Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat May 04, 2024 2:30 pm

"gird yer loins..."

"The party is growing, but it is being beaten"
May 4, 13:53

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"The party is growing, but it is being beaten"

Enthusiasm is required from every new political party. But other political parties, not only the new one, also have enthusiasm; and if a new party encounters an older one in a political struggle, it is inevitable, or rather, it usually follows, that those who find themselves in the minority will proclaim to the world that the moral victory is on their side. Anyone whose legs are broken by the enemy wins a moral victory. Tolstoy once said that moral victory is something extraordinarily bright. Masaryk celebrated a moral victory. But Tolstoy and Masaryk were never beaten. So, someone who wants to propagate the principles of a newly emerged party usually has to be satisfied with a moral victory and exclaim: “We won!”, while rubbing his back with opedeldok, because opedeldok is an excellent remedy for bruises, abrasions and bruises.

So every new political party, and even more so every apostle of a new political idea, should stock up on opedeldoc in advance. Anyone who wants to convince another political party of the correctness of their political beliefs is advised to always carry a bottle of this mixture with them if there is no medical aid station nearby. Every such political speaker should remember that tumors are cured with Kolar water; when the face swells after a slap, the swelling will disappear if you rub it with a mixture of chloroform and olive oil, adding a little camphor alcohol. This remedy perfectly paralyzes the effect of new political slogans and oratorical techniques.

There is no need to rub the wounds caused by arapnik; it is useful to apply a cold compress to them. As for broken heads, they will be repaired in any surgical clinic, because with the increase in the number of political parties there has been noticeable progress in surgery.

If, as a speaker, they spit in your eyes, do not wipe them with your hand, sleeve or handkerchief: you may get an inflammation of the cornea. In this case, the best remedy is warm water. If a political opponent knocks out your tooth, do not despair: when political opponents knocked out all of Saint Catherine’s teeth, she became a saint. True, these days the church has no use for saints like you, calmly go to the doctor and he will insert a new tooth for you. If those gathered tear off your ear at a meeting, grab it and, without waiting for the end of the meeting, quickly run to the nearest doctor so that he can sew it back on for you. Well, if they tear your head off, God bless you, don’t pick it up: you don’t need a head in politics... These are the principles, undoubtedly very reasonable, with which we, members of the committee of the party of moderate progress within the framework of the law, arrived at the meeting of the National Social Party , held in the dance hall “U Banzetov” in Nusli. We walked there cheerfully, like people who realize that if you sit behind the stove, the world will never know about you. And we wanted to grow like any other party. This is how the Old Czechs wanted to grow up, and meanwhile the Young Czechs grew up. This is how the National Social Party grew precisely at the time when the Young Czechs were about to grow. And the Social Democrats grew while the National Social Party imagined that it was growing alone.

We had the best opinion of ourselves as a political party, because we argued that we would grow: but the greatest victory in politics is the one that has the future.

And we went to the Banzettes with the firm belief that if the National Socialists have a program, then we can have it too. And if one of the points of their program is freedom of speech, then we want to have freedom of speech - that is, they will listen, and we will speak. We owe this memorable evening that we were able to introduce a new point into our program, which we adopted from them: “Down with freedom of speech!”

So, we came to the dance hall "At Banzet's", and I took the floor after the main speaker, who was applauded after every word, every look and wave of the hand; he was applauded when he climbed onto the podium and when he came down from it. But here’s what’s strange: when I climbed onto the podium, only six people applauded, and even then only members of the committee of our party, and the other nine hundred men and young men looked at me with such a menacing expression, as if they wanted to say: “You won’t get out of here in one piece!” »

This is very disappointing. This is offensive to any apostle. This is where I started my speech, you have to be consistently frank! I began like this:

“Dear meeting!”

I am extremely surprised that you did not greet me with applause. How am I worse than the previous speaker? After all, he had not yet opened his mouth, and you had already started clapping...

- You rogue! - a voice came from behind; and suddenly all the listeners seemed to go mad at once and rushed to the podium with exclamations that foreshadowed my moral victory:

“Get out, stink!”

- Get out, you bastard!

- Vaclav, hit him!

- Oh, you're a socialite!

- Why are you staring?!

And some tall, athletic man grabbed me by the collar of my jacket with his muscular hand and carried me through the angry crowd, shouting:

“You came here to disrupt the meeting, so we’ll teach you a lesson!”

A voice came from behind the presidium table:

“Don’t hit him, brothers!”

But this voice was drowned out by a storm of protest against the party leadership:

“Nothing, beat him, brothers!”

I have retained respect for these people to this day.

They beat me, beat the entire committee of the Moderate Progress Party within the limits of the law and, throwing us out into the street, returned back to continue discussing cultural issues. This is the bitter truth...

(c) Yaroslav Hasek

https://kritikaprava.org/library/211/pa ... no_ee_byut - zinc

Somehow I didn’t come across it before. Hasek is wonderful as always.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9135278.html

Google Translator

Toughen up, brothers and sisters.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sun May 05, 2024 5:11 pm

Review of the article by V.A. Podguzova “Everything can be solved... but not with any personnel”
No. 5/93.V.2024

Article by V.A. Podguzov’s “ Everything can be solved... but not with any personnel ” helped clarify a number of important points in a seemingly clear and explained topic about the overall strategic task of “Breakthrough” and the direction of activity for supporters.

When answering the question “What can be done?”, it is worth remembering that at one time Lenin considered the strategic task of uniting the proletarian class with scientific theory. Valery Alekseevich explains in the article:

“History needs either the masses, already armed with the knowledge of Marxism, or specific individuals in whom the masses see intelligence, education, conscience and therefore trust the tasks set by these individuals.”

Since the masses themselves are not armed with knowledge of Marxism, then in the most general form the task comes down to building an organization of competent Marxists. If you dig even deeper, you can identify the following elements in the problem.

Firstly, conscientious self-education of future members of the organization (“to be as authentic as possible to Marxism-Leninism”). It is absurd to count on victories without solving the problem of increasing the scientific and theoretical training of the active breakthroughists to the required level. Secondly, the actualization of Marxism (“without any false modesty, to throw new, strong, convincing scientific and theoretical “bridges” from the logic of the times of Marx, Lenin, Stalin into the reality of our days, taking into account the reasons for the catastrophically shameful defeat of the CPSU”), that is, the creation and maintaining an up-to-date victory plan - a theoretical compass for the movement of the organization. Third, the creation of a party of scientific centralism; a party capable of creating a “conveyor belt” for growing full-fledged Marxists.

The formulation of such a task in the most general terms has already been justified, discussed and accepted by the supporters of “Breakthrough”. Difficulties in determining the correct next steps of one’s own activities, especially in the field of agitation and propaganda, begin at an intermediate moment, when the level of Marxist competence is still low, the “victory plan” and the NC party are in their infancy, and outside, capitalist contradictions of a planetary scale are raging with might and main, turning into acute phase.

How to approach the decision correctly?

In the task posed, at least two points should be taken into account: the state of training of personnel preparing to “unite the proletarian class with scientific theory,” and the state of the minds of the proletarian class.

In relation to the class enemy, we can say that the party must surpass the bourgeoisie in terms of organization and competence. In relation to the proletariat, it can be said that the level of competence and organization of the party should be greater, the less scientific the state of mind of the masses.

The ubiquitous vulgar philistine thinking, especially operating in a turbulent global situation, is a difficult obstacle. The easiest way for the masses to become an “authority” now is for swindlers in the service of the bourgeoisie. It is enough to “defeat” the obvious horrors of capitalism, highlight the shortcomings of undesirable domestic and foreign geopolitical entities, and propose a national-religious nightmare as a solution to problems. You can fool the population indefinitely and indefinitely, right up to complete dehumanization in times of crisis.

You can visually smash any capitalist contradictions from a Marxist position, from revealing the essence of liberal fascism to the incompetence, weakness and idealism of the “Russkomirshchiki”, but then the “seeing light” masses will demand actions and decisions and, not seeing them, will happily dive into the illusory nationalist darkness . During the civil war that unfolded after the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the masses followed the Bolsheviks only because words were followed by deeds. The people received peace, the peasants received land, the workers got rid of the bourgeoisie, and leaders stood at the helm who prevented the country from being divided between interventionists; leaders who introduced electrification, stopped famine, mechanized agriculture, etc.

Consequently, even if the criticism of capitalism is carried out from a scientific position, but behind this criticism there is no “victory plan” and a party capable of taking the next step of criticism, negating the negation of capitalism, making a planned transition from words to deeds, then we can forget about taking the masses under ideological control .

“ Our goal is to prevent the bourgeoisie from lulling class consciousness; this is precisely the primary direction of the struggle ,” K. Semin declares empty well-wishes that make zero contribution to the cause of communism.

In such a situation, access to the masses is not associated with “taking them under control,” as some wish, but with the search for supporters among conscientious people capable of creative mental activity. This requires the widest possible dissemination of deeply researched materials on the theoretical issues of communism and Marxism, as well as on the most pressing policy issues (for example, SVO).

Revealing the details of the incompetence of the bourgeoisie, the nuances of the influence of the confrontation between oligarchic groups or the specifics of the errors of bourgeois-national ideologies (“Russkomirshchiki” of the Russian Federation or the pro-Russian Baltic parties) are quite working topics in the field of current politics and for training the pen in the process of self-study.

Regarding the main focus of theoretical and practical activity, Valery Alekseevich gives the following advice in the article:

- Do not take on specific issues without first solving general ones.

— Formulate and work out timely tasks that correspond to the maturity of objective prerequisites and the subjective factor at a given specific moment in history, that is, implemented by the communists of our time.

— Understand that self-education is primary, literary activity is secondary.

— Introduce into the information space unconditionally scientifically valid materials containing answers to the most important questions of social progress.

- Strive to create works no worse than “Anti-Dühring”, “Infantile disease of leftism in communism”, “What to do?” etc.

— Learn from the classics, relating their works to the historical circumstances in which they were written. Examples:

Point in time: when the communist movement in Russia, like today, was weak. Direction of thought: about building a centralized party in Russia, which was based on a SCIENTIFIC approach to all aspects of party life, CLASS struggle. Result: Lenin’s article “Our most important task”, “Urgent tasks of our movement” and “Immediate tasks of Soviet power”.

Point in time: from 1917 to 1922. Direction of thought: deepening knowledge in the field of the history of philosophy, especially the creative understanding of Hegel’s dialectics, its significance for the development of the methodology of dialectical materialism. Result: “Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism”, “On the slogan of the United States of Europe”, “State and Revolution”, “Marxism and Uprising”, “April Theses” and all subsequent victorious practice.

— Re-read Lenin’s works “Tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the European war”, “Situation and tasks of the socialist international”, “What next? (On the tasks of workers' parties in relation to opportunism and social chauvinism)", the brochure "Karl Marx (A short biographical sketch outlining Marxism)", "The Collapse of the Second International", "On the slogan of the United States of Europe".

— Re-read the breakthrough materials about the tasks and directions of work: “ On the issue of self-education ”, “ What should those who call themselves communists work on? ", " Scientific centralism "


Ya. Dubov
5/05/2024

https://prorivists.org/93_response/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed May 22, 2024 3:15 pm

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Overcoming our Sisyphus fate
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on May 20, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted May 22, 2024)

​The principal question for any socialist movement today, be it in the U.S. or outside, is where it stands on issues of war and peace–what will be its position regarding American imperialism. As the great W. E. B. Dubois had long ago noted, “the government of the United States and the forces in control of government regard peace as dangerous.” The foundation of American society, as it exists under the tyranny of capital, is war. They have built up a grand machinery of lies, pumping out through all mediums the twisted facts and invented realities needed to support their topsy-turvy narrative of world events–and thereby, obtain consent for their crimes. They have slaughtered people and allowed whole populations to face the meat grinder of war to defend the right of accumulation for the owners of big capital–the monopoly-finance capitalist class. To defend the ‘rights’ of those who have pillaged the world for centuries. Those who make a killing out of killing. Who trade in the annihilation of life for profit.

As everyone knows, wherever there is oppression and immiseration there will be, sooner or later, resistance. This is a universal law of all human societies fractured by class antagonisms. It is this dialectic of class struggles which pushes humanity forward, often producing the births of whole new social systems from the ashes of a previous one. But these moments of societal renewal, where a new class comes into a position of power and creates a world in its own image, are not guaranteed–even if the conditions for producing it are. There is always the possibility, as Marx and Engels had long ago noted, of a general societal dissolution. To put it in terms fitting with the contradictions of the capitalist mode of life, it isn’t only socialism which stands as a possibility within the embryo of capitalism, equally capable of actualizing itself is, as Rosa Luxemburg long ago noted, barbarism.

The human element, what in traditional communist literature is called the subjective factor or the subjective conditions, are indispensable. It does not matter how bad things get, how clearly revolutionary the objective conditions are, without the subjective factor all is nil. It is the organized masses, led by the most conscious within their ranks, that make, out of the objectively revolutionary conditions, the revolutions.

For Lenin and the communist tradition, objectively revolutionary conditions require the presence of a few key factors: 1- the worsening of the masses’ living conditions, 2- their inability to go on in the old way, 3- their willingness to act (and not just passively accept dissatisfaction), and 4- a crisis in the ruling class itself, where even they cannot continue on in the old way. These objective conditions are present, and intensifying daily, in American society. I chronicle them in detail in my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

We are faced with the first generations in American history to live lives worst than their parents. Precarity has become a general reality for working people, the majority of whom are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600 thousand homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times more empty homes than homeless people. Debt slavery has also become, in our highly financialized capitalism, a generalized reality drowning most working-class Americans. Hundreds of thousands die yearly for lacking the financial means to access medical services or overdosing on opioid drugs pushed by the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with the government, the universities, and NGOs. Social decay is evident as former industrial powerhouse cities are plagued by zombified humans and rusted remains of the industries that once were the basis of decent working-class communities. The American dream has become a joke for working-class people who have more and more come to realize what the comedic-critic George Carlin once said: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

But these conditions, although functioning as the prime matter for building a revolutionary movement, are not enough. Why is that? I turn to Lenin, who says that “it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.”

Like Sisyphus, the left of the last two decades seems condemned to roll the rock up simply to see it fall… rinsing and repeating continuously every few years. Since the protest movement against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Bernie Movement, to the Black Lives Matter Protests, to the current protests against the Zionist Genocide, the left has seen itself condemned to pull hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions, into the streets to express anger with whatever injustice is latched onto, only to then, after a few weeks or months, have everything return to square one.

I genuinely hope that the protest for a permanent ceasefire breaks this trend.

But if we are honest with ourselves, what fruit has borne out of the last two decades of protests? Did the Iraq protests stop the invasion and further destruction of the middle east? Did the occupy wall street protests stop financial speculation and overthrow the 1 percent? Did the Bernie movement win political power and bring with it the much-promised political revolution? Did the BLM protests actually challenge policing, the prison industrial complex, and the system which has made them necessary? The answer is not only No. The answer is, besides not achieving their desired ends, they have often accomplished quite the contrary. Movements such as Bernie’s and BLM, whatever still remains of it, were clearly just absorbed into the liberal, frankly most dominant, wing of the ruling class. They became what I’ve called a controlled form of counter hegemony, presenting a veneer of radicality on what is essentially a bourgeois politics that serves to reinforce the status quo with radical sounding language.

Giving up is, of course, not an option. The necessity for struggle is in the air. What do we do then?

I think we must start with being open to self-critique. Far too often even the attempt at doing so will receive backlash from those who are more comfortable with continuing the failures. Marxism is to dogma as water is to oil. If one is present the other cannot be, or at least not for long. If the tactics of the past have not worked, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and ask: why have the working masses not been won over to our side? Why have all the movements we’ve led this century ended in disappointment? It is okay to fail, but what is insane is to continue to fail in the same way while expecting a different outcome.

When questions such as these are tackled by the dominant left, the blame is almost always placed upon working people. Working people are not enlightened enough, too brute to realize how bourgeois ideology manipulates them, etc. While components of the narrative are true, the question is, so what? What is the point of communists if not precisely to piers through that, to win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people–to rearticulate the rational kernels of the spontaneous common sense they’ve developed within the bourgeois order towards socialism, either producing active militants in the process or the sympathetic mass which it leads. In my view, the chunk of the blame for our failures lies on the left itself. On its middle-class composition and the purity fetish outlook it operates with.

Therefore, while we find objectively revolutionary conditions in the U.S., we have a deep crisis in the subjective factor, that is, a poverty of revolutionary organizations and their worldviews. Most of the organizations of the socialist left are governed by the professional managerial class, what in the time of Marx and Engels was simply called the intelligentsia. What were supposed to be working-class organizations, vehicles for the conquest of political power by this class, have become centers of petty-bourgeois radicalism, as Gus Hall used to say. This analysis is not new, many theorists have pointed out how, since the late 1970s, along with the State Department’s attack on communists and socialists in the labor unions, and its promotion, through programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of a compatible anti-communist left, the working-class left has been destroyed and replaced by middle-class “radical recuperators,” as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. The U.S. State Department, as I show in my work, has been effective in creating a “controlled counter-hegemonic left,” a left that speaks radically but in substance always allies itself with imperialism.

This is far from a condemnation of intellectuals in general, but the reality is that, as it currently exists in the U.S., the dominance of the professional managerial class within socialist organizations is deeply alienating to workers, who are less concerned with their middle-class moralism than with surviving in a declining society.

On an ideological level, I have shown that this middle-class left suffers from purity fetish, a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support. If something doesn’t live up to the pure ideas that exist in their heads, it’s rejected and condemned. In essence, it is the absence of a dialectical materialist worldview, a flight from a reality governed by movement, contradictions, and interconnectedness, and toward a pure and lofty ideal safe from desecration by the meanness of reality. This purity fetish, I argue in my work, takes three central forms in the United States:

1) Because a bloc of conservative workers are too imperfect or “backward” for the American left, they are considered baskets of deplorables or agents of a “fascist threat.” Instead of raising the consciousness of the so-called backward section of the working population, the purity fetish left condemns them, effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized. This is a ridiculous position which divorces socialists from those working in the pressure points of capital. The purity fetish left, therefore, eschews the task of winning over workers irrespective of the ideas they hold. In doing so, they simply sing to the choir, i.e., the most liberal sections of the middle classes that already agree with them on all the social issues they consider themselves to be enlightened on.

2) The second form that the purity fetish takes is a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads. In doing so, they have often become the leftist parrots of empire, failing to recognize how socialism is to be built, that is, how the process of socialist development occurs under the extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare in a world still dominated by global capital. In its acceptance of capitalist myths about socialism, this left acquiesces to the lie that socialism has always failed, and arrogantly posits itself as the first who will make it work. Instead of debunking the McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people, this left accepts them.

3) The third form of the purity fetish is the prevalence of what Georgi Dimitrov called national nihilism: the total rejection of our national past because of its impurities. A large part of the American left sees socialism as synonymous with the destruction of America. Bombastic ultra-left slogans dominate the discourse of many of the left-wing organizers, who treat the history of the United States in a metaphysical way, blind to how the country is a totality in motion, pregnant with contradictions, with histories of slavery, genocide, imperialism, but also with histories of abolitionist struggles, workers’ struggles, anti-imperialist and socialist struggles. It is a history that produces imperialists and looters, but also produced Dubois, King, Henry Winston, and other champions of the people’s struggle against capital, empire, and racism.

This purity fetish left forgets that socialism does not exist in the abstract, that it must be concretized in the conditions and history of the peoples who have won the struggle for political power. As Dimitrov put it, it must socialist in content and national in form. Socialism, especially in its early stages, must always have the specific characteristics of the history of the people: in China it is called socialism with Chinese characteristics, in Venezuela Bolivarian socialism, in Bolivia it means embedding socialism within the indigenous traditions of communalism. etc. Kim Il Sung once wrote “What assets do we have for carrying on the revolution if the history of our people’s struggle is denied.” This is effectively what the national nihilists, rooted in the purity fetish outlook, do.

Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride, it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.

To put it in philosophical terms, there cannot be–contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy–abstract universals devoid of the specific forms they take in various contexts. On the contrary, as the Hegelian and Marxist traditions (both rooted in dialectical worldviews) maintain, the universal can only be actual when it is concretized through the particular. In other words, if we don’t take the rational progressive kernels of our national past and use them to fight for socialism, we will not only be doomed to misinterpret U.S. history, but we will fail, as we have, to connect with our people and successfully develop a socialist struggle in our context.

In every instance, the purity fetish of the middle-class left forbids them not only from properly understanding the world, but from changing it. It is no coincidence that the part of the world in which Marxist theoreticians find everything too impure to support is also the one that has failed, even under the most objectively fertile conditions, to produce a successful and meaningful revolutionary movement.

In short, conditions in the U.S. are objectively revolutionary. But the subjective factor is in deep crisis. Processes of social change cannot succeed if these two conditions are not united. For the U.S. left to succeed, it must re-centralize itself in the working masses and dispel its purity fetish outlook, replacing it with the dialectical materialist worldview–the best working tool and sharpest weapon, as Engels pointed out, that Marxism offers the proletariat. It needs a party of the people guided by this outlook, what has been traditionally called a communist party. Although some might bear that name today and tarnish it with decades of fighting for the liberal wing of the ruling class, the substance of what a communist party stands for, what it provides the class struggle, is indispensable for our advancement. It is the only force that can unite the people against the endless wars of empire that not only lead to the deaths of millions around the world, but also to the immiseration of our people and cities, who live under a state that always has money for war, but never any to invest in the people. Only when the people actually come into a position of power and create a society of, by, and for working people, can this fate change. For this we need a communist party, a people’s party.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/22/overcom ... phus-fate/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri May 24, 2024 3:04 pm

Study, study and study. Concept of self-education
No. 5/93.V.2024

Introduction
Few ordinary people can boast of a cloudless life: the opportunity to do what they love; excellent relationships with colleagues, partners, family, friends; confidence in the future. And it is very difficult to find a person who would not be familiar with inflation, corruption, crises, manifestations of poverty, terrorist attacks, wars and other everyday events. Among the entire mass of the population, desperately fighting for their interests, people occasionally appear who are able to connect the aggressiveness of the environment not with God’s punishment, not with the invariably dominant animal principle, not with a problem in individual heads, but with the capitalist structure of society itself. A spontaneously awakened conscience knocks on their hearts stronger than the ashes of Klaas on Ulenspiegel; it requires action and immediate benefit to humanity.

However, neither the obvious idiocy of the leaders of the largest capitalist countries, nor the seething indignation can suggest that the effective struggle for the happiness of society is recorded only in the practice of communist movements ; that the successes of the communist parties of the present and the victorious practice of the most authoritative communist leaders of the past, who did not lose a single battle during their lifetime, are associated not with the strength of just indignation, not with faith in a bright future and not with the intensity of activity, but with the fact that they knew exactly how it is necessary to act in a specific situation. Such knowledge is a consequence of a highly accurate reflection of the surrounding reality, which can only be a product of scientific thinking, a product of a mind that has mastered Marxism. And there is no other way to master scientific thinking except the most intense and continuous self-education.

1. Knowledge
It goes without saying that the success of everyday activities, from using household appliances to finding a job, depends heavily on knowledge. However, this connection ceases to be so obvious in broader social issues: political, economic, historical, religious, national and others. Here, among fellow citizens, it is not knowledge that comes to the fore in their discussions, but ideas, faith and opinions. The world turns out to be either completely unknowable, or driven by a mystical force (or even the mind of man himself), or even standing on unchanging postulates such as the innate justice of a nation or the inherent desire of man to destroy his neighbor.

The masses of the population find themselves at the mercy of unknowable ideas, which are supposed to be believed and which are justified by a mass of selective facts, interconnected by means of formal logic. For the non-religious part of the population, such an idealistic construction successfully hides elements of faith and creates the appearance of rational thinking.

And if you tell the average person that all his persistent beliefs in one way or another hide a mixture of his own and imposed primitive interests of an animal nature, he will be very surprised.

Around some of the most attractive types of idealism - religious, national and other kinds - quite stable groups of people unite; the infinity of fantasies around interests and the individual nature of the interests themselves invariably create new groups and split existing ones into warring factions; The nature of faith does not even provide a theoretical opportunity to stop this evil process and reach a consensus among any significant masses of the population. Moreover, you need to understand that the true interests served by one or another idealistic ideology often have nothing to do with the real interests of their adherents.

Thus, it is precisely ignoring the need for knowledge that leads to an infinity of idealistic worldviews that hide only individual and group interests behind a pretentious screen. Representing fantasies, these worldviews do not complement each other, but represent the basis for a conflict society full of contradictory relationships. For every stupid idealistic theory, real life responds with the painful truth of poverty, hunger, ignorance, war and man-made disaster [1].

Consequently, the fundamental, essential basis of damaged social relations is ignorance, and progress in the development of society is based primarily on resolving the contradiction between ignorance and knowledge , that is, on scientific knowledge of the world around us and on the fight against idealism. It is the denial of ignorance that is the first prerequisite for the destruction of social differences of opinion, and therefore for the achievement of scientific unanimity.

Denial of ignorance means the need to descend from the empty clouds of idealism to “our sinful land,” that is, material; the need to recognize that the material world exists outside consciousness, that human thinking is capable of cognizing it, and that the effectiveness of any, not just everyday, activity directly depends on the accuracy and depth of knowledge.

The consequence of the objective opportunity to obtain and verify scientific knowledge is the unanimity of its bearers, and the subjective prerequisite for unanimity is the need for each member of society to impartially and conscientiously obtain and verify knowledge.

Since scientific knowledge does not arise in the head on its own, but through a person’s volitional effort, the first moment of self-education is revealed - the fundamental need for self-education to participate in progressive activities. Anyone who wants to at least understand the essence of the problems of social relations, not to mention correcting them, will first have to engage in self-education and develop scientific thinking.

The verifiability of scientific knowledge allows a beginner not to rush headlong into hectic activity, not to take anything for granted, ignoring authorities; and at the same time imposes upon him the duty of reading, studying and checking. Everything that will be said below can be verified, and the author insists that the reader does not join any organizations until he is convinced of the scientific nature of the knowledge presented and the truth of the theses put forward.

2. High quality knowledge
Since the result of self-education should be an increase in the quality of thinking from non-scientific to scientific, then self-education should not only exist, but also have a scientific quality . Scientific quality is the second point of self-education .

The form of self-education in itself only means the absorption of knowledge of a certain nature. To serve in the fight against ignorance, self-education must receive proper content that accurately reflects the laws of development of the material world. Only such content will make it possible to displace ignorance and progressively apply the acquired knowledge to specific conditions of social life.

Such content can be found in a system of scientific knowledge, the development of which occurs through the establishment of the essence of phenomena and absolute objective laws (interrelations) as a result of the study of socio-historical practice, based on scientific methodology. The criterion by which this or that theoretical scientific knowledge can be considered true , that is, accurately reflecting the surrounding reality, is compliance with all socio-historical practice. This means that theory must be based on socio-historical practice; that a theory must have explanatory power in its field; that the new practice arising from the theory must confirm this theory and be victorious. No objective scientific truth can contradict any reliable fact of socio-historical practice, including the scientific knowledge obtained in its course, be it the laws of physics, chemistry, biology or Marxism [2].

Thus, self-education is the enrichment of a person with the knowledge of science, that is, a developing system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and their stable relationships (laws) . The content of self-education is built around advanced science about the laws of development of the world, society and thinking, which has absorbed the practice-tested results of the most accurate research by the leading minds of humanity throughout the entire period of its existence. Brought together by K. Marx and F. Engels, subsequently developed by V. Lenin and I. Stalin and becoming a support for the leaders of the most progressive of modern countries, this science, known as Marxism , is a synthesis of truths about the most general objective laws of the development of matter and before the entire society as matter of a special kind [3].

2.1. Method
The methodology of Marxism is primarily based on certainty in the ontological (primacy of the material over the ideal) and epistemological (fundamental knowability of the material world) issues already touched upon above. On this foundation, Marxism built a research methodology , a way of thinking used both to understand the world around us and for social practice.

The question of the way of thinking is not simple. The usual maximum that the average person can get out of himself on this topic is reasoning about formal logic, “critical thinking” or “common sense”. Most people have a metaphysical way of thinking , that is, considering particulars without a general picture, exploring any “individuals” outside their universal connection; thus, they lose the opportunity to see real development. Metaphysics is based on the opposition of induction to deduction, analysis to synthesis, empiricism to rationalism. However, before embarking on the most complex studies of society, it is necessary to rely on philosophy - a methodology that includes the most general philosophical categories and a way of research and thinking [4].

The Marxist method - dialectical materialism, or diamatics - did not appear out of nowhere. At the beginning of the 19th century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, in his work “The Science of Logic,” generalized all the philosophy created before him and thus managed to formulate the most indisputable propositions about the universal, i.e., about what is contained in absolutely all elements of the universe. The main acquisition of Hegelian philosophy is the systematization of the dialectical method, i.e., the method of thinking that considers everything in development, and K. Marx and F. Engels applied this acquisition in a materialist vein: unlike G.V.F. Hegel, proceeded from the fact that the universe is an infinite material world objectively existing in space and time, and all forms of thinking and ideas are properties of highly organized matter [5].

Diamatics as a methodology of thinking is a universal method of cognition . The objective existence of all material formations, including the objective existence of all subjects, is subject to the same laws of development. The laws of movement of thought are a reflection of the laws of movement of the objective material world [2].

Diamatics begins every movement of thought with the fundamental categories of being (“being”, “matter”, “time”, “space”, followed by “quality” and “quantity”, “measure”, “thing”, “property”, “ essence”, “identity” and “opposite” and others [6]), suggesting their strict correspondence with the entire socio-historical practice of mankind. A philosophical category is, firstly, an extremely general scientific abstraction, the richness of its content guarantees the systematization and consistent inclusion of any particular fact or series of facts. Secondly, this is a concept of a phenomenon that does not allow arbitrary interpretation. Thirdly, this is a concept that reflects objective laws, forms or aspects of objective material reality, key points of knowledge. The study of categories is based on the following diamatic principles. The first step is to consider the universe in unity, as a connected whole. This implies an approach to phenomena as organically connected, dependent on each other and conditioning each other. Second, consideration of phenomena exclusively in movement, development, namely from the point of view of their emergence and death. Moreover, development is a sudden qualitative leap as a result of the gradual accumulation of natural quantitative changes. And lastly: the reason for the self-motion of all phenomena of the universe is the internal opposition immanent in them, the obsolete and the developing, the positive and the negative, in short, the unity of opposites [4].

Diamatics recognizes the discovery of absolute objective laws (interrelations) as the highest type of knowledge. The process of cognition is subject to the law of negation of negation, that is, the movement from the truth of the first order to the truths of the subsequent order is carried out through negation, but this negation excludes the abolition or refutation of the previous truth. On the contrary, the negation of the negation means deepening, clarification, continuity [2]. At the same time, creative materialism is the living process of thinking itself, inextricably linked with the existence of the objective world, continuously deepening in the comprehension of its essence and forms of its development, continuously changing society, for thinking cannot be dialectical if it is divorced from transformative social activity [ 7].

2.2. Social studies
The conclusions of Marxism about society are a synthesis of truths about the most general objective laws of social development. Such a science was the result of a clearly defined and formalized logical methodology, diamatics, applied and confirmed its scientific nature first to the universe and nature (through diamatic criticism of famous works in the field of natural science), and then addressed to society (through diamatic criticism of famous works in the field of social science).

Social science also did not appear out of nowhere. Studying the legacy of the founders of Marxism (49 volumes), it is impossible not to pay attention to the list of authors whose works were scrupulously studied by K. Marx and F. Engels. It would not be an exaggeration to say that K. Marx and F. Engels conscientiously studied the works of almost all famous scientists since the times of Ancient Greece in all branches of human knowledge up to and including the 19th century. That is, Marxism has a gigantic base of theoretical sources and is an unsurpassed teaching that diamatically integrates all the scientific wealth developed by humanity during the pre-Marx period. Thus, K. Marx and F. Engels in their works systematized and synthesized all the knowledge that existed before them about the development of the real productive forces of society, about the laws of development of sciences, individual and social consciousness [8]. And most importantly, they made this critical revision on the basis of the only scientific methodology, that is, with an adequate understanding of how the world works and what the laws of thinking are.

The very formulation of the task of social science to study the laws of development of society implies identifying the essence of a number of concepts: society itself, its moments, primary factors of development, stages of development and intra-stage factors of development.

Development of living matter
First of all, human society is one of the types of living matter. There are prerequisites and conditions for the existence of any type of living matter. Prerequisites are biological factors (such as adaptability to the external environment and mechanisms of life reproduction), and conditions are external factors (such as geographic). A variety of quantitative (such as population density) and qualitative (such as the level of development of skills to interact with living and inanimate nature) factors are indicators of successful existence in these conditions. However, prerequisites and conditions only contribute to existence. Existence itself, and therefore development, can only occur in interaction with the planetary ecosystem, in the course of the exchange of substances and energies with nature, in the struggle for life. We can say that this exchange constitutes the existence of living nature, and the identity and unity of opposites - nature and living material objects - is a key factor in the development of these objects.

In the evolutionary process, primates, possessing the ability to reflect and adapting to the conditions of a diversely aggressive external environment, began to spontaneously unite for collective work and thereby began to stand out from the animal world through the creation of a society that served as a catalyst for the development of the human psyche.

This moment marked a qualitative leap in the development of living matter: if earlier individual animals and their groups, in the process of struggling for survival, adapted to changing environmental conditions, then human society itself transforms the habitat and at the same time increases the efficiency of this transformation through the development of social relations as the main factor of labor and its effectiveness.

The development of society cannot be fully studied without understanding what it is.

Concept of society
The very logic of the relationship between the universal, the particular and the individual makes it possible to define society as a socially organized form of living matter, the moments of which man is. Outside of society, a person does not show signs of a rational being, because only a social person can become a rational person - formed by society, being a single manifestation of society, its moment.

Thus, social existence itself - people, their relationships, the results of their practice, in a word, the life of society in all its diversity - has as its moment an active social consciousness influencing the material conditions of life, determining the consciousness of every person who changes social existence [9].

What contributes to the progressive development of society?

Firstly, as something universal and whole, human society is characterized not simply by people as its moments, but by their relationships. The development of society, therefore, depends on the development of each member of society and on the development of relationships between them.

Since members of human society are characterized primarily by the presence of reason, the development of society is associated with an increase in the quality of their thinking. Moreover, the high quality of a worldview does not simply relate to the level of intelligence in a particular work area, since in this case there is no development of social relations, but, for example, a strange order is formed when highly intelligent members of society are looking for more and more sophisticated ways of killing their own kind. A high-quality worldview refers, first of all, to a developed understanding of society, which is the most important factor for the development of social relations.

Secondly, since human society emerged from the animal kingdom and has the distinctive feature of transforming the environment in the process of struggle for survival, the development of members of society and the relationships between them contributes to the life process of society and, therefore, is progressive .

Thirdly, the development of members of society and the relationships between them, in turn, depends on the state of society , that is, on the totality of conditions prevailing in it that influence the development of each member of society. The level of development or quality (condition) of society can be determined through the level of suitability of these conditions for the high-quality development of each member of society. The law of the development of matter allows us to say that society moves from a lower quality state to a higher quality one, from simple to complex, through the creation of increasingly optimal conditions for reproduction through the comprehensive development of each member of society. It is this kind of movement that is progressive .

Thus, society in its life process of active transformation of nature develops progressively only if the quality of relations between members of society develops, which is possible only if there are conditions in society for the development of the quality of thinking of each member of society.

Development of society: principles and key factor
Like any living matter, society develops through interaction with nature, but in addition, being the highest form of matter, it struggles to separate itself from the animal world. Society’s interaction with the external environment has developed to a controlled and goal-oriented exchange of substances and energies with nature with the aim of transforming it [9], that is, to collective labor.

Moments of development characteristic of society (or moments of collective labor) are identified in the course of studying the key moments of society: its elements and the interaction between them.

Productive forces and production relations mutually determine each other. Productive forces and production relations constitute an identity of opposites, called the mode of production . The leading opposition in the method of production is the productive forces, they are primary - the nature of production relations depends on the quality of thinking of people and the instruments of production, the latter can only accelerate or slow down the development of the productive forces. It is the method of production that is the key factor in the development of society , the force of social existence that plays a decisive role in progress, and the productive forces and production relations are its sides [9].

Progress of development of society
Having received this key in their hands, K. Marx and F. Engels thereby localized the field of search for the laws of social development. By combining the acquired knowledge with known historical data, scientists found the following.

Firstly, methods of production replace each other as productive forces develop. The change occurs in a well-known historical sequence from the primitive communal way of life to the communist one, although individual countries and societies may skip stages under external influence. The transition from one mode of production to another occurs through revolutionary changes, but they mature evolutionarily. Evolution is a gradual preparation for a revolutionary leap [10].

Secondly, the method of production underlies the development of social existence and its moment - social consciousness. In turn, production relations constitute the basis of society, on which a superstructure rises: the state, the legal system, a certain ideology. The specific historical unity of the basis and the corresponding superstructure is called socio-economic formation . The era of dominance of a certain method of production is the historical period of this formation [9].

Thirdly, at a certain stage of development, humanity is experiencing a period of dominance of private property relations and exploitative formations.

By the era of the Neolithic revolution, humanity had sufficiently developed the tools of production to transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding. At the same time, it became possible to accumulate and store a significant surplus of production and specialization of labor took place into managerial (mental) and executive (physical). So gradually the elite emerged in society. Due to underdeveloped thinking and dominant semi-animal habits, the emerging leaders used the surplus for private interests . Immediately, in order to protect their property and power, a special apparatus of coercion, violence and deception was required, which was later institutionalized in the form of the state, law and corresponding ideology. This is how relations of private ownership of the means of production arose , which became a class-forming factor. With the advent of a new method of production, all of humanity was divided into antagonistic classes: the owners of private property in the means of production were organized through state institutions into a class of exploiters, which was opposed by the unorganized, and therefore submissive, exploited masses.

Fourthly, K. Marx in his work “Capital. Critique of Political Economy” examined in detail the features of the capitalist mode of production: how and under what conditions the exchange of goods between the wage worker and the capitalist turns into exploitation; what is the mechanism of exploitation - capital, that is, money invested in the means and processes of exploitation; how the endless cycle of accumulation reproduces the conditions of capitalist production.

Practice
All this titanic theoretical work - revealing the research method, finding the key factor in the development of society and discovering the laws of this development - was required by K. Marx and F. Engels in order to answer the question “How to build a society of happy and free people?” So they made the greatest discovery - the proletarians, organized into a revolutionary class, will become the gravedigger of capitalism.

V. Lenin developed Marxism, adding critically revised practical experience of the struggle of the populists and three Russian revolutions, applying it to the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions [11]. Vladimir Ilyich needed theoretical work to clarify and develop the tenets of Marxism for a specific era in order for the organized working class to take power into its own hands.

No less complex theoretical work on clarifying and developing the tenets of Marxism-Leninism was required by I. Stalin for the victorious construction of the society of the first phase of communism in one particular country, for the collapse of the classical colonial slavery of bourgeois democracies, for the spread of communism as a world social system, for the fight against fascism and to create developments in the field of formation of the necessary material factors for the transition to mature communism [11].

At our newest stage of history, there is a need for a theoretical understanding of the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR [13], the main one of which is the insufficient competence of party members - requires the development of the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, in particular in matters of party building, with an emphasis on development productive forces, quality of human thinking. This kind of work has been carried out by V. Podguzov and the editors of the Breakthrough group for decades. The historical task of building a party of scientific centralism [14] is no less urgent right now than at the beginning of the 20th century, and its implementation requires extremely competent Marxists.

3. Competence
Since the world is material, knowable and develops according to objective laws, then the movement towards a high-quality state of society, communism, depends on the objective level of development of the productive forces and production relations, on the corresponding development of social science theory and on the degree of mastery of it by each member of society. At the current historical stage, the theory of knowledge of the laws of social development has become a full-fledged science, known under the name of Marxism, and the degree of mastery of it through high-quality self-education makes it possible to determine a person’s competence . Thus, the third point of self-education is that it is a continuous process extended over time, contributing to the formation of a Marxist, allowing him to raise the level of his competence.

The development of human thinking is determined not only by his biological characteristics, but also by social relations, and in the historical time of exploitative formations, the ruling class is directly interested in ensuring that the masses wander in the darkness of ignorance in matters of social science. This means that the law of uneven development of people's scientific thinking , applied to the exploitative period, states, firstly, about the general low level of scientific thinking in society, and secondly, about a significant difference in the levels of competence of members of society.

Since the scientific thinking of every person is a prerequisite for the existence of a communist society, the task of building progressive relations between people of different levels of scientific competence is an important aspect of the task of building communism.

To approach the solution of this problem, let us identify communities of people who manifest themselves in accordance with the level of competence: first of all, these are groups of carriers of scientific and non-scientific thinking. In the last, non-Marxist group, subgroups of people with an individual (half-animal or petty-bourgeois) and social (religious, national, leftist, etc.) worldview clearly manifest themselves. Marxists, according to their level of competence, can be divided into Marxists in the making, party members and leaders.

Below we will illustrate these levels through the possible evolution of a “good man”, a clean tradesman.

3.1. Unscientific individual thinking. Tradesman
There are good people living in the world - trained, hard-working, moderately honest, good friends, with strong families, almost without bad habits. Good people are surrounded, for the most part, by equally good people, and, one could say, “life is good.” But she wasn't so successful.

Good people from Stepanakert, Donetsk, Tel Aviv and other cities one day discover that rockets are flying into their homes.

Good people from Minsk see armed officers on the streets, twisting peaceful protesters, equipped with fittings and flammable cocktails.

Good people from Ukraine discover Muscovites on the territory, who arrived in tanks under the fictitious pretext of liberation from some Nazis.

Good people from the Russian Federation have been suffering for years from the Russophobia that has unfolded in Europe.

And finally, all these good people notice that life is getting worse: it’s harder to find work, there’s more crime, children are taught worse, food is becoming more and more expensive, normal treatment is becoming more and more inaccessible. And all this against the backdrop of increasingly fattening rich people and increasingly inadequate officials.

A good person knows the reasons: greedy enemy politicians are to blame for the war, and stupid and greedy officials, so wonderfully described by Gogol in The Government Inspector, are to blame for the rise in prices. A good person himself stands for everything good, not just with his thoughts, but with all his actions; and that’s why he doesn’t understand why others shouldn’t act like him.

“Why do I need all this?!” — losing self-control from adversity, any good person asks the ash tree.

Let's help him.

To answer this question, let's break it down into two other implied questions: "Why do such disasters occur in society, despite the fact that I personally do good?" and “Why do social disasters fall on me?”

By asking such questions, a good person discovers a mistake in the very course of thought: ignoring the connection between the individual (individual) and the general (social). It is not difficult to find answers by restoring this connection.

First: the character of social life is not the result of the activity of one person; he is the result of the activities of the whole society, including the good man himself. Therefore, one must be able to distinguish between “I do good for myself without offending others,” “I do good for myself and some others,” and “I do good for the whole society.” These three activities may well be mutually exclusive.

Second: social disasters affect the entire society, albeit unevenly. Consequently, seeking individual salvation from them is an attempt to do “good for oneself,” which, as we noted above, may well contradict “good for the whole society.”

Simply put, a good person has himself to blame for everything. His activities make a significant contribution to the creation of public, including his personal, problems.

How it works?

“World peace,” so passionately desired by a good person, depends on the nature of his personal activity in relation to the whole society, and not to himself or the units around him. And in relation to society, the progressiveness or reactionaryness of a person’s practice is determined only and exclusively by the level of development of his thinking.

Battery effect
A good person is, first of all, a useful employee. No matter what happens to his personal life, he must find a job. From an individual point of view, the conditions and content of work at work, the size of the salary and the amount of free time that he can spend on his personal life outside of work are important to him.

His activity takes on a different aspect when we look at it from the point of view of bourgeois society. The hired worker sells his ability to work, labor power, to the capitalist. He sells it in advance because he receives his salary after working. In paid time, he labors to create some kind of product or service, which appears in the form of value, part of which the capitalist returns to him in the form of wages, and the other part appropriates for himself. Feudal corvee was more honest, because such theft of labor, exploitation, was physically divided: the peasant worked either in his own field or in the field of the feudal lord.

The very state of affairs, where a hired worker cannot live without getting a job, indicates that the capitalist has gained the opportunity to force the proletarian to work for the purpose of profit. The capitalist can dictate working conditions, and his interest is to reduce the cost of working conditions, reduce wages and reduce the amount of free time the worker has. Consequently, from a bourgeois economic point of view, the personal life of a good person is just a cost necessary to restore the “talking tool”, which must be minimized.

In order not to exhaust the population in the pursuit of profit, not to kill each other in competition, and to protect themselves from the business of their neighbors on the planet, capitalists become a class: they are organized in the form of a state that maintains balance with the help of ideological and power tools and structures. Next, states and their blocs enter into a competitive struggle, from economic regulation to military confrontation.

Thus, the best hired worker has a dual nature, individual and social.

As an individual, he is a subjectively good person, because he lives an ordinary, non-aggressive everyday life. As such, he is a tradesman. He spends a lot of time thinking about this side of his life, guided, as a rule, by personal interests.

As a part of society, the wage earner is just a slave; the battery that fuels the capitalist system. As such, subjectively he may remain good, but objectively the nature of his activities is determined by state policy. The proletarian finds himself in this position, firstly, objectively, in connection with his removal from public administration of the so-called. by legal methods, that is, by the will of the ruling class, and secondly, subjectively, due to one’s own intellectual passivity. The latter is expressed in the fact that he is not trained to think about the social side of his life, and spends only as much time on it as is necessary to ensure individual interests, personal comfort and convenience.

It is precisely the low quality of the subjective factor, that is, the thinking of the tradesman, concentrating on his individual side and ignoring the social one, that allows him to be relegated from the pedestal of a thinking person to a man-production function, a “battery” .

Thousands and millions of such “batteries” are concerned only with the quality of energy production and their recharging, but are not at all concerned with the direction of movement of the mechanism that they power. The ruling class chooses the direction for them.

It only remains to add that the bourgeois mechanisms themselves are as mindless as their “batteries”, since they are motivated only by an animal thirst for extracting surplus value. The degree of reactionaryness of bourgeois states varies due to the different degrees of their degradation, and therefore it is a matter of pure chance whether a good person gives his strength to Nazi Ukraine or the average reactionism of the bourgeois Russian Federation.

The irony, then, is that the average tradesman prefers to leave his question “Why do I need this?” without an answer, since he himself is part of it.

3.2. Unscientific public thinking
Some philistines manage to come out of the shell of individualism and begin to become interested in social movements. Sometimes this is a consequence of curiosity, but more often, during a period of social upheaval, anxiety for one’s own safety requires filling the marker “friend or foe” with content, determining the cause and culprit of the unrest. Lacking a strong logical apparatus, citizens observe events, read different opinions on the topic, recall school knowledge in social studies, ask the point of view of loved ones and form their own opinions. The range of non-scientific ideas that promise to deliver humanity from suffering is infinitely wide - from democratic to religious-sectarian and even racial - but in most cases the bourgeoisie comes to a moderate-radical national-patriotic worldview.

The quality of the subjective factor of a national patriot is higher than that of an apolitical bourgeois: his thinking is not limited only to his own interests, but already takes into account public ones.

A spontaneous national patriot, as a rule, supports the “mechanism” of which he is a part. Conscious citizens from conflicting countries - the Russian Federation and Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Palestine and others - are no different from each other: if they were born on the other side of the conflict, they would support it. Thus, having been born at the beginning of the 21st century in the USA, a national patriot will make every effort to ensure that his country plunders the whole world; having been born in the Russian Federation, he will support the inconsistent national liberation struggle against Western countries. Sometimes a citizen ends up in the cage of a foreign state, like, for example, a liberal in the Russian Federation who has adopted the ideology of the West and works for an NGO.

Having developed from an individualist into a social person, a person of national-patriotic convictions can be active in support of his homeland. Occasionally, he may even completely abandon his personal life in favor of public life.

In this sense, the nature of the activity of an active citizen still reflects the degree of reactionaryness of “his capitalism” and he may well cause more damage to society than if he were just a “battery” tradesman. At the same time, he has a chance to move to the next level of development of his thinking.

Thus, the national patriot is one step further from the animal worldview relative to the philistine and thus has greater potential for mastering science. However, his thinking remains in the non-scientific sphere, which means it has the potential to degrade to the fanatical-dogmatic Nazi level, where the destruction of one part of the population for the illusory benefit of another is considered acceptable.

3.3. Unscientific social thinking. Leftism
Out of faith in their great and invincible nation, fighting against eternal evil enemies, some national patriots make attempts to understand the laws of movement of society. Some of them, having waded through tons of idealistic theories, will approach scientific Marxist works. They will be bored with reading and developing, and, having enriched their vocabulary with a number of catchy phrases, they will become leftists.

Ersatz Marxism is similar to the modern celebration of the ancient Celtic holiday of Halloween. Here you have zombies, mindlessly shouting phrases from Marxist textbooks that are not connected by a general meaning. Here are the werewolves, bringing their texts to solidarity with the bourgeoisie and revisionism. Here are the vampires, turning the proletariat into leftism with their thoughtlessly cheerful actionism and economism. There are also simply storytellers who talk about how a catastrophe will come, will call wizards to life, and a good life will improve on its own. All these characters tirelessly flicker in front of the audience, not forgetting to beg for sweets and donations.

The leftist is twofold. An idle leftist can encourage a tradesman and a national patriot to develop his logical apparatus, which can lead him to progressive scientific activity. But the same leftist can lead a potential Marxist astray from this path with his beautifully presented nonsense. Even worse, he can turn a person against his relatively reactionary state in its fight against the fascist invaders, as, for example, modern leftist pacifists of the Russian Federation do.

And yet, if a leftist’s conscience is not atrophied, the door to Marxism is open to him.

3.4. Unscientific individual thinking
At the same time, the tradesman can choose another way out of adversity - to consciously subordinate public interests to his own, that is, to get as close as possible to the lowest possible level of thinking - semi-animal. In the era of private property relations, we are talking about the desire to climb the bourgeois mechanism, fueled by the energy of the middle-class “batteries”; become a capitalist yourself: a parasite living off the labor of others.

The degradation of thinking has no boundaries: starting with small, fussy business, half-animal man strives to ride the powerful productive forces in order to make a profit; strives to become an imperialist oligarch - a slave-owning dictator, all of whose activities are aimed at strengthening the dominance of its owner through the growth of capital. In its extreme form, such parasitism becomes fatal for society, because maximum profit is obtained not just through exploitation, but also through wars: either local for the purpose of profit, or global with the goals of both profit and the destruction of competitors.

Let us note that neither a high level of intelligence nor a good memory for Marxist quotes in any way prevents non-scientific thinking and does not guarantee scientific competence, since intelligence and memory are only tools that a person uses in practice or for his own benefit (and here he can behave in the most antisocial manner), or for the benefit of society.

The relationship between the bearers of unscientific thinking is as follows: two-legged stomach-oligarchs use all available intellectual abilities to organize such a world order, where ordinary townspeople and small entrepreneurs are the food supply of large capitalists, and non-scientific and ideological citizens become their ideological servants, as a rule, national-patriotic or leftist character.

3.5. Scientific thinking
Fate can imprison a person in any very reactionary country, even in an analogue of fascist Germany itself in the 30-40s of the last century. And as a hired worker, he will still be the “battery” that powers the monster. But if he is a Marxist, if he is motivated to the level of conscious necessity, if his thinking is scientific and his practice is revolutionary, then he has changed qualitatively as a person. He began to live for the sake of the whole society and stopped living only for the sake of its part: himself, his family, a separate country. He stopped asking the question “Why do I need this?” and be a good-person-for-oneself, an active national-patriotic “battery” or an empty leftist. In a word, he has ceased to be a relatively reactionary element of society, leading it to disaster with some speed. This is the only way he compensated for the “battery effect” and set out on the path of progress.

The newly minted Marxist, yesterday's tradesman, understands that his maximum task is to achieve the maximum level of competence, develop a theory and, on its basis, carry out the practical movement of the masses towards communism, the maximum possible under the given historical conditions. That is, to become the leader of the communist movement. On this path, it is necessary, first of all, to embark on the road of self-education and achieve such a level of competence in order to become a communist, a member of the PNC.

(Much more at link and well worth the time.)

https://prorivists.org/93_self-education/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue May 28, 2024 3:00 pm

You Can’t Vote Against Fascism
MAY 27, 2024

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By Cde-Editor Myrrh – May 24, 2024

The CPUSA has been circulating numerous discussion articles for its upcoming June convention, at which the future direction of the party will be determined. These articles and their content indicate a forthcoming line struggle within the party on a number of questions. By line struggle we mean, “1. the Ideological struggle within the Communist movement for correct program, strategy and tactics for proletarian revolution, and 2. the Ideological struggle between the Communist movement and the spontaneous movements, particularly the advanced elements.” Some of the questions for CPUSA involve whether the party should finally expunge Marxism-Leninism from its programme once and for all, and how the party should engage with the broader worker’s movement. But two burning questions for CPUSA, around which several articles have been written, and which represent the crux of the struggle are:

1- What is fascism?
2- Is fascism already here?

These questions undergird every convention discussion article, and each author’s position on them becomes apparent throughout, or even from the title alone — take “The United States is not a Fascist Country,” for example. While this article doesn’t have a cogent answer of what fascism is, it wants to be clear that whatever it is, it’s not here. Other articles, such as “Redefining Fascism” and “It is Time to Expand our Definition of the Fascist Threat” grasp the urgency around finding a better answer to the first question, and are at least open to the idea that the United States is already a fascist country, or that the sole threat of fascism in the U.S. is not Trumpism alone.

Some of these articles were published prior to the eruption of the student protest movement, and some of them are more recent. But despite being able to bear direct witness to the brutality unleashed by the pig government against the student movement at Columbia, UCLA, Irvine and other universities, along with the general silencing of dissent against the genocide in Palestine, some CPUSA writers (and, indeed, the party’s most prominent voices and leadership) insist that Trump and the MAGA movement remain a unique threat to working class interests. This is despite the genocide being financiered by Democrats and the most violent repression of students taking place on campuses with Democrat administrators, located in cities with Democrat mayors, in states with Democrat governors, under a Democrat’s presidency.

But even these plain facts are not enough to break the hold of the triumvirate of revisionism, opportunism, and tailism — call it ROT for short — over CPUSA, and some of the articles are truly so heinous as to necessitate being dragged through the mud individually.

We’ll begin this process with Callum Wilson’s egregious and ROT-filled, “Not One Step Back — Vote Against Fascism 2024” — the very title of which is a slap in the face of the heroic sacrifices made by the USSR in World War II. The author identifies “Not One Step Back” as an anti-fascist battlecry from that time, but the phrase more specifically refers to Stalin’s famous decree of July 28 1942. This doctrine essentially prohibited the Red Army from withdrawing or retreating from battles against the Nazis, and was a major factor in reversing the Nazi onslaught. The metaphor that our little bacterium is attempting to evoke is that voting for the Democrats will turn the tide against “MAGA Fascism” just as Order 227 turned the tide of World War II in Russia. To even compare these situations is daft and nauseating. Consider: “Not One Step Back… out of line to vote,” vs. “Not One Step Back: lay your life down to kill the Nazis.” For this author, the size of a step out of the polling line is the size of a step into a Nazi grave. To him, not voting for Democrats is as horrible as avoiding confrontation with the monsters who raped and slaughtered millions of your countrymen.

The article begins by referring to a previous article by the same author, which is all but indistinguishable from this article, but focused on the 2022 election battle between Shapiro and Mastriano in Pennsylvania rather than the forthcoming federal election. In that article, Wilson failed to consider that avid zionist and pig financier Shapiro could just be a different manifestation of fascism than his Christian white nationalist opponent. In this article, fascistic qualities of the Democrats are completely ignored. MAGA fascism and Donald Trump are the only concerns. This level of analysis is woefully inadequate for someone calling themselves a Communist, but apparently makes sense to the single celled organism that wrote it.

In fact, this misconstrual of the Democrats and Republicans as diametric opponents, with nary a mention of their aligned class interests or the various factions within them, permeates the article, which, for reasons upon which we can speculate, is a painful 2,585 words in length… twice as long as the restriction placed upon other writers. And its length is not the sole cause of torment. When sentences like, “If the people’s movement fails to defeat Trump at the ballot box, the future of democracy in our republic will be in doubt” are broken down, there’s much to cringe about. Namely what people’s movement? Why specify at the ballot box? The future of democracy for which class? Why’d you say “our republic,” Callum? To which class does your republic currently belong, and why do you identify as a member of that class? Ah, well, we know why. To even ask these questions answers them.

Wilson then makes the laughably pathetic and flaccid claim that, “There will be the time to press the attack against the Democratic party, when we become leaders in the all people’s front. By getting out the vote to defeat fascism, we advance the cause of socialism.” This is a rephrase of the fool’s errand in attempting to “push Biden/the Democrats/etc. left.” A fool’s errand because the Democrats, as chosen mouthpieces of the U.S. ruling class, are some of the most vicious and irredeemable terrorist scum in the history of humanity. Can you push a hyena left? What about a shark? Will you push them left when they finally count the bodies of this genocide and find two or three hundred thousand or more Palestinian corpses? A major impetus for the Biden administration towards not counting the dead, besides the fact there’s nobody left to count them, is that it raises questions of how much worse Trump could possibly be for the people of Gaza. Will there be anyone left alive in Gaza, come election day?

The body of the article is then swallowed up by analysis and fearmongering about the Republicans that could have been found on MSNBC. Trump would be a scary dictator, ushering in waves of unspeakable repression and horror, but he can still be defeated within the existing legal constraints of the Empire for some reason. Of course, Biden isn’t called dictatorial in the same article for exercising these same extraordinary legal powers to circumvent “our dysfunctional and gridlocked political system.” This is definitively tailist — words by a so-called Communist that mirror exactly the reactionary Democrat.

Wilson goes on to beat that famous, dead and all but decomposed horse — the paragraph of Dimitrov’s 1935 Speech to the Communist International that, according to Wilson puts forth the ”Marxist definition of fascism” as:

“the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital… It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

Is Wilson aware that this definition is not even the definition used in his own supposedly Marxist party’s constitution? The CPUSA’s revision of Dimitrov’s quote defines fascism as follows:

“Fascism would be the open terrorist dictatorship by the most reactionary, militarist, racist section of monopoly capital and the elimination of all avenues of popular resistance and protest.”

This is CPUSA’s answer to the first question we posed at the beginning of the article, slyly worded so that the answer to the second question can always be no. After all, no matter how many campus protests against the Palestinian genocide are viciously curbed, the protesters are technically still allowed to protest. We can’t say all avenues of popular resistance and protest have been eliminated, and it’s of course impossible for Trump to eliminate all of them either. We can see how Dimitrov’s actual formulation fits the United States, regardless of which party is in power, while the CPUSA’s bastardization of it is conveniently targeted at Republicans.



But Republicans are not Wilson’s only target. The article seems to be nefariously constructed to drive actual readers of Lenin to madness.. Wilson has the audacity to write “Ultra leftists have attempted to turn Lenin into a mascot of their immature fanaticism while ignoring the brilliant Marxist and enlightened small-d democrat he actually was.” At some point, people must admit when they haven’t done the reading, or when they have the comprehension of a bacterium. Demanding that authors like Callum cease their rancid opportunism by keeping Lenin’s name and vision out of their mouths and papers, however, might be too much to ask.

The Red Clarion has previously noted that the CPUSA only quotes directly from Lenin briefly or, in this article’s case, not at all. If they did so, they might be at risk of printing something useful for developing revolutionary consciousness and potential. Instead, we are stuck with the deep fried sentiment, “If you cannot organize voter turnouts, then forget about your revolution.” This is not something Lenin ever said, or even alluded to. Consider the following real Lenin quote, which expresses his perspective on participating in the enemy’s electoral politics: “we shall not refuse to utilise this arena, but we shall not exaggerate its modest importance; on the contrary, guided by the experience already provided by history, we shall entirely subordinate the struggle we wage in the Duma to another form of struggle, namely, strikes, up risings, etc.” Guided by the experience already provided by history. These words, already written in 1906.

Wilson concludes the article with an impotent critique of Biden. While he uses the proper “Genocide Joe” epithet, the argument made in these final paragraphs is a jumbled mess of lesser-evilism. For instance, he writes “In order to successfully defeat Trump, and protect democracy, we must mobilize, organize, and rally the great masses of the working class majority in this country, which the Democratic Party often fails to do themselves.” What does this really mean? We must mobilize, organize, and rally the working masses to the Democrats so that the Democrats can win against their will? It apparently does say that, because it’s reiterated further down: “While Biden will have no one to blame but himself for his defeat, the results would be catastrophic.” We must help this pudding-brained octogenarian win against not only his own will, but while struggling uphill against the entire Democratic political establishment to boot. And speaking of pudding brains, check out this sentence that Callum includes from Joe Sims — “defeating Biden’s support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is the path to defeating fascism in November.” The working class movement must again, do what? Defeat Biden’s will to support the zionist entity against his own wishes so that he doesn’t lose the election? Did anyone read this before it was published? Who reads that sentence and says, “yeah, sounds good, put that in.” What about “After all, the 2020 Democratic victory in Georgia, was accredited to non-partisan grassroots community organizers, instead of the Democratic National Committee political machine.” These non-partisan grassroots community organizers sound totally cucked.

In sum, the article in question demonstrates that its author, Callum Wilson is a spineless weasel and careerist, who should choose between joining the Democrats, purging himself of his pathetic revisionism, opportunism, and tailism (ROT), or doing some sort of secret third thing. Wilson’s article shows a woeful misunderstanding of fascism as a phenomenon somehow beholden to the legal framework of Empire, rather than that Empire’s defense against the working and oppressed classes of the world. It erroneously construes fascism and liberal democracy as two mass movements at odds with one another, where it is possible to stop one by simply voting for the other.

In order to advance the Communist movement within the imperial core, it is the duty of CPUSA members to struggle against this naivety and rot within their ranks. They must formulate a better answer to the question of what truly constitutes fascism in order to be capable of waging a revolutionary struggle suited to the actual conditions of the Empire. Certainly, the notion that pervades this and similar articles and their authors, this idea that “voting against fascism can deal it a devastating blow,” must be expunged from the party and the Communist movement.

https://orinocotribune.com/you-cant-vot ... t-fascism/

A good polemic. We need more of that.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu May 30, 2024 2:16 pm

“The Betrayed Revolution” as an example of Trotskyism
No. 5/93.V.2024

There is a lot of shine and noise in Trotsky’s phrases, but there is no content in them (Lenin)

In August it will be 88 years since the publication of L. Trotsky’s infamous book “The Revolution Betrayed: What is the USSR and where is it going?” Among some on the left, this book is revered as a serious analysis of the socialist state and a Marxist critique of the Soviet system. The authors of Trotsky’s four-volume work, Felshtinsky and Chernyavsky, expressed regret about Lev Davidich’s inability to “discard Marxist dogmas” and complained about his “communist utopianism” and “fanaticism.” However, the concerns of respected gentlemen. American historians were in vain, because in “The Revolution Betrayed” there is not even a shadow of Marxism; the former People's Commissar actually speaks from the position of left-liberalism, powdered, like the face of an aging prostitute, with r-revolutionary phrases.

“The Betrayed Revolution” is the brightest example of Trotskyism, the standard of Trotskyist thinking (Trotsky himself assessed it as “the main work of his life”). A solid Marxist, without much difficulty, is able to expose the countless manipulations, distortions and outright lies of Judas Trotsky, his empty pseudo-revolutionary phrase, behind which hides the same anti-communism that permeates all the writings of fascists and liberals against the USSR. But the quality of the current cadres of the communist movement is such that even some of the comrades who openly declare that they stand on the positions of Stalinism, that is, recognition of Stalin’s theoretical and practical contribution to Marxism, take a wavering position: they say, yes, Trotsky was a traitor and a saboteur, but in the end he turned out to be right. They say that “The Betrayed Revolution” may be odious and biased, but the main prediction turned out to be correct: the restoration of capitalism was actually carried out by the degenerated top of the party bureaucracy.

It should be recognized that Trotskyism today is one of the most effective means of combating the spread of Marxist science, especially among young people. How can this be explained?

Firstly , Trotskyism is very easily digestible, like glucose; if reading, for example, the main works of Stalin requires at least a minimum amount of knowledge, mastery of the basics of Marxism, then any pamphlet by Trotsky can be read without any knowledge and “understand” the text. Because, in essence, there is nothing to understand from Trotsky, he is superficial, but he writes very smartly and sharply, with biting phrases and juicy epithets. We must pay tribute to Lev Davidich - he is a brilliant publicist; he should write fantastic stories in the spirit of A. Belyaev, but - alas! — he preferred to write political fiction, passing it off as Marxism. Is it any wonder that young people, outraged by social injustice and the ugliness of capitalism, but putting aside the serious study of Marxism on the back burner, read Trotsky’s pamphlets, captivated by his image of an intellectual and “eternal revolutionary.”

Here it should be specially emphasized that Trotskyism as a phenomenon cannot in any case be narrowed to the activities of Trotsky himself and his associates. It was not Trotsky who gave birth to Trotskyism (for the “lion of the revolution” did not have any consistent and firm ideas and convictions, and he himself was a typical demagogue and adventurer), but “Trotskyism” gave birth to Trotsky, i.e. a new round of opportunist current that came to change of Menshevism. Lev Davidich led this new round, becoming his “brand”.

Secondly , Trotskyism is an extremely tenacious form of opportunism (adaptation to the conditions of bourgeois rule), which, like a virus, constantly mutates, actively penetrating communist organizations. For example, in the Russian Federation, against the background of the high authority of Stalin and the Stalin era, Trotskyism mutated into the so-called. “Shapinism” is an attempt to “reconcile” Trotskyism with Stalinism through objectivism and the statement that the contradictions between them have allegedly lost their relevance. No matter how Trotskyism is disguised, no matter what clothes it dresses up in, its political physiognomy remains unchanged - it is direct or indirect anti-Stalinism, denial or belittlement of Stalin’s role in Marxism, denial of communism in the USSR.

Thus, taking into account the growth of leftist sentiments of the masses and the absence of an authoritative communist center, the weak theoretical preparation of the left, Trotskyism is the leading edge of bourgeois ideology, a reactionary practice in the left movement.

In this article I am not going to examine in detail, under a microscope, Trotsky’s entire book - I will leave that to other researchers. My goal in analyzing a specific chapter is to show the methodological insignificance of the most famous left-wing critic of the USSR, to analyze his anti-Marxism using specific material.

Two cornerstones of “classical” Trotskyism
Before proceeding with the actual analysis, I will outline two cornerstones on which the “Revolution Betrayed” is based. Firstly , this is the famous “Soviet Thermidor”. And if you expect a strict definition of “Soviet Thermidor”, then... do not forget that you are dealing with Trotsky, with a man who “loves ringing and empty phrases” and “avoids facts and specific instructions” if they “mercilessly refute all his angry exclamations and pompous phrases” (characteristic from Lenin’s article “On the violation of unity, covered up by cries for unity”).

If we seriously analyze the theses about “Thermidor,” then the idea is promoted that the socialist revolution is naturally doomed to repeat the path of the French bourgeois revolution. Trotsky is not at all embarrassed by the question of how correct it is to draw parallels between the French Revolution and October, because they took place in completely different historical situations; that the nature of these revolutions is fundamentally different: in the first case, some exploiters overthrew others, and in the second case, the working class overthrew all the oppressors at once and took political power for the first time. He claims:

“The axiomatic assertion of Soviet literature that the laws of bourgeois revolutions are ‘inapplicable’ to proletarian revolutions is devoid of any scientific content.”

Deprived - and that's it. Trotsky, as usual, does not present any arguments.

The roots of “Thermidor” come from distorted historical materialism. Trotsky promotes a vulgar approach to history: he completely denies the subjective factor, the role of the individual. For him, all historical figures are just functions, puppets in the hands of classes, obediently playing out the roles assigned to them:

“The sequence of stages of the Great French Revolution, during its ascent as well as its descent, shows no less convincingly that the strength of the successive “leaders” and “heroes” consisted primarily in their correspondence to the character of those classes and strata that gave them support ; It was only this correspondence, and not any unrelated advantages, that allowed each of them to put the stamp of their personality on a certain historical period. In the alternation in power of Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre, Barras, Bonaparte, there is an objective pattern that is immeasurably more powerful than the special signs of the historical protagonists themselves.”

Accordingly, according to Trotsky, the Bolsheviks won in October 17 not because they were armed with scientific revolutionary theory and had in their caliber the brilliant leader Lenin, who was able to accurately grasp the moment when “today is too early, and tomorrow is too late,” but simply because “the proletariat finally managed to lead the dissatisfied peasantry against the bourgeoisie.” Apparently, it succeeded by itself, without the participation of the Bolsheviks...

Of course, such “historical mathematics” is a caricature of Marxism. In no case does Marxist theory deny the role of the individual in history, much less try to reduce it to a simple function. Stalin explained:

“Marxism does not at all deny the role of outstanding individuals or the fact that people make history. In Marx, in his “The Poverty of Philosophy” and other works, you can find words that it is people who make history. But, of course, people do not make history as some fantasy tells them, not as it comes to their minds. Each new generation encounters certain conditions that were already in place at the moment when this generation was born. And great people are worth something only insofar as they are able to correctly understand these conditions, understand how to change them. If they do not understand these conditions and want to change these conditions as their imagination tells them, then they, these people, find themselves in the position of Don Quixote. Thus, precisely according to Marx, people should not be opposed to conditions. It is people, but only insofar as they correctly understand the conditions that they found ready-made, and only insofar as they understand how to change these conditions, that make history” (“Conversation with the German writer Emil Ludwig”).

That is, the point is that each person acts in certain objective historical realities and cannot go against them. Take, for example, the story of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his religious reform: Egyptian society was not ready to accept the monotheistic model and after Akhenaten’s death, all his ideas, like his name itself, were consigned to oblivion. The opposite example is Tsar Peter the Great. Despite the radicalism of the reforms, as a result of which the beards of the boyars were chopped off, often along with their heads, Peter’s transformations after his death, unlike Akhenaten, remained in force and all subsequent kings and queens declared themselves as “successors of the work of Peter the Great.” Because Russian society as a whole was ready for Peter’s reforms; they were long overdue; all that was needed was a strong enough and decisive figure to implement them.

You can find many examples when at a critical historical moment there was no suitable person or leader, which led to disaster. For example, the kingdom of Congo in the 17th century had every chance of becoming a powerful African empire, successfully fought against the Portuguese slave traders, but when the Congolese king Pedro II died, there was no worthy heir, strife began, and as a result the state collapsed, turning into a colony of Europeans.

That is why the fantasies of the writers of the now popular genre of “misfits” are naive, when our contemporary miraculously finds himself, for example, in the era of Ivan the Terrible and begins to progress, introducing modern technologies and knowledge. Let's take, for example, a steam engine. There is evidence that the ancient Greeks figured out how to use the power of steam and built steam fountains. But the first steam locomotive appeared only at the beginning of the 19th century. Really, all these centuries, no one thought of attaching wheels to a steam engine and putting it on rails? The point is not that they didn’t guess, but that there was no objective economic need for it. If some Leonardo Da Vinci had guessed to build a steam locomotive, at best it would have become a toy for the rich, like the most complex “robot” dolls created by watchmakers in the 18th century. Actually, the locomotive was initially just an attraction for the wealthy public. The railway service is a product of capitalism, when it became necessary to transport large volumes of goods across the vastness of America and Europe.

This is the diamatic understanding of the role of personality and technology in history. Trotsky took only one side, distorting the relationship between the objective and the subjective in history.

Trotsky's second cornerstone is his demagoguery about the "bureaucratic class" that has usurped power and oppresses the working class. In Marxism, the issue of “bureaucracy” is resolved unambiguously: the bureaucracy does not form a separate class, but is in the service of the ruling class. The freedom of action of officials and rulers is limited by the will of the ruling class. When they abuse the will of their class, they are eliminated, sometimes physically. There is a well-known form of political power called “Bonapartism”, when the top of the state tries to maneuver between the interests of different classes according to the principle: both ours and yours. The freedom of action for the device is somewhat expanded. However, the Bonapartist regime does not distinguish bureaucrats as a separate class; it still remains within the framework of those social-production relations as before. Trotsky acts cunningly here: he endows the “Soviet bureaucracy” with all the attributes of a class, but does not recognize it as a full-fledged class (fairly recognizing that the Soviet official does not own or inherit state property) and prophesies that soon the “bureaucrats” will want to become “real” owners and restoring capitalism. Young inexperienced leftists, looking for the cause of the death of the USSR and getting acquainted with these theses of Trotsky, find them logical and convincing, based on the fact that the counter-revolution was carried out by the party elite.

Trotskyist demagoguery about the “bureaucratic class” clings to the fact that power cannot be exercised directly by them. And here it does not matter whether we are talking about the masses of proletarians or the “mass” of the small bourgeoisie. If we imagine a society where literally every entrepreneur is endowed with state power, then we get a gloomy “dystopia” in the spirit of Bradbury. This is pure fantasy; such a society cannot exist in reality without falling into anarchy.

The question of the bureaucracy as a class is essentially a question of the supra-class elite of power. The actions of any apparatus or state come down to the question of ways and means of achieving the goals of the ruling class. This is the ABC of Marxism. When it comes to bourgeois society, then, as a rule, there are no difficulties for the left, but when it comes to socialist society, about the Soviet past, difficulties arise here.

The fact is that communism, unlike capitalism, cannot come spontaneously and economically; if the bourgeois revolution is the final act of the formation of a capitalist formation, then for communism the taking of power by the working class is only the beginning of a long and difficult path of reformatting the entire society. If the bourgeoisie, when taking power, already has its own economic basis, then the working class and communists, having made a revolution, need to gradually build the basis of communism, and this is a very difficult task.

Before the revolution, among the party “lower classes” and revolutionary youth there was a naive thought that it was enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie and socialize the means of production - and communist production relations would come by themselves (after all, “the basis is primary, and the setting is secondary”). But then, when this did not happen, another idea appeared that it was necessary to surpass the technological level of the imperialist countries - and then communism would come. Trotsky, by the way, preaches precisely this vulgar point of view:

“Marxism proceeds from the development of technology as the main spring of progress, and builds the communist program on the dynamics of the productive forces.”

And further:

“If Marx called the society that was supposed to be formed on the basis of the socialization of the productive forces of the most advanced capitalism of its era the lowest stage of communism, then this definition clearly does not fit the Soviet Union, which even today is much poorer in technology, life goods and culture, than capitalist countries. It would be more correct, therefore, to call the current Soviet regime, in all its contradictions, not socialist, but preparatory or transitional from capitalism to socialism.”

Here you can conduct a test: if a person claiming to be a communist accepts this text as Marxist, then he has failed the test and he needs to better study the works of the classics.

So, communism cannot come spontaneously. Why is that? Because communism is built not on naked class interests, which are a socially formed instinct, but on the consciousness of the masses, on the scientific organization of society. The masses must mature to communism, get rid of the atavisms of class thinking and behavior. It is absolutely true that communism cannot be built without a developed material and technical base, but it is also impossible to organize communist relations in society by simply improving the means of production. No matter how many goods are produced, it will still not be enough for the townspeople, like the rajah from the fairy tale “The Golden Antelope.” Consumer products must cease to be a tool for designating “status” and a form of self-realization. This can only be achieved through culturalism, the gradual re-education of the masses on the basis of state property and a planned economy.

The objective factors of communism are long overdue and overripe: modern productive forces (especially with the development of robotics and neural networks) are already ready for communism, albeit a long one, which will require a change of several generations. People involved in production have everything they need to start living and working in a new way today. All that is missing is the subjective factor, the organizing force in the form of the dictatorship of the working class. Under communism, it is not the objective (economic) but the subjective factor that acquires decisive importance in the form of the political line of the party—the vanguard of the working class.

Let me quote a fragment from my article “ Remark on the problem of leftists studying the death of the USSR ”:

“In an exploitative formation, that is, in the synthesis of a base and a corresponding superstructure, the main and main preserving element is precisely the superstructure, and not the entire social consciousness, which contains both reactionary and progressive aspects. The prevailing relations of production are gradually becoming overripe and are themselves ready to move into a new state, to give way to new relations. The peculiarity of capitalism as the last exploitative formation, its difference from feudalism and slavery, is that more progressive and complex production relations (communism) do not spontaneously develop in its depths. Therefore, the socialist revolution cannot rely on any ready-made economic ties; it relies only on people - on the proletariat, who have realized the need for a revolutionary demolition of the “old world”.

Under communism, the superstructure presupposes the free and dynamic development of the base as an organic side of social production, and the base provides scope for the development of the superstructure. In this sense, the formation of “communism” is not the opposite of the formation of “capitalism,” but of all class formations together. This is why the arguments of various leftist theorists about the contradictions of socialist production with social relations are deeply erroneous. It is correct to talk about the struggle between the old exploitative ways of life and the new communist way of life.”

Why does it happen that at some point the party begins to lead the masses not towards the victory of communism, but in the opposite direction from communism? Trotskyism explains this by “bureaucratic degeneration,” and Marxism by the class struggle, which not only does not subside, but intensifies with the growing successes of communism due to the furious resistance of reactionary forces. The party turns into an arena of class struggle between Marxists and opportunists. In the 30s, opportunism in the CPSU(b) was organizationally defeated, but not uprooted, and after Stalin’s death it took revenge in the form of Khrushchev’s coup.

Regarding the fact that “the bureaucracy restored capitalism.” In general, there are only two possibilities for the restoration of capitalism in a socialist country: outside intervention or betrayal within the ruling party, its betrayal of the interests of the working class. Treason can occur in two forms: a coup at the top, as happened in Yugoslavia (Tito’s coup in 1949), or a gradual slide of the party into the swamp of opportunism, ideological degeneration and degeneration of the leadership, as happened with the CPSU and many other European communist parties.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever denied the possibility of degeneration and degeneration of the party. They understood perfectly well that careerists, money-grubbers and other bastards would immediately climb into the Bolshevik Party, which became the ruling party. Trotsky did not add anything new on this issue and only mechanically described this process, adding along the way nonsense about the “bureaucratic class,” presenting bourgeois remnants in Soviet society as “signs of degeneration” and proposing completely idiotic ways to overcome them.

Trotsky’s problem is not that he spoke about the possibility of bourgeois degeneration, but that he passed off the possibility as a fait accompli, unfoundedly and groundlessly attacked Stalin and the Stalinist party, accusing him of usurping power, a break with the class and the people, while none of this did not have. Moreover, the course of the disintegration of the CPSU and the degeneration of the party leadership showed how a break with the class and the people actually occurs. And it did not happen through the open usurpation of property, some kind of formalization of the “bureaucracy” into a class, etc., as Trotskyism depicted, but through the decomposition of the working class and people by anti-Marxist, liberal propaganda: “more democracy, more socialism,” etc. When the working class was completely disorganized, slogans were used: “we need an owner,” “the state is not effective,” “give us the market,” etc.

That is, according to Trotsky, the class struggle is depicted as a struggle of some supposedly organized pseudo-class of the bureaucracy and the working class, in the form of receiving some kind of privileges and so on, while in fact the class struggle took place, first of all, within the party leadership according to lines of scientific competence and opportunism, ignorance, stupidity. The dominance of opportunism and stupidity, coupled with democratic procedures and the “collective mind of the party,” paved the way into the leadership for open enemies, spies and saboteurs, who were not so much for capitalism as against Bolshevism, which they fiercely hated and longed to destroy, even if it meant the whole country along with its population will have to be wiped out into dust. They wanted to destroy the country and rule themselves in the newly formed “principalities.”

Thus, the viciousness of the demagoguery about the “bureaucratic class” lies not only in the slander against Stalin and the USSR, but also in the fact that it is a monstrous perversion of Marxist theory, which makes the dictatorship of the proletariat impossible in principle. The working class cannot exercise power all at once, even through the form of Soviets, much less can it successfully build communism, because it does not have the knowledge of Marxism. This is why the Party exists - the vanguard, that is, the headquarters, the brain of the class:

“The working class can act as a class only by organizing itself into a special political party opposing <...> the parties created by the propertied classes” (Engels “Congress in The Hague. Letter to Bignyami”).

To pit the working class against your own party is the worst kind of sabotage. To instill in the working people disbelief in their leaders means to disorganize the working class, to undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat, because without leaders, strictly speaking, the party cannot exist, and without the party there is no point in talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The strength and power of the communist state does not lie in the laws and system of violence, but in the quality of the connection between the party and the class, and this quality is dictated by the subjective factor, conviction, goals, correctly used means and conditions, etc.

"Bolshevism for the enlightened bourgeoisie"
This is what Trotsky called pro-Soviet Western literature in the preface of his book, which he characterized as follows: “Contemplative, optimistic, by no means destructive literature, which sees all troubles behind us, has a very calming effect on the reader’s nerves and therefore meets with a favorable reception.” Well, Trotsky’s book, therefore, is meaningless, pessimistic, very destructive and pushes all the unsightliness to the foreground, excitingly acting on the nerves. In principle, that’s all true.

The preface, or rather two prefaces, deserves special mention. The first preface (1936) states that previously capitalist countries pretended not to notice the economic successes of the USSR, but “the facts, however, do their job. Now the book market of all civilized countries is flooded with books about the Soviet Union.” The world's first proletarian state is gaining a number of sympathizers, supporters and enthusiasts who write their books about it. But Trotsky is not satisfied with these books - for him it is all nonsense, “amateurish journalism” and schematism. But he, Trotsky, finally gave the world a comprehensive scientific assessment of the Soviet system. Trotsky himself understood perfectly well that his “scientific assessment” could and would certainly provoke criticism, so he laid out a straw in advance:

“Well-meaning “leftist” philistines like to repeat that extreme caution is needed in criticizing the Soviet Union so as not to damage socialist construction. We, for our part, do not at all consider the Soviet state to be such a shaky structure. The enemies of the USSR are much better informed about it than its real friends, that is, the workers of all countries.”

This quote contains all of Trotsky! Firstly, he immediately labels his opponents, supporters of the USSR, “left-wing philistines.” Secondly, he, like a mosquito, injects an “anesthetic” poison: they say, the Soviet state is firmly on its feet and my, Trotsky’s, slander, in the sense of a critic, cannot harm it in any way, and if you think otherwise, then you yourself don’t believe in the power of the Union! And in general, I am, they say, fulfilling a very important mission: informing workers of all countries about the real state of affairs! - lies and pretense in every line! In fact, Trotsky was concerned not with the imaginary ignorance of the real friends of the Union, but with the fact that they DO NOT TRUST liberal-fascist slander, but trust Stalin and his party. And that is why Judushka took up his pen to, relying on the inflated authority of the “organizer of the October Revolution” and the “Leninist guardsman,” lie, lie and lie again about Stalin, about the Union, about socialism.

In the second preface (1937), Trotsky, embittered by the exposure of his accomplices at the Moscow trials, throws off the mask of an unbiased researcher. Trotsky depicts the horrors of Soviet Mordor:

“The extermination of the revolutionary generation and the merciless purge of youth testifies to the terrible tension of the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people. In this book we have tried to give a social and political analysis of this contradiction before it burst out so violently. Those conclusions that might have seemed paradoxical just a year ago now stand before the eyes of humanity in all their tragic reality.”

And again, shameless manipulation and demagoguery. The trial of a collection of spies, murderers and saboteurs is declared to be a growing contradiction between the party (in Trotsky’s terminology, the “bureaucracy”) and the people! If the tension of contradictions between the party and the people grew, and even more frighteningly, then this should have resulted in numerous mass excesses. But nothing like that happens. And the defendants in the Moscow trials were accused precisely of CONSPIRACY activities, of attempting to carry out a military coup d'etat with the support of foreign intelligence services. If these scoundrels who betrayed the working class were actually representatives of the people's will, why then did they not appeal directly to the people? Why did they humbly repent of their mistakes before the Stalinist leadership and publicly renounce their views? What should the people, suffering under the yoke of the bureaucracy, as Trotsky assures us, think about such “fighters against the regime”? But precisely because the so-called. The “left opposition” was unable to win any serious support from the worker-peasant masses, since it lost in OPEN debates with the Stalinists, its leaders decided to go into the anti-Soviet underground, switch to the practice of conspiracies, terror and sabotage. But for Trotsky this is “evidence of the terrible tension of the contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people”!

At the end of the preface, Trotsky becomes infuriated:

“Some of the official “friends,” whose diligence is paid in full chervonets, as well as in the currency of other countries, had the shamelessness to reproach the author that his book helps fascism. As if bloody massacres and judicial forgeries were not known to the world reaction without this book! In fact, the Soviet bureaucracy is now one of the most malignant groups of world reaction... It [the book] is imbued with the spirit of irreconcilable hostility towards the new caste of rapists and exploiters. Thus, it serves the real interests of the working people and the cause of socialism.”

Again, everyone who disagrees with Trotsky and defends the Union from slander are paid agents of Moscow, how could it be otherwise! It is noteworthy that Trotsky does not deny that his book helps fascism. He simply makes a statement: even without my book, everything is clear to everyone! And in general, fascism is nonsense, the “Soviet bureaucracy” is the head of the hydra of world reaction, and not the imperialists who were openly preparing a second world massacre!

Guide to the "barnyard"
The lead backside of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution (Judas Trotsky)

The first three chapters of “The Revolution Betrayed” are “statistics”, where Trotsky happily cites selected data, from which the following picture emerges: the economy in the Union is entirely backward and inefficient, workers and peasants live poorly, and all the successes and achievements he reports government, inflated and fake, because “it is known that the organic need of any bureaucracy is to tint up reality.” In general, nothing that could not be read in the liberal-fascist press. The only point worth noting:

“The “complete victory” of socialism in the USSR has been announced several times in recent years, in a particularly categorical form - in connection with the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”... From the point of view of this perspective, the state should have finally died out at the same time, because Where the “last remnants” of capitalism have been eliminated, the state has nothing to do.”

Here Judushka makes a substitution of concepts typical of Trotskyism: he attributes to the lower phase of communism (known as socialism) the quality of the higher, mature phase of communism. The withering away of the state occurs under complete communism, when all the rudiments of an exploitative society are completely eliminated from the psyche of the masses. Only naive anarchism can demand the withering away of the state right here and now. Trotsky should be aware of this, but since his writings are aimed at a public not sophisticated in Marxism, he boldly puts the blame on simple-minded readers.

And here is how the ideologist of “permanent revolution” defines socialism:

“Socialism is a system of planned production in the name of the best satisfaction of human needs, otherwise it does not deserve this name at all.”

This is how it turns out, based on this logic, that socialism is not a period of fierce battle between the old exploitative and new communist order, but a kind of welfare society, where a planned economy provides all people with the “best satisfaction of needs”! In this cheating method, the focus moves from the class struggle to such a sweet topic for the bourgeoisie as meeting needs and not just any satisfaction - the best! What if a socialist state is not able to best satisfy all the needs of people for an objective reason, for example, an economic blockade and sabotage by world imperialism? Oh yes, the theorist of “permanent revolution” should have a revolution in the camp of imperialism, and if this does not happen, well, let’s part ways, comrades! We sit and wait until the proletarians of the imperialist countries are ripe for revolution! For some “also communists” this may be a revelation, but the successes of building communism, strictly speaking, are not related to the volume of the food basket, otherwise there would have been no victories during the period of war communism, the implementation of the GOELRO plan, or victory in the Great Patriotic War. These are populists and demagogues who are ready to promise that they will benefit everyone at once without the slightest effort on the part of the latter. The communists say honestly: there will be no bourgeois paradise.

But it’s time, finally, to move on to the key, ninth, chapter “What is the USSR?” It begins with official statistics, which say that the private sector of the economy in the Union has decreased significantly and contains no more than 10% of the population, and the share of socialist production will be 98.5%.

“These optimistic figures serve, at first glance, as irrefutable proof of the “final and irrevocable” victory of socialism,” writes Trotsky. “But woe to those who do not see the social reality behind the arithmetic!”

Trotsky calls not to trust Soviet figures, because they were “derived at a stretch.” In particular, he reports that, they say, the personal plots of collective farmers were assigned to the socialist sector. But that’s okay - “the center of the issue is not here.” What? The point is that bourgeois tendencies are emerging in the socialist sector itself. These trends are that

“The achieved increase in the material level of the country is significant enough to awaken increased needs in everyone, but is completely insufficient to satisfy them. Thus, the very dynamics of economic growth involve the awakening of petty-bourgeois appetites not only among peasants and representatives of “mental” labor, but also at the top of the proletariat. The naked opposition of individual farmers to collective farmers, handicraftsmen to state industry does not give the slightest idea of ​​the explosive power of these appetites, which permeate the entire economy of the country and are expressed, generally speaking, in the desire of each and every one to give as little as possible to society and to receive as much as possible from it.” .

For Trotsky, the wind blows because the trees bend. Petty-bourgeois thinking (“give less, get more”) is the most enduring relic of private property relations, a complex of habits and “reflexes” formed over thousands of years, the vast majority of which consisted of hunger, cold and hard work. Strictly speaking, the essence of building communism lies precisely in eliminating the rudiments from the psyche of the masses. Trotsky tries to present the matter in such a way that the socialist sector of the economy itself gives rise to petty-bourgeois consciousness by allegedly not being able to satisfy the growing needs of the masses. It turns out that, on the one hand, socialism, according to Trotsky, is “the best satisfaction of human needs,” but, on the other hand, when the planned economy begins to gradually provide these needs, Trotsky screams about the growth of “petty-bourgeois tendencies”!

Trotsky gets on his favorite horse and talks about the evil Soviet “bureaucracy”, which is the source of all troubles:

“...“Socialist” bureaucracy is a blatant contradictio in adjecto, this monstrous and ever-growing social perversion, which in turn becomes the source of malignant diseases of society.”

Here comes the contrast I have already discussed above between the “bureaucracy” (i.e., the party and economic leadership) and the proletarian state and the working class. We will not dwell on this and will continue to skip such fragments.

“The new constitution,” Trotsky declares, “entirely built, as we will see, on the identification of the bureaucracy with the state, and the state with the people, says: “state property, that is, the property of the whole people.” This identification constitutes the fundamental sophistry of the official doctrine.”

They say that state property is not yet public property. One can agree with this, but not at all in the interpretation of Trotskyism:

“State property only becomes “national” to the extent that social privileges and differences disappear, and therefore the need for the state. In other words: state property turns into socialist property to the extent that it ceases to be state property. And vice versa: the higher the Soviet state rises above the people, the more fiercely it opposes itself, as the custodian of property, to the people, as its squanderer, the more clearly it itself testifies against the socialist character of state property.”

What is the Marxist view on this issue? Productive forces are tools of labor + people armed with these tools. Consequently, the question of building communist production relations must be considered from two sides:

1) Socialization of the means of production, which has a formal and real side. Real socialization, after the formal one, occurs as the system of scientific centralized planning develops and improves. If the planning system is poorly established and unscientific, then de jure national enterprises begin to function de facto as private capitalist enterprises, where the role of the capitalist is played by management or a collective of workers. A similar situation arose in the late Soviet Union, when, due to market reforms, the introduction of cost accounting and the weakening of the state, unified planning was disrupted, individual enterprises and entire industries worked not for the plan, but for the market, which gave rise to market anarchy of production.

2) Along with the real socialization of the means of production, there is the building of communist production relations through the narrowing and reduction of market mechanisms, on the one hand, and the growth of the consciousness of the working masses through cultural and political education and training, on the other hand.

Both of these processes are accompanied by fierce class struggle. Actually, the essence of the lower phase of communism is the struggle between old exploitative relations (selfishness, philistinism, ignorance, parasitism, parasitism) and new communist relations , which since primitive times have been fragmentarily contained in exploitative formations and, under the influence of science, acquire a new embodiment.

What about Trotsky? Under the brand of Marxism, he pushes virtually wretched anarcho-syndicalism, demanding that the state immediately wither away and transfer all property to the “people”!

Trotsky continues to fire off:

“The social distance between physical and mental labor has expanded rather than decreased in recent years, despite the replenishment of the scientific workforce by people from the lower classes. Thousand-year-old caste barriers that determine the life of every person from all sides - the polished city dweller and the uncouth peasant, the magician of science and the unskilled worker - have not just been preserved from the past, in a more or less softened form, but have been revived, to a large extent, anew and are taking on an increasingly defiant character".

This is how it turns out that the elimination of mass illiteracy, the organization of rural schools with free primary education, workers' schools, reading rooms, the publication of popular scientific literature, newspapers, the organization of lectures and demonstrations - all these measures of the Soviet government in no way contributed to overcoming the remnants of the old inequalities, did not reduce the gap between city and countryside! In Trotsky, the “caste” barriers were revived, taking on “an increasingly defiant character,” apparently more defiant than in tsarist bast shoes in Russia! However, Judushka wrote the book not for Soviet citizens, but for foreigners, so he did not restrain himself from lying!

Depicting the horrors of Soviet inequality for Western readers, Trotsky declares:

“If the ship is declared collective property, but the passengers are still shuffled between the first, second and third classes, then it is clear that the difference in conditions of existence will be of immeasurably greater importance for the third class passengers than the legal change of ownership. On the contrary, first class passengers will, between coffee and cigar, preach the idea that collective property is everything, and a comfortable cabin is nothing. The antagonisms that arise from this can explode an unstable team.”

Any anti-communist will gladly subscribe to these words of a “Bolshevik-Leninist”. Of course, it would be good if it were possible even during the lowest phase of communism to ensure abundance for the entire society, but this is difficult not so much for technical reasons as because of the dominance of philistinism, the grasping reflex and the hamster instinct to drag everything into a hole, which has found expression in popular rhymes:

Take every nail from the factory -

You are the host here, not the guest!

The Soviet state had to strictly ensure that the irresponsible part of the workers freed from exploitation did not tear apart their own factories. Regarding the “distribution of passengers of a collective ship by class.” Of course, this is a necessary measure, because the reverse principle of equalization is always pandering to lazy people and money-grabbers. Why work hard if you still get the same as your hard-working neighbor? And the hard worker, seeing how the lazy person is idle, but receives the same number of banknotes, thinks: “Why should I strain myself if my neighbor is netting?” Laziness is a contagious thing. Therefore, in the lowest phase of communism, the principle of distribution according to work + forced bribery of the most valuable technical personnel is inevitable.

Trotsky continues:

“The Soviet press was happy to tell how a boy in the Moscow Zoological Garden received an answer to his question: whose elephant is this? answer: state, immediately concluded: that means he’s a little bit mine too. However, if the elephant were actually divided, the precious tusks would fall to the select few, some would feast on elephant ham, while the majority would have to be content with offal or hooves. Deprived boys are unlikely to identify state property with their own. The homeless consider “theirs” only what they steal from the state. The little “socialist” in the zoo was probably the son of some prominent dignitary, accustomed to reasoning according to the formula: “I am the state!”

Here Judas reveals his own bourgeois psychology in all its glory: the first thing he wants to do with a public elephant is to cut it into pieces, and expresses concern that during the division, someone will get the tusks, and someone else will get the hooves! And Judas doesn’t care about the fact that in a “disassembled” form the elephant will no longer represent the value that it represents in its entirety, living in the zoological garden and delighting visitors with its appearance! And what impudent cynicism: Trotsky is indignant that poor “street boys” will not identify state property with their own, because... the evil Soviet state protects public property and does not allow “deprived boys” to steal it! And a boy who does not think about how to saw off a tusk from a common elephant and sell it to a pawnshop is declared a little baron! This is written by a man who, as People's Commissar, traveled to Civil on a personal armored train with all the amenities and servants with a special uniform and took these benefits for granted!

But these are flowers, berries await us ahead. Here I am forced to quote a lengthy fragment of text:

“If, for clarity, we translate socialist relations into stock exchange language, then citizens can be imagined as participants in a joint-stock enterprise that owns the country’s wealth. The public nature of ownership implies the distribution of “shares” equally and, therefore, the right to the same share of dividends for all “shareholders”. Citizens participate, however, in the national enterprise not only as “shareholders”, but also as producers. At the lowest level of communism, which we agreed to call socialism, remuneration is still made according to bourgeois standards, that is, depending on qualifications, intensity, etc. Theoretically, the income of each citizen is thus composed of two parts, a + b, t .e. dividend plus salary. The higher the technology, the more perfect the organization of the economy, the more place a occupies in comparison with b, the less influence individual differences in labor have on the standard of living. From the fact that in the USSR the differences in wages are not lower, but higher than in capitalist countries, one has to conclude that the shares of Soviet citizens are distributed unevenly, and that the income of citizens, along with unequal pay, includes an unequal share of dividends. While a laborer receives only b, the minimum wage that, other things being equal, he would receive in a capitalist enterprise, a Stakhanovite or official receives 2a + B or 3a + B, etc., and B may, in his own turn, equal to 2b, 3b, etc. Differences in income are determined, in other words, not only by differences in individual output, but also by the disguised appropriation of the products of other people's labor. The privileged minority of shareholders lives at the expense of the disadvantaged majority.

If we accept that the Soviet unskilled worker receives more than he would receive, given the same level of technology and culture, in a capitalist enterprise, i.e., that he is still a small shareholder, then his wages will have to be taken equal to a + b. Earnings of higher categories will be expressed by the formulas: 3a + 2b; 10a + 15b, etc., which means: a laborer has one share, a Stakhanovite - 3, a specialist - 10; Moreover, their wages in the proper sense are related as 1: 2: 15. The hymns of sacred socialist property sound, under these conditions, much more convincing for a director or Stakhanovite than for an ordinary worker or collective farmer.”

A circus with horses is the most decent expression that can be used regarding the flight of thought quoted above. All this would be funny, but since the leftist youth takes this nonsense seriously, there is no need to laugh. Anyone who has read this fragment (2/3 of the book) not for the sake of laughter and has not yet given up has definitely not read Marx, and if he has read it, it has been vertically.

Let me start with the fact that the very idea of ​​​​translating communist relations “for clarity” into the language of the stock exchange, that is, the language of speculators and world-eaters, is complete nonsense. It’s like translating Goethe’s “Faust” into a prison “fenya”. Communist relations are the complete opposite of market relations, so it is simply impossible to equate the former with the latter “for clarity”; it will turn out to be nonsense. True, there is the concept of “market socialism”, numerous projects for crossing a snake with a hedgehog, i.e., a market and planned economy. But these studies have nothing to do with Marxist science. By the way, Trotsky himself actually agitates for the market:

“The plan cannot be based on speculative data alone. The game of supply and demand remains for him for a long period a necessary material basis and a saving correction.”

Soviet economists later wrote the same thing, to which Stalin was forced to respond with the work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” where, strictly speaking, the problems lay not in the economy as such, but in the total Marxist ignorance of economists.

So, Trotsky depicts communist relations in this way: all property is distributed in the form of equal shares, “shares”, to each citizen who, along with his salary, receives some “dividends” from his “shares” and, they say, with full communism “dividends” will completely replace wages. What exactly is meant by “dividends” in Trotskyist political economy is difficult to understand. By introducing this vague term, Trotsky claims that since there is a difference in the incomes of Soviet citizens (the statement that the difference in wages in the USSR is higher than in capitalist countries, we will leave it to Trotsky’s conscience, which, however, he never had) , this means that the size of their “dividends” is different, and if so, it means that the value of the “shares” of the unskilled worker is lower than that of the Stakhanovite, therefore, the Stakhanovite appropriates the labor of the unskilled worker, exploits him. Just think about it: a Stakhanovist exploits the unskilled worker... I once read the zealous liberal Hannah Arendt, who argued that the Stakhanovite movement was a “labor aristocracy” that the Bolsheviks created to undermine the solidarity of the workers, but even she did not think of writing that the Stakhanovites exploited “ ordinary" workers, but our "Leninist guardsman" thought of it!

Exploitation is a product of private property relations, direct (through slave labor or corvée) or veiled (through payment of “wages”) appropriation by the exploiter of the fruits of the worker’s labor. Is it possible to talk about the exploitation of Soviet workers by Soviet officials? No you can not. After all, they do not enter into market relations. The Soviet worker did not sell his labor power to the state, and the state did not buy the worker’s labor power. To understand this, you need to correctly understand the category “capital”:

“Capital is a word adopted to designate the form of relations between people regarding the established unequal exchange between the owners of the commodity “labor power” and the owners of the fixed means of production. In such an exchange, which is appropriate to call deception, all surpluses are produced by the owner of the commodity “labor power”, but are appropriated free of charge by the commodity owner of the main means of production. This permanently unequal system of exchange of goods between people is called capitalism. In short, capital is a form of relationship that arises between proletarians and entrepreneurs regarding the surplus product produced by the proletarians and appropriated free of charge by the capitalist. The more surplus value the proletarian creates for the capitalist for free, the faster the capitalist turns into an oligarch,” - V. Podguzov.

Consequently, wages are the exchange of the commodity “labor power” for a sum of banknotes approximately equal to the cost of restoring labor power. Simply put, a worker sells his ability to work to a capitalist in order to have the strength and opportunity to later work for him, and then some more... And also to raise at least one future worker who will later replace him.

Under communism there is no capital and no wages, although these words, out of old habit, continue to be used in everyday life, like the word “money,” although, strictly speaking, under the lowest phase of communism there is no longer money in the sense that it is deprived of its main property - to transform into capital, i.e. relations of exploitation. Millionaire Koreiko from “The Golden Calf” could hide a million Soviet rubles in a suitcase, but could not “put it into action.”

The difference between the principles of communist distribution of goods and market ones is that all spiritual and material goods are distributed so that they serve the development of all the inclinations of the personality of each individual and are available to everyone. But, unfortunately, due to the bourgeois habits of the masses and especially mental workers, who are offended that “some” hard worker will receive the same benefits as they do, go straight to the direct distribution of the total social product according to needs (for these needs still unbridled philistine) is impossible. So you have to distribute according to work, or rather, according to the share of time and effort spent on socially useful work. How does the distribution take place? The distribution is carried out by the proletarian state based on the current capabilities, goals and objectives of the development of the socialist economy and the construction of communism. Of course, the philistines may be offended by the fact that some bureaucratic body will decide who gets what “salary.” What can I say? Comrade Podguzov aptly notes:

“According to the logic of Mitrofanushki, it turns out that the distribution of the total social product under communism is shameful and not respectable, and the same action, but carried out by the Chubais, Khodorkovskys, Berezovskys and other Deripaskas is correct and elegant.

It is necessary to understand that mathematics has long ago developed techniques and rules that make it possible to calculate proportions of any scale and with any number of factors, unknowns and variable quantities. Spaceships fly to the outskirts of the Galaxy in calculated orbits, and there are no technical problems to accurately calculate any proportions in the economy in order to distribute the total social product among all types of productive and “non-productive” consumption. There have been no scientific problems in this area for a long time.

There is only one political economy problem. Entrepreneurs do not want to get off the throne and give up their hereditary grand-ducal power to society. They shout the loudest: “Stop the thief, shame on distribution!” But they themselves want to distribute all public wealth. And how they know how to do this can be understood by observing chronic inflation, bankruptcies, financial crises, environmental, energy, humanitarian disasters, large-scale acts of fraud, wars waged in the most sacrificial and destructive way precisely regarding the distribution and redistribution of social world wealth between entrepreneurs."

For Trotsky, everything is simple: since the state apparatus is preserved and is not going to die out in the coming years, since there is no direct product exchange and distribution is based on labor and not according to needs, since there is property stratification, then there is no communism and there cannot be. He confuses the first phase of communism with the second and presents it with obviously unrealizable demands. For Trotskyism, the society of the lowest phase of communism must be ideal, as in the textbook, and any deviations from the book ideal are immediately declared “signs of degeneration.” But in reality, immature communism cannot be perfect, which is precisely why it is immature.

But if there is no communism in the USSR, then what? In this matter, Judushka acts cunningly, denying communism in the Union; he does not give a clear answer to the question of what kind of society ultimately exists in it: “The question of the character of the USSR has not yet been resolved by history,” he meaningfully summarizes. There is no communism in the Union, but it cannot be called capitalist either; Judushka also does not consider the Soviet system to be transitional (though in some parts of the text he still recognizes the system as transitional, but it doesn’t matter), because this “means rejecting complete social categories like capitalism , so is socialism." In general, just like in a fairy tale: the queen gave birth to either a son or a daughter that night...

In this roguish way, Judushka is trying to sit on two chairs: to spit on and discredit the USSR, but at the same time to remain in the eyes of the public a communist, and not a greyhound writer who sold his honor, a servant of imperialist intelligence services.

“Doctrinaires will undoubtedly not be satisfied with such an optional definition. They would like a categorical formula: yes - yes, no - no. Sociological questions would undoubtedly be simpler if social phenomena always had a complete character,” such a thoughtful conclusion from Trotsky. It is ironic that the answer to the main question taken in the title of the book is “What is the USSR?” - never sounded like that.

(conclusion at link(Russian), it wouldn't fit.)

https://prorivists.org/93_antitrocky/

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 18, 2024 3:07 pm

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Pioneers for Communism: Strive to be like Che
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on June 14, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted Jun 17, 2024)

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once called Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara the “most complete human being of our age.” Today, 96 years after his birth, it is still difficult to find a better example of the socialist human being than the one who proclaimed courageously with his unforgettable last words, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Che was for Fidel Castro “the most extraordinary of [the] revolutionary comrades;” a man with an infectious character who organically lifted those around him to emulate his revolutionary virtues of “altruism,” “selflessness,” and the “immediate [and] instantaneous willingness” he had towards “carrying out the most difficult missions” for the socialist struggle. Although carried by a Herculean courage and a spartan attitude in the face of difficulties, in the speech Fidel gives in memory of Che he says that it is

In the field of ideas, in the field of feelings, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, apart from its military virtues, where we feel the tremendous loss his death has meant for the Revolutionary movement.

The bourgeois Ideologues who serve as the theoretical and rhetorical mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling class will pile garbage on the reputation of any historical figure who successfully advances the struggle for socialism, Che Guevara is no exception. As he had already eloquently noted in a 1961 speech in Santa Clara, “it is the nature of imperialism which bestializes men, turning them into wild blood thirsty beasts willing to behead, to kill, to destroy the last image of a revolutionary, of a partisan, of a regime that has either fallen under its boot, or still fights for freedom.” However, Che lived his life in a way that made him exceedingly difficult for the bourgeois imperialist media to criticize. How can you, after all, criticize someone who fell defending “the cause of the poor and the humble of this Earth,” and that, as Fidel noted, did so in such “an exemplary and selfless way” that “not even his most bitter enemies dare to dispute?”Che believed that a necessary component in the construction of a socialist society is the creation of a ‘new socialist man,’ free of the selfish and individualistic traits that are common among individuals existing within capitalist relations of production. For Che, every revolutionary should strive to exemplify the new socialist man in their actions, through being honest, hardworking, incredibly studious, and willing to labor for the good of the collective society. This marks a radical transition away from the capitalist notion of growth centered on an individual’s accumulation of capital and commodities, and towards a socialist notion of growth centered on human flourishing – towards a notion of the human being as the unique expression of the ensemble of relations they are embedded in as individuals dialectically interconnected to the social. As Che told the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in a 1962 speech, “the young communist must strive to be the first in everything…to be the living example and mirror through which our companions who do not belong to the young communist see themselves.” This meant that young communists must

be essentially human. To be so human you become closer and closer to perfecting the best attributes of being human. To purify the best attributes of man through work, studies, and the exercise of continual solidarity with our people and all people around the world. To develop to the maximum his sensibilities, to the point of feeling anguished when a man is assassinated in another corner of the world, and enthusiastic when in some corner of the world, a new flag of freedom is raised.

Che himself became increasingly disciplined as he got older and serves as a shining example of the socialist virtue-ethic he hoped would shape the next generations of Cuban communists. Since his death, generations of young Cubans have exerted themselves in the process of constructing the new socialist human being through the maxim: “pioneers for communism; we will be like Che.”

For Che, the transition to socialism could not just be reduced to changes in political economy, a fundamental transformation of the human being through the development of socialist culture was necessary. As Michael Löwy notes, Che held “the conviction that socialism is meaningless and consequently cannot triumph unless it holds out the offer of a civilization, a social ethic, a model of society that is totally antagonistic to the values of petty individualism, unfettered egoism, [bourgeois] competition, [and] the war of all against all that is characteristic of capitalist civilization [and] this world in which ‘man eats man.’” Not only was it necessary to raise the intellectual and cultural life of the mass of working people by developing “a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values,” but this transformation should not be limited to the ideological-political superstructure; it must also embed itself in the economic foundation of society through what he prescribed as the need for “a complete spiritual rebirth in one’s attitude toward one’s own work.” As Vijay Prashad notes,

it was this new moral framework that motivated Guevara’s agenda to build socialism… if a new society had to be created, it had to be created through a new moral fiber.

Like any successful historical revolutionary, Che stressed the importance of reading and intensive study. Guevara himself was known to read incessantly throughout the entire course of his life. As a young boy playing soccer in Argentina, he would read Marxist theory while waiting to play on the bench, especially when horrific asthma attacks would pull him from the games. As the Cuban guerrillas waged their revolutionary struggle in the Sierra Maestra, Che would teach classes on Marxist economics and philosophy to the revolutionaries who would be tasked with managing Cuban society after the gangster dictator Batista was toppled. When he was in Africa at the forefront of anti-colonial struggles, he was reading none other than G.W. F. Hegel. In this manner, in the germs of the Cuban revolutionary process Che had already planted the seeds for the creation of the new socialist man, and the elevation of the people’s intellectual and moral life. The embryo of the proclamation Che made in Socialism and Man in Cuba, to have ”society as a whole…converted into a gigantic school,” was already being realized even under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances guerilla warfare entailed.

Che understood that the education of the Cuban masses had very practical implications for the long-term success of the Cuban revolution. When he was young, he had thought the US empire was controlled by evil wizards and dark princes who wanted to rule the world and cared not who they slaughtered in order to do so. It was after reading books like Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that Che came to understand that it was capital who perpetrated the violent imperialism he saw all around him in Latin America, rather than a diabolical cabal of evil wizards. It was the will of capital which dictated the murderous actions of the American Government in Guatemala, from which Che barely escaped with his life. If the people of Latin America could be made to understand this, it would be far more difficult for the US imperialists to convince them that it’s in their benefit to reinstate capitalist relations of production – which the US often tries to do via propaganda and other techniques to foment color revolutions.

After six decades of internationally denounced sanctions and hybrid warfare on Cuba, the blood soaked hands of the American empire have been unable to overthrow the construction of socialism in the country. Even in the periods where the U.S.’s warfare on Cuba has produced the most formidable of challenges in attaining the necessary materials to ensure the subsistence of the Cuban people, the mass of Cubans have brazenly continued the revolutionary process, with the slogan of their Bronze Titan Antonio Maceo engraved on their chest – “Whoever tries to take over Cuba will only collect the dust of their blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the fight.”

The Cuban people, in the face of a battle against Goliath, have understood the proclamation the revolution’s Apostle José Martí had made in Nuestra America – that “Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone,” that the revolutionary ideals Cuban socialism strives for are infinitely preferrable than the hardships Goliath’s war might provide. It is in part these revolutionary ideals and ethics embedded in Cuban culture and consciousness which have allowed a socialist nation with limited resources to survive right under the nose of the U.S. empire; while other projects with far more resources and material potential went down the road of capitalist restoration, plunging millions of people into poverty and conditions unseen since before the October revolution. It is in great part thanks to the emphasis Che laid in the construction of a new man, of a new culture and set of ideals and practices, that the Cuban revolution continues to be a beacon of hope for revolutionaries around the world, and a thorn in the nose of imperialists who would want nothing more than to pillage Cuban resources, superexploit Cuban workers, and use Havana as the sin-city vacation spot they once did.

By studying the emphasis Che laid on developing the new socialist human being and the new socialist culture, we give ourselves the ability to understand the success of Cuban socialism more concretely. Additionally, for those of us in countries currently fighting for the seizure of power by the working masses, studying Che’s life and work reminds us of the necessary role the intellectual and moral leadership of the revolutionary vanguard plays in disarticulating working people away from bourgeois hegemony, and towards the new set of socialist ideals, passions, desires, and ethical life necessary for the attainment of a society free of alienation, oppression, exploitation, and war.

https://mronline.org/2024/06/17/pioneer ... -like-che/

'Gird thy loins', children of the dream.....

but do recall, The Old Man said it might take decades to prepare us, but I don't think we got that much time.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 22, 2024 2:35 pm

What is Independent Political Action?

I recently found an unpublished essay written in 1979 by a comrade from Western Pennsylvania who argued passionately for the urgent necessity of independent political action. In The Time is Now: A Position Paper on Independent Political Action, Bob Bonner challenged the left to begin the process of building independent political organizations and to convince the people to support them.

Bob is not a starry-eyed academic or a know-it-all armchair socialist, but a keen observer of local politics, its limitations, and its possibilities.

He was then a worker, a founding leader of the Clairton Coalition, a leader in a local independent political party that scored some notable electoral victories, and a founder of the Pittsburgh Coalition for Independent Politics. He grew up in Clairton, PA breathing the foul air of the country’s largest cokeworks, a virtual company town that knew every corporate injustice that one found in the industrial heartland. It has become fashionable to refer to people like Bob as community organizers; I prefer to see him simply as a peoples’ leader.

There are many parallels today with the world that Bonner wrote about in 1979. Jimmy Carter had run and won in 1976 on the most progressive party program that the Democrats had offered since the New Deal; but by 1978, he had jettisoned the program and turned to policies that presaged the policies of the soon-to-be-president, FBI snitch and B-actor, Ronald Reagan. By the midterm elections of 1978, Carter had reneged on virtually every progressive campaign promise and was saddled with brutal inflation.

Bonner wrote at the time: “America’s two-party system has reached an all-time low in the eyes of the voters… rendering the concepts of majority parties and representative government meaningless and, to some, a laughing stock… 62.1% of American voters, or 90 million people, stayed home last election day, an increase of another one and a half percent from 1974… Millions more can’t be motivated enough to even register [to vote].”

Citing a New York Times-CBS poll, Bonner notes that “fully half of those who participated in the two-party charade felt that the outcome would have no appreciable effect on their lives.”

Bonner goes on to show that despite dire media assessments of a rightward trend, where progressives or independents offered voters a real choice, they were met with enthusiasm, often victory.

The then-left-oriented Congressional Black Caucus picked up three new members in the interim election, and arch-reactionary Frank Rizzo was denied a third term in Philadelphia. “The massive monopoly effort in Missouri to pass an anti-union ‘right to work (for less)’ law through a referendum failed, and in some states liberal to progressive tax initiatives won,” Bonner reminds. Communist Party candidates, running as Communists, received vote totals unprecedented since the 1940s. There was a sense that inroads were possible for independent politics.

With regard to the then-emerging danger of the so-called “new right” of Reagan and his ilk, Bonner had this to say: “The high visibility of the ‘new’ right is made possible by the huge gap that exists between the direction of the two main parties and the urgent pressing needs of the people as a whole. The ruling class has recognized this gap and has smartly and opportunistically shoved reactionary one-issue groups into this vacuum in order to confuse and misdirect the voting public.”

Ironically, today’s corporate Democrats have followed this Republican strategy by placing single issues front and center at the expense of a popular program meant to resonate with all working people.

Bonner believes that “[t]he electorate is searching for meaningful alternatives. That is why they vote for ‘mavericks’; that is why Black people voted for Republicans in the last election…”

Forty-five years later, this obvious point is missed by the elite pundits who denounce working-class “deplorables” turning to unlikely “mavericks” like Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. They are surprised and alarmed that polls show many Black and Latino/Latina voters-- ignored by Democratic Party leaders-- leaning toward Trump’s false promises of change.

Today, one-issue groups abound, with foundations doling out financial support, designer NGOs staffing causes, academics offering studies, and consultants mapping strategies. Talk of “intersections” are just that, with more and more divisions denying any basis for common cause, as our common plight grows more desperate.

And when the two parties’ thinkers offer even a hint of prospective benefits in exchange for their votes, it is not a vision, but a reminiscence. The Republicans promise a return to the land of milk and honey before “freedom”-restricting laws on civil rights, the environment, workplace safety, and unions.

The Democrats, on the other hand, offer an idyllic time before the Reagan revolution-- the so-called Neoliberal era ushered in with the 1980 election-- conveniently forgetting the long, painful, previous decade of stagflation. In essence, we are given two different versions of “Make America Great Again.” Neither promise works for the twenty-first century.

Sounding eerily prescient, Bonner cites the opposition to the unbearable weight of the military budget and the threat of war, actions against the energy monopolies, a militant women’s movement for women’s rights, the fight against police brutality, the miners’ strike, and the struggle for the Dellums National Health Service Act as a basis for bringing together a united, independent movement escaping the political inertia of 1979. “There is absolutely no reason and no excuse for not pulling several of these forces together and entering the political arena…,” Bonner asserts.

Forty-five years later, we have yet to create this needed movement, and the battles of 1979 are yet to be won.

We must recognize that a mere declaration of independence is not enough, as our own US Revolution shows. Achieving independence is an arduous process. In our time, it is a battle against the dependency that comes from taking the money offered from corporations, foundations, non-profits, NGOs, and governments, and from uncritically accepting the influence of think tanks, universities, academic “authorities,” and consultants.

Most importantly, political independence only begins with a concerted effort to fight capture by the two parties. Far too many left initiatives have been absorbed and suffocated by the Democratic Party. In its essence, independence is always independence from some external force that doesn’t share our values and goals.

We must also judge independence by acts and not rhetoric or posture. The fallacy of celebrity, the fetishism of personality, is a sure barrier to independence. Instead, the steps away from wealth and power should be our measuring stick of independent political action. Where independence exists, we must nurture it; where it doesn’t, we should sow it.

In the forthcoming election, how will we express our political independence?

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/06/wha ... ction.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 15, 2024 3:08 pm

Multipolarity and BRICS Once More


The debates over “multipolarity” and the significance of an allegedly multipolar BRICS grouping continue. In an opinion piece in People’s Voice (Multipolarity, BRICS+ and the struggle for peace, cooperation, and socialism today, June 16-30, 2024) writer Garrett Halas mounts an earnest defense of multipolarity and the BRICS+ “as a positive step towards socialism.”



Halas joins many others in envisioning all twenty-first-century resistance to US imperialism and the imperialism of its (largely ex-Cold War) partners as the same as resistance to imperialism in general. They divide the world into the US and its friends and those who, to some extent or another, oppose the US. Sometimes they characterize this as a conflict between the global North and the global South. Sometimes they refer to the imperialist antagonists collectively as “the West.”



From the perspective of the multipolarity proponents, if the countries resisting the US should neutralize US domination and that of its allies, then the world will become peaceful and harmonious. In their view, it is not capitalism that obstructs enduring peace, but US imperial aspirations alone. Accordingly, in the idealized future, multiple friendly, cooperative states (poles) will engage in peaceful, equitable economic transactions that all agree will be mutually advantageous-- what Chinese leaders call “win-win.” If this isn’t achieved immediately, it will soon follow. Is not socialism down the road?



The reality is that as important as resisting US domination and aggression surely is, its decline or defeat will not put an end to imperialism, as long as monopoly capitalism continues to exist.



In the history of modern-era imperialism, the decline of every dominating great capitalist power has spawned the rise of another. As one power recedes, others step up and contest for global dominance-- that is the fundamental logic of imperialism. And, all too often, war ensues.



CLASS: Glaringly absent from the theory of multipolarity is the concept of class. Advocates of a multipolar world fail to explain how class relations-- specifically the interests of the working class-- are advanced with the existence of multiple capitalist poles. Halas tells us that the “BRICS+ is a coalition with a concrete class character rooted in the global South” but he doesn’t tell us what that “concrete class character” is. This is a critical question and a significant problem, given that Halas concedes that “most BRICS+ nations are capitalist”! Of the original BRICS members, capitalism is unquestionably the dominant economic system in Russia, India, South Africa, and Brazil. Of the candidate members scheduled for entry in 2024-- Argentina (likely a withdrawal), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates-- all are capitalist. The idea that working class interests will be served, and socialism advanced by this group seems far-fetched.


CLASS CONFLICT: Class struggle-- the motor of the struggle for workers’ advances, workers’ power, and socialism-- has been stifled by the governments of nearly all the BRICS and BRICS+ countries. In Iran, for example, Communism is illegal and Communists have been executed in large numbers. Communism is likewise illegal in Saudi Arabia. Modi has conducted class war against India’s farmers. South Africa’s working class has seen unemployment and poverty rise under the disappointing government. Egyptian workers labor under a brutal military government. How does their entry into BRICS promise socialism?


GLOBAL NORTH/GLOBAL SOUTH: Halas and the “multipolaristas” would have it that the “contradiction” informing multipolarity is the clash between the “global north” and the “global south” or, paradoxically, the “West” and the rest of the world. Apart from the fact that the geographical division captures little—other than the imagination of social-media leftists-- it gives the impression that Australia and New Zealand have something in common with impoverished Burundi. Or that Serbia and Germany are Western partners in exploiting small African countries. There is, of course, a division between wealthy countries and poor countries, between exploiters and exploited. Historically, the sharpest fault lines have been defined by colonialism and its successor, neo-colonialism. But the imperialist cards are shuffled from time to time due to resource inequities, uneven development, or other gained advantages. For example, the Arabian Peninsula was once a dominated colony of the Ottoman empire. That empire’s dissolution and subsequent developments led to an emergent Saudi Arabia infused with resource wealth and high up on the imperialist hierarchy. Today, India has three of the top 20 corporations in Asia by market value, larger than all Japanese corporations except for Toyota. India’s Tata Group has a market capitalization of over $380 billion, with its tentacles spread to 100 countries. The June 28 UK Morning Star editorial informs us: “Tata Steel’s threat to shut the blast furnaces at Port Talbot three months earlier if Unite goes ahead with strike action is blackmail. The India-based multinational does not believe steelworkers should have a say in the plant’s future… It’s outrageous that the future of British steelmaking should be at the whim of a billionaire on a different continent.”


DECOUPLING: Halas suggests that BRICS+ offers an opportunity for countries to break out of the capitalist international financial structures imposed after World War II and the dominance of the dollar in global transactions. Such an option may exist in the future, but clearly it is intended as an option and not a substitute for existing structures and exchange instruments. As recently as late June of this year, PRC Premier Li Qiang said that “We should broadly open our minds, work closely together, abandon camp formations, (and) oppose decoupling…” [my emphasis] It is clear that the picture of global country-to-country relations-- as envisioned by Peoples’ China’s second most prominent leader, Li, at the “Summer” Davos-- offers no challenge to existing financial arrangements or to the dominance of the dollar. The antagonistic conflict between the old order and the new multipolar order is more a fantasy in the minds of some on the left than a real policy goal of the leading country in BRICS.


ANTI-IMPERIALISM: Halas would like us to believe that twentieth-century anti-imperialism is multipolarity embodied in BRICS. He cites the UN votes on Palestinian status and oppression (predictably vetoed by the US) as an example of “global south” anti-imperialism. While symbolic and not without significance, it is hardly the principled anti-imperialist action we came to know in earlier times. It is worth reminding that Saudi Arabia was on the verge of abandoning Palestine for better relations with Israel before October 7. Egypt has long sold out the cause of Palestine, as has much of the Arab world. According to Al Jazeera, India is currently selling military supplies to Israel. Virtue-signaling at UN forums is not a substitute for concrete, material solidarity.


CHINA: This is not the place for debating whether the Peoples’ Republic of China is a socialist country, a favorite parlor game of the Euro-US left. However, it is worth stating that-- as the only self-acclaimed socialist country currently in BRICS-- the PRC does not claim to be advocating, encouraging, or materially aiding the struggle for socialism outside of China. Unlike the former Soviet Union, the PRC does not prioritize or privilege investment or material support for countries embarking on the socialist path. The word “socialism” is largely absent from its foreign policy statements. While the Chinese leadership defends its outlook as “socialism with Chinese characters,” it does not demonstrably support “socialism with anybody else’s national characters.” Yet, some on the left see multipolarity and a largely capitalist BRICS as a road to socialism for the rest of us?


WE HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE: In the 1960s, it was common for the left in Europe and the US to lose hope in the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Where working-class movements in Europe aligned with Communist Parties, they fully committed to a gradualist, parliamentary road to socialism. An anti-Communist New Left proposed a different vehicle of revolutionary change: The Third World. In the common parlance of the time, the Third World was the newly emergent, former colonies that were neither in the US camp nor the Soviet camp. Per this view, revolutionary change (and ultimately) socialism would grow from the independent road chosen by the leaders of these emergent nations. But instead, they were overwhelmed by the neo-colonialism of the great capitalist powers and absorbed by the global capitalist market, with few exceptions.


AND EVEN EARLIER: Karl Kautsky, the major theoretician of the Socialist International, anticipated multipolarity in 1914, introducing a concept that he called “ultra-imperialism.” Kautsky believed that great power imperialism and war had no future. The imperialist system would, of necessity, stabilize and, due to declining capital exports, “Imperialism is thus digging its own grave… [T]he policy of imperialism therefore cannot be continued much longer.” For Kautsky, a stage of “concentration” of capitalist states, comparable to cartelization of corporations, will lead to inter-imperialist harmony. Lenin rejected this theory out of hand. For a discussion, go here.


Imperialism is not a stable system. Capitalist participants are always seeking a competitive advantage against their rivals. Sometimes they find it useful or necessary to form (often temporary) coalitions or alliances with others in order to protect or advance their interests. One such alliance was forged by the US after the Second World War in opposition to the socialist bloc and the national liberation movements.



After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US sought to keep existing coalitions intact by selecting or devising new enemies-- the war on drugs, the war against terrorism, and wars of humanitarian intervention. Beneath these political ties existed a US established and dominated global economic structure privileging the US, but deemed necessary to protect the capitalist system.



This politico-economic framework served capitalism well, until the great economic crash of 2007-2009 and the ensuing cracks and fractures in the framework. The turmoil unleashed by the crisis dampened the pace of growth in international trade and accelerated the competition for markets. Further challenging the US-centered framework was the ability of People’s China to navigate the crisis rather painlessly. Where the US ruling class formerly saw the PRC as an opportunity, it began to see China as a rival in the imperialist system.



The post-Soviet global market-- cemented by the so-called “globalization” process-- began to unravel in the wake of twentieth-century economic instability, especially the 2007-2009 crash. Rather than defend existing free-trade dogma, capitalist countries were drawn to protectionism and economic nationalism. Beginning in the Trump Administration and accelerating during the Biden Administration, the US waged a tariff-and-sanctions war against economic competitors. US dominance of international financial institutions and the nearly universal dependence upon the US dollar gave US leaders even more weapons in this competition.



The US “pivot” to China in its defense posture and its growing hostility to Russia were reflections of its losing ground to the PRC’s growing economic might and Russia’s dominance of Eurasian energy markets.



Understandably, in this new era of economic nationalism, Russia, China, the leading power on the subcontinent, India, Africa’s top economic power, South Africa, and the largest economy in Latin America, Brazil, would look to counter aggressive US and EU competition. The era of mutual cooperation was ending, and the era of intense rivalry and national self-interest was emerging. It was in this environment that BRICS was born.



It was a capitalist response to a capitalist problem, not a path to socialism.

The main task for Communists and progressives is not to take sides, but to fight to ensure that these fractures and frictions do not explode into war.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2024/07/mul ... -more.html

'Red' = 'the money shot'

'Multiplarity' will probably yield a 'honeymoon' period of a decade or so but capitalist competition will end that. Many anti-imperialists are getting way ahead of reality. Socialism first.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 16, 2024 4:59 pm

On the issue of self-education
№ 9/15, November 2017

Image

The word "education" comes from the word "image". In the sense of acquiring knowledge, learning, enlightenment, education literally means "to create an image", that is, to create an image of objective reality. Therefore, self-education is a process of independent comprehension of the surrounding reality. However, it should be taken into account that the external world is reflected, at least in a sufficiently developed consciousness, not only in a series of natural and social phenomena that a person encounters directly, in the most significant way for his life, but also in the totality of all phenomena in general, that is, as a whole. It is clear that the human brain is not capable of reflecting the entire universe in its entirety in all the diversity of its particulars, either through the organs of perception or through the power of abstraction. At least because it is infinite. However, the world is not the sum of separate things, but their entirety in all connections and mediations, which thus means that each phenomenon is inherent in the most general properties of being itself: every phenomenon is material, exists in time, moves in space, changes, has quality, is characterized by quantitative certainty, is a part of something and has constituent elements in its structure, and so on. It follows from this that in each separate element of being and especially in the system of elements of being, which is the general picture of the perception of the external world by any person, there is an expression of the most general laws of the universe. This creates the possibility of reflection in a separate consciousness of the world as a whole.

Consequently, it is unacceptable to exclude from the process of self-education the philosophical and methodological foundation: the resolution of the question of what the world is in its essence, and a clear vision of the principles of approaching the phenomena of reality. Such omissions will turn self-education into fruitless attempts to resolve particular issues without resolving general ones, which thus violates the universal objective law of "the general prevails over the particular" and is fraught with the impossibility of linking together many specific scientific truths, the comprehension of which constitutes the result of study.

As is known, the editorial board of the journal "Proryv" put forward a slogan for the assimilation of Marxist theory and especially methodology, a slogan for the priority of the theoretical form of class struggle. What does this mean? The Proryvtsy, relying on the experience of the victories and defeats of Bolshevism, link the productivity of the communist movement with the organizational viability of the Party as the guiding and leading force of the workers' movement. In turn, the organizational viability of the Marxist Party depends mainly on the scientific and theoretical competence of its members , which is confirmed by practical victories and the growth of authority among workers and intellectuals and is ultimately expressed in the organization of the proletarian masses into the working class in accordance with the programmatic goals set out by Marx and Engels in the "Communist Manifesto".

The breakthrough slogan is intended to gather around the magazine the healthiest, most sane elements from the left movement, the intelligentsia, the proletariat and serve as a factor in forging the cadres of the future Party of Scientific Centralism.

At the same time, the main means for increasing the scientific and political education of the journal’s activists and the supporters gathered around it is self-education:

"The overwhelming majority of publications in the journal 'Proryv' emphasize and actively promote the urgent need for people of communist convictions to improve their Marxist literacy, master the skills of the dialectical-materialistic method and enrich their social science baggage with scientific knowledge. This idea is one of the main, key ideas that fundamentally distinguishes both our programmatic provisions and practical activity from all other 'left' organizations, which at best declare their commitment to Marxism, but do nothing for the Marxist education of either themselves or their supporters. The basis for considering this thesis so important for us is the fundamental position of dialectical materialism that no practice is possible in principle without the preliminary formulation of theory. This position is precisely the stumbling block that causes particular difficulties for ignorant followers of 'direct action'. The essence of human activity is that theory and practice are so interconnected that the primacy of theory does not seem so obvious: many, on the contrary, believe that before thinking, you have to do something, and only after receiving the results of the activity do we get the subject that we begin to think about. However, this is relatively true only in the abstract - when we imagine a person as a "tabula rasa", i.e. a person who does not have any prior basis of knowledge, which he never is in practice.

…Instead of calls for “organizing studies,” we call on all our readers to organize themselves first of all—to independently study Marxism, to improve their knowledge in various areas of social science, to accustom themselves to research work, to cultivate themselves not as distributors of leaflets, but as scientists who are capable, even when cut off from their comrades, of resolving all theoretical problems that arise and, on the basis of this knowledge, to organize victorious revolutionary practice.”

Therefore, it is proposed to reflect on how to organize self-education, the primacy of which, as a result of the magazine’s tireless propaganda, is increasingly rarely disputed even by the most backward groups participating in the left movement.

In order for self-education to fulfill the tasks assigned to it, it is necessary to know what to read, how to read and how to best organize the classes in general.

What to read? For what purpose to read?
Among those who claim to know Marxism, a special sporting discipline flourishes, although not yet recognized by the International Paralympic Committee, and consists of compiling lists of literature for the study of Marxist theory. The constant principle of the formation of all these numerous registers is the Sisyphean search for the most feasible works of the classics, with which alone the study of Marxism should begin.

There is nothing more wrong than, given the current general literacy, to seek out Marxist works, the study of which would allow one to experience no difficulties or experience them to a lesser degree than, for example, studying the first volume of Capital. Marxism is a monolithic system of knowledge , as if cast from a single piece of high-strength Bolshevik steel, therefore each position of each work of the brilliant classics requires the utmost exertion of intellectual powers .

The assimilation of Marxism is the result of great diligence, demonstrated in studying, poring over, correlating the works of the classics of Marxism, and investigating the specific historical conditions in which certain provisions of Marxist theory and policy were put forward. Fortunately, in the collected works of Marx-Engels, Lenin, Stalin, the justifications for practically all the stated theses and principles are expressed with the utmost clarity, it is repeated many times which specific fundamental conclusions of Marxism underlie the worldview as a whole, and which particular conclusions are the result of historical compromise or the specifics of the situation.

Therefore, regardless of the subjective goals that are set by those studying Marxism, the objective task , dictated by the very essence of Marxism, if, of course, it really “materializes” in the consciousness of the adept, is to learn to look at Marxism dialectically, that is, as a holistic scientific worldview in development, in the inseparable unity of all .

Roughly speaking, Marxist science was created by the classics and preserved for the most part in collections of their works. It must be known and understood as Newton's three laws in their mutual connection. And only this knowledge, as it is mastered, gives and increasingly expands the subject's ability to work in a Marxist way, if, of course, he also has a highly developed conscience .

Thus, the breakthrough slogan, which is a condensed formulation of the goal of the communist struggle at this stage, itself also provides the goal of self-education - to become a Marxist in order to deserve the title of communist .

What does it mean to be a Marxist and to work in a Marxist way from the perspective of Breakthrough?

“To be a Marxist means, at the very least, firstly, to master the dialectical method of thinking, i.e. to become a dialectician; secondly, to consistently apply this method in the analysis and synthesis of facts of the history of the production of the material conditions of life of society, bringing the research to the discovery or, at least, a deep understanding of objective economic laws, i.e. to become a materialist; thirdly, to learn in practice to manage the struggle of the working class, guided by the demands of objective economic laws, i.e. to become a practical revolutionary.

Without mastering dialectical thinking, it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of life in its continuous dynamics, in all the diversity of its forms of manifestation and development, it is impossible to influence the processes that are taking place in any reliable way, since the dialectical method, still misunderstood and underestimated by the bulk of humanity, is the only scientific method that brings the “mechanism” of human thinking and action into full conformity with the objective laws of the development of nature and society.



Nowadays, in order to become a communist, it is necessary to master not only Marxism, but also Leninism.

Unlike Marxism, which had three sources of its origin, Leninism has two sources: the first is theoretical, i.e. Marxism itself, and the second is the practical experience of the struggle of the populists and the three Russian revolutions of the era of capitalism, in which the proletariat was the hegemon, having managed to independently find a new form of the dictatorship of the proletariat - Soviet power. In the words of Stalin, Leninism is Marxism developed by Lenin in relation to the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. Leninism is the first absolutely successful experience of combining the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian masses with the highest achievements of human thought in the field of social science.

The next outstanding stage in the development of the communist worldview was the Stalinist stage. In turn, Stalinism is Marxism-Leninism of the era of the victorious construction of a communist society in one single country, the collapse of the classical colonial slavery of bourgeois democracies and the spread of communism as a world social system."

"When a Marxist seeks an answer to a question that has arisen, he is obliged to work hard, creatively, and without fear of fatigue, to develop an answer, mobilizing all the theoretical wealth that has been created by Marxism as a whole and verified by the social practice of human development. That is, the answer to the question posed by history is not given by mobilizing a dozen quotes fished out of Marxism, and even more so from the subjective understanding of "Marxism" by Novikov, but by the ability to make a modern conclusion on the basis of an existing holistic theory and social practice, which, as a rule, in its content gradually goes beyond the framework of an existing theory and requires from communists not a quotational, but a creative theoretical and practical approach to the analysis of new, relevant practice."

Lunacharsky, in our opinion, very successfully called Marxism the highest level of knowledge:

"Marxism is not only a theory of society in its genuine scientific version, it is the highest level of knowledge. Marx and Engels found that fundamental method of human thinking, coinciding with the objective laws of development, which is called the dialectical method. And the bourgeoisie was forced, overturning and rejecting Marxism, to reject its foundation - the materialistic worldview and its method - the dialectical method. Instead of fertilizing the sciences of inorganic and organic nature with the achievements of science in the field of social science, and laying a materialistic foundation for the exact and biological sciences, the bourgeoisie, by hostilely hushing up Marxism and slandering it, led to the fact that the natural sciences and the biological sciences remained unbound by Marxist methodology, and turned out to be insufficiently based on an objective materialistic view."

Next, what does it mean to become a communist from the perspective of Breakthrough?

"First of all, a person who calls himself a Marxist is obliged, without making any allowances for fatigue, to study everything that made Lenin and Stalin victorious communists. If you fail to do this, then do not rush to appropriate the name of a communist, which presupposes, first of all, mastery of science. In extreme cases, let your comrades call you a Marxist, if they are sure of it.

Secondly, every subject who considers himself a Marxist is obliged to have opportunists on his account, disgraced in the theoretical form of class struggle, as well as scientific research, propaganda and agitation works, published in one way or another. If you do not have this, learn to defeat or re-educate opportunists, write yourself and do not rush to teach others.

Thirdly, every person recognized as a Marxist in the circle of his comrades is obliged to organize, in person or in absentia, the training of candidates for the title of communist. If this does not work out, learn to teach, so that you will eventually be approached as a teacher.

Fourthly, every Marxist must be able to work in a team and with a team, to be able to organize people to achieve strategic goals. If you can't do it, learn from someone who can do it, don't compete, but learn by selflessly helping him.

Fifthly, never think about career, fame, gratitude, material gain. All this makes becoming a Marxist impossible. If all this secret tinsel, born of stupidity and envy, is not indifferent to you, occupies you, dear reader, know that you, for now, have no relation to Marxism, regardless of what you have read and written.

You will work for communism, simply, sparing no effort, overcoming fatigue, and what only empty, vain and greedy people dream of will fall on your shoulders - fame, recognition of the majority, and along with them a gigantic responsibility, hatred, envy, lies, intrigues of outright enemies and competitors who “adored” you.

Today, all those who trail behind the proletarian movement and are only capable of assenting to the leaders of the trade union-strike form of resistance to the tyranny of entrepreneurs call themselves communists. The struggle for communism has been sacrificed by the modern left to helpless babble about the need to help the proletariat in its Sisyphean struggle for a "swamp kopeck."

Strictly speaking, mastering Marxism is impossible without self-education.

Many people sympathizing with communism sincerely want to understand the surrounding situation and current events, follow the news, complain about the weakness of the communist movement and criticize capitalism and its particular manifestations. However, knowledge of individual events, incriminating agitation and propaganda materials and even oratorical talent are only capable of giving a certain push to thought in a certain direction. In order to truly objectively understand the essence of the situation, capitalism, the regime and the path of communist struggle, a thorough and independent study of Marxism is necessary.

Anyone who wants to understand socio-political reality must, at a minimum, study the capitalist system, its entire economic structure, the identity of the opposites of the base and superstructure, the connection between economics and ideology, understand the internal contradictions of capitalism and, finally, comprehend the mechanics of those forces that, originating in its depths, will ultimately destroy it.

However, it does not follow from what has been said that without becoming a strong Marxist one cannot take a free step in the communist movement. Quite the contrary, becoming a Marxist means being useful right now , means engaging in practical work both in the field of propaganda and in providing the necessary technical assistance. Only in practical work does theoretical growth really take place .

As already stated in the newspaper, after the initial acquaintance with famous books and brochures of the classics, the stage of practical work must begin:

"Without practical propaganda work, preferably in literary form, further assimilation of Marxism seems, generally speaking, extremely unlikely. In addition, only if the propaganda is based on a careful, already slow and thoughtful study, mainly of Capital, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, all of Lenin's main works and most of the works of Stalin's 13-volume collected works. And tireless digging into large, small and most minute questions in the works of the classics as an urgent requirement of propaganda practice, with the obligatory resolution of questions at least in the first approximation, will gradually create a stable system of relatively strong basic knowledge, which is already qualitatively different from the intra-cranial vinaigrette of the overwhelming mass of leftists. At the same time, a solid habit is developed of checking with the classics on every "subtle" question, as if "consulting" with a book."

In the propaganda work of a budding Marxist, simplifications and mistakes are possible, sometimes even gross ones. But the main thing is not at all in the mistakes, but in whether the person remains on the basis of a sincere search for objective truth or clings to his convictions because they are "his own". If the person is conscientious , then no mistakes in such a situation are terrible and will certainly be corrected.

In addition, it should be noted that, as practice shows, successful self-education is absolutely impossible without a certain orientation of thought, an attitude towards searching for the truth of a certain initial range of questions. The content of any Marxist work for its successful assimilation must be somehow connected with a person's thoughts, with the need to expand the stock of knowledge, with life experience. Otherwise, the enterprise is doomed to failure in 99%. However, it should not be forgotten that the modern average level of culture, the quality of public consciousness, has all the makings for even spontaneous formation in the life of the majority of physically mature individuals of the corresponding factors of the designated needs. Therefore, by the way, there are nine-year-old composers and chess players, but there cannot be a nine-year-old Marxist.

As a rule, this need is formed by a certain set of interests inherent to an individual at first glance by chance. The quantitative and qualitative diversity of this set of interests appears in the form of normal human curiosity and is an excellent support for self-education and fruitful development of the personality as a whole. In this case, it remains to raise normal curiosity to the level of scientific, and an unflagging interest in the search for objective truths is guaranteed.

Less often, the need for self-education arises on the basis of a mature, conscious attitude to life. The concept of an individual's consciousness is not limited to the degree of scientificity of his worldview, but also includes such a characteristic as thoughtfulness and logical consistency of views. This kind of holistic worldview is usually associated with worldly wisdom. It is not necessarily scientific, but it has the potential for scientific education, including Marxist. At the same time, people wise with life experience tend to conserve their views, to reject the new, while naturally losing the opportunity for productive practice, both professional and in everyday life. If a person still has the desire to work through his views, to rethink his position, then the indicated inclination to self-education must manifest itself.

In addition, a person's interests allow him to focus his attention with the least effort of will on the subject that directly resonates with them. However, often interests, having arisen relatively by chance, represent a familiar area of ​​knowledge rather than a subject of special spiritual experiences. Interests can serve as a good support exclusively at the initial stage of self-education, in the future, the productive expansion of the horizon of knowledge, the assimilation of dialectical methodology, increases the strength of the mind to the possibility of maintaining attention to the subject being studied for a long time. In the future, persistence , thoroughness and meticulousness gradually become a habit of scientific and theoretical work .

Diamatics is to complete the process of filling consciousness with concrete absolute truths, spontaneously started by mathematics and physics, thus freeing humanity, first of all, from mysticism, the so-called trial and error method and the Russian "maybe", which in the 20th century was given the pretentious name "risk theory". Diamatics, after social "liberation" by the revolutionary process of building communism, will gradually turn into the only indisputable method of forming an absolutely adequate individual and social consciousness.

Today, in the specific case of self-education of a supporter of communism, we are obliged to have an example of precisely such a formation of consciousness, its filling with positive content and the displacement of stupidities from it, which, it would be appropriate to note, enriches life with both satisfaction and pleasure. Here is the conclusion that Valery Alekseevich makes on the topic:

"Naturally, the first algorithmic step of any brilliant thinking is the assimilation of the axiom of dialectical materialism: matter is primary, consciousness is secondary. But this truth is absolute only within the limits of the main question of philosophy. Beyond its limits, living dialectical materialism begins, consisting in the fact that all human activity in the material world is preceded by a mental act of will, the highest form of which is consciousness of one or another degree of adequacy. Therefore, depending on the level of development of consciousness, in the same historical context, some individuals experience tragedies, while others prosper, the most developed of them prosper at the level of happiness, and the undoubtedly brilliant ones - at the level of pleasure and permanent bliss.

Many of my contemporaries, but not all, will rush to prove that it is impossible to be permanently blissful, especially for everyone, since some recognized geniuses ended their days at the stake of the Inquisition. But this only means that many of my peers are so harassed by the market economy that they have long since stopped flying in their dreams, but run away in them from tax inspectors, collectors and killers. Moreover, under the modern structure of society, bliss, the enjoyment of life is not available to anyone, not a Nobel laureate, not an oligarch, not his wife, not the Pope. Few people today will understand Marx's words that happiness is a struggle, since many today, like Solzhenitsyn, understand struggle only as a calf butting an oak tree.

The tragic existence of the majority of the planet's population over the course of millennia is largely due to the fact that mass public consciousness was formed by the persistent application to individuals, first of children's, mostly idiotic, bedtime stories, like Baba Yaga or Harry Potter, then, with the help of children's stories for adults, elevated to the rank of "laws" of God, economic, nationalistic and racial theories, novels by Babel, Solzhenitsyn, Pomerants, Yerofeyev...

But, as the USSR grew stronger and, accordingly, the European world colonial system collapsed, by the middle of the 20th century the reading skills of the majority of the population of many countries in Asia, Africa and even the USA had risen significantly higher compared to Russia in 1917, when its proletarian masses perceived Marxism in the trenches of the First World War only by ear, only in the form of slogans and only on faith.

Therefore, in modern conditions, proletarians, first of all, intellectual workers, have a great chance, if they wish, to independently, without pastors and prophets like Solzhenitsyn, Posner, Svanidze, understand the logical constructions of Hegel, and even more so, Marx, Lenin and Stalin. This desire will grow faster, the larger the scale of religion and the liberal government, in order to save the budget, will displace opportunist and collaborationist departments of the humanities, all sorts of Dugins, from modern universities. The process of increasing the economic efficiency of teaching in universities, i.e. the reduction of teachers of the humanities in Russia, despite the loyal or empty content of their lectures, is gaining momentum. Consequently, not only in proletarian collectives, but also among students, in the near future, the propagandists of Marxism, if they really prepare themselves, will have practically no competitors. With the proper creative attitude to self-education and propaganda, modern creative Marxists, united in the party of scientific centralism, can form the only center of scientific social science knowledge, and no theological or official professors of a liberal persuasion will be able to compete with them due to the bias, dogmatism, speculativeness and tailism of their “knowledge.”

Krupskaya, being the greatest Marxist theorist and practitioner of education, wrote that nothing gives such pleasure to a person as the ability to connect the new with the old, to encounter a new phenomenon that boldly violates established ideas and exposes its mystery.

How to read?
The word "education" also means education, that is, the creation of new layers of knowledge, firmly connected with this basic fund of knowledge and ideas of a person, around the basic fund of knowledge and ideas. And the book has a fundamental meaning here. This means that for productive self-education it is vital to learn to work with a book, to develop the habit of reading a lot and with concentration. There is nothing more stupid than reading quickly, in the sense of "swallowing books". This kind of "self-education" is a waste of time. In the process of comprehending solid scientific literature, the brilliant Leninist formula " better less, but better " has absolute power.

A stupid disdain for mental work has long been ingrained in the public consciousness. It is considered indisputable that in order to achieve relatively tolerable mastery, say, in classical dance, a person needs years of daily grueling training. In order to learn to perform at least one arabesque tolerably expressively and technically, one needs both strong general choreographic training and thousands of repetitions of the pose itself. In order, say, to become a decent master in metalwork, one needs to successfully wield metalworking tools for a couple of years. However, at the same time, the absolute majority of people imagine such mental work as mastering Marxism as an easy walk - read Capital once and become a Marxist. The same applies to the organization of work on the propaganda of Marxism - sit down, write an article about this and that, without rereading, without thinking, without thinking over every word, without comparing every thought with the classics, and that's it. It is not surprising that such frivolity leads to continuous failures and disappointments, including on the basis of inflated expectations from a single reading of the classics and the first results after the release of propaganda materials.

It should be realized that between reading a Marxist work and understanding it, assimilation, there is a process of multiple rereading, multiple references to the text, comparison, reflection and study . The capacity of the brilliant works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is such that even twenty references to each of them reveal something new, previously unnoticed and unaccounted for. The whole point is that the heuristic power of a truly Marxist text consists not only in the theoretical depth of the narrative itself, but also in how certain thoughts and positions are linked in the reader's consciousness in connection with the operation of Marxism as a holistic teaching. In other words, in the course of the growth of the individual as a Marxist, previously read works are mastered again with a certain new depth and freshness, the author's train of thought and the objective factors reflected in it become increasingly clear.

The most effective means of mastering the works of classics seem to be the following. First, thinking through the author's reasoning, thinking about whether it is possible to reason about the subject in some other way. Second, retelling the provisions of the work to another person in order to exchange impressions or get acquainted with Marxism. Third, finally, processing the Marxist position into an independent note or article, that is, a presentation of what has been read and understood, an abstract.

It is well known how the classics themselves worked with literature: they made notes, compiled summaries, and formulated critical comments. Krupskaya, for example, recommends compiling notebooks with concise, clearly written visual notes reflecting the theses of the work and what one needs and wants to remember.

However, to master a work does not always mean to fully master the system of objective truths set forth in it. The fact is that a significant role in the formation of scientific and theoretical consciousness is played by a stock of personal observations, a person's life experience, especially the experience of operating knowledge. As was said above, without applying Marxism in practice, including in scientific research work, in professional activities and even in the practice of personal life, it is, strictly speaking, impossible to master it in the full sense. Therefore, the "refined" reading of the classics, reading for the sake of reading, reading for the sake of self-admiration of a know-it-all, characteristic of some intellectuals, has nothing in common with Marxist self-education and the communist movement.

This is why it is extremely important for those engaged in self-education to try to apply and test the knowledge they acquire through personal observation and work-related processing.

The pace of self-education varies within the limits of what is permissible under objective conditions. Today the situation is such that the decisive role is played by the sedateness of the educational process, the maximum possible emphasis on quality , not on speed. The feverishness that hotheads often preach only does harm today. Today we need librarianship , not a "r-revolutionary" farce.

It is precisely by activating the process of self-education, by affirming the spirit of self-education and self-cultivation among the supporters of the “Breakthrough” that the necessary state is achieved, which is conducive to solving the most important strategic task: “ to complete the creation and mass development of a full-fledged theory of building communism on the basis of objective prerequisites born of the development of modern productive forces .”

A. Redin , A. Borovykh
11/19/2017

Note
In addition, it is necessary to say something about the relationship between the acquisition of scientific knowledge in general and Marxist self-education, since this issue turns out to be quite relevant during the discussion of the article.

There is no and cannot be any knowledge confirmed by practice that would hinder the development of a Marxist . Moreover, unlike most leftists, we consider the process of becoming a dialectical materialist not as a process of mastering the professorial-dictionary version of Soviet or anti-Soviet "dialectical materialism", but as an element of general education . And when we call for studying dialectical materialism, this does not mean reading "textbooks", does not mean reading only "Science of Logic" or even only "Science of Logic" and the works of the classics.

The struggle for general education is the most important component of the struggle for dialectical education, that is, for Marxist self-education. Mathematics is a special case of dialectics. Physics, chemistry, biology and other more specific sciences are the application of dialectical mathematics to the study of various forms of matter motion, the discovery of objective laws by which living and inanimate nature exists. Although elements of dialectical thinking in the discoveries of great natural scientists manifested themselves only within the framework of their spontaneous materialistic worldview.

Just as, by mastering Capital, we actually comprehend historical materialism using the example of one of the modes of production, having studied higher mathematics, mechanics, thermodynamics, optics, electrodynamics, organic and inorganic chemistry, and so on, we partially become familiar with at least dialectics, and in rare cases with diamatics.

It is proposed to move from the simple to the complex, from general education to dialectical materialism, from broad erudition to Marxism .

At the same time, the comprehension of any particular knowledge naturally causes the need to turn to methodology, that is, to the philosophy of Marxism, to the provisions of dialectical materialism. Thus, a harmonious relationship is formed between the process of comprehension of particular knowledge and the process of mastering dialectical materialism. And thus, dialectical materialism is assimilated, including on the material of particular sciences, and not by lifeless philosophical schemes from dusty, emasculated textbooks.

Engels, answering the question of how to learn to think, said that humanity has not developed a better method than studying the history of philosophy. Note: not memorizing the laws of dialectics, but turning to the philosophical concepts of the past. It should be clarified that the most fruitful will be the study of dialectics itself and its sources in the person of G.V.F. Hegel and L. Feuerbach. It should also be added, as has already been said above, that the second most important and significant is the conscientious study of the particular sciences and note that dialectics is also learned from personal observations, from rich life experience, which, of course, is approached in a balanced and self-critical manner.

In this regard, Comrade Lbov, moving from the question “the main thing is to be able to think creatively” to revealing the essence of teaching dialectical thinking, wrote :

"For Stalin, the question of the general interconnection in philosophical views was not without reason one of the key ones, because dialectical knowledge is the knowledge of all the properties of an object, that is, dialectical thinking, as the initial stage of knowledge, initially presupposes study precisely as a mechanical process of observation (in a broad philosophical sense), for which the method of obtaining knowledge about these properties is completely unimportant, whether it is the result of independent study or memorization. One of the elements of the properties of an object is its interconnections, which expand the scope of these properties. The more complex the object, the greater the scope of these properties and interconnections, accordingly, direct study becomes more and more unrealistic, it becomes increasingly necessary to abstract the properties of the object in the form of ready-made laws and concepts, accordingly, thinking itself acts to a greater extent as a systematizer of already existing knowledge and to a lesser extent as a producer of new knowledge.

… Marxists see the process of learning dialectical thinking as an element of general education . If you study dialectics, but do not study the world around you, then dialectics will not help you derive any correct ideas from nothing. It is impossible to be ignorant with “correct thinking” — thinking must be built on some knowledge base… When “Proryv” calls for studying dialectics, we assume by default that our readers and supporters are already engaged in self-education in social science — studying history, economics, reading statistical digests, analytical articles and scientific works on interesting social science problems, collecting data on their own from various sources. And this purely mechanical process is no less complex and difficult than the actual study of the mastered material using dialectical methods. Dialectics fertilizes knowledge, synthesizes it, gives it dynamics, but does not replace it. Applied to the phenomena of reality reflected in consciousness, dialectical logic ensures the adequacy of this reflection, that is, the correspondence of the laws of thinking to the objective laws of being, but in itself does not replace the reflection itself.

"We, the 'breakthroughists', have worked for many years, focusing our propaganda on the most advanced part of the intelligentsia and the proletariat, on the cadres for whom calls for extensive acquisition of a mass of knowledge on various issues were simply superfluous - the most difficult question was the methodological part of the analysis of this knowledge. However, the expansion of propaganda, contact with some groups of proletarians with a lower level of development, cause a clash with Makhaev's tendencies among unconscious proletarians, consisting in the denial of the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia in the formation of the working class, the reduction of the intelligentsia to the role of 'servants' who can be ignored, since according to the views of the neo-Makhaevists, 'one does not live by labor' and their knowledge is easily compensated for by everyday 'reason', or the so-called 'ability to think'."

Among other things, the most important political component in the choice of principles of self-education is visible.

Stick to a scientific approach in self-education and you will be on the right political line in this issue, which is most important for the development of each individual and the formation of a practical revolutionary.

And a final remark directly about the study of Marxism. Our experience of working at the newspaper shows that a real deep understanding of any issue of Marxist theory occurs exclusively or almost exclusively in the course of its elaboration for a speech with the printed word. Only by instilling a taste for printed propaganda, on the one hand, and cultivating a high responsibility of the author to the readers, on the other hand, is it possible to ensure productive personnel forging, from our point of view.

https://prorivists.org/self-education/

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