Social-democracy at the service of the ruling classes.
The struggle of the Communist Party.
By Raúl Martínez, Responsible for the
Ideological Area of the CC of the PCPE, and Ramón López, member of the
Ideological Area of the CC of the PCPE
Revisionism, a historical phenomenon hostile to Marxism.
Since the birth of the labour movement to
this day, an intense struggle between two tendencies has been waged
within the movement: the revolutionary one and the opportunist one.
Over the history, opportunism has adopted different and numerous
expressions, diguised under forms of "left wing" and right wing. This
article deals with the right wing opportunism or revisionism, initial
source of the political current that is nowadays known as
social-democracy, whose nature mutated along the twentieth century,
from being a current of the labour movement to a political movement
which is an uncompromising defender and the essential pillar of
monopoly capitalism.
Revisionism emerged in the late
nineteenth century when, after the passing away of Frederick Engels,
open warfare broke out within the socialist movement led by the German
Eduard Bernstein whose maxim “the movement is everything, the ultimate
aim is nothing1”
became the banner of the followers of the revisionist theory and its
political practice, reformism. Lenin would argue about it:
“This catch-phrase of Bernstein’s
expresses the substance of revisionism better than many long
disquisitions. To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt
itself to the events of the day and to the chopping and changing of
petty politics, to forget the primary interests of the proletariat and
the basic features of the whole capitalist system, of all capitalist
evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for the real or assumed
advantages of the moment—such is the policy of revisionism. And it
patently follows from the very nature of this policy that it may assume
an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less “new”
question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events,
even though it change the basic line of development only to an
insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always
inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another.”2
Revisionism, claiming that the
socio-economic conditions had changed radically, expressed itself as a
current openly hostile to Marxism, rejecting the basic postulates of
Marxist science:
-
In the sphere of philosophy, it denied its partisan and class character, being in tow of the bourgeois “science” and dragging b along after the “neo-Kantian” thinkers3.
-
In economic terms, it denied the theory of value, the law of capitalist accumulation and the law of absolute and relative impoverishment of the proletariat in the new conditions of capitalism. It was said that concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale production does not occur in agriculture at all. They defended the idea that the process of concentration of ownership proceeded very slowyly in commerce and industry. They expressed the view that the big capitalist companies would end the anarchy of production and therefore reduce automatically the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie4.
-
In the sphere of politics, revisionism sought to review what actually constitutes the basis of Marxism: the theory of class struggle. Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the ground for the class struggle —we were told by the revisionists—. For, they said, since the “will of the majority” prevails in a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class rule, nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie against the reactionaries5.
For Lenin, revisionism —revision of
Marxism— was one of the chief manifestations, if not the chief, of
bourgeois influence on the proletariat and bourgeois corruption of the
workers6. In his work The Collapse of the Second International, he gave the following definition of opportunism:
“Opportunism means sacrificing the
fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an
insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance
between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against
the mass of the proletariat.”7
The fact is that ideology is the
reflection, in the consciousness of human beings, of the objectively
existing social conditions, and mainly a reflection of the prevailing
production relations. Thus, from the Leninist view, the historical
roots of the revisionist phenomenon and its class nature are
highlighted:
“In every capitalist country, side by
side with the proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty
bourgeoisie, small proprietors. Capitalism arose and is constantly
arising out of small production. A number of new “middle strata” are
inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism (...)
These new small producers are just as inevitably being cast again into
the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the
petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up in the
ranks of the broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this
should be so and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune
that will take place in the proletarian revolution.”8
In short, Marxism-Leninism emphasizes three essential particularities of right-wing opportunism or revisionism:
-
Revisionism is an international phenomenon, being a social product of a particular historical epoch.
-
Revisionism regularly appears in the workers' parties, given the cyclical nature of capitalist development, and it can adopt diverse forms.
-
Right-wing opportunism, in reviewing the basic postulates of Marxism, distorts the revolutionary character of the workers' party, deviating it from its main objective: the destruction of the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie9.
Faced with the reformist political
practice that stems from the revisionists theoretical standpoints,
Lenin argued that the bourgeoisie grant reforms with one hand, and with
the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to
enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate
wage-slavery. For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in
practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and
weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the
workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.10
The bankruptcy of the Second International, Social-Democracy and the imperialist war.
Most of the Second International parties
consummated their bankruptcy by betraying the resolutions of the
Congress of Basel (1912), in which social-democratic parties had
established its position opposing the forthcoming imperialist war and
calling the world proletariat to actively fight against its triggering.
However, on August 4th, 1914, the German and French
social-democrats voted in their respective parliaments for the war
credits, in favour of the imperialist war and became part of the
governments of their countries, as later did the British and Belgian
social-democrats, thus obtaining the trust of the bourgeoisie for the
management of capitalism and thus changing from opportunist workers'
parties to bourgeois parties.
Most parties previously grouped in the
Second International suffered its first major historical mutation,
transforming from socialist workers' parties, in which lived together
in hard struggle the revolutionary and the opportunist trends, into
national-liberal workers' parties, thus popping the International,
inside wich opportunism had gained strength during the relatively
peaceful development of capitalism period between 1871 and 1914, into a
thousand pieces.
In the midst of World War, Lenin deepened
in his characterization of opportunism. He defined as the economic base
of chauvinism and opportunism the alliance between a few upper layers
of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie – who took advantage of
the crumbs from the privileges of "their" national capital - against
the proletarian masses, against the working masses. He revealed that
the old division of the socialists in the opportunist and revolutionary
trends, typical of the era of the Second International (1889-1914),
corresponded with the new division of chauvinists and
internationalists. Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the
idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle;
adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the
borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient;
making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class
viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad
masses of the population”(meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such,
doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. 11.
Starting from the point that opportunism is not the result of chance,
nor a sin, a slip or a betrayal of a group of isolated individuals,
Lenin said that it was the social product of an entire historical
epoch, also expressing its class character:
“The epoch of imperialism is one in
which the world is divided among the “great” privileged nations that
oppress all other nations. Morsels of the loot obtained as a result of
these privileges and this oppression undoubtedly fall to the share of
certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie and to the working-class
aristocracy and bureaucracy. These strata, which form an insignificant
minority of the proletariat and of the toiling masses, gravitate
towards “Struvism”, because it provides them with a justification of
their alliance with their “own” national bourgeoisie, against the
oppressed masses of all nations.”12
“Opportunism was engendered in the
course of decades by the special features in the period of the
development of capitalism, when the comparatively peaceful and cultured
life of a stratum of privileged workingmen “bourgeoisified” them,
gave them crumbs from the table of their national capitalists, and
isolated them from the suffering, misery and revolutionary temper of
the impoverished and ruined masses.”13
Thus, the specific role of the labour
aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy in the general framework of the
class struggle of the imperialist epoch became clear. This analysis
currently retains full relevance today.
For Lenin, the first World War marked a
fundamental shift in History as it became impossible to continue having
the same attitude towards opportunism than in the previous period. It
was impossible to deny the fact that at the time of crisis the
opportunists had deserted the workers' parties and had gone to the camp
of the bourgeoisie.
“An entire social stratum, consisting
of parliamentarians, journalists, labour officials, privileged office
personnel, and certain strata of the proletariat, has sprung up and has
become amalgamated with its own national bourgeoisie, which has proved fully capable of appreciating and “adapting” it.”14
Therefore, it was time to come into action:
“The course of history cannot be
turned back or checked—we can and must go fearlessly onward, from the
preparatory legal working-class organisations, which are in the grip of
opportunism, to revolutionary organisations that know how not
to confine themselves to legality and are capable of safeguarding
themselves against opportunist treachery, organisations of a
proletariat that is beginning a “struggle for power”, a struggle for
the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.”15
It had been shown that, in the era of
imperialism, the old theory that said that opportunism is a "legitimate
nuance" in a workers' party should be discarded, because it had become
the biggest obstacle for the revolutionary development of the labour
movement.
The Second International had died,
defeated by opportunism, the Third International had before it the task
of organizing the forces of the proletariat for the revolutionary
offensive against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the
bourgeoisie of all countries, for the political power and the victory
of socialism.
The final mutation of the social-democracy after the Second World War.
After the victory of the Great October
Socialist Revolution of 1917 the division in three wings was
consolidated: the right-wing, which had become a bourgeois party and
was represented by the revisionists, the left-wing, represented by the
communists with the Bolsheviks at the forefront, and the centrist wing,
formally Marxist and adapted in practice to opportunism, claiming to
seek unity and peace in the party. The centrist sector was led by
Kaustky, who devoted his theoretical efforts to attack the October
Revolution, accusing the Bolsheviks of ignoring the limits of the
productive forces of Russia and, ultimately, describing the revolution
as an aberration.
In the period between the First and
Second World War, the centrist sectors dominated the Second
International, enacting formally “revolutionary” and “Marxist”
resolutions and but yielding in practice to the demands of right wing
which, thus, strengthened itself to the point of forcing the
involvement of social-democracy in bourgeois governments in many cases.
From this ministerial involvement in
various countries - Britain, France, Germany, etc. - arise some issues
that raise no doubts about the leap made by the social-democracy, from
a reformist position, but a working class one, into a bourgeois
position, between liberals and communism. Since the murder of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebneckht to the anti-labour economic measures
applied as a result of the capitalist crisis of 1929, all reveals the
true nature of social-democracy as a bourgeois party in charge of
conducting the class conciliation in order to try to prevent and
contain the revolutionary outbreak, opposing the development of the
communist movement..
The shameful role of social-democracy
during the rise of fascism, its refusal to compromise with the Third
International and its petty-bourgeois vacillation in key moments of the
class struggle, are key elements to understand how fascism came to take
the State apparatus with relative ease in different countries. Their
confidence in the legal methods, their rotten liberalism, proved that
social-democracy had become a defender of capitalism, making difficult
the development of the policy of united front of the Communist
International16.
The most blatant and definitive
mutation of social-democracy takes place after the Second World War.
The victory over Nazi-fascism, the successes in the construction of
socialism in the USSR, the global extension of the socialist bloc to a
number of countries, the development of the contradictions in the
capitalist countries of Western Europe as a result of the destruction
of productive forces operated in the war, the reduction of the material
basis of capitalism and the enormous prestige of the international
communist movement among the working masses of the West, were factors
that were driving imperialism to a dead end. Social-democracy, hand in
hand with its bourgeois masters, again finds its place in an attempt to
neutralize the class struggle. Many social-democrat leaders in exile
came in close contact with Anglo-American imperialists, setting up what
would be the order following the defeat of Nazi-fascism in countries
like Italy, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, etc.17
The Frankfurt Congress, which established
the Socialist International, takes place in 1951, and in 1959 the
so-called Bad Godesberg Programme sets in writing the political
positions of social-democracy in the largest and most influential party
of this trend, the German SPD, which would determine the programs of
the other parties and their reconstituted International.
That program formally abandons the
reference to Marxism and places itself next to the “Christian ethics”
and “humanism”, even without naming them. The times when the
social-democracy needed to wear the Marxist label to fight the
communist movement had passed. From that moment the struggle is an open
one against Marxism itself. In the field of the class struggle, the
workers' struggle is subsumed within the struggle for “more democracy”,
as the ultimate goal of the “democratic socialism”, whose horizons were
vague and refer to economic factors that do not exceed the level of
liberal reformism, accepting in its main terms the bourgeois economic
theories, budgetary discipline, Keynesianism as a brake on the class
struggle, and so on. Using the words of the program itself: “as much
plannig as necessary and as much competition as possible”.18
If some doubts still remain, the program
has references against “the totalitarian control of economy”, affirming
the need for the existence of private property. As maximum horizon -
never consistently applied - the reference to “economic democracy” in
which the working class should be able to intervene in the management
of private and public companies. Except in some productive sectors in
Germany and other European countries, except that such participation
was confined to specific management problems, as happens today with the
participation of members of the company committees (the emblem of this
social-democratic policy) in company boards, and exercised by the
reformist trade union bureaucracy, such a thing was never applied in
any country, despite having enough parliamentary majority to do so. In
fact, the Godesberg Program, accepted internationally by the
social-democrats, only found scope for public education and health, and
always restricted to certain countries of Western Europe.
The economic contradictions inherent to
the so-called “Welfare State” - which was nothing else than a State of
exploitation of the working masses sacrificed on the altar of
capitalist and imperialist development - led to the outbreak of the
capitalist crisis of the seventies and a change in the perception of
most of the bourgeoisie, leaving the Keynesian principles and adopting
a purely liberal approach, revisiting their old conceptions of “laissez faire”,
separating the State from the direct economic intervention and taking
it to exert its influence only through the budget and the monetary
policy, undertaking the privatization of the public sector created in
the previous period.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to add that
the Godesberg Programee already renounced to these “direct” mechanisms
and privileged the indirect ones, except in those sectors where State
intervention was necessary to avoid the creation of private monopolies.
In fact, the liberal version says exactly the same and even speaks of
“mixed economy” to include these methods of State intervention. In the
eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, the theory of the
“natural monopolies in hands of the State” - energy, transportation,
telecommunications and other strategic sectors – was abandoned and the
ideas of a Central Bank whose monetary policy has the sole goal of
inflation control over other considerations, as may be allowing some
level of inflation to encourage bourgeois investment, were embraced.
At that time and until the outbreak of
the current capitalist crisis, the bourgeoisie gave priority to
privatizations, commodification of productive sectors at the margins of
the action of the law of value - whose scope had been modified by the
intervention of state powers - and the internationalization hand in
hand with large monopolistic firms that had accumulated large amounts
of capital in the preceding period. At the same time, the political
conditions in which the labour movement has to defend their living and
working conditions worsen, the repression against the revolutionary
movement and the militarization of the economy increase, and the
deployment of imperialist war is enhanced.
Nowadays, social-democracy has a certain
attachment to the labour movement through the reformist trade unions,
where it maintains a discourse of “defense of the workers”, purely
economic and which tends always towards the reconciliation with the
bourgeoisie. Its mission is to ensure social peace and the
impossibility of the development of a workers' response that can be
transformed, as a result of their increased militancy and organization,
in development of the class consciousness, the passing from class
consciousness in itself to class consciousness for itself, a revolutionary alternative to dying capitalism.
In the capitalist crisis in which we are
now submerged, social-democracy has a very clear mission: to implement
the measures contrary to the interests of the workers keeping the class
conflict within the limits set by the oligarchy. Thus, while adopting
legal measures that are contrary to the most elementary rights acquired
over decades of struggle of the labour movement (collective bargaining,
the right to severance pay, a decent amount of the minimum wage and
pension, etc.), they keep the control over a trade union bureaucracy
deeply linked to social-democracy and the bourgeois State apparatus.
The “social covenant” positions are
intended to chain the labour movement to policies that are clearly
contrary to their interests, that favour the monopolies and vent the
contradictions that have exploded with the capitalist crisis on the
shoulders of the working class and the popular strata. This is to
revive the declining trend in the rate of profit, to promote the cycle
of expanded reproduction of capital and, for that, to intesify the
exploitation rate. In this mission, the social-democracy plays a
crucial role: the role of the firefighter that tries to fight the fire
even before it occurs.
Petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy.
In order to preserve the support of its
social base of the petty and middle classes that share the petty
autonomy at work, address specific groups of workers and a shift away
from machine, social-democracy, as the lead organization of petty
bourgeois reformism, maintains a policy to isolate these groups from
the labour movement and prevent the formation of a popular and workers
front with hegemony of the proletariat through its political vanguard,
which can become a revolutionary alternative to capitalism.
Within this field, social-democratic
policies are in the spirit of supporting the petty bourgeoisie with
public funds as exemptions from paying social security, trying to ease,
without success, the situation of small producers against the large
ones. In the trade union field favouring the middle class against most
workers, promoting better working, social and economic conditions for
these groups. These sectors were the old basis of the bourgeois
reformist policy of the years of the “Welfare State”, when favoured
over a mass of workers condemned to conditions of extreme exploitation
and devoid of any union support. This has the effect of worsening
conditions of life and work of the proletarian majority, the
intensification of its exploitation and also its growing isolation from
other classes and sectors.
Yet the capitalist crisis has severely
beaten the middle strata and the petty bourgeoisie who see their living
and working conditions worsen as a consequence of the development of
capitalist contradictions, showing also for these groups the failure of
reformism. At the same time, social-democracy extends the petty
bourgeois ideology of the “citizenship” where we all have equal rights
before the law, ignoring class differences, the position of each one in
respect to the ownership of the means of production and to the work,
influencing the workers to defuse the class struggle precisely among
those who most suffer exploitation and are most in need of assuming
their historical role as a revolutionary class.19
In a similar way, the role played by the
labour aristocracy is essential in the maintenance of social-democracy
and the strengthening and spread of revisionism within the labour
movement. Comrade Eleni Comrade Mpellou20 offers the following analysis of this phenomenon:
“Of course what happens at the level
of consciousness, in this case revisionism, is a reflection of
socio-economic developments-sections of the working class in advanced
capitalist countries experienced higher wages and better living
conditions due to the super-profits which capital obtained in their
countries, having for example the monopoly in foreign trade (Britain
until the end of the 19th century), the
ability to exploit raw materials and cheap labour in less developed
societies. The offspring of these sections of the working class and of
the labour aristocracy in the trade union and political movement,
absorbed bourgeois propaganda through the education system, and they
were incorporated into the widened state mechanisms-either into the
“services” of the bourgeois state (education, health, welfare) or into
purely administrative mechanisms ( tax office, local government bodies,
maintenance of state property etc) or into state or semi-state
industries (banks, public utilities, energy, water, telecommunications
industry, tourism etc).
The buying off of sections of the
working class and in dynamic sectors of capitalist industry was
achieved in combination with the extensive buying off of scientists,
who were of working class background; thus we can see that the widening
of the social basis of opportunism and the strengthening of revisionism
are interconnected phenomena. The ability of the bourgeois political
forces to buy off broad sections of the working class served the
political goal of corrupting the labour movement, of diverting it from
its strategic aim of socialist revolution in Europe and more generally
in the developed capitalist world and indeed in conditions when the
international balance of forces had improved for the forces of
socialism after the end of the 2nd World War.”
The "left social-democracy", the revisionists and the communist movement.
Social democracy became also an active
participant in the international class struggle against the socialist
camp. The role that social-democratic parties had to play was to weaken
the communist parties, organize and strengthen a non-communist labour
and trade-union movement. Altogether with other fiercely anticommunist
parties – the trotskyists - the mission assigned by imperialism was
clear: the fragmentation of the labour movement, consolidate an
anticommunist reformist trend and prevent the development of class
struggle in capitalist countries, as well as assist politically,
economically and otherwise to counterrevolutionary movements that were
developing in countries that were actively constructing socialism. The
CIA had a section for those parties: “non-communist left”, which
received political, logistical and economic support.
Together with the openly hostile and
counterrevolutionary role with respect to socialist countries,
social-democracy has also historically played a role of political
penetration of the communist parties. Even before World War II,
social-democracy sought support within the communist movement to reach
agreements that would link these parties to bourgeois policies. But it
was later, in the immediate postwar years, when strong reformist
tendencies appear within the communist parties that crystallized in the
so-called “Euro-communism”. This process was possible to the extent
that the international communist movement, stuck in the fiction of the
existence of an intermediate, democratic and anti-monopoly stage
between monopoly capitalism and socialism, subordinated its strategy to
a parliamentary alliance with social-democracy that would ultimately
have serious consequences for the working class and the international
communist movement itself, which found immense difficulties to define a
revolutionary strategy in the new conditions after the war.
Such revisionist tendencies, fully
triumphant in most parties of Western Europe, had the same social basis
of old social-democracy and followed the same path that was previously
foloowed by the social-democratic parties. As a reflection, they
represented the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the middle
strata of the labour aristocracy and sections of the trade union
bureaucracy. They arrived to the unabashedly reformist conclusion that
socialism could be built in Europe through a parliamentary agreement
with the social-democracy, using only legal means, constitutional
means, reform after reform, reaching a point at which socialism would
have been built. This vision, utopian in the sense of being
reactionary, was a dead end that found its own limits with the change
in policy of the bourgeoisie as a result of the economic crisis of the
“Welfare State”.
The bankruptcy of Euro-communist
revisionism is currently suffered by numerous workers' detachments
throughout the capitalist world, especially in the European countries,
where the heirs of Euro-communist organizations, keeping in some cases
the communist acronyms and symbols or having abandoned it in others,
aware of the mutation of a social-democracy that had become a bourgeois
party several decades earlier, seek to occupy the left flank of the
bourgeois parliaments. This always in an alliance subordinated n one
way or another to the social-democratic parties and always under the
banner of reformism that waves within the margins of the system.
Furthermore, they also agree and
coincide, not by chance, in a generally favourable view of the European
Union, the imperialist project of the oligarchy of the member
countries. They want to become the party of “left” passable for those
institutions, accepting the fundamentals of European construction, the
undemocratic and anti-labour rules for its operation and its one-way
monetary and economic policies, the blackmail to which they subject the
peoples of Europe in the capitalist crisis, and ultimately, the
policies imposed in each moment by the bourgeoisie.
Today these opportunist parties are
organized in the European Left Party and they constitute an obstacle to
the development of class struggle, they stand as a brake to the
development of class positions and class consciousness; ultimately they
are natural allies of social-democracy, they are its current left-wing,
fulfilling the task of introducing reformist and petty bourgeois
ideology in the workers' field, to support a false social peace that
will ensure a political framework for the anti-labour measures that
capital has to apply to maintain its profit rate and save the day.
Some final considerations.
A part of the social base of
social-democracy and revisionism, is constituted by the working strata
with a low class consciousness who join the struggle to defend their
immediate interests in face of the increasing aggression of capital.
When these sectors, with little political background and no class
consciousness join the struggles that should trigger the class to
defend its interests they do, necessarily, from an ideological point of
view.
Indeed, the fact that these workers' sectors do not have class consciousness for itself
does not deny the fact that they have, like all people, an ideological
worldview which allows them to insert themselves into society. Such a
worldview that does not come entirely from class position, must
necessarily come from its opponent, if we agree with Marx that within
the class-divided societies the dominant ideology is the ideology of the ruling class.
Their worldview, therefore their
ideology, if it is not proletarian it necessarily has to be bourgeois
or petty bourgeois. It consists in some adjustments of the ideologies
of the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie to the living conditions of
the working class, and the most historically appropriate to these
functions is precisely the “economicist” ideology, a reformist one
touted by the social-democrat trade unions and parties, and also by the
opportunist parties of the EL Party and other similar to them. This
ideology fits the workers' conditions, but does so from the bourgeois
standpoint, defending small changes in capitalism that can improve or
alleviate the current conditions which are applied to the proletariat.
Similarly, and seemingly in an opposite
sense, we might consider the utopian-revolutionary ideology which,
despite its alleged revolutionary character, is powerless to lead the
revolutionary struggle and ends by advocating measures which, if
possible, would mean only small changes keeping the fundamentals of
capitalist exploitation.
The mission of social-democracy and their
trade union confederations within the labour field is to prevent that
position, which is an objective stage in the development of
consciousness in these sectors, to evolve into the assumption of a
purely proletarian ideological position under the prism of
Marxism-Leninism, and that tends to confrontation with capitalism,
towards its revolutionary overcoming.
Therefore, besides the existence of the
social sectors previously referred to - petty bourgeoisie and middle
strata - the sectors that have little awareness, the stragglers, can
also be a support base for revisionism in general and social-democracy
in particular within the class movement.
The communist parties have to deal with
these positions and we will have to do so in the future, under very
different political, social or economic conditions, until the
overcoming of the class conflict itself, until the highest and final
stage of socialism-communism. In these various conditions, reformism
will take different political positions but, in essence, will ry to
adapt the labour movement to the positions of the class enemy, by
accepting the battlefield and the fight rules that the enemy considers
lawful and denying the need to overcome the capitalist system that
generates the contradictions that keep the labour momvement in a
subordinated position21.
The primary mission of the communist
parties in this field, generally in trade union action, is to raise
that economic awareness, which does not exceed capitalism, to
revolutionary political consciousness, so that these sectors abandon
the ideological theses of the petty bourgeoisie (in addition to the
above mentioned we could mention the idea that the State is neutral in
the class struggle, that the law is sacred and that all the provisions
of the laws are met, the idea of independence of the judiciary, the
separation of powers and other petty bourgeois naiveties that
objectively block class struggle) and embrace the ideological theses of
their own class. This is possible precisely because the proletarian
ideology of Marxism-Leninism is only a reflection in the realm of the
subjective field, of the economic conditions suffered by the exploited.
In other words, any attempt at a social level of trying the same with
non-proletarian sectors is doomed to failure, regardless of whether,
individually, many members of the petty bourgeoisie and the middle
layers approach the working class and even adopt its worldview in face
of the development of capitalist contradictions.
-.
The communist movement is forced to learn from its mistakes. The conditions under which the capitalist crisis places the class struggle requires a frontal attack against the positions of integration that social-democracy and revisionism promote in the workers' ranks. Ideological, political and organizational independence of the working class must be firmly defended, without compromise:
The communist movement is forced to learn from its mistakes. The conditions under which the capitalist crisis places the class struggle requires a frontal attack against the positions of integration that social-democracy and revisionism promote in the workers' ranks. Ideological, political and organizational independence of the working class must be firmly defended, without compromise:
“Now the people, the
workers and employees, the self-employed must write their own pages in
the history of this country, in really large and bold letters. Their
anger must be transformed into strength so that they can take their
counterattack to its conclusion. There is no other way (…) Barbarity
cannot be made humane ”22
1“Las premisas del socialismo y las tareas de la socialdemocracia”, recopilación de artículos Revista Neue Zeit, 1897-1898
2V.I. Lenin, “Marxism and Revisionism”. Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 29-39 24. Progress Publishers, 1973, Moscow
3Idem
4Idem
5Idem
6V.I. Lenin, “A Fool’s Haste Is No Speed”. Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 322-324. Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow
7V.I.
Lenin. “The Collapse of the Second International”. Collected Works,
Vol. 21, p. 205-259. Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow
8V.I. Lenin, “Marxism and Revisionism”. Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 29-39 24. Progress Publishers, 1973, Moscow
9Enrique Líster López. “Leninismo y oportunismo” (Leninism and opportunism). Ediciones PCOE, 1976, p. 21 – 22. Madrid
10V.I. Lenin. “Marxism and Reformism”. Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 372-375. Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow
11V.I.
Lenin. “The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International”.
Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 35-41. Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow
12V.I.
Lenin. “The Collapse of the Second International”. Collected Works,
Vol. 21, p. 205-259. Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow
13Idem
14Idem
15Idem
Nowadays,
having the necessary perspective and when there is no doubt about the
bourgeois and imperialist character of many sections of
social-democracy during World War II, the communist movement has to
analyze rigorously the policy of the united front of proletariat with
the social-democratic parties adopted by the 7th Congress of
the Komintern, as it entailed a series of consequences which have great
importance for the international communist movement.
17The
links of prominent social-democrat cadres with the oligachy have
deepened since then. As an example, we can mention the participation of
the former president of the Spanish government, Felipe González –
former Secretary General of PSOE – in the so-called “Father's and Son's Business Meeting”, a private initiative that brings together businessmen from all over Latin America and their heirs in order to share the “recipes of success in business” and speak about “the social issues that worry the world”.
Some of the oligarchs who participated were, among others, Carlos Slim,
the second richest man in the world; the Colombian tycoon Julio Mario
Santo Domingo; the Venezuelan businessman Gustavo Cisneros; the
Argentinians Paolo Rocca, Federico Braun and Alfredo Román; the
Chileans Andrónico Lucksia and Álvaro Saieh or the Brazilians Joao
Roberto Marinho, David Feffer and Antonio Moreiras. (Publico newspaper, Madrid, 08/03/2009, news from Agency EFE).
18Basic Programme of the SPD. Bonn, 1959, p. 5-17.
19About some movements which, like the known as “15M” or “movement of the indignados”,
never go beyond the social-democratic approaches, we refer to the
Statement of the Executive Committee of the PCPE on the mobilizations
started on May 15th, issued on May 19th, 2011, which can be found in http://www.pcpe.es/comunicados/item/268-sobre-las-movilizaciones-iniciadas-el-15-m.html.
20Member
of the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of Greece. Quote from her
article “Ideas on a new international. Internationalism in Marxist
theory” , written after the invitation of the Turkish Communist Party
to the meeting organized by the Marxist-Leninist Research Centre of
Turkey. The article was published in the theoretical journal of the KKE
(KOMEP, issue 6 of 2010).
21 The President of the Spanish Congress and leader of the PSOE, José Bono, declared in public that the “class struggle” in 21st
century “is a bash” that “is not even believed in China”, that nowadays
jobs have to be created “basically” by the businessmen with the “help”
of the public administrations so, he noted, PSOE will not campaign
“against those who create wealth and jobs”. Words reflected in the
Spanish mass media on May 9th, 2010. Agency Europa Press.
22Speech of comrade Aleka Papariga, Secretary General of the KKE, before thousands of workers, on May 11th, 2011.
