Re: Ideology
Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 4:44 pm
Continued from previous post. There are four posts in all,)
The Bolsheviks needed democracy only at the first stage of the party creation, for the involvement in the movement, for the FORMAL discipline of the party members, who at that time belonged to the exploited masses, and had petty-bourgeois values. If not, yesterday’s agricultural laborers and middle peasants would not turn into kulaks [bourgeois peasants], and yesterday’s proletarians, turning into trade union leaders, would not sell out to their masters and fascists. But intellectuals, peasants and proletarians have dual nature. Industrial proletarians are characterized by this duality and double-dealing in a less degree than the proletarians of mental labor and peasants.
But on the days when these lines were written, the miners of the Kemerovo region asked Medvedev… to increase their working day from six to eight hours. It shows how primitive the brains of today’s miners are. They do not even understand that now the owners of the mines will fire 30% of their comrades, increase a little the wages of the rest workers, transferring the wages of the dismissed to the mines owners profit. Of course, this is the most disgraceful moment in the history of the world working-class movement, but the consequences of this folly will thoroughly clear the brains of the fired miners, who have recently believed that there is nothing more important than beer after work.
It feels especially ashamed for these wage slaves of the 21st century, because at the end of the 18th century and at the end of the 19th century, workers demanded from the capitalists, firstly, to reduce the working day and, secondly, to increase wages under a shorter working day. They wanted to live. They knew the price of free time. Today it seems to the workers that they can earn, sacrificing their priceless health and life.
Few of them now understand that if socialism in the USSR was not destroyed by miners’ strikes in 1990, today the whole population of the country would have free accommodation, and the working day in all sectors would be no more than 4 hours a day, with a two-month paid vacation, with, figuratively speaking, the same wages, with free education, medicine, free public transport, children’s pre-school institutions, sanatoriums, tourist camps, without terrorism, religious obscurantism, nationalism, fascism and organized crime.
But the proletariat without a real Communist Party, becomes a self-destructive force. Only the history of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is enough to disprove the view of the proletariat as an self-developing revolutionary force, especially a communist one. The proletarians throughout Europe produced weapons against the USSR, the proletarians furiously walked over their own dead bodies on the way to Moscow, stormed Stalingrad, shot and hanged partisans. Considering that the proletariat is revolutionary by default means to understand nothing in The Communist Manifesto, which quite definitely states that the proletariat is just the EXPLOITED class, i.e. the class, which mostly does not understand that it is exploited, and moreover it is happy to be exploited. These proletarians stand in long lines at the employment exchange and, if they have not found themselves in the lists of dismissed workers, look down on all other losers. The proletariat is the most revolutionary class of market society only because all other classes of capitalist society are either absolutely REACTION, or petty-bourgeois, or passive, indifferent to everything that happens.
Without its vanguard, without a party of scientific world outlook, the proletarians of mental and physical labor are not able to free themselves from exploitation, which is brilliantly proved by the many hundred years experience of the proletarian movement in the developed market countries. But this would not be so terrible if the proletarians did not take the most active part and were not the main victims of world and colonial wars, did not just blindly execute the will of the fascists and militarists in the insane race of nuclear weapons.
Only people with the scientific world outlook can unwaveringly carry out only one line, due to finding it really scientific and not due blind faith in the Program.
After formation of the Communist Party, or the Party of the Scientific World Outlook, the degree of its development can be defined not by the growth of its members, but by the decrease of democracy in the PARTY and by the increase of science-based CENTRALISM.
Seems like it is enough to look at the experience of Gorbachevism to draw a final conclusion about how much the inner fool in the party, or a supporter of democracy in the Communist Party, is more dangerous than an external enemy. Does appeal to the masses of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, or their “consultations with the people”, show their great intelligence? Of course, you can call them democrats, but intelligent and, moreover, educated — you cannot.
Can we call a person a chief designer, if he tries to find out by a democratic vote among the employees of the drafting department, which brand of steel should be used to create a nuclear reactor?
Can we call smart presidents and prime ministers, who privatize state-owned factories under the slogan: “Entrepreneurs are smarter than we are”?
If these statesmen do not know how to manage the economy of the country, then how can they run the country? But there are still people who do not understand that the whole “system” of the authorities under market democracy exists only to make the demos obey big capital, no matter how “smart” the oligarchs are. At least this is how it works in all developed democratic market countries. The oligarchs “rule” the entire economy as they want, and the police pacifies the unemployed and robbed depositors according to scientifically developed program of the demos pacifying, using the most advanced technology and techniques and the democratic government spares no expense on it.
Thus, if we do not hesitate to answer the question, why the Communists League, the First and Second Internationals, the CPSU, all the communist parties of the CMEA countries collapsed, why the CPRF and the RCWP are also close to this, then we must admit that only such communist organizations can collapse, which has no communists among its leaders, i.e. those who know perfectly the methods of scientific world understanding. Strictly speaking, the historical practice of China and North Korea showed that under certain historical conditions, even one really competent communist is enough for the entire country to implement the really Communist Party program.
When the CPSU collapsed, it turned out that republican organizations did not have the educated communists. There were only some heroes, strong and inflexible internationalists such as Anpilov, Shenin, Burokevičius. There is an interesting theorist on the problems of world development, Jermalavicius. But there are no scientists who have answered scientifically the critical question of our time about the cause of the collapse of the CPSU and other parties of the CMEA countries so that at least one “post-CPSU” organization with a communist name could be like a Bolshevik one. As a result, on the wreckage of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR, their clones emerged: the RCWP, then the CPRF and several other very small communist parties with their leaders. The history of all these parties decay has proved that they did not and do not have a single person who, under conditions of a high, for the bourgeois country, degree of freedom of speech, could persuade the proletariat, at least in anything. Everyone are plunged into the parliamentary infighting and collecting signatures. Some of these party members showed firmness of character, fidelity to principles, good memory for some quotations, but not the ability to think and act in a Leninist way.
If the members of these parties continue to be too lazy to learn methodology, it is clear that there is no communist perspective on the territory of the former USSR in the next five years.
The gradual expulsion of real communists from the Internationals, all communist parties and editorial boards, is the result of religious trust in democratic centralism.
Then, naturally, the question arises. If democratic centralism is an instrument of seizing the party leadership by opportunists, then how to build a party on the principles of science-based centralism?
The saddest thing is that there is hardly a theorist in the modern communist movement, who studied the examples of applying the principle of science-based centralism in the history of the CPSU, or described in detail the mechanism of applying the principle of science-based centralism in building the Communist Party, where opportunism cannot exist in spite of all the efforts.
What should be the Party of Science-based Centralism?
The analysis of the collapse of all Internationals and most of the parties with communist names leads to the indisputable conclusion about a discrepancy between the rules of these parties and the essence of the working-class party. In other words, the method of forming the political organizations of the proletariat did not fully correspond to the unique tasks to be solved. Therefore, it was easier for parties to overthrow fundamentally rotten regimes than to create a new economic form of society.
It is quite obvious that since Marxism-Leninism has not been disproved theoretically and is confirmed by victorious practice on all “fronts” of the USSR of the Stalin period, the following collapse of the CPSU can be explained only by the contradiction between the objective law of the correspondence of the party cadres to the priority of strategic tasks and imperfect principles of party building. These imperfect principles increase the number of fools and anti-communists in the governing bodies of the party, and as a result, turn the party of the dictatorship of the working class into a counter-revolutionary organization.
Each new stage of qualitative transformation of society demanded from party members higher level of intellectual training, but the system of party education and recruitment, deformed by democratic centralism, lagged further and further behind the needs of the epoch.
The collapse of all parties with communist names shows the inadequacy of the standard formulations used by the candidates for the party to demonstrate their readiness to be a communist: “I accept and commit myself to carry out the Party Program and the Party Rules”, or “I want to be in the forefront of the builders of communism”.
Admission to the Communist Party is not a legal act and not a marriage contract. The communist activity is not a matter of desire. The communist activity must bring scientific and theoretical competence in social practice and, first of all, in the political activity of the proletariat. The communist activity in current conditions is like the activities of those volcanologists who know exactly where, when, why and what will happen, try to inform people, but they think, almost like at Fukushima, that they are safe from the political tsunami in the form of, for example, World War III.
Therefore, the text of an application for admission to the party of a new type should be essentially different: “I have mastered the theory of Marxism-Leninism and have creatively practiced it in the ideological and political form of the class struggle. The publications are attached. I take an active part in… trade union’s activity”.
These are competent members, who differ the Communist Party from any other type of a party. Communist work in any conditions can be conducted only by competent people, who are able to understand the essence of objectively determined goals, who realize the NECESSITY of observing party discipline dictated not by obstinacy, not by fear of responsibility, not by personal career interests, but by scientific understanding of the cause-effect relationship, ignoring of which leads the party and the whole of society from mistakes to tragedy.
The discipline of a communist is a form of the most uncompromising following the requirements of SCIENCE-based NECESSITY. Strength of the organization, coordination of actions are possible only under domination of the scientific consciousness among the vanguard participants of the political process. Candidates who join the party with the phrase “I accept and commit myself to carry out the Party Program and the Party Rules” must remain candidates until their publications and practical work with proletarians reach the necessary scientific level and obvious results.
However, during the Civil War in Russia and in Stalin’s period, the standard form of application for admission to the party corresponded to the sincere attitude of most joining members, proved their readiness for self-sacrifice and unquestioning observance of the party discipline, since the stay in the party for a long time did not promise any material benefits, and sometimes even threatened their life. But even in those days, using the procedure of democratic centralism, adventurers and careerists, even enemies of the working people, joined the party for power and sabotage, that was confirmed by memoirs of Yakovlev, the last secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on ideology.
While the Bolshevik Party was led by Lenin and Stalin, their competence was sufficient to ensure the expected results by the unquestioning obedience to all the decisions of the party. Even the Trotskyites, due to the instinct of self-preservation, sometimes had to obey the party decisions. However, when there had already been no geniuses in the party leadership, it turned out that the moral and psychological readiness of incompetent party members was not enough to rebut the opportunists and neutralize their subversive plans. The “collective party mind” could not compensate for the personal illiteracy of democratically elected under-educated leaders. Many people still do not understand the absurdity of the phrases: “an ordinary member of the Communist Party” or “a true Bolshevik with bad knowledge of Marxism”.
Seems like the difference between “a communist” and “a party member” is insignificant, but in fact there is a gap between the party membership goals of a competent person and an illiterate careerist. Consciousness of an illiterate party member cannot contain any significant social goals, especially goals related to the building of communism. On the basis of political ignorance only petty-bourgeois consciousness can develop. That was democratic centralism that guaranteed to such party members vast majority in the leadership of the party.
Many members of the party have understood literally the Engels’s idea that since communism has become a science, it must be studied. That’s all. This task was fulfilled strictly by the CPSU members. They obediently memorized and repeated citations almost all their life, without thinking about what it means to master completely the science of communism. Their greatest achievement was saying the necessary quotations of the classics at appropriate times, but more often at inappropriate ones and with distortion of the meaning. In this matter almost the entire membership of the Central Committee did not notice that they were in fact the Bernsteinians: no one cared for the process of party study or the final result. Periodic examinations concerned only the matters of the lectures timetable, the presence of a poster and the text of the lecture prepared by an educator. Already under Brezhnev, the examiners did not realize that the educator should DEEPLY understand the material, but not read it as a sexton. It was easier for the examiners to find out that there was no summary or that a lecturer was late than to catch his conscious distortion of the root of the matter.
The educators in social sciences were paid per hour, but not per mental workload.
That was the lack of understanding of the scientific depths of the program tasks by the leading workers of the party, their overestimation of their readiness to put into practice scientific truths, the primitive method of working with young people to prepare them for the party membership, the absurd system of training cadres for law enforcement agencies, the Marxist underdevelopment of most Soviet poets, novelists and publicists, all of it gradually led to full theoretical and political degradation of the CPSU, its system of propaganda and agitation.
When representatives of the artistic intelligentsia and “great” actors gather on Russian TV to tell each other vulgar anecdotes, they honestly admit that at school they were non-achievers and did not understand anything in Marxism, also because they never studied it in their student years. And they think it is very funny.
The overwhelming majority of writers, screenwriters, directors by their world outlook turned out to be ordinary philistines, unable to rise above bedroom scenes, but they presented their triviality, artistic mediocrity, as purposeful dissidence. The problem of building truly free society of humanists was too complicated for these “social engineers”. The spiritual deafness of most Russian intellectuals of that period, their undying philistinism are well shown in the novel Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak.
Taking all this into account, today’s young people who want to devote their life to the struggle for building a truly progressive, humanized, scientifically organized society, i.e. those who want to join the Party of Science-based Centralism (the PSC), must join its primary organizations at the place of residence or work in order to become real party activists and to develop personal scientific, theoretical and organizational level. The period of being a candidate member should not be limited to a formal time frame, but should be entirely determined by the real progress of a person in the theory of dialectical materialism, by the necessary propagandist and agitator skills, by the results and scope of his work in the party mass media.
Certainly, if a candidate does not have progress in his practical explanatory work with the proletarians of mental and physical labor, if he does not feel up to study the theory and to be a successful propagandist of scientific knowledge and a political organizer among proletarians, then there is no reason to admit him to the party.
Of course, with genuine desire to win over parasitism one can always participate in this struggle ACCORDING TO HIS POSSIBILITIES, without joining the party. But, in any case, the SELF-CRITICAL attitude to the OWN scientific potential, the proved right to work in the ranks of the party as an organizer and leader, must be the standard of behavior of each leftist.
The collapse of the CPSU and the Young Communist League proved that the party membership cannot depend on any formal democratic arguments, norms and recommendations. A young man must be acknowledged by the party organization due to his attitude toward the matter.
There are people who will say that this approach will antagonize a huge number of people. And we reply that competent, proven, and therefore a reliable headquarters is more attractive for normal people than any party card, which offer exciting possibilities for a formal party career. People who are satisfied only with the party membership and parliamentary illusions are good with the CPRF. Today everyone is accepted there, that is why the CPRF has already experienced more splits than the RSDLP, since many CPRF members are more interested in today’s State Duma career than in tomorrow’s communism. Most likely, for the leadership of the CPRF communism is not interesting at all.
A person, who is afraid of the difficulties in mastering the communist theory, who avoids real propaganda work among proletarians, will find something easier than scientifically organized struggle. At least Lenin wrote that it is much better when ten men, who work, do not call themselves communists, than one talker, who calls himself a communist. It is hard to disagree with Engels, who said that it is better if the enemies accuse the communists of cowardice than if the proletarians consider the communists to be fools. This is one of the reasons why the proletarians sometimes prefer to follow Putin, not Zyuganov.
But the success in the struggle for a happy life depends on the number of ACTIVE participants in this process. It is the objective fact and the law of history. Therefore, Marxism is not about the accomplishment of a revolution only by the forces of one party, even the most NUMEROUS one. Marxism is not about the substitution of the proletarian class by the party, but about the educational and organizational work of the party to rouse the proletarian masses for their creative, conscious, active participation in the qualitative development of society. And keeping the content of propaganda and agitation at high level requires improvement of scientific and theoretical level of every party agitator and propagandist.
In brief, the party successes in enlightenment and organization of the masses are directly proportional to the QUALITY of the party ranks, and not to the number of passionate, but illiterate, members.
It may be said that the RSDLP was created in other way. Yes, the RSDLP was formed at the time of history, when, on the one hand, the activity of the proletarians in the economic struggle increased all over the world, which also happens today, and on the other hand, there were some individuals who saw themselves as established leaders. They all had exiles and penal servitude behind them, so they naturally had a wish to unite in the party all ready, tested by prison, practical revolutionaries, in spite of the “insignificant”, as it seemed then, differences in their theoretical views on the most important problems of practice. For a long time there was a hope that the formal principle of democratic centralism, i.e. the majority rule, will cope with the theoretical disagreement. But realization of this principle only sharpened contradictions between the “branches” of the party, making opportunists eager for revenge and reversal of the party policy after each their defeat. The RSDLP experienced several big splits just because the majority of the congresses was captured by opportunists.
In these situations, the Leninists, or the science-based centralists, had to organizationally separate from the conscious opportunists and in such a way to implement the only scientific, brilliant Leninist policy in the proletarian masses.
Today’s practice of the Communist Party building is complicated by the fact that in the communist movement of the world there are practically no authoritative and mature Marxist theorists, acknowledged by the proletarians of mental and physical labor. Therefore, a new generation of party builders will face a difficult and intensive struggle to solve this problem.
The creation of a new Communist Party in the present conditions is fraught with joining of young people who have learned only one meaningless slogan — “We want changes”, but they absolutely do not know the laws of objective conditions for that changes.
But this lesson did not teach anyone, even the members of the former CPSU. Since the very establishment, for example, of the RCWP, all attempts to organize serious party studies and the party press were not supported by the leadership of the party, and in this way twenty years were lost. In the RCWP, as soon as someone young appeared, he was immediately elected to all governing bodies, appointed to the leadership of the RCYL or to the presidium and, eventually, this “young person” degenerated.
Unfortunately, there are no cases in the history of pedagogy, except for Marx, when a young man by the age of 18 have already learned at least the foundations of the dialectics of Hegel, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, have read and mastered four volumes of Capital, have written at least one serious work, updating the positions formulated by the classics of Marxism a century earlier, and have felt deeply the problems and tragedies of social being that make a person an uncompromising, persistent and consistent fighter against the deadly vices of capitalism.
One can advise to admit a young person to the party in advance, on the basis of his activity, and then teach him.
But, Proriv prefers to work in the reverse order. Learn from the party without joining, understand properly your own motives, test yourself in practice and, if you do not change your mind at the age of 23, then join. At least Lenin, already at the age of 23, wrote and published mature scientific works, was widely acknowledged as a scientist, and only after that, at the age of 28, he joined the party with the clearly formulated principles of Bolshevism.
There are good examples to follow, and it is mean to join the party without hard work on self-education in the way that Lenin did.
Therefore, the PSC will not create separate youth organizations (based on the age criteria). Proriv sees the solution of the problem in the development of a party-oriented educational process, mainly virtual one, with using modern information technologies. As Karl Marx said, the best education is self-education. Lenin taught that without an independent work, universities can give nothing. Therefore, the ultimate success entirely depends on the degree of perseverance and constancy in the fulfillment of the main party duty of a young man: to master the science of victory in the political struggle.
When the entire primary organization of the left-wing youth consists of persons under 23 years old, such organization can be considered as an organization of the PSC supporters, but nothing more. The regional organization of the PSC coordinates the activities of the PSC youth organizations in the region. The evaluation criterion for the work quality of such primary youth organizations is not the number of conducted actions, not the number of arrests by the police, but the growth of the quality of propaganda materials and the growth of the number of experts in communist science.
As the experience of the RCWP and the CPRF showed, all attempts of the modern left-wing youth to create united youth organizations were objectively in vain, in spite of the highly-developed means of communication. The gap in today’s young people knowledge of social science, intense rivalry, the lack of the real authority of youth “leaders” among the young people, all this led these initiatives to failure.
The absurdity of the RCWP and the CPRF youth “policy” is that the leadership of these parties was engaged in “Sisyphean labor”: they created centralized independent youth organizations that played the role of a political sandbox for future opportunists and careerists.
While Stalin leaded the CPSU, and the Young Communist League had just an executive role, there were no big political problems. But, after the party was headed by people who were not literate enough, and therefore, unauthoritative, especially Gorbachev, the Young Communist League became a kind of for-profit organization. The Young Communist League expectedly dissolved itself before the party did.
It can be said without exaggeration that, the CPSU did not find the more productive form of youth organization, and by creating a centralized youth organization, paradoxically, used the Trotskyite type of organizing youth in the USSR. Strictly speaking, the party influenced the young communists through the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. It is characteristic that the main destroyers of communism, Andropov, Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin, came to the party through the leadership of the Young Communist League. But it is well known that if a young man is addicted to careerism and cynicism, then his re-education, according to the laws of pedagogy, is the most thankless task.
The complete collapse of the CPSU proved how harmful the creation of centralized all-Union and republican organizations of the Young Communist League type was. But this experiment, like any other experiment, is an option of usual optimistic tragedy, that teaches those who are able and want to learn. It is a pity that no one drew attention at the time to a detailed warning about the futility of creating centralized republican youth organizations of communist orientation, about the negative aspects of this project described in the full version of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered. But the novelty of the tasks solved by the communists in the 1920s posed unprecedented challenges for pedagogical science and the whole party. It was necessary and possible to experiment. However, in the future, the theory and practice of Makarenko were not only unappreciated by the majority of party members, but also were consciously “oppressed” by pedological careerists, most of whom were direct enemies of communism. As a result, the Young Communist League became not a school of communist education, but an incubator of Trotskyism and degeneration of the youth, the source of many undereducated party careerists, cynics and deserters. For many ordinary members of the Young Communist League among the working youth, this period of their lives remained in memory as a romantic and honest, heroic and creative period of their youth, their Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Factory, Stalingrad, virgin soil, the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
The Young Communist League, at times, was a school of courage, but did not become a school of political maturity.
The collapse of the CPSU also proved the absolute impropriety of the centralized University system of teaching Marxism, based on the principles close to the educational systems of class societies. Successful and effective education of communist activists depends on the close COORDINATION of theoretical studies and practical activities, self-education and self-improvement in the process of fighting for the actual tasks of real party politics.
As shown by the age-old practice, students who have the potential to master philosophical and social problematics, they by themselves come to the necessity of a thoughtful, intense study of the objective laws of the social development. But most of the today’s students, who are deformed by tests and motivated only by the mercantile side of education, should be prepared to fulfill consciously their civic duties primarily on the basis of feature and documentary films, because, on average, the modern youth culture of reading tends to decline. But some feature films made in the USSR are still able to play the role of a social alarm clock.
It may seem strange that a science-based centralist criticizes centralism in the system of the party education and the youth movement. After all, everyone knows that in civilized countries all social sciences are taught by professors, according to the approved programs. How can we reject the centuries-old experience of the best universities in developed capitalist countries?
Only those who do not understand dialectical materialism, can offer to use the experience and methodology of bourgeois universities for the communists education. The fact is that the system of high education of class society is opposite to the real education, that is transfer of scientific knowledge and improvement of thinking level.
The process of intellectual growth needs not the premises of teaching, or officially approved programs and professors, but the real educator with constantly developing knowledge and skills, who is able to know and understand what has not yet been learned by a young man on the basis of his own life experience.
The role of such a teacher must play the Central Organ of the party, which includes people who have perfectly mastered the communist science and systematically test their knowledge in practice.
It is enough to take into account the experience of self-education of the first Bolshevist leaders to draw the correct conclusion about what the system of the new Bolsheviks education should be. Nevertheless, this did not happen. Lenin and his comrades became an icon for worship, but not for mass practice of their experience.
Why did the CPSU collapse? First of all, because after Stalin the theoretical work in the party degraded, and during the perestroika, the magazine Communist (the theoretical organ of the CPSU Central Committee), was empty and very far from the scientific point of view. And it could not be otherwise, since the magazine was headed by the “developed socialist” Richard Kosolapov, and the editor of the economic department of this magazine was the outspoken anti-communist Yegor Gaidar, who turned out to be a heavy drinker. In August 1991, there were no Bolsheviks in the CPSU who could lead at least anyone.
In short, never confuse formal and real centralisms.
For example, the first religious universities in Europe had highly-developed freedom and autonomy from secular feudal lords, but at the same time, they also had highly-developed centralism in everything related to the content of teaching. The students learned, first of all, what the professors gave them. And only those became the professors who had outstanding knowledge of the Bible. Only few names of the first university professors remained in history, but Copernicus and Galileo made their marks on the world by their deep and substantiated centric systems of the universe and world understanding. Darwin remained in the history of science not because he had a degree, but because he had the highest scientific conscience and therefore became the center of attraction of all thinking people.
Therefore formal democratism and real science-based centralism are the diamatic contradictions that transformed the system of the higher spiritual “education” of the Middle Ages to the higher secular education where scientific truths gradually supplanted other motives of the universities existence. But the market relations of capitalism did not allow to destroy the influence of profit on the official professorship.
Certainly, the lowest level of corruption in the university system was during Stalin’s period of the USSR history. However, mercantilism in the higher education system was not completely liquidated even in that brilliant period. Marxism is not an ideology, but a science. The bourgeois ideology tries to doubt scientific base of Marxism and to impose on a philistine the thesis that Marxism is also just an ideology, like any social concept that existed before it, like any religion. Today, many great scientists of the Stalin era are accused of their secret religiosity, which they skillfully hid from the party committees. This is, for the most part, true, because, firstly, these scientists were formed in the era when praying did not seem like savagery, and secondly, very narrow education does not necessary lead to scientific world understanding. Very often there is a situation when a proton expert, or a virtuoso, who has proved Poincarй conjecture, solves all other crucial problems at the level of a teenager.
It is obvious that improvement of the system of young people education requires a reduction of formalism and the monopoly of science in its complex form. Young people should be united on the basis of the scientific truths they have learned, on a practical functional basis, but not according to the numerical principles of building an organization. And, the earlier, the better.
The trouble was that, even in the USSR, especially after Khrushchev’s election as the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, the work on narrow specialists education at the local level was formal. As a result, even in the space and aviation industries, developed in the USSR from non-existence to the record world height thanks to communist Stalin, even in these industries between general designers and party members often there was not a competition of communists for the victory over imperialism in these branches of science and technology, but a personal petty-bourgeois, vindictive rivalry. Conceit and mercantilism gradually became a visiting card of most representatives of the scientific, technical and artistic intelligentsia.
The narrowly focused specialist became just a formal superior who had the legal right to manage, without paying attention to the level of understanding by workers the socio-historical meaning of their labor. Labor from affair of honor, valor and glory, with the help of Khrushchev, again turned into means of getting an individual wage.
It was during the time of Khrushchev when the philistinism began to revive among the intelligentsia, it was forgotten that the communist level of competence and comradeship, in contrast to competition, excludes administrative formalism, let coordinate actions and fulfill duties of the participants proportionally and optimally, really help each other, in time and constructively respond to the initiative, work towards a common goal. It is a must for competent communists.
People who have adapted to cannibal market democracy, to competition through contract killings, to mutual undisguised hatred, they, of course, cannot take delight in true brotherhood and equality. The communists find these people deeply psychically defective. Most things that make an everyday life happy are not available for them in the same way as color perception is not available for the color-blind person.
What should the system of party education be?
As you know, the Bolshevik wing of the party was formed under the influence of the first issues of the newspaper Iskra and the first five books of Lenin. The most consistent and developed minds of Russia rallied around this diamatic wealth. The real revolutionaries did not need any formal voting to unite around their intellectual center. The faultless logic of Lenin’s works, more powerful than the logic of Euclidean geometry, could not lead scrupulous readers astray, especially if readers set themselves one goal, as Karl Marx taught, “to figure out what is the matter”. Only those denied this who were interested in the very process of confrontation with the genius and in the satisfaction of their ambitions, but not in the ultimate result of the struggle. Ignorance, megalomania, cult of a leader among the market intelligentsia influenced by the feudal reality of tsarist Russia, provoked this type of people to “dissent”. They were not able to think constructively, therefore they could just deny the expediency of Lenin’s strategy and make proposals on tactical issues, opposite of those that Lenin worked out.
Thus, when the bourgeois-democratic revolution was transforming into the socialist revolution, they demanded refusal of decisive actions. During the struggle for the necessary Peace of Brest-Litovsk guaranteeing survival to the power of the Soviets, they, on the contrary, demanded the most reckless struggle to save the “revolutionary face”.
Only the correct organization of the party education system will not let the loss of a real authoritative leader tragically affect the content of the political strategy. After all, it is not about one approved educational program or one rector, but these are the objective truths that need to be studied and creatively developed. Dialectic materialists know that these objective truths are the center of attraction for all party activists.
Leaders of today’s protest movements, for example, in Russia, literally buy their leadership position in the real protest movement. Having money, from foreign sponsors in particular, they pay for the rally time, in advance defining themselves as organizers of the protests and the main propagandists. Certainly, this scheme does not consider any suggestions of the masses. The masses are at the mercy of such guides because most people used to get the ready truths from the “leaders”.
But according to dialectics the truth is not a statement, which is relatively true at the given time, for example, “The party is our vanguard”. But the truth is the level of understanding by each party member the essence of the problem, for example: “The party is our vanguard when not only the leaders, but the whole party constantly and uncompromisingly works on the real growth of the QUALITY of its ranks”. In other words, the centralizing power of Marxism is its ABILITY to bring up assertions to the level of absolute truths. The method of dialectical materialism allows the party not to rely on the past truths, turning it into dogmas, but to adapt the current policy to the concrete, contradictory realities of the present time.
Figuratively speaking, there is no truth in social science except for DEVELOPING Marxism, and only by mastering this truth the party becomes its prophet.
The core of the class system of education is the principle of corrupted administrative centralism, when the organizers of the education system watch precisely so that the knowledge of the students does not go beyond the religious dogmas and professional cretinism of the UNIVERSITY PROGRAM. In this system, professors are highly paid supervisors, and the student’s professional training is measured by the professor’s SUBJECTIVE evaluation, i.e. the size of the bribe.
The longer a student is not allowed to study the real current problems, the more education turns into formalism.
The old system of party education in the CPSU also had a cult of professors with a degree, and any educational program got through subjective professorial perception and his examination grades. Therefore, in the new conditions, when the majority of graduated communists proved their incompetence and betrayal, the education and self-education of the party activists must be based on the local and central party organizations, scientific research institutions and mass propaganda and agitation bodies, i.e. to be in indissoluble unity with the REAL scientifically-understood PRACTICE.
Of course, the specific character of scientific personnel training allows, and sometimes involves, a narrow specialization of workers in some branches of knowledge and professions. But often it is not determined by the principles of effective pedagogy and the needs of communist practice, but by the limited talents of many people whose intellectual abilities were formed in the conditions of the market Bologna process of education, pop “art” and early use of tobacco, alcohol and drugs.
However, narrow specialization is not permissible in the system of party education, because objective dialectics requires a system, complex and multiple-factor approach at any level of reality.
History has proved many times that encyclopedic education is possible, and that this level of education is the most effective. The diamatic theory of universal education aims to achieve this level by the whole physiologically healthy part of the population.
It is clear that a good specialist in the grammar of the ancient Egyptian language will take little by the knowledge of Capital, Volume I. Although reading of Capital can help any narrow specialist to have meaningful life and not to become a scum. It is impossible to make someone master diamatics perfectly if he does not want to. But there is no need to make these specialists join the party, which authority must be based on the competence of its activists in social science, but not on the popularity. A communist must convince them that it is necessary to culturally develop themselves and all young people, to make their contribution to the physical and aesthetic development of the oncoming generation, but not to entertain the oligarchs at private parties.
The better the communists master diamatics and apply it to understand complicated current problems, the less they have to influence people through the use of politics and force.
Practice constantly proves that the power of scientific enlightenment is the most constructive, creative and victorious. And vice versa, ignorance is the most destructive force capable of destroying Bolshevism from within.
The primary difficulty in preparing a communist, and moreover the communist leader, is that a communist does not have the right to be either a philosopher or an economist or an expert only in the field of “scientific communism”. Strictly speaking, a person only with the higher physico-mathematical education has not a ghost of a chance to become a communist. There is nothing in “calculus”, “strength of materials” and Einstein’s theory that would prevent a person from developing into a scum, like, for example, Berezovsky or Yeltsin did. Moreover, today, like never before, mathematics and physics serve the sordid, cannibalistic appetites of most oligarchs and their graduated servants.
Therefore, or a man tries to master all parts of Marxism, or he is not a communist. Moreover, if a party member does not understand that his economic and political literacy should be based on diamatic literacy, he has no chance at all to become a communist.
The collapse of the CPSU became possible because there was not a single true Marxist in the ranks of the party leadership of the Gorbachev period, as well as in the whole system of higher party education. The party philosophers in the CPSU, as well as their present-day market colleagues, did not understand anything either in diamatics or in economy. Party economists did not know diamatics at all. And the “scientific communists” did not know anything profound and concrete, except for several cut and distorted quotations of the classics.
Those, who really studied the biography of the classics of Marxism, know that their formation as acknowledged leaders of the proletariat and the advanced intelligentsia took place under INSEPARABLE unity of their theoretical encyclopedic self-education, literary and organizational practice in spite of the difficulties made by the gendarmes, the bourgeoisie, the democrats and the opportunists.
The complex scientific and political growth of a party candidate is a necessary requirement of the party cadre policy. Figuratively speaking, if a candidate does not aim to master the theory of Marxism, there is no genuine desire to become a communist.
An individual who wants to be in the ranks of the communists, but who does not persevere in SELF-education and SELF-improvement, who cannot find his place in political practice, in organizational work, he must realize his professional impropriety to function as an activist of the Communist Party, and party organizations must expel mentally lazy, non-inventive, passive members who claim leadership.
At least, the CPSU for the last two decades of its existence, was full of idlers and mercantile careerists. Precisely because of the ideological weakness, after August 23, 1991 almost the entire CPSU went home, joined democratic parties, and many CPSU leaders turned into national-democratic leaders. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, Aliev, Snegur, Kravchuk, being the presidents pursued a reactionary, often obviously fascist policy, and thereby revealed their true face, their ignorance of the theory of Marxism. It was once again proved that there is no pure consciousness. Human consciousness, if it is unscientific, then it is aggressively reactionary.
Therefore, the main duty of a party member and one of the key criterion for his stay in the party is his attitude to personal self-education. The criteria of an activist ability to fulfill his program duties are the qualitative and quantitative results of his participation in propaganda and agitation work and successes in involving citizens in the political life of the country and the party. If such criterion was used in the CPSU, Yeltsin would never become a member of the Young Communist League, and, especially, a member of the party.
The problems of building communism is the main direction of all scientific work in the party. Therefore, a party member may be considered as a mature activist if his scientific and theoretic level is high enough, i.e. if he is able to construct logical models, which, on the basis of objective and subjective conditions, help to accelerate the dying away of market rudiments and to develop the communist relations.
The organizational work of the party is just the implementation of the scientific theory, and the scientific theory has primacy in political practice, so the tactical steps related to temporary departures from the strategic line, should be analyzed by all party activists before the decision of the central organ of the party. No discussion on such decision of the central organ shall be permitted. All suggestions on improving the realization of the taken decision in specific regional and local conditions should not contradict the general line of the party, should be considered and approved by the party organizations at the regional and local levels with immediate reporting to the central organ on the found solutions.
Science-based centralism requires, firstly, the science-based action strategy, secondly, the members with scientific approach, whose competence is confirmed by the practice; thirdly, the system of recruiting the central organ members according to the results of their scientific, theoretical, propaganda and organizational work.
Strictly speaking, the Leninist and Stalinist period in the party leadership had consistent victories precisely because of the supremacy of science-based centralism and the reasonable restriction of democracy, which, firstly, helped to solve the problems extremely quickly, and secondly, to neutralize the opportunists, to reduce the number of their representatives in the directing bodies and to minimize demagogy in the party policy.
As the opponents of Lenin and Stalin said, during their leadership the party activists worried about how to fulfill strategic decisions of the leaders rather than what to do. And it was not a matter of restrictions or “arm twisting”, but the QUALITY of Lenin’s and Stalin’s genius decisions, which made it possible to gain the victory over the opportunists at the stage of approving these strategic decisions by the congress of the party.
It would be even faster if in the Party Rules the congress had not a legislative but an informational role, if the scientific and theoretical level of cadres allowed them to resist the attack of opportunism at the local level. But every year it was necessary to assemble the party activists at the congresses in order to fight against the idiotic attacks and provocations of the opportunists for a few days, and by the method of democratic voting to force the opportunists to carry out the decisions of the congress. Unfortunately, the party rarely used the practice of excluding dissenters. It is quite obvious that if the opportunist opposition was sure in the scientific character of their strategy, they would create their own party, win the confidence of the working class and lead them. The fact that the opposition has never left the party clearly proves the conviction of the opportunists in their total lack of talent and their ability to exist only by parasitism.
Therefore, in the PSC, any person convinced of the existence of an alternative line of propaganda and agitation, tactics and strategy, should immediately get an unlimited opportunity for self-expression and organizational actions, but outside the PSC.
Valery Podguzov, Proriv
https://prorivists.org/eng_source-of-opportunism/
The Bolsheviks needed democracy only at the first stage of the party creation, for the involvement in the movement, for the FORMAL discipline of the party members, who at that time belonged to the exploited masses, and had petty-bourgeois values. If not, yesterday’s agricultural laborers and middle peasants would not turn into kulaks [bourgeois peasants], and yesterday’s proletarians, turning into trade union leaders, would not sell out to their masters and fascists. But intellectuals, peasants and proletarians have dual nature. Industrial proletarians are characterized by this duality and double-dealing in a less degree than the proletarians of mental labor and peasants.
But on the days when these lines were written, the miners of the Kemerovo region asked Medvedev… to increase their working day from six to eight hours. It shows how primitive the brains of today’s miners are. They do not even understand that now the owners of the mines will fire 30% of their comrades, increase a little the wages of the rest workers, transferring the wages of the dismissed to the mines owners profit. Of course, this is the most disgraceful moment in the history of the world working-class movement, but the consequences of this folly will thoroughly clear the brains of the fired miners, who have recently believed that there is nothing more important than beer after work.
It feels especially ashamed for these wage slaves of the 21st century, because at the end of the 18th century and at the end of the 19th century, workers demanded from the capitalists, firstly, to reduce the working day and, secondly, to increase wages under a shorter working day. They wanted to live. They knew the price of free time. Today it seems to the workers that they can earn, sacrificing their priceless health and life.
Few of them now understand that if socialism in the USSR was not destroyed by miners’ strikes in 1990, today the whole population of the country would have free accommodation, and the working day in all sectors would be no more than 4 hours a day, with a two-month paid vacation, with, figuratively speaking, the same wages, with free education, medicine, free public transport, children’s pre-school institutions, sanatoriums, tourist camps, without terrorism, religious obscurantism, nationalism, fascism and organized crime.
But the proletariat without a real Communist Party, becomes a self-destructive force. Only the history of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is enough to disprove the view of the proletariat as an self-developing revolutionary force, especially a communist one. The proletarians throughout Europe produced weapons against the USSR, the proletarians furiously walked over their own dead bodies on the way to Moscow, stormed Stalingrad, shot and hanged partisans. Considering that the proletariat is revolutionary by default means to understand nothing in The Communist Manifesto, which quite definitely states that the proletariat is just the EXPLOITED class, i.e. the class, which mostly does not understand that it is exploited, and moreover it is happy to be exploited. These proletarians stand in long lines at the employment exchange and, if they have not found themselves in the lists of dismissed workers, look down on all other losers. The proletariat is the most revolutionary class of market society only because all other classes of capitalist society are either absolutely REACTION, or petty-bourgeois, or passive, indifferent to everything that happens.
Without its vanguard, without a party of scientific world outlook, the proletarians of mental and physical labor are not able to free themselves from exploitation, which is brilliantly proved by the many hundred years experience of the proletarian movement in the developed market countries. But this would not be so terrible if the proletarians did not take the most active part and were not the main victims of world and colonial wars, did not just blindly execute the will of the fascists and militarists in the insane race of nuclear weapons.
Only people with the scientific world outlook can unwaveringly carry out only one line, due to finding it really scientific and not due blind faith in the Program.
After formation of the Communist Party, or the Party of the Scientific World Outlook, the degree of its development can be defined not by the growth of its members, but by the decrease of democracy in the PARTY and by the increase of science-based CENTRALISM.
Seems like it is enough to look at the experience of Gorbachevism to draw a final conclusion about how much the inner fool in the party, or a supporter of democracy in the Communist Party, is more dangerous than an external enemy. Does appeal to the masses of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, or their “consultations with the people”, show their great intelligence? Of course, you can call them democrats, but intelligent and, moreover, educated — you cannot.
Can we call a person a chief designer, if he tries to find out by a democratic vote among the employees of the drafting department, which brand of steel should be used to create a nuclear reactor?
Can we call smart presidents and prime ministers, who privatize state-owned factories under the slogan: “Entrepreneurs are smarter than we are”?
If these statesmen do not know how to manage the economy of the country, then how can they run the country? But there are still people who do not understand that the whole “system” of the authorities under market democracy exists only to make the demos obey big capital, no matter how “smart” the oligarchs are. At least this is how it works in all developed democratic market countries. The oligarchs “rule” the entire economy as they want, and the police pacifies the unemployed and robbed depositors according to scientifically developed program of the demos pacifying, using the most advanced technology and techniques and the democratic government spares no expense on it.
Thus, if we do not hesitate to answer the question, why the Communists League, the First and Second Internationals, the CPSU, all the communist parties of the CMEA countries collapsed, why the CPRF and the RCWP are also close to this, then we must admit that only such communist organizations can collapse, which has no communists among its leaders, i.e. those who know perfectly the methods of scientific world understanding. Strictly speaking, the historical practice of China and North Korea showed that under certain historical conditions, even one really competent communist is enough for the entire country to implement the really Communist Party program.
When the CPSU collapsed, it turned out that republican organizations did not have the educated communists. There were only some heroes, strong and inflexible internationalists such as Anpilov, Shenin, Burokevičius. There is an interesting theorist on the problems of world development, Jermalavicius. But there are no scientists who have answered scientifically the critical question of our time about the cause of the collapse of the CPSU and other parties of the CMEA countries so that at least one “post-CPSU” organization with a communist name could be like a Bolshevik one. As a result, on the wreckage of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR, their clones emerged: the RCWP, then the CPRF and several other very small communist parties with their leaders. The history of all these parties decay has proved that they did not and do not have a single person who, under conditions of a high, for the bourgeois country, degree of freedom of speech, could persuade the proletariat, at least in anything. Everyone are plunged into the parliamentary infighting and collecting signatures. Some of these party members showed firmness of character, fidelity to principles, good memory for some quotations, but not the ability to think and act in a Leninist way.
If the members of these parties continue to be too lazy to learn methodology, it is clear that there is no communist perspective on the territory of the former USSR in the next five years.
The gradual expulsion of real communists from the Internationals, all communist parties and editorial boards, is the result of religious trust in democratic centralism.
Then, naturally, the question arises. If democratic centralism is an instrument of seizing the party leadership by opportunists, then how to build a party on the principles of science-based centralism?
The saddest thing is that there is hardly a theorist in the modern communist movement, who studied the examples of applying the principle of science-based centralism in the history of the CPSU, or described in detail the mechanism of applying the principle of science-based centralism in building the Communist Party, where opportunism cannot exist in spite of all the efforts.
What should be the Party of Science-based Centralism?
The analysis of the collapse of all Internationals and most of the parties with communist names leads to the indisputable conclusion about a discrepancy between the rules of these parties and the essence of the working-class party. In other words, the method of forming the political organizations of the proletariat did not fully correspond to the unique tasks to be solved. Therefore, it was easier for parties to overthrow fundamentally rotten regimes than to create a new economic form of society.
It is quite obvious that since Marxism-Leninism has not been disproved theoretically and is confirmed by victorious practice on all “fronts” of the USSR of the Stalin period, the following collapse of the CPSU can be explained only by the contradiction between the objective law of the correspondence of the party cadres to the priority of strategic tasks and imperfect principles of party building. These imperfect principles increase the number of fools and anti-communists in the governing bodies of the party, and as a result, turn the party of the dictatorship of the working class into a counter-revolutionary organization.
Each new stage of qualitative transformation of society demanded from party members higher level of intellectual training, but the system of party education and recruitment, deformed by democratic centralism, lagged further and further behind the needs of the epoch.
The collapse of all parties with communist names shows the inadequacy of the standard formulations used by the candidates for the party to demonstrate their readiness to be a communist: “I accept and commit myself to carry out the Party Program and the Party Rules”, or “I want to be in the forefront of the builders of communism”.
Admission to the Communist Party is not a legal act and not a marriage contract. The communist activity is not a matter of desire. The communist activity must bring scientific and theoretical competence in social practice and, first of all, in the political activity of the proletariat. The communist activity in current conditions is like the activities of those volcanologists who know exactly where, when, why and what will happen, try to inform people, but they think, almost like at Fukushima, that they are safe from the political tsunami in the form of, for example, World War III.
Therefore, the text of an application for admission to the party of a new type should be essentially different: “I have mastered the theory of Marxism-Leninism and have creatively practiced it in the ideological and political form of the class struggle. The publications are attached. I take an active part in… trade union’s activity”.
These are competent members, who differ the Communist Party from any other type of a party. Communist work in any conditions can be conducted only by competent people, who are able to understand the essence of objectively determined goals, who realize the NECESSITY of observing party discipline dictated not by obstinacy, not by fear of responsibility, not by personal career interests, but by scientific understanding of the cause-effect relationship, ignoring of which leads the party and the whole of society from mistakes to tragedy.
The discipline of a communist is a form of the most uncompromising following the requirements of SCIENCE-based NECESSITY. Strength of the organization, coordination of actions are possible only under domination of the scientific consciousness among the vanguard participants of the political process. Candidates who join the party with the phrase “I accept and commit myself to carry out the Party Program and the Party Rules” must remain candidates until their publications and practical work with proletarians reach the necessary scientific level and obvious results.
However, during the Civil War in Russia and in Stalin’s period, the standard form of application for admission to the party corresponded to the sincere attitude of most joining members, proved their readiness for self-sacrifice and unquestioning observance of the party discipline, since the stay in the party for a long time did not promise any material benefits, and sometimes even threatened their life. But even in those days, using the procedure of democratic centralism, adventurers and careerists, even enemies of the working people, joined the party for power and sabotage, that was confirmed by memoirs of Yakovlev, the last secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on ideology.
While the Bolshevik Party was led by Lenin and Stalin, their competence was sufficient to ensure the expected results by the unquestioning obedience to all the decisions of the party. Even the Trotskyites, due to the instinct of self-preservation, sometimes had to obey the party decisions. However, when there had already been no geniuses in the party leadership, it turned out that the moral and psychological readiness of incompetent party members was not enough to rebut the opportunists and neutralize their subversive plans. The “collective party mind” could not compensate for the personal illiteracy of democratically elected under-educated leaders. Many people still do not understand the absurdity of the phrases: “an ordinary member of the Communist Party” or “a true Bolshevik with bad knowledge of Marxism”.
Seems like the difference between “a communist” and “a party member” is insignificant, but in fact there is a gap between the party membership goals of a competent person and an illiterate careerist. Consciousness of an illiterate party member cannot contain any significant social goals, especially goals related to the building of communism. On the basis of political ignorance only petty-bourgeois consciousness can develop. That was democratic centralism that guaranteed to such party members vast majority in the leadership of the party.
Many members of the party have understood literally the Engels’s idea that since communism has become a science, it must be studied. That’s all. This task was fulfilled strictly by the CPSU members. They obediently memorized and repeated citations almost all their life, without thinking about what it means to master completely the science of communism. Their greatest achievement was saying the necessary quotations of the classics at appropriate times, but more often at inappropriate ones and with distortion of the meaning. In this matter almost the entire membership of the Central Committee did not notice that they were in fact the Bernsteinians: no one cared for the process of party study or the final result. Periodic examinations concerned only the matters of the lectures timetable, the presence of a poster and the text of the lecture prepared by an educator. Already under Brezhnev, the examiners did not realize that the educator should DEEPLY understand the material, but not read it as a sexton. It was easier for the examiners to find out that there was no summary or that a lecturer was late than to catch his conscious distortion of the root of the matter.
The educators in social sciences were paid per hour, but not per mental workload.
That was the lack of understanding of the scientific depths of the program tasks by the leading workers of the party, their overestimation of their readiness to put into practice scientific truths, the primitive method of working with young people to prepare them for the party membership, the absurd system of training cadres for law enforcement agencies, the Marxist underdevelopment of most Soviet poets, novelists and publicists, all of it gradually led to full theoretical and political degradation of the CPSU, its system of propaganda and agitation.
When representatives of the artistic intelligentsia and “great” actors gather on Russian TV to tell each other vulgar anecdotes, they honestly admit that at school they were non-achievers and did not understand anything in Marxism, also because they never studied it in their student years. And they think it is very funny.
The overwhelming majority of writers, screenwriters, directors by their world outlook turned out to be ordinary philistines, unable to rise above bedroom scenes, but they presented their triviality, artistic mediocrity, as purposeful dissidence. The problem of building truly free society of humanists was too complicated for these “social engineers”. The spiritual deafness of most Russian intellectuals of that period, their undying philistinism are well shown in the novel Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak.
Taking all this into account, today’s young people who want to devote their life to the struggle for building a truly progressive, humanized, scientifically organized society, i.e. those who want to join the Party of Science-based Centralism (the PSC), must join its primary organizations at the place of residence or work in order to become real party activists and to develop personal scientific, theoretical and organizational level. The period of being a candidate member should not be limited to a formal time frame, but should be entirely determined by the real progress of a person in the theory of dialectical materialism, by the necessary propagandist and agitator skills, by the results and scope of his work in the party mass media.
Certainly, if a candidate does not have progress in his practical explanatory work with the proletarians of mental and physical labor, if he does not feel up to study the theory and to be a successful propagandist of scientific knowledge and a political organizer among proletarians, then there is no reason to admit him to the party.
Of course, with genuine desire to win over parasitism one can always participate in this struggle ACCORDING TO HIS POSSIBILITIES, without joining the party. But, in any case, the SELF-CRITICAL attitude to the OWN scientific potential, the proved right to work in the ranks of the party as an organizer and leader, must be the standard of behavior of each leftist.
The collapse of the CPSU and the Young Communist League proved that the party membership cannot depend on any formal democratic arguments, norms and recommendations. A young man must be acknowledged by the party organization due to his attitude toward the matter.
There are people who will say that this approach will antagonize a huge number of people. And we reply that competent, proven, and therefore a reliable headquarters is more attractive for normal people than any party card, which offer exciting possibilities for a formal party career. People who are satisfied only with the party membership and parliamentary illusions are good with the CPRF. Today everyone is accepted there, that is why the CPRF has already experienced more splits than the RSDLP, since many CPRF members are more interested in today’s State Duma career than in tomorrow’s communism. Most likely, for the leadership of the CPRF communism is not interesting at all.
A person, who is afraid of the difficulties in mastering the communist theory, who avoids real propaganda work among proletarians, will find something easier than scientifically organized struggle. At least Lenin wrote that it is much better when ten men, who work, do not call themselves communists, than one talker, who calls himself a communist. It is hard to disagree with Engels, who said that it is better if the enemies accuse the communists of cowardice than if the proletarians consider the communists to be fools. This is one of the reasons why the proletarians sometimes prefer to follow Putin, not Zyuganov.
But the success in the struggle for a happy life depends on the number of ACTIVE participants in this process. It is the objective fact and the law of history. Therefore, Marxism is not about the accomplishment of a revolution only by the forces of one party, even the most NUMEROUS one. Marxism is not about the substitution of the proletarian class by the party, but about the educational and organizational work of the party to rouse the proletarian masses for their creative, conscious, active participation in the qualitative development of society. And keeping the content of propaganda and agitation at high level requires improvement of scientific and theoretical level of every party agitator and propagandist.
In brief, the party successes in enlightenment and organization of the masses are directly proportional to the QUALITY of the party ranks, and not to the number of passionate, but illiterate, members.
It may be said that the RSDLP was created in other way. Yes, the RSDLP was formed at the time of history, when, on the one hand, the activity of the proletarians in the economic struggle increased all over the world, which also happens today, and on the other hand, there were some individuals who saw themselves as established leaders. They all had exiles and penal servitude behind them, so they naturally had a wish to unite in the party all ready, tested by prison, practical revolutionaries, in spite of the “insignificant”, as it seemed then, differences in their theoretical views on the most important problems of practice. For a long time there was a hope that the formal principle of democratic centralism, i.e. the majority rule, will cope with the theoretical disagreement. But realization of this principle only sharpened contradictions between the “branches” of the party, making opportunists eager for revenge and reversal of the party policy after each their defeat. The RSDLP experienced several big splits just because the majority of the congresses was captured by opportunists.
In these situations, the Leninists, or the science-based centralists, had to organizationally separate from the conscious opportunists and in such a way to implement the only scientific, brilliant Leninist policy in the proletarian masses.
Today’s practice of the Communist Party building is complicated by the fact that in the communist movement of the world there are practically no authoritative and mature Marxist theorists, acknowledged by the proletarians of mental and physical labor. Therefore, a new generation of party builders will face a difficult and intensive struggle to solve this problem.
The creation of a new Communist Party in the present conditions is fraught with joining of young people who have learned only one meaningless slogan — “We want changes”, but they absolutely do not know the laws of objective conditions for that changes.
But this lesson did not teach anyone, even the members of the former CPSU. Since the very establishment, for example, of the RCWP, all attempts to organize serious party studies and the party press were not supported by the leadership of the party, and in this way twenty years were lost. In the RCWP, as soon as someone young appeared, he was immediately elected to all governing bodies, appointed to the leadership of the RCYL or to the presidium and, eventually, this “young person” degenerated.
Unfortunately, there are no cases in the history of pedagogy, except for Marx, when a young man by the age of 18 have already learned at least the foundations of the dialectics of Hegel, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, have read and mastered four volumes of Capital, have written at least one serious work, updating the positions formulated by the classics of Marxism a century earlier, and have felt deeply the problems and tragedies of social being that make a person an uncompromising, persistent and consistent fighter against the deadly vices of capitalism.
One can advise to admit a young person to the party in advance, on the basis of his activity, and then teach him.
But, Proriv prefers to work in the reverse order. Learn from the party without joining, understand properly your own motives, test yourself in practice and, if you do not change your mind at the age of 23, then join. At least Lenin, already at the age of 23, wrote and published mature scientific works, was widely acknowledged as a scientist, and only after that, at the age of 28, he joined the party with the clearly formulated principles of Bolshevism.
There are good examples to follow, and it is mean to join the party without hard work on self-education in the way that Lenin did.
Therefore, the PSC will not create separate youth organizations (based on the age criteria). Proriv sees the solution of the problem in the development of a party-oriented educational process, mainly virtual one, with using modern information technologies. As Karl Marx said, the best education is self-education. Lenin taught that without an independent work, universities can give nothing. Therefore, the ultimate success entirely depends on the degree of perseverance and constancy in the fulfillment of the main party duty of a young man: to master the science of victory in the political struggle.
When the entire primary organization of the left-wing youth consists of persons under 23 years old, such organization can be considered as an organization of the PSC supporters, but nothing more. The regional organization of the PSC coordinates the activities of the PSC youth organizations in the region. The evaluation criterion for the work quality of such primary youth organizations is not the number of conducted actions, not the number of arrests by the police, but the growth of the quality of propaganda materials and the growth of the number of experts in communist science.
As the experience of the RCWP and the CPRF showed, all attempts of the modern left-wing youth to create united youth organizations were objectively in vain, in spite of the highly-developed means of communication. The gap in today’s young people knowledge of social science, intense rivalry, the lack of the real authority of youth “leaders” among the young people, all this led these initiatives to failure.
The absurdity of the RCWP and the CPRF youth “policy” is that the leadership of these parties was engaged in “Sisyphean labor”: they created centralized independent youth organizations that played the role of a political sandbox for future opportunists and careerists.
While Stalin leaded the CPSU, and the Young Communist League had just an executive role, there were no big political problems. But, after the party was headed by people who were not literate enough, and therefore, unauthoritative, especially Gorbachev, the Young Communist League became a kind of for-profit organization. The Young Communist League expectedly dissolved itself before the party did.
It can be said without exaggeration that, the CPSU did not find the more productive form of youth organization, and by creating a centralized youth organization, paradoxically, used the Trotskyite type of organizing youth in the USSR. Strictly speaking, the party influenced the young communists through the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. It is characteristic that the main destroyers of communism, Andropov, Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin, came to the party through the leadership of the Young Communist League. But it is well known that if a young man is addicted to careerism and cynicism, then his re-education, according to the laws of pedagogy, is the most thankless task.
The complete collapse of the CPSU proved how harmful the creation of centralized all-Union and republican organizations of the Young Communist League type was. But this experiment, like any other experiment, is an option of usual optimistic tragedy, that teaches those who are able and want to learn. It is a pity that no one drew attention at the time to a detailed warning about the futility of creating centralized republican youth organizations of communist orientation, about the negative aspects of this project described in the full version of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered. But the novelty of the tasks solved by the communists in the 1920s posed unprecedented challenges for pedagogical science and the whole party. It was necessary and possible to experiment. However, in the future, the theory and practice of Makarenko were not only unappreciated by the majority of party members, but also were consciously “oppressed” by pedological careerists, most of whom were direct enemies of communism. As a result, the Young Communist League became not a school of communist education, but an incubator of Trotskyism and degeneration of the youth, the source of many undereducated party careerists, cynics and deserters. For many ordinary members of the Young Communist League among the working youth, this period of their lives remained in memory as a romantic and honest, heroic and creative period of their youth, their Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Factory, Stalingrad, virgin soil, the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
The Young Communist League, at times, was a school of courage, but did not become a school of political maturity.
The collapse of the CPSU also proved the absolute impropriety of the centralized University system of teaching Marxism, based on the principles close to the educational systems of class societies. Successful and effective education of communist activists depends on the close COORDINATION of theoretical studies and practical activities, self-education and self-improvement in the process of fighting for the actual tasks of real party politics.
As shown by the age-old practice, students who have the potential to master philosophical and social problematics, they by themselves come to the necessity of a thoughtful, intense study of the objective laws of the social development. But most of the today’s students, who are deformed by tests and motivated only by the mercantile side of education, should be prepared to fulfill consciously their civic duties primarily on the basis of feature and documentary films, because, on average, the modern youth culture of reading tends to decline. But some feature films made in the USSR are still able to play the role of a social alarm clock.
It may seem strange that a science-based centralist criticizes centralism in the system of the party education and the youth movement. After all, everyone knows that in civilized countries all social sciences are taught by professors, according to the approved programs. How can we reject the centuries-old experience of the best universities in developed capitalist countries?
Only those who do not understand dialectical materialism, can offer to use the experience and methodology of bourgeois universities for the communists education. The fact is that the system of high education of class society is opposite to the real education, that is transfer of scientific knowledge and improvement of thinking level.
The process of intellectual growth needs not the premises of teaching, or officially approved programs and professors, but the real educator with constantly developing knowledge and skills, who is able to know and understand what has not yet been learned by a young man on the basis of his own life experience.
The role of such a teacher must play the Central Organ of the party, which includes people who have perfectly mastered the communist science and systematically test their knowledge in practice.
It is enough to take into account the experience of self-education of the first Bolshevist leaders to draw the correct conclusion about what the system of the new Bolsheviks education should be. Nevertheless, this did not happen. Lenin and his comrades became an icon for worship, but not for mass practice of their experience.
Why did the CPSU collapse? First of all, because after Stalin the theoretical work in the party degraded, and during the perestroika, the magazine Communist (the theoretical organ of the CPSU Central Committee), was empty and very far from the scientific point of view. And it could not be otherwise, since the magazine was headed by the “developed socialist” Richard Kosolapov, and the editor of the economic department of this magazine was the outspoken anti-communist Yegor Gaidar, who turned out to be a heavy drinker. In August 1991, there were no Bolsheviks in the CPSU who could lead at least anyone.
In short, never confuse formal and real centralisms.
For example, the first religious universities in Europe had highly-developed freedom and autonomy from secular feudal lords, but at the same time, they also had highly-developed centralism in everything related to the content of teaching. The students learned, first of all, what the professors gave them. And only those became the professors who had outstanding knowledge of the Bible. Only few names of the first university professors remained in history, but Copernicus and Galileo made their marks on the world by their deep and substantiated centric systems of the universe and world understanding. Darwin remained in the history of science not because he had a degree, but because he had the highest scientific conscience and therefore became the center of attraction of all thinking people.
Therefore formal democratism and real science-based centralism are the diamatic contradictions that transformed the system of the higher spiritual “education” of the Middle Ages to the higher secular education where scientific truths gradually supplanted other motives of the universities existence. But the market relations of capitalism did not allow to destroy the influence of profit on the official professorship.
Certainly, the lowest level of corruption in the university system was during Stalin’s period of the USSR history. However, mercantilism in the higher education system was not completely liquidated even in that brilliant period. Marxism is not an ideology, but a science. The bourgeois ideology tries to doubt scientific base of Marxism and to impose on a philistine the thesis that Marxism is also just an ideology, like any social concept that existed before it, like any religion. Today, many great scientists of the Stalin era are accused of their secret religiosity, which they skillfully hid from the party committees. This is, for the most part, true, because, firstly, these scientists were formed in the era when praying did not seem like savagery, and secondly, very narrow education does not necessary lead to scientific world understanding. Very often there is a situation when a proton expert, or a virtuoso, who has proved Poincarй conjecture, solves all other crucial problems at the level of a teenager.
It is obvious that improvement of the system of young people education requires a reduction of formalism and the monopoly of science in its complex form. Young people should be united on the basis of the scientific truths they have learned, on a practical functional basis, but not according to the numerical principles of building an organization. And, the earlier, the better.
The trouble was that, even in the USSR, especially after Khrushchev’s election as the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, the work on narrow specialists education at the local level was formal. As a result, even in the space and aviation industries, developed in the USSR from non-existence to the record world height thanks to communist Stalin, even in these industries between general designers and party members often there was not a competition of communists for the victory over imperialism in these branches of science and technology, but a personal petty-bourgeois, vindictive rivalry. Conceit and mercantilism gradually became a visiting card of most representatives of the scientific, technical and artistic intelligentsia.
The narrowly focused specialist became just a formal superior who had the legal right to manage, without paying attention to the level of understanding by workers the socio-historical meaning of their labor. Labor from affair of honor, valor and glory, with the help of Khrushchev, again turned into means of getting an individual wage.
It was during the time of Khrushchev when the philistinism began to revive among the intelligentsia, it was forgotten that the communist level of competence and comradeship, in contrast to competition, excludes administrative formalism, let coordinate actions and fulfill duties of the participants proportionally and optimally, really help each other, in time and constructively respond to the initiative, work towards a common goal. It is a must for competent communists.
People who have adapted to cannibal market democracy, to competition through contract killings, to mutual undisguised hatred, they, of course, cannot take delight in true brotherhood and equality. The communists find these people deeply psychically defective. Most things that make an everyday life happy are not available for them in the same way as color perception is not available for the color-blind person.
What should the system of party education be?
As you know, the Bolshevik wing of the party was formed under the influence of the first issues of the newspaper Iskra and the first five books of Lenin. The most consistent and developed minds of Russia rallied around this diamatic wealth. The real revolutionaries did not need any formal voting to unite around their intellectual center. The faultless logic of Lenin’s works, more powerful than the logic of Euclidean geometry, could not lead scrupulous readers astray, especially if readers set themselves one goal, as Karl Marx taught, “to figure out what is the matter”. Only those denied this who were interested in the very process of confrontation with the genius and in the satisfaction of their ambitions, but not in the ultimate result of the struggle. Ignorance, megalomania, cult of a leader among the market intelligentsia influenced by the feudal reality of tsarist Russia, provoked this type of people to “dissent”. They were not able to think constructively, therefore they could just deny the expediency of Lenin’s strategy and make proposals on tactical issues, opposite of those that Lenin worked out.
Thus, when the bourgeois-democratic revolution was transforming into the socialist revolution, they demanded refusal of decisive actions. During the struggle for the necessary Peace of Brest-Litovsk guaranteeing survival to the power of the Soviets, they, on the contrary, demanded the most reckless struggle to save the “revolutionary face”.
Only the correct organization of the party education system will not let the loss of a real authoritative leader tragically affect the content of the political strategy. After all, it is not about one approved educational program or one rector, but these are the objective truths that need to be studied and creatively developed. Dialectic materialists know that these objective truths are the center of attraction for all party activists.
Leaders of today’s protest movements, for example, in Russia, literally buy their leadership position in the real protest movement. Having money, from foreign sponsors in particular, they pay for the rally time, in advance defining themselves as organizers of the protests and the main propagandists. Certainly, this scheme does not consider any suggestions of the masses. The masses are at the mercy of such guides because most people used to get the ready truths from the “leaders”.
But according to dialectics the truth is not a statement, which is relatively true at the given time, for example, “The party is our vanguard”. But the truth is the level of understanding by each party member the essence of the problem, for example: “The party is our vanguard when not only the leaders, but the whole party constantly and uncompromisingly works on the real growth of the QUALITY of its ranks”. In other words, the centralizing power of Marxism is its ABILITY to bring up assertions to the level of absolute truths. The method of dialectical materialism allows the party not to rely on the past truths, turning it into dogmas, but to adapt the current policy to the concrete, contradictory realities of the present time.
Figuratively speaking, there is no truth in social science except for DEVELOPING Marxism, and only by mastering this truth the party becomes its prophet.
The core of the class system of education is the principle of corrupted administrative centralism, when the organizers of the education system watch precisely so that the knowledge of the students does not go beyond the religious dogmas and professional cretinism of the UNIVERSITY PROGRAM. In this system, professors are highly paid supervisors, and the student’s professional training is measured by the professor’s SUBJECTIVE evaluation, i.e. the size of the bribe.
The longer a student is not allowed to study the real current problems, the more education turns into formalism.
The old system of party education in the CPSU also had a cult of professors with a degree, and any educational program got through subjective professorial perception and his examination grades. Therefore, in the new conditions, when the majority of graduated communists proved their incompetence and betrayal, the education and self-education of the party activists must be based on the local and central party organizations, scientific research institutions and mass propaganda and agitation bodies, i.e. to be in indissoluble unity with the REAL scientifically-understood PRACTICE.
Of course, the specific character of scientific personnel training allows, and sometimes involves, a narrow specialization of workers in some branches of knowledge and professions. But often it is not determined by the principles of effective pedagogy and the needs of communist practice, but by the limited talents of many people whose intellectual abilities were formed in the conditions of the market Bologna process of education, pop “art” and early use of tobacco, alcohol and drugs.
However, narrow specialization is not permissible in the system of party education, because objective dialectics requires a system, complex and multiple-factor approach at any level of reality.
History has proved many times that encyclopedic education is possible, and that this level of education is the most effective. The diamatic theory of universal education aims to achieve this level by the whole physiologically healthy part of the population.
It is clear that a good specialist in the grammar of the ancient Egyptian language will take little by the knowledge of Capital, Volume I. Although reading of Capital can help any narrow specialist to have meaningful life and not to become a scum. It is impossible to make someone master diamatics perfectly if he does not want to. But there is no need to make these specialists join the party, which authority must be based on the competence of its activists in social science, but not on the popularity. A communist must convince them that it is necessary to culturally develop themselves and all young people, to make their contribution to the physical and aesthetic development of the oncoming generation, but not to entertain the oligarchs at private parties.
The better the communists master diamatics and apply it to understand complicated current problems, the less they have to influence people through the use of politics and force.
Practice constantly proves that the power of scientific enlightenment is the most constructive, creative and victorious. And vice versa, ignorance is the most destructive force capable of destroying Bolshevism from within.
The primary difficulty in preparing a communist, and moreover the communist leader, is that a communist does not have the right to be either a philosopher or an economist or an expert only in the field of “scientific communism”. Strictly speaking, a person only with the higher physico-mathematical education has not a ghost of a chance to become a communist. There is nothing in “calculus”, “strength of materials” and Einstein’s theory that would prevent a person from developing into a scum, like, for example, Berezovsky or Yeltsin did. Moreover, today, like never before, mathematics and physics serve the sordid, cannibalistic appetites of most oligarchs and their graduated servants.
Therefore, or a man tries to master all parts of Marxism, or he is not a communist. Moreover, if a party member does not understand that his economic and political literacy should be based on diamatic literacy, he has no chance at all to become a communist.
The collapse of the CPSU became possible because there was not a single true Marxist in the ranks of the party leadership of the Gorbachev period, as well as in the whole system of higher party education. The party philosophers in the CPSU, as well as their present-day market colleagues, did not understand anything either in diamatics or in economy. Party economists did not know diamatics at all. And the “scientific communists” did not know anything profound and concrete, except for several cut and distorted quotations of the classics.
Those, who really studied the biography of the classics of Marxism, know that their formation as acknowledged leaders of the proletariat and the advanced intelligentsia took place under INSEPARABLE unity of their theoretical encyclopedic self-education, literary and organizational practice in spite of the difficulties made by the gendarmes, the bourgeoisie, the democrats and the opportunists.
The complex scientific and political growth of a party candidate is a necessary requirement of the party cadre policy. Figuratively speaking, if a candidate does not aim to master the theory of Marxism, there is no genuine desire to become a communist.
An individual who wants to be in the ranks of the communists, but who does not persevere in SELF-education and SELF-improvement, who cannot find his place in political practice, in organizational work, he must realize his professional impropriety to function as an activist of the Communist Party, and party organizations must expel mentally lazy, non-inventive, passive members who claim leadership.
At least, the CPSU for the last two decades of its existence, was full of idlers and mercantile careerists. Precisely because of the ideological weakness, after August 23, 1991 almost the entire CPSU went home, joined democratic parties, and many CPSU leaders turned into national-democratic leaders. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, Aliev, Snegur, Kravchuk, being the presidents pursued a reactionary, often obviously fascist policy, and thereby revealed their true face, their ignorance of the theory of Marxism. It was once again proved that there is no pure consciousness. Human consciousness, if it is unscientific, then it is aggressively reactionary.
Therefore, the main duty of a party member and one of the key criterion for his stay in the party is his attitude to personal self-education. The criteria of an activist ability to fulfill his program duties are the qualitative and quantitative results of his participation in propaganda and agitation work and successes in involving citizens in the political life of the country and the party. If such criterion was used in the CPSU, Yeltsin would never become a member of the Young Communist League, and, especially, a member of the party.
The problems of building communism is the main direction of all scientific work in the party. Therefore, a party member may be considered as a mature activist if his scientific and theoretic level is high enough, i.e. if he is able to construct logical models, which, on the basis of objective and subjective conditions, help to accelerate the dying away of market rudiments and to develop the communist relations.
The organizational work of the party is just the implementation of the scientific theory, and the scientific theory has primacy in political practice, so the tactical steps related to temporary departures from the strategic line, should be analyzed by all party activists before the decision of the central organ of the party. No discussion on such decision of the central organ shall be permitted. All suggestions on improving the realization of the taken decision in specific regional and local conditions should not contradict the general line of the party, should be considered and approved by the party organizations at the regional and local levels with immediate reporting to the central organ on the found solutions.
Science-based centralism requires, firstly, the science-based action strategy, secondly, the members with scientific approach, whose competence is confirmed by the practice; thirdly, the system of recruiting the central organ members according to the results of their scientific, theoretical, propaganda and organizational work.
Strictly speaking, the Leninist and Stalinist period in the party leadership had consistent victories precisely because of the supremacy of science-based centralism and the reasonable restriction of democracy, which, firstly, helped to solve the problems extremely quickly, and secondly, to neutralize the opportunists, to reduce the number of their representatives in the directing bodies and to minimize demagogy in the party policy.
As the opponents of Lenin and Stalin said, during their leadership the party activists worried about how to fulfill strategic decisions of the leaders rather than what to do. And it was not a matter of restrictions or “arm twisting”, but the QUALITY of Lenin’s and Stalin’s genius decisions, which made it possible to gain the victory over the opportunists at the stage of approving these strategic decisions by the congress of the party.
It would be even faster if in the Party Rules the congress had not a legislative but an informational role, if the scientific and theoretical level of cadres allowed them to resist the attack of opportunism at the local level. But every year it was necessary to assemble the party activists at the congresses in order to fight against the idiotic attacks and provocations of the opportunists for a few days, and by the method of democratic voting to force the opportunists to carry out the decisions of the congress. Unfortunately, the party rarely used the practice of excluding dissenters. It is quite obvious that if the opportunist opposition was sure in the scientific character of their strategy, they would create their own party, win the confidence of the working class and lead them. The fact that the opposition has never left the party clearly proves the conviction of the opportunists in their total lack of talent and their ability to exist only by parasitism.
Therefore, in the PSC, any person convinced of the existence of an alternative line of propaganda and agitation, tactics and strategy, should immediately get an unlimited opportunity for self-expression and organizational actions, but outside the PSC.
Valery Podguzov, Proriv
https://prorivists.org/eng_source-of-opportunism/