Enver Hoxha
EUROCOMMUNISM IS ANTI-COMMUNISM
As we saw, modern revisionism is expressed in various currents and assumes different appearances according to the concrete political and socio-economic conditions of each country or group of countries. This is the case also with the parties which are now known under the name of Eurocommunist parties. Although they represent. a separate current of modern revisionism, a current which conforms more to the interests of the bourgeosie of the developed capitalist countries, such as the countries of Western Europe, the Italian, French and Spanish revisionist parties also have certain specific features.
Speaking about the third road., which consists of the new strategy of Eurocommunist revisionism, in his report entitled "For Socialism in Peace and Democracy...", delivered at the 15th Congress of the ICP, Berlinguer . gives a rather more complete explanation of what he and his associates mean by this third road. "I'in referring," he says, "to a fortunate expression. .. which we have accepted... We have had the experience of the Second International: the first phase of the struggle of the workers' movement to emerge from, capitalism. . . But this experience... capitulated in the face of the First World War and various kinds of nationalism. "The second phase," continues Berlinguer, "opens with the Russian Revolution of October ... " (E. Berlinguer, For the Socialism in the Peace and the Democracy Throughtout Italy and Europe).
But this, too, according to him should be looked at critically in view of the history and the reality of the Soviet Union, because this experience is not valid, either. And it results that the third phase has begun now with Eurocommunism. The task of the workers' movement in Western Europe, Berlinguer declares, is "to find new roads of advance towards socialism and the construction of socialism" (E. Berlinguer, For the Socialism in the peace and the Democracy Throughtout Italy and Europe).
According to the Italian revisionists, the road to achieve this "society" is "the line laid down by the Republican Constitution to lead Italy to the road of its transformation into a socialist society based on political democracy". (The politics and the organization of the italian communists, Rome 1979). Whereas the French revisionists, who cannot present the De Gaulle Constitution as the basis of their socialism, since not only did they not take part in drafting it, but they also voted against it, do not mention it, although in practice they do not negate it.
The Italian revisionists worked out their idea of achieving "socialism" through the bourgeois Constitution a long time ago. In his speeches, as early as 1944, Togliatti declared that allegedly "the times had changed, the working class had changed and the ways to the seizure of power had also changed. With this he meant that <-(the time of revolutions was over and the time of evolutions had come", that "power cannot be seized except by way of reforms, on the parliamentary road, through votes".
Later, at the meeting of the CC of the Italian Communist Party on June 28, 1956, immediately after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Togliatti said: "we must foresee a socialist advance which takes place precisely on the terrain which the Constitution determines and envisages, which is the terrain of democratic freedoms and progressive social transformations... This Constitution is not yet a socialist Constitution. But since it is an expression of a broad unitary movement of rejuvenation, it differs profoundly from the other bourgeois Constitutions, and represents an effective base for the development of Italian society on the road towards socialism."
That the Italian Constitution differs, for example, from the Constitution of the time of the monarchy and fascism, that a series of democratic principles figure in it, this is understandable, because these principles have been imposed on it by the struggle of the working class and the Italian people against fascism. But the Italian Constitution is not the only one which contains such principles. After the Second World War, the bourgeoisie in all the capitalist countries of Europe tried, to this or that degree, to outflank the working class by giving it certain rights on paper and taking them away in practice.
Those things which the Italian Constitution envisages are formal freedoms and rights which are violated everyday by the bourgeoisie. For example, it envisages a certain restriction of private property. But this has not stopped the FIATs and Montedisons from becoming more and more wealthy and their workers becoming ever more Impoverished. The Constitution envisages the right to work, but this stops neither the capitalist employers, nor their state from throwing about 2 million people out of work. The Constitution guarantees a series of democratic rights but this has not stopped the Italian state, the carabinieri or the police, basing themselves on the rights which the Constitution provides, from acting almost openly to set up that mechanism which is ready for the establishment of a fascist regime. The various fascist commandos, from those of the extreme right to those who call themselves the "Red Brigades" and the terrorists of the Fontana Square, also find their justification in the Italian Constitution.
To think, as the followers of Togliatti do, that the Italian bourgeoisie drafted its well-known Constitution to lead the society towards socialism, is simply absurd. The Italian Constitution, like the other fundamental laws of bourgeois countries, sanctions the undivided political, legislative and executive rule of the bourgeoisie in the country, sanctions the protection of its property and its power to exploit the working masses. It gives a legal basis for the organs of violence to restrict the freedom and democracy of the people, to suppress all and rule over everything. "Beautiful", words such as freedom, equality, fraternity, democracy, justice, etc., may be written in the Constitution for two hundred years, but in practice they will not be realized for another two thousand years, if the capitalist bourgeoisie is not overthrown together with its Constitution and laws.
For the Italian revisionists the existing Constitution is their Bible and the bourgeoisie could not find better advocates to defend it or more zealous propagandists to advertise it. The ardent defence which the Italian revisionists make of the Constitution of their capitalist state shows that they cannot conceive any other social system outside the existing bourgeois society, outside its political, ideological, economic, religious and military institutions. To them socialism and the present-day Italian capitalist state are the same thing. The opportunism in which the leaders of the Italian revisionist party were born and raised, has clouded their eyes and shut off all horizons to them. The Italian revisionists have become the guardians of the capitalist order. They even present this role as a virtue and mention it in their documents. ". ..in these'30 years," say the theses for the 15th Congress of the ICP, " the Communist Party has followed a line of the consistent defence of democratic (read- bourgeois) institutions; a line of the organization and development of democratic life amongst the masses of workers and citizens, a line of struggles for individual and collective freedoms, for observance and the application of the Constitution. The ICP has implemented this policy through continually seeking unity with the ISP', with the other democratic forces, secular and Catholic, and seeking every possible convergence even with Christian Democracy itself, even from the opposition, with the aim of avoiding the damage to the democratic constitutional framework".(The politics and the organization of the italian communists, Rome 1979).
For 35 years on end the Italian bourgeoisie, revisionists, the Church, and so on, have been deceiving the Italian people by telling them that the hard life which they lead, the poverty in which they live, the savage exploitation, corruption, terror, and all the other social evils that characterize Italy are the result of "failure to implement the Constitution consistently". But the situation in Italy has been and still is deplorable, not from failure to implement the Constitution, but because of the system which the Constitution defends. The present situation is the result of the whole development of Italy after the war.
Italy, which suffered the evils of the royal regime of the Savoy dynasty, which experienced the horrors of the fascist regime, which came to know the economic poverty and moral and political degeneration which this regime brought, which suffered the devastation of the Second World War, came out of this war economically ruined and entered a grave political and moral-social crisis which continues to this day.
After the end of the war, Italy was turned into chaos, but also into a circus, in which the role of acrobats and clowns was played by the new hierarchs decked out in the robes of re-constituted parties with "brilliant", titles such as socialist, social-democrat, Christian Democrat, liberal, communist, etc. One posed as the continuer of the party of Gramsci, the other of Don Sturzo, the one of Croce, the other of Mazzini. From a country of silence and closed mouths, which Italy was in the time of fascism, it turned into the country where a deafening clamour is traditional.
If American capital has got one foot in the door in the different countries of Europe, it has both feet firmly planted in Italy. This has occurred because the bourgeoisie of that country is more degenerate, more cosmopolitan, more unpatriotic, and more given to all-round corruption.
The Christian Democrats have always held the reins of Italy in their hands. The other bourgeois parties also want their share in this bargaining, where everything, including Italy itself, is up for sale, wholesale and retail. The innumerable frequent changes of governments are an expression of the struggle for power, of the competition and rivalry between parties. Changes are made, but the Christian Democrat Party always remains the pivot which takes the lion's share. The Christian Democrats have proved to be skilful tight-rope walkers in the formation of ministerial councils, giving their rivals carefully measured rations of authority and leaving the impression that they are and are not the incontestable rulers of the country. In this way they bring on stage sometimes the "centre-left", sometimes the "centre-right", setting up a cabinet sometimes "monotone" in colour, sometimes "two-tone". All these are conjuror's tricks to show that they are allegedly finding a solution to the chaos, poverty, hunger, unemployment, to the terrible all-round crisis the country is in.
At present all sorts of crimes are flourishing in Italy. The new fascism has organized itself in parliamentary parties and possesses countless terrorist squads and groups, which the Italians call the "lambs" of the general secretary of the fascist party, Almirante. The criminal mafia has its claws deeply implanted everywhere, and crime, thefts, murders, kidnappings, have been raised to a modernized industry. No Italian is certain of tomorrow. The army, the carabinieri and the organs of the secret police have become so inflated that the country can hardly breathe. They have been increased allegedly to defend the people and "the democratic order" from the members of the ultraleft and ultra-right brigades. But the truth is that without these organs the big thieves and murderers who occupy the soft seats in parliament or in the staffs of the army, police etc., could not protect themselves. At the same time, Italy is up to its ears in debt while its currency is one of the weakest of all the currencies of the countries of Western Europe. Today it is called the "sick man" of the European Nine. No one trusts this Italy, with this rotten regime it has, this Italy which may take a course dangerous not only for the Italian people but also for its neighbours.
The various Italian governments, not to mention the period of Mussolini fascism, have in general maintained unfriendly stands towards Albania, either openly or in disguise. The treacherous Albanian reaction which fled on board the British ships was gathered together in Italy, was organized and trained by the post-war governments of that country, by the permanent enemy of Albania - the Vatican, as well as by the Anglo-Americans, to operate against the new Albania. In the first years after Liberation, our people had to wage a stern fight against wreckers who landed in our country from Italy. What end they met, is known. However, the end of the others was no better. Some of the fugitive Albanian traitors remained in Italy, the others dispersed to the United States of America, Belgium, Britain, Federal Germany and many other countries where the imperialist espionage services sent them.
Seeing that they could achieve nothing against the new Albania with acts of diversion, the Italian governments began to maintain an "indifferent" political stand towards our country. True, diplomatic relations between the two countries were established, but other relations always remained at a low level. The Italian governments never showed any desire to develop them. No government has ever publicly condemned Mussolini's barbarous acts against Albania. However, these governments did interest themselves in taking the bones of the Italian soldiers killed by our partisans during the National Liberation War from their graves and sent them to Italy to consecrate them as "heroes who had fought for the greatness of Italy", and every year they pay homage to them. Most of the Italian press rarely publishes any positive article about Albania. It has distinguished itself above all the world press for its stand of denigration and misinformation about our country.
The stand of the Italian revisionists has not been and is not any different from this stand of the government leaders and the press of Italy. In 1939, the leaders of the Italian Communist Party stood back and watched the fascist armies which were going to rob a small neighbouring people of their freedom. They did not prove to be even at the level of the Italian socialists, who condemned the imperialism of their country at the time of the war of Vlora in 1920. Even after the war, the main leaders of the Italian Communist Party did not deign to come to Albania, to condemn the crimes of fascism and express their solidarity with the Albanian people who had faced death and destruction and had fought heroically against Italian fascism.
The Italian Communist Party fought and is fighting to eliminate the revolutionary spirit from its members and the Italian proletariat, to foster the idea of class conciliation and wipe out all thought of seizing power from the hands of the capitalists through violence. It is nothing but a social-democratic party like the others, but has been left in opposition and has not been invited to take part in the dance, because it was formerly in the Third International, and because, apparently, the bourgeoisie requires still greater proofs of loyalty from it.
The Italian "democratic" bourgeois state gives billions of lire in subsidies to the Italian Communist Party, as well as to other parliamentary parties. However, the revisionist party also has other large sources of income from trading companies, as well as from various subsidies in the form of commissions. It has its aristocracy and its plebs: the aristocrats are the deputies, senators, chairmen and councillors of municipalities and the permanent functionaries.
The 10th Congress of the Italian Communist Party, which was held in 1962, codified the ideas of Togliatti, his social-democratic line and open departure from Marxism-Leninism. Togliatti was a reformist intellectual and this is what he remained to the end of his life, up till the "Testament of Yalta" in which he re-emphasized his "polycentrism" and pronounced himself in favour of the "pluralism" of parties allegedly to go to socialism, of the "freedom of religion", "freedom of speech", "human rights", etc. This was the road of the socalled Italian socialism.
The 10th Congress presented the "Italian road to socialism" as an original road, as a new development of Marxism, as a superseding of the teachings of the October Revolution and the experience of all the socialist revolutions up to that time. In reality, it was the road of "structural reforms" the revisionist, opportunist road adopted to suit the needs and the situation of Italian monopoly capital.
According to the "theory" of "structural reforms" the transition to socialism will be made through gradual reforms which will be forced from monopoly capital in a peaceful way. These gradual reforms will be made only by means of parliamentarianism, through power of the vote, regardless of the fact that the capitalist monopolies have in their hands the wealth of the country, the weapons, and the running of parliament and the administration. According to the Italian revisionists, the .Kreforms of socio-economic structures" which it is allegedly possible to carry out within the framework of the bourgeois state, "will wipe out exploitation and class inequalities and will make it possible... to gradually overcome the gap between those who rule and those who are ruled, and move towards the complete liberation of man and society " (The politics and the organization of the Italian communists, Rome 1979).
The Italian revisionists have slipped completely into the positions of trade-unionism and social-democracy. They restrict the workers' struggle merely to economic and democratic demands, and think that the consequences of the capitalist order can be avoided while leaving this order intact. However, history has proved this to be utopian, because the consequences cannot be eliminated without eliminating their causes which lie in the capitalist system itself.
Now the Italian revisionist chiefs themselves accept this open transition to the positions of social-democracy, and indeed they even boast that they have been able to take this "historic" step. At the recent congress of the Italian Communist Party, Ingrao, the former chairman of the Italian Parliament and member of the leadership of the party, declared: "We have much to learn from social-democracy." It is true that the leaders of the Italian revisionist party are still young pupils, compared with the old social-democratic professors, in revising Marxism-Leninism and in the struggle against the revolution. However, they can be considered their equals in their unrestrained zeal to serve the bourgeoisie unconditionally and in a servile manner.
The Italian revisionists can preach night and day, can foam and shout in all the squares and pray in all the churches of Italy, but they will never be able to achieve their reformist dreams of the transition to socialism through parliament, the Constitution and the bourgeois state.
The follow-on from Togliatti's line of "structural reforms", has now become the "historic compromise" with the bourgeoisie, proclaimed by Berlinguer. This slogan, with which the Italian revisionist leadership is now comforting itself, was launched precisely at the time when the Italian capitalist bourgeois state was in a very deep crisis. Through the "historic compromise" the Italian Communist Party offered Christian Democracy, the representative of big capital and the top clerical hierarchy, its co-operation in order to get out of this situation and rescue this state.
Berlinguer's "historic compromise" is the continuation of the old orientations of the Italian Communist Party which immediately after the war sought participation in the bourgeois state, and unification with the socialists of Nenni. It is the continuation of its notorious flirtation with the then chairman of the Christian Democrats, Alcide de Gasperi, it is the hand of friendship of Togliatti-Longo offered to the Catholics. Berlinguer turned this orientation from a tactic into a strategy. The "historic compromise". proposed by the Italian Communist Party is the old liberal policy which has always fitted Italy "comme un gant" like a glove (French in the original).
Berlinguer's "historic compromise" was an effort and a hope born under the influence of events in Chile. When the Italian revisionists saw that the socialist Allende was unable to remain in office without the co-operation of the Christian Democratic Party of Frey, they thought that they, too, could neither come to power nor remain in office without the support and collaboration of the Christian Democrats. Fear of the establishment of fascism with the aid of American imperialism led them to major retreats and concessions in principle and practice, to abandoning even that slightly independent position which they had maintained until that time, when they thought they could win the parliamentary majority and govern jointly with a left coalition. Since that time, in order to avoid the events of Chile in Italy, they accepted to play the secondary and subsidiary role in a coalition, no longer of the left, but of the right, together with the Christian Democrats.
When the Italian Communist Party launched the slogan of the "historic compromise" Italy gave the impression that it was being transformed into a powerful industrialized country. At this period, not only to reaction, but also to the Italian "communists" themselves, the -"historic compromise" seemed like a long-term "strategy". However, the crisis came and fascism was revived, became threatening; the bombs began to burst, people were murdered and disappeared. The "historic compromise" began to become more immediate and to seem "reasonable" even to a part of the bourgeoisie and some Christian Democrats. Aldo Moro was a representative of this current, but he was liquidated, because the Christian Democrats were not and are not yet ready to enter this compromise, regardless of the losses they have suffered in elections.
In the present crisis situation, the Christian Democrats have found some ways and forms of co-ordinating activities with the "communists" on certain questions, at the trade-union level and the party level, but still they are afraid of even an Italian Communist Party "à l'eau de rose".
Will Italian monopoly capital accept the hand which the Italian Communist Party is offering it? It wants the revisionists to support the government in parliament, to vote for its program and laws, to come into the "parliamentary majority", into the "government majority", but not into the government, not into power, not into the centres where political decisions for running the country are taken. The United States of America has expressed its opposition to the presence of the European revisionists in the governments of the NATO member countries. The Italian bourgeoisie is carrying out this order of its patrons.
Whenever parliamentary elections are held the Italian Communist Party is faced with a great dilemma. It does not know how to act in case it wins a greater number of votes than the Christian Democrats. Berlinguer, frightened, adheres to the formula that in any case a broad government should be formed of an the parties of the "democratic arch", which would carry out some reforms, of course, in a "pluralist democracy", and Italy would not leave NATO.
Why does Berlinguer hold out this prospect? Because this is the revisionist line of the Italian Communist Party, which is afraid to. accept the responsibility in the face of the crisis and bankruptcy of the bourgeois system which cannot be cured with reforms. On the other hand, the Italian Communist Party is afraid of the masses of the workers and working people of Italy, who if this party should win, will demand not cooperation with the employers, but the seizure of power. The Italian Communist Party does not want this situation and will never permit it. But neither does the American and the Italian monopoly bourgeoisie want it, and they will do everything in their power to avoid such a situation.
An anti- historic compromise might be made in the beginning if the Italian Communist Party wins on the votes, but this compromise- will be ephemeral, just to calm public opinion, until the screws can be tightened. Capital never hands over its weapons, if they are not taken from it by force. The Italian Communist Party is not of those parties which go into revolution. It is not, and never has been, for the establishment of a Socialist society in Italy, either today, tomorrow, or ever.
Togliatti and his Italian acolytes long ago carried out the theoretical elaboration of the "roads" to the "new socialist society" which the Eurocommunists advocate. At present, however, it is the French revisionists who are making megalomaniacal "philosophical" speeches, who are trying to make up for lost time and emerge as the banner-bearers of Eurocommunism, as those who interpret and state its laws. This role they have undertaken makes them ridiculous and exposes them even more in the eyes of the working class of their own country and the working people of the whole world. Georges Marchais has become a zealous follower of the theories of Roger Garaudy, who made the law ideologically in the French Communist Party in the time of Thorez and who was expelled from that party later. Garaudy strove to "prove" that in the developed capitalist countries the proletariat allegedly no longer exists, that it has been put on the same level as the working people of the administration, the engineers and technicians who according to Garaudy, are all equally exploited. Now Georges Marchais has taken over this theory as his own and has carried it even further. According to him, everyone, not only the working class, not only all the working people, but even the bourgeoisie, and indeed the army and police, are allegedly for the "socialism" which he preaches. In his discourses he says repeatedly, "We want to advance to socialism, but we are hindered by just 25 families, which comprise the strength of capital in France." "How is it possible that we, all this force, should not be able to have our say and overcome this caste which remains in power?" wonders Marchais. And he provides his own answer, that to advance to socialism France requires only economic and political reforms. He deals with the question of overthrowing capital as something which can be easily achieved, just with a few words, by puffing out one's cheeks and blowing it over. Whatever else it may be, the road which the French revisionists advocate can be anything but it has nothing at all to do with the genuine road to socialism.
Marchais compares and equates the present representatives of state power in France with the French aristocracy before the time of the triumph of the bourgeoisie, two centuries ago, and refers to its leaders as "these princes who govern us". However, the French revisionists are not even in the positions of those people who carried out the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. It is known that this revolution cut off the heads of the king and the queen, and of all those "princes" who governed France at that time. The progressive bourgeoisie of that period, which overthrew the monarchy and feudalism, did not stop at that, but carried the revolution further by cutting the heads of all the leaders of the reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie which were emerging: the Feuillants, the Vergniauds and Dantons. This revolution reached its culmination in the dictatorship of the Jacobins led by Robespierre whom bourgeois reaction sent to the guillotine.
Marchais describes Prince Ponyatowski, Giscard d'Estaign's former minister of the interior, as a Versaillese. However, he forgets the Commune of Paris which fought with arms against Thiers and the Versaillese. "The Communards stormed the heaven," said Marx, while Marchais, with his revisionist theories, wages against the Ponyatowskis "1a guerre en dentelles". (French in the original)
The leaders of the French revisionist party try to explain "the underlying reasons- for the decline of France. The theses for the 23rd Congress of the French Communist Party say: "Since 1976, inflation practically stands at a high level; unemployment has increased about 30 per cent; the buying power of the working people has declined; economic growth has ceased.. . Austerity, unemployment and the super-exploitation of the working people are accompanied with an increase in the capitalists' profits.. . In France, which has a multi-branched industrial economy, whole branches, such as iron-steel, shipbuilding, machine building, textile, footwear, etc., are being ruined today. The number of workers employed in industry has fallen by more than 500,000." These things about the situation in France are known. The problem is not to observe the grave situation of the economy and the workers in France, but how to change this situation.
Marx did not restrict himself merely to making his diagnosis of capitalist society, but also defined the road to overthrow it. The modern revisionists have abandoned this scientific road and only prattle to deceive the party and the working class that they are allegedly concerned about its situation.
The French revisionists also speak about the grave crisis which the capitalist world is experiencing today. "The present crisis of the capitalist countries is an international crisis," says Georges Marchais, "it is in the final analysis a crisis of the system of exploitation, domination and plunder of the workers and the peoples." Very good, but how does he intend to utilize this key moment, which not only France, but the whole world is experiencing? With what kind of struggle? With class struggle, or with discourses? Does he hope that with his speeches he will liquidate the French monopoly bourgeoisie which oppresses the proletariat and working people of France with all that army and police force which Marchais thinks he has on his side? No, he indulges in demagogy which is meant, on the one hand, for the "gallery" and on the other, to tranquilize the employers.
Such revisionists base themselves on the pseudo-theories which they have concocted themselves, according to which the situation has now allegedly matured to the point that there is no longer any need for the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to build the new socialist society. Now, according to them, every class in society, indeed every individual, thinks as a socialist. For them, socialism has become so deeply implanted in the consciousness of man that it has become part and parcel of his consciousness. The Resolution adopted by the 23rd Congress of the French Communist Party says, "Socialism. is already being realized, and moreover, being realized in a great diversity of forms." (Cahiers du communisme, June-July, 1979, p.371)
The purpose of these pseudo-theories is to tell the workers that what Lenin did through revolution and bloodshed has now been achieved, moreover under the savage oppression of capital, without revolution and without violence.
The revisionist leaders of the French Communist Party are trying to convince the workers that in the existing society of France, Europe and the world, man has managed to understand that industrial society is no longer a society based on capitalist profit. This is an utterly false theory, because monopoly capital which prevails in this society demands not merely profits, but maximum profits. Georges Marchais also speaks about the export of capital, but he does not say that this export is a means of barbarous exploitation, not only of the workers of the metropolises, but also of the workers of the backward or developing countries. Today the export of capital has become a fundamental feature of neo-colonialism. Georges Marchais goes so far as to claim that in the existing situation, mimperialism is obliged to seek new international solutions which correspond to the needs of the peoples.. How humanitarian this imperialism has become that acts according to the needs of the peoples! However, imperialism remains imperialism and dees not change with the words and analyses of sophists. By preaching such stuff the French Eurocommunist revisionists are simply assisting imperialism by prettifying it, by spreading and nurturing the illusion that it desires to remake a new world.
In a long tirade, at the 22nd Congress of the FCP, Marchais goes so far as to say that the accusation of allegedly wanting to eliminate the wealthy, levelled against the French revisionists, is without foundation. Considering it a slander, he declares openly that they want private property to exist, want the middle bourgeoisie to exist with all its property and want the landed peasantry to exist; that they want only to nationalize all the common state assets and to have all these administered by the people. Social-democracy also defends these capitalist structures which Marchais defends. In this instance he has the right to be angry with those who accuse him of not being one hundred per cent loyal to the bourgeoisie like his social-democratic brothers.
At the beginning of 1979, Georges Marchais wrote: "We want a social democracy, an economic democracy, a political democracy, and we wish to go further, to a radical transformation of social relations so that we can make it possible for the French people to live in a democratic selfadministrative socialism." "L'Humanité"
Thus, Marchais emerges as a follower of Tito who has implemented in Yugoslavia precisely the anarcho-syndicalist theories of Proudhon and Bakunin on "worker self-administration", which Marx and later Lenin sternly condemned. Now Georges Marchais, under the cloak of "creative" Marxism but never "deigning" to use any of the statements of the great teachers of Marxism, does not dare to defend the anti-Marxist views of Proudhon openly and say that he is his disciple. However, in demanding "self-administration", he simply is changing the terms while he carries on the petty-bourgeois theory of Proudhon.
The leaders of the French Communist Party speak a great deal about wages and raise the problem of the reformist struggle for raising them. The buying power of the workers and their families must be increased by giving more to those who get the least, they say. The measures to minimize the inequalities in incomes as well as in bonuses must be increased. The range of wage differentials must be reduced by raising the lower wages. The revisionists raise these problems because at the present time increased pay is a universal demand of the masses.
Georges Marchais asks in amazement how the phenomenon can exist that workers and the elderly do not have the possibility to live properly, do not have the right to speak on the radio and television.
They must win all these things, he says. "My Party has fought and is fighting to increase wages, to reduce taxes, to ensure that parliament will no longer be as it is at present, with intolerable conditions imposed on its functioning and its prerogatives restricted," says he. While restricting the struggle of the working class simply to day-to-day demands, the French revisionists neglect the teachings of Marx who has explained that in a disguised way, wages hide the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists who appropriate a part of the labour, precisely the unpaid labour of the workers, which creates surplus value for the capitalist. They deliberately say nothing about the idea of Marx who says that the solution to the problem does not lie in raising wages, or in equalizing them, as Proudhon, that classic reformist, believed. Marx said that to restrict the struggle of the working class merely to wages was nothing but an attempt to prolong the existence of wage slavery. The final elimination of the exploitation of wage labourers, says Marx, is the only correct and radical solution to the problem.
The French revisionists leave in obscurity Marx's theory about the social character of production and the capitalist, private character of the means of production in capitalism and the relations of production between classes. They deliberately do not mention the fact that these questions involve the interests of different classes which are constantly in struggle with one another to alter the character of ownership. They deal with these problems in general terms, simply as economic questions, just as the theoreticians of economism did. Their "theory" is not the theory of Marx, but the theory. of deviators who came after Marx. Marchais reduces the mission and the struggle of the proletariat to a struggle for economic rights and not for the overthrow of the power of capital. In the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" Marx issued the call: "Workers of all countries, unite!" But why? To carry out the revolution. While Marchais says: Workers, peasants, bourgeois, police, soldiers and officers, unite. .. to carry reforms! The notion "proletariat" is considered by the French revisionists to be a romantic notion about which to create poetry.
Instead of fighting to ensure that the proletariat is in the forefront of the revolution and in close alliance with the working people of town and countryside, the French revisionists try to unite it in "another historic bloc", in a "union of the left", as the French revisionists call their collaboration with the bourgeois parties, or in the "historic compromise", as the Italian revisionists call such a thing.
The French revisionists promote this theory on alliances on the basis of their view that in the present-day capitalist order, the workers everyday "see that the conditions of life are improving" and that "the proletariat, in the true meaning of the term, is disappearing". This is the thesis of the revisionist Garaudy whom the French revisionists keep outside the party in vain. Whether he is inside or outside it, it is all the same so long as the revisionist leaders of the French Communist Party agree that the bourgeois parties should join them in the dance in order to go to socialism. That is where Garaudy and company vegetate, too. The French revisionist leadership criticized and expelled Garaudy from the party, not proceeding from principled positions, but because he came out prematurely with and raised the banner of "the new line", something which according to rank, was up to Marchais and other leaders more senior than he. This leadership is acting in the same way today with Ellenstein and Althuser who want to proceed more quickly on the revisionist road. However, there is no doubt at all that the leadership of the French Communist Party will quickly come to terms and unite, not only with Garaudy and Ellenstein, but also With Mitterrand, Rocard and all the social-democrats. Whether they will pass first through a "union of the left", a "Joint program" or through some other form is of no importance. Since they have the same views and aims, everything else will come about automatically.
The revisionists in general and the French ones in particular in their theories are opposed to the management of the economy by the state in socialism. Marchais says: "We are fighting today against authoritarianism and suffocating centralism... On the contrary, we want the state enterprises to be autonomous in their administration. . . we want the working people - the workers, the clerks, the engineers and the cadres to take part more and more actively in this administration. We also want the communes, districts and regions to become real centres for decision making and democratic administration."- (Le socialisme pour la France, Paris 1976, pp. 84-85).
These views of revisionists in the French Communist Party are totally in accord with the line of Yugoslav "self-administration" and the federalism of Proudhon who said, "there should be only an industrial democracy, a positive anarchy. Whoever speaks of freedom speaks of federalism, or says nothing, whoever speaks of republic, speaks of federalism, or says nothing, whoever speaks of socialism, speaks of federalism, or says nothing." Hence for Proudhon, the federal principle is applied in the economy and in politics. Perhaps Georges Marchais does not describe these questions in the terms which Proudhon used, but when he speaks of his "democratic socialism- he says, -We want a fine society, with justice, freedom, etc.-, and asks whether it is reasonable that the workers should be suppressed for these simple aspirations and that these aspirations should remain only a dream.
Proudhon demanded democracy and freedom, and according to him, these could be won very easily, could be taken from the hands of the capitalists without any trouble. Marchais does not restrict himself merely to this, but stresses that the workers in bourgeois democracy had greater freedom two hundred years ago, they took part in the affairs of the state and the factories, and finally, he is "indignant" that they do not have these freedoms today. However, he goes no further than indignation. And Marchais goes no further, because he does not want to do battle with the capitalists but wants to co-exist with them in peace. All this is like a fairy tale for the "gogos" [the innocent].
Marchais preaches that even in the conditions of the existence of the capitalist order, by means of reforms it can be brought about that the proletariat takes part in the management of the economy. He dreams and says that within this order there can be a social democracy in which all the workers, without exception, can benefit from wealth, that there can be a political democracy in which every citizen can control, manage, and truly be in the leadership, in other words "self-administration". Is this not completely the theory of Proudhon?
In connection with the democratic socialismhe advocates, Marchais also deals with the question of property and the planned running of the economy. He divides property in this society into state and private Property, but the property which he leaves to private owners is colossal. With this he wants to tell the ruling bourgeoisie, don't accuse us French revisionists in vain, because we respect private property, we are not for the for proletarian revolution, we are no longer for "raisind the fist", but for "holding out the hand of friendship". Marchais speaks about municipal, departmental, regional property. He does not use Proudhon's term "federalism", but it amounts to the same thing. When Marchais says, we fight against authoritarianism and suffocating centralism, he implies the struggle against democratic centralism, contrary to the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. And he stresses, we must build up the plan in a democratic way, ensuring that not only the workers and other working people, but also those who have property will take part.
Marchais knows that the planning of the economy is not a method which can be applied in any social system depending on the good will of those who are in the leadership of the country. Unified central planning becomes possible only where complete social ownership has been established over the means of production, and this is characteristic only of socialism. Private property, in whatever form, has not submitted and never will submit to centralized planning. These are objective truths and they cannot change just because this would please Marchais and other Eurocommunist "theoreticians".
Modern revisionism, not only in France but in all capitalist-revisionist countries, is also attacking Marxism-Leninism in the field of literature and the arts, because it wants to use them as means to poison the minds of people and make them degenerate. The revisionist writers, poets and artists have taken the road of bourgeois degeneration. Today it is difficult to distinguish an Aragon from a Beauvoir and an André Stil from a Sagan. This is not referring to a similarity in style and form, but to an identity in the content and purpose of their works which are inspired by anti-Marxist philosophical trends, in order to emerge on the same course, to fight the revolution, to tame the spirits, to make them "dead spirits", equally degenerate.
All the revisionist "theoretieians" advocate the thesis that Marx and Engels allegedly gave very little attention, if any at all, to aesthetics. The .aesthetes of the French Communist Party go even further. They try to "prove" that Marx was allegedly not interested at all in art or did not understand it. Contrary to the facts, they allege that Marx "was unable to understand what it was that gave art an everlasting value irrespective of the historical moments, and was unable to understand how Greek art, linked with the infrastructure of that time, continues to arouse emotions". Such a distortion of Marx is not done without a purpose.
On the one hand, they want to create the impression that there is no Marxist opinion about art and that allegedly the revisionists are elaborating this, and, on the other hand, they are trying to deny the class character of art and to start discussion about whether art "is part of the superstructure or the structure, whether or not it is an ideology, whether or not it is linked with the class and the revolution, to what degree and to what point", etc.
A series of "theoreticians" of the French Communist Party have had different opinions about literature and art at different periods, and this has brought about confusion and chaos in the ranks of the party and its militants and vacillations in the creative literary and artistic work of communist writers and artists. At one period, the French Communist Party fought for that creative work which was based on the people's art, on revolutionary art, and later, on socialist realism. At a later stage anti-Marxist trends penetrated the creative work of communist artists.
With its decadent art, the bourgeoisie exerted an influence not only on the rank-and-file members of the communist party, but also on the cadres engaged in agitation and propaganda. Influengped by this art, these elements propounded theories, gave distorted and incorrect interpreatiols of Lenin, who pointed out that the revolution creates its own art and that the communists do not reject the progressive heritage of the people from the past. These individuals also interpreted in bourgeois and revisionist ways the statements of Lenin, Stalin and Zhdanov, that in socialist society the writers and artists should be free in their creative work, should have personal initiative, but always be realist and create works which truly serve the revolution and socialism.
Certain pseudo-Marxist aesthetes went so far as to defend the thesis that Lenin had allegedly advocated absolute freedom in creative work, The anti-Marxist philosopher Garaudy proclaimed "unlimited realism". Others defend the thesis that when ideology and the party prevail in literature and art, there is no freedom and therefore, no creative work.
What else could one expect in the field of aesthetics, when such people as Andr6 Gide, Malraux or Paul Nizan had influence in the French Communist Party and posed as communists. Together with Aragon, they took part in the First Congress of the Soviet writers in Moscow, but in the end betrayed and became open anti-communists. Such "theoreticians" in France, inside and outside the Communist Party, could have no idea of the value of art based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. The purpose of these elements was to separate art and literature from politics and ideology, of course, from proletarian politics and the Marxist ideology. They struggled to clear the way for the spread of bourgeois ideology and politics, for the development of decadent art, psychoanalist, sexual, crime and pornographic novels, so that the markets, book-shops, show-cases, theatres and cinemas would be filled with such works.
Let us take Picasso. He was a member of the French Communist Party till he died, but he never became a Marxist. This is reflected in his works, while the French Communist Party boasted of him and the only criticism which they made of him was for a scrawl which was called "Portrait of Stalin", and which his friend and comrade Aragon published in the newspaper "Les lettres françaises" of which he was director.
Socialist realism was not supported by th-French Communist Party strongly and with conviction. Some of the writers, philosophers and critics who were party members, such as Marguerite Daras and Claude Roys, deserted. After Khrushchev's slanders against Stalin, the French Communist Party was shaken and such intellectuals were the first to capitulate. It launched the slogan of "complete freedom in art and culture", and such former defenders of socialist realism as Aragon, André Stil, and André Wurmser not only changed their coats but even sold their souls and their hides to revisionism. Thus the French pseudo-communist literary figures began to fall in love with the Lukacses, the Kafkas and the Sartres. Critical discussions began throughout the whole party on the platform which the bourgeoisie desired, such as, "what is the relation between literature and ideology?", "what form should be accepted in art, 'sectarianism in interpretation' or 'opportunist eclecticism'?". Speaking as an "authority", Roland Leroys pronounced the conclusion that, "there cannot be a specific form of proletarian art or art which is completely revolutionary".
Wallowing in opportunism and revisionism, the French Communist Party allowed these antirevolutionary theses to ooze like stagnant waters and become predominant amongst its creative artists.
As a conclusion, we can say that the line of the French Communist Party in literature and art has had its ups and downs. But it has always been wobbly. Its vacillation has been caused by its "orthodoxy" in the preservation of principles, on the one hand, and by the direct and indirect influence of bourgeois ideology in literature and art amongst its intellectuals, on the other hand.
In general, the intellectuals who worked in the field of artistic creativeness have played a role more negative than positive for the French Communist Party. Irrespective of their class origin, they completed their schooling and sought "fame". The party never influenced and guided them with the proletarian ideology and culture. To these intellectuals of the party it was their free, subjective, individual, creative work, and never the true interests of the proletariat and the revolution, that. was important. These elements lived and worked far removed from the working class and isolated from it. For them, the class was the "economy", while the intellectuals were the "godhead" that had to guide the "economic factor". The intellectuals of the French party had been raised and inspired in the Bohemia of Montparnasse, in "closerie des Lilas" "Pavillon de Flore", "Bateau-Lavoir" and in other clubs in which all kinds of decadent trends came together, trends from which emerged the Aragons, the Picassos, the Elsa Triolets and many other friends of the Lazareffs, the Tristan Zaras, the dadaists, cubists, and a thousand and one decadent schools of literature and art. This tradition and this road continued uninterruptedly within the French Communist Party, until it arrived at its 22nd Congress at which the revisionist Georges Marchais flaunted all the anti-Marxist corruption which had long been festering in the French Communist Party.
At this congress, the French revisionists came out officially against the leading role of the party of the working class in the field of art and against the method of socialist realism. Undef the pretext of the struggle against "uniformity" they claimed that socialist culture should be open to all currents, to all kinds of experiments and creations.
In the book which contains his report to the 22nd Congress, the pseudo-Marxist Georges Marchais published a poem by Aragon taken from his book "Elsa's Madman". Elsa was Aragon's wife. Here is what Aragon, a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, says in this verse: "Will there always be fighting and feuds/ Regal behaviour and bowed heads! Children born of mothers unwanted/Wheat destroyed by the locusts?/ Will there always be prisons and torture/ Always massacres in the name of idols (the idols are Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin)/ A mantel of words cast over the corpses/ A gag in the mouth and nailed hands?/ But a day will come with orange colours..." This is Aragon's way of saying that he and his party have abandoned the red colour, communism.
In this way, the French revisionists threw overboard the principles of the immortal theory of Marxism-Leninism. Now their party is floundering in a revisionism which is a mixture of the old utopian theories of Bernstein, Proudhon, Kautsky, and anarchism. Uniting with the ideology of other bourgeois parties, it is fighting to create the idea in France and elsewhere that Marxism has become obsolete, and Eurocommunism must come to the fore instead.
In 1968 the students in Paris clashed with "the forces of law and order" The Trotskyites, Sartre, the theoretician of existentialism, Sirnone de Beauvoir, Cohn-Bendit and others seized on to these clashes to give them an anarchist colour.
And in fact they took place in great disorder. The French Communist Party did not participate. Why did it not participate? Was it that in principle it was opposed to anarchism? I think this is not the reason. The reason is that it did not want to unite with the student youth, which was attacking the De Gaulle government. In fact, it was this movement which forced De Gaulle to hold the referendum, and when he did not win in the way he wanted, he retired to Colombay-Les-Deux-Eglises, where he died.
The French Communist Party stopped the working class from going into action and taking over the leadership of the uprising. The party had the strength to ensure that the flames were spread throughout France, and if not to seize power, at least to shake the power of "princes", or the power of "barons", as they called it at that time. It did not do this, because it was for that road and for those methods which the petty-bourgeois revisionist Georges Marchais advocates.
The French Communist Party has great hopes in a "coalition of the left", which it tried to create with the socialist party of Mitterrand in the elections for the president of France and in the parliamentary elections. The French Communist Party and the French Socialist Party reached a certain agreement, but this was temporary. Not only did they not win in the voting, but after the elections and the triumph of Giscard d'Estaign, it was seen that the love between the communists and the socialists was cooling, and indeed they began to attack one another. Neither the big bourgeoisie, nor its parties, nor even the Socialist Party of Mitterrand will ever want a communist party, even one of an orange colour, such as Aragon describes it, to take part in the government of France. This did not take place with the Popular Front, when Uon Blum was at the head of the Socialist Party, is not taking place today, when Mitterrand is at the head of the Socialist Party, and neither will it take place when someone else emerges at the head of it.
The interests of the French capitalist bourgeoisie and of the two hundred families, which Marchais has reduced to 25 in order to give the impression that today they are dealing with a small reactionary force, are closely linked together to protect their privileges, to protect their great possessions and capital, to increase their profits at the expense of the proletariat and all the working people of France. Of course, the socialists have contradictions with the other parties of the bourgeoisie, but when it comes to the issue that the bourgeois power is threatened by the proletariat, then unity is achieved, not between the communists and the socialists, however, but between the socialists and the bourgeoisie. This is occurring in Italy with the Socialist Party which is uniting with the Christian Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Social-Democratic Party, and is not making a common front even with Togliatti's "communists".
However, assuming for a moment that a cartel of the "left" in France could manage to take Power, for the French communists, even with their orange colour, this would be ephemeral and would change nothing. Why is this? Because this is what happened when De Gaulle, in order to get out of his difficulties, accepted a few communists headed by Thorez in the government, and threw them out again after he had used them as firemen. And when did he do this? He did this at a time when the French Communist Party had emerged from the Second World War with no small authority, as the only party which had fought the occupier consistently. Therefore, Marchais' pretentions that he "is going to take power and build socialism" now, with the Eurocommunist strategy, with the, revisionist ideology of Proudhon and Bernstein, will never be realized. The most that the heads of the French Communist Party might achieve is to; become share-holders in plundering the sweat and' toil of the French proletariat and people, to strengthen the fire brigades of the counter-revolution, but nothing more.
The line of the Spanish revisionists is worthy of special attention, not because these revisionists are different from the Italian and French variety, but because of the special role they have undertaken, as spokesmen and kite-fliers for all revisionists. Carrillo and company speak with the gloves off, speak openly, and whether or not the other revisionists headed by the Soviet revisionists like it, they express the true opinion of modern revisionism. If the Soviet revisionists ,sometimes "criticize" Carrillo, they do this not because of his treacherous revisionist ideas. but because he blurts out the opinions and aims of all -revisionists.
Carrillo is a product of the corrupt bourgeois capitalist society in decay, a product of lumpenintellectuals in the service of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
He has lived in France, and apparently, while there, was profoundly influenced by Sartrist, anarchist, Trotskyite, and all sorts of other corrupt anti-Marxist theories. Now he is developing these theories in the speeches and interviews with which he fills the pages of the bourgeois press, and especially in his much advertised book "Eurocommunism and the State". In this utterly anti-Marxist "work", the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain has summarized and systematized the opportunist theses and views of Togliatti, Berlinguer, Marchais, Khrushchev, Tito and other ,chiefs of modern revisionism. His main aim is to justify his deviation from Marxism-Leninism, to attack the idea of the revolution and socialism, and legitimize revisionism.
Carrillo called his book "Eurocommunism and the State", as a counter to Lenin's famous and brilliant work "The State and Revolution", in which he put forward the strategy of the socialist revolution and the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This megalomaniac, Carrillo, pretends that with a mishmash of phrases gathered from all the renegades from communism, he can knock down one of the mightiest monuments of the Marxist thinking such as "The State and Revolution", which life and revolutionary practice have stamped with the great seal of history, making it immortal.
According to the renegade Carrillo, who propagates the theses of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, the proletariat today is allegedly no longer the most revolutionary class of society which leads the struggle for socialism, but all classes to some extent and, first of all, the intelligentsia, lead this struggle. He claims that in Lenin's time the proletariat was allegedly a backward class, while today, this renegade says, the working class is very advanced and the intelligentsia has grown up alongside it. In other words, he, too, associates himself with the theses of the revisionist philosopher Roger Garaudy. According to Carrillo, the communists must take power today, not through violence, not by destroying the bourgeois power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, but by using other forms, appropriate to the changes which the capitalist system has undergone. Allegedly, present-day bourgeois society contains within itself the kernel of socialism, therefore the proletariat is not the only class interested in the establishment of socialism.
We must understand, says Carrillo, that the capitalist state has changed today, and he goes on to claim that the others do not see this change in the capitalist state, but his mind reveals it. And what it reveals is an imaginary reality on which he proceeds to build up his whole worthless "theory" According to him, the capitalist state has nationalized a series of enterprises which have assumed other forms which differ from those of the old concerns of capitalism or imperialism. The state administers these enterprises more or less correctly, through functionaries who have a bourgeois mentality. Now, according to Carrillo, all that has to be done is to change this mentality and everything will be in order. This bourgeois mentality of the functionaries, says Carrillo, has undergone radical changes, but more must be done to reach the stage at which the bearers of this mentality understand the need for further reforms to advance to socialism.
Carrillo tries "to prove" that the presentday state in the capitalist countries allegedly does not represent the power of the bourgeoisie, its apparatus of violence to protect its property and rule, but is a supra-class power belonging to all classes. Being unable to make black entirely white, lie admits only that there is a certain superiority of the bourgeoisie in this state, which he regards as something left over from the historical conditions in which this state was created, but which now can be set right. But how is this change to be made? How is this superiority to be eliminated and the state of "democratic socialism" to be created? Obviously, according to him, the Leninist theory, which allegedly was valid for the past periods, cannot be applied, because the economic, social and other ,conditions have changed. Now another theory is needed, and Carrillo has it ready.
The ownership of the means of production, he says, is now not only that of the bourgeoisie. Along with it exists state ownership, which Carrillo considers "socialist", cooperativist ownership, etc. The proletariat no longer exists, because it has merged with all the intelligentsia, the office workers, the priests, the judges, the gendarmes, etc. Meanwhile, the capitalists remain a small group of stubborn bourgeois who still cling to the old. In these conditions, according to Carrillo, the institutions of the bourgeois superstructure must be democratized through reforms and education, and this process has already commenced. Thus the only task left for the communists to carry out is, to accelerate this process.
According to the renegade Carrillo, the conflict between the working masses and the bourgeois state today has radically changed. This conflict is no longer what it was before, because now allegedly the state is an employer which no longer defends the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole, but only of a fraction of it, that fraction which controls the big monopoly groups. Therefore, he says, now the state is no longer in opposition only to the advanced proletarians, but also directly to the broadest social classes and strata, including a big section of the bourgeoisie itself. The element of different classes, which is in opposition to the big financial oligarchy and the employing state, not only can penetrate the state apparatus, he declares, but already has penetrated it. Through this "progressive element" it is possible to take power by means of reforms.
"To confirm" these dreams, Carrillo quotes the example of Italy, where as he says, even the police in Rome vote for the Italian Communist Party. With this he wants to arrive at the conclusion that the forces of compulsion and oppression of the capitalist bourgeoisie have undergone changes also. True, he says, they frequently act according to the desire of capital, but they do this allegedly contrary to their conscious will, because, when the occasion arises to express this consciousness without exposure to the capitalist state, they act in opposition to the will of this state.
The position is similar in regard to the law courts. The courts, says Carrillo, naturally carry out the laws of the bourgeoisie, but there too, the consciousness of the courts has begun to undergo a metamorphosis.
He deals with the problem of religion and the church in the same spirit. The church, he says, has changed and is no longer that dogmatic church of the past. Today the clergy themselves are for amendment of the dogmas, are no longer opposed to science but in favour of it. This being the case, they are in favour of a life entirely different from that which the Bible and the Vatican formerly preached, and the Vatican has allegedly made anevolution towards a more progressive and human society, towards a society in which there will bea greater and more complete democracy.
According to Carrillo, even the church makes. its contribution to the social transformations towards socialism! Basing himself on this fantasy, he arrives at the conclusion that the top clerical hierarchy, without as yet going so far as to accept socialism and Marxism, has allegedly begun to, raise doubts about the possibilities of capitalism as a Way to solve the problems for the future. He declares that he takes his hat off to the clergysince they have made an evolution in their dogmas, therefore the Eurocommunists must reject their own "dogmas", i.e., Marxism-Leninism, in order to be more "progressive" than the church and the Vatican.
Education, one of the most consistent ideological apparatuses of the bourgeoisie, does not present any problem to Carrillo, because it has just about been transformed already. He claims that education today, while having become available to the masses, has also changed its ideological content.
As to the family, according to Carrillo, it has ,completely changed its way of life and thinking. Present-day children not only do not listen to their parents, but they are opposed to their ideas. Mentally, they are virtually living in socialism already.
In other words, for Carrillo, the whole of capitalist society has been transformed, is no longer that society of the time of Marx and the time of Lenin, is no longer that decayed state of 1917, when the Great October Socialist Revolution overthrew czarism. Carrillo links both the October Revolution in the Soviet Union and the revolutions. which triumphed in other countries with the world wars, thus perpetrating a monstrous slander against genuine revolutionaries, which, according to him, are in favour of war in order to ensure the triumph of the revolution. It is true that by exacerbating -the social contradictions to the maximum, and by .increasing the sufferings of the masses to an unprecedented level, world wars hasten and accelerate the outburst of the revolutions, as the only way to escape wars and the order which gives birth to them. But world wars and local wars are not the cause of social revolutions. The underlying cause of the revolution is the contradictions of the capitalist system itself, especially the conflict between old relations of production and new productive forces, a conflict which can be solved even without being associated with inter-state wars, as history has proved.
Socialism, declares Carrillo, cannot be linked with world war, because such a war in our time would lead to the total destruction of the human society. Thus Carrillo does not fail to make him-self a propagandist of imperialism's atomic black-mail. Following in the footsteps of Khrushchev, he says that it is not necessary to carry out revolutions or liberation wars in the conditions when the atomic bomb exists, because they might become the cause for nuclear wars in which neither side will win. If we speak about a world without weapons, without wars,. says Carrillo, then we must carry this idea ' through to the end. Since we want to build a world without wars, as was said at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, let us work in this direction, not only by demanding disarmament and making speeches in favour of peace, but also by undermining and sabotaging the revolution every-where.
On the other hand, to Carrillo violent revolution is a closed road because allegedly American imperialism will not permit such a thing. Carrillo wants to raise his own petty-bourgeois fear to the level of theory and to transform his capitulation to imperialism and the bourgeoisie into a norm. The threat of intervention to suppress any revolution on the part of imperialism, and not only American imperialism., but the whole of world reaction, has existed for a long time and this is part of the aggressive strategy of the American and other imperialists. However, history has proved that the peoples have risen into revolution, have clashed with the American intervention, and have triumphed. Let us take the Iranian revolution as a recent example. American imperialism used all its threats, but does not dare to intervene directly with arms, because it senses that, faced with the determination of the Iranian people, it will suffer a bigger defeat than that it and the gendarme Shah, whom it had armed to the teeth with the most modern means, suffered.
What is new in Carrillo's sermons is that he has become the spokesman for and champion of the imperialist policy, a spreader of panic and a tool of reaction to sow the seed of demoralization and capitulation among the masses. And whom does he warn that they should fear foreigners? He is addressing the heroic Spanish people, who fought so boldly and valiantly not only against Franco, but also against the armed intervention of Hitler and Mussolini, and against the socialists like Blum, who sabotaged the revolution in Spain, and whose pupil Carrillo has now become.
To Carrillo it seems unnecessary for the bourgeoisie to maintain a large police force and apparatus of oppression. Why does it need this when public opinion does not want such a thing? asks Carrillo. The state power of the financial oligarchy and capital ought to come to terms with the workers, preaches this new Christian priest. According to him, strikes can continue to be held, but should be done in co-ordination with and organized by the employers and the representatives of the workers, that is, by the worker aristocracy. It is very easy, says Carrillo, for the managers to reach agreement with the workers and put aside their arrogance and not impose their dictate.
According to him, this can be achieved simply and without difficulty. But he is reckoning without his host. He is speaking without those who have power and are holding on to it, who have the apparatus of oppression, the propaganda machine, the church, etc., in their hands. They do not swallow these tales of Carrillo's, but they support him so that he will create such concepts and spread them in the ranks of the working class and the strata of working people so that the latter will live with the dreams of Carrillo.
In regard to the army, the problem is quite simple to Carrillo. The present-day army must be transformed on the basis of a democratic policy, he writes in his book. This does not mean to give it another political colour, he says, let it retain the colour it has (i.e., reactionary), but it must never think about military plots, or about a present-day repetition of the history of the 19th century and part of the 20th century. To Carrillo, insurrections and civil wars must be avoided. Likewise to be eliminated is the historical binomial: the oligarchy plus the armed forces equals conservatism and reaction; an identification of the army and civilian society must be achieved, an identification which will allegedly facilitate the advance of the progressive forces towards democracy, a society of equality and justice.
According to him, no pretext must be given for the army to be set in motion by one side or the other, but work must be carried out for a "democratic transformation" of the military mentality, so that the army will understand that war should no longer exist in society, because otherwise it will be suicide. The doors of this army of capital should not be opened only to the cadres of the bourgeoisie, but also to the broad strata of the people, so that the ideology of the masses, the socialist ideology, etc. can penetrate it, and it will no longer be a reserve of the police, but simply a weapon in the service of public order. How this is to be done is another matter. However, Carrillo thinks that, since he preaches it, the bourgeoisie should accept his "wise" council, should peacefully relinquish the main weapon of its power, and one fine day, after it has been convinced that "this is what justice requires", will say to Carrillo, "come and take power, we are withdrawing, lead all of us towards socialism!"
In support of his thesis about the possibility of the democratization of the army and its transformation into an army which serves the people, Carrillo produces a number of arguments which are as naive as they are ridiculous. The French army, he says, was democratized after the war in Algeria, because its regulations were redrafted and new ones were established "which have created a democratic spirit in it". To claim that the French bourgeois army has changed its world outlook and is no longer a weapon in the hands of the big bourgeoisie, but a weapon in the hands of public opinion, is betrayal.
According to this revisionist, the military doctrine and the army itself in the capitalist states are in crisis, because in its ranks, in the ranks of the military cadres there are both hawks and doves. Hence, says Carrillo, we must work in a peaceful way to turn the hawks too, into doves. To this end, Carrillo thinks that the communist parties should have a separate military policy, but should never consider carrying politics into the army. He says that efforts should be made to draw the military theme into the field of the policy of the left, so that it will be a monopoly of neither the right nor the left. According to Carrillo, such a policy on the part of the communist parties would draw the army away from the policy of the right, and the army would go over more to the side of the nation. Thus, both the left and the right together should struggle against and control each other and, in the traditional way, should control the state, too, not the bourgeois state, but Carrillo's state, which .Kis to be created. through reforms.
As a conclusion of these "analyses" of present-day capitalist society and the bourgeois state, Carrillo, who poses as the ideologist and theoretician of Eurocommunism, also builds up his strategy to go over to socialism. The strategy of revolutionaries today, says Carrillo, is not to overthrow the state power of the bourgeoisie, because state power no longer belongs to the bourgeoisie, neither is it to overthrow the bourgeois relations of production, since they have changed already. The only thing which should be done is to gradually transform the existing political and ideological institutions through reforms, in order to bring them intoconformity with the social reality and turn them in favour of the people.
The head of the Spanish revisionists preaches that now it is completely possible to gradually transform the capitalist superstructure into a socialist superstructure, without altering its base.
This is anti-dialectical and contrary to simple logic. However, Carrillo is not interested in science, but in the schemes he has concocted. This is because his aim is not to indicate the solution of problems, but to obscure their solution, to set the proletariat on a wrong road, to lead it up a blind alley and turn it away from the revolution.
As we said, Carrillo has been inspired by all the "theories" of the Khrushchevites, the Trotskyites, Browder and a thousand and one other traitors to the working class. However, he demands that things should be said openly, that the i's should be dotted, in other words, that the revisionists' actions should be unified with capitalism and world imperialism. First of all, allegedly with theoretical arguments, he calls on all the revisionists and pseudo-communists of the world to rise against Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. He distorts and interprets as he pleases Marx's writings on the events of 1848, on the June Uprising in France, on the Paris Commune and goes so far as to admit openly that he is taking his treacherous theses from Trotsky or Kautsky. By mentioning these renegades and notorious and discredited opponents of Marxism, he shows from which stable he comes and where the sources of his "theoretical" discoveries lie.
Total denial of the class struggle is the foundation of all Carrillo's ideas. In his view, all classes are together at the head of the bourgeois state today. But to Carrillo the stratum of intellectuals is everything, is the cleverest, the most knowledgeable, the most capable and the best administrator. If one had said these things in the time when Marx, Engels and Lenin were alive, declares Carrillo himself , they would have called them utopian ideas. Our classics would not just have called these counterrevolutionary ideas utopian, but would have described them as betrayal, just as they described the predecessors of Carrillo as traitors.
Carrillo is a revisionist whose betrayal knows no bounds. All revisionists are traitors, but in one way or another they have tried to disguise their betrayal. They have hesitated to attack Marx, Engels and Lenin so openly as all of them have attacked Stalin.
But Carrillo goes further in his road than Khrushchev and many others. Although he tried, Khrushchev did not dare to publicly rehabilitate Trotsky. By calling Stalin a criminal, by rejecting all the revolutionary trials which were held in the time of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, in practice Khrushchev rehabilitated Kamenev and Zinoviev. He also rehabilitated many other traitors such as Rajk and so on. However, Carrillo was not satisfied with Khrushchev. In his book, he rebukes him as if to say: "When you have rehabilitated all these fine people whom Stalin had shot, when you have betrayed Marx, Engels and Lenin, why have you not rehabilitated your father' Trotsky?" Therefore, Carrillo calls for Trotsky to, be rehabilitated and for a campaign to do justice to the "merits" of Trotsky.
In other words, Carrillo is one of the dirtiest, one of the most bare-faced agents of world capitalism. However, his "theories" will not do capitalism much good because, as Carrillo presents them, they are a real exposure of the pseudo-Marxism of the modern revisionists. On the one hand, Carrillo serves imperialism and world capitalism, because he opposes the revolution, and denies the Marxist-Leninist ideas which inspire the proletariat and the peoples throughout the world, but on the other hand, he tears the mask from theother modern revisionists and exposes them, discloses their true aims to the proletariat and the peoples.
Santiago Carrillo, the General Secretary of' the Communist Party of Spain, is a bastard of' revisionist bastardy. He took all the vilest and most counterrevolutionary things from modern revisionism and made himself the apologist of utter betrayal and capitulation.
Present-day capitalist society, both bourgeois and revisionist, is pregnant with revolution and the revolution always has been and always will be guided only by the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin .and Stalin. All the different ideas which seek to revise our great theory will end up in the rubbish bin of history, just as they have always done. They will be smashed, together with capitalism, imperialism and social-imperialism, by the great power of the world proletariat which leads the revolution and is inspired by the immortal doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.
The tactics and manoeuvres of the Eurocommunists cannot overshadow our great doctrine and they will never get established. Only those who are imbued with the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and remain loyal to it see what dangerous and cunning opportunists they are confronted with in their gigantic struggle for the triumph of the new world, the socialist world, without oppressors, exploiters, war-mongering imperialists and socialimperialists, without revisionists, demagogues and traitors, either old or new.
In France, Italy, Spain and the other capitalist countries, it depends greatly on the proletariat and its Marxist-Leninist parties to ensure that the anti-class, anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist theories of the revisionists are defeated. Without a genuine Marxist-Leninist party to lead the proletariat in class battles and revolution, these anti-Marxist theories which have been spread by the revisionist parties cannot be combated and the power of the bourgeoisie cannot be liquidated.
Conscious of the great loss which the birth and spread of modern revisionism, especially Khrushchevite modern revisionism, brought the ,cause of the revolution and communism, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries knew how and were able to resist this great counterrevolutionary tide and to organize themselves and fight resolutely against it.
With a lofty sense of responsibility to the proletariat of their own countries and the world, they placed themselves in the forefront of the stern, principled struggle for the exposure of the revisionists' betrayal and set to work to create new Marxist-Leninist organizations and parties.
The Marxist-Leninist movement was born and developed in this great process of differentiation from modern revisionism and the struggle for the cause of communism, and took upon itself to raise and carry forward the banner of the revolution and socialism, betrayed and rejected by the former communist parties. which the revisionist degeneration had transformed into firemen to quell the flames of the revolution and the peoples' liberation wars. The formation of new Marxist-Leninist parties was a victory of historic importance for the working class of each country, as well as for the cause of the revolution on a world scale.
The parties in which Browderite, Khrushchevite, Titoite, Eurocommunist, Maoist modern revisionism became established were liquidated as communist parties. Revisionism stripped them of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary spirit, transformed them from organized detachments of the working class to carry out the revolution into weapons for "extinguishing" the class struggle, for establishing class "peace", for sabotaging the revolution and destroying socialism.
Bearing in mind the struggle which the modern revisionists wage against the Leninist theory and practice on the party, the genuine communist revolutionaries fight for the defence, strengthening and development of proletarian parties built on the basis of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. They are conscious that without such a party, without an organized vanguard detachment of the working class, the revolution cannot be carried out, the national liberation struggle cannot be waged correctly through to the end and the bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be deepened and go over to the proletarian revolution.
The Marxist-Leninist party does not emerge and is not created accidently or for no purpose. It emerges and is created as a resu t certain very important objective and subjective factors. The Marxist-Leninist party emerges from the ranks of the working class, represents its highest aspirations, its revolutionary aims and wages and carries forward the class struggle. Without the working class, without its revolutionary objectives, without the Marxist-Leninist theory, which is the theory of the working class, there can never be a Marxist-Leninist party.
A party of the working class becomes its truly organized detachment, its supreme staff when it is educated with and masters the MarxistLeninist theory and when it uses, this powerful and irreplaceable weapon competently, in a creative way, in the class struggle for the triumph of the revolution, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism.
That party which assimilates this theory but does not apply it, or applies it incorrectly and continues to fail to correct the mistakes it is making, will not advance on the right road, but will deviate from Marxism-Leninism.
The genuine Marxist-Leninist party is characterized by the clear-cut and resolute stand which it maintains towards modern revisionism, towards Khrushchevism, Titoism, Mao Zedong thought, Eurocommunism, etc. The establishment of a clear line of demarcation over this question is of major principled importance.
If a party permits illusions to be created in its ranks, for example, that "irrespective of the Khrushchevite ideology, socialism is being built in the Soviet Union" that there are "bureaucrats" in the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but there are "revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists" as well, then willy-nilly such a party is no longer in a Marxist-Leninist position, but has deviated from the revolutionary strategy and tactics, and if not openly at least indirectly, has been transformed into a pro-Soviet party, irrespective of the fact that in words it might be against the theses of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Khrushchevism. Revolutionary experience has proved that you cannot fight against Khrushchevism if you do not also fight against the chauvinist and socialimperialist hegemonic policy which the leaders of the present-day capitalist and imperialist Soviet Union, Brezhnev, Suslov and company, follow.
The views of those who divide the reactionary line and the pro-imperialist policy of thecurrent Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong and. Mao Zedong thought are of the same nature and equally harmful. The counterrevolutionary stands of Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng cannot be opposed and unmasked if the ideological basis. of their actions, which is Mao Zedong thought, is not fought and unmasked.
The Party of Labour of Albania has reached this conclusion after making a profound analysis, of Mao Zedong thought and the line which the Communist Party of China has followed. Tot defend Mao Zedong and his ideas without going deeply into and seriously analysing the events. and facts means to fall into a revisionist deviation. As long as you do not clear up this position you cannot be in a genuine Marxist-Leninist position.
The Marxist-Leninist parties and the proletariat of each country never underestimate the, pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology, the, oppressive force of capitalism, imperialism, social-imperialism. and deceptive revisionist ideologies. This pressure and these negative influences, become harmful, very dangerous, if the party of the proletariat does not wage a resolute struggle, against them and does not have a strong organization and iron proletarian discipline, and if it is not characterized by a steel unity of thought and action, which excludes any spirit of factionalism and groups.
This is why, along with raising their ideological level and waging the struggle against revi-,sionism and the influences of the bourgeois ideology, the Marxist-Leninist parties devote the greatest care to their internal organizational strengthening on the basis of the Leninist norms and principles. The party is and becomes revolutionary wh en tested, active, dedicated, revolutionary elements militate in its ranks. They resolutely combat the sectarian intellectualist concepts which frequently, hiding behind the requirement to admit "trained elements", close the doors of the party to the workers and sound elements from the other strata of the working masses who, by militating in the ranks of the party, can gain all those qualities which must characterize the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat.
Sentimentality, liberalism, the tendency to .seek numbers in order to give the impression that the ranks of the party are increasing with new members, are harmful and have grave consequences. Such admissions without strictly applying the Marxist-Leninist norms not only do not hinder the influence and pressure of the bourgeoisie from attacking the party from outside but allow the party to be infiltrated by various elements which divide and liquidate it.
The Marxist-Leninist parties in the capitalist countries are working and fighting in difficult conditions and encounter many dangers which come from various directions. These dangers are not imaginary. They are real, are encountered every day, in every step and in every action. They cannot be withstood if the communists do not understand that the program of action and struggle of the party is founded on the need for sacrifice for the great ideals of the cause of the proletariat and communism, if these sacrifices are not consciously accepted and made unhesitatingly at any moment, in any situation or circumstances which the major interests of the proletariat and the people require.
In the capitalist countries, the existence of many parties causes great confusion in people's minds. These parties are parties for votes; they are in the service of local and world capital. This united capital rules with the aid of state power and money, with the organized force of the army, the police and other organs of violence. The parties, which are linked with capital, with the various multinational concerns and companies, play the game of "democracy" with the aim of diverting the masses from the main objective of their struggle - throwing off the yoke of capital and seizing state power, that is, carrying out the revolution.
It is not without purpose that the bourgeois parties apply certain organizational and political orientations and forms. For example, they allow anyone to enter or leave their ranks whenever he wants. All are "free" to talk and shout, to deliver discourses at meetings and rallies, but no one is allowed to act, to go beyond the bounds of the so-called freedom of speech. The transition from freedom of speech to concrete actions is classified and treated as an act of anarchists, criminals and terrorists.
The Marxist-Leninist party can never be such a party. It is not a party of words, but a party of revolutionary action. If its members are not engaged in concrete actions and struggle it will not be a genuine Marxist-Leninist party, but a Marxist-Leninist party only in name. At given moment& such a party will certainly be split into different factions, will have many lines which will coexist, and it will be turned into a liberal, opportunist and revisionist party. Such a party is neither suited to or needed by the workingclass.
A revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party cannot reconcile itself either to reformism or to anarchism and terrorism. It is against all these counterrevolutionary trends in whatever form they present themselves. The party must always bear in mind that it is impossible for the bourgeoisie not to attack it, that it is impossible that it will not call its actions the actions of anarchists and terrorists. However, this does not make the party tail behind events and the movement of the masses, give up actions and enter the vicious circle of revisionist and reformist parties.
It is the complex actions of the political, ideological and economic struggl e of the Marxist-Leninist parties at the head of the working class against the bourgeoisie, social-democracy, revisionism and the bourgeois state, which allow the masses to determine whether or not these activities are truly revolutionary in character. The masses know how to distinguish genuine revolutionary actions which are in their interests from terrorism and anarchism. Therefore they join in the revolutionary actions which the Marxist-Leninist parties lead and rise against the power of the bourgeoisie regardless of the blows and the harsh oppression of the capitalist bourgeoisie, which goes as far as undertaking bloody actions against the working class and genuine communists.
The Marxist-Leninist communist party is not afraid of civil war, which the savage oppression and violence of the bourgeoisie lead to. It is known that civil war is not waged between the working class and honest working people, but is waged by the working masses against the ruling capitalist bourgeoisie and its organs of oppression. The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat must lead to the violent seizure of power. It is precisely this development of which the capitalists, the bourgeois and the revisionists are afraid. That is why social-democracy and the modern revisionists strive to prevent the working class from gaining revolutionary consciousness, from understanding the significance of economic, political and ideological problems, and reaching that revolutionary maturity and sound organization which help in the creation of the subjective conditions for the struggle for the seizure of power.
The strategy and tactics of the bourgeoisie, which the Eurocommunists have made their own, aim to split the working class so that they will not be faced with a unified striking force. The Marxist-Leninist parties, however, fight for the opposite, for the unity of the working class.
The bourgeoisie fears the revolutionary organization and unity of the proletariat, which, contrary to the preachings of the Eurocommunists and other revisionists, remain the main revolutionary motive force of our time. Therefore, it tries, to maintain continuous control over tradeunion organizations, over trade-union centres, which can be numerous in the capitalist parties, with names and programs which appear different, but which have no essential differences between them. Through the bourgeois and revisionist parties and its own state structures, the bourgeoisie has encouraged as never before the diversionist role of the trade-unions which are openly manipulated by them.
As the facts show, trade-unions of this kind in many countries have become completely integrated into and become appendages of the economic and state organization of capitalism. The ever more open collaboration of the trade-union centres with the owning class, with finance capital and the bourgeois governments is a notorious fact. As it is now, the trade-union movement does not challenge capitalism, but works for it, tries to subjugate the proletariat and to restrict and undermine its struggle against capitalism. Some of them are more like big capitalist concerns than trade-union organizations.
It is a fact that, as a result of this undermining activity carried out but the revisionists and social-democracy, by the bourgeois-reformist trade-union centres, the European proletariat remains split, and an important section of the workers is manipulated by these centres. The control of revisionists and social-democrats over the trade-union movement is a major obstacle to the development of the class struggle and the formation and tempering of the revolutionary consciousness of the working people. Therefore, the only road for the Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries, a road which is imposed on them, is to expose the activity of revisionists, to disintegrate their positions in the trade-union movement and to create revolutionary trade-unions. Obviously, these new trade-unions cannot but have the objective of achieving the unity of the working class, against the power of capital, against its demagogy and that of the bourgeois and revisionist parties.
To fight against the so-called traditional trade-unions does not mean that you are opposed in principle to the existence of unions as organizations of the masses with a broad character, as centres of the organization and resistance of the working class, historically inevitable and essential in the conditions of capitalism for uniting the working class and throwing it into the class struggle against the bourgeoisie.
While putting forward the task of creating revolutionary unions, the Marxist-Leninists in no way abandoned their work in the existing unions in which there are large masses of workers, because otherwise they would have left the tradeunion bosses a free hand to manipulate the working class and to use it in their own interests and the interests of capital. Participation of communists in the existing unions is not determined by contingency and is not a "tactic" as the Trotskyites try to present it, but a stand of principle which stems from the Leninist teachings on the need for unity of the working class, which cannot be achieved without working among the masses and without freeing them from the influences of the bourgeoisie and various opportunists.
Of course, the struggle of the Marxist-Leninist party within the reformist and revisionist trade-union centres does not have the aim of correcting or educating the trade-union bosses, or improving and reforming them. Such a stand would be a new reformism. The Marxist-Leninist work with the masses of trade-unionists in order to educate and prepare them for anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-revisionist revolutionary actions. The unity and cohesion of the proletariat is brought about in the process of work and struggle.
However, as Marxism-Leninism teaches us, the unity of the working class is achieved, first of all, in the field of practice, through political actions and economic claims properly harmonized with one another, giving priority to political actions. Taking a firm revolutionary class stand, the Marxist-Leninists fight to link economic claims with political claims, and in this terrain denounce and expose the treacherous activity of the trade-union bosses who, through various trade-union manoeuvres, sacrifice the major fundamental interests of the proletariat.
At present, there are millions who come out on strikes, in demonstrations for economic claims, which also have a political character, because they are fighting capitalism which refuses to recognize the rights of workers. However, all these end up in an agreement between trade-union bosses and capitalists, who make the strikers some minor concession, just to give them a certain satisfaction. However, if these claims are given a real political character, the tools of capital in the trade-unions and capital itself are placed in great difficulties.
The worker aristocracy and the capitalist bourgeoisie are very much afraid of the linking of the economic struggle with the political struggle. They fear the political struggle, because it leads the working class a long way, and even leads it to clashes and battles. Political actions, properly carried out, weaken the leadership of the capitalist bourgeoisie in the trade-unions, break the rules, the laws, and everything else it has established in order to enslave the working class, and opens the eyes of the class.
The working class is the leading class, and as such, it must break its links with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois psychology. In order to do this, it is necessary to fight both against liberalopportunist views, which lead to rightist tradeunionist deviations, and against sectarian views which isolate the genuine Marxist party from vigorous concrete work with the masses. Both these types of views have extremely harmful consequences for the cause of the revolution. Just as the reduction of the trade-union movement merely to struggle for economic demands must be combated, hesitation to fight for economic demands, for fear of going over to opportunism and the simple trade-union struggle, must also be avoided.
While fighting for the unity of the working class, the Marxist-Leninist parties see this as the basis for the unity of all the masses of the people, which is quite the opposite to those unprincipled, counterrevolutionary combinations and alliances which the Eurocommunists advocate.
The deepening of the crisis, which the capitalist-revisionist world is experiencing, is extending the social and class basis of the revolution. Apart from the working class, other strata of society exploited by capitalism, such as the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and the students, the youth and the masses of women, are taking part ever more actively in the revolutionary movement. Therefore, the question of linking up with these masses and leading them becomes a task of first-rate importance for the Marxist-Leninist parties.
Direct work by the Marxist-Leninist party and its members in the ranks of the masses is indispensable and of great value, but it is insufficient to extend the influence of the party among the broad working masses, if the levers of the party, the organizations of the masses, such as those of the youth, women, etc., are not organized and set into action. The Marxist-Leninist party works wherever the masses are, even in the organizations which are run and manipulated by the bourgeois and revisionist parties, in order to separate them from the influence of the reactionary and opportunist ideology of these parties, just a,, it works also to create the revolutionary organizations of the masses which militate on the line of the party and act with conscious conviction under its leadership.
In the countries where capital rules, the youth, the women and other working masses are a major reserve of the revolution. Today there are millions of youth and women unemployed, abandoned and left without hope by the bourgeoisie, therefore they are seething with revolt and the elements of revolutionary outbursts are accumulating. Regarding the movements of the youth, students, intelligentsia and progressive women as important component parts of the broad democratic and liberation revolutionary movements in general, the Marxist-Leninists try to unite the drive and revolutionary aspirations of these broad masses with the drive and aspirations of the working class, in order to organize, educate and lead them on the right road. When the inexhaustible energies of the youth, the women and the other masses are united with the energies of the working class under the leadership of the proletarian party, there is no force which can stop the triumph of revolution and socialism.
The hegemony of the proletariat will not be complete and effective if it is not extended over all the strata of the population interested in the revolution, especially over the peasantry which in the overwhelming majority of countries, represents the main and most powerful ally of the working class. At the same time, the alliance of the working class with the peasantry is the basis for uniting in a broad front all the working masses, all those who in one way or another are fighting against capitalism and imperialism, against oppression and exploitation by monopolies and multinational companies.
At the present time, many rallies and demonstrations are being held in the streets of cities and villages of the capitalist countries. Naturally, these are organized by the bourgeois, social-democratic and revisionist parties, which have certain aims when they bring the masses out in the streets. Above all, they want to keep the revolted masses of working people under their control and to confine their demands within the economic framework permitted by the bourgeoisie. The task of the communists is not to stand apart from these demonstrations because the bourgeois and revisionist parties organize them, but to take part in these mass movements and turn them into political demonstrations and clashes with the bourgeoisie and its lackeys.
Inactivity, apathy and fruitless discussions are lethal to a Marxist-Leninist party. If a Marxist-Leninist party is not continually active, in movement with agitation and propaganda, if it does not take part in the different manifestations of the working class and the other working masses, irrespective that they may be under the influence of reformist parties, it will not be possible to alter the direction which the reformist parties give the movement of the masses.
The correct line of the Marxist-Leninist party, cannot be carried among the masses by means of its press alone, which is usually very restricted. The communists, sympathizers, and members of the mass organizations carry the line of the party among the masses precisely during the activities and actions of the working class and the other working masses when they are in movement, in struggle and battle for their economic rights, and even more for their political rights.
Such vigorous revolutionary action ensures two important objectives: on the one hand, it tempers the party itself in action together with the masses and raises its authority and influence, and on the other hand, it creates possibilities for the party to see the most politically and ideologically sound and advanced elements of the working class in action, those who will be the best and the most resolute militants of the party in the future. From these elements, the MarxistLeninist parties secure the new blood for their ranks, and not from a few discontented intellectual elements, or some unemployed workers who demand justice, who are revolted, but are not so stable and do not accept the iron discipline of a Marxist-Leninist proletarian party.
The leaders of revisionist parties think that the whole work of the party consists of endless discussions, fruitless theorizing and empty contests over one question or another. Nothing comes out of such sterile work. The revisionist parties work on the masses through their press which, it must be admitted, is extensive. These parties themselves are big capitalist trusts, and they have paid workers especially to turn out their propaganda. They have become very skilful at preaching to the working masses what they should and what they should not do. With their demagogy they obscure the final aim of the working masses, which is the overthrow of the capitalist system, and make them believe that what is achieved with a normal strike is everything. This big lie is in favour of the capitalist bourgeoisie. That is why the bourgeoisie is not worried by the words, the articles and the discourses of the salaried revisionist propagandists, or by the strikes which are held under the leadership of their parties.
The Marxist-Leninist parties never descend to these forms of the stale propaganda of the revisionist parties. They know that the uprising and the revolution do not come about automatically. They must be prepared. The best preparation is through actions. But together with action, the theory which guides these actions is necessary. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin teach us that without revolutionary action there is no revolutionary theory and without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary action.
The work of the Marxist-Leninist party among the masses, uniting them around concrete political objectives, is an important task, because the revolution is not carried out by the working class alone, and even less so by its vanguard, the communist party alone. To carry out the revolution, the working class enters into alliance with other social forces, with progressive parties and factions of them, with progressive individuals, with whom it has interests in common on various problems and at different periods. Broad popular fronts with definite political programs are created with these forces. The party of the working class is not dissolved in these fronts, but always retains its organizational and political independence.
The question of alliances is a very acute and delicate problem. The Marxist-Leninist party must follow, study and define the tendencies, demands and contradictions which exist within the movement of the masses, in other words, the dialectics of the class struggle. On this basis the communists choose the right road to achieve various alliances. The maturity of the Marxist-Leninist party is expressed in its sound analysis and assessment of the situation which exists in the ranks of the masses and amongst different political groupings for the creation of necessary alliances. Only with a correct policy and an accurate foresight of how events will develop will the party of the working class be able to maintain its individuality in these alliances and increase its influence among the masses which it wants to rally and throw into revolution.
The creation of different alliances and, on this basis, the creation of broad popular fronts becomes an imperative duty, especially in the conditions when in many countries the danger of fascism is great and immediate, and the pressure and interference of the superpowers against all countries have increased. The fact that the national issue is assuming a special and steadily increasing importance in the revolutionary process today favours the achievement of this unity and these alliances.
This is linked with the intensification of the expansionist, hegemonic and aggressive policy of the imperialist powers. But the occupation of a country is not always done through military aggression. This enslavement, colonization, oppression and exploitation is also carried out in other "new", "modern", economic, cultural, political forms, which disguise savage imperialist domination.
That is why, when we say that the revolution is on the order of the day, this is also linked with the national issue, that is, with the occupation of one or some countries by the big capitalist and imperialist powers, either through direct military occupation or through indirect means and ways. In this sense, countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc., although they are not occupied by the armed force of foreign armies, still suffer from foreign domination and interference.
The Eurocommunists can prattle as much as they like that their countries are free and sovereign, but in fact the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and other peoples are oppressed and exploited. A bourgeois democracy exists in each of their countries, but the state there is bound hand and foot to foreign capital. The people, the working class do not enjoy genuine democracy and sovereignty, they are not free because everything is controlled by foreign capital.
During the Second World War, at the time when many countries were occupied by the German nazi or the Italian fascist armies, the quislings and collaborators united with the occupiers. Today, too, other quislings and collaborators, with different disguises and slogans, are in power and are bound to the new modern occupiers, the neocolonialists and their capital, with a thousand threads.
Very important for the preparation and carrying out of the revolution is the revolutionary work in the ranks of the bourgeois armies, which Lenin called
"...the chief instruments of state power".
[V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 459 (Alb. Ed.)]
Lenin has provided the answer to many theoretical and practical problems linked with the necessity of revolutionary work in the ranks of the bourgeois armies and has defined the ways to attack, demoralize and disintegrate them. This question assumes special importance in the present conditions when the revolutionary situations in many countries are maturing rapidly. In general, the bourgeois army is the bourgeoisie armed to the teeth which confronts the proletariat and the popular masses.
The large armies of the capitalist countries create the impression that in such circumstances the revolution and the smashing of the state of oppression and exploitation become impossible. These views are spread and propagated especially by the Eurocommunists who do not attack the bourgeois army even with feathers. In regard to the number of troops in the army, this does not make any great difference to the revolution, while it creates worrying problems for the bourgeoisie. The extension of the army with many elements from various strata of the population creates more favourable conditions for demoralizing the army and turning it against the bourgeoisie.
In this way the revolution encounters two major problems. On the one hand, it must win over the working class and the working masses, without whom it is impossible to go into the revolution and, on the other hand, it must demoralize and disintegrate the bourgeois army which suppresses the revolution. In the trade-unions, the bourgeoisie uses the worker aristocracy for its own ends, while in the army it uses the caste of officers who carry out the same functions there as the trade-union bosses in the trade-unions.
The principles, laws and organizational structures in the bourgeois armies are such that they allow the bourgeoisie to exert control over the army, to maintain and train it as a means to suppress the revolution and the peoples. This shows the markedly reactionary class character of the bourgeois army and exposes the efforts to present it as "above classes", "national", "outside politics" "respecting democracy", etc. Regardless of the , "democratic traditions", the bourgeois army in any country is anti-popular and destined to defend the rule of the bourgeoisie and to carry out its expansionist aims.
However, the bourgeois army does not constitute a compact mass; there is not and cannot be unity in it. The antagonistic contradictions between the bourgeoisie, either capitalist or revisionist, on the one hand, and the proletariat and the masses, on the other, are reflected in the armies of these countries, too. The masses of soldiers, made up of the sons of workers and peasants, have interests diametrically opposed to the character of the army and the mission the bourgeoisie charges it with. Like the workers and other working people, the masses of soldiers are interested in the overthrow of the exploiting order, and that is why the bourgeoisie shuts it up in barracks and isolates it from the people, turning the army, as Lenin pointed out, into a "prison" for millions of soldiers.
This is the basis of the conflict which grows constantly deeper between the soldiers, who are the sons of the people, and the commanding body, the officers, who are the executive hand of the capitalist bourgeoisie, trained and educated to serve the interests of capital zealously. The work of the Marxist-Leninist party aims to make the soldier revolt against the officer, so that he does not carry out the orders, does not observe the discipline and the laws of the bourgeoisie, and sabotages the weapons in order to prevent them from being used against the people. Lenin said,
"Not a single great revolution has ever taken place, or ever can take place, without the 'disorganization' of the army. For the army is the most ossified instrument for supporting the old regime, the most hardened bulwark of bourgeois discipline, buttressing up the rule of capital, and preserving and fostering among the working people the servile spirit of submission and subjection to capital."
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 321 (Alb. Ed.)
Of course, the methods, forms and tactics to bring about the disorganization and disintegration of the army are many and varied, depending on the concrete conditions. The conditions are not identical in every country today and, therefore, the tactics of the Marxist-Leninists differ from one country to another. There are countries where fascist dictatorships and terror have been established openly, and there are others where those few legal forms of bourgeois democracy can and must be utilized. In general, however, personal work with individual soldiers, both inside and outside the barracks, the stern struggle of the workers, the continual strikes, demonstrations, rallies, protests, etc., play an important role, both for the mobilization of the masses and for the disorganization of the bourgeois army.
"...all these, so to say, test battles and clashes," pointed out Lenin, "are inexorably drawing the army into political life and consequently into the sphere of revolutionary problems. Experience in the struggle enlightens more rapidly and more profoundly than years of propaganda under other circumstances."
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 402-403 (Alb. Ed.)
Work must be done with the soldier, the son of the people, before he joins the army, and later, when he is carrying out his military service, which is the most decisive phase, and finally, when he completes his service and becomes a reservist. Work with the lower ranking officers, in order to separate them from the caste of senior officers and to convince them not to raise their hand against the people, must not be excluded, either.
Of course, political work in the army is as dangerous as it is important. Whereas the worst that can happen to you for political activity and propaganda in the ranks of the trade-unions is to be dismissed from your job, in the army where political work and propaganda are sternly prohibited, the punishment could be to f ace the firing squad. However, revolutionary communists have never lacked the spirit of sacrifice, or the conviction that without working in this sector the way to the revolution cannot be opened.
At the same time, the disorganization of the bourgeois army is a component part of the strategy aimed to ruin the war-mongering plans of the capitalist bourgeoisie, to sabotage its predatory wars and transform them into revolutionary wars. This is how the bolsheviks acted with the czarist army in the time of Lenin. The overthrow of Kerensky and his government which wanted to continue the imperialist war, Lenin's policy on peace, on the agrarian question and the distribution of the land among the poor peasants, etc., brought the soldiers over to the side of the revolution, while the officer caste remained with the White Guards, on the side of the counter-revolution. The Leninist strategy and tactics of struggle against the bourgeois army make it easier to encourage and mobilize the working class and the peoples for the revolution, for the anti-imperialist and the national liberation wars.
The world revolutionary movement has rich experience of work in the ranks of the bourgeois armies. In the czarist army in Russia in 1905, revolutionary committees of soldiers were created under the leadership of the Russian Social-democratic Party, of which Lenin was the leader.
In the February Revolution of 1917, and especially in the October Revolution, party cells and soviets of soldiers and sailors were formed in the detachments and units of the czarist armed forces, and these played the decisive role in taking the bulk of the bourgeois army over to the side of the revolution.
During the Anti-fascist National Liberation War in Albania, the Communist Party of Albania worked in deep illegality within the ranks of the army, and even in the gendarmerie, police, etc., in order to paralyse those weapons and to bring about disorder in and desertions from their ranks. This compelled the enemy to distrust, and in some cases, to intern whole detachments of the old Albanian army which was in the service of the occupier. At the same time, many militarymen from the old army went over to our National Liberation Army.
Let us take another more recent example, that of the army of the Shah of Iran and his caste of officers, which notwithstanding that it was armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated weapons, was incapable of operating effectively and suppressing the anti-imperialist and anti-monarchist uprising of the Iranian people.
The Pahlavi regime was one of the most barbarous, blood-thirsty and corrupt regimes of exploiters of the modern world. The savage Pahlavi dictatorship was based on the feudal lords and the very wealthy stratum which the regime created, on the reactionary army and its officer caste, and on SAVAK which, as the Shah himself described it, was a "state within the state". The Pahlavis who ruled through terror were partners with and sold out to the American and British imperialists, the most heavily armed gendarmes of the Persian Gulf under the orders of the American CIA.
Nevertheless, the great terror, the army, SAVAK and all the rest were unable to quell the revolt of the Iranian people, which in different forms and intensities continued until it was raised to quality and overcame the stage of fearing violence. In this process the army and SAVAK, the shields of the blood-thirsty regime of the Shah, disintegrated, part of the army went over to the side of the people who seized the weapons and are holding on to them. This is an experience which proves that the army and the police, however numerous and well armed, cannot stop the revolution when the people rise in a united bloc, when careful work is done for the demoralization and disintegration of the bourgeois army and police.
It has now become fashionable in the capitalist countries for all sorts of people to speak about the "revolution" and to carry out allegedly revolutionary activities. The so-called "leftists" scream for "revolutionary measures" but then immediately set a limit to them. They "explain" that revolutionary measures should not be undertaken everywhere and in every field, but only some "alterations" should be made. Hence, an illusion should be created to deceive the masses that are seeking radical revolutionary changes.
Like the bourgeoisie, the "leftists" see the army as an "impregnable fortress" and never even raise the task of disintegrating, demoralizing and destroying it. The Marxist-Leninist parties, however, without neglecting the other directions of the struggle, regard the struggle for the unity of the working class and the disintegration of the bourgeois army as two directions of decisive importance for the triumph of the revolution.
"Of course," said Lenin "unless the revolution assumes a mass character and affects the troops, there can be no question of serious struggle."
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 183 (Alb. Ed.)
The purpose of the work of the Marxist-Leninists in the ranks of the bourgeois and revisionist armies is to draw the militarymen into conscious revolutionary activity, and not simply to organize coups d'état. Marxist-Leninists have never regarded the overthrow of the capitalist order as a question of putsches and military plots, but as a result of the conscious activity and active participation of the masses in the revolution.
Coups d'état, plots organized by the officer caste have become fashionable in many countries of the world. By these means the monopoly groups bring down one government and replace it with another in their service. By means of military coups, the American imperialists and Soviet socialimperialists have placed reactionary cliques in their service at the head of the state in many countries of the world. In these cases, the mass of soldiers has frequently blindly served the interests of the local ruling classes and imperialist superpowers.
In such instances, the genuine revolutionaries make things clear to the masses of soldiers, so that they will not be deceived by the reactionary propaganda which presents the military coups as actions "in the interests of the nation", "in the interests of the people and defence of the nation", etc. They make clear also that anarchism, terrorism and gangsterism, which are assuming extensive proportions in the capitalist and revisionist countries, have nothing in common with the revolution, either. Daily facts prove that the groups of anarchists, terrorists, and gangsters are used by reaction as an excuse and a weapon for the preparation and the establishment of the fascist dictatorship, to intimidate the petty bourgeoisie and to make it a tool and a hotbed of fascism, to put pressure on the working class and keep it bound with the chains of capitalism under the threat that it will lose those few crumbs which the bourgeoisie "has given it".
All these currents and groups are disguised behind alluring names, such as "proletarian", "communists", "red brigades" and other labels which sow total confusion. The activities of these groups have no links with Marxism-Leninism, with communism.
In its propaganda, the bourgeoisie accuses the communists, those who are genuinely for revolution and socialism, for the overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie, of being terrorists, anarchists and gangsters, and tries to build up opinion against the genuine revolutionary organizations of the proletariat and its vanguard. This is one of the main purposes for which it incites terrorism and gangsterism, which in such countries as Italy is assuming major proportions.
The Marxist-Leninists always take account of these manoeuvres and tricks of the bourgeoisie and struggle to expose and defeat them. They reject the attacks, accusations and slanders of the bourgeoisie and its lackeys who call the illegal activity of the Marxist-Leninist parties terrorism and gangsterism.
Whether the Marxist-Leninist party is illegal, either partly or completely, depends on the concrete conditions of a particular country. Irrespective of these conditions, however, the organization of illegal work is the greatest guarantee that the victory will be secured. Without this organization the great striking force of the bourgeois dictatorship wreaks havoc and gravely damages the proletariat and its vanguard at the moments the dictatorship finds it suitable to do so.
A party of the working class,, which does not foresee moments of fierce attacks and clashes with the forces of the capitalist bourgeoisie, is not a genuine revolutionary party. For such a party, the theoretical principle that power cannot be seized from the bourgeoisie except by violence, by fighting and making sacrifices, remains an empty phrase, a mere slogan. Moments of fierce struggle are inevitable and in these moments of fierce struggle legal propaganda bases alone are not sufficient. At these moments , the communist party must have its fighting bases, must have created its striking forces, must have its rear secure and equip them with the necessary political, ideological and material means. The coming action will require sacrifices, there will be people who are hurt, who are killed or imprisoned. Therefore, work must be done to build up around the party a great mass of dedicated people, resolute revolutionaries who listen to the party and will hurl themselves into revolutionary action together with it.
Meanwhile, the Marxist-Leninist parties know they must also take advantage of bourgeois "democracy" and the possibilities which legal work and struggle provide for the preparation of the revolution. Even when they operate legally, they make efforts to ensure that their activities serve to fulfil the requirements and tasks of the revolution, the ideo-political, organizational and military preparation of the party and the masses for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, regardless of what the bourgeois laws permit or do not permit.
On all occasions and under all conditions, the genuine revolutionary parties know that they must combine the organization and development of illegal and legal struggle correctly, using only those forms of work and revolutionary tactics which do not obscure their strategy with illusions about bourgeois legality and democracy.
"In all countries, even in those that are freest, most 'legal', and most 'peaceful' in the sense that the class struggle is least acute there," said Lenin, "it is now absolutely indispensable for every Communist Party to systematically combine legal and illegal work, legal and illegal organizations."
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 211 (Alb. Ed.)
At first sight, it seems that the working class in Western Europe is bound tight in the chains which social-democracy and the revisionists called Eurocommunists have rivetted on to it, and that the workers' movement is strongly under the influence of bourgeois and revisionist ideology. However, this appearance does not reflect the reality. Moreover, it does not indicate the tendencies of social development, the processes which are seething in the ranks of the working masses, the historical necessity and imperative demands of the time.
The bourgeoisie, the revisionists and all the other opportunists are trying to restrain the revolution and to extinguish the communist ideal. At given stages and in special historical conditions, they even manage to bemuse and confuse the proletariat and working masses, and to obscure the prospects of the socialist future to some degree. But this is a temporary and passing phenomenon. The revolution and socialism as a theory and practical activity cannot be imposed on the masses from outside by isolated individuals or groups of people. The revolution and socialism represent the only key which the proletariat and the masses need to solve the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalist society, to put an end to their exploitation and oppression and establish genuine freedom and equality. As long as there is oppression and exploitation, as long as capitalism exists, the thinking and struggle of the masses will always be directed towards the revolution and socialism.
The Eurocommunists have rejected the banner of Marxism-Leninism, the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They preach class peace and sing hymns to bourgeois democracy. However, the ills of bourgeois society are not cured and its contradictions are not resolved with sermons and hymns. History has already proved this and its lessons cannot be set aside. The proletariat, the oppressed and the exploited are moving naturally towards the revolution, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. Just as naturally they are seeking the road which leads to the fulfilment of these historical aspirations, the road which the immortal theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin shows them. It is the duty of the new Marxist-Leninist communist parties to take over the leadership of class battles which the Eurocommunists have abandoned, to provide the proletariat and the masses with that militant fighting vanguard which they are seeking and accept as their leadership.
The situation is not easy, but let us recall the optimistic words of Stalin, that "there is no fortress which the communists cannot take". This revolutionary optimism stems from the objective laws of the development of society. Capitalism is an order condemned by history to liquidation. Nothing, neither the frenzied resistance of the bourgeoisie nor the treachery of modern revisionists can save it from its inevitable doom. The future belongs to socialism and communism.
First Edition: "8 Nentori" Publishing House, Tirana, Albania, c. 1980.
Electronic Edition: Marxists Internet Archive, April 2000.