “grave mistakes of China.”

The Soviets quickly distributed voluminous material against China and resolved to convoke a meeting some hours later of all the parties to condemn the CPC as “anti-Marxist.”

The Party of Labor of Albania was firmly opposed to that maneuver.

“In the former meeting which was organized by Khrushchev, Comrade Hysni Kapo, in the name of the Party and on the basis of detailed directives, which we sent him every day and frequently twice a day, attacked Khrushchev and the others for their anti-Marxist aims and the conspiratorial methods which they used, defended the Communist Party of China and opposed the continuation of such a meeting.

“Khrushchev did not expect this. In the meetings which were held he talked all the time, stamping his feet and thumping his fist, became angry and spluttered with indignation. But Comrade Hysni Kapo…, with his characteristic coolness and courage, not only did not yield, but gave Khrushchev as good as he got with his cutting replies.”

In his many speeches, Khrushchev “always found the occasion to attack our Party and its representative….”

“‘We cannot agree at all with Mao Zedong and the Chinese, nor they with us. Do you want us to send you, Comrade Kapo, to reach agreement with them?’ Khrushchev asked Comrade Hysni on another occasion.

‘I do not take orders from you,’ replied Hysni, ‘I take orders only from my Party.’

“Nothing could make him budge from the courageous, revolutionary, principled stand of the Party. He never flickered an eyelash at the screams and the pressures of the charlatan Nikita Khrushchev.”⁷

After Bucharest, the Soviets through their ambassador in Tirana and their agents in the KGB, intensified their pressure and sabotage in the confrontation with Albania.

Violating all the agreements they had signed, they even tried to starve the Albanian people to force them to submit. They refused to furnish grains in a moment in which the reserves of bread in Albania were barely enough for 15 days.

Albania was forced to draw on its own hard currency reserves to buy grain from France.

The provocations became increasingly open.

The Soviet and Bulgarian ambassadors in Yugoslavia applauded Rancovic when, at a rally in Sremska Mitrova, called Albania “a hell enclosed with barbed wire”; the Bulgarians published a map of the Balkans in which “by mistake” Albania was included within the boundaries of Yugoslavia. In Warsaw, Gomulka’s men forced their way into the Albanian embassy and tried to kill the ambassador.

At the Moscow Conference, the battle began in the preparatory commission, which was to prepare the draft of the declaration of the Conference.

Suslov led the work, trying to have the theses of the 20th Congress included in the draft of the declaration.

The Albanian delegation particularly attacked Khrushchev’s thesis according to which imperialism had been tamed and that a world without war was now possible.

‘”To say that it is possible to build a world without wars today (Khrushchev’s thesis) when imperialism exists,’” stressed Comrade Hysni Kapo, “‘is contrary to the teachings of Lenin.’”

Before the Conference began, a document was distributed to all the participants that attacked China and Albania and said that they were “erased” from the group of socialist countries.

“The written indictment of China which was distributed was a dirty anti-Marxist document. With this the Khrushchevites had decided to continue in Moscow what they had not achieved in Bucharest…. The material cast a deep gloom over the participants in the meeting and would not be welcomed as the Khrushchevites expected. Splits would be created in the meeting.”⁸

By now, the split was inevitable. In his speech, Enver Hoxha severely attacked the line of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, stating among other things: “One must defend the work of Joseph Stalin. Whoever does not defend this is an opportunist and a scoundrel.”

After Enver Hoxha’s speech, the Albanian delegation left the residence to which the Soviets had assigned them and took up lodging in the Albanian embassy, where they remained for their whole stay in Moscow. When the Albanians left the residence assigned to them by the Soviets, a Soviet security officer told Hysni Kapo in confidence: Comrade Enver did well to go, because his life was in great danger here.”

The Khrushchevites were capable of anything and the Albanian delegation did not agree to go by air, because it was too easy for an “accident” to happen.

Thus the Khrushchevites provoked the split in the international communist movement and started a process which would lead to the destruction of the basis of socialism and to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe.

Against Chinese Revisionism and the “Theory of the Three Worlds”

In the 1970s, when the Chinese Communist Party elaborated the so-called “theory of the three worlds,” Enver Hoxha denounced the anti-Marxist character of that theory, stating that it was a new variant of modern revisionism.

This means that – Enver Hoxha said – the call made by the Chinese is for the “third world” to unite in alliance with the “second world” to fight half of the “first world”?

Such a division of the world confuses the oligarchy with the oppressed and the people, their aspirations and their level of development, which are different and in struggle against that oligarchy.

“In its division of the world into three, the Communist Party of China is advocating class conciliation….

“In the first place, by juggling with the contradictions, the Chinese leaders are endeavoring to justify their stand towards US imperialism, to pave the way for their rapprochement and collaboration with it.

“The Chinese revisionists claim that there is only one contradiction in the world of today, and that this puts the ‘third world,’ the ’second world’ and half of the ‘first world’ in confrontation with the Soviet Union. Proceeding from this thesis which unites the peoples with a group of imperialists, they advocate that all class contradictions must be set aside and that the only fight must be against Soviet social-imperialism.”⁹

“The Chinese revisionists continue to hold to their known standpoint of the fight only against Soviet social-imperialism… They relegate US imperialism to second place and stress that the United States of America ‘wants the status quo, that it is in decline’. From this the Chinese revisionists arrive at the conclusion that an alliance with American imperialism against social-imperialism can and should be reached.

“US imperialism is not at all weakened or tamed, as the Chinese leaders claim. On the contrary, it is aggressive, savage and powerful, like Soviet social-imperialism….

The very posing of the question that one imperialism is stronger and the other weaker, one is aggressive and the other tamed, is not Marxist-Leninist. The presentation of the question in this manner is a reflection of a reactionary view which leads the Chinese revisionists into alliance with the United States of America, NATO and the European Common Market, with the King of Spain, the Shah of Iran, Pinochet of Chile and all the fascist dictators.

“We Marxist-Leninists cannot defend the various reactionaries, the clique around Strauss or Schmidt in Germany, the British Conservative or Laborite leaders, simply because they have contradictions with Soviet social-imperialism. Were we to do so and support the preachings of the Chinese to the effect that ‘the capitalist states of Europe should unite in the Common Market’, that ‘United Europe’ should be strengthened so as to be able to face Soviet social-imperialism, that would mean our agreeing to sacrifice the struggle and efforts of the proletariat of these countries to break the chains of enslavement.”¹⁰

Enver Hoxha recalled that in the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party had quoted the well-known Marxist-Leninist theses and principles.

In the document entitled “A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement, published by the Central Committee of the CPC in 1963, it stated: “These or those necessary compromises between socialist and imperialist countries do not require that the oppressed peoples and nations also make compromises with imperialism and its stooges.” And further: “Never should anybody, under the pretext of peaceful coexistence, demand that the oppressed peoples and nations renounce the revolutionary struggle”.

Today – stated Enver Hoxha – it is the Chinese leadership that is preaching to the peoples, the revolutionaries, the Marxist-Leninist parties and the proletariat of the whole world the necessity of allying with the imperialist or capitalist countries, of allying with the bourgeoisie and all reactionaries against Soviet social-imperialism.

“Such vacillations and 180° turns have nothing to do with the principled Marxist-Leninist policy. They are characteristic of the pragmatic policy followed by all revisionists.”¹¹

Enver Hoxha denounced the support of the Chinese government to the worst reactionary regimes.

“China defends Mobutu and the clique around him in Zaire. Through its propaganda China is trying to create the impression that it is allegedly defending the people of that country against an invasion of mercenaries engineered by the Soviet Union, but in reality it is defending the reactionary Mobutu regime. The Mobutu clique is an agency in the service of US imperialism. Through its propaganda and ‘pro-Zaire’ stand, China is defending Mobutu’s alliance with US imperialism, with neo-colonialism, and striving to prevent any change in the status quo of that country.”¹²

“The Chinese ‘third world’ and the Yugoslav ‘non-aligned world’ are almost one and the same thing….

“As Tito’s visit to China and Hua Kuo-feng’s visit to Yugoslavia showed, the Yugoslav revisionists are lavishing praises and cunning flattery on China…. Although they do not renounce their theory of the ‘third world’, the Chinese revisionist leaders, headed by Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping, have come out in open support of the Titoite theory of the ‘non-aligned world’. They have demonstrated that they want to work closely with the Yugoslav revisionists along the same lines, on two parallel rails, with the anti-Marxist aim of deceiving the peoples of the ‘third world’….

“During Tito’s visit to Peking, the Chinese leaders half admitted that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was a Marxist-Leninist party and that genuine socialism was being built in Yugoslavia. When Hua Kuo-feng went to Belgrade, they stated this completely and officially.”¹³

“History shows that every big capitalist country aims to become a great world power, to overtake and surpass the other great powers, and compete with them for world domination….

“In order to become a superpower, China will have to go through two main phases: first, it must seek credits and investments from US imperialism and the other developed capitalist countries, purchase new technology in order to exploit its local wealth, a great part of which will go as dividends for the creditors. Second, it will invest the surplus extracted at the expense of the Chinese people in states of various continents, just as the US imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists are doing today….

“Nikita Khrushchev and the modern revisionists elaborated the ill-famed theory of Khrushchevite ‘peaceful coexistence’, which advocated ’social peace’, ‘peaceful competition’, ‘the peaceful road’ of the revolution, ‘a world without arms and without wars’. It was intended to weaken the class struggle….

“The Communist Party of China has been following a policy like that of Khrushchev since the time when Mao Tsetung was alive. This policy, too, calls on both sides, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the peoples and their rulers, to cease the class struggle, to unite against Soviet social-imperialism only, and forget about American imperialism.”¹⁴

All these statements of Enver Hoxha have been confirmed by facts, by the complete degeneration of the Chinese Communist Party into a bourgeois party which has restored capitalism.

In the history of the international communist movement, the great ideological battle of the Albanian communists against all forms of revisionism and opportunism constitutes an exemplary page.

In spite of capitalist and revisionist encirclement, the threats of military intervention on the part of the imperialists, of the Warsaw pact and of the Titoites, small socialist Albania has never bowed its head; it has never renounced the defense of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.

While building socialism in their country, Enver Hoxha and the Albanian communists have unmasked all the variants of modern revisionism, Khrushchevite revisions, Titoite revisionism, Chinese revisionism, so-called Euro­communism, etc. They have emphasized the clearness of Marxist-Leninist analysis, they have rejected any compromise that goes against the interests of the proletariat and the oppressed peoples, they have applied Leninist principles to the new reality represented by the domination of the two main imperialist superpowers, they have used revolutionary boldness to confront the Khrushchevite revisionist gang and smash it in its own lair, in front of 81 delegations of communist parties.

For the Italian Marxist-Leninists, the PLA led by Comrade Enver Hoxha has always been a fundamental point of reference, and an example of how the genuine communists – in the most difficult conditions of imperialist and revisionist encirclement and provocations – were able to hold high the banner of proletarian revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

National Committee for Reconstruction of the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist)

Printed on our own

Via S. Maria, 11 28047 Oleggio (Novara)

1 James Klugmann, From Trotsky to Tito, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1951, p 11. Re-translated from the Italian.
2 Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution, “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana, 1979, English edition, p. 55.
3 Enver Hoxha, The Titoites, “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana, 1982. English edition, pp. 213, 288.
4 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 533, 534-535.
5 Enver Hoxha, The Khrushchevites, “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana, 1980, English edition, pp. 59-60.
6 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 42-49.
7 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 401-403.
8 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 436-437.
9 Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution, “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana, 1979, English edition, p. 270, 278.
10 Enver Hoxha, ibid., p 282, 291, 296
11 Enver Hoxha, ibid., p. 305.
12 Enver Hoxha, ibid., p. 319.
13 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 325, 332-334.
14 Enver Hoxha, ibid., pp. 368-369, 369-370.

(Translated from original Italian to English, by the Comrades at NorthStar Compass)

The new Soviet state is a machine to crush the resistance of exploiters, to do away with exploitation and class domination by exploiters, to reinforce the class dominance of the proletariat and its leadership of the rest of the toiling masses to the end of finally liquidating classes in general and passing into communism.”

- A.Y. Vyshinsky, ed., The Law of the Soviet State

“The dictatorship of the proletariat solves the problems of the proletarian revolution both with the aid of law and with the assistance of measures strictly defined by statute, through administrative and judicial organs.  The dictatorship of the proletariat is authority unlimited by any statutes whatever.  But the dictatorship of the proletariat, creating its own laws, makes use of them, demands they be observed, and punishes breach of them.”

- A.Y. Vyshinsky, ed., The Law of the Soviet State

“Law – like the state – will wither away only in the highest phase of communism. … Until then, however, there is necessity for general control, firm discipline in labor and in community life, and complete subordination of all the new society’s work to a truly democratic state.”

- A.Y. Vyshinsky, ed., The Law of the Soviet State

“[The] Soviet government is the expression of the most complete and most fully developed democracy.  At the same time, it is the expression of the dictatorship of the working class, which secures the very possibility of democracy for the people.  Soviet democracy and proletarian dictatorship are two aspects of one and the same phenomenon.”

- A.Y. Vyshinsky, Lenin and Stalin: The Great Organizers of the Soviet State

“Marxism teaches the necessities of using law as one of the means of the struggle for socialism – of recasting human society on socialist bases … It is invoked to meet the problems of the struggle with foes of socialism and the cause of building a socialist society.”

- A.Y. Vyshinsky, ed., The Law of the Soviet State

Part 2: What Kind of Organization Do the Present Leaders Want?

Revelations and decisions at the June NC meeting make it now possible to discern the organizational model that the Party’s leading group has in mind. They want a re-named, non-profit, progressive entity (“People Before Profits,” the C word will be first downgraded not jettisoned, yet) that needs only passive members, and certainly no pesky “clubs.” The growing reliance on investment income means the Party can, over time, dispense with a dues-paying membership base. Reportedly, about eighty percent of the Party’s income is from investments. It will have a core staff, reasonably well paid. It will have a web presence. It will be a multi-issue group.

Class orientation will be watered down. For example, there will be no industrial concentration policy to seek to influence the trade unions. Objectively, this will throw away the Party’s future influence. Present influence is already suffering from “adaptation.” Even now, there are few or no differences with trade union officialdom whose positions are declared to be “left.”[1]

Hard copy? With no bookstore distribution network, printed political pamphlets on key ideological questions are seldom seen. There are fewer neighborhood forums and paper distributions. Marxist-Leninist education, already abysmal, will vanish. Already Party schools are said to feature mainly the works of Webb.

People Before Profits, if that proves to be the quite awkward new name, will run no candidates. It will lead no struggles. Fact is, the CPUSA leads few struggles now, [2] waiting for whatever the imaginary “Labor-Led People’s Movement” [3] or the Democrats decide to do.

Another NC member ruefully remarked: “Haven’t people noticed that, nowadays, after an NC Main Report, there is never anything to do? No mobilization. No tasks. It is just a shallow current-events survey, full of expressions of joy at the arrival of the Age of Obama.” An example: while 30 million unemployed people languish the Party leadership has not taken a single step toward responding to the crisis in its own name. Contrast that with the 1930s.

All in all, one senses an evolution into a second Committees of Correspondence (CoC), though one with more real estate assets. The present CPUSA top leadership has sought to maintain close relations with the CoC, suggesting an eventual merger, wholly logical given the similar ideologies.

If it isn’t stopped, the liquidation endgame can be a morally squalid affair. In the US there are disturbing parallels to what happened in the UK in the early 1990s. The Eurocommunist clique which folded up the Communist Party of Great Britain changed its name to “Democratic Left.” Soon they realized Democratic Left had no reason for being. So the scoundrels in London sold off all the physical assets, gave themselves generous pensions, and went off to build careers, for example, in bourgeois journalism.[4]

A New Landscape?

Because of the new political landscape, the Left has an opportunity to step from the edges into the mainstream of U.S. politics. Sam Webb

This is not the place for a full analysis of the politics of the Obama Administration. Rather, these notes are concerned with the CPUSA analysis of Obama, and why it assumes the disingenuous form it does. One can hear supporters of the line say, “he [Obama] never promised us he would be an anti-imperialist.” The last point is true enough, but what is shocking is not Obama’s limitations,[5] but the CPUSA apologetics about those limitations. The defense of imperialism in the working class movement is the historical role of Right Social Democracy.

Is the CPUSA cheerleading for Obama, dissolving the Party in broader coalitions, opportunism? Of course. The former left wing positions of the CPUSA required struggle, strategy, leadership, intellectual honesty, realism, self-sacrifice, risk-taking, contact with masses, and political toil. Now, the center positions require little more than going with the flow of spontaneous mass movements. Whenever it is needed, to justify this retreat from struggle, the inane phrase “Labor-led People’s Movement,” is invoked. Politically, the phrase is worse than worthless, it is destructive. It justifies yielding political leadership to center forces.[6]

One Big Straw Man

Supposedly, the trial lawyers have a saying:

If you have the facts on your side, but not the law, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, but not the facts, pound the law. If you have neither the law nor the facts on your side, pound the table!

Webb is notorious for depending on the Straw Man tactic. If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then attribute to your opponents a weak argument (a Straw Man) that superficially resembles the one which they actually hold. Then refute the weak argument and claim victory.

His words below add up to one big Straw Man. Their abstractness (“amorphousness, elusiveness,” Lenin might say) is also noteworthy. No one is accused by name. Clearly going after his critics in the Party and nobody else, Webb pounds the table about the mentality of marginalization:

How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways….
1. In spending too much time agitating the choir;
2. In dismissing new political openings;
3. In thinking that partial reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty;
4. In thinking that our outlook is identical with the outlook of millions;
5. In turning the danger of co-optation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles;
6. In enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; and
7. In damning victories with faint praise.

and he says that the mentally marginalized think that:

• Politics has few complexities.
• Change is driven only from the ground up.
• Winning broad majorities is not essential.
• There are no stages of struggle.
• No social forces possess strategic social power.
• No divisions [in the ruling class are] worth noting.
• Distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.

No one in the CPUSA holds such preposterous views. Many in the ultraleft do hold them. Webb is attributing to critics in his own party views they in no way hold. Webb warns his own party’s members and “the left” that unless they change, success will continue to be elusive: Unless the Left – and I include Communists – sheds this mentality, it will miss a golden opportunity at this moment to engage and influence a far bigger audience than it has in the past six decades This reasoning is absurd. How exactly does a political party seeking to overturn a social order increase its influence by adopting the views of its class opponents who rule the selfsame social order? It doesn’t. Maybe it obtains “access”? No, the CPUSA, for all its tailist pains, has not won even that trivial crumb. Only in its imagination does this confused Party leadership join the winners circle, and get to be a “player.” The truth, as Communists have always known, is the exact opposite. One wins political power for one’s class by struggle, not the cessation of struggle.

Organizational Difficulties: Caused by the Line

The present leaders go to great lengths to deny the obvious causal link between Party organizational crisis and the political line of the Party. The present general line — unjustified, obsequious support for Obama, and its organizational corollary narrowing differences between the Administration’s positions and CPUSA positions, leads straight to organizational crisis. There is no Party growth because primarily because there is no incentive to join the Party.

One can draw comfort from the fact that at the deepest level the line is not only wrong. It is probably futile. The CPUSA is seeking to tail the Democrats and somehow make its own members rest content with the present US Administration. Sam Webb’s dilemma: how does one sell class collaboration when the class struggle is sharpening? Look around the world: depression and mass unemployment in the US; the leftward trend in Latin America; strikes of unprecedented militancy in other major capitalist countries; spreading wars of US aggression, and so forth.

He tries to escape the dilemma by means of oratorical sleight of hand. Hence, the sophistry that characterizes Webb’s writing.[7] He relies on ever-bigger buckets of bilgewater about the joy of the political moment. There is shabby maneuvering too. He conjures up fake budgetary emergencies, so liquidationist steps can be pushed through. He relies on staff loyalists to deliver a majority at an under-attended NC meeting. He ignores failure. He celebrates non-existent success. This can only be done by being fact-free and abstract, as for example, OPRRW is, page after apologetic page. He appears to deny causation. The putative party budget crisis is an orphan, with no father and no mother. No one’s to blame. He insists: press ahead with the same policies. Presumably, the past is no guide to the future.

No one denies that the Party’s difficulties are real: No growth. A tiny membership of perhaps a thousand in a country of over 300 million souls. Budget crisis, contrived or uncontrived. But above all, above all, the greatest problem is the demoralization and political disorientation. In most regions of the country, club life has declined. People are voting with their feet and becoming inactive, or joining organizations that do struggle.

The latest changes adopted in June are being billed as “efforts to make the Party grow.” But a party cannot grow if the reasons for working people to join it have been — and continue to be — removed.

In other words, tailism has consequences. No wonder few want to join a party which conceives its chief mission to be electing Democrats.[8] No wonder members are drifting away. Owing to the world capitalist economic crisis, the class struggle is sharpening at home and abroad. The warlike tendencies of monopoly capitalism are coming to the fore. Working people and oppressed people want to fight back. Honest Communists want to lead the fight. Under attack, working class people want far-reaching change — real change, not campaign-slogan “change.”

But, by abandoning struggle, the CPUSA is missing opportunities for recruitment among masses of people moving into struggle.

Worldwide Stakes

US working people are not the only ones with a stake in this inner-party ideological struggle. The world Communist movement understands full well that there is a need for a revolutionary organization in the heartland of imperialism, one that can lead mass struggles. The CPUSA suffers from growing international isolation. Two ideologically steeled mass Communist parties that, since 1991, have unselfishly rallied the Communist movement, the Greek and the Portuguese, are continually badmouthed in private conversation by CPUSA leaders. It is known that foreign Communist leaders are watching the drama in the CPUSA with growing concern, dismay, and alarm.[9]

How to Recover

A growing number of Party members at all levels believe the present course must be changed. Privately, though they do not relish an internal fight, they will admit that if the present leaders will not or cannot change course, then the leadership must be changed. What might a recovery plan carried out by a new leadership look like? A few suggestions, in no particular order:

• Replace the struggle against the ultra-right by the perspective of struggle against monopoly, especially in light of the world economic crisis.[10] To achieve whatever reform potential [11] exists under the present Administration, it needs pressure from the Left. It’s getting plenty of pressure from the Right.

• Re-study the CPUSA ’s role in the Great Depression. The Party is today doing the opposite of what it did then. Then, it supported FDR’s good initiatives, opposed his bad ones, but mainly it led and organized from below among masses in struggle. Carry out a sober analysis of the class forces represented by the Obama Administration. Fashion a CPUSA anti-crisis program for this moment.

• Stop tailing the Democrats. Resume the struggle to build political independence in all its forms, including, where possible and appropriate, Communist candidacies. Project the Party’s own advanced demands for anti-monopoly democracy and for socialism. Fight for leadership of people’s movements, including trade unions. Never leave out that any reforms under capitalism, even if won, are never secure. Only socialism can bring real change.

• Revitalize the industrial concentration policy. The cream of the YCL and other younger members should be encouraged to go into key industries to win positions of union leadership and influence for the future.[12]

• Revamp the labor policy. There is a complete muddle about what is “left” and “center.” The center forces will settle for whatever is on offer from the Democrats. Without the voice of a conscious Marxist current, center forces vacillate, the endless retreat of UAW top leaders being only the latest egregious example. The Party’s labor staff in Chicago has better things to do than recycle AFL-CIO press releases. The most militant tactics (plant occupations, e.g.) are rarely publicly advised by CPUSA leaders though once under way, such tactics are supported by all, and intensely admired by rank and file CPUSA members.

• Restore Marxist-Leninist education at all levels. The rightists in the leadership have gotten this far because of the woeful theoretical development of US Party members.

• Restore the PWW and PA as the voice of Communist militancy, with new chief editors who have Communist politics. Smart use of the Internet is important, but it cannot substitute for direct mass contact with workers through print publications. Imagine telling workers at a plant gate or on a picket line, or unemployment line that they can read it all at www.pww.org

• Renew and reinvigorate proven left forms and create new ones with more advanced positions than the mass movements, especially in matters of the highest priority such as: equality for African-Americans and other nationally oppressed groups; anti-imperialist solidarity, Free the Cuban Five and end the blockade; health-care reform worthy of the name; disarmament; an immediate end to the various US aggressions in the Mideast; rank-and-file union action and democracy; women’s equality; democratic rights and civil liberties, and so forth. Left-center unity, key to social change, is not built by a self-renouncing Left. Left forms are also one of the keys to Party growth.

Conclusion

An article as forthrightly opportunist as “The Mentality of Marginalization” reflects the Party’s ideological decline.

The CPUSA is in a deep crisis. In a crisis, a contradiction sharpens to the point that it soon must be resolved. The contradictions here are two interrelated ones. One is the contradiction, on the one hand, between the leadership circle that, with sheer chicanery, is speeding up its drive to remake the CPUSA into something other than a Communist Party and, on the other hand, the honest members who think they are in the same Communist Party they joined. In June 2009 the leadership miscalculated by attacking the print edition of the Party newspaper. Many more members now see the truth, or at least are open to hearing it. That represents progress.

The other contradiction — helping to open up Party members’ eyes — is the gap between reality and the Party’s rose-colored political line. The line is not only unrealistic. It thwarts Party growth. These two contradictions will sharpen. They will be resolved, one way or another. The present situation cannot last.

The present CPUSA leadership is calling for more of the same policies. Moreover, to their shame, they are blocking the channels of inner-party democracy. With the May 2010 national convention not far off, in a frenzy to pre-ordain the outcome, under pressure from national Party officials, reportedly one large district is abolishing industrial clubs, creating unwieldy “community clubs” under the control of loyalists who will vote for the more of the same at the convention. It is likely that such clubs will be directed to carry out electoral work for Democrats, and do little else. Thus, for two reasons, tactically, to weaken critics and potential convention opponents, and longer-term, to turn the Party more fully into an electoral helpmate for the Democrats, the hard-won industrial roots of the Party are being ripped up.

This article will not presume to tell CPUSA members what to do. They can figure that out. Only Party members will decide the fate of the CPUSA. But, first, they must recognize the calamitous path that the current leadership has mapped out.

In the view of more than a few Party members, the incumbent leadership needs to be held accountable for nearly ten years in office. Their record is: a nonsensical political line, no growth, dwindling influence on the left and in mass movements, political disorientation and declining morale, recurrent budget crises, fraying international ties, and a headstrong determination to steer the Party straight into the iceberg. Surely, it is possible to find a few fresh leaders who are accountable and politically sound.

Every time a function of the Party is shut down, it makes it harder for healthy forces to recover lost ground. If the changes voted for in June 2009 are any indication of things to come, goodness knows what they have planned for May 2010. As one observer noted, a plane can be dismantled one piece at a time. A four-engine jet can fly with one engine malfunctioning, or perhaps with a damaged tailfin. But at some point, the absence of key parts causes the plane to fall to earth. The Party is reaching that point.

If anyone is tempted to walk away in disgust, resist the temptation. Real revolutionaries don’t quit. Walking away only makes the victory of the Party-wreckers easier. There is not an infinite amount of time to right this starboard-listing ship. Every comrade is needed is in this struggle. Let the motto of this struggle be what a CWA worker shouted not long ago at a strike rally: “We will fight until hell freezes over…and then we will fight on the ice!”

Words to live by.

——–

Endnotes

[1] OPRRW: “We took a fresh look at the labor movement, noting the new positive developments, even asking ourselves whether quantitative changes were reaching a qualitative turning point in terms of labor’s outlook and practical activity.”

[2] Individual Communist activists soldier on in antiwar work, health care reform work, labor work, solidarity work, often with little direction from the national center. Out of self-discipline and commitment these loyal individuals keep engaged in struggle. It one of the reasons not all of them see the metamorphosis at the national center.

[3] This notion is at best ten percent true. Labor unions, being the biggest, most stable, best-funded, and often best-organized people’s organizations, often bulk large in larger coalitions. But in so many arenas of non-economic struggle, (anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, etc.) unions do not lead at all, although they could do so, with Left leadership. The Left must win leadership in all arenas of struggle.

[4] Line of March: a Historical and Critical Analysis of British Communism and its Revolutionary Strategy by Max Adereth (London: Praxis Press, 1994). Passim. Another lesson of the British tragedy was that a generation of radical youth can be lost to ultra-leftism. If US liquidationism wins, the effects will be felt for decades. It can happen here.

[5] The apologetics extend to domestic policy. Obama is for “charter schools,” i.e., privately-managed public schools, a panacea promoted by the Right to weaken teacher unions. So, siding with Obama, the Party goes silent on the charter school issue. For decades, teacher unions have done their best to fend off charter schools and defend the public school system, with mixed results. The urban public school system, underfunded though it is, remains a major achievement of US democracy.

[6] The foreign policy landscape is hardly new. True, the domestic policy landscape can boast some welcome changes, but it is not entirely new either. The CPUSA inner circle simply declares that a glorious morning of new politics has dawned. This explains its refusal to concretely analyze the class nature of the Obama Administration, i.e., the monopoly capitalist interests he represents. It would hinder the idolization of the fictitious Obama they have created. In the 2008 campaign when some CPUSA members quite naturally referred to him as “a bourgeois politician,” the label was hotly rejected by Webb and his associates. Instead they heap outlandish praise on Obama and the Democrats. The titles of speeches are silly: “The Impossible Becomes Possible,” “Change is Here; Change is on the Way!” The country just went through “The Springtime of Possibility.” Obama’s “a friend,” a “people’s advocate.” During the campaign his speech on racism was “a speech for the ages.” Such mad hyperbole expresses contempt for the intelligence of party members. It is supposed to convince them to ignore the facts under their noses.

What are those facts? In foreign policy, little is new. One can point to a changed atmosphere. There is welcome shift to diplomacy, and less of the reckless, brutal shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later of the Bush years. In domestic policy, many Obama policies can be praised. The picture is mixed. Unemployment rates have soared above 20 percent in many US cities. Thanks to both Obama and Bush, the biggest bank monopolies are brazenly gorging themselves on profits and bonuses derived from taxpayer bailouts. Tens of thousands of autoworkers, many of whom surely worked hard to get him elected, have been tossed to the wolves. Obama’s election, breaking the racist color bar on the White House, admittedly was a democratic achievement. But, for the overwhelming majority of Americans of color, the burden of special oppression and class oppression remain a material reality, as the Black unemployment rates double the white unemployment rate (true for decades now) illustrate.

The two big domestic reforms that working people and progressives care most about — health care reform and the restoration of union organizing rights through the Employee Free Choice Act — are both in trouble. Their best features have already been compromised away by the Administration under corporate pressure. Covering up, denying, minimizing, and distorting these realities is a big part of the present CPUSA line.

[7] Opportunism is not only a political phenomenon. It has a psychology. Lenin wrote: When we speak of fighting opportunism, we must never forget a characteristic feature of present day opportunism in every sphere, namely, its vagueness, its amorphousness, elusiveness. An opportunist by his very nature will always evade taking clear stand. He will always seek a middle course, he will always wriggle like a snake between two mutually exclusive points of view and try to ‘agree’ with both and reduce his difference of opinion to petty amendments doubts innocent and pious suggestions, and so on and so forth.

[8] The likeness between the Obama Administration’s positions and CPUSA positions is the source of endless glee and fascination on the web sites of the ultra right anti-Communist lunatics stuck in a Cold War time warp. They claim it proves Obama is a Communist. Not at all. It suggests certain Communist leaders have reinvented themselves as Democrats.

[9] It has not escaped notice in the world movement that the CPUSA, often citing the positions of an Iraq Communist Party leadership that is part of the puppet government, is willing to sign fewer and few international statements on Iraq, on Gaza, on anything.

[10] The CPUSA Progam, 1984, more radical than the one adopted in 2005, contained the following 11-point anti-monopoly program:
A program of radical reforms would include, but not necessarily be limited to, the following:
1. Negotiate comprehensive arms limitations and reductions. Drastically slash the bloated military budget and apply the savings to constructive public use, such as providing employment and training; guaranteeing affirmative action with firm quotas and timetables so as to overcome past discrimination and rapidly achieve full equality; building low-rent, quality housing; vast improvements in mass public transportation and public services.

11. Enact a National Youth Act guaranteeing- the right of youth to earn, learn and live a full life.

[11] The current no-struggle-be-happy-with the-Democrats policy is arguably unfair to Obama. He has a reasonably progressive background. If the US Left including the CPUSA, instead of writing love letters, were mounting pressure on him, they would help him and he might welcome it. To paraphrase what FDR famously told A. Philip Randolph. “Mr. Randolph, the reform you propose would a good idea. Now make me do it.”

[12] Webb’s OPRRW makes a fleeting reference to “labor concentration.” This could leave the misleading impression that there is still a CPUSA policy of industrial concentration. There isn’t one. Ask the YCL. Ask the industrial districts. It’s gone.

Startling new documents by the CPUSA National Chair Sam Webb, above all, The Mentality of Marginalization,[ 1] so candid in its opportunism, are his most revealing writings in a long time.[2]

They reveal that the top-down changes imposed at the National Committee (NC) of the CPUSA in June 2009 — over significant protest from Party leaders and members — are, in reality, Party liquidation, not Party building. A new stage has been reached. Mounting evidence shows that Party liquidation – the dismantling of the CPUSA — has begun in earnest.

Consider the question: “Are these changes Party liquidation or Party building?” How on earth can such a question even arise? To reach for an analogy, isn’t the difference, for example, between house demolition and house construction perfectly obvious to all?

Actually, in the early stages, it is hard to tell the difference between construction and demolition. Demolition of an old building requires as much preparation as building a new one:  performing asbestos abatement, obtaining the needed municipal permits, submitting necessary notifications, disconnecting utilities, vermin removal, and development of site-specific safety and health plans. The preparatory processes can be hard to tell apart. [3]

The analogy is imperfect. Party demolition is harder to see also because those carrying it out deny that demolition is what they are doing. House demolition does not have to be denied.

In June 2009 the early stages of Party liquidation ended. The likely trajectory of liquidation has become much clearer. Even the shape of the organization the present top leaders are striving for is coming into focus.

To sift through Sam Webb’s writings in “Mentality of Marginalization,” in “Observations on Reconfiguring and Restructuring Our Work” (OPRRW), and in his speech at the Chautauqua Institute, “The Communist Party: a Work in Progress, ” is to find a tangle of specious arguments for dismembering the Party. Almost any argument is pressed into service, no matter how disingenuous, far-fetched, and inconsistent with other arguments and previous statements. Together, these writings and a closer look at what the June 2009 NC meeting actually did — not what it claimed to be doing — shine a light on the real meaning of the new Party course. Moreover, the transformation of the CPUSA into something other than a communist party is accelerating.

Elsewhere the present writer has discussed the history of opportunism in the US Communist movement[4] and the debilitating changes Sam Webb and his closest allies have been arguing for.[5]  Alas, gloomy forecasts in those two earlier articles have proven accurate.

What is Liquidation?
Party liquidation can be political, ideological, organizational, and physical, or all of the above.  An excerpt from a long out‑of‑print CPUSA pamphlet, “The Communist Party and How it Works” states:

There are constant pressures of ruling class and petty bourgeois ideology on the Party. Occasional errors of Party organizations and individuals can, if not corrected, become tendencies and even general departures or “deviations” from Marxism‑Leninism. Ideological struggle against such tendencies is permanently necessary for the Communist Party. Though the forms constantly change, in the United States opportunism has been the main character of ruling class pressure on the Party and the working class movement. This involves adapting the working class movement to the interests of the ruling class.  It also means capitulating to the difficulties created by the ruling class and learning to “live with” those difficulties.  Tendencies to liquidate the Communist Party as a Leninist party, to be replaced by an ideologically and organizationally amorphous “broader socialist” organization, have been one of the principal expressions of opportunism historically. [6]

“Tailism” is to follow the political line and to accept the ideological leadership of a section of the capitalist class.  It is a form of class collaboration.[7] Up until spring 2008 the foremost manifestation of the present opportunist Party general line has been 1) to tail the Democrats by dropping any CPUSA struggle for political independence, and 2) to tail the Democrats specifically on the Iraq War, uncritically endorsing them as the vehicle for ending the war.

Since 2008 when Barack Obama emerged as the leading candidate, the CPUSA controlling group has tailed the Obama campaign[8] and now the Obama White House.

Signs of Liquidation Are Everywhere
Political and ideological liquidation has been under way for some time. For example, in 2005 the principle of the struggle for the leading role of the Party, a cornerstone of Leninism, was cut out of the new Party Program under false pretenses.[9] Out the window, also, went the struggle for the political independence of the labor movement and its allies. The 2005 Program sees the Democratic Party as the final resting place of working class activism, for as far into the future as anyone can see.[10]  The changes in the new program were sold to members with many quotations from Dimitrov. But Dimitrov never said that a Communist Party in a multi-class coalition has to trim its ideological sails to whatever is acceptable to more conservative social classes and political forces also opposed to the main enemy, be it fascist or ultra-right. He said the opposite.[11]

Political Affairs, once a Communist theoretical journal, is now (despite a few remaining principled contributors) mostly a quirky liberal magazine. It is available online only. Often enough, its writers seem more devoted to distancing themselves from Marxism-Leninism, than using it to understand the world.[12] The name Lenin is seen less and less in its pages.

The ideological unity of the party is a thing of the past. De facto there are two trends, the dominant one, is that of the rightward-moving top leadership. The other trend, struggling, is the Marxism-Leninism of many members and leaders.

Prompt Press, a printing press that has traditionally printed the Party’s newspaper and pamphlets, is on its way out. The Party Archives were given away for free four years ago to a wealthy private university. There has been no Party candidacy for any public office in perhaps 15 years. There are no bookstores. There are few or no pamphlets. There are no mass public meetings — even by today’s modest definition of “mass” — and no attempt to organize them. There is no mass distribution of the Party paper. There is no industrial concentration policy. [13]

A little discussed form of liquidation is the abolition of left and intermediate forms. This is a conscious policy: when attempts are made to revive them, for example, US Peace Council chapters, the leadership pounces, denouncing “sectarianism.” These forms, such as such as NAIMSAL, WREE, NAARPR, TUAD, USPC[14] and others have been allowed to wither and die. Only remnants survive. With mass radicalization from Bush’s attacks on working people and with global capitalist economic crisis laying bare the rottenness of the capitalist system, the CPUSA should be growing. It is not. One reason for that is that it has no periphery. A Communist Party recruits from among people on the left, not from center forces. With Communists one-sidedly working with center forces unready to make any commitment to Party membership, it is harder to recruit.

CPUSA antiwar work has been stalled since before Obama’s election. The Party has a noble tradition of leadership in antiwar work. With the CPUSA leadership so preoccupied these days with trying to orchestrate membership contentment with the Administration’s Iraq “withdrawal” policy, and Party leaders in complete denial on the expanding US aggressions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, the antiwar movement, deprived of its natural leader, is rudderless.

No multi-racial US political organization can boast of a better record on fighting racism than the CPUSA. Now African-American working people are being hammered by mass unemployment and unprecedented housing foreclosures and evictions. Affirmative action, for 35 years an effective policy for achieving racial equality, is under fresh attack by reaction. Nobody denies that the breaking of the racist color bar on the White House by Obama’s election was a splendid democratic achievement for the US people. Understandably, it was uniquely gratifying to tens of millions of people of color in the US. Missing is a special Party class analysis of racism as a barrier to class unity in the new circumstances.[15] Instead there is endless 23rd Street jubilation at the Obama election, and irritation at members who raise questions about the persistence of racism, especially institutionalized racism.

New examples of physical and organizational liquidation can be seen. Headed for the scrapheap today is the print edition of the People’s Weekly World (PWW).[16] Fury at this autocratic decision from many clubs, districts, and individuals — after Party leaders had recently and publicly denied that any such move was planned — went unreported[17] at the NC meeting, by a leadership famous for claiming “democracy matters.” The Party’s finest comrades have been faithfully carrying out the PWW’s distribution in the wee hours of the morning in foul and fair weather for decades. If “a Communist Party’s prime task is to unite its science with the class,” the PWW represented a transmission belt to basic workers on the shop floor, on a picket line, at a demonstration, or on an unemployment line. It is the most obvious and outrageous way so far that the present CP leaders are severing Party links to the working class.

Phony Rationales for Change
At the NC meeting in late June, concrete measures to enfeeble the CPUSA were rammed through. In recent months there had been a leadership epiphany regarding the communicative powers of the Internet. From the podium, NC members heard puerile hype about Twitter and  Tweets, and Facebook, and MySpace. The simple truth is the party, like all living organizations, has been on the Internet since the early 1990s. Nobody denies that smart use of new information technology is important for any organization. The present writer is unaware of any other Communist Party in the world, big enough to have print publications, discarding such print publications to go to “Internet only.” In reality, the newly discovered technological imperative is merely a bogus excuse to get rid of the print PWW. The paper’s announced demise sparked a degree of opposition in some sections of the leadership, though not enough to thwart it.

Back in 1989 Gus Hall said this:

About our press — articles from three clubs in one way or another raised the question of doing away with the People’s Daily World because it “takes too much effort, money, and time..” And, as one article said, “We don’t have the time to visit the contacts we make with the paper anyway.”

To do away with the People’s Daily World would be the first step in liquidating the Party. I don’t see any alternative to our press — or our Party. Here again, the influence of the People’s Daily World is much greater than its subscriptions alone.[18]

The Spanish-language editor of the PWW (Nuestro Mundo)was dismissed. This will hurt the Party’s outreach to the growing and often militant Spanish-speaking population in the US.

Other steps by the cyber-Communists threaten to be just as enfeebling.  Perhaps most harmful of all is the decision to abolish the Organization Department – and to hand its function over to a committee with many other functions. This giant stride toward Party liquidation rips the heart out of democratic centralism. Few Party functions are as important as the Organization Department, subordinate only to the National Convention, NC, and NB.[19]  Its checkup-and-control mission is to turn Party policy into organizational reality. The Organization Department has the responsibility for the daily implementation of the policy decisions of National Conventions, the NB and the NC.[20] It makes the difference between an organization of doers and an organization of talkers.

Ominously, the June NC meeting saw the first tentative steps to a new party name, “People Before Profits,” whose advent will be cloaked as merely a new mode of self-presentation on the Internet. Cleverly, the edict is put forth in a plausibly deniable way.[21] The giveaway is that the dreaded C- word, “Communist,” will be downgraded, most likely before it is discarded altogether.[22]

The 42 percent cut in staff is a massive cut (29 people down to 17 people). This means the Party’s influence will be torn to shreds in many spheres of its work.

The YCL is the party’s future. If, as claimed, these proposals are about accepting austerity for a period in order to create more favorable conditions for future growth, why is the YCL staff being shrunken?[23]

“Observations and Proposals…” and the Chautauqua speech[24]
In the document that Chairman Webb circulated on the eve of the June NC meeting  “Observations and Proposals on Reconfiguring and Restructuring the Work “(OPPRW) he argues: 1) the changes made since 2000 have allowed us to successfully adapt; 2) we have been on this road for years — this is only one more step; 3) The budget crisis makes the end of the print PWW necessary; 4) a cyber-CPUSA is a technological imperative.

Taken together, these arguments make no sense whatsoever.

Is a “budget crisis” driving Party economy moves? Anyone who can do arithmetic could have and should have foreseen it. Sam Webb stated, “We are not doing anything new; it’s just reconfiguring.” But he gave the game away when he also said “I’d be in favor of these cuts even if there were no budget crisis.”

If management blunders caused a deficit requiring drastic remedial measures, those responsible should have been required to submit their resignations. But there will be no resignations. The changes imposed were not in fact driven by technology or budget.  The present leadership has no wish to be called to account and no intention of self-criticism.

We should not lose sight of the fact, finally, that there was no pretense of a Leninist basis[25] for any of the organizational changes, for example, to perfect democratic centralism.

Why take further steps along the same road if nine years of similar steps only caused the organizational difficulties to deepen? If we have successfully “adapted” to a harsh political climate since 1991, why do we have a shrinking party and a budget crisis, requiring a new round of savage cuts?

Sam Webb states, “We have not had a sustainable budget for as long as I can remember.” Who has been national chair since 2000?

Who in Party leadership signed off on salary increases for a sizable  paid staff, as if it was unforeseeable that, in time, the wage bill would be unsustainable and require a 42 percent cut (currently 29 people, down to 17 people) in paid staff headcount?

This “emergency,” then, was completely foreseeable. In most organizations, incompetent management, not foreseeing such a shortfall, would be sacked. Frankly, it looks more like a contrived emergency than a real one to achieve other, unstated goals. That possibility is explored below.

The Mentality of Opportunism
The grandiose historical argument in Mentality of Marginalization is that the present-day lack of political success of the US Left (which Sam Webb presumes to speak for, not merely for the CPUSA) is due to a holdover mindset, “mentality of marginalization.”[26] At an earlier stage, marginalization, he claims, was caused by objective factors such as “McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the long economic expansion following WW II…”  But now it is resistance “to thinking anew” that is causing the persistence of the “mentality of marginalization.” In other words, the Party’s problems are the fault of an unwilling Party membership.

This notion suggests Webb’s broader analysis, which he has openly stated elsewhere. He believes many of the stock slanders of the Party are justified, that the present day Party is in crisis because of its dogmatism, sectarianism, bureaucracy, and rigidity, that it may not survive unless it abandons its out-dated dogmas. It should emulate social democracy; its differences with social democracy are not that great, and it should seek to merge with the “broad left,” a favorite phrase.[27]

He congratulates himself for pushing the Party in this direction,  apparently undisturbed by the contradiction that the road he chose  has led the Party to this crisis. In OPRRW he states: “A glance at history, after all, reveals that the landscape of the class struggle is littered with working class formations that didn’t adapt to new realities. But to our credit we choose change, we choose innovation which is not surprising since we are a party of innovators. We could have clung to familiar moorings, long held views, and our place in the scheme of things, but we choose a different road.”

Abruptly — only at the end of Mentality of Marginalization — does the reader discover the article is a rationale specifically for opportunistically abandoning the Party’s longstanding commitment to achieve health care reform by ousting the parasitic private insurers from the system, for example, by the single-payer proposal.[28]  But Mentality of Marginalization sounds themes of a much broader significance than health care reform, important and timely though that matter is.

At root it is a plea to continue the Tail Obama CPUSA general line that Webb has been pursuing since Obama emerged as Democratic front-runner in early 2008. Before then, the tailing of the Democrats took the form of all-out, uncritical electoral support for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, supposedly as a way of ending the Iraq War and reversing attacks on the US people by ending Republican (“ultra-right”) control of the White House and Congress. The Democrats came into office in 2006 and 2008 all right, but neither the wars nor domestic attacks on working people have let up.

Webb’s writing has been predictable. He always tries to justify his opportunism by depicting it as a struggle against “sectarianism.”  That mask is now dropped.  He no longer bothers with arguments invoking Dimitrov’s reasoning about the Popular Front.  He observes that the “ultra right”  – George Bush and his would-be successor John McCain — was ousted from The White House in November of last year.[29] He worries that to demand more tailism by calling anew for “unity against the ultra-right,” because it might come back, would seem too flimsy an argument to Party members.[30] So his argument has mutated. It is “Tail Obama because he is the leader of the people’s coalition, and you risk isolation if you don’t support him.”

Be a “Player”
Opportunism sacrifices long-term and fundamental class and revolutionary goals for temporary and partial advantages. In this case, principle is exchanged for “player” status. In his own raw formulation:

A player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.

But all or almost all CPUSA position have been shifted over the last few years, either explicitly or by gradually filling them with new content. To accommodate the Democrats and top union leaders Webb has been slowly shifting the CPUSA’s positions from the left to the center: on the Iraq and Lebanon wars,[31] on the socialist goal[32], on revolutionary strategy, on racism, on Cuba solidarity, on the economic crisis and the auto crisis, and by giving up on both political independence and industrial concentration.[33]  The phrase “class struggle” is not only used less often; it  is not even a frame of reference.

The retreat continues today. For example, there is CPUSA silence about US imperialism’s role in the Honduras coup; muted criticism of the expansion of Bush’s wars into Afghanistan and Pakistan; about  Administration retreats on US democratic rights and liberties, on closing Guantanamo, and on and on.

Foster: Intentions Don’t Count. Outcomes Count
It has puzzled the present writer that friends in the Party have expressed unease with the word “liquidation.” One good friend remarked, “serious as the problems are, we want to avoid talk of ‘liquidation’ and place our entire stress on strengthening the Party politically, organizationally, financially, in its class composition and consciousness…”  Why the unease?

Liquidation is a precise scientific word in Marxist-Leninist theory, yet it receives a negative reaction.  Is it too abstract? Too little understood by a party whose educational standards have dropped?

Some believe, with good reason, the basis of the negative reaction is the party-wide drift away from Marxist-Leninist analysis and therefore Marxist-Leninist language. Scientific terms appear less often in CPUSA publications, even such elementary terms as “capitalist class,” “the national question,” even “right opportunism” or “imperialism.” This typifies the Party’s ideological decline, slowly succumbing to the surrounding ideological pressure in the wake of the break-up of the USSR and other socialist countries.

It seems likely the main cause of unease is that the idea of liquidation is counterintuitive. People simply have a hard time believing that any leader would seek to dismantle the very organization he is leading. Do union leaders liquidate trade unions? No. Do leaders of the nationally oppressed liquidate civil rights organizations? No. Do anti-war leaders liquidate peace organizations? No. True, such leaders may make this or that organizational blunder, but they never shoot the horse they are riding. Liquidation appears to suggest conscious bad intentions. And it’s always hard to prove intentions. So, to assert “liquidation is under way” evokes skepticism. Such skepticism is honest and merits an answer. Nevertheless, it is contended here the use of the word liquidation still makes sense.

Amidst the fight against Browderism, William Z. Foster stated,

Of course Comrade Browder does not want any such situation [that American imperialism would eventually dominate the world - EAD], but Lenin has long since taught us that the objective results of political policies bear no necessary relation to the subjective desire of the initiators.[34]

The motive of liquidation is the same. In 1944-46 Browder wanted to reduce the CPUSA to a “progressive” current within the Democratic Party. It can be shown that Webb’s policies, objectively, have the same outcome.

The organizational changes Webb seeks are actually more radical than Browder’s. Browder merely changed the name to Communist Political Association (CPA), and gave up the Party’s right to run candidates, something parties typically do. Most of the rest of the work of the CPUSA went on as usual in the brief existence of the CPA, 1944-45.  Webb seeks a fundamentally different kind of organization, as we will see below.

The mode of liquidation is different. Returning to our earlier metaphor, Browder liquidated quickly. His method was dynamite and the wrecking ball. Stealthier and more gradual, Webb’s “deconstruction”  policies amount to 21st century Browderism.

Gus Hall who lived through the Browder debacle, once stated, “The most dangerous liquidationist trend is not disbanding the Party structure, but eliminating the Communist essence in our mass work.” He noted that, in end-stage opportunism, the party itself becomes the obstacle.

Thus, the Browder-led process of liquidating the Communist Party set in. The process of liquidation did not start with organization or physical liquidation. The process was at first one of liquidating the role, the functions of the Party. Slowly, the Party gave up taking independent positions. Less and less it took positions in its own name. More and more it became only the supporter of movements led by other forces. There was an acceptance of the cockeyed idea that the Party narrowed down mass movements and that anything non-Party was “broad.” Even a unity with small “Left” sects who influenced no one became a “broader” movement. Finally, the Party became an obstacle to Browder’s opportunism.  Browder kept denying he was liquidating the Communist Party. Each new opportunist step was presented as necessary as a way of giving the party a broad a mass base,  but it became an obstacle to “the alliance of intelligent men.“ Opportunism reduced the Party’s influence and warped its policies so they would be acceptable to the most backward sections of the people. However, as the Party began to move toward the less politically developed sections of the population, it began to lose its influence with the politically and ideologically more advanced sectors of the people. This is always the result of opportunist policies. [35]

Intentions Do Not Matter.
Let us give Sam Webb the benefit of the doubt. He has devoted his adult life to the US Communist movement. The last thirty years have  been hard times for proponents of revolutionary change. It is possible he thinks he is saving the Party. It is possible he is not fully conscious of the implications of his liquidation policies.  He has spoken of “adaptation.”[36]  He may believe that his “adaptation” strategy is the only realistic strategy for the CPUSA in the long haul. He often says socialism is not “on the agenda.” He evidently expects nothing more of US politics than a low-intensity, slow-tempo class struggle, with national politics consisting of little more than alternation of Democratic  and Republican Administrations, for decades to come. But Lenin, and Foster, and Hall are all saying the same thing: subjective intentions do not matter. Declared intentions do not matter. Objectively, Webb and his supporters are dismantling the Party. That is all that matters.

If such pessimism is indeed the outlook underlying liquidation, it is an outlook of despair. It leads straight to a “Socialism of Modest Aspirations,” as one writer aptly labeled it.[37]  It leads to the willingness to settle for crumbs from the table of the Democratic Party. Consider the timeline. Webb and others came to hold their present political beliefs in the awful 1990s. They came into office about 2000. One of the inner circle then was heard to state, “We have ten years to remake the Party.” The irony is that they are carrying out their plans — now speeding them up — at the very moment that possibilities for radical change in the country and in the world are fast reviving. With the world economic crisis, the possibilities are multiplying exponentially. The whole ideological crisis in the CPUSA, therefore, has a curious anachronistic quality.[38]

A fuller discussion of the origins of opportunism can be found elsewhere on this website.[39] Opportunism has roots in the material position of a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation.  In such a situation, there is always pressure to move toward opportunism and reformism, at first by revising revolutionary theory. The dominant ideology in society remains that of the dominant class. There is a natural and understandable pressure on revolutionaries to be relevant, to not isolate themselves from the working class, and thus a natural tendency (that revolutionaries must consciously resist) to adopt the ideas, vocabulary, and positions of non-revolutionary workers, or liberals, or social reformists. Superimpose on that lasting reality these historical circumstances: the blow to revolutionary self-confidence stemming from the downfall of socialism in Europe twenty years ago, and the problematic course of People’s China in the last three decades.  The upshot: at the beginning of the 21st century opportunistic pressures on Communist parties in imperialist countries are a mighty force.

Why do Communist leaders go further and try to shoot the horse they are riding, that is to say, liquidate the parties they lead? It is an international phenomenon in the Communist movement. In France the Robert Hue leadership, aping the French Socialist Party, has reduced the CPF to a shadow of its former strength. In 1977-88 the “Eurocommunists” wrecked the CP of Great Britain, requiring a British Communist movement to be rebuilt almost from scratch. After 1989-91 the once mighty Italian Communist Party shattered like glass into successor fragments, some Communist, most reformist.  And why did Gorbachev liquidate the CPSU?

Liquidation is an advanced form of opportunism. Concretely, what propels this leader Sam Webb to move beyond the revisionist conclusions he drew after the events of 1989-1991, (but has never admitted forthrightly), to move not merely to opportunist policies and revisionist theories, easy to trace in his writings over the last few years, but now to actual dismemberment of the Party?

Here is the answer: a Communist Party, organized along Marxist Leninist principles, is not an ordinary organization. Lenin developed the theory of a Marxist-Leninist party “of a new type” in fierce ideological struggle with Second International opportunism. The Leninist theory, and the fortress-like organization designed by that theory, is based on the whole history of the European and world working class movement over many decades. Uniquely, a Communist party’s  democratic centralism, its rules, its structure, its traditions, its practice of collective leadership, its criticism and self-criticism, its insistence on realistic all-sided estimates, its check-up and control, its reliance on revolutionary theory tested in class struggle around the world, the clarity and precision of its terms  — all represent built-in organizational safeguards aimed at resisting opportunist degeneration.

Therefore, opportunism, meeting such steely organizational resistance, sooner or later tries to liquidate the Party.

Next time: The Crisis of the CPUSA Part 2: What Kind of Organization Do They Want?

____________________________________________________________
Endnotes:

[1] When the CPUSA is reconstituted on a Marxist-Leninist basis, “The Mentality of Marginalization” should be part of the curriculum of party schools, in the class dealing with party history and inner-party ideological struggle. It vividly illustrates opportunism in the US Communist movement.

[2] In a slightly different form, its ideas were included in his June 2009 remarks to the National Committee of the CPUSA and in his Chautauqua speech.  They are, therefore, his considered position.

[3] Demolition is not exactly the same as de-construction. De-construction involves taking a building apart while carefully preserving valuable elements for re-use. The current drive toward Party liquidation is more like de-construction.

[4] Reflections on Revisionism <<http://mltoday.com/en/reflections-on-revisionism-in-the-usa-371.html>>

[5] From Revisionism to Party Liquidation <<http://mltoday.com/en/from-revisionism-to-party-liquidation-370.html

[6] Party veterans say this superb pamphlet was written by Danny Rubin. Let us give credit where credit is due.

[7] William Z. Foster observed, “trailing after the big bourgeoisie is the historic error of social democracy.” William Z. Foster “On the Question of Revisionism.”  In Marxism-Leninism vs. Revisionism, by William Z.  Foster, Jacques Duclos, Eugene Dennis, and John Williamson. Foreword by Max Weiss. New Century Publishers, Feb. 1946, 9.

[8] In calling for change in the organizational structure of a Marxist-Leninist Party they have invoked the Obama campaign as an organizational ideal. They still refer to an “Obama movement.” It does not exist. They confuse a 2008 email list of small contributors with a mass movement. The genuine wave of enthusiasm for Obama in the early stages of the 2009 campaign came from his perceived stronger anti-Iraq War stance. Democratic primary voters are liberal and antiwar. Since Inauguration Day his anti-war reputation has suffered.

[9] The lame argument, which sad to say, a majority of delegates bought, was that in the name of modesty, the Party should earn the leading role, not merely claim it.

[10] He believes political independence should be limited to work within the Democratic Party. Any attempt to go outside the two-party system is sectarian and futile. Third party efforts, particularly those with an anti-monopoly thrust, are no longer of strategic importance; they may actually impede the struggle. Running Communists and workers is especially narrow and self-defeating. Electoral struggle in the Democratic Party is the main arena of progressive struggle in this period. OPRRW: “… a sea change occurred on Election Day [2008] and nothing that has happened since then suggests anything else. We live in a new era of struggle, filled with immense opportunities. … Is there any doubt that Gus, Winnie, Jim Jackson, Helen, George, Elsie, Lou, Carl, Vic, Fred, Jim West, Tommy, and many others would have hailed our election policy, the election of the first African American President, and the broad coalition that elected him?”) To invoke the first names of revered Party leaders whose policies he is reversing is deeply offensive to this writer.

[11] “Communists, of course, cannot and must not for a moment abandon their own independent work of communist education, organization, and mobilization of the masses.” “Content and Form of the United Front.” Dimitrov on United Front (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971),  27.

[12] Last August an editor of Political Affairs ran a lampoon of Marxism. He became highly indignant when some Party members expressed shock.

[13] Webb’s OPRRW makes a fleeting reference to “labor concentration.” This could leave the misleading impression that there is still a CPUSA policy of industrial concentration. There isn’t one. Ask the YCL. Ask the industrial districts. It’s gone.

[14] Younger readers may be unfamiliar with these organizations and their initials: NAIMSAL (National Anti-imperialist League in Solidarity with African Liberation) , WREE (Women for Racial and Economic Equality) , TUAD (Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy), USPC (the US Peace Council, an affiliate of the World Peace Council) , NAARPR (National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression) and others.

[15] Old timers can recall the Party’s emergency focus on the ideological defense of affirmative action in the late 1970s when the Bakke and Weber cases threatened to undo civil right progress. No like effort exists now.

[16] Some don’t regret the loss of the print PWW much. Not to regret its loss is a mistake, in the present writer’s view, though to be sure its ideological decline has been steep. The editorials and coverage show little fighting spirit, which can only be found in the articles of a few dogged contributors.

[17] At the next meeting NC members could demand to know the extent of protests from around the country. There were many, and they did not mince words.

[18] Gus Hall, “The Power of Ideology: Keynote Address to the First Ideological Conference of the Communist Party USA,” July 14-16, 1989, Chicago, New Outlook Publishers, 1989, 57.

[19] The current Organizational Secretary will be reassigned to work on new fund raising work, big donor development and a campaign to raise $100,000 by the end of the year.

[20] “The Communist Party and How it Works: a Handbook on its Organization and Functioning,” March 1976, 53.

[21] The former PA editor has been openly advocating a name change for some time.

[22] The NB proposal was: “Single website (People before Profits) with multiple domains – CPUSA, PWW, PA, and YCL featuring on line news, commentary, education, theoretical discussions, action initiatives, podcasts, u-tube interviews, downloadable materials, etc. “

[23] The NB proposal was: “Reduce staff of YCL to one position; discuss reconfiguring of the work and structure of YCL with its leadership and membership; and explore further the feasibility of an additional staff position.”

[24] The Chautauqua Institute speech, given to a non-party audience in Western New York, restated the Mentality for Marginalization thesis. This is odd; the thesis is aimed at the supposedly self-marginalizing Left, not the public.

[25] At Chautauqua he characterized the Communist Party as “a work in progress,” as if organizational changes would be determined by pragmatism and the needs of the moment, not a theory of what a revolutionary organization must be and must do.  He also began the speech with the curious comment that “if any of you are expecting militant rhetoric and passionate appeals to storm the barricades, you will be disappointed…”

[26] Inconsistency does not bother him. Are the changes he demands a response to failure, or simply movement along a continuum of successful adaptation? Both, he seems to believe.

[27] The very fact that he wields The Straw Man weapon against his opponents shows the weakness of his argument and the strength of his opponents’ views. He cannot win against their actual arguments, so he invents an argument he can defeat.

[28] Ever flexible, he announces his retreat. He comes out in favor of the Administration’s weak “public option” proposal, which leaves the private carriers in the system, supposedly to be regulated by competition.  In truth, the “public option,” whatever its details, barely constitutes reform at all. Of course, Webb prefers single-payer in his head, but is unwilling to struggle for it. It might isolate him from Obama. The health care struggle has demonstrated the strategic weakness of the Party’s policy of being in bed with the Obama Administration. Not fighting for a strong HR676 single-payer initiative makes the “public option” the most “left” option and the target of right wing attack. It is difficult to mobilize people for a vague public option. Many cannot grasp it or else distrust it, due to the closed negotiations and the changing details.  In other words, people are not sure what they are fighting for, other than that they don’t want the insurance companies and Big Pharma to dictate the “reforms.” Moreover, the single-payer advocates are a real movement. They can and do mobilize. With their huge resources, the insurance companies mobilize coached, fake “grassroots protestors” and various ultra right thugs and cranks at Health Care Town Hall Meetings. But having tossed aside the single-payer movement, Obama and his allies are without a comparable mass force.

[29] Some say that the ultra right is still strong in the larger US political system and Obama has to be defended to help him overcome it. That Obama needs pressure from left and independent forces is, of course, correct. It is quite another thing to adopt and defend Obama’s centrist positions, which is what Webb does. The argument carries another implication: that the US left must forever stay within the confines of Democratic Party as long as the ultra right threat exists, that the struggle for political independence must be delayed indefinitely, inasmuch as only the Democratic Party is a practical electoral vehicle to defeat the ultra right.  This is a trap. The material basis of the ultra right — finance capital, oil giants, weapons manufacturers, etc., which have a stranglehold on state power — will be a reality until a radical or revolutionary movement takes them over. The ultra right  will exist for a very long time. This way of thinking is to put off the fight for a labor-based independent formation forever. Moreover, in tailing Obama, the CPUSA is ignoring its own 2005 Program, which states: “U.S. capitalism is presently in the monopoly capitalist, imperialist stage of development, and in the transnational monopoly phase of that stage. Once the most reactionary ultra-right transnationals, who dominate political life today, receive a major defeat, it will be both necessary and possible to take on the transnationals as a whole; it will be possible to move on to the anti-monopoly stage of struggle. Building an anti-monopoly coalition is the next key step in the road to socialism in the U.S.” If ousting Republicans from the White House was not a major blow, why all the political ecstasy? If it was a major blow, why is the Party not back in the anti-monopoly stage of struggle?

[30] Not that he hasn’t tried it, referring to an “ultra right” that threatens “to derail the Obama administration.” Hence, any criticism would be out of bounds as long as the ultra right exists.

[31] Bill Miller, “For Anti-Imperialist Partisanship in the CPUSA”  (www.MLToday.com) August 2006

[32] His previous writing suggests he believes much bourgeois criticism of socialist democracy and economic planning is essentially correct. He distances the Party from the Soviet Union. OPRRW: “We began re-envisioning the path to socialism and socialist society, based on present day challenges and a critical examination of the socialist experience in the 20th century.”

[33] George Meyers, a great Communist trade unionist, is tendentiously misquoted to justify the CPUSA’s present satisfaction with the centrist positions of the AFL-CIO. To be sure, Meyers was correct to state that “left-center unity is built on the most advanced position of the center forces.” He was referring to unity on action program, not ideological unity. Communist and other left-wingers don’t drop their ideology when they coalesce with center forces.

[34] William Z. Foster “On the Question of Revisionism” Marxism-Leninism vs. Revisionism,  William Z.  Foster, Jacques Duclos, Eugene Dennis, John Williamson. Foreword by Max Weiss. New Century Publishers,  Feb. 1946 , 39.

[35] Political Affairs.

[36] Implicit in the “adaptation” talk is the social democratic notion: the capitalist system is not moribund, but strong. It is not in general crisis. Its direction is upward. Therefore, the Party’s strategy should be to win attainable reforms within the system rather than advocate capitalism’s revolutionary replacement with socialism. OPRRW: “We could have clung to familiar moorings, long held views, and our place in the scheme of things, but we choose a different road. While embracing our traditions and history, which admittedly help us navigate stormy seas, we also eagerly searched for new angles of looking at, thinking about, and reshaping the world.”

[37] Zoltan Zigedy, http://mltoday.com/en/for-a-serious-conversation-on-socialism-616-2.html.

[38] Foster discerned the pattern. Periods of upswing of US imperialism, coupled with setbacks/defeats for socialism, correspond to bouts of opportunism in the US Communist movement. He cited “The Roaring 20s” (Lovestone); World War II military success (Browder); the conservative 1950s when a top-dog US ruled the postwar world (Gates). One can add:  The Booming 1960s (Healey and Richmond ); the downfall of socialism and emergence of US as sole superpower (Committees of Correspondence). Only the present bout is exceptional, for the reasons indicated.

[39] Reflections on Revisionism<<http://mltoday.com/en/reflections-on-revisionism-in-the-usa-371.html>>

The ploy included “making it appear” that the Communist Party was attacking the “hoodlum” labor practices of the Italian mafia, for which the Party had in the past been critical of in its encounters with the Mafia on the labor front in the past; likewise capitalizing on the animosity of the mafia towards the communists.

The pinnacle of the FBI’s scheme involved a “spurious” Party statement blaming the mafia for bombings “because of the Party efforts on behalf of workers.”The plan develops even further in hopes of provoking the mafia to initiate attacks against the CPUSA, “so that each group would think the other was mounting a campaign against it.”

Maoists have long tried to separate themselves from Mao’s reactionary and revisionist ideas, from the role of the peasantry to the role of mass organizations, from collaboration with the bourgeoisie in building socialism to the counterrevolutionary actions of Cultural Revolution, and finally, from the most infamous of ideas, the “Three Worlds Theory.”

Within the revisionist tendency of Maoism, there are presently two current lines of thought. One of those is the more “hardline” of the Maoist movement, the half that keeps the mask of Marxism-Leninism firmly planted on its revisionist face, though it usually refers to itself by some other name, usually either “Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tsetung-Thought,” or more recently “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” or simply “Maoism.” In this category are most of the various Maoist parties, though as eclectic as Maoism is, no two of them are exactly alike in practice or in political line. Still, they manage to keep up the illusion quite well. The people in this category, most of them anyway, usually uphold the classic Marxist-Leninist leaders. They usually also pay token support to Stalin, though that has been fading in recent years, which I’ll go into some other time. It is in this category that the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) belongs. The other current line of thought residing in Maoism is the “nutty” sort of Maoist, the ones who take all of Mao’s revisionist theories to their logical conclusion. It is in this category that the Maoist Internationalist Movement (or MIM) belongs.

Both trends, though separate and antagonistic, have a great deal in common. They both uphold the reactionary anti-Leninist phenomenon of the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (which Enver Hoxha once aptly described as “neither Great, nor Proletarian, nor Cultural, nor a Revolution”) as “the farthest advance of socialism in human history.” Both depart from the line of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, to say nothing of Hoxha’s developments. Both criticize the stance taken by Hoxha against revisionism from opportunist standpoints. Most notably for the purposes of this article however, is that both trends have an absolutely seething, rabid, fanatical hatred for Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labor. Let’s have a look at what they say.

Hoxhaites uphold Albanian socialism and the leader of the Albanian Communist Party, Enver Hoxha.

Well, this is true at least, except that the Albanian Party of Labor was only called the Albanian Communist Party until about the forties, when Stalin himself suggested the new name. It is worth saying here that the use of the word “Hoxhaite” is clearly meant as pointless slander, since ending any ideology with “-ite” is meant as an insult because of association with “Trotskyite.” The proper name for the ideology is “Hoxhaist” or “Hoxhaism,” despite what Third-World nutters say, although we consider and call ourselves “Marxist-Leninists.”

The line between “Hoxhaites” and “Stalinists” is blurring in recent years, as is their separation from Castro and Kim.

Actually, Mao’s ideas of a hybrid state-capitalist “socialist” state are still alive these days in Cuba and North Korea. Where this accusation of us being the same as them comes from, I have no idea, since though Hoxha was pro-Kim in the 50s (so was Mao, as a note), he later realized the revisionist nature of the DPRK and called him a “megalomaniac with a cult of personality yet unforeseen” in his Reflections on China diary. Not to mention his identification of Cuba as being firmly planted in the revisionist camp on the pro-Soviet side, which no one will deny. Kim Il-Sung was also part of the “Non-Aligned Movement” with the renegade Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav revisionists, which damn near half of Hoxha’s writings are spent blasting. Castro was a puppet of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who Hoxha’s writings also analyze thoroughly, not to mention the Albanian army used to train using dummies with Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s faces on them as bayonet targets. Hoxha describes Castro as a “progressive democratic leader,” but not a Marxist-Leninist. Had MIM bothered to actually read his Selected Works, they might know that.

All of the writings and speeches of Castro and both Kims indicate the truth: socialism and Marxism-Leninism were never practiced in either country, since they reject the dictatorship of the proletariat and the hegemony of the proletariat, much like the populist rule of Mao Zedong.

Hoxha claimed public unity with Mao until the latter’s death in 1976. Throughout the 1960s and till Mao’s death, Hoxha referred to China as undergoing “socialist construction” and he referred to Mao as a “Marxist-Leninist.”

Despite the fact that MIM might have a heart attack from sheer shock when it hears this truly startling revelation, not everyone on the planet has a completely correct line on every issue right from the beginning, and—though this is CERTAINLY departing from Marxism and science in general to say so—things do occasionally change. Dialectics teaches us that nothing ever stops developing or changing, there is no “total and final” development.

Hoxha was pro-Mao for many years, this is true, and particularly after Mao came out against Khrushchev openly (four years after Hoxha, I might add). But the truth is that he had certain contradictions with the Chinese even from the start. Again, this is incredibly obvious if you read his Selected Works.

In addition, not everything is clear right from the start. Information, evidence and data are needed in order to perform a dialectic process. Really, if MIM would read a little it might learn a thing or two. Hoxha addresses the fact that he was wrong about China, just as he was wrong about the USSR after 1956, throughout the whole of his magnum opus “Imperialism & the Revolution.”

After Mao died and Albania lost its aid from China, Hoxha attacked Mao’s legacy that he used to uphold.

Interesting formulation indeed! Apparently Hoxha is a narrow opportunist, eh? So this must mean while he was still getting aid from China, Hoxha praised Mao to the high heavens and shows no contradictions with them? I would put forward that his essays in Volume III and IV of his works say otherwise. Here are a few for your own reading pleasure:

“The Stands of the Chinese Comrades are Improper in Several Directions” – Dec. 24, 1962.

“The Struggle Against Khrushchevism Must Not Be Diverted Into Territorial Claims” – Aug. 22, 1964.

“The Chinese Idea About An Anti-Imperialist Front Including Even the Modern Revisionists is Anti-Leninist” – Oct. 15, 1964.

“In No Way Can We Reconcile Ourselves To These Views of Chou En-Lai” – Oct. 31, 1964.

“The Chinese Want To Impose Their Opinions On Us” – Nov. 3, 1964.

“The Defeat of Chou En-Lai In Moscow” – Nov. 21, 1964.

“Opportunist Tactic of the Chinese Comrades” – Feb. 3, 1965.

Even more notably, in Volume IV:

“Some Preliminary Ideas About the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution” – Oct. 14, 1966

“Reflections On the Cultural Revolution. Anarchy Cannot Be Combated With Anarchy” – April 28, 1967.

“It Is Not Right to receive Nixon in Beijing. We Do Not Support It.” – Aug. 6, 1971.

“Nixon’s Journey to China, The Sino-American Talks, the Final Communique” – March 21, 1972.

MIM’s statement is even historically inaccurate, since all aid to Albania was stopped during the Cultural Revolution, far before “Imperialism & the Revolution” was published.

In 1979, Hoxha publicly criticized the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

God forbid. The Holy Cultural Revolution which all Maoists worship.

First off, it is obvious the Cultural Revolution was simply great in conception—workers checking the Party against revisionism! But in its practical execution became an adventurist disaster characterized by opportunistic youths & students rather than the working class. Marxism-Leninism was never the guiding force, but rather the cult of Mao, who eventually lost control and called in the PLA to take control of all the Party organizations and dissolve the Red Guards. The GPCR also killed whatever was left of the CCP.

New Democracy was a state-capitalist disaster that never led to the socialist revolution. Mao’s revisionism later manifested itself more severely when he announced the “Three World Theory” and allied China with the reactionary bourgeoisie of a number of countries throughout the so-called “Third World,” even down to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, CIA puppets like Mobutu Seko and anti-communist butchers like Augusto Pinochet, whom Mao’s China was the first to recognize.

As Comrade Hoxha observed, Mao made some very characteristically un-Marxist theoretical stands, which combined traditional Chinese philosophy with bourgeois democracy; such as his political pluralism, his thesis that socialism can be built on the collaboration of all classes, and his cyclical interpretation of society and revolution which is in direct contradiction to the science of dialectical materialism.
The unfolding of revisionist lines in China began from the start, with particular regard to the liquidation, by the mid-fifties, of the Marxist-Leninist grouping headed by Kao Kang and the subsequent launching of the “Great Leap Forward”—a revisionist campaign initiated by Mao in alliance with the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie in order to mobilize the peasantry into conflict with the national bourgeoisie headed by Liu Shao-chi.

Instead of “Marxist-Leninist” as Hoxha earlier called Mao, Hoxha said that Mao was a “progressive figure” and “nationalist.”

I agree with that formulation. A good book to read for a thorough analysis of Mao’s revisionism is “Class Struggles In China” by Bill Bland.

Hoxha said it was impossible for a bourgeoisie to exist in the party unless the party was revisionist and tolerated the bourgeoisie; hence he opposed Mao’s theses and the reason for a Cultural Revolution, which Albania never had.

This is perhaps the strangest sentence by MIM, seeing as how nothing in it is true—literally nothing. Hoxha never said it was impossible for a bourgeoisie to exist within the party, Hoxha initially supported the GPCR until he learned it was a shallow power struggle between the comprador and national bourgeoisie factions headed by Mao Zedong and Liu Shao-Chi respectively, and Albania did in fact, have a Cultural Revolution.

It most certainly is a tenet of Hoxhaism that bourgeoisie can manifest inside the Communist Party, particularly when you let them in as Mao did. Revisionists do not always “sneak in” from outside the Party. Some do, no doubt. But others are generated from inside, as any good Marxist-Leninist (and no, not just Mao, and not Mao first), knows very well. Hoxha’s ideology preserves Marxism-Leninism rather than throwing it out the window in exchange for an ideology that assures us that under communism the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can coexist. This is Maoism.

In practice, Hoxha’s own hand-picked successor Ramiz Alia restored open, traditional capitalism in Albania;

It would take far too much space to give a true timeline of how capitalism was restored in Albania, but it is not so cut-and-dry and MIM makes it out to be. Alia did loosen the grip of the PPSH on Albania quite a bit, but did not suddenly, overnight and metaphysically “restore open capitalism.”

Even if they were right, and Alia did such a thing, MIM seems to think people should be able to recognize this instantaneously, as if class struggle in socialist society is conducted in an obvious cowboy-and-Indian way where everybody knows who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Their whole argument boils down to, “They lost, therefore they must be wrong.” Pitiful.

yet, Hoxhaites have still failed to draw any correct scientific conclusions about who was correct: Mao or Hoxha.

What? If they are “Hoxhaites,” as MIM so chauvinistically put it, wouldn’t they have already arrived at the conclusion that Hoxha was right (not that their caricature of him is in any way accurate)? Otherwise, how could they be called Hoxhaists? MIM literally just contradicted itself in one sentence.

They fail to say, “yes, look at Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Alia: they were all inside parties alleging to be communist, so how can we deny Mao’s thesis about a bourgeoisie in the party?” It can still be said that Hoxhaites talk about class struggle under socialism, but without a bourgeoisie!

Let’s start with the idea that Mao developed the idea of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As can easily be shown, this concept was originally put forward by Lenin and Stalin. Was Mao the first one to put forward the term “the new bourgeoisie?” Let’s take a gander.

“Lenin also stated that ‘the new bourgeoisie’ was ‘arising from among our Soviet government employees.’” (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 29, p. 162. Quoted in Lin, Biao. Report to the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. English ed. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, April 14, 1969.)

OK, so was Mao the first one to suggest that Party’s role in production relations trigger a new bourgeoisie?

“[...] the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small production. For, unfortunately, small production is still very, very widespread in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 31, p. 6.)

Well, so much for Mao’s so-called developments, and so much for MIM’s revisionist slander.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The pinnacle of the Khruschevite treachery against Soviet security was the illegal arrest and execution of Lavrenti P. Beria. Knowing that Beria represented a great threat to his personal political aims, Khruschev organized a coup against Beria, who previously showed absolutely no ambitions of replacing Stalin as General Secretary of the Communist Party. During a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Beria was arrested by eleven marshals and generals on June 26, 1953. He was later executed on December 23 of that year.

Within months of Beria’s arrest, the Khruschevite revisionists set about purging the state and party apparatuses of genuine Marxist-Leninists as “collaborators” and “co-conspirators” in Beria’s alleged treason. The campaign against the Marxist-Leninists took place most prominently in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia, where a number of Stalin (and Beria) loyalists were currently in place.

On July 14, 1953, senior military leaders in Georgia organized a coup d’etat in the Georgian Communist Party to purge its leadership of individuals hostile to the Khruschev’s liberalization. Led by General Alexei Antonov and Major-General Efimov, several leading party and state figures were detained and either exiled or executed while former Lt.-General Mzhavanadze became First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party.

On July 23, the Khruschevites executed Deputy Minister of State Security Mikhail Ryumin, an avid Stalin supporter, accused by Khruschev of playing a leading role in the ‘Doctors Plot’. Meanwhile, former Minister of State Security Semyon Ignatiev (and Ryumin’s superior) was protected by Khruschev and given the position of First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Baskhir Republic.

In September 1955, Khruschev sacked Nikolai Rukhadze as Georgian Ministry of State Security, who had initially purged Beria supporters in 1951 in the so-called “Mingrelian Affair.” Rukhadze, who was openly opposed the coup in Georgia’s communist party in July 1953, was later shot (on Khruschev’s orders) as an accomplice of Beria.

Source: Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens

Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland on September 17, 1939? Why ask? “We all know” this invasion occurred. “You can look it up!” All authoritative sources agree. This historical event happened.

Here’s a recent article in The New York Review of Books (April 30, 2009, p. 17) by Timothy Snyder, Yale University professor, academic expert in this area and fanatic anticommunist who certainly knows what he is writing here is false:

Because the film (although not the book)* begins with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 rather than the joint German-Soviet invasion and division of Poland in 1939… the Soviet state had just months earlier been an ally of Nazi Germany… (* “Defiance”)

“Behind Closed Doors” (PBS series 2009):

“After invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis and the Soviets divided the country as they had agreed to do in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact…”
http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/in-depth/struggle-poland.html

Wikipedia article: “Soviet invasion of Poland”:

“… on 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

Every historian I have read, even those who do not conform to Cold War paradigms, state unproblematically that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939.

But the the truth is that the USSR did not invade Poland in September, 1939. Even though the chances are at least 99 to 1 that every history book you can find says that it did. I have yet to find an English-language book that gets this correct. And, of course, the USSR had never been an “ally of Nazi Germany.

I will present a lot of evidence in support of this statement. There is a great deal more evidence to support what I say – much more than I can present here, and no doubt much more that I have not yet even identified or located.

Furthermore, at the time it was widely acknowledged that no such invasion occurred. I’ll demonstrate that too.

Probably the truth of this matter was another victim of the post-WW2 Cold War, when a great many falsehoods about Soviet history were invented or popularized. The truth about this and many other questions concerning the history of the first socialist state has simply become “unmentionable in polite company.”

Demonizing – I use the word advisedly, it is not too strong – the history of the communist movement and anything to do with Stalin has become de rigeur, a shibboleth of respectability. And not only among avowed champions of capitalism but among ourselves, on the left, among Marxists, opponents of capitalism, the natural constituency of a movement for communism.

Some time ago Doug Henwood tweaked me on the MLG list for “defending Stalin.”

I could make a crack about what defenses of Stalin have to do with a “sensible materialism,” but that would be beneath me.
(MLG list May 17 2009)

Doug thinks he knows something about Stalin and the USSR during Stalin’s time. He doesn’t! But you can’t blame him too much, since none of us do. More precisely: We “know” a lot of things about the Soviet Union and Stalin, and almost all of those things are just not true.We’ve been swallowing lies for the truth our whole lives.

I’ll be brief in this presentation. I have prepared separate web pages with references to much of the evidence I have found (not all – there is just too much). I’m also preparing a longer version for eventual publication.

The Nonaggression Treaty Between Germany and the USSR of August 1939

Before we get into the question of the invasion that did not take place, the reader needs to become familiar with some misconceptions about the Nonaggression Treaty and why they are false. These too are based on anticommunist propaganda that is widely, if naively, “believed.”

The most common, and most false, of these is stated above in the PBS series “Behind Closed Doors”

…the Nazis and the Soviets divided the country as they had agreed to do in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact…

This is completely false, as any reading of the text of the M-R Pact itself will reveal. Just read the words on the page (see below).

The Soviets Wanted to Protect the USSR – and therefore to Preserve Independent Poland

[For the text of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact see m-rpact.html ]

It is conventionally stated as fact that the Nonaggression Pact between the USSR and Germany (often called the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” or “Treaty” after the two foreign ministers who signed it) was an agreement to “partition Poland”, divide it up.

This is completely false. I’ve prepared a page with much fuller evidence; see  “The Secret Protocols to the M-R Pact Did NOT Plan Any Partition of Poland”.

No doubt a big reason for this falsehood is this: Britain and France did sign a Nonaggression Pact with Hitler that “partitioned” another state — Czechoslovakia. That was the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938.

Poland too took part in the “partition” of Czechoslovakia too. Poland seized a part of the Cieszyn area of Czechoslovakia, even though it had only a minority Polish population. This invasion and occupation was not even agreed upon in the Munich Agreement. But neither France nor Britain did anything about it.

Hitler seized the remaining part of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. This had not been foreseen in the Munich Agreement. But Britain, France, and Poland did nothing about it.

So the anticommunist “Allies” Britain, France, and Poland really did participate in the partitioning of a powerless state! Maybe that’s why the anticommunist “party line” is that the USSR did likewise? But whatever the reason for this lie, it remains a lie.

The Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact with Germany not to “partition Poland” like the Allies had partitioned Czechoslovakia, but in order to defend the USSR.

The Treaty included a line of Soviet interest within Poland beyond which German troops could not pass in the event Germany routed the Polish army in a war.

The point here was that, if the Polish army were beaten, it and the Polish government could retreat beyond the line of Soviet interest, and so find shelter, since Hitler had agreed not to penetrate further into Poland than that line. From there they could make peace with Germany. The USSR would have a buffer state, armed and hostile to Germany, between the Reich and the Soviet frontier.

The Soviets — “Stalin”, to use a crude synecdoche (= “a part that stands for the whole”) — did not do this out of any love for fascist Poland. The Soviets wanted a Polish government — ANY Polish government — as a buffer between the USSR and the Nazi armies.

The utter betrayal of the fascist Polish Government of its own people frustrated this plan.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the Polish government had two alternatives in the event its army was smashed by an attacking army.

1. It could stay inside the country, perhaps moving its capital away from the invading army. From there it could have sued for peace, or surrendered.

2. The Polish government could have fled to an allied country that was at war with Germany: either France or England.

The governments of all other countries defeated by Germany did one or both of these things. The Polish government — racist, anticommunist, hyper-nationalist, — in short fascist, as bad as they get — didn’t do either. Rather than fight the Polish government fled into neighboring Rumania.

Rumania was neutral in the war. By crossing into neutral Rumania the Polish government became prisoners. The legal word is “interned”. They could not function as a government from Rumania, or pass through Rumania to a country at war with Germany like France, because to permit them to do that would be a violation of Rumania’s neutrality, a hostile act against Germany.

I will discuss “internment” and the international law on this question extensively below.

The USSR did not invade Poland – and everybody knew it at the time

When Poland had no government, Poland was no longer a state. (More detailed discussion below)

What that meant was this: at this point Hitler had nobody with whom to negotiate a cease-fire, or treaty.

Furthermore, the M-R Treaty’s Secret Protocols were void, since they were an agreement about the state of Poland and no state of Poland existed any longer. Unless the Red Army came in to prevent it, there was nothing to prevent the Nazis from coming right up to the Soviet border.

Or — as we now know they were in fact preparing to do — Hitler could have formed one or more pro-Nazi states in what had until recently been Eastern Poland. That way Hitler could have had it both ways: claim to the Soviets that he was still adhering to the “spheres of influence” agreement of the M-R Pact while in fact setting up a pro-Nazi, highly militarized fascist Ukrainian nationalist state on the Soviet border.

At the end of September a new secret agreement was concluded. In it the Soviet line of interest was far to the East of the “sphere of influence” line decided upon a month earlier in the Secret Protocol and published in Izvestiia and in the New York Times during September 1939. This reflected Hitler’s greater power, now that he had smashed the Polish military. See the map at new_spheres_0939.html

In this territory Poles were a minority, even after the “polonization” campaign of settling Poles in the area during the ‘20s and ‘30s. You can see the ethnic / linguistic population map at curzonline.html

How do we know this interpretation of events is true?

How do we know the USSR did not commit aggression against, or “invade”, Poland when it occupied Eastern Poland beginning on September 17, 1939 after the Polish Government had interned itself in Rumania? Here are nine pieces of evidence:

1. The Polish government did not declare war on USSR.

The Polish government declared war on Germany when Germany invaded on September 1, 1939. It did not declare war on the USSR.

2. The Polish Supreme Commander Rydz-Smigly ordered Polish soldiers not to fight the Soviets, though he ordered Polish forces to continue to fight the Germans.

See rydz_dont_fight.html

3. The Polish President Ignaz Moscicki, interned in Rumania since Sept. 17, tacitly admitted that Poland no longer had a government.

See moscicki_resignation.html

4. The Rumanian government tacitly admitted that Poland no longer had a government.

See moscicki_resignation.html

The Rumanian position recognized the fact that Moscicki was blowing smoke when he claimed he had legally resigned on September 30.  So the Rumanian government fabricated a story according to which Moscicki had already resigned back on September 15, just before entering Rumania and being interned (NYT 10.04.39, p.12). Note that Moscicki himself did not claim this!

Rumania needed this legal fiction to try to sidestep the following issue. Once Moscicki had been interned in Rumania – that is, from September 17 1939 on – he could not function as President of Poland. Since resignation is an official act, Moscicki could not resign once he was in Rumania.

For our present purposes, here’s the significant point: Both the Polish leaders and the Rumanian government recognized that Poland was bereft of a government once the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania and were interned there.

Both Moscicki and Rumania wanted a legal basis – a fig-leaf — for such a government. But they disagreed completely about this fig-leaf, which exposes it as what it was – a fiction.

5. Rumania had a military treaty with Poland aimed against the USSR. Rumania did not declare war on the USSR.

The Polish government later claimed that it had “released” Rumania from its obligations under this military treaty in return for safe haven in Rumania.

But there is no evidence for this statement. No wonder: it is at least highly unlikely that Rumania would have ever promised “safe haven” for Poland, since that would have been an act of hostility against Nazi Germany. Rumania was neutral in the war and, as discussed below, insisted upon imprisoning the Polish goverment and disarming the Polish forced once they had crossed the border into Rumania.

The real reason for Rumania’s failure to declare war on the USSR is probably the one given in a New York Times article of September 19, 1939:

That means Rumania recognized that the Red Army was not allied with Germany, an “other war.” This is tacit recognition of the Soviet and German position that Poland no longer had a government, and therefore was no longer a state.

6. France did not declare war on the USSR, though it had a mutual defense treaty with Poland.

See m-rpact.html for the reconstructed text of the “secret military protocol” of this treaty, which has been “lost” – i.e. which the French government still keeps “secret”

7. England never demanded that the USSR withdraw its troops from Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, the parts of the former Polish state occupied by the Red Army after September 17, 1939.

On the contrary, the British government concluded that these territories should not be a part of a future Polish state. Even the Polish government-in-exile agreed!

See maisky_101739_102739.html These documents are in the original Russian, with the relevant quotations translated into English below them.

8. The League of Nations did not determine the USSR had invaded a member state.

Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant required members to take trade and economic sanctions against any member who “resorted to war”.

No country took any sanctions against the USSR. No country broke diplomatic relations with the USSR over this action.

However, when the USSR attacked Finland in 1939 the League did vote to expel the USSR, and several countries broke diplomatic relations with it. See http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1939/391214a.html

A very different response! which tells us how the League viewed the Soviet action in the case of Poland.

9. All countries accepted the USSR’s declaration of neutrality.

All, including the belligerent Polish allies France and England, agreed that the USSR was not a belligerent power, was not participating in the war. In effect they accepted the USSR’s claim that it was neutral in the conflict.

See FDR’s “Proclamation 2374 on Neutrality”, November 4, 1939:

“…a state of war unhappily exists between Germany and France; Poland; and the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa,…” – http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15831&st=&st1=

- also “152 – Statement on Combat Areas” – defines

“belligerent ports, British, French, and German, in Europe or Africa…” – http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15833&st=&st1=

The Soviet Union is not mentioned as a belligerent. That means the USA did not consider the USSR to be at war with Poland. For the Soviet Union’s claim of neutrality see soviet_neutrality.html

Naturally, a country cannot “invade” another country and yet credibly claim that it is “neutral” with respect to the war involving that country. But NONE of these countries declared the USSR a belligerent. Nor did the United States, the League of Nations, or any country in the world.

The Polish State Collapsed

By September 17, 1939, when Soviet troops crossed the border, the Polish government had ceased to function. The fact that Poland no longer had a government meant that Poland was no longer a state.

On September 17 when Molotov handed Polish Ambassador to the USSR Grzybowski the note Grzybowski told Molotov that he did not know where his government was, but had been informed that he should contact it through Bucharest. See polish_state_collapsed.html

In fact the last elements of the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania and so into internment during the day of September 17, according to a United Press dispatch published on page four of the New York Times on September 18 with a dateline of Cernauti, Rumania. See polish_leaders_flee.html

Without a government, Poland as a state had ceased to exist under international law. This fact is denied — more often, simply ignored — by anticommunists, for whom it is a bone in the throat.

We take a closer look at this issue in the next section below. But a moment’s reflection will reveal the logic of this position. With no government — the Polish government was interned in Rumania, remember — there is no one to negotiate with; no body to which the police, local governments, and the military are responsible. Polish ambassadors to foreign countries no longer represent their government, because there is no government. (See the page polish_state_collapsed.html , especially the NYT article of October 2, 1939 )

The Question of the State in International Law

See state_international_law.html for more details.

EVERY definition of a “state” recognizes the necessity of a government or “organized political authority.” Once the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania, it was no longer a “government.”

Even the Polish officials of the day recognized this by trying to create the impression that “the government” had never been interned since it had been handed over to somebody else before crossing into Rumania. See the discussion concerning Moscicki and his “desire to resign” on September 29, 1939, also cited above.

So EVERYBODY, Poles included, recognized that by interning themselves in Rumania the Polish government had created a situation whereby Poland was no longer a “state.” This is not just “a reasonable interpretation” – not just an intelligent, logical deduction but one among several possible deductions. As I have demonstrated in this paper, it was virtually everybody’s interpretation at the time. Every major power, plus the former Polish Prime Minister himself, shared it.

Once this is problem is squarely faced, everything else flows from it.

* The Secret Protocol to the M-R Pact was no longer valid, in that it was about spheres of influence in “Poland”, a state.

By September 15 at the latest Germany had taken the position that Poland no longer existed as a state (discussed further here).
Once Poland ceased to exist as a state this Secret Protocol did not apply any longer.
Therefore if they wanted to the Germans could march right up to the Soviet frontier.
Or – and this is what Hitler was in fact going to do if the Soviet Union did not send in troops — they could facilitate the creation of puppet states, like a pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist state.
In any case, once Hitler had taken the position that Poland no longer existed as a state, and therefore that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s agreement on spheres of influence in the state of Poland was no longer valid, the Soviet Union had only two choices: either to

1. Send the Red Army into Western Ukraine and Wester Belorussia to establish sovereignty there; or
2. Let Hitler send the Nazi army right up to the Soviet border.

* Since the Polish state had ceased to exist, the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact was no longer in effect.

The Red Army could cross the border without “invading” or “committing aggression against” Poland. By sending its troops across the border the USSR was claiming sovereignty, so no one else could do so – e.g. a pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist state, or Nazi Germany itself.

* Legitimacy flows from the state, and there was no longer any Polish state.

Therefore the Polish Army was no longer a legitimate army, but a gang of armed men acting without any legitimacy. Having no legitimacy, the Polish Army should have immediately laid down its arms and surrendered. Of course it could keep fighting — but then it would no longer be fighting as a legitimate army but as partisans. Partisans have NO rights at all except under the laws of the government that does claim sovereignty.

* Some Polish nationalists claim that the Soviets showed their “perfidy” by refusing, once they had sent troops across the Soviet frontier, to allow the Polish army cross the border into Rumania.

But this is all wrong. The USSR had diplomatic relations with Rumania. The USSR could not permit thousands of armed men to cross the border from areas where it held sovereignty into Rumania, a neighboring state. Imagine if, say, Mexico or Canada tried to permit thousands of armed men to cross the border into the USA!

Re-negotiation of “Spheres of Influence” September 28 1939

See new_spheres_0939.html

All this is referred to directly in a Ribbentrop (German Foreign Minister)-to-Schulenburg (German ambassador to Moscow) communication of September 15-16 — Telegram No. 360 of 15 September 1939 — with its reference to “the possibility of the formation in this area of new states.”

Note that Ribbentrop is very displeased with the idea that the Soviets would “tak[e] the threat to the Ukrainian and White Russian populations by Germany as a ground for Soviet action” and wants Schulenberg to get Molotov to give some other motive. He was unsuccessful; this was exactly the motive the Soviets gave:

The German government was already considering that Poland no longer existed — there’s no reference to “Poland”, only to “the area lying to the East of the German zone of influence”, etc.

Polish Imperialism

A word of explanation regarding the Soviet reference to “the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland.”

At the Treaty of Riga signed in March 1921 the Russian Republic (the Soviet Union was not officially formed until 1924), exhausted by the Civil War and foreign intervention, agreed to give half of Belorussia and Ukraine to the Polish imperialists in return for a desperately-needed peace.

We use the words “Polish imperialists” advisedly, because Poles — native speakers of the Polish language — were in the small minority in Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, the areas that passed to Poland in this treaty. The Polish capitalist regime then encouraged ethnic Poles to populate these areas to “polonize” them, and put all kinds of restrictions on the use of the Belorussian and Ukrainian languages.

Up till the beginning of 1939, when Hitler decided to turn against Poland before making war on the USSR, the Polish government was maneuvering to join Nazi Germany in a war on the USSR in order to seize more territory.

As late as January 26, 1939, Polish Foreign Minister Beck was discussing this with Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Warsaw. Ribbentrop wrote:

Polish Foreign Minister Beck was telling Ribbentrop that Poland would like to seize ALL of the Ukraine from the USSR, for that was the only way Poland could have had “a connection with the Black Sea.”

In occupying Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine the USSR was reuniting Belorussians and Ukrainians, East and West. This is what the Soviets meant by the claim that they were “liberating” these areas. The word “liberation” is conventionally used when an occupying imperialist power withdraws, and that’s what happened here.

The Polish Government In Exile

At the beginning of October 1939 the British and French governments recognized a Polish government-in-exile in France (later it moved to England). This was an act of hostility against Germany, of course. But the UK and France were already at war with Germany. (The USA took the position of refusing to recognize the conquest of Poland, but treated the Polish government-in-exile in Paris in an equivocal manner. Evidently it wasn’t sure what to do.)

The USSR could not recognize it for a number of reasons:

* Recognizing it would be incompatible with the neutrality of the USSR in the war.

It would be an act of hostility against Germany, with which the USSR had a non-aggression pact and a desire to avoid war. (The USSR did recognize it in July 1941, after the Nazi invasion).

* The Polish government-in-exile could not exercise sovereignty anywhere.

* Most important: if the USSR were to recognize the Polish government-in-exile, the USSR would have had to retreat back to its pre-September 1939 borders — because the Polish government-in-exile would never recognize the Soviet occupation of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.
Then Germany would have simply marched up to the Soviet frontier.
To permit that would have been a crime against the Soviet people, of course. And, as the British and French soon agreed, a blow against them, and a big boost to Hitler as well. See should_the_ussr_have_permitted.html

Polish Government Uniquely Irresponsible

No other government during WW2 did anything remotely like what the Polish government did.

Many governments of countries conquered by the Axis formed “governments in exile” to continue the war. But only the Polish government interned itself in a neutral country, thereby stripping itself of the ability to function as a government and stripping their own people of their existence as a state.

What should the Polish government leader have done, once they realized they were completely beaten militarily?

• The Polish government should have remained somewhere in Poland – if not in the capital, Warsaw, then in Eastern Poland. f they had set up an alternative capital in the East — something the Soviets had prepared to do East of Moscow, in case the Nazis captured Moscow — then they could have preserved a “rump” Poland.
  There it should have capitulated – as, for example, the French Government did in July 1940. Or, it could have sued for peace, as the Finnish government did in March 1940.
  Then Poland, like Finland, would have remained as a state, though it would certainly have lost territory.
• Or, the Polish government could have fled to Great Britain or France, countries already at war with Germany.
  Polish government leaders could have fled by air any time. Or they could have gotten to the Polish port of Gdynia, which held out until September 14, and fled by boat.
• Why didn’t they? Did Polish government leaders think they might be killed? Well, so what? Tens of thousands of their fellow citizens and soldiers were being killed!
  • Maybe they really did believe Rumania would violate its neutrality with Germany and let them pass through to France? If they did believe this, they were remarkably stupid. There’s never been any evidence that the Rumanian government gave them permission to do this.
  • Did they believe Britain and France were going to “save” them? If so, that too was remarkably stupid. Even if the British and French really intended to field a large army to attack German forces in the West, the Polish army would have had to hold against the Wehrmacht for a month at least, perhaps more. But the Polish Army was in rapid retreat after the first day or two of the war.
  • Or, maybe they fled simply out of sheer cowardice. That is what their flight out of Warsaw, the Polish capital, suggests. I

Everything that happened afterwards was a result of the Polish government being interned in Rumania.

Here’s how the world might have been different if a “rump” Poland had remained after surrender to Hitler:

* A “rump” Poland might finally have agreed to make a mutual defense pact that included the USSR. That would have restarted “collective security”, the anti-Nazi alliance between the Western Allies and the USSR that the Soviets sought but UK and French leaders rejected.

That would have

• greatly weakened Hitler;
• probably eliminating much of the Jewish Holocaust;
• certainly preventing the conquest of France, Belgium, and the rest of Europe;
• certainly prevented many millions of deaths of Soviet citizens.

* Poland could have emerged from WW2 as an independent state, perhaps a neutral one, like Finland, Sweden, or Austria.

All this, and more – if only the Polish government had remained in their country at least long enough to surrender, as every other government did.

Conclusion

See conclusion.html

By Domenico Savio

General Secretary of the PCI-ML (Marxist-Leninist Italian Communist Party)

Comrades and workers of Italy and of all countries of Earth, welcome to this special live TV coverage of Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party for the 56th anniversary of the death of Comrade Stalin.

His name Josef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, known as Stalin, was born in Gori, in Georgia on December 21, 1879 and died, unfortunately, in not too advanced age in Moscow on March 5,1953. Stalin died in an important moment in the former Soviet Union when there was by achieving still a long way in the building of the socialist society in order to make concrete then the passage to the building of that communist one.

After that Marx, Engels and Lenin had built the philosophic, theoretic building of communist doctrine and also with the contribution of enrichment of Comrade Lenin, Stalin has been  the first builder of Socialism in the history of humanity. For the first seven years Soviet Union after the glorious October Revolution of November 7, 1917 was able to make use of the great guide work of comrade Lenin who unfortunately died in 1924 and was up just to comrade Stalin to continue in building of the socialist society. Therefore Lenin and Stalin have been the first persons to start a process of building of the socialist society that replaced the former capitalist society of Russia.

The communist society that is built after having built that socialist one, is born and advances through the class struggle in the proletariat of single countries and of whole world. Marx says about the class struggle:”the existence of classes is only bound to certain stages of historical development of production, the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, this same dictatorship constitutes only the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. In fact, in communist society where there are not more differences of class, the classes are extinguished, no longer exist.

So we can say that the social classes as they are born at a particular time of productive development of the society, in this way will die.

The Socialism made in Soviet Union and throughout the former socialist world is not bankrupt, as deceptively try to make understanding the opponents of class, namely the bourgeoisie, the power of information and of formation of the public opinion, the capitalist power through the media, Socialism has not failed just as has not failed the communist doctrine.

The construction of Socialism and then the building of Communism pass through a long and hard class struggle in the construction of socialist society, the class struggle continues and at times must be even more determined to defeat the attempts of the defeated bourgeois class to appropriate itself again the power and to establish again the exploitation of man over man.

So in the former Soviet Union and in the former socialist world, unfortunately, the class struggle of the proletariat in the process of completing the construction of socialist society has been, this fight, unfortunately defeated. But this does not mean that the class struggle does not continue today and that there are not, as soon as possible, of course, in historical necessary time, new and more powerful proletarian revolutions, where the proletariat recaptures the power and restarts, and this time is the wish of all us especially in this 56th anniversary of the death of Comrade Stalin, this time the victory of Socialism over capitalism, over the bourgeoisie is definitive.

The socialist society is the only one capable of providing an alternative to social infamies, to the social differences of the capitalist system, and we saw how in Soviet Union and other socialist countries had been defeated the barbaric system of exploitation of man over man, all citizens when they saw the light of the world, when were born had guaranteed by the society, by the community on the whole, the right to the highest health care, the right to study and then the right to work, to housing, the right to free time in order to live a dignified existence, worthy to be lived, not as happens today in the capitalist society where the man, the worker is desperate by the system of master domain, by the redundancy, unemployment, misery, by lack of a safe wage or salary .

The only socialist society which has abolished the exploitation of man over man, where the master class doesn’t rules longer is possible to have a life worthy of this name. Soviet Union under the leadership of the great revolutionary Stalin was also the hard but heroic, glorious task to defeat Nazi-fascism in Europe, decisive was the contribution of Soviet Union, of its glorious Red Army, the people of Soviet, one hundred people, a hundred ethnic peoples, those heroic people lost 20 million of their children in the struggle to defeat Nazi-fascism.

And we want just, here, in this moment of terrible crisis of the capitalist system, just in this moment we wanted to highlight the achievements of socialist society, the crisis that the peoples of the Earth, the proletariat of all countries in particular, are experiencing dramatically in  these days and  in these months, dear comrades, dear workers, is the crisis of the capitalist system, the Socialism made in the twentieth century has not never been in crisis, but rather reaches a level of social, technological, scientific development that was not afraid to compete in  the capitalist Western world, in United States, Soviet Union was the first country to send humans into space, and the capitalist system based on the exploitation of man over man, on the centralization of socially produced wealth in the hands of a few people to go periodically into crisis, we can say that the capitalist system is always in crisis as more and less and the working class pays all the possible consequences.

Today, the Italian or European capitalist families of all countries on Earth have immense wealth, in real estate, bank deposits, stock, immense wealth because the crisis produced by them for achieving ever more profit and wealth pay, rather make paying the charge to workers, to popular masses through the bourgeois, political power which legislates to favour always the bourgeois and capitalist class against the interests of the working world.

This is capitalism, dear comrades, dear workers is capitalism of the crisis, is the capitalism that is starving the people, it is capitalism that leads the masses just because of the lack of a safe job, a secure wage and salary induces the popular masses to live desperately their lives.

The system of capitalism is a murderer social system, and the term is not exaggerated, this murderer, social system can be buried, defeated, dear workers, it is enough that you, we want this, it is enough that we realize that if divided the workers are easy capture of master exploitation.

But if they join, if they form a single front, if they create their great Party, the true Communist Party described by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, this Party can bring the proletariat to its liberation from the exploitation of man over the man, to the liberation from misery, from existential despair.

Dear workers, you must know that the working class without his class-union, not as the bourgeois unions that exist today in Italy and that make the interests of the master class, not those ones of the working world.

Workers without own class and revolutionary Party cannot achieve any social emancipation, can not to hope for the release from their daily suffering, for which the construction of a great Communist Party is key in the capitalist society, and it is still most important today that we suffer worse evils with a terrible crisis, a fearful social and economical crisis of this system.

But unfortunately we communists that are realist, that must always look directly at the reality, the possibilities  to organize, to lead the class struggle, unfortunately, today we see  that the worst evil of the working class is the terrible decadence of  class consciousness in individual workers of the whole proletariat. Yes, decadence of class consciousness, that is, the workers do not become aware, despite the crisis of the capitalist system, despite the economic and social violence of the capitalist system, workers do not become aware that is possible to organize themselves differently, to militate in a real Communist Party , to create a great deal of class and revolutionary struggle to reach the appropriate historical moment to the conquest of the political power and therefore the starting of construction of the new socialist society.

With sadness we note that Italian and not only Italian working class today does not understand this its historic task, his opportunity to rid once and forever from the chains of master exploitation and domination. We note in exploited, abused workers a dismay of their classmates.

Within the working class, unfortunately dominate the not-committalism, individualism, division, lack of will to unite to be strong to face and win the enemy of class, the ownership.

Unfortunately, as Marx said, today the working class is still class in itself, which is incapable of its political class and revolutionary function, unable to work socially for his release.

It is on this working class in itself that the ownership pours and continues all his violence of labor exploitation and brutalization of existence of the workers. Therefore a working class that is still not class for itself, that is committed daily in its initiatives of fight to build a new social perspective.

And we see this thing from the passwords that are pronounced by the workers during strikes called by bourgeois trade-unions, strikes that do not bring to a concrete, consistent result, for the improvement of living conditions of workers. We see it also in bourgeois, union comparison of workers, we notice it on TV, we read also on press in the attitude towards political power, even in television a working class is incapable of a class analysis and therefore of a perpective of class; a working class which, unfortunately, at any time ends to make the interests of the master class.

And there is this working class victim of bourgeois unions, of false Communist Parties which of communist usurping falsify only the word, and remain yet this working class within the wider capitalist political Left. Employees who fail to realize that everything in today’s Italian left, whether reformist, bourgeois, capitalist, falsely communist, in all this false political Left there is nothing of communism, of class struggle, of prospect of liberation of the working world from the master slavery.

The workers do not realize that this is an undeniable truth and from all points of view.

And more, this working class that ignores the socialist system, the benefits of the socialist system, the elevation of the human personality, of human existence of the socialist system, are workers that, unfortunately even here, slaves of master system and of bourgeois culture of exploitation that capitalism spreads daily plentifully through the press, its television stations.

So a working class that fails to see its path of liberation and dignity of life.

Therefore tonight I want to appeal to Italian and not only Italian working class: workers, study you the texts of Socialism, study you the thought and work of the great Masters of the international proletariat, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, workers, leave you the bourgeois and clerical culture which you are still slaves, find the strength to break the chains of this bourgeois and clerical culture that keep you clamped, which does not allow you to get rid, break you these chains of intellectual, bourgeois and clerical slavery because starts from there, from this capacity the moment of liberation, redemption, the ability to look ahead towards the construction of a new social order for you and your children.

In Italy, says a statistic, 41% of young people is without prospect, 41% of young people do not have a secured job, don’t have a secured future, for these young people there is only the prospect of despair, if they lived in a socialist system would have guaranteed, as I said before, the health care, the study, the house, to get married, leisure, the freedom to live truly a dignified existence.

And in this tragic situation we see, unfortunately, still young people which with the mind and thought wander among school trends and suicidal movementism, that is the commitment, the protest of the movement vision of the social and political struggle, this is a suicidal fight without prospect because at its base does not have content and values of class.

We have seen how is end all student-movement of 2008 who has been baptized with the name of the ‘Wave’, a not-committal movement, without any possibility of impacting in the dramatic social situation in which these young students and unemployed workers live.

Here, this student, youth movement, have the serious limitation of not realizing that without class struggle, without fighting the capitalist system, without killing it at the right time, for them there is no possibility of redemption, of liberation, to raise really the head.

This type of movement struggle naturally fails before starting, and we have seen how this movementism of ‘wave’ is miserably finished, failed, have made the play of bourgeois and capitalist government that has continued to pursue its anti-popular choices.

And we also heard on television in recent days, a woman saying: “I want a future for my son, for my children, almost as if the future different from that dramatic one that we live today falls from the sky and cannot be only the result of a new social commitment of struggle. Therefore this lady talks, and all those like her, talks in vain because his lament without being materialized by a different and social commitment of struggle, cannot achieve any results. And when the working class withdraws, that master one advances.

And we see this situation also in these months. We have seen how in the last 30 years with the inglorious end of former Italian Communist Party, with the transformation of compromise, of conciliation also of CGIL in Italy, the working movement is backward while the master class with his political power have advanced and are recovering, if they have not already taken, all the one who the working class in Italy had won before the end of the 70 years.

Meanwhile we see the fascist and reactionary right to raise their heads and reorganize, especially in these days we have noted with greater worry this problem of fascist and reactionary right that in our country after nearly 60 years from the end of fascism raises its head, that master one advances in social and political terms.

And we note that advances the right of government, Italy is now

And here’s because is correct the definition: ‘when the working class withdraws ruled by a center-right government, but when it was ruled by a government of center-left, the situation was the same for the Italian working class, similarly exploited and abused by political, economic and capitalist power.

So we now have a center-right government and with the advance of the political power of right advances also the fascist and violent right. Just Saturday afternoon, Saturday, February 28, we have seen in Bergamo, city of North Italy, the organization, one of the organizations of extreme right Forza Nuova (New Force), armed with sticks goes down the streets to the cry of “Executioner who releases”, the notorious fascist expression ”Executioner who releases’.

At this time these fascists who feel reborn, who feel supported by a political, reactionary power of right, are free to praise and exalt fascism and are free to trample the bourgeois Constitution which condemn fascism, the fascist culture, organizations of fascist kind.

Unfortunately, the false Italian left have brought us again, have brought back us that bourgeois culture that by now of left has not any element, that have tried to create a parallel between the deaths of anti-fascist Resistance and the deaths of petty Salo Republic.

The moment is difficult; the same anti-fascist nature of our Republic, of our social life is not safe. And we have already said that movementism and extremism are not useful to the struggle for Socialism, nor even less to improve our conditions of daily life.

Just as the extremism of the social centers like the movementism are not useful, indeed, are negative and not educating.

Also Saturday, February 28, we saw the social centers to take to the streets in Bergamo as opposition to the demonstration of Forza Nuova. We say that the protest organized in this way, with political, cultural, movement and extremist elements, does not bring to actual convincing results, does not bring to increase really in Italy the anti-fascist movement.

These social centers are doing these actions since 50 years, since 50 years they get organized, protest, spend energy also important, but it is the wrong way, what is the use to put on a hood before the military power of the State of the masters?

What is of use also to risk everything to take truncheons when then the initiative as a whole has no political perspective, has no prospect in the direction of building a large class and revolutionary Communist Party? Because it is the only one who can make withdrawing the advance of fascist and reactionary right in our country.

Unfortunately for the working class and particularly for young people are dark moments, and as we have said before but repeating with force that only make growing a big Communist, Marxist-Leninist Party who works since this moment without waiting other times to build the perspective of socialist revolution, the conquest of political power in our country by the proletariat to be able to start the building of the new socialist society.

This is the only road, perspective, I want to tell the comrades of the social centers: there is no alternative to this perspective, your demonstrations do not bring anything good and practical to this perspective; extremism, said Lenin, is the childhood disease of communism, as well as the movementism does not nothing in common with the communist doctrine, with the strategy of the working masses to gain and build a new society.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin these great masters of the international proletariat today must be our guide in the class struggle, there are not other teachers, only their thought, their work, their teaching may serve us for a political and social commitment that could lead us outside the infamous capitalist social system.

And on this 56th anniversary of the Stalin’s death, which falls today and in which Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party have wanted to dedicate this live broadcast, just in this circumstance we must take example from the revolutionary existence, by the commitment of political and class struggle of comrade Stalin, a life entirely dedicated to the liberation struggle of the proletariat in each country and throughout the world.

Only Italian Marxist-Communist Party which I have the honour to represent, that today in Italy is the only true Marxist-Leninist, Communist Party who works for the prospect of Socialism, only a Party of such nature, as Lenin would have said and yet Stalin, could feel today the power even the need to remember the great political work of Stalin, first builder of a socialist society in the history of humanity, first guide for many, dozens of people who worked in building the new society, the socialist society. That’s because I address an invitation to the Italian working class, to the intellectuals of vanguard that are few, as we know, however, exist, I address them an invitation to resume the journey along the path traced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin along the path of Communist doctrine, the socialist revolution, the construction of Socialism.

In this day of 56th anniversary of the death of Comrade Stalin, we pay tribute to his memory, resuming and making green again its high passion of revolutionary struggle, a comrade jailed several times, repeatedly fled from czarist prisons, a comrade who was a lighting guide together with that one of Lenin during the glorious October Revolution. We must take example by him, Stalin lived as he was born: poor, all the one who he had in the mind and the arms put with passion, with total abnegation at disposal of the class struggle for the liberation of the proletariat of all world from the chains of master exploitation, of the capitalist social slavery.

And in particular way the old persons remember how in front of Stalin trembled the capitalism, trembled the imperialism, imperialism and capitalism which today as yesterday are afraid of the experience of glorious life of Stalin, of his teaching.

And it is for this reason that through their press, their televisions, their scribblers which churn out to order books to throw mud, to slander the Communist leaders, especially Stalin, to indicate him as a demon, like a massacre so that the name of Stalin is away from the popular consciousness because capitalism and imperialism are afraid of Stalin’s teaching, if the working masses will make own, and we hope as soon as possible, the teaching of life of Stalin, capitalism and imperialism will resume to tremble and will approach the days of socialist revolution, the day of redemption, the day of recovery in the construction of Socialism not only in individual countries but worldwide.

Therefore we defend, it is our duty, Stalin from the calumnies of the bourgeoisie, not only of the bourgeoisie but also of the revisionists, the false communists present today also in Italy and in particular the falsely Communist Parties, the revisionists as Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), the ‘Partito dei Comunisti Italiani’ (Italian Communists Party) or other groups that are coming in these months, they are declared anticommunist that although continue to use the sickle and hammer and the name ‘communist’, only deceive the working masses because their activity serve only to the capitalist system to continue their lives.

Therefore with Stalin for Socialism today and even or rather now, dear comrades, dear workers the fight for socialist revolution, for the conquest of power by the working class must start immediately, let abandon you the bourgeois trade-unions, let abandon you the false communist Parties, let enter you to militate in the true class, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist communist Party, which is the Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.

Therefore honor and glory to the great Stalin, the great Georgian.

With Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin dear comrades, dear workers we can win and we will win if we will work together, if we will set off together on the path that leads us to the socialist revolution, the conquest of political power by the working class, the construction of the new Socialist company.

To do this today in Italy the only way is to enter to militate and to struggle politically within the still small but already glorious Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party that I have the honor to represent; glorious just because plays the thought and work of the great masters of the international proletariat Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and it is in the name of these masters that we will continue our revolutionary fight of communists in order to give particularly to the Italian proletariat at the right time the opportunity to get rid and to gain their social dignity.

Onwards to Socialism! Onwards to Communism! Dear workers, just is enough to believe in the possibility of building a new society in which man is truly free, in which man can to assert himself worthily if we believe in that, if we will believe in that, we can build this future, but we can to build it as soon as possible inasmuch as the Italian proletariat will do the most right choice, that is, to give force to Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. GLORY TO STALIN!

A few examples…

K.Vasilev. Invasion - 1941

A.Sukhoverkhov. Partisans of Belorussia - 1944

V. Bozhko. Banner of Victory - 1945

Several readers have commended Free Media Productions for its principled stance against opportunism and revisionism (in both its ultra-left and rightist formations). However, some have also asked us of “reactionary chauvinism” when it comes to the “sex question.”

According to some of these individuals, Free Media Productions is guilty of:

• Hostile rhetoric that negates the relationship between Marxism and feminist liberation
• Propagation of petty-bourgeois moralism and a ‘puritanical’ approach to questions of personal conduct and behavior
• Upholding negative stereotypes and prejudices towards women

The final criticism came from an e-mail from one reader who asked us why we don’t use “non-chauvinist” vocabulary, such as “womyn, persyn and so on.”

We’ll gladly respond to these criticisms in due time. But we’d like to know what you think? Is FMP guilty of “reactionary” chauvinism? Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail us your replies to freemediaproductions@gmail.com

Why a revolutionary working class newspaper?

By V.I. Lenin

In recent years the question of “what is to be done” has confronted Russian Social-Democrats with particular insistence. It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken. It is a question of a system and plan of practical work. And it must be admitted that we have not yet solved this question of the character and the methods of struggle, fundamental for a party of practical activity, that it still gives rise to serious differences of opinion, which reveal a deplorable ideological instability and vacillation.

On the one hand, the “Economist” trend, far from being dead, is endeavoring to clip and narrow the work of political organization and agitation.

On the other, unprincipled eclecticism is again rearing its head, aping every new “trend,” and is incapable of distinguishing immediate demands from the main tasks and permanent needs of the movement as a whole.

This trend, as we know, has ensconced itself in Rabocheye Dyelo.[3] This journal’s latest statement of “program,” a bombastic article under the bombastic title “A Historic Turn” (“Listok” Rabochevo Dyela, No. 6[4]), bears out with special emphasis the characterization we have given. Only yesterday there was a flirtation with “Economism,” a fury over the resolute condemnation of Rabochaya Mysl,[5] and Plekhanov’s presentation of the question of the struggle against autocracy was being toned down.

But today Liebknecht’s words are being quoted: “If the circumstances change within twenty-four hours, then tactics must be changed within twenty-four hours.” There is talk of a “strong fighting organization for direct attack, for storming, the autocracy; of “broad revolutionary political agitation among the masses” (how energetic we are now —both revolutionary and political!); of “ceaseless calls for street protests”; of “street demonstrations of a pronounced [sic!] political character”; and so on, and so forth.

We might perhaps declare ourselves happy at Rabocheye Dyelo’s quick grasp of the program we put forward in the first issue of Iskra,[6] calling for the formation of a strong well-organized party, whose aim is not only to win isolated concessions but to storm the fortress of the autocracy itself; but the lack of any set point of view in these individuals can only dampen our happiness.

Rabocheye Dyelo, of course, mentions Liebknecht’s name in vain. The tactics of agitation in relation to some special question, or the tactics with regard to some detail of party organization may be changed in twenty-four hours; but only people devoid of all principle are capable of changing, in twenty-four hours, or, for that matter, in twenty-four months, their view on the necessity — in general, constantly, and absolutely — of an organization of struggle and of political agitation among the masses.

It is ridiculous to plead different circumstances and a change of periods: the building of a fighting organization and the conduct of political agitation are essential under any “drab, peaceful” circumstances, in any period, no matter how marked by a “declining revolutionary spirit”; moreover, it is precisely in such periods and under such circumstances that work of this kind is particularly necessary, since it is too late to form the organization in times of explosion and outbursts; the party must be in a state of readiness to launch activity at a moment’s notice. “Change the tactics within twenty-four hours”! But in order to change tactics it is first necessary to have tactics; without a strong organization skilled in waging political struggle under all circumstances and at all times, there can be no question of that systematic plan of action, illumined by firm principles and steadfastly carried out, which alone is worthy of the name of tactics.

…We need but recall the recent events. With our own eyes we saw that the mass of workers and “common people” of the towns pressed forward in struggle, while the revolutionaries lacked a staff of leaders and organizers. Under such conditions, is there not the danger that, as the most energetic revolutionaries go over to terror, the fighting contingents, in whom alone it is possible to place serious reliance, will be weakened? Is there not the danger of rupturing the contact between the revolutionary organizations and the disunited masses of the discontented, the protesting, and the disposed to struggle, who are weak precisely because they are disunited? Yet it is this contact that is the sole guarantee of our success. Far be it from us to deny the significance of heroic individual blows, but it is our duty to sound a vigorous warning against becoming infatuated with terror, against taking it to be the chief and basic means of struggle, as so many people strongly incline to do at present. Terror can never be a regular military operation; at best it can only serve as one of the methods employed in a decisive assault.

But can we issue the call for such a decisive assault at the present moment? Rabocheye Dyelo apparently thinks we can. At any rate, it exclaims: “Form assault columns!” But this, again, is more zeal than reason. The main body of our military forces consists of volunteers and insurgents. We possess only a few small units of regular troops, and these are not even mobilized; they are not connected with one another, nor have they been trained to form columns of any sort, let alone assault columns. In view of all this, it must be clear to anyone who is capable of appreciating the general conditions of our struggle and who is mindful of them at every “turn” in the historical course of events that at the present moment our slogan cannot be “To the assault,” but h s to be, “Lay siege to the enemy fortress.”

In other words, the immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organization capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organization ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle.

The lesson of the February and March events[7] has been so impressive that no disagreement in principle with this conclusion is now likely to be encountered. What we need at the present moment, however, is not a solution of the problem in principle but a practical solution. We should not only be clear on the nature of the organization that is needed and its precise purpose, but we must elaborate a definite plan for an organization, so that its formation may be undertaken from all aspects. In view of the pressing importance of the question, we, on our part, take the liberty of submitting to the comrades a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print.[8]

In our opinion, the starting-point of our activities, the first step towards creating the desired organization, or, let us say, the main thread which, if followed, would enable us steadily to develop, deepen, and extend that organization, should be the founding of an All-Russian political newspaper. A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social-Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population.

Never has the need been felt so acutely as today for reinforcing dispersed agitation in the form of individual action, local leaflets, pamphlets, etc., by means of generalized and systematic agitation that can only be conducted with the aid of the periodical press. It may be said without exaggeration that the frequency and regularity with which a newspaper is printed (and distributed) can serve as a precise criterion of how well this cardinal and most essential sector of our militant activities is built up.

Furthermore, our newspaper must be All-Russian. If we fail, and as long as we fail, to combine our efforts to influence the people and the government by means of the printed word, it will be utopian to think of combining other means, more complex, more difficult, but also more decisive, for exerting influence. Our movement suffers in the first place, ideologically, as well as in practical and organizational respects, from its state of fragmentation, from the almost complete immersion of the overwhelming majority of Social-Democrats in local work, which narrows their outlook, the scope of their activities, and their skill in the maintenance of secrecy and their preparedness. It is precisely in this state of fragmentation that one must look for the deepest roots of the instability and the waverings noted above.

The first step towards eliminating this shortcoming, towards transforming divers local movements into a single, All-Russian movement, must be the founding of an All-Russian newspaper.

Lastly, what we need is definitely a political newspaper. Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is inconceivable in the Europe of today. Without such a newspaper we cannot possibly fulfill our task — that of concentrating all the elements of political discontent and protest, of vitalizing thereby the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. We have taken the first step, we have aroused in the working class a passion for “economic,” factory exposures; we must now take the next step, that of arousing in every section of the population that is at all politically conscious a passion for political exposure.

We must not be discouraged by the fact that the voice of political exposure is today so feeble, timid, and infrequent. This is not because of a wholesale submission to police despotism, but because those who are able and ready to make exposures have no tribune from which to speak, no eager and encouraging audience, they do not see anywhere among the people that force to which it would be worth while directing their complaint against the “omnipotent” Russian Government.

But today all this is rapidly changing. There is such a force — it is the revolutionary proletariat, which has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle. We are now in a position to provide a tribune for the nationwide exposure of the tsarist government, and it is our duty to do this. That tribune must be a Social-Democratic newspaper.

The Russian working class, as distinct from the other classes and strata of Russian society, displays a constant interest in political knowledge and manifests a constant and extensive demand (not only in periods of intensive unrest) for illegal literature. When such a mass demand is evident, when the training of experienced revolutionary leaders has already begun, and when the concentration of the working class makes it virtual master in the working-class districts of the big cities and in the factory settlements and communities, it is quite feasible for the proletariat to found a political newspaper. Through the proletariat the newspaper will reach the urban petty bourgeoisie, the rural handicraftsmen, and the peasants, thereby becoming a real people’s political newspaper.

The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organized labor.

With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organization will naturally lake shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence these events.

The mere technical task of regularly supplying the newspaper with copy and of promoting regular distribution will necessitate a network of local agents of the united party, who will maintain constant contact with one another, know the general state of affairs, get accustomed to performing regularly their detailed functions in the All-Russian work, and test their strength in the organization of various revolutionary actions. This network of agents[1] will form the skeleton of precisely the kind of organization we need — one that is sufficiently large to embrace the whole country; sufficiently broad and many-sided to effect a strict and detailed division of labor; sufficiently well tempered to be able to conduct steadily its own work under any circumstances, at all “sudden turns,” and in face of all contingencies; sufficiently flexible to be able, on the one hand, to avoid an open battle against an overwhelming enemy, when the enemy has concentrated all his forces at one spot, and yet, on the other, to take advantage of his unwieldiness and to attack him when and where he least expects it.

Today we are faced with the relatively easy task of supporting student demonstrations in the streets of big cities; tomorrow we may, perhaps, have the more difficult task of supporting, for example, the unemployed movement in some particular area, and the day after to be at our posts in order to play a revolutionary part in a peasant uprising. Today we must take advantage of the tense political situation arising out of the government’s campaign against the Zemstvo [local government in tsarist Russia – ed.] ; tomorrow we may have to support popular indignation against some tsarist bashi-bazouk [an undisciplined soldier - ed.] on the rampage and help, by means of boycott, indictment, demonstrations, etc., to make things so hot for him as to force him into open retreat. Such a degree of combat readiness can be developed only through the constant activity of regular troops.

If we join forces to produce a common newspaper, this work will train and bring into the foreground, not only the most skillful propagandists, but the most capable organizers, the most talented political party leaders capable, at the right moment, of releasing the slogan for the decisive struggle and of taking the lead in that struggle.

In conclusion, a few words to avoid possible misunderstanding. We have spoken continuously of systematic, planned preparation, yet it is by no means our intention to imply that the autocracy can be overthrown only by a regular siege or by organized assault. Such a view would be absurd and doctrinaire. On the contrary, it is quite possible, and historically much more probable, that the autocracy will collapse under the impact of one of the spontaneous outbursts or unforeseen political complications, which constantly threaten it from all sides. But no political party that wishes to avoid adventurous gambles can base its activities on the anticipation of such outbursts and complications. We must go our own way, and we must steadfastly carry on our regular work, and the less our reliance on the unexpected, the less the chance of our being caught unawares by any “historic turns.”

Excerpts from V. I. Lenin Where to Begin?[2] From Lenin Internet Archive (2001). Written in May 1901. Published in Iskra, No. 4, May 1901. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, Moscow, Volume 5, pages 13-24.

President Zelaya of Honduras has just been kidnapped
[Note: As of 11:15am, Caracas time, President Zelaya is speaking live on Telesur from San Jose, Costa Rica. He has verified the soldiers entered his residence in the early morning hours, firing guns and threatening to kill him and his family if he resisted the coup. He was forced to go with the soldiers who took him to the air base and flew him to Costa Rica. He has requested the U.S. Government make a public statement condemning the coup, otherwise, it will indicate their compliance.]

Caracas, Venezuela – The text message that beeped on my cell phone this morning read “Alert, Zelaya has been kidnapped, coup d’etat underway in Honduras, spread the word.” It’s a rude awakening for a Sunday morning, especially for the millions of Hondurans that were preparing to exercise their sacred right to vote today for the first time on a consultative referendum concerning the future convening of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution. Supposedly at the center of the controversary is today’s scheduled referendum, which is not a binding vote but merely an opinion poll to determine whether or not a majority of Hondurans desire to eventually enter into a process to modify their constitution.

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has a very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law.

In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday’s elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president’s followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president’s order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military’s actions, and so he ordered the General’s removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.

But the following day, Honduras’ Supreme Court reinstated General Romeo Vásquez to the high military command, ruling his firing as “unconstitutional’. Thousands poured into the streets of Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, showing support for President Zelaya and evidencing their determination to ensure Sunday’s non-binding referendum would take place. On Friday, the president and a group of hundreds of supporters, marched to the nearby air base to collect the electoral material that had been previously held by the military. That evening, Zelaya gave a national press conference along with a group of politicians from different political parties and social movements, calling for unity and peace in the country.

As of Saturday, the situation in Honduras was reported as calm. But early Sunday morning, a group of approximately 60 armed soldiers entered the presidential residence and took Zelaya hostage. After several hours of confusion, reports surfaced claiming the president had been taken to a nearby air force base and flown to neighboring Costa Rica. No images have been seen of the president so far and it is unknown whether or not his life is still endangered.

President Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, speaking live on Telesur at approximately 10:00am Caracas time, denounced that in early hours of Sunday morning, the soldiers stormed their residence, firing shots throughout the house, beating and then taking the president. “It was an act of cowardness”, said the first lady, referring to the illegal kidnapping occuring during a time when no one would know or react until it was all over. Casto de Zelaya also called for the “preservation” of her husband’s life, indicating that she herself is unaware of his whereabouts. She claimed their lives are all still in “serious danger” and made a call for the international community to denounce this illegal coup d’etat and to act rapidly to reinstate constitutional order in the country, which includes the rescue and return of the democratically elected Zelaya.

Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have both made public statements on Sunday morning condeming the coup d’etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated. Last Wednesday, June 24, an extraordinary meeting of the member nations of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), of which Honduras is a member, was convened in Venezuela to welcome Ecuador, Antigua & Barbados and St. Vincent to its ranks. During the meeting, which was attended by Honduras’ Foreign Minister, Patricia Rodas, a statement was read supporting President Zelaya and condenming any attempts to undermine his mandate and Honduras’ democratic processes.

Reports coming out of Honduras have informed that the public television channel, Canal 8, has been shut down by the coup forces. Just minutes ago, Telesur announced that the military in Honduras is shutting down all electricity throughout the country. Those television and radio stations still transmitting are not reporting the coup d’etat or the kidnapping of President Zelaya, according to Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas. “Telephones and electricity are being cut off”, confirmed Rodas just minutes ago via Telesur. “The media are showing cartoons and soap operas and are not informing the people of Honduras about what is happening”. The situation is eerily reminiscent of the April 2002 coup d’etat against President Chávez in Venezuela, when the media played a key role by first manipulating information to support the coup and then later blacking out all information when the people began protesting and eventually overcame and defeated the coup forces, rescuing Chávez (who had also been kidnapped by the military) and restoring constitutional order.

Honduras is a nation that has been the victim of dictatorships and massive U.S. intervention during the past century, including several military invasions. The last major U.S. government intervention in Honduras occured during the 1980s, when the Reagain Administration funded death squads and paramilitaries to eliminate any potential “communist threats” in Central America. At the time, John Negroponte, was the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras and was responsible for directly funding and training Honduran death squads that were responsable for thousands of disappeared and assassinated throughout the region.

On Friday, the Organization of American States (OAS), convened a special meeting to discuss the crisis in Honduras, later issuing a statement condeming the threats to democracy and authorizing a convoy of representatives to travel to OAS to investigate further. Nevertheless, on Friday, Assistant Secretary of State of the United States, Phillip J. Crowley, refused to clarify the U.S. government’s position in reference to the potential coup against President Zelaya, and instead issued a more ambiguous statement that implied Washington’s support for the opposition to the Honduran president. While most other Latin American governments had clearly indicated their adamant condemnation of the coup plans underway in Honduras and their solid support for Honduras’ constitutionally elected president, Manual Zelaya, the U.S. spokesman stated the following, “We are concerned about the breakdown in the political dialogue among Honduran politicians over the proposed June 28 poll on constitutional reform. We urge all sides to seek a consensual democratic resolution in the current political impasse that adheres to the Honduran constitution and to Honduran laws consistent with the principles of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.”

As of 10:30am, Sunday morning, no further statements have been issued by the Washington concerning the military coup in Honduras. The Central American nation is highly dependent on the U.S. economy, which ensures one of its top sources of income, the monies sent from Hondurans working in the U.S. under the “temporary protected status” program that was implemented during Washington’s dirty war in the 1980s as a result of massive immigration to U.S. territory to escape the war zone. Another major source of funding in Honduras is USAID, providing over US$ 50 millon annually for “democracy promotion” programs, which generally supports NGOs and political parties favorable to U.S. interests, as has been the case in Venezuela, Bolivia and other nations in the region. The Pentagon also maintains a military base in Honduras in Soto Cano, equipped with approximately 500 troops and numerous air force combat planes and helicopters.

Foreign Minister Rodas has stated that she has repeatedly tried to make contact with the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras, Hugo Llorens, who has not responded to any of her calls thus far. The modus operandi of the coup makes clear that Washington is involved. Neither the Honduran military, which is majority trained by U.S. forces, nor the political and economic elite, would act to oust a democratically elected president without the backing and support of the U.S. government. President Zelaya has increasingly come under attack by the conservative forces in Honduras for his growing relationship with the ALBA countries, and particularly Venezuela and President Chávez. Many believe the coup has been executed as a method of ensuring Honduras does not continue to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in Latin America.

James Petras – Information Clearing House

“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation…Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes). Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.

The Electoral Fraud Hoax
Western leaders rejected the results because they ‘knew’ that their reformist candidate could not lose…For months they published daily interviews, editorials and reports from the field ‘detailing’ the failures of Ahmadinejad’s administration; they cited the support from clerics, former officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites fluent in English, to prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the ‘voices of moderation’, at least the White House’s version of that vacuous cliché. Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris. Other academics claimed that the ‘youth vote’ – based on their interviews with upper and middle-class university students from the neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the ‘reformist’ candidate.

What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western media believed their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral process was described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their favored candidate would win.

The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad. Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the competing demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.

Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital – few venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition’s supporters were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street activities, while Ahmadinejad’s support drew on the majority of working youth and household women workers who would express their views at the ballot box and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics.

A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting behavior rather than other social or class interests. A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and the middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt, obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

The careless and distorted emphasis on ‘ethnic voting’ cited by writers from the Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ‘s victory a ‘stolen vote’ is matched by the media’s willful and deliberate refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted by two US experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences than ‘generational life style’. According to this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian youth were too poor to have access to a computer and the 18-24 year olds “comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups” (Washington Porst June 15, 2009). The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’, which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.

In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers’ opposition to the ‘reformist’ program, which included proposals to ‘privatize’ public enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening national security from US and Israeli threats in light of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan, which have killed scores of Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which has not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up to the elections.

What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad’s strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.

The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare system, with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by Western-oriented privileged youth who prize individual life styles over community values and solidarity.

The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income, free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working class, low income, community based supporters of a ‘moral economy’ in which usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition’s attack on the regime’s ‘intransigent’ foreign policy and positions ‘alienating’ the West only resonated with the liberal university students and import-export business groups. To many Iranians, the regime’s military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or Israeli attack.

The scale of the opposition’s electoral deficit should tell us is how out of touch it is with its own people’s vital concerns. It should remind them that by moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices that make life tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside the privileged gates of Tehran University.

Amhadinejad’s electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than 60% of the vote in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries prefer social welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with military empires.

The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an abandonment of Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium is not an existential threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow Israel’s lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an ‘illegitimate’ government in Tehran which ‘stole an election’.

Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.

The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response: Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should use the hoax of ‘electoral fraud’ to exert maximum pressure on the Obama regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad regime.

Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.

A reader recently asked us a question about any possible discrepencies between Marxism-Leninism and ‘patriotism.’ Here’s our response:

Many so-called Marxists renounce the idea of ‘patriotism’ as categorically un-Marxist. Often, these “Marxists” purposefully obfuscate the abstract concept of ‘patriotism’ with the most base form of bourgeois ‘nationalism,’ a move only possible if one intentionally fails to distinguish between the nation and the state.

So, in the vast world of Marxism-Leninism, is there room for a “Red Patriotism,” that is loyalty, pride and above all a socialized attitude towards one’s identifying with a proletarian workers’ state? While there’s no codified instructions present in the current Marxist-Leninist canon that would clearly invalidate the basis for a “red patriotism,” there are those who understand the political importance of inculcating a sense of pride, loyalty and other attributes associated with patriotism (in general) within a socialist society.

History shows that Stalin, as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and later Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (1941-46) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (1946-53), understood the importance of pride in one’s country as especially necessary when confronted with the realities of hostile, aggressive and provocative capitalist encirclement. The Great Patriotic War tested the strength of not only the Red armed forces, but also the socialist method of production, organization and social relations against capitalism in its most brutal and degenerated form: Hitlerite militarism.

While nothing can replace the material factors which drove the Soviet Red Army to victory over the Wehmracht – and the subsequent liberation of Eastern Europe, on the political, cultural and social front – the creation of a new “Soviet patriotism” was invariably essential for perpetuating the continued sacrifices of the Soviet population in support of Soviet defense and eventual liberation. The role of patriotism was thus critical for Soviet successes in the Great Patriotic War, but most importantly in its role in establishing the ‘total mobilization’ of the civilian population to increase production in the desperately needed heavy industry and agriculture.

Thus, as within bourgeois society, socialist society too can benefit significantly from the inculcation and socialization of a “red patriotism.” This, insofar as history has proven, is the correct path. But is such a concept “anti-Marxist?”

That question has no clear, instantaneous answer. We could draw upon the writings and collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and so forth in order to derive the correct answer. But we must also take into account that none of these men were prophets – capable (or interested) in prescribing the exact details for how socialism, and eventually communism, are to be constructed in future generations. Rather, we can use these works to provide a principled basis for understanding the methodology in establishing socialism in one country, and later on world-wide scale (as dictated by material/historical conditions).

Evidently, patriotism in its bourgeois form has been responsible for serving the interests of the ruling classes. Despite Lenin’s claims calling for the European socialist parties to condemn the imperialist First World War, revisionist and opportunist constituent parties of the Second International reverted to bourgeois patriotism and nationalism and supported their respective governments in the imperialist plunder of Europe. But patriotism is a means, not an end. And therefore, this attribute of patriotisms negative impacts on the world are not demonstrative of patriotism as a whole.

In a socialist society, patriotic attitudes and sentiments towards the Party and the workers’ state would help bind and unify a society where clearly not everyone will be motivated by Marxism-Leninism. A realistic appraisal of social conditions may necessitate the adaptation of a patriotic trend in officially subsidized culture and propaganda with the aim of providing the means for adequate defense of the socialist country in question.

The basic assumption here refers back to the (absolutely correct) assessment by V.I. Lenin that communists must be tactically fluid and pragmatic – and willing to reassess procedural decisions and keep a mind that victory may also come alongside tactical retreats (two-steps forward, one-step back). Lenin’s tactical fluidity was the backbone of the Bolshevik’s strategy for overthrowing the Kerensky provisional government in the Great October Socialist Revolution; and it was this understanding of politics that was accurately and faithfully applied by Stalin in the ensuing years while taking the Soviet Union down the path towards socialism.

May 29 – The proliferation of hawkish propaganda disseminated through the bourgeois media aiming to instill the public on a war-footing towards hostile military action against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has once again demonstrated the subordination of honest, quality journalism to bourgeois jingoist ideology and capitalist ambitions. The latest inflammatory coverage of events the DPRK has been especially concentrated through the 24-hour cable news outlets, such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc.

These so-called “news” organizations have the [dis]honor of serving as the privately-owned spokespersons for the White House and the interests of the ruling class. In reference to the generally bad journalism that takes place on American broadcast news stations – quality information is substituted wholesale for cheap mass-reproduction of government talking points, progressively infused “infotainment” and yellow journalism in its most disgusting form.

Mainstream network television news has traditionally been one of the most popular forms of information dissemination in the United States. But statistics show a downward trend in viewers attributed to the rise and success of the 24-hour cable news channel (CNN, Fox News), which can rapidly respond in a moment’s notice to the modern daily news cycle. If you recall immediately during and after the events of September 11, 2001 – American television news viewers were glued to the screens of their television, and channels like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC reported their highest audience ratings to date.

This phenomenon continued during the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The owners, CEOs and boards of directors responsible for the programming, editorial decision-making and directorship of these channels certainly understood that conflict, war and crisis spells exponentially increased viewers – in turn fueling increased advertisement sponsorship in a never-ending quest for the accumulation of higher profits.

Like any commercial institution in bourgeois society, news organizations don’t provide a service or product for its own (or the public’s) sake; there is always a profit motive working behind the scenes that enables that particular organization or industry to sustain itself and grow. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC – unlike their network counterparts such as ABC, CBS and NBC – have huge vested interests in relying on dramatic news to generate increased audiences in hopes of accumulating higher profits. When profits are the primary focus of an organization’s mere existence, then it goes without question that other elements of the operation (integrity) take lesser precedence. Unlike CBS or the other networks, the cable news channels don’t rely on explicitly entertainment content, such as sitcoms, reality TV shows, etc.   And while concentration of the news-media industry has left a monopoly of control over the means of mass communication, in order for these outlets to prove profitable extensions of their parent companies, they require dramatic events that captivate an audience in order to push back on potential advertisers for higher ad rates.

Thus, the profit motive is playing an undeniably crucial role in the drumming for military aggression towards, and the defamation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The privately-owned 24-7 cable news media wants nothing more than for the US and its lackeys in “south” Korea and Japan to initiate war against the peace-loving nation of the DPRK. From the rationale of capitalism, it makes perfect sense.

The drumming up for war against the DPRK has always had its boisterous support among the bourgeois news-media, overly dramatizing events on the Korean peninsula that have an innate ability to increase anxiety and tension in audiences. In short, the build-up to war is an essential part of the psychological manipulation that’s consistently seen in advertising. In short, this is nothing more than attempt to manipulate public thought in anticipation of mobilization and escalation to armed conflict. If, or when, the imperialists take their threats to action, the need for information consumption by the public will then be satiated by the producer all-too happy and willing to satiate.

What’s most disgusting though, is that so-called “progressives” champion these calls by employing the same outlandish rhetoric against the DPRK. Take, for example, the recent editorial by the ©PUSA, which condemned the DPRK in language nearly identical to that used by the official White House mouthpiece Robert Gibbs. These pitiful and pathetic examples of so-called lefists are worse than their chicken hawk counterparts, who at least have the virtue of being explicit in their reactionary beliefs and opinions.

June 6 Gaza Solidarity Day

Demonstration in downtown San Francisco to commemorate 42nd anniversary of Zionist seizure of Gaza

What: Demonstration against Zionist aggression in Gaza

When: Saturday June 6, 2009 @ 12 pm noon

Where: UN Plaza, Downtown San Francisco (7th & Market). See map.

Who: See below for sponsoring organizations

May 28 – June 6th marks the 42nd anniversary of the Zionist-Israeli seizure and subsequent occupation of Gaza. In memory of this atrocity and the continued perpetuation of the terrorist-Zionist state of Israel, the International A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition is organizing June 6 Gaza Solidarity Day, a special day of demonstration in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine demanding an end to the siege of Gaza and the cessation of US financial and military support to the murderous Zionist regime that continues to ravage the displaced peoples isolated in the narrow Gaza strip.

The demonstration will begin this Saturday June 6 at noon at the UN Plaza (7th and Market) in downtown San Francisco. The focus of the June 6th protest will be calling upon the US government, complicit in the murderous crimes of the Zionist regime, to end its financial and military support for the terrorists in Tel Aviv, and commemorate the tragic seizure and current occupation of Palestinian territories.

The June 6 Gaza Solidarity Day is sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, the Muslim American Society Freedom, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, National Council of Arab Americans, Free Palestine Alliance, Al-Awda—Palestinian Right of Return Coalition, American Muslims for Palestine and more.

Individuals interested in helping out can stop by the ANSWER San Francisco office at 2489 Mission St (#24), or call 415-577-1492.

A reader recently asked us why we take such a strong position on “morality,” and how we (at least the Marxist-Leninist staff) viewed the role of morality in a socialist society. First, we’d like to acknowledge that morality is strictly a reflection of the values embodied by whichever ruling class dominates society, and forms part of the superstructure reflective of the economic base. That being said, there is no objective morality in the idealist sense – as pointed out by Marx, Engels, etc. Nonetheless, it can easily be argued that morality serves a certain utilitarian function in society, and as Marxist-Leninists we acknowledge that morality exists solely on a consequentialist basis – that which aids the development of socialism is morally good, while that which inhibits or deters it is fundamentally morally bad.

In order to clarify this position better, I’ve illustrated a few positions on vice and immoral symptoms dominant within capitalist society that would have no place in a socialist society. Vices and immorality are the enemy of the proletariat; and while some can’t be helped, there are many that are inherently social and nature and must be gotten rid of in a functioning socialist society.

Prostitution
Addictives
Decadence
Promiscuity

Prostitution is both a social ill and symptom of a lumpenproletarian sub-economy that has no place in a socialist society. With collective ownership of the means of productions, anyone physically capable of working and producing would have a place in society, and thus the social origins that precipitate the success of an underground sex market would be fundamentally eliminated. Pimps, lumpenproles and others who try to make a quick dollar through the exploitation of women should be harshly punished. Education, rehabilitation and re-integration into a functioning socialist society of former prostitutes would be a service effectively offered within a socialist society in transition from the previous capitalist order.

Addictive chemical substances should be highly regulated, including alcohol and marijuana. More importantly, as the liberal culture and dominant ideology of capitalism is eliminated and replaced by a socialist society, the social attitudes that and material conditions that create the conditions favorable to excessive use of chemical substances would simultaneously disappear. Active measures should be taken by the state to promote responsible living, as the new well-being of the individual under socialism is accountable not only to him or herself, but the collective masses as a whole.

Decadence is the symptom of bourgeois liberalism that has, like a gangrenous infection, been met with favorable social conditions consequently rotting the masses from the inside out. As the transfer of the social means of production from private to the collective develops, so too will the dominant ideology that provides the philosophical, moral and ethical standards of those within society. As Marx, Engels and Lenin correctly pointed out, the legitimacy of the ruling class is inextricably linked with the predominance of the dominant ideology that justifies and legitimizes its rule. In a socialist society, the dominant ideology will reflect the material conditions present under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Obviously promiscuity would be a difficult vice to do away with, but mandatory sexual education that promotes both the virtues of abstinence as well as objective scientific facts (instead of clerical propaganda) is one way to go about curbing the destructive, anti-social behavior associated with promiscuity. And in all fairness, this would apply even more to men than women, as under bourgeois society there is an abhorrent sense of “pride” affiliated with male promiscuity – while female promiscuity is treated with ambivalence.

In an extensive article attacking Stalin’s legacy, the New York Times (NYT) was forced to print the following admission, plus printing the photograph below of a “look-alike Stalin living in Georgia.”

“The admiration and the love for Stalin in this small 4.6 million population of Georgia, is seen in the following news item.

Jamil Ziyuadaliev, 64, and a father of two, was asked by the people of Gori to help out in keeping the name of Stalin alive and his deeds to be remembered. Majority of Georgian people respect Stalin because he was a great leader who helped to build the Soviet Union, for defeating the Nazis and saving the world from fascism. He was also the most famous Georgian who ever lived.”

Georgian history books even now – despite the reactionary pro-American leadership – write about Stalin and his love of Georgia.

In Gori, Stalin’s birthplace where there is still a marble statue of Stalin in the central square. Jamil (Stalin) is asked to be an honored guest at weddings, anniversary occasions, history classes in schools and on important holiday occasions by people celebrating the USSR.

There are always toasts on such occasions, such as: “To our great comrade Stalin!”

Jamil Ziyuadaliev personifies in person the love for Stalin by majority of not only the Georgian people, but most Soviet people as well dedicated Marxists-Leninists-Bolsheviks in the world.

Those to try to erase Stalin’s name from history – will themselves be erased and forgotten forever – while the name of J.V. Stalin will live on forever!

from Al-Manar TV News

The United States and four of its allies, along with Israel, boycotted the United Nations World Conference against Racism, or Durban II.

Every single word mentioned in the title of the conference – racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance – speaks of Israel and its criminal policies. Therefore, it was not unusual for the first 2001 Durban Conference to focus on Israel, a task to be carried on in the second Geneva conference.

Strangely, well-known countries stand against “singling out” Israel although
it is condemned by the majority of the countries around the world. In addition, to focus on other countries or issues does not alleviate Israel’s guilt or invalidate its condemnation.

This condemnation is not restricted to the Arabs and Muslims. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which groups 57 countries from all over the world, condemns Israel. The U.N. General Assembly too condemns Israel once or more almost every year, with the objection of the United States, Israel, Micronesia, or similar South Pacific Island states.

” In the face of six countries and some islands there is the entire world and thousands of civil society organizations in the East and the West. They all condemn Israel, along with U.N. organizations and committees ”
Jihad el-Khazen

The countries endorsing Israel become accomplices in the crimes it perpetrates. There is no room to mention every country in this column, and I probably do not need to refer to the U.S. role in arming and funding Israel, as well as protecting it with the veto, which enables it to maintain occupation, murder, and destruction. As for Germany, I understand that it is trying to distance itself from its Nazi past, one of the main reasons behind the scourge of Israel. Then, there is Australia, a state established by criminals banished from Britain. I would not say its stance reflects a pact of “honor among thieves,” since Australia was also stolen from its population, but I would say that the Australian government headed by Kevin Rudd assumes regular anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stances.

In the face of six countries and some islands there is the entire world and thousands of civil society organizations in the East and the West. They all condemn Israel, along with U.N. organizations and committees.

Equally important is that thousands of Jews around the world, and in Israel itself, condemn Israel. Following the barbaric attack on the Gaza Strip I have read letters published in dailies and written by prominent Jews around the world, in addition to articles in different media, including some of the Israeli press such as Haaretz. I have also registered growing appeals to boycott Israel, also made by Jewish scholars and activists around the world.

Those Jews should be mentioned and thanked. Their anti-Israeli stances have a greater impact than the boycott of Christian Churches in the U.S. and Europe. It is because they give precedence to their humanity over Israel’s aggressiveness even though they are Israelis.

” These words certainly apply to Israel more than to any other country in the world. It alone kills women and children and then hides behind the Holocaust ”
El-Khazen

In my opinion, Israel pursues very strange policies. It espoused the Jewish Left, but after 1977 it gradually shifted toward the radical Right, without this Right constituting a majority in Israel. Indeed, every public opinion poll shows that the majority are centrists and peace seekers. Yet, we see Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu rule.

Such leaders and the Likudniks in the U.S. cannot cover up Israel’s crimes and the world condemnation no matter how much they try. We see them focus on Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and try to scare people of him, although the Iranian president had merely spoken out. He did not kill the Jews, unlike Nazi Germany and its allies, nor did he kill Palestinian women and children, as has been doing the state of the survivors of Nazism and their descendants on a daily basis. Although I disagree with the Iranian president over the majority of issues, I believe that he was not mistaken when he said that Israel was a racist state. It is so and even more.

I leave the readers with two opinions on the Geneva conference. Pope Benedict XVI praised the conference, urging countries around the globe to join forces in order to eliminate all forms of racism, discrimination, and intolerance. Israeli President Shimon Peres felt hurt, as this conference, which coincided with the commemoration of the Holocaust, had Ahmedinejad as a keynote speaker. He believes that “in Iran people are hanged because they are suspected of God knows what – nothing. There is a center of hate, of blood, of terror.”

These words certainly apply to Israel more than to any other country in the world. It alone kills women and children and then hides behind the Holocaust.

I do not mean to compare between the Pope and Peres the deceiver so as not to insult the former, but I say that Israel is condemned in the tribunal of international opinion before it is in Durban I and Durban II. The countries that boycotted the anti-racism conference are accomplices in the crimes it perpetrates regardless of the excuses they give to justify non-participation.

The revisionist Trotskyite revanchists, having learned nothing from their repeated mistakes over the course of the last 70 years, continue to this day to espouse ideological perversions under the slogan of “revolutionary socialism.”

One of the most un-Marxist, repulsive positions of the neo-Trotskyist opportunism is the challenge of holding all revolutionary struggles, whether national liberation or proletarian in nature, to unattainable qualifications of “perfection.” By “perfection,” these so-called critics mean to gauge the worthiness of a movement or struggle on whether or not it conforms to the deviationist principles outline by the illegitimate Fourth International; the conglomeration of parties and movements representing the so-called “Trotskyite movement” formed in 1938.

The basis for this line of thinking dates back to the writings of Leon Trotsky after his expulsion from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and exile. In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Trotsky writes

There does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name. If our international be still weak in numbers, it is strong in doctrine, program, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres. Who does not perceive this today, let him in the meantime stand aside…. (pp. 42-3).

This overtly conciliatory and petty-bourgeois line reveals the loathsome arrogance of not only the author, but of the so-called “Trotskyite movement” in general. For not only does it reek with the foul stench of the most vile form of sectarianism, it also suggests that the Fourth International takes an ambivalent ambition to the expansion of capital across the globe, insofar as it condemns contemporary and current struggles.

Having routinely faced such criticisms, the website for the “Fourth International” masks its chauvinism and anti-proletarian position under the term “critical support.” But in reality, behind the slogans, lies the contempt and bitterness of a strangled and phony ideological trend up to its neck in its own political and theoretical failures.

The theoretical failings, and subsequent political intrigues, for which Trotskyism has been historically renowned, circle back to the issue of revisionist “permanent revolution” versus the correct-line of “socialism in one country.” As has been repeatedly proven in the past, the possibility of establishing socialism in one country has already been proven in the appropriate historical context, while simultaneously espoused by the father of Marxist thought in the era of imperialism, V.I. Lenin; who said, “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone” (On the Question of a United States of Europe).

Thus, naturally any movement that basis itself on the strategy of establishing socialism in one country naturally is at odds with the Fourth International and Trotsykyism. Moreover, the Left Opposition that inevitably degenerated into an external “movement” abandoned all semblance of a mere theoretical trend in opposition to the central line of the Party, instead unleashing a bitter and hostile attack against “socialism in one country” and Marxist-Leninist thought in the form of serving as the mouthpiece for Western imperialist conciliation against active revolutionary struggles.

And thus the illegitimate Fourth International, having abandoned anything resembling Marxism-Leninism, continue to this day to commit the same errors that serve only the interests of international capital and the global bourgeoisie.

April 8 – With just under 30 hours until the start of the April 9 rallies in Georgia demanding the resignation of puppet President Mixeil Saakashvili, tensions are running high in the capital city as police prepare for what could turn into another disaster mirroring previous anti-government protests. However, if the opposition wants to succeed in removing Saakashvili, then they need to develop a sound strategy with effective tactis.

Thus far, in a number of interviews with pro-opposition media, opposition leaders have only vaguely outlined the intended strategy for how they plan to force the unpopular president from office. According to Eka Beselia of the Movement for United Georgia (one of the organizations participating in the demonstrations) in an interview with Rezonansi, said the opposition protests will begin sharply at 2 pm local time outside the Parliament building followed by an announcement of an ultimatum to the administration demanding Saakashvili’s resignation… or else.

Unfortunately, the “…or else” leaves much to be desired. According to Beselia, if Saakashvili refuses to resign, then the opposition movement will launch “concrete actions, which will be peaceful.” The actions Beselia and other opposition leaders have in mind, include picketing government office buildings in the capital and around the country.

Many of the youth groups within the opposition have developed similarly weak and ineffective tactics. The organization known as “Why?” has already staged numerous protests throughout Tbilisi, largely focused on publicity stunts and media-grabbing visuals.

Unless more effective tactics are employed, the opposition movement is likely to fail miserably in its attempt to uproot the Washington’s proxy in Tbilisi. The fact that opposition leaders have pledged a commitment to “non-violence,” is equally disappointing – as the regime has already demonstrated its willingness to use police and security personnel to violently disperse anti-government protesters in the past.

If anything, removing Saakashvili with violence may be the only alternative, and certainly a justifiable one considering the administration’s abysmal failures and misadventures. Furthermore, in the 2003 so-called “Rose Revolution,” Saakashvili was brought to power (by way of private, Western financing) as a replacement for an equally corrupt and dismal politician, Eduard Shevardnadze. There’s little guarantee that any substitute for Saakashvili would be any more desirable or willing to serve the interests of the Georgian working class.

Instead, the opposition movement itself needs to be reshuffled and transformed into an effective body capable of not only removing this particularly corrupt and inept politician, but radically overthrowing the very system which breeds such louses. Georgia doesn’t need another “reformist,” it needs a revolution that can put it on the direction towards sustainability, viability and prosperity, as it enjoyed under socialism before the era of Khruschevite revisionism.

April 7 – Last month’s shifts in the top echelon of the Cuban government only further demonstrated the revisionist line that Cuba’s so-called Communist Party has pursued in the last several decades.

The purpose of the changes are intended to communicate a message to the imperialist world, namely the United States and Europe, that Cuba is making changes in order to attract foreign investment in order to booster its weak, state-capitalist system.

The capitalist reforms that have taken place since Raul Castro assumed executive control over the state, enjoys the support of Fidel Castro. The March “purge” in Cuba was an attempt by the Castroite revisionists to pave the way for more liberalization in the Cuban economy, at the expense of the Cuban people.

The initial reforms, announced by Raul in February 2009, demonstrated that the path for genuine socialism has been largely abandoned. The unequivocal nature of Cuban revisionism doesn’t bother to even pretend to mask itself in socialist rhetoric; when he openly admitted in February that his vision of “socialism” was markedly more “liberal.”

Indeed, even the enemies of the Cuban revolution have noted that the ascension of Raul Castro would likely open up new opportunities for exporting capital into the country.

We’ve received a lot of comments in our inbox lately, particularly surrounding coverage of issues related to Zionist-Israel. And while we’re always very grateful to receive positive feedback from readers, we love the hate-mail even more. This latest batch is to help kick-off a new section of the Editorials where we share all of the hate-mail we receive from those of you out there who simply don’t like us, take issue with what we have to say or just find us repulsive.

January 28, 2009

“You parade as anti-Zionists when its completely obvious to anyone that you are a hateful little snipe, completely unawares of your own bigotry in your treatment of Israel. Oh, and by the way, referring to Israel as “Zionist-Israel” (which you seem to have a particular fetish for) is redundant. Without Zionism there would be no Israel.”

-Mark B.
January 30, 2009

“What a joke. You pretend to be ‘journalists’ when you’re nothing more than radical Islamic terrorist wannabes probably sulking in your parents basements. One of your writers (can’t remember his name) talks incessantly about Islam but claims to be an atheist? Does he not know what Shariah law has in store for him? You can thank your ungratefull ass that there is a United States and Israel protecting the world from arab extremism and islamism.  What a disgrace.”

-Anthony S.

March 9, 2009

Stalin was a traitor and no Marxist-Leninist. Your video [Editor's note: author is referencing the 'Socialism in One Coutry' video] wasn’t even informative – you only went on to try and create parallels between socialism in one country (more like national socialism) to Marxism-Leninist internationalism. Stalin’s rise was the Bolshevik thermador. Take your Stalinist bullshit somehwere else.

-Real Revolution Trotsky

March 11, 2009

Anti-Zionism is just anti-Semitism is just a more politically correct mask. if you reject Jewish nationhood then you are an anti-Semite. The world has already seen what happens when Jews must endure without a nation-state of their own. And no matter what, we’ll never let it happen again. Oh, and your article on the displacement of Arabs in al-Quds is incorrect: it’s not political – it’s legal. Those homes were built without permits you lazy shits. Do some research before you just say anything.

-Yakov B.

March 13, 2009

“I like your site. I’m sending it to my friends I know they’ll like it too…”

-Ben M.

[Editor's Note: This reader was directed to the FMP site via Newsvine, and is a regular pro-Zionist fanatic who frequently visits websites in order to promote Zionist-Israeli propaganda.]

March 22, 2009

“Democratic reforms in Tibet? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Do you know how hard those people live because the communist party won’t let them express their own ideals, that is to live under their own culture, their own government, under DEMOCRACY? You take your talking poitns from the Propaganda Department, and try to paint it objectively. You’re not even that creative. Your a bunch of HACKS.

LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE FOR A FREE TIBET! DOWN WITH CHINESE FASCISM.”

-Jessica W.

March 22, 2009

“I just wanted you to know I reported your site for promoting terrorism. You made a video about ’solidarity with Hamas.’ Good for you douche bags. Nice to know there are still grateful people in this country who appreciate their freedoms and the people who sacrifice their lives so they can write insolent diatribes like you and your other band of anti-American limp-dicks. Go to hell, and get the FUCK out of my country you pissant, whiny, snot-nosed shits.

Oh and I’ve saved a copy of your ‘dog tags reports’ as evidence. You sick fucks. I’m reporting that for abuse as well and I’ll make sure people know about what you and your ‘comrades’ are doing here.

Fuck you and have a nice day.”

-Mike C.

To answer this question, I’d like to direct you to an excellent article written in the Spring 2004 issue of The Communist – published by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

But first, one can’t simply judge how progresive or reactionary an organization is simply on its slogans, rhetoric or even Party platform. We must take a scientific assessment and examination of the outcomes of that platform and its practical outcomes. No matter how “progressive” or “revolutionary” one might seem – if the outcomes work against the interests of the international proletariat, then they are without a doubt reactionary.

For a more in-depth examination of the problems of Trotskyite revisionism, I strongly recommend the above-mentioned article from the PLP. Thankfully, the PLP website seems fully functional once again and they have made their past works fully accessible in downloadable, PDF format.

Here’s the link: Why Trotskyism is Reactionary (2004).

Little in the way of authoritative biographical works have been written about Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, once known as “Stalin’s Favorite” and former People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. This new book offers an interesting glance, through a bourgeois historical lens, about the early life and political rise of Nikolai Yezhov without delving too much into his reign as a People’s Commissar. In fact, little is mentioned at all about this period, and instead focuses on Yezhov’s life from his proletarian origins, his service in the military, and his meteoric rise within the Bolshevik Party’s personnel apparatus.

The book’s strengths lie in that the author’s at least make some meaningful attempts to avoid allowing their own political beliefs hinder their objective historical work, though there is no short of reference to the “crimes” committed by Yezhov. Likewise, the authors don’t try to draw a psychological profile of Yezhov and are quite determined to describe his life and pre-NKVD career independent of how history has remembered him. Perhaps the work’s most praiseworthy element is that the author’s don’t try to assume conclusions (at least explicitly) where information is lacking. Unlike Robert Conquest, Getty and Naumov try not to assert assumptions in place of evidence and factual information.

A lot of information is based on sources or testimonies of people who recorded their experience of Yezhov from his earlier career – including individuals who served with him in the Red Army (1919-1921), his Party comrades in numerous provincial Party organs and his colleagues and coworkers in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. It also draws on some of the remnants of Yezhov’s personal records taken from his official archives.

The overall questions that Getty and Naumov are trying to answer throughout their research is what kind of person was Yezhov before he held the power of a People’s Commissar, explain his rapid rise within the Party and State apparatus and ultimately (according to the authors) discover whether Yezhov was merely Stalin’s tool, or a willing leader capable of acting on his own initiative.

The drawbacks of the book are that, despite the attempts of the authors, it does invoke moments of bourgeois anti-communist moralizing in reference to specific events and actions undertaken by the Soviet government, the NKVD and is underscored with a preconceived hostility towards Soviet policy. Furthermore, the book itself is extremely short (less than 200 pages), though this is probably due to the lack of verifiable sources on Yezhov’s early life.

I’m going to break this question into two parts: the first dealing primarily with the differences between Marxism and Anarchism; and the second for a future piece specifically focused on questions of the individual and the collective.

To begin with I’m assuming you’re describing left-wing anarchism (the primary group of anarchist thought) which is equally hostile to capitalist exploitation and oppression as Marxism; versus right-wing anarchism, which many anarchists would contend isn’t anarchism at all, but just laissez-faire capitalism.

Secondly, I’d like to point out that the distinctions between anarchism and Marxism-Leninism are not merely tactical – as one might suspect. For instance, Marxist-Leninists uphold the view that socialism is the necessary transitional stage after capitalism, and prior to communism. That doesn’t mean that Marxist-Leninists don’t reject the tactics of anarchism, or criticize the means for implicating the anarchist ideals as anti-scientific and anti-materialist; however, the major diversion occurs on matters of principle. Stalin described this in his article “Anarchism or Socialism.” Here is an excerpt on the contradiction of principles between the two:

The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: “Everything for the individual.” The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: “Everything for the masses.” (J.V. Stalin)

Thus for anarchism, social liberation of the masses is achieved through total liberation of the individual. Conversely, according to Marxism – the liberation of the masses is the necessary condition for the liberation of the individual. The fundamental divergence in principles is the result of anarchists’ abandonment of the dialectical-historical method, and substituting it with base metaphysics. Marxists understand that each individual is engaged in continuously changing relationships with other members of society, with the means of production and class. Marxists understand that consciousness is dictated by existence, and that the mental and physical liberation for the individual is impossible without first liberating the masses. This is proven through Marx and Engel’s dialectical-materialist method.

Finally, There also exists a faction of anarchists who refer to themselves as “anarcho-communists,” claiming to uphold the Marxist dialectical materialist method, while simultaneously rejecting socialism, and fighting directly for a communist society. Anarcho-communists, despite their rhetoric and in line with anarchism in general, make the same grave mistake of rejecting the dialectical materialist method, and substituting it with idealist metaphysics. For not only do anarcho-communists reject the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism) – they are fundamentally idealists who believe that material conditions can be ignored, and that the laws governing political economy and social progress can be tossed aside for the glory of the individual.

In short – Marxism and Anarchism are essentially incompatible; and not merely two lines of thinking committed to differing tactics and means for achieving the same end.

How do we define elements of “bourgeois society” from the kind of society which the Marxist-Leninists envision? What is this far more “encompassing transformation of society as a whole.”?

In a post-capitalist society, the fundamental basis of all social relations (economic, cultural and political) undergo a revolutionary transformation as the capitalist base is destroyed and the subsequent emergence of a socialist society. Marxism teaches us that the infrastructure (political systems, culture, social relations, etc.) are dependent upon the economic base. Therefore, Marxism-Leninism is concerned not merely with substituting ownership of the means of production, but an all encompassing transformation of every aspect of society.

This encompassing transformation of society as a whole is the result of a new economic base, achieved when modes of production are organized in a socialist fashion. But the result of this isn’t passive determinism, it also requires a new state apparatus, under the control of the working class, to help direct society towards the resolution of all contradictions as a means to establishing a communist society.

Social-democrats, Third Positionists, Nationalists et al. all oppose liberal capitalism on some grounds or another, but they fail to take notice of the way in which all existing societies have been defined by class-struggle, and that class struggle is a natural development of antagonisms between exploited and exploiting classes; and thus, don’t see the need for a truly revolutionary overthrow of not only the ruling elites, but their very institutions and systems. Simply nationalizing the means of productions to varying degrees isn’t necessarily socialism. The change necessitated to overhaul society from the grips of capitalism must come on all fronts – economic, political and social.

Destroying the bourgeois institutions, instituting a new proletariat culture and directing the masses towards progressive change are all necessary components of establishing the victory of socialism. Failing to do so leaves in place those very same contradictions that plague capitalism in the first place. Take for example the Bolsheviks, after overthrowing the Provisional Government and emerging victorious after the Civil War, they instituted sweeping changes that brought society in line with the economic changes that had revolutionized the former Russian Empire. Bourgeois institutions were smashed, and in their place stood new, proletariat institutions dictating how individuals and the collective mass would relate to one another, to the state, to production and so forth. Even during the New Economic Policy (NEP), a minor step backwards to help re-build Soviet infrastructure with a temporary influx of private capital, the changes were still going on at the political and cultural level.

Fascists, Conservatives and Nationalists seem to be lumped together as Third Positionists, while Trotsky-ism, is lumped together with Anarchism, I notice in some conversations. Do you believe there are any reasons to regard Trotskyism, and Anarchism, as likewise, “Third Positionism” since they are idealistic deviations from Marxism-Leninism, as it was practiced last century?

This oversimplifies things. Fascists are very distinct from conservatives, and their lumping together is largely the result of the former term becoming a political epithet. Nationalism and fascism can overlap, but are often times opposed to mainstream conservatives, particularly in many Western countries, who are really just neo-liberals with a “law & order” attitude towards society.

Trotskyism is distinct from Anarchism, but the connection is made on grounds of their unintentional practical outcomes, not any correlation or connectedness in theory. Both represent trends of idealism and deviation. Anarchism which links itself to Proudhon and many of the 19^th century Anarchist theoreticians reject the dialectical method on grounds of metaphysics. Trotskyism, while claiming to uphold the dialectical method, reject it in their practical conclusions.

Anarchism and Third Positionism have always been distinct from Marxism-Leninism on numerous grounds and can’t properly be called “deviationist” in the strict sense since they never attempted to uphold Marxism-Leninism. Trotskyism, however, is an idealist ultra-left deviation from Marxism-Leninism and must be treated accordingly. Trotskyism, for a period of time, showed itself as a political alternative, but quickly degenerated into an opportunistic conspiracy after their allusions to power in the Soviet Union were all but smashed. Nowadays, Trotskyism is an academic pursuit primarily found in Western universities. It has no real connections with the international proletariat, has never once formed the foundation for a serious revolutionary movement and has little relevance in contemporary political discussions.

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