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On the Occasion of the 140th Anniversary of the Birth of Lenin The Way I See It Don Currie Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism, Editor Focus on Socialism April 22, 2010
The international working class in 1970 organized mass public celebrations of Lenin’s birth and undertook a deep and creative study and application of his work. The World Marxist Review organized a major symposium attended by Communist leaders from around the world and published hundreds of theoretical articles. The UN recognized the significance of Lenin’s birth and work as publicist, revolutionary organizer and statesman. On the occasion of the Lenin Centenary, the Communist Party of Canada organized public meetings, concerts and celebrations all across the country. The General Secretary of the Communist Party, William Kashtan and National Chairman, Tim Buck and all of the Provincial leaders prepared and delivered addresses in all provinces and major cities. This writer recalls speaking at mass meetings at the time in Hamilton, London and Toronto. The Central leadership sent the General Secretary of the YCL, Dr. Charles McFadden and the national organizer, Don Currie, on membership and press building tours across the country. The re-founding convention, of the Young Communist League followed those tours with over 100 delegates attending from all provinces and international guests from the USA. The YCL Convention took place in Toronto March 27, 28, 29 1970, during the Lenin Centennial Year. To ringing applause, Tim Buck, National Chair of the Communist Party addressing the young delegates spoke of the significance of their achievement and said in closing; “Let no one or anything, undo what you have done here today.” The documents of that historic convention have been preserved and will be re-published soon on FOS as part of the historical legacy of the Communist Party of Canada and in honour of the upcoming Central Convention of the Young Communist League. The YCL Convention of 1970 can truly be said to have been the Lenin Centenary Communist Youth Convention. A Lenin recruiting leaflet, written by the National Organizer and designed by graphic artist Michael Lucas, was published. Ten thousand copies were distributed across the country appealing to revolutionary minded workers and youth to join the Communist Party. Many did. The Canadian Tribune, the Communist Party’s newspaper published articles on the significance of Lenin’s contributions to the struggle for socialism in Canada. The Canadian Tribune under the editorship of W.C. (Bill) Beeching immediately grew by several hundred new readers resulting from the membership and press building drive that was undertaken by all party organizations inspired by the Lenin Centenary. Tim Buck authored his celebrated work, Lenin and Canada as well as major articles for World Marxist Review and Communist Viewpoint. Those articles are re-published on the FOS website on the occasion of Lenin’s 140th birth celebrations. One of Bucks’ noteworthy articles inspired by Lenin’s teachings on the trade unions, entitled Lenin and Today’s Problems in the Trade Union Movement was published in the August 27th edition of the Canadian Tribune. The article was addressed to militant trade unionists of the day and still rings with helpful ideas for today’s new generation of rank and file activists. The Lenin Centenary and Earth Day In the lead up to the Lenin Centenary during the time when world-wide events celebrating Lenin’s 100th birthday were being organized by the International Communist Movement, a US Senator, unknown outside the USA, proposed the launching of Earth Day on April 22nd 1970 on the same day as the world wide celebrations of Lenin’s birth. The US senator’s proposal was quickly taken up by the capitalist press and a year later UN approval was given for world-wide commemoration of Earth Day on April 22nd. Much has been written in a speculative way about the coincidence of the launching of Earth Day on the same day as the 100th anniversary of the Lenin’s birth. Today, 40 years later, the capitalist press abounds with praise for Earth Day and is full of exhortations to the public to set aside all other struggles and work to save the earth from environmental disaster. We are warned by all and sundry that the world is close to extinction due to global warming caused by the “affects of human activity”. The media is flooded from the far “left” to such enlightened capitalists as Al Gore addressing a message to all of humanity about the dire threat of human extinction due to global warming. The warnings are usually quite indiscriminate and include the billions of poor and poverty stricken, the oppressed women and youth and even the children, all without redress of their urgent immediate needs for clean water, health care, housing, food and education. The message in the capitalist and environmental media is that rich and poor, workers and capitalists, imperialists and revolutionaries; “we are all in this together”. They repeat daily that we are all responsible for overcoming global warming. It is “our” human activity after all that menaces the world, from the C02 emitted from a miserable charcoal fire warming the meagre food of an innocent earthquake victim in Haiti to the handful of global private profiteers. Profiteers who own the biggest global emitters of CO2 and exploit the labour of the workers forced to work there for wages to survive. “We” are all responsible. Moreover the issue of “human activity” causing global warming, it is argued, vociferously by ardent environmentalists, now transcends all other problems faced by humankind. In affect everyone is responsible and in the end no one is accountable. The environmental issue has become the great classless crusade of the 21st Century. Who needs to bother fighting for nuclear disarmament and to replace capitalism with socialism when we are confronted with such an imminent catastrophe of biblical proportions? Let us not be overly concerned about US-NATO wars, militarization of the capitalist economies, global economic depression, mass unemployment, poverty and racism, the exploitation of wage labour, when the world is being destroyed by “human activity.” What better way to absolve imperialism of its crimes, than to attribute all of the world’s problems to “human activity.” Such a ludicrous tautology seems to paralyze all reason, even among the ranks of some Communists. Since when has the development of the productive forces and its impact on the environment not been the result of human activity? One can only imagine the scorn that Lenin would pour on such poverty stricken reasoning that passes for “thinking” in our contemporary world. So pervasive is the campaign promoting Earth Day that even the Communist press in Canada, both the most recent issue of Spark the CPC’s theoretical journal, the Fall 2009 issue, and the April 15-30 2010 issue of People’s Voice, the party’s newspaper, overlooked the 140th Anniversary of Lenin’s birth. The People’s Voice “green issue” devoted its front page, an editorial and a full page to Earth Day ponderings, but not a single word about the significance of Lenin’s 140th. Lenin and his contributions to the liberation of the labouring masses of the earth from imperialism will outlive Earth Day and all those who have erroneously failed to note his contributions to human progress…that is not a concern. What is a concern is the failure of today’s Communists to call upon class conscious workers to re-study Lenin and to seek his help in solving in their own interests the problems of the modern day class struggle, including environmental problems. The words of Communist Party of Canada leader Miguel Figueroa to the opening of the 36th Central Convention in February have a hollow ring in light of the omission of Lenin from the pages of People’s Voice and the Spark and within the content of the Central Convention deliberations on this most significant of anniversaries where Comrade Figueroa said:
Comrade Figeroa continues:
Marxism Without Leninism Today it has become fashionable, for neo-Marxists to speak of Marxism without Lenin. Not only is that wrong in principle, it is impossible in practice. Marx, Engels and Lenin are a continuum of the science of dialectical and historical materialism that armed the workers and their allies with a reliable theoretical guide to confront capitalism through all of its stages of development. Lenin is the continuer of Marx and Engels teachings on revolution in the era of imperialism, the last and final stage of capitalism, the era of imperialist wars, proletarian and people’s revolutionary upsurges, of the general crisis of capitalism in the period of its most reactionary stage and decline. Lenin guided by Marx, led the proletariat to the victory of the socialist revolution in the era of imperialism, the era in which we are now living. There isn’t a country in the world that can undertake the transition to socialism, without studying Lenin’s teachings and the Soviet experience on how to do it and that is particularly important for an advanced capitalist country like Canada. The Communist Attitude to Theory This writer recalls attending a public meeting in Trail BC in support of the Communist candidate in the last federal election. At the meeting the Labour Secretary of the Communist Party, now BC Provincial leader, was asked by a veteran labour militant to comment on the significance of the leadership of Ken Georgetti, currently President of the Canadian Labour Congress. Georgetti is a former mill worker from Cominco Trail. The reply by the Communist Labour Secretary to the question recounted his experience and involvement in the efforts of a left caucus of which he was part, to elect militants to the leadership of the CLC at one of its conventions, not an unimportant matter. In the course of his remarks, the Labour Secretary said, among other things, that he didn’t know how many rungs on the ladder of capitalist development remained. He said that he wasn’t overly concerned about what stage we were at in the development of capitalism. This was because, he argued, what is of primary concern to organized labour is the actual struggle itself as it is now unfolding. I am recalling from memory his remarks that remain vivid in my mind. I was struck by their import since I had polemicized with the Communist Party leadership precisely on this point while expressing the CPS’s views on the CAW-Magna brouhaha. Why mention this incident? What relevance does it have for Canada on the occasion of the 140th Anniversary of the birth Lenin? It has everything to do with it because it reveals a certain dismissive irritation and impatience bordering on scorn for matters of theory. That is a serious mistake especially coming from an experienced Communist leader at any time. It is particularly important today, however, when the extreme right wing is aggressively attacking organized labour and when the labour movement has not found the way to mobilize its strength to confront monopoly capitalism and force it to retreat. Every effort must be exerted to find a theoretical answer to that problem because without it, the practical solutions will be blind and lag the objective reality and conditions. The labour movement at a time of severe recession and mass unemployment is finding great difficulty in “getting untracked” and to exert its tremendous power to gain the initiative in labour political action. What impedes independent political action by organized labour is the deep running negative influence that springs from of reformist ideology. It spreads the illusion among workers that capitalism is still capable of reform. Reformists perpetuate the chimera that progressive development in the era of imperialism is still possible. They say all that is required of the working class is a patient and passive waiting upon events. The leaders of the labour movement mired in bureaucratic management of the movement, accord scant time or thought to the objective reality of the level of current capitalist development and its impact on the working class and its development. That must change. The current stage of the development of capitalism is not where it was 40 years ago. The working class is still the decisive force within the relations of production, but the condition of its existence within those relations has changed. The industrial working class as a proportion of the working class as whole is declining in numbers as basic industry and the manufacturing sectors of the economy decline. Bourgeois economists shrug at such a development. What is unimportant for them is critical for workers. New conditions demand that that organized labour re-think and re-group. It requires organized labour to begin to grasp the fact that new struggles and new demands are called for. Capitalism in the historical sense, and also in the immediate sense, is a spent force incapable of providing the working class with full employment and satisfying its economic and social needs. Labour must take up the challenge today starting with the same advice it was given by Tim Buck in 1970 when he said: “Gone are the days when it was enough to be: “ Agin (against –ed, these are Tim’s words) collaboration with the bosses.” Central to that task is to discuss what kind of government is needed that will ensure the restoration and expansion of Canada’s basic and manufacturing industries. The environmentalists do not set themselves such a task. In fact some even applaud the disappearance of industrial development declaring it to be unsustainable in the modern era. The Communists have not done a good job on confronting that vision of the country. In fact, the Communist Party has uncritically adopted most of the environmental program, aligning its own formal energy program with the environmentalists. This adoption stands in stark contrast to the Communist Party’s demand for expansion of manufacturing, health care, housing, education – it cannot be done without an expansion of all energy sources. That is the weakness that CPS sees in the treatment of the energy issue in the latest issue of Spark and about which we will be commenting further in the future. Confidence in an in depth understanding of the historical stage we are living through, the forms of its development and to have a consistently working class stance on all issues, is what determines the sense of optimism and urgency with which organized labour, with the help of the Communists, takes up and develops the new strategies of struggle in the 21st Century. Such new strategies must include the discussion of the necessity for socialism in Canada. That is unavoidable. What the Communists have not done well or at all is to come to grips with how that discussion is to be promoted first of all to the militant rank and file of organized labour. To have a firm grasp of what all of that entails for Communists and labour militants, all those who declare themselves to be socialists, cannot be ignored. Lenin had much to say on this matter and we fail to study his advice at our peril. There are some clues in his writings from 1917 up to his death in 1924 and we need to return to them and seek his advice in the 21st Century. Tax In Kind and Rungs in the Ladder of Capitalism In his work, Tax In Kind, obligatory reading for any worker that wants to know about the difficulties of consolidating the victory of worker’s power in Russian after WW1, and after the Bolsheviks had led the working class to power in October 1917, Lenin made reference to another of his famous works, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” 1917. Lenin at the time was arguing passionately, tirelessly and patiently for the workers and peasants to understand the importance of a revival of state capitalism to bring about a revival of large scale industry and to transform Russia from a peasant economy to an industrialized socialist economy. The quote that follows is from Volume 32 Collected Works page336. We provide Lenin’s quote in full so as not to lose the significance of the idea that Lenin presented to the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasants of Russia in April 21, 1921 and that continues to have profound significance for our struggles today in April 2010. Lenin counselled;
This is the point that the Labour Secretary of the Communist Party missed in his remarks in Trail during the last federal election. It is important to understand that Canada is at the rung on the ladder of history of the development of capitalism in our country, between which and the rung called socialism there are not intermediate rungs. That is the profound idea that separates Communists from all neo-Marxists, from all reformists, from all anarchists, trotskyists and latter day environmentalist theorists, whether radical or not, who believe for one reason or another, that capitalism is not the problem and is still capable of progressive historical development. At all costs, the capitalists and the petty bourgeois radicals who plead with them to reform, demand that workers be consigned a dependent subordinate role in this discussion. Workers are counselled not to enter the discussion with an independent working class view. Workers are to be dutiful helpers in resolving the latest contradiction of capitalism, since it is asserted it is without question, in their interests to do so. The matter of their exploitation at the point of production will have to wait a better day. It is astounding that this advice is offered to the working class by those who claim to be Marxists and some even who claim to be Leninists. Lenin spent his entire life combating such neo-Marxists and “friends of labour.” What has all of this to do with Lenin and the Soviet experience of building socialism as outlined in Volumes 30, 31 and 32 of Lenin’s Collected Works, extending from 1917 to his death in 1924? Perhaps a better way to pose the question is; what is the purpose of the orchestrated global anti-communist campaign that is being unfolded by the propaganda mills of corporate power in an attempt to disprove and discredit Lenin and his teachings during the period of the revolutionary victory of the proletariat over the combined national and international forces of imperialism? Of course it has to do first of all with covering up the crimes of imperialism and its most criminal form Nazism that reached it most depraved form in the horrors of WW2. The nub of this anti-communist campaign is to assert that imperialism is invincible and all-powerful and that in spite of its crimes there is nothing better for the labouring masses to do than to hope that imperialism will reform itself as the environmentalists and the reformists plead with them to do. Therefore it is pointless to study the experience of the international working class in attempting to win power and build a society of peace and socialism and restore the health of the planet. That is what preoccupies the petty bourgeois radicals and keeps them awake in a frenzy pondering how to be more clever and convincing in offering imperialism advice to cease being so wicked. These petty bourgeois forces, swing back and forth between capitalism and the working class, caught in a constant despair arising from the fact that they have been cast out by capitalism, and don’t want to join the working class. Such revolutionaries are deeply disappointed that the working class let them down and did not win the revolution when they first discovered it. Such petty bourgeois forces flood the internet with a plethora of websites slicing and dicing and reconstructing one theory after another to explain the “failures” of socialism and how they could have fixed them and how they can fix capitalism. So much has been said by such neo-Marxists about the alleged failures of socialism and the importance of avoiding a mechanical application of the Soviet experience to the struggle for socialism today, something Lenin himself warned against, that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction of declaring that nothing in the Soviet experience is universally applicable to the struggle for socialism today. Sadly sometimes even the Communists indulge in this pointless and unseemly sport. The Soviet experience, including the causes of the counter-revolution that resulted in the overthrow of Soviet power, contains many vital lessons for working class struggles today. That is true for all of the revolutionary historical experience of the international proletariat. There were universal lessons to be learned from the Paris Commune, the 1905 Russian Revolution, the October Revolution of 1917, the emergence of the European socialist system of states and all subsequent revolutions that have occurred since. The revolutionary struggle for socialism goes forward in spite of all attempts to stop it because it is necessary and it is law governed. The struggle for socialism in the era of the final stage of capitalism, its moribund imperialist stage is epochal. The task of modern day Canadian Leninist revolutionaries is to study the objective laws of revolutionary development that are common to all of the revolutions of the modern era and creatively apply them to Canadian reality. The Struggle for Socialism in Advanced Capitalist Imperialist States Let us take one example from that experience that has importance for Canada today. CCPA Monitor, as reported in People’s Voice of April 15-30, 2010 states that half million Canadian industrial and manufacturing workers were permanently displaced from the work place in the current depression and there is no immediate prospect of them regaining those jobs. The People’s Voice correctly reports this finding. That is as it should be. But is it enough? It is never enough for the a Communist paper to publish the findings of one of the better left social democratic think tanks without comment. Do the Communists accept the bleak assessment of CCPA that the permanent loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs is irreversible? We don’t and we can’t and still call ourselves Marxists and Leninists. What did Lenin have to say in his work, “The Tax In Kind” on the vital importance of large-scale production? Lenin said the worker’s government could not advance to socialism without large scale production. The country had just emerged from the state of war communism where grain had to be appropriated from the peasants, even when they did not have enough for themselves, in exchange for paper ( promise to re-pay) to feed the starving workers and the army. That was War Communism. As the interventionist and counter revolutionary armies were defeated, it was then possible to tax the peasants in kind for a portion of their grain production and permit them to exchange grain surpluses for commodities produced in factories by the workers, in effect, a temporary revival of capitalism. Lenin was blunt on this point and did not cover up the fact that where there is commodity production and exchange there is capitalism. Lenin upheld this important temporary concession to capitalism and in addition said the socialist government would invite foreign concessionaires (foreign capital) to develop oil and forestry and mining to pave the way for a revival of large scale industry in Russia. Lenin said this would be a form of state capitalism and so long as the worker’s held power they could dictate and control the terms of its development. What was critical was to understand that socialism was not possible without large scale production. The first step in that process was the electrification of the entire country. The Soviet Union went on in the decades that followed to build socialism first on the basis of the construction of heavy industry and then with a rapid expansion of manufacturing and the collectivization of agriculture with both collective and state farms. Had the Bolsheviks given in to the petty bourgeois views that abounded at the time, that a temporary revival of capitalism did not serve socialism, capitalism would not have been temporarily revived in a controlled and planned way under the power of the proletarian government. It would have been revived spontaneously and uncontrollably by the market that would arise first among the masses of peasantry with the richest among them simply displacing the former Czarist landowners and becoming the new oppressors of the poor peasants in effect and new class of capitalist land owners. The same thing would have happened in industry with the foreign capital taking over and returning workers to their previous status as wage slaves. In fighting for his views, Lenin engaged in a polemic with Bukharin who did not support Lenin’s advice to the Party and the country. Lenin said to Buhkarin; “…Marx was profoundly right when he taught the workers the importance of large-scale production, precisely for the reason of facilitating the transition to socialism.” Lenin then went on to refer to Marx’s view that by way of exception it might be possible to buy out the ruling class of Britain to facilitate the transition to socialism in Britain, because Britain at the time was a highly developed advanced capitalist industrialized state with a large working class. So what is the lesson in all of this history for Canada today? Canada is far advanced and overly ripe as a developed monopoly finance capitalist system where the complete preparation for the transition to socialism exists. Many options exist for the working class to transform the state-monopoly system into a revolutionary state headed by the working class that would enable the people of Canada to rebuild our ruined industries, expand our manufacturing, rebuild the country on east west and north lines and do it in such a way as to preserve the environment and provide good jobs for all who want to work. The Communists must begin this discussion on much higher level than presently. The Communist Party must say bluntly to all of the democratic forces who want change, that they cannot get it through the two old line parties of the profit system or for that matter the reformist NDP. It cannot happen because none of the parties dare to challenge the power of monopoly over the state. The Canadian capitalist class has abandoned the defence of Canadian sovereignty, adopting a cosmopolitan view of its place in global capitalism. That is a further evolution of Canadian capitalism to its most reactionary stage. It is a departure from the 19th Century vision of capitalist development of the Fathers of Confederation of an east west development of our country that required the development of basic large scale industry and manufacturing and modern agriculture to serve the home market and export surpluses to the world. Today finance capital has abandoned even a pretence of that 19th century vision of Canada as an independent capitalist state and is working to integrate it more closely into the G8, the leading capitalist states as an imperialist power driven by finance capital and its global ambitions. The modern day Canadian finance capitalists have nothing to offer the working class. They are indifferent to the deindustrialization of basic production. They accelerate the sell-out of Canada’s energy and natural resources without regard to Canada’s future economic needs. They promote corporate agriculture and do nothing as the rural economy sinks into poverty. They have abandoned the home market to foreign imports and spend all of their time and resources on free markets with the EU, the USA, and reactionary regimes such as Columbia where they can import cheap and sell dear at the expense of Canadian jobs. They are pre-occupied with the export of finance capital to markets where they take advantage of cheap labour and appropriate resources that do not belong to them. Their interest in the inflow and outflow of finance capital is only concerned with whether or not it makes a profit for the banks, large bond holders and large investors and their hangers on of wealth, privilege and parasitism. The merger of finance capital with the state department of finance is now almost total with big capital advising the government on all matters of fiscal and budgetary decisions. The era when the Canadian capitalist class, that was amenable to pressure from the people and organized labour to institute progressive state capitalist reforms based on the principle of universality such as public health care, universal pension plans, public education, crown corporations to facilitate east west transportation, alleviate regional underdevelopment and provide R and D for farmers, and to promote through CMHC some public housing is over. Today the ruling class has turned on the people and their aspirations and achievements in a way that can only be described as amoral, predatory and vicious. An entirely new type of governance is needed for Canadians, and that type of governance can only be to place monopoly under control and through public ownership and control embark and planned economic restoration of Canadian basic industry and manufacturing and all of the infrastructure including in the first place the repatriation of ownership from foreign dominance and control all of Canada’s energy resources. The descent of the ruling elites of Canada to the role of predators on their own country and its people is expressed in the abject surrender of Canadian foreign and military policy to unelected foreign entities such as NATO, NORAD and NORTHCOM that effectively places Canadian military doctrines in subordination to the US Military High Command. The capitalist class has opted for a program of militarization as the foundation of Canada’s foreign policy, and the active participation in US-NATO wars as its practice. Canadian capitalism today is wholly reactionary and must be replaced if Canada is to survive as an independent state and advance to socialism. The process of its replacement is what must preoccupy the Communists and all of the advanced revolutionary and militant forces of labour and people’s movements. That is the significance of Leninism in our day. We are standing on the last rung in the ladder of the development of capitalism beyond which there is only socialism. That reality demands a re-thinking of the types of programs, slogans, propaganda and agitation that will advance the cause of the working class and underline constantly the urgency of all those programmatic demands that the express the need for socialism. We in CPS believe that is a work in progress. The Communist Party has much to do. The first thing it must do is to raise up through a public discussion of new Canadian reality the theoretical level of the entire party membership, its supporters, and in particular the militant rank and file of organized labour to grasp the significance of the changes in our economy and to act accordingly. We in CPS propose that the way to do that is for the Communist Party to invite all of its supporters with an special appeal to militants and the youth in the labour movement, to organize a two year discussion of the Communist Party Program of the Path to Socialism in Canada in the 21st Century that should become the main theoretical work of the Party leading to its next convention marking its 90th Anniversary. CPS will not wait for that invitation, because it is our view that such work is necessary and that the program, the work of the Communists must be made also the creative work of the entire working class. We intend to do our part by a thorough study and review of the history of the development of the Communist Program for Canada and to publish our views. Much remains to be done…and we need Lenin’s help to do it. |
Forty years ago the International Communist
movement organized world-wide celebrations on the 100th anniversary
of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov) the great international
Communist leader of the proletariat and the founder of the first worker’s state
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin was born on April 22,
1870 at Simbirsk, a small town on the banks of the Volga River. He died in
Moscow January 21st 1924. His remains are interned in the Lenin
Mausoleum on Red Square.