p The year 2011 witnessed very positive developments right across the board for international communism. At home in the USA we formed a real Communist Party, USA (Foundation) and witnessed the appearance of its online daily newspaper the Daily Worker USA. Abroad in the Western Hemisphere the enemies of communism suffered defeat after defeat with South America in a new and permanent anti-imperialist alliance for its own development along several different paths, but for the first time in two centuries almost completely independent of US imperialism. The Chinese solution, to the problem of the emerging capitalist second economy conspiracies to restore capitalism in the remaining socialist countries (as it had in the USSR its East European People’s Democracies and Mongolia), expanded to Cuba from the PRC, Vietnam and Laos, and appears to be about to do so in the DPRK as well.
p This latter development flows from the analysis that now takes up the first thirty odd pages of Chapter 18 as a detailed theoretical explanation of how capitalism came to be restored in the initial homeland of the World Stalinist Socialist Stage. This proves that we now know how to avoid similar developments in countries embarking upon the socialist road. Reconstructing the origin of the New Class in Czarist Russia and the New Class in the Soviet Union is therefore complete and a central feature of the presentation throughout this Handbook.
p In 2011 Gringo capitalism found itself absolutely stuck in the muck of its own creation beginning first and foremost in its homeland with massive unemployment and thirty million workers on the dole of some kind. Another hundred million underemployed and/or underpaid living in poverty. The general crisis of capitalism (see chapter 12 — The Capitalist Stage) is an iron law and the gringo capitalists no more immune than any other group of capitalist social parasites. Meanwhile the gringo imperialists suffered defeat after defeat in three wars against the Muslim world and in the massive social upheaval of petty bourgeois revolts against the establishments of bourgeois comprador regimes in Arab countries ranging from Egypt to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Not to mention being expelled permanently from Iraq and soon from Afghanistan. While Chinese socialism continued to demonstrate success at home and abroad, wherever it counted, the gringo
3imperialist hegemony over capitalism not only showed it could not reassert itself, but Gringolandia itself appeared increasingly to the entire world as a paper tiger about to be set on fire and permanently removed as a threat to the people of the world. It was a good year indeed.
Fighting Anti-Communism in North America
p Scientists define the stage of Modern Communism as something no one has yet seen and the stages of Primitive Communism as something we left behind prehistorically. However, “Communism” in the capitalist press means what we Bolsheviks are doing, or have done, where we have or had state power.
p The reality is the man in the street, knowing no better, accepts this constant repetition of the latter definition of communism, and thus our cadre must deal right off the bat with questions such as why was Communism overthrown in the Soviet Union, why does Communism do this, why that? In current affairs then to most North Americans “communism” means what we Marxist-Leninists have done and are doing, where we do have state power, and where we do not. The answers to all these questions are in this Handbook, thus the name change to “The ABC’s of Communism” from the earlier editions published as the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism.
p Nor is this a new and unusual propaganda direction for the capitalist press. In fact, this is the normal way the bourgeoisie uses everywhere to lie to the mass of producing people. In this regard the US is exactly like everywhere else.-And has been since day One. Lenin said it best in his address to the 1st Congress of the Communist International in 1919: “The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument (counterpoising democracy and dictatorship) repeated in a thousand strains by the capitalist press are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.”
p This is a Handbook for revolutionary cadre regardless of Party affiliation. You may think of it as the citizen’s equivalent of a soldier’s Field Manual. In this sense this handbook serves the same purpose as Nicolai Bukharin’s book (1918) of the same name. (Co-authored by Bolshevik theoretician Yevgeny Preobrazhensky). The Bolsheviks and their Red Army of that time (1918 — 1920)) had the task of securing the national home base for socialism in the Soviet Republic and then the Soviet Union. —And, they had the additional task of triggering the world socialist revolution.
p Your task is to speed up the law governed process of sociocultural evolution so as to get us through the stage of Capitalism as quickly as possible. Especially now, when the positive contributions of capitalism to sociocultural evolution have been completed and only the bad remains. Bad is too mild a term. The lethal component of capitalism now threatens our species very existence. This means you additionally are to lead the struggle for armed insurrection against the capitalist regime in Washington DC and establish working class state power over the entire North American nation. Thereby finishing the task of global socialist revolution.
p Without us communists, it will take millennia to make the transition. With us communists, we can do the job in a few generations or decades.
p Gulf of Mexico
p What the never ending environmental crisis in the US Gulf of Mexico has proven, as if any more historical evidence was needed than history has already provided, is that without us communists, the capitalists will destroy the world in their insatiable greed to produce profits at any cost. The capitalist disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is just the tip of the coming iceberg! With us, working people will destroy the cap threat and propel our species into the Era of Freedom.
p BP
p The last several chapters of this book (Ch. 24 to 27) deal coincidentally with BP from its inception as Anglo-Persian at the turn of the last century. You will find this historical insight into BP useful in your day to day conversations with others.
p Bungler’s Paradise
p The Implosion of Gringo “Intelligence”
p Perhaps the most interesting non-economic development of 2010 in Gringolandia was the Washington Post July expose, where it becomes evident that the Gringo “intelligence and subversion” establishment has imploded. In fact, many different systemic failures came to head at the same time in the gringo “intelligence” establishment, just as they had in the overall imperialist economic structure.
p There is nothing surprising about this to us. US intelligence has always been considered to be a joke in the major spy centers of the globe. The reason being the (1) general historical ignorance of those employed and (2) the inability to build ties to anyone in the colonial and semi-colonial, Third World comprador classes. (3) To the degree that gringo agents have had success it is because of the suitcases full of money they carry and that is it pure and simple. Now they have run out of real money and have to rely on printing increasingly questionable money. The recipients know it and are desperately looking around for an alternative to these funny money paymasters. (4) No significant tradecraft knowledge exists among gringo agencies including their so-called agents on the spot.
p In the last decade the imperialist bosses in Washington simply did what they always do and that is to try and buy their way out of every mess they have created with borrowed money. So, what was already a pathetic intelligence establishment (measured by what you get for what you pay) became an out and out travesty as thousands upon thousands of con men were hired as analysts (one stop on the two ladders upward in Washington — government jobs being one and private contractor jobs being the other. A gringo equivalent to Middle American peasant life where one ladder up is civil and the other the church). No one in gringo “intelligence” has the slightest idea what they are doing and furthermore they never will. Take my word for it — they have always been lost and now they are lost in space and will never find their way back.
4p This does not mean they are not dangerous. Even a hog will root out a pearl now and then. But it does mean they can be handled by normal means.
p Wikileaks
p Shortly after I wrote the foregoing section on the Washington Post expose of the total incompetence of gringo intelligence after its 9/11/2001 so-called “long awaited reform” we discovered that a US Army Private soldier from Oklahoma (see the new Left
magazine Red State about Oklahoma’s past and present socialist history) had managed easily to get his hands on all the secret cables of the US State Department, to and from its embassies around the world, and furthermore had had no difficulty in copying them and sending them to the website Wikileaks. Is this level of Gringo intelligence incompetence even possible? Doesn’t this make the Brit capitalist error in permitting Soviet penetration of MI5 and MI6 look strictly “small potatoes” in comparison. The entire episode simply reinforces the truth of what I said foregoing. The gringo’s don’t have the slightest idea what they are doing on the ground, with each agent and agency running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Furthermore there is no reason to believe we will be up against anything better than this sorry joke of an enemy in the foreseeable future.
5What Do We Want for Humanity’s Future?
p The first stage of this new Era, where humans are no longer confronted first, foremost and forever with the problem of satisfying their most fundamental wants before they are FREE to do anything else, will begin with the Stage of Communism. The transitional modes in the organization of modern society with revolutionary proletarian governments, we establish to accelerate the process, we have to come to call “socialist.”
p I have tried to provide you with the information you will need to answer the many questions people have about sociocultural evolution, ranging from primitive days, through the rise of monumental architecture (e.g., pyramids), to the present day. Accordingly this Handbook now has an index. When working people understand what Modern Communism will really be, once accomplished, then they will set out enthusiastically on this road into the Era of Freedom (as Engels termed the period which will begin with the stage of Modern Communism.)
p I want you to remember and never forget that there are only a few of us Communists among those fighting for liberation from wage slavery and the establishment of working class power, in our country. Most people on our side are simply fighting for justice in order to survive and hopefully prosper. They know very little about the facts of history and even less, usually nothing, about the laws of history. This is not an accident. The ruling class and especially its new trillionaire oligarchy have seen to it that working people get only lies as news and history. It’s been that way acutely for some 65 years. On the other hand, a few people are knowledgeable. Specifically, us communists. It is our historical obligation to lead the working masses and in so doing complete the task at hand.
6p Some of us have always been communists. We will always be communists. In practice this means that we take command of every situation in which we intervene as a combat organization of professional revolutionaries and provide the leadership the masses must have to win their battles. That’s what Leninism means in the phrase Marxism-Leninism.
p In North America we have had to create a new Party for reasons you will come to understand herein. The first job of our Party is to train the next generation of communists to take our place. For, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying, “the Earth belongs to the living.” The rectified North American vanguard party, the Communist Party USA (Foundation), is tasked with taking command of the revolution of the working masses of our country. What is coming will not be an easy fight. It will not end well for our enemies or it will not end well for us. However, this is a price we are willing
p to pay, for as Mr. Jefferson was also fond of saying “better that there be no more than one man and one woman left in every country on the face of the Earth than that things should continue as they have.”
p In this 8th edition I have done more than deepen and expand certain sections. I have changed the name of the book from Fundamentals of Historical Materialism to The ABC’s of Communism retaining the subtitle Bolshevism and the year of the edition (in this case 2012), mainly for the reason above. You should note this name change also reflects the fact a real Communist Party has now been created in the USA
p In short, since the day to day practice of our politics is what most North Americans think of when the term communism is utilized in the cap press we now rise to the occasion, defining in this limited sense, what communism is all about in contemporary life. Accordingly, even though we are still in the last days of the pre-Modern Communist period (the last days of the Era of Necessity as Engels termed it,) we should always answer the questions being asked by workers about what they consider to be “communism” and in the process of doing so, convert the situation into an opportunity to present the facts about how our day to day political policies have developed since 1917. In such a way dialectically convert the sabotage and obfuscatory tactics of our class enemies into weapons to open the vaults of historical truth
7p For the moment let’s tackle the number one capitalist propaganda tenet; namely, that capitalism is coming back in the Socialist Camp (China, Vietnam-Laos, Cuba.) In short this is just nonsense. Just another capitalist lie.
p In the Soviet Union and East Europe the New Class (originating as socialist bureaucrats and emerging after Stalin’s death as a new bourgeoisie) did overthrow socialism. In chapter 18 you will come to understand the mechanics of how they accomplished this, doing in four short final years what every previous capitalist plot from 1917 through the Hitlerite attack had failed to do. The Soviet New Class has established a kind of half-assed capitalism benefiting no one but them. Currently Putin et al are facing a crisis where they must decide which way to turn — return to a socialist path toward communism or try and make permanent some kind of fascist capitalism. Putin having led Russia into BRICS is a good omen for the future but of course not nearly enough.
8p On the other hand, where the New Class was weaker, and working class control of the Communist Party stronger, socialism was also accordingly stronger. Thus, in China, Vietnam-Laos and Cuba, the Communist Party did not lose power but adjusted to changing circumstances. In chapter 18 you will see how.
p In these latter countries we are implementing what we have learned from our own experimentation in the 20th century, and continuing now in the 21st, in the technologically developing countries of our Socialist Camp. In short, in today’s Socialist Camp we are still completing the task of building the infrastructure we should have inherited from a fully developed capitalist stage.
p Experience in the USSR has shown us it is often necessary to use in this process the bourgeois and especially small bourgeois, elements of society to get this done (chapters 13 and 14). Under our direction, of course. As part of our general plan. What we cannot allow is a secret second economy growing unchecked and in fact denied. This led to the collapse of the Soviet experiment and cannot be allowed to happen again. In all
p the contemporary countries where communist parties have command, the socialist component of these economies is by far the overwhelming dynamic portion, and our Party is openly controlling the completely exposed capitalist portion of the national economies in question. This is why China handled the global capitalist collapse so successfully (Chapter 28 below).
p ALBA
p ALBA has been given several meanings (Bolivarian Alternative Latin America; Bolivarian Alliance Latin America; etc.) but what it is, is a Left alliance led by Cuba and Venezuela, which includes Marxist-Leninist governments in Nicaragua and Bolivia and a Left bourgeois government in Ecuador. It’s expanded form is economic and takes in a whole variety of Caribbean and Latin American bourgeois republics with a vested interest in securing their energy and trade relations independent of US imperialism. It has become a constituent part of the New World Socialist Camp the core of which is China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
p(Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)
p Our party is also in power in a few coalition situations as in the ANC government in South Africa. In Brazil our Party is in coalition with several other worker’s parties and Brazil’s new President is one of ours who fought with Marxist-Leninist Guerillas in her youth and spent many years in exile in Cuba. Now South Africa has joined with Brazil, Russia, India, and China to form a bloc of the biggest of the developing countries (BRICS) whose very nature is antithetical to US and all other capitalist imperialisms (Europe and Japan). So both Brazil and South Africa are part of a newly forming phenomenon where Communist Parties share power with other Left and Progressive forces in pursuing national development and anti-imperialist policies internationally. Keep an eye on BRICS for these parties in power in coalition play a sometimes decisive role.
9p The New World Socialist Camp of the 21st Century
p —And, the emergence of ALBA and BRICS means de facto that the nature of the 21st century World Socialist Camp has changed from the simple cookie-cutter version of Joseph Stalin (see Chapter 13 below) to something much more sophisticated. What we have in this new Socialist world camp is tripartite:
p (1) A core with hard-line orthodox party ruled nations in direct alliance with
p (2) Left governments of a broad-spectrum of varieties ranging from ALBA to
p (3) BRICS.
p A new socialist camp is emerging in other words and we should not mince theoretical words about this. This is the future of the Socialist Camp for the foreseeable years impending. You must internalize this and act accordingly. Our enemies are too stupid to have figured this out yet and continue with their Cold War style plotting against communism. Which is just as well for us. But the enemy will not stay stupid for long and
p will adapt its tactics in the foreseeable future and that is perhaps the real significance and danger of the Obama regime on the Potomac.
p Social Justice and Communism are two separate categories entirely
p Why mixed economies before full socialism, not to mention communism? Because social justice is one thing and communist stage egalitarianism quite another. You cannot artificially impose permanently the latter. It can only be permanent when the mode of production is fully developed to the level necessary to make practical the slogan “from each according to her ability to each according to her need”. Let us next take a quick forward peek to see why. The remainder of the text in this book explains this insight into the future in scientific terms. This time warp view of the future is Marxism perfected — what the term Marxism is all about in the phrase Marxism-Leninism.
A few comments on how we got to our current correct understanding of human social and cultural evolution (sociocultural evolution) and the shining path it has opened for us.
A Completed Theory
p When Karl Marx and Frederick Engels met each other for the first time in Paris, in November 1842, they quickly recognized they had each, independently, come to the same general conclusions about how society evolved to its present stage (what we now call Historical Materialism, and its constituent sciences of evolutionary anthropology, history, psychology and sociology). They also recognized that Marx had begun unlocking the secrets of production of the Capitalist Stage itself. In so doing Marx was answering the question as to why the more science and technology contributed to the ability of humans to make more things, more effectively, and cheaply, the less the people making these things actually kept for themselves. As Hegel had remarked, to paraphrase, “never did a labor-saving invention do anything other than worsen the conditions of the laborers themselves.” Marx’s theory of capitalist production was presented to the international working class movement in various forms through the 1850’s and 1860’s and culminated with the publication of Capital Volume One in 1867.
10p (A) The last seven years of Karl Marx’s life (1877-1883) were spent trying to extend the historical materialist theory of sociocultural evolution back into the detailed history and prehistory of mankind. Marx, in other words, had already unlocked the secrets of the Capitalist Stage and was attempting to do the same thing for the preceding stages in the social and cultural (sociocultural) evolution of humanity. Thanks especially to a century’s work, on the part of innumerable anthropologists (especially archaeologists), that task has now been completed, as this book will prove
p (B) What We Did Not Foresee: Why Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez are Correct. As far as I can tell neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels ever anticipated that the working class would take power anywhere other than in an advanced capitalist country. Even in their later years when conversing with Russian Social Democrats about the possibility of revolution in Russia, did either seem to have anticipated the strange unfolding of events which was about to occur. Marx did see the possibility that Russia could be the trigger of world socialist revolution but that is all. The idea that Russian workers could go it alone never occurred to him.
p What is the significance of this? What am I talking about? About the fact that workers first took power in the least advanced of the capitalist countries — namely Russia and its Empire. Nor, then, could the founders have foreseen that the next great addition to the global workers government stage would come in China which was only capitalist in the most technical sense of the word and then largely under the influence of imperialism and Chinese compradors (the Green Gang based in Shanghai — Chapter 14.)
p On the contrary, Marx and Engels had seen capitalism being moved rather swiftly out of the way, as its own advanced working class replaced it, with a new system which put them and the masses at the top of the priority list rather than on the bottom of it (See Chapter Two paragraph 22 of The Communist Manifesto). In the highly schematized way we have of looking at social and cultural evolution that was natural and it is quite understandable, especially to anthropologists; particularly to archaeologists. (Archaeology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: the other three being cultural anthropology, physical anthropology and linguistics) Why? Because we in archaeology, especially, are always drawing sequences from older to younger, in archaeological sites, in regional and area synthesis, in overall evolution. One layer gives way to the next. Let me show you:
11p In an archaeological region or subarea, in the USA Southwest, we might have the following reconstruction:
p Modern human remains
p Pueblo VI remains
p Pueblo V remains
p Pueblo IV remains
p Pueblo III remains
p Pueblo II remains
p Pueblo I remains
p Anasazi III remains
p Anasazi II remains
p Anasazi I remains
p Proto-Anasazi remains
p Archaic Desert Cultural remains
p Proto-archaic remains
p Palaeo-indian remains
p This reconstruction would be based on several different sites. Each site would have enough of the sequence within it so that, in a like fashion to tree-ring matching and tree-ring sequence building, we can put together a sequence of occupation for the entire region or cultural subarea, or area.
p However, this is highly schematized, not that there is anything wrong with schematics — far from it. Schematizing archaeological sequences and broader sociocultural evolutionary sequences is one of the principal tasks of archaeology. What can be wrong with this approach is not the approach but the assumptions that could go with it. For example, this particular schematic shows little about the processes occurring (quietly unassertive) in each level. These we have to figure out for ourselves based upon both
p theory and detailed analysis of the remains of each level, sublevel by sublevel, in each of the sites in question. When we do this we begin to see an entirely new picture.
p For example, how and why did the Anasazi people move from the pithouse domestic structures of Anasazi I — III into the above ground house and room buildings of the Pueblo levels? Or, for that matter, how and why did the archaic nomads of the Great Basin Desert Culture move into a sedentary (or at least semi-sedentary) residence pattern? These details are in the ground and with detailed research in enough sites over a sufficiently broad area the mechanics can be laid bare for all interested observers to see.
p Now, in the preparation of summaries for our colleagues, for students, for readers of prehistory in general, we usually produce the kind of schematic you see above. When we look at the even larger picture, say all of North and Middle America, we often draw a schematic that looks like this:
High Cultural Civilization of Mesoamerica
p(the Aztecs and the Mayas for example)
p(Teoitihuacan, Oaxaca, Palenque for example)
p(the Archaic levels)
p(the proto-archaic and archaic levels)
Broad-spectrum Hunting and Gathering
p(Palaeo-indian sequences at Tehuacan: Lerma, Clovis, Folsom levels)
p -And, we may even generalize further as:
p White Contact
p Post-Classic
p Classic
p Formative
p Archaic
p Proto-archaic
p Lithic
p In this latter schematic we have a sequence equivalent to the historical sequence of
p Modern Communism
p Capitalism
p Feudalism*
p Slavery
p Primitive Communism
p *Feudalism: as I explain in the text, the term feudalism is loaded with the idea of small fiefdom society in Western historical literature. That is fine. However, that definition has little in common with the use of the term here, where a broad global sociocultural evolutionary stage, is the object to be defined. Here, therefore, we use the
p term Feudalism to represent the global, universal, transitional stage between chattel and wage slavery, which occurred everywhere in the world where there was autochthonous (indigenous) sociocultural evolution and, therefore, feudalism, as a global stage, may be fiefdom in polity (e.g., Europe) or imperial (e.g., China).
p Now the point is, to look at how much we miss if all we have is the latter sequences. We miss almost all of the transitional evidence. We don’t quite miss it all as Feudalism is a transitional stage between chattel and wage slavery, but even that may be hard to see without a more thorough sequence of stages and phases to show us the transitional period (and its, at least, two Chiefdom Stages) which had occurred already between primitive communism and slavery.
p It is for this reason, as I say; I went into archaeology to begin with. To try and find what Marx was looking for in the last seven years of his life. Namely, the transitional proofs for the movement out of primitive communism into chattel slavery. I thought if we had that part of the sequence than perhaps we could gain insight into characteristics of the current transition from wage slavery to modern communism. I believe I was correct in that regard as the first ten chapters of this book will prove.
p Practical Application: the Source of Ultra-Left and Trotskyist Errors
p You can use our now accurately reconstructed, model of prehistoric with historic sociocultural evolution and see where the Trotskyists and the Ultra-Left took the completely wrong fork in the theoretical road; namely, by confusing in 1917 where we were with where they wanted to be, to wit:
p Communist Stage
p Second Egalitarian Epoch Begins Here
p _^_ Where the Ultra-left want to be and think we were in 1917
p Advanced Socialist Stage(s)
p _^_ Where we are now
p Stalinist Socialist Stage
p _%_ Where we really were in 1917 in Russia but without the completed capitalist stage technological accomplishments
p Second Transitional Period Begins Here
p Capitalist Stage
p Feudal Stage
p Slave Stage
p Servitude Epoch Begins Here
p Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms Stage
p Simple Chiefdoms Stage
p First Transitional Period Begins Here
p Tribal Agriculture Stage
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 3 (Homo sapiens)
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 2 (Homo erectus)
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 1 (Homo Australopithecus)
p Ape-like Humans
p Primitive Communism (1st Egalitarian Epoch) Begins Here
p Human-like Apes
Discussion
p Because the Trotskyists and ultra-leftists of all stripes (e.g., RCP and Bob Avakian) had no accurate prehistoric-historic knowledge about sociocultural process — reflected above in our archaeological chart of sociocultural stage evolution, or fundamentally about the more profound implications of our theory, these Trots, and later the followers of Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife (Madame Maoists), took the wrong road. This is their objective, scientifically derived, commonality. Those who followed Stalin and what became the Party’s General Line had no such knowledge either but they had common sense and knew their way was in fact the only way. The latter persevered and the former have not. History speaking for itself i.e., unfolding as it did is the proof.
p By correcting this profound error — going back to the fork and taking the correct road — those in error (Trotskyists and ultra-leftists) can become effective fighters for rapid transformation to Communism, once again. These people are our comrades, and many if not all have suffered greatly for their beliefs, and we should at least try to help them, despite their problems, if we can. We want them to rejoin the international revolutionary movement via the correct Communist Party and correct international working class revolutionary line. After all, everyone was confused for a while. Those who were right by accident will now know why they were right. (The revisionists old or modern were always wrong and anti-Marxist-Leninist then and now but that is another matter altogether.) Problem resolved.
12p Let’s not get off on the Wrong Foot right at the Start
p The brief explanation of the history of the internationals in a blurb at Venezuelanalysis is completely misleading, wrong and unacceptable.
p The First International did not collapse. It was threatened by anarchist takeover in Europe so General Secretary Karl Marx sent it to Philadelphia. There the 19 sections of US communists dissolved it at Marx’s bidding. In its stead they created the Workingmen’s Party of the United States and other Marxists in Europe created their own
p social democratic parties. I discuss this in detail in Part III on the history of the Labor Movement in the USA.
p The Second International was taken over from the beginning by revisionists. By revisionism we mean those who try to justify capitalist rule by preaching “the reform of capitalism.” They did what we have come to expect from revisionism. (Both this original archetype kind which is still with us and in power in many capitalist countries, and modern revisionism of the USSR-East Europe type, which is now gone thank goodness, except for the leftover puppet parties — e.g., the USA Party).
p The Third International created by Lenin set things straight. It is a lie to say that the Comintern was perverted by Stalin and/or Stalinism. If we are going to start a new international it cannot be just an excuse to bring Trotskyist mythology back to the fore. In this book you can read the truth about the history of the 3rd International in the160 pages of chapters 13 through 16.
p The Fourth International of the Trotskyists never got off the ground. They have never been able to secure state power anywhere. Originally because, at least in my opinion, the only programmatic difference between Stalin and Trotsky was on the question of pace of the five year plans. The only other real difference being the personality struggle between the bourgoisiefied would-be aristocrat Trotsky and the long term Old Bolshevik Stalin.
p Trotsky was an enemy of Bolshevism most of his life and with us only a short time. Stalin gave Lenin the first permanent labor union in the Czarist Empire in the oilfields of Baku and Batum and robbed banks and stage coaches and ships to get Lenin money. It was Stalin and associated Old Bolsheviks (never including Trotsky) who triggered the national general strike that led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Russian Revolution of 1905. All of this and the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well, is discussed in this book.
p A fifth international is exactly what is needed but not one based on silly Trotskyist lies, distortions and mythology. If those assembled should decide to create the 5th International they should consider setting up a Historical Commission to study and resolve differences of opinion on all these matters. Any attempt to foist Trotskyist mythology on the international working class movement’s most important central body will doom such a body to defeat right from the start. We need to get off on the right foot.
p The Four Curses of the Modern World
p If Ancient Egypt suffered from eight curses the modern world and especially the international working class movement suffers from four. These are in order of importance (or descending order of danger) (1) naïve ultra-leftism (2) Trotskyism (3) modern revisionism and (4) anarchism.
p The order of danger is important here because as recently as last year I would have listed revisionism first and Trotskyism second. However, there are no revisionist regimes left and their parties nothing but shadows in most countries. Trotskyism is dangerous but not as dangerous as the more wide-spread naïve ultra-leftism as RCP still exhibits in the USA (Bob Avakian needs to get with it and learn what is in this book. I mention this party specifically
p because they could have a lot to offer if Avakian would just read a little) and its associates internationally not yet fully exposed for their fundamental Madam Mao errors.
p Trotskyists (and camouflaged Trotskyists in such groups as Workers World and PSL) are always a danger because of the way they pander to the petty bourgeoisie student movement (There are good communists — Us - and those guys in PL or CPUSA(F) are the bad communists — or in other words not just these mentioned but virtually everyone else considering themselves Marxist-Leninists.)
p Anarchists we parted ways with 150 years ago but like a bad case of syphilis they just keep coming back whenever the working class movement is under stress. So they take up last place. All of these (perhaps 95% of the US Left) are unfit for duty in any revolutionary sense and will be swept away like a skirmish line when the revolution gets underway in North America (by which I mean the USA and Canada). However, in the meantime their members are well meaning and could be helpful if the chains that bind them to these foolish parties are broken.
p This is just the first course in Marxism-Leninism
p Finally, in 2010, I wrote a synthesis for my colleagues in anthropology, concerning the completion of Marx’s theoretical research into the origin and evolution of human modes of production. This monograph also serves as an introduction to graduate level coursework (e.g., Anth 501 Advanced Historical Materialism, for those of you teaching ABC’s courses.) That monograph entitled Karl Marx’s Second Magnum Opus: Archaeology and Primitive Communism.
p We have Great Opportunities
p The Enemy is finished — The Gringo Imperialist Empire is collapsing
p Asimov’s “Foundation” Analog
p As 2011 opened the USA and its Empire was at a defining point in history: namely, the end of the Gringo Empire, the demise of the so-called North American Century. No matter what the US ruling tiny group of oligarchs does now in 2012, it is too late. The US Empire is doomed and nothing its rulers do now can save it. The trillionaire Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, DuPont, etc. super-capitalists can and will save themselves by changing nationalities and/or national business locations. In fact, they already are. Meanwhile, the American people have been well and truly fucked, all their assets disappearing in a great historical robbery. The Britainization of gringo ambitions combined with the looting of the working people’s assets in every form is leaving behind the burnt out shell of a national clunker. This is not hyperbole but science as you will learn as you read and internalize this book.
13p In this sense we are where Hari Seldon was when his mathematics of psychohistory predicted the inevitable end of that Empire. It was this fictional analog I just referred to in the subheading foregoing about the Isaac Asimov story. As a matter of interest Asimov’s story propelled both (Nobel Prize winning economist) Paul Krugman and me into our search for the foundations of human sociocultural evolution. —And, it is
p this story which is on-target today (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation.)
p Another analog is the situation for humans in the quandary of contemporary global warming in that no matter what the US now does it is too late. In other words, even if today we stopped all further CO2 pollution (which of course we won’t) it would be far too late to stop what is now environmentally inevitable.
p Fortunately, the road forward for you young revolutionary communist cadre is far more easily seen perhaps than it was before the global capitalist system collapse of 2008. Your task is to speed up this transition from the Servitude Epoch (and its capitalist stage we are now in) to communism via the most rapid possible transitional stages (we are also in now.) This handbook has been produced to assist you. You must fight for a constitutional convention to rewrite our fundamental document in favor of Socialism and against Capitalism. To secure our victories in this arena we must have a working class army and police force and that should grow from our armed seizure in combination with the military not against it. —And, we must have a model.
p To you students let me say the most important part of this book in my opinion are the first ten chapters which explain how class divided and state (army/police) organized society came into existence after 99.99% of human history having been spent in a period of egalitarian and altruistic social relations (what we call primitive communism.) I mention this because many of you are in political Parties where there are contentious matters having to do with 20th century issues in our movement (Trotskyism for example.) I recognize many of you are anxious to get to those chapters. Fine, get to them first if you need to, but don’t forget the most important lesson herein lies in how and why we left the epoch of primitive communism and entered the Servitude epoch (the slave stage, feudal stage and capitalist stage) and these facts you will learn in the first ten chapters.
14p Why is this, the most important topic? Isn’t it essentially academic?
p No, it is not a purely academic endeavor for if we know how we traversed the period between primitive communism and Slavery (1st stage of the Servitude Epoch) than we may well get insights as to how we will get out of Capitalism (the last stage of the Servitude Epoch) and into modern communism! Two transitional periods, each composed of at least two sociocultural evolutionary stages, we know existed and exist. In any science it is pro forma to investigate for possible transitional commonalities in such situations and so we conduct such an investigation in social science.
p At any rate, in these remarks, and in additional chapters at the end of this book, I will also comment on what happened in the USA during 2009, 2010 and 2011, when there were dramatic developments in this heartland of world imperialism leading to:
p (1) The brink of collapse of the entire Empire! The Capitalist Stage (Imperialist phase) USA Empire is fatally flawed and can be taken down soon! However, even with the dismissal of Gringolandia from its role as sole global superpower our problems will remain. Specifically, the problem that construction of Communism via the intermediary steps of Socialist stages will take longer than we had originally thought, with or without US imperialism as the leader of the global capitalist stage.
p (2) Furthermore, as you will see in this Handbook the international situation with regard to working class revolutionary seizure of power has improved radically.
p This Handbook also reflects
p (3) A perfection of the Specific Theory of Primitive Communism as a distinct main point and part of the structure of our science. A distinct contribution if you will to the General Theory of Historical Materialism.
p (4) As usual I will summarize the developments that were most important to you (as a revolutionary cadre) in 2009 - 2011 from a scientific perspective. Never forget we have the science of culture, society and their history as our virtual sole property and we should rely heavily upon it. Not just to be right. But to be more effective than our enemies.
p Our enemies live in a dream and fantasy-like world of religious superstition and ad hoc radical screw ball slogans of the far right (fascist) wing US leaders. This ridiculous ideology which arose to delude the sheep is now leading the Rockefeller-Mellon-Morgan et. al. oligarchy into one fatal trap after another. We have seen this happening to them over many decades and now their ignorance is coming home to roost for them. Ignorance, silly political prejudices, and religious fairy-tales, as the main stay of your educational and information system are one thing when you are running the show — when you are in fact the Empire. But when you are just another failing capitalist country, history proves fairy-tale religion combined with general ignorance of history and sociocultural evolutionary anthropology, will fuck you in the ass every time.
15p For the gringo capitalist oligarchy there is no going back to being number one top dog. They will be fortunate just to hold onto a leading place in the wolf-pack of advanced capitalist countries. —And, if they are allowed by their bourgeois brethren to hold onto a respected place in the alpha group of capitalist countries it will be a gift. One they have not earned, and do not deserve except, for their inertia. (Meaning their huge in-place capitalist institutions in manufacture and finance. Although by dismantling much of this and sending it to cheap labor centers abroad, they have screwed themselves in this regard too.) The hope of the world has been that the election of President Obama will mean a retreat to the otherwise rather clear course toward World War we have been watching unfold. Obama may lead the US into the not altogether despicable position of being “the guy in the room who fucked everything up, but couldn’t help it because he is the village idiot.” In the end that is the best he will be able to do for the oligarchy.
16Murdoch (FOX — balanced and fair neo-Nazi propaganda — fascist oxymoron news and commentary) may jump ship and go back to Australia and you can expect many other similar centi-billionaire and trillionaire families to ditch the US for better homelands elsewhere in the world. After all the educated US petty bourgeoisie has been jumping ship for decades and now at least 250,000 USA originating families emigrate every year to new permanent homelands. Murdoch circumvented our laws against foreign ownership of the media by becoming a US citizen first so he could legally bring his poison into the US for his partners in the Rockefeller oligarchy. (See Chapter 27 for my fight with the Azcarragas over their ownership of all the Spanish language newspapers, TV and radio stations in the US. They had too much self-respect to do the same as Murdoch.)
17Real versus Phony Communists
p (5) This is excellent news for us Communists because now with a proper ideological rearming (as herein for example) we can make up for lost time quickly. More importantly we can bring about the end of capitalism even more quickly than we might
p have imagined even a year ago. If we do we will definitely be starting out in some kind of advanced Stalinist socialism so we want to be sure we shape this thing the way we want it. Along those lines the Communist Party USA (Foundation) was formed to earn a vanguard position among North American working people.
18p Going to Completion
p (6) Harry Bridges used to point out to his colleagues in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) a most critical fact. Namely, this is a capitalist country, and as long as it is, there is only so far the Union can go. In other words being a worker in a capitalist country is something like being a ten year old boy on a first date.
p In my own case I thought I was in love with a ten year old girl (Judy Syms) in my elementary school class and I went as far as to arrange a date. My father took us to see Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return. The problem was, at the end of the date there was nothing to do! My father drove us to our respective homes and that was it. I didn’t know about sex and had no idea what to do next and the whole thing just died a natural death. A ten year old boy can only rarely go to completion.
p Industrial workers are in the same boat until they destroy the capitalist thuggery (the Army-Police) holding them in wage-slavery, creating our own state (Army-Police) and go over to seizing and taking total ownership over the means of production. Turning their own labor and the resulting income stream to their own benefit.
p Seizing the Means of Production
p Class conscious workers in a Union are also stuck in a nowhere-to-go situation. As long as this is a capitalist country there is only so much value and surplus value to be directed toward the needs of the men and women who actually do the work. That amount of Value is finite and limited. Winning a strike is great but it leaves you right where you were to begin with as long as capitalism is retained. The capitalists still have the legal right to own the factory and make all the decisions (except for the issue you just won because of the strike.) The worst part is that the capitalists get to keep coming back to screw workers again and again no matter how many limited worker actions we might win. Unless we liquidate them and their system, and replace it with us and our system,
p workers will always be in the quandary of a ten year old boy on a first date. Unable to close the deal.
p Only moving toward a fully conscious demand for Communism and Now can US workers get beyond this conundrum by seizing ownership of the factories and other means of production by armed force and establishing our own police power over enemies of the people — e.g., the capitalists — preventing them by law from ever coming back to an ownership position. Then workers can use the profits of their endeavors for themselves, their families, and society overall.
p The Private Property Trap
p Classes are defined on the basis of the ownership relations of a group of people to the means of production and the subsequent right to oversee distribution. People consider themselves part of one class or another when they assume a commonality of interest.
p This is the Achilles Heel of the petty bourgeoisie for example because they assume a commonality of interest in the private ownership of the means of production with the big bourgeoisie because they think they must. The capitalists convince them that ownership of private property is a universal right, the same for giant factories as it is for your bathroom toothbrush, and if you want what goes along with being bourgeois, (that is, some special privileged position with regard to ownership, then they have to agree that all of the means of production and distribution must be held privately too). These rather pathetic small bourgeois elements are thereby coerced into thinking they have little choice but to accept this, thus defined, Doctrine of the Sanctity of Private Property. That is the capitalist pitch.
19p The truth is private ownership of the giant factory type and the individual householder type should be two totally separate categories in law and can be easily made so in practice. In fact, they already are, often in capitalist countries as well. At any rate, in the current capitalist crisis the media (which is always under oligarchic dictatorship) consistently talks as if the one unquestioned assumption is that there always has been and there always will be private ownership of the means of production and distribution. We, of course, counter with “No. Private ownership of the means of production and distribution is a new phenomenon of perhaps 6,000 years duration and in the previous millions of years property was held in common. It was the division into society of classes and the expropriation of public property by the ruling class which put the means of production into private hands. Theft, in other words. There will be no permanence now to private ownership of the means of production and distribution. In fact we intend on seizing all the means of production and distribution above a certain level immediately upon seizing power.”
20p Protecting Your Personal Property
p What is that “level?”
p Another capitalist trick is to give people the idea that we communists are going to seize their cars and Ipods. This is just bullshit but some people will believe anything. We have no interest in the personal property of people being publicly owned. That would make no sense at all. In fact, just the opposite! We are trying to get as much personal property as possible into the hands of individuals. That is what “from each according to her ability to each according to her needs” means for goodness sakes!
Private ownership of the principal means of production (steel, autos, aluminum, electricity, etc.) is a totally separate category from personal private property (cars, houses, the stuff in them, etc.) That is the point, and you need to internalize this. We will seize in totality the commanding heights of all finance and industry and simultaneously protect the interest of working people in their ownership of their private personal property. WE will seize the corporate farms and assist small and middle and even big farmers who want to stay private and work along a co-op road (especially important here are some religious groups who practice cooperation and collectivity such as the Mormons, Mennonites and Amish.) Right now the capitalists own the principal means of production and fuck around at will with the people’s personal property (mortgages, credit cards, crop price supports, etc.) Our revolutionary armed seizure of power will reverse that situation and double-quick!
21I — The International Capitalist Situation:
p (1) Political economy: The two central global financial developments of the preceding year have been (1) the ruling class response (a) in the US and (b) internationally, to the US instigated financial collapse and (2) the rapid recovery of the People’s Republic of China from the global catastrophe. Let’s take China first.
p Since China has a Capitalist sector we must review that aspect of Chinese development within the context of the overall growth of the Socialist sector of the economy (incomparably larger.) When we do we see one thing crystal clearly — it was the Socialist sector and its strength which allowed the Party to move in and take the necessary steps to do an equivalent injection of capital to what is called “stimulus” in the new US ruling class lingo. In fact, it was easy for the Chinese Party to do this because of half a century of state power dealing with much more difficult investment problems, not to mention prior decades of learning how to make do in the insurrectional environment of Civil War.
p The Chinese Communist Party has now proven it can handle Two Systems One Country and its ability to do so is primarily due to its leaders honesty combined with the strength of the socialist sector of the PRC economy. But, from our standpoint, the critical point is the Deng solution of a NEP-like program for Chinese revolutionary construction does work! We have our Party in command of China, implementing an industrialization of industry and mechanization of agriculture with both capitalist and socialist answers. Despite the collapse of the world capitalist system the Chinese Party was able to handle the consequences within China while stepping up their program for increasing GDP.
p Workers will see, if you explain it to them that what worked in China could work even better here! Namely, by putting people back to work as they have in China but have failed to do in Gringolandia, with its thirty million workers now on the dole.
p In fact the same methodology in government will work better here because we do not suffer from technological backwardness which is still the central feature of the PRC economy. The US “rust belt” could be resuscitated overnight, and we communists would do that. With cash infusion comparable to the way we converted Detroit from automobiles to tanks and planes (a la World War II) these factories could be up and running in months. Our communist government would put everyone to work immediately! But this will require a revolutionary armed seizure of power by working people and how that is to be done needs to be worked out.
p —And, most importantly, as good as the Chinese example is it is inadequate because China is so much more backward than would be required for true Advanced Socialism (let alone Communism.) We have to build our own model. In the US we can move directly to Communism, because the industrial infrastructure required by Marx and Engels is in place and we can take advantage. It is our (a) great technological sophistication, as well as (b) the experience we international Bolsheviks have gained in building Socialism since 1917, which allows this to happen.
p (2) Class analysis: Meanwhile class shock continues unabated among working people of the advanced capitalist countries. We will deal extensively with the situation in Gringolandia and elsewhere in the capitalist world in the last chapter of this book.
p An Old Gringo Bolshevik Lives to See the Great Day
p Some of you may remember the Carlos Fuentes book and movie Old Gringo (Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, now streaming on Netflix) as I do and which I can identify with as I am about the same age I suppose as the Gregory Peck character. When I was in Cuba eight years ago preparing to help the Cuban’s resist another assault from the gringo monster from the North even I could not imagine that in eight short years the entire gringo colossus in Latin America would have collapsed and it its place a new unified continent and adjacent islands would have found their way into a permanent alliance with Socialist Cuba and an anti-imperialist economic-political-military alliance which cannot be reversed. This Old Bolshevik Gringo lived to see it happen.
p Developing socialist economies in Latin America have featured continuing redistribution of wealth and power more democratically as in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Now these four are in political and military alliance with Cuba. What a dramatic shift in global relationships in the eight years since I visited Cuba, when this homeland of Socialism was relatively isolated and on a near-war footing, awaiting gringo invasion.
p -And, in all four of these nations, major potentially progressive strata of the Latin American nation, are stronger and more empowered and emboldened than ever before. The gringo regime lost control of both Colombia and Peru in 2011 and this is of monumental significance for our side. For our most deadly enemy it was an unexpected fatal blow for the gringo imperialists who did not imagine eight years ago, in their wildest nightmares, that the future they hoped for in Latin America was about to be dumped into the sewer of fantasia forever. It was a shocking turn of events for such as gusana Ros-Lehtinen and assorted fascist thugs who assemble in Washington just in time to see Honduras, Colombia and Peru permanently depart from the US orbit. Only the Miami mafia dream-world remains for them. Overall on a broad front in Latin American (i) national (patriotic) bourgeoisie, (ii) petty bourgeoisie (include farmers here), (iii) working class and (iv) indigenous peoples, a progressive New Horizon emerged from the US instigated global capitalist financial collapse, and emerged far stronger than almost anyone thought possible a short eight years ago.
22p What the gringo oligarchy had been thinking about, and all they had been thinking about in their greed, was getting out from under the collapsing burden of too much cash going out and too little coming in to the USA, and buying time by borrowing money which was what the sale of US paper is all about. China is dumping this soon to be
p worthless paper as fast as it can, but according to Saturday Night Live June 4th 2011, Hu Jintao is still taking it up the ass to the tune of 800 billion! To get out from under this fatal imbalance they had to wreck the other capitalist classes and they proceeded to do so. All in all the US capitalists made out very well as successful bandits in this regard, for as a class oligarchy anyway, the top of the top one percent did win out, at least compared to what happened to their class brethren internationally (although this betrayal will come at an as yet unknown political price).
p The US imperialists were forced into “stall and retreat” actions against the progressive Governments and movements in Latin America. The gringo imperialists don’t have the money or the troops to send anything more to South America than the small-unit trouble-making forces composed of US Navy Seals, US Army Green Berets, and US CIA agents. So far all these guys have succeeded in doing is causing trouble in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, in mounting offensive probes against Venezuela, and in seizing momentary opportunities such as that in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where small forces under their command can seize a few buildings affecting a temporary overturn of a popular “banana republic” Government. In 2011 the Latin American’s following Hugo Chavez managed to reverse even that. An amazing defeat of US imperialism which has always had Honduras as an outright client puppet.
23p All in all ALBA is not only still in place and stronger than ever, it is having a very positive effect in creating a unified political and military stance for the South American continent minus the US puppets like former Colombian President Uribe. Santos as his successor is taking Colombia into the South American united front and away from its alliance with US imperialism. Meanwhile Ollanta Humala took Peru away from gringo comprador Alan Garcia in an epoch making historical election. Regardless of many silly gringo interventions ALBA has made it possible for the ABC powerhouse to move irreversibly toward full independence within the capitalist stage. (ABC = Argentina, Brazil, Chile.)
p This loss of gringo imperialism’s last South American client regimes (Colombia and Peru) means that continent has been permanently removed from the gringo orbit. This freedom for South America is another fruit of US imperialist aggression against Arabia and the Muslim World and nothing the gringo oligarchy does can make up for this historic reversal in their loss of South America. Now that the gringo rulers are helplessly lost in the quicksand of South Asia and Arabia we have a few more years in which to consolidate our gains before the next US imperialist invasion of South America, which is inevitable, if the Gringo Regime survives intact.
p (3) The Next and Immediate coming crisis: Importantly, the US rulers at least have begun preparing people for the inevitable monetary crisis. Specifically, the crisis created by the rapidly devaluing US dollar. This devaluation was inevitable even without the collapse. Now the degree to which this devaluation has been accelerated by the trillions of printed dollars created for the gringo oligarchy to get out of its current crisis is the only remaining question.
p One way or another a second international currency will be brought into existence. Either the existing dollar removed from control by Washington and turned over to a new governing body (EU-BRICS for example) and a new domestic currency created for the gringo politicians to fuck around with, without affecting the rest of the
p world. Or some combination of international currencies to form a basket of convertible notes to replace the US dollar, already underway, will be regularized, the gringos left to handle their mess anyway they can.
p The first hint of this new capitalist propaganda mass-line I heard on NBR (PBS show National Business Review) September 16, 2009, when Paul Kangas’ guest told viewers, even though we have gotten used to the idea of US Treasury notes being as good as cash, the truth is they are not cash and their value is in question, if over a ten year perspective, and investors should be aware that low risk does not mean no risk! Furthermore, he says you should consider your US instrument buying to be short term to avoid the longer term risk.
p Then on October 7th yellow (anti-immigrant) “know nothing” journalist Lou Dobbs invited several so-called economists to discuss a second international currency (These CNN talking heads are just idiots like Dobbs but in this case we have a classic example of “it’s not important what they say but that they are admitting the issue.”) In short, the sheep are getting the message: “The US dollar is not sacrosanct and subject to the same objective laws of economics as everyone else.” With that Dobbs kicked off his new Financial News section and one suspects one central ideological feature is going to be an ongoing dilution of the truth about the inevitable collapse of the Post-World War II financial world order, featuring the US dollar and several shock-absorbing sub-currencies (originally the Mark and the Yen but now including the Yuan) in command. (Dobbs resignation at CNN coming shortly thereafter is simply a concession to the rapidly burgeoning Mexican and Hispanic population. His Hispanic wife heading for the door.)
24p October brought official admissions that even Brazilian currency, until recently one of the Pariah currencies of Latin America, appreciated 40% in the first nine months of 2009 over the US dollar!
p On October 8, BBC World News reported that the major Asian central banks had intervened in the currency market to stop the headlong crash of the US dollar.
p Not to be outdone CNN reported October 9 the Dollar is in severe doldrums. Whatever that means. Actually it means nothing except one more step in admitting the truth to the North American people about what has been done to their money.
p On October 10, CNN Your $$$$$ which is another regular “business” show reflecting the policy of the US oligarchy, dedicated much of its program to the “collapsing US dollar”. One of the guests was humorously if unusually honest saying “I thought I knew a lot about economics but I don’t understand anything happening right now.” Unfortunately, for the North American people, this is going to be the general line; namely, somehow things got out of whack but eventually we will get out of this “recession” and everyone will go back to living happily thereafter. In fact, on October 16th the Los Angeles Times ran a front page headline implying that the decline in value of the US dollar was actually a good thing since US exports would be cheaper.
p On the day before Thanksgiving I heard for the first time the phrase “the US is a declining power and India is a rising power” on a BBC report on the visit of the Indian President to Washington. The same day PBS News Hour conducted an examination of the monetary crisis: India’s central bank bought 200 tons of gold from the IMF. This is a desperation move to turn devaluing US dollars into something solid before it is too late — but - it also puts such important central banks as that of India (especially China, but also the central banks in Venezuela, Brazil and soon Cuba) in the position of becoming major
p international currency brokers and price setters. This is the beginning of the final move away from US currency as the international currency. The same report pointed out Canadian dollars were now about equal to US dollar; the Euro at $1.50 heading for $1.60. Everyone knows the value of the US dollar will continue to collapse as the Gringo Regime prints more and more money with nothing whatsoever to back it up except the “good faith and credit of the US Government?” A phrase that has lost a great deal of credibility in recent days. On Thanksgiving Day the bosses of Dubai announced they were defaulting on loan payments and set them over unilaterally for six months. The money in Dubai’s real estate development does not come from oil but from investment and much of that was of the gringo variety — meaning highly shaky. A Dubai bankruptcy could bring down capitalist banks all over the world including Gringolandia. —And, on that same day the US dollar collapsed to a fourteen year low against the old shock absorbing standby currency of the Japanese Yen.
25p On June 9th 2010, Jack Cafferty admitted on CNN that the 19.5 trillion dollar US debt (by 2015) can never be paid! He concluded the Obama Administration is destroying the country by continuing the massive spending programs of stimulus, war, and interest payments not to mention other long overdue corrections as in health care.
p US workers are not living happily ever after now, and now they never will be — under capitalism. Thus, your task is a lot easier. As that year closed NBR reviewed (1208-2009) US productivity and found “significant gains” for capitalists surviving the latest round in the gladiator contests as workers were forced to work longer hours for less money. More temporary workers were being hired as capitalists shed all health care benefits. What should have been technological advances at the service of mankind became instead death traps for workers forced to the street, unemployed, health uninsured, their children long since forgetting about college, and if they are in a minority preparing instead for a life in prison.
p Of course, that happily living forever I mentioned above, happened only in the daily propaganda of television and radio as far as US working people are concerned. It’s been fifty years since Leave it to Beaver might have had even the remotest reflection of daily life for any substantial number of US families. As if to prove it, the 26th of November issue of the comic book Time (magazine) had a cover beginning to hint at the truth in its “decade of hell” theme.
p We will review relevant data about North American Labor History leading up to the current capitalist depression in Part III. The most relevant fact concerning “recovery” as far as working people are concerned is that it took from 1929 to 1945 to get out of the last capitalist major depression and that happened only because of the massive government World War II spending that put everyone back to work and drafted huge new feminine reserves into the industrial work force. That spending was the greatest in US history and amounted in the end to many trillions of contemporary dollars spent over a period of three and one half years. The point here is the US oligarchy has men and women at its command now who know this and who wish lead the US to recovery by doing the same kind of spending (regardless of the excuse; it doesn’t matter as long as it gets money into the hands of hundreds of millions of people on a regular basis.)
26p Yet this matter is severely complicated by the fact that the value of the dollar itself cannot be maintained. That is not a condition existing in the great depression of 1929-1945. No one knows therefore exactly how this policy of continuing trillion dollar
p spending injections will play out. If the stability of the US dollar cannot (and is not) to be counted upon, and is to be replaced by a stable alternative of some kind, then the dominant leading role of the US in the international capitalist class can no longer be expected to be what it was. In fact, it is only a matter of time until the gringo oligarchy is pushed into the background, as far as the other ruling classes of the rest of the capitalist world are concerned. Capitalists as classes all over the world are getting bigger and more powerful than the gringo oligarchy — China now has nearly as many billionaires as gringolandia; the Britainization of the Gringo Empire is underway and irreversible.
p On June 30, 2010, Jack Cafferty again led the way on CNN when he devoted his show to the replacement of the US Dollar with an international new currency beginning with a “basket of currencies” as advocated that day by UN financial analysts. So, finally, the US population will begin to hear the truth about what has happened (irreversibly) to their currency.
p In other words, as we began this Preface, the truth is no matter what the US oligarchs do now they cannot save their Empire. As in Hari Seldon’s Galactic Empire, US Imperial collapse is inevitable and analogously this is identical to the model predicted by Seldon’s science of psychohistory.
p But this is not a novel. History has led the US Empire to its inevitable dissolution and this collapse is underway, law governed, and most importantly irreversible, no matter what steps the US ruling families take now. —And the science is not Asimov’s fictional psychohistory but the dialectical and historical materialism of Marxism-Leninism.
p As 2012 unfolds we will hear more discussion of the fringe effects of monetary devaluation (of the US dollar) on various aspects of the domestic US and international economy. This is no accident but part of the overall propaganda theatre being choreographed by the masters of media control. This phase of the current capitalist depression is far more severe than it was previously and much more unstable in terms of international fiscal policy of various capitalist governments. What I mean is we have to watch closely to see how they handle this phase as I said we would have to do as far back as the 2007 edition, when I predicted this collapse, to see how the capitalists would handle their crisis. This “watching” being about all us communists can do at the moment in the USA.
p Why? Because (1) we communists are spread out among a broad-spectrum of parties considering themselves communist (plus a Party [CPUSA]), and (2) as usual, as some kind of haunting syphilitic specter always at our heels, international anarchism. To escape the current crisis permanently the US people have to (3) reject capitalism. To do that they now have a (4) real vanguard revolutionary working class (Communist) Party: the Communist Party USA (Foundation).
p (4) Information Control: Why is this as important as the first three factors?
p Because the key thing I learned about the way the gringo capitalist oligarchy (Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon and other trillionaire families) got out of their 2008 catastrophe and leveled out into the current depression in 2009 - 2011 is, they got away with it because they have absolute control of the media and we need to understand how that was and is being achieved. In short, it has been a masterful use of television and radio to maintain an atmosphere of calm, “normality if severe”, “we will inevitably rebound and soon”, and it worked, even while millions lost their homes and jobs. I doubt working people in any other capitalist country would have stood still for this, nor for an
p occasional check from the Regime on the Potomac as a sop to keep them from starving on the streets. In the first nine months of 2009, of the nine million scheduled and already processed foreclosures, only 500,000 have been helped by the Federal Regime of Barack Obama. In short even the progressive government of Obama has really just done a social justice deed for a few people while they have given an absolute blow job to the capitalists.
p At any rate absolute and masterful media choreography is how the US oligarchy held on while their emergency room actions to save their economy were underway. Learn all of the lessons inherent in this fact. Break this control of the airwaves by a half dozen trillionaire families somehow and their days will be numbered.
p (5) The Gringo Conundrum: Fatally Flawed World-view Models of the dying USA ruling class is the other side of the “information control coin.” We have generations of journalism and political science students (among others in related fields) who have internalized the fantastic stories and models of the US rulers. They actually believe the official (e.g., Time, Newsweek magazines) version of the world. Since this model has literally no accurate reflection within it of the real world, and the causality and process inherent therein, believers are doomed to a Wizard of Oz kind of understanding of the world in which we live.
p As I have mentioned, it is one thing to have a fantastic view of the world we live in when it doesn’t matter. It no longer matters, for example, whether one is protestant or catholic (excluding the crackpot evangelist far right wing nutballs where every fairy tale nuance of their Biblical interpretation is important) as it did at the time our Republic was founded. But it is important if the fantastic world-view means to completely misunderstand or totally non-understand the history of the United States and of the international working class movement. Since the “official” models are silly and non-reflective of reality it leaves US trained journalists and political scientists, who are would-be willing agents of gringo imperialism, lost in space! Real space cadets.
p As the gringo Regime on the Potomac stumbles into one catastrophe after another because their view of the world is not only unscientific it is actually anti-scientific, the fantasy world models of these poorly educated and trained “wannabe” journalists and political scientists are of no real world use in advising the USA trillionaire oligarchy. Instead of intelligence being gathered, a silly world-view is being propagated, and as useful as that is in fooling the sheep back home it is counter-productive when what you need is the incisive insight afforded by a scientific (academic) understanding of the issues at hand.
p The real world is a mine field and only those with an accurate understanding of it will have a chance to traverse it successfully. The gringo ideologists at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and PBS are not just the purveyors of calm in a chaotic capitalist crisis but sponsors of silliness in the understanding of the real world and its history. Therefore, they are also the grave diggers of the gringo capitalist system because you can’t negotiate a mine field at all if you are truly blind and alone. The gringo capitalists and their flunkeys are truly blind and very alone. Helping, if unwittingly, to delude the US people, the pathetic US journalists and political science graduates are now also helping to fuck up gringo imperialism simultaneously with their silly op-eds and hypothesis based on nothing but fairy-tale models of reality. Their current dilemma over Cuba a case in point. Their dilemma over Afghanistan another (not to mention, Iraq, Venezuela, and virtually
27everywhere gringo planners have substituted fairy tales and religious superstition for the realistic scientific descriptions of nations and events which real world politics requires.)
Another Example of Dialectics in Practice
p This conundrum, which is irresolvable by the gringo capitalists, is an excellent example of dialectics in practice. A social and cultural mechanism created and shaped over many decades to delude the masses has within it the assurance that imperialism’s brain trust will be made up of retards! Dialectical method allows us to see this and is an obvious example of how our superb scientific understanding of social and cultural causality and process gives us a superior position from which to fight the class war.
p The Problem with Models - It’s Time We Advanced Once Again
p Searching for the Model; Building the Model
p This is the Stalinist Road of Expanding Global Socialism
p The problem with Models for us has been that the only one we had — the Soviet Union — was not really adequate for us. The Russians being in a far more primitive mode of capitalist production at the time of the October Revolution than we are now. We shall see where we are now in the overall reconstruction of US capitalist history in Part III below.
p This doesn’t mean it is methodologically bad to use a model. Quite the contrary. Model building is the first step in scientific higher education at places like Cal Tech, and it should be for us too. The problem with a model lies in the degree to which this new cultural “software” fits the old social “hardware”. In other words, the better the model the better the outcome. The more poorly a model approximates reality the poorer the outcome.
p As Professor Antonio Gilman has pointed out for many decades, Stalin’s theory of socialist expansion had one Soviet Republic after another, probably bordering the USSR, being created cookie-cutter style. This Russian model however kept changing. Changing from the idealized War Communism model, to the NEP model, and finally to the Five Year Plan model of socialized agriculture in collective farms alongside a supporting industrial power plant greater than the world had ever seen. All good models for Russia in their time. But perhaps only the latter applicable to the USA. However, it had taken fifteen years for the Stalinist model to really take shape. In the meantime the US communists had had their own battles to fight and their own future models to think about.
p The Chinese after 1975 expanded their search for the right model(s) in a way quite similar to the way the gringo bourgeoisie did. The division of that capitalist nation (USA) into “states” effectively allowed the local bourgeoisie to be the bosses of their own areas. It allowed for a multitude of social experiments to be conducted simultaneously. Some states had advanced working class legislation while others had outright chattel slavery. This social structure became an extremely effective way of letting off steam from many sources. For example, Utah is nearly worldwide known as the “Mormon State”. (Never mind the fact Utah guarantees the civil rights of all religionists.) —And, in the course of our history we have had States dominated by Catholics, right wing nutball Evangelists, Protestants of the respectable Presbyterian
28p variety, even left wing “socialist” state governments under a variety of populist leaders have existed from time to time. One thing they all share in common is their acceptance of capitalism. The other thing they have in common is that each constitutes an experiment which if and when successful might be duplicated by other States.
p China has been doing exactly this kind of experimentation, at the provincial, county and municipal level for decades now and it’s paying off for them just as well as the gringo bourgeois experiment we call the USA worked out for them. Except here in China all these experiments share in common their acceptance of socialism and CPC direction.
p We have a choice which is to build our own model now while the enemy has state power and then try to impose it during armed revolutionary struggle. Another choice would be to utilize a loose governing structure such as the US federal system while the Party proceeds to impose its program. We could wait for some other advanced capitalist country to set the pace. Wait until we can model ourselves after them.
p Frankly, I think we will in practice witness all three of these options coming to the fore in the coming decades.
p The Cover
p The cover of this book presents a picture of the Stalinist model of Socialism on the road to Communism as pictured for the masses of Russia and the world c. 1936. At its center the idealized picture of the USSR in the 1930’s with its mechanized collectivized agriculture on the “American scale” so admired by Lenin and Stalin. The industrialized base for mechanization (e.g., tractors and the factories creating them) is shown in one overall grand scheme of things. —And, hovering above it all is the image of Joseph Stalin symbolizing the fatherly, wise, protective, leading role in all this of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As Professor Antonio Gilman has pointed out, it is this model the Comintern presented to the world to be duplicated in country after country. It was this model we had to sell in the 1930’s and 40’s and indeed into the 50’s and beyond. The model was highly attractive for decades around the world and still is especially in developing countries.
29However, it is our task to improve and perfect this model to the standards now attainable in the advanced capitalist countries and the advanced socialist countries. You should be giving our perfected model a lot of thought because this is what you have to sell. It is this emerging model we will have to sell to the newly forming Fifth International.
II — Theoretical Matters
Using Our Sociocultural Evolutionary Chart: The most important immediate conclusion to the completion of the general schematic of human sociocultural evolution has been to see the answers to our questions about where we are, and why, in the overall course of history. When we do this we can see the real at-bottom theoretical source of confusion for the last century has had to do with one or another misreading of where we are on the ladder of sociocultural evolution. For example, we were not on the verge of being able to create Communism in October 1917, not even what we have
come to call Socialism. In fact, in the Soviet Union we were in the most primitive beginning phase of industrial capitalism (as we had come to know it in North America and Western Europe). It was a pattern to be continued for many decades in our Socialist Camp. Since that phase has lasted so many decades and featured its duplication in many countries we conclude, following the rule history is always unfolding as it should, what we have seen is a special subphase of the second transition or what in fact is what we have come to call a distinct stage in sociocultural evolution — i.e., Stalinist Socialism. It too we see will evolve into an advanced form of Socialism and there may well be more as yet unseen transitional Stages yet to come for these parts of the world before we enter the Stage of Communism. Make a copy of our chart of sociocultural evolution and put it on your wall. Your tasks as revolutionaries in the future will be to work out the steps and phases relevant to your own situation and act accordingly in terms of developing a strategy and tactics to propel your Party into power. Much of that will depend upon where you are. What is relevant in Nepal is unlikely to have any relevance to what needs to be done in Singapore or the USA. Here it is.
30
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Chart of Sociocultural Evolutionary Stages
p(Read this chart from bottom to top which is to say from the oldest to the most recent category.)
p(Era of Freedom begins)
p Star Trek Stage
p Communist Stage
p(Era of Necessity ends)
p Advanced Socialism Stage
p Stalinist Socialism Stage
p(Epoch of Chattel and Wage Slavery)
p Capitalist Stage
p Feudal Stage
p Slave Stage
p First Transitional Period
p Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms
p Stage of Simple Chiefdoms
p(Epoch of Primitive Communism)
p Stage of Tribal Agriculture
p Stage of Advanced Homo sapiens Hunting and Gathering
p Stage of Homo erectus Hunting and Gathering
p Stage of Home australopithecus Hunting and Gathering
p Practical Application: the Source of Ultra-Left and Trotskyist Errors
p You can use our now accurately reconstructed, model of prehistoric with historic sociocultural evolution and see where the Trotskyists and the Ultra-Left took the completely wrong fork in the theoretical road; namely, by confusing in 1917 where we were with where they wanted to be, to wit:
p Communist Stage
p ç Where they want to be and where they think we were in 1917
Second Egalitarian Epoch Begins Here
p
p Advanced Socialist Stage(s)
p ç Where we are now (China, Cuba, Vietnam)
p Stalinist Socialist Stage
p ß Where we really were in 1917
p Second Transitional Period Begins Here
p Capitalist Stage
p Feudal Stage
p Slave Stage
p Servitude Epoch Begins Here
p Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms Stage
p Simple Chiefdoms Stage
p First Transitional Period Begins Here
p Tribal Agriculture Stage
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 3 (Homo sapiens)
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 2 (Homo erectus)
p Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 1 (Homo Australopithecus)
p Ape-like Humans
p Primitive Communism (1st Egalitarian Epoch) Begins Here
p Human-like Apes
p Because the Trotskyists and ultra-leftists of all stripes (e.g., RCP, Bob Avakian) had no accurate prehistoric-historic knowledge about sociocultural process — reflected in our archaeological chart of sociocultural stage evolution, or fundamentally about the more profound implications of our theory, the Trotskyists and the Madame Maoists took the wrong road. This is their objective, scientifically derived, commonality. Those who followed Stalin and what became the Party’s General Line had no such knowledge either
p but they had common sense and knew their way was in fact the only way. The latter persevered and the former have not. History speaking for itself i.e., unfolding as it did is the proof.
p By correcting this profound error — going back to the fork and taking the correct road — those in error (Trotskyists and ultra-leftists) can become effective fighters for rapid transformation to Communism, once again.
These people are our comrades, and many if not all have suffered greatly for their beliefs, and we should at least try to help them, despite their problems, if we can. We want them to rejoin the international revolutionary movement via the correct Communist Party and correct international working class revolutionary line. After all, everyone was confused for a while. Those who were right by accident will now know why they were right. (The revisionists old or modern were always wrong and anti-Marxist-Leninist then and now but that is another matter altogether.) Problem resolved.
Before We Begin: The Language of Historical Science: Terminology, Concepts and Facts
p Contents
p Defining Our Terms
p Historical Perspective
p A Vision of the Future
p Erroneous Visions
p The Evil Imprinting of the Servitude Epoch
p In Science we build on the Past
p The Method: Original Documents
p History is Always Unfolding as it Should
p Modern Science Born
p Theory and Practice in the Science of
p Society, Culture and their History
p Marxist Philosophy of Science
p Cross-cultural Comparative Analysis by Formula:
p The mathematics of sociocultural evolution
p The evolution of culture: the dialectics of contradiction
p The evolution of culture: Crises dialectics
p Do not get confused
p The Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit
p Laws
p The First Presentation of Stage Sequential Laws
p Of sociocultural evolution
p The Problem of Trotsky and Trotskyism
p The New Class is the General Crisis of
p The stage of Stalinist Socialism
p Stalin and Stalinism
p Taking on the Rothschilds, 1901
p The Empire Atremble
p The Revolution of 1905
p Trotskyist Mythology
p The New Class is not a deformation but Part of a New and Necessary
p Transitional Stage — of which there will be several more before we arrive at Communism
p The New Class is Our # 2 Problem
p Backwardness in technology is not what Marx and Engels Proposed
p Prehistoric Origins of the New Class
p In the Slave and Feudal Stages
p Capitalism and the Technocrats
p Socialism and its New Class
p To Review
p Two Ugly Facts You Must Face
p Back to Our Story in Russia
p Construction of Russian Socialism is both fast and slow
p Lessons of the Cultural Revolution
p Wanting Communism is not enough to have Communism
p Epilogue as Prologue
p If this country had a real educational system, which is to say a system of telling the truth about political science, then what follows in this preliminary section would more properly be termed “remedial terms, definitions and concepts.” Since we do not and most North Americans are in a state of total political ignorance with all of its ramifications (ignorance of history for example other than the fairy tale history of US lower grade textbooks) we will not use the term remedial with its pejorative content. It would be unfair to so penalize those who were the victims rather than the perpetrators of these educational crimes.
p Furthermore, many who consider themselves communists from virtually all of the Left (self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist parties) have been writing pamphlets, brochures, leaflets and even books for the last several years in which their discussion of world capitalism, globalization, the role of labor, the role of revolutionaries, etc., managed to never even mention the imminent global capitalist collapse now in process. (Chief offender here is Sam Webb’s ongoing propaganda in favor of disarming the working class and substituting the U.S. Government’s version of what is going on for a scientific Marxist view.) The other offenders didn’t mention it because they didn’t see it coming. They didn’t see it coming because they don’t understand Marxist economics. They don’t understand Marxist economics because they don’t understand Marxism. We, on the other hand, do understand Marxism and you can see the proof in the last several years of articles I have written for my old website and now reproduced in our Recent Archives section, as well as in this text The ABC’s of Communism, Bolshevism 2012.
31p What is happening now is just the dress rehearsal for the total and final collapse, (obvious to any serious Marxist-Leninist political scientist as I have proven over the last five years in this book and in the innumerable columns I have written for my old website http://groups.msn.com/JasonSmithcom soon to be found at the Daily Worker. This next collapse is coming and soon. Thank goodness what we are currently experiencing is just
p the dress rehearsal because we US Bolsheviks are far from prepared at the moment to being able to lead working people in a final revolutionary struggle against the fascist regime in Washington. As for the North American Left’s self-declared “communists” enough is enough from these writers. Now let us move on.
p Let me begin by pointing out that the definition of terms is critical in every scientific and academic endeavor. -And so it is in revolutionary politics as well. In this book you will learn, many of you for the first time, the scientific definitions of important terms in the science of society, culture and their history. You will learn these correct definitions and how enemy propagandists, and their so-called “educators,” try and trick you by giving these same words an entirely false and unscientific meaning. This confusion is spread as a principal tactic of our enemies. For example, when neo-Nazi fascist thugs, like George Bush and Rush Limbaugh, mouth words like “freedom” and “democracy”, these words end up meaning exactly the opposite of their real definition. For “freedom”, Bush et. al., mean the “freedom” to rob, pillage and kill, the working people of this world. By “democracy” they mean that among themselves (the billionaires and trillionaires who own this country and its sorry “government” in Washington) they will be “democratic” in determining how to rob, pillage and kill the working people of North America. A far cry from their real meaning and like the Nazi’s before them this “populist” language is aimed at confusing the ill-prepared, ignorant, and uneducated.
32p Historical Perspective
p For the first time in many years the situation in the USA with regard to the possibility of working class political power is extremely good. The Orwellian nightmare of modern revisionism in the USSR and Eastern Europe has been lifted from our backs and now the US imperialist flagship has crashed itself onto the Iraqi shoals of an emerging new continent in world history; in the aftermath there is great confusion on the part of our enemies. For our side, we have gone through a period of confusion, but this book among others, is a signal that long-view clarity is being imposed. It remains only to put our now correct understanding of contemporary historical process to work in appropriate organizational ways. I, for one, have never seen us in a better position than the one we Bolsheviks now occupy, both at home and abroad; more importantly I believe there has never been a more propitious situation in the history of North America, for real progress toward real Communism, than the one we now confront.
33p A Vision of the Future
p Is there a painting, or an illustration, or say a movie, which can give us a view of the future which is consistent with what Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin would have pictured for us as an ideal future? Yes I think so — probably quite a few books, illustrations and movies or TV shows, show us a future with at least some aspects we can admire and with which we can identify. My favorite happens to be the vision of Gene Roddenberry (not that there are not many others.) For in Star Trek we see a near future with technology so advanced that people can live without money and without pay, and yet everything they desire in the way of material things is instantly available. In this future the “necessities” of everyday life are made available to everyone as a matter of birthright. This is a near future with technology so advanced that when a person wants a cup of coffee or a meal she simply asks the “replicator” machine for said item and the food and the cup or plate
34p containing it instantly appears. Private ownership of such things as food and cutlery is an anachronism; i.e., irrelevant; immaterial. This is Communism. In this version the Starship Enterprise crew are the communists of the future.
p For me, this Star Trek future is the vision I think is most consistent with the scientifically predicted future of Karl Marx and most subsequent Marxists. Therefore, you will see occasional references in this book to future human society and future communist society as societies having Star Trek characteristics. We will be thinking in broad sociocultural evolutionary themes with a sweeping overview of humanity from its primate origins to its near and predictable future forms, so such “vision” is important for all of you to consider.
p Whether, such advanced technology as pictured by the Roddenberry tradition is at hand, or even possible in the coming century, is really not the point. The point is that someday, in the not too distant future, meaning in the next few centuries, we will have an adequate industrial base to support the slogan “from each according to her ability to each according to her need.” —And, when that day arrives we will have the technological basis needed to support the Stage of Communism.
p I happen to think that what Roddenberry pictures for us with regard to faster-than-light travel is possible and will be achieved in the 21st century (virtually everything else from The Original Series has been invented and is very much with us, with this exception, and the exception of teleportation). As far as space travel in general is concerned, there is just one remaining problem and that is the cost. But from a several centuries perspective, that problem will go away once science and engineering create an anti-gravity engine. For these reasons, I have spent considerable time over the last four decades in the area of subatomic physics — a kind of hobby, if you will, where the problems of light speed and gravitation are the very essence of the subject matter. For those of you interested in where I am going with this I recommend that you read my book New Perspectives in Physics, 1999, Jason W. Smith, Premier Books, Boise, 160 pp. or, the four papers at http://www/communistfoundationpartyusa.org - click on the button to on the home page of that site, also labeled “New Perspectives in Physics.” (See the website WorldCat for university libraries closest to you.)
35p Erroneous Visions
p One final comment about futuristic visions and their importance. I alluded to the fact that not every Marxist leader saw the future as Marx, Engels and Lenin did. Most notorious was Cambodia’s Pol Pot, who as a young man wrote a doctoral dissertation in France, and then carried out much of the thinking expressed therein, many decades later as chief of the Khmer Rouge. In his way of thinking, it was sufficient to have an ideologically pure and advanced cadre lead people into an egalitarian communal way of life before any great technological advance occurred. We know how that turned out in practice. —And, I think it proves that Pol Pot was not really a Marxist at all. In China when the Cultural Revolution took an ultra-left turn it was Madame Mao (Chiang Ching) who took the equivalent position to Pol Pot and we know how that disaster turned out.
36p There is the historically related movement called Anarchism. Their view of the future may best be seen in the way they organized their areas of Republican Spain in the 1930’s. However, their failure to accept Marx and Engels’ discovery of the nature of the state, left them irrelevant to us, and enemies in fact. (e.g., Marx sent the First
p International away from Europe to the USA, allowing it to “die” there, in order to avoid allowing the pernicious influence of anarchism to contaminate labor. See Part III of this book for the details.)
p In the same sense I think Pol Pot and Madame Mao left the common fold when they failed to accept what Marx and Engels had proven; namely, that one cannot advance into a truly communist society, let alone into a society where human power is its own end, until one has the technological wherewithal to make the foregoing slogan of communism a reality.
p Roddenberry’s vision has our advanced technological base as a “given” for the altruistic and egalitarian lifestyle he preaches. So, in that sense, it is fully in accord with the vision of Marx and Lenin. Don’t get bogged down in whether this or that facet of Star Trek is possible or not possible, or feasible or not feasible — give a little artistic freedom to the writers, because, our tasks at the moment, are much more down-to-Earth, as you are about to see. The point is that we Marxist-Leninists have a vision of technologically assured plenty, scarcity eliminated, egalitarian social relations extant, in the absence of class coercion (i.e., the state) as the future of humanity.
p The Evil Imprinting of the Servitude Epoch: Herbert Aptheker
p Herbert Aptheker, an outstanding North American Marxist historian, and theoretician of the CPUSA, recognized the evil nature of mental imprinting in the world as currently constructed, and in the last years of his life he said so to his Communist Party USA colleagues. The autobiography of his daughter tells us that Aptheker had his own peculiar, culturally imposed, demons which presumably helped him come to this correct conclusion. His experience teaches us that erroneous visions, such as his terrible life curse, have their foundation in, the at-bottom evil nature of contemporary mental imprinting that affects ALL classes not just the oppressing classes. People are not born with a blank slate for long. Imprinting begins with birth and proceeds rapidly apace so that by the time a child is a few years old it is well set in. Communists are just as susceptible to evil basal mental imprinting as anyone else. It is for this reason that attempts to jump into the social organization of communism, without adequate mode of production preparation, have failed. That is, first or simultaneously with socialist reorganization of society, we need to have the fully accomplished technological gains of the Capitalist Stage firmly in hand, so the material foundations for modern altruism exist. —And, then enough time must pass for the new way of doing things to be reflected in the ideology of said societies. This means that the old and evilly infected must be allowed to pass away so that the new generation of properly imprinted persons can take their place. Because the Earth always belongs to the living, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying.
37p Let’s say it again: the material conditions of great plenty, the founders required for communism to be successful, must be laid first! Or, at the very least, must be very well advanced and underway before modern altruism can replace modern selfishness-sadism, among the masses, as the primary underlying mental template being imprinted. The founders were right, as usual. Modern communism requires the fully modernized industrial base of the capitalist stage. You either inherit it or you build it. There is no short cut. We know. We have tried. We found out the hard way.
p It certainly is not our intention to return to primitive communism. From our theoretical standpoint we would be far better off sticking with capitalism which is more
p advanced in sociocultural evolution, as you will see in this book, and as Marxists have always maintained.
p In Science we build on the Past
p In science we are always building on the past. For example, in the case of biology we are always building on Darwin’s discovery of variation and natural selection. We work out the details as we go along; explaining how these two pillars of our general theory work mechanically and systematically, and we have gone through several distinct periods with their unique contributions. Such as the discovery that inheritance is particulate (Mendelian genetic specific theory) and now the rise of molecular specific theory (DNA). We don’t throw Darwin’s discoveries overboard as we progress, but rather deepen our understanding of the way in which variation occurs and the ways in which selection acts upon it. In the case of physics we don’t throw out Newtonian mechanics or Faraday’s electricity discoveries but rather more fully explicate their mechanical function, always seeking to deepen our understanding of the underlying systems, as in Maxwell’s field mathematics, Einstein’s relativity theory and contemporary subatomic research, e.g., http://www.communistfoundationpartyusa.org —And, the same should be the case with social science. Our task is to deepen our understanding of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels original discoveries and to do so by learning the real lessons of history from our own historical practice.
38p The Method:
p Original Documents;
p History is always Unfolding as it Should
p In fairness we need to point out that social science is neither biology nor physics. Because it is “social science” everyone recognizes that contemporary “political programs” are affected by our reconstruction of historical events. This means there is a very definite bias favored by contending persons inherent in such reconstructions and this in and of itself leads to partisanship in scholarship. This accounts for the radically different qualities of journalism to be found in the newspapers of the far Left. Some articles have valuable data and are “right on,” others are simply ludicrous and sometimes have not a true historical statement in them, being simply umpteenth-hand regurgitations of historical mythology (as for example in continuing misrepresentations of what happened in the first go-around in China with the capitalist classes. See Chapter 14 Bolshevism Spreads to China for an accurate summary).
39p But, there are ways for everyone to “check” the tendency toward petty partisanship. A scientific “method” in other words peculiarly well suited to our subject matter.
p What are these checks? What is this method?
p The first is to go to the original documents. The second is to follow the guideline that history is always unfolding as it should!
p Thus, our task is not to pick a side (as for example Stalin vs. Trotsky) but rather to determine accurately what in fact did happen and why. In the end we may appear to be taking a side but there is a very big difference in the way we go about doing it. Contemporary Marxist schismatics pick their side first and then try to justify it by a partisan, inaccurate, interpretation of historical events — scientists on the other hand make
p an objective historical assessment first and then if they wish may pick a side, although what possible service side-picking might afford many decades or more after the fact is beyond me. Recognizing that history has provided us with this analytical tool cum rule (i.e., history is always unfolding as it should,) I have tried to follow it in my work, as for example in this book. This means finding out what really did happen and then finding out why. —And, to do this I always go to the original documents — not nearly as difficult a task in this day and age, with so much information instantly available on the internet, as it used to be when hours, days, weeks, months and even years in various research libraries were required. This is a method you can use to check the tendency toward petty partisanship in your understanding of history. Once you do this adequately you can proceed to the next — organizational — step.
40p Modern Science Born
p As Charles Darwin founded modern biology so Karl Marx and Frederick Engels founded modern social science. As Darwinian evolutionary theory is the foundation of all of modern biology, so Marxist sociocultural evolutionary theory is the foundation of all of social science.
p The word “theory” in science is used to describe our highest explanatory construct in that science. Theory does not mean in science what it means in everyday talk, which is to say someone’s idea about something. This latter definition more appropriately fits the scientific term “hypothesis.” Scientific general theory flows from materialist epistemology (that branch of philosophy known as “theory of knowledge.”) For us Bolsheviks, this materialist epistemology is always dialectical. That is, we search for the interconnections between all phenomena and try to discover the moving causes which create the evolutionary process. Often these causes appear as “opposites” and feature one transforming into the other.
p Generally speaking there are three areas of “philosophical matter.” That is, three types of real world existence in the universe. These are the non-living physical area, the living or biological area, and the sociocultural realm. Our concern as professional revolutionaries is primarily with the latter.
p When Marx and Engels met for the first time in Paris in November 1842, they quickly realized that, independently, they had come to the same conclusions as to the motive forces involved in sociocultural phenomena. We often refer to these discoveries as the “laws of history.” To wit, people articulate with their environment via a buffer we call “culture.” Culture has three components: the forces of production (technology), the relations of production (social organization) that people enter into in order to utilize that technology and a mental superstructure (ideology) that arises on the foregoing, Mode of Production.
p The terms technology, social organization and ideology were inventions of Leslie A. White who brought Marxism back to the forefront in the English-speaking World, as the General Theory of Anthropology. White felt he had no choice but to camouflage anthropological theory’s Marxist origins, if he were to successfully populate the post-Second World War US (GI Bill) public universities with graduates of his own "neo-Evolutionary" school of Anthropology. Thus, the terms, technology, social organization and ideology, so widely used in anthropology today. Another story for another book.
p Theory advances with practice.
p In biology that practice took nearly a century of intense work, after Darwin published Origin of Species, before the underlying mechanism of variation was laid bare for all to see in the 1953 announcement of Watkins and Crick that they had uncovered the nature of hereditary chemistry. DNA showed us the structure of heredity and also told us how natural selection works mechanically.
p At about the same time as Darwin and Marx those who would found the modern Earth geological sciences were publishing their own breathtaking vision of the real forces at work shaping the planet. —And, building on Newton’s discovery that light is particulate, practical experimenters were building the foundations of contemporary subatomic physics. This latter work would take much longer as the subject matter, being invisible, required more sophisticated means of getting to its at-bottom causality.
p Theory and Practice in the Science of Society, Culture and their History
p In social science, we have had 91 years of practice since workers first seized power in October, 1917, by overthrowing the Magnate-Ducal Czarist regime in Russia; creating the first working class state and government in the world. Since then the tide of global class struggle has ebbed and flowed, and in this book you will see how and why. As importantly you will see what stages humanity passed through on its way to this contemporary situation. We are in the second transitional period (between two Epochs, and this time two Eras) where the last of the Servitude Stages (Capitalism) is giving way to the first stage of the Era of Freedom (Communism) via at least two intermediary “socialist” stages.
p Sociobiology
p There is a field of ongoing neo-Nazi ideology called sociobiology. The first principle of this so-called school of scientific thinking is (1) the science of Anthropology never existed. (2) There is no such thing as culture as we Marxists and all anthropologists define it. (3) Rather in this new Hitlerian vision all human behavior is determined by genes and the earlier Hitler caveat of Aryan racial superiority in a chart of superior to inferior humans based on skin color, hair form, skull shape, stature, weight and so forth, was wrong and the real chart should be based on who has what superior genes which again are said to determine all behavior including such things as altruism. Then they set about blissfully to find these genes. Of course this is all nonsense.
p The truth of Marx’s and Engels’ understanding of culture (forces and relations of production upon which arises an ideological superstructure) is as firmly set in social scientific stone as natural selection and variation are in biology. Which is not to say there are no critically important genetic components to human evolution as of course there are and I have mentioned them throughout this text. Most importantly, recently, has been the successful ongoing research linking changes in the chimpanzee brain to cultural activity as I point out herein.
p The only important thing for you to note about this nutball “science” is that it is in the wings and waiting. Waiting for what? For the inevitable final struggle between fascism and socialism and the open dictatorship the oligarchy will establish by military coup or at least attempt to establish soon here in the USA. This will be reflected in an imposition of this kind of neo-Nazi ideology on the university and High School textbooks and teachers. That is, if we allow that to happen, which we shall certainly try and prevent.
p Marxist Philosophy of Science
p Frederick Engels spent the better part of his life studying the then contemporary advance of philosophy as the highest guiding body of knowledge of any science. His central conclusion was that science and philosophy had become the same thing; at least as far as we are concerned. (Bourgeois ideologists of course get paid for penning ongoing bullshit but that is their problem.) There are no better works on dialectical materialist epistemology than the originals of this great historical genius. —And, from his work we have constructed the modern materialist philosophy of science and I urge all serious Marxist philosophy students to go back and start at the beginning with the work of Frederick Engels.
p The method flows from a Marxist philosophy of science and the theoretical explanations thereby constructed. Science always has an explanatory and investigative “structure” beginning with epistemology (that branch of philosophy known as “theory of knowledge”) which in our case is the epistemology of dialectical materialism, another topic for another book. Schematically, we can picture the following from top to bottom: the first level on top is epistemology. Below epistemology is General Theory which means a series of statements and concepts expressed in words or numbers or both, explaining “everything” within that science. At the next level, below general theory, each science has many, seemingly innumerable, specific theories which are more specific statements that explain everything within a rather tightly subsumed category within that science. So, for example, we have the “General Theory” of Historical Materialism and the “Specific Theory” of Primitive Communism.
41p In our case our general theory is historical materialism — what this book is all about — and that also means our general theory is the general (highest) theory of the sciences of anthropology, psychology, history and sociology. When we set our immediate task to develop a specific explanation (theory) that covers all examples of the New Class in all circumstances where it exists, we turn to the three major ways to construct an explanatory specific scientific theory and these are: 1) the deductive way where the premises make the conclusion necessary; (2) the probabilistic form of theoretical explanation where the premises make the conclusion probable; and (3) the historical or “genetic” form where any given event is explained in terms of its evolutionary antecedent forms. Because genetic has so many other connotations in science we will use the term ”historical” which at any rate has its own place in the history of our science.
42p Cross-cultural Comparative Analysis by Formula
p The Mathematics of Social Evolution
p Using the third form of scientific investigation/explanation we extract a formula for production as the “theoretical” way of expressing the relationship within the Mode of Production. (The mode of production is called the “base” of culture; ideology arises on the base and is called the superstructure)
p {Technology àSocial Organization} mode of production or base
The formula can be expressed in terms of four elements in an equation, and using the formula for the capitalist stage as an example (see Chapter 12), these are:
Human working activity (l = concrete individual working activity; lp = homogenized collective labor, temporally measured, called labor-power.)
Technology (in the case of capitalism this is always some kind of machinofacture.)
Value — the cost of labor and in the Servitude Epoch (especially in the capitalist stage) the cost of labor-power
p Surplus value — the additional amount produced above value in capitalist systems and in pre-capitalist systems of the Servitude Epoch; and surplus social product in pre-Servitude Epoch society.
p Expressed as follows:
p l (or lp) + technology àV1, V2 + SV
p These are the four essential elements of human productive activity and they can be cross-culturally compared through time and across the entire space of the globe. This is the way we build a theory in science and the way we make it useable. (You may think of them analogously as the four nucleotides of sociocultural DNA; not that there is such a thing, of course.) The General theoretical structure is the cultural concept of the Mode of Production; the specific theoretical constructs are as numerous as the sociocultural evolutionary stages they represent. Which is to say (i) we define the essential elements at the core of something (in this case human productive activity) and (ii) arrange them in such a way that they appropriately describe every instance of the subject in question (which in this case is the evolution of human productive activity through distinct “stages”) —And (iii) we do this at two levels: (a) a high general level and (b) a secondary tier of specific levels. As you can see “theory” has two magnitudes.
43p This time, in this edition, as we use our third form of scientific investigation and explanation, we will spend more time on the origin and development of our contemporary New Class, tracing the New Class back into its previous forms. We can see that it has several “occupational” or “professional” components. Accounting is one. Enforcement is another. Religion (and certain associated scientific endeavors such as astronomy) is another; professionally specialized crafts are another. You will see who the predecessors of today’s new class were, how they functioned and transformed.
p Thus, we have what we meant to have, when we used the phrase “a “Marxist” “theoretical” explanation” (or as commonly, an “historical materialist theoretical” explanation.) It has been the failure to produce a Marxist theoretical explanation for what happened in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and in a totally different way, the People’s Republic of China, in the last several decades, which left the “Left” in the capitalist countries totally confused and often demoralized — subject to ideological subversion by the non-stop assault of the capitalist media. Hopefully, that deficiency is remedied herein.
p The Evolution of Culture: The Dialectics of Contradiction
p Mechanical materialists (e.g., Leslie A. White; Marvin Harris) approach the evolution of culture as a linear process whereby one step leads to the next. Dialectical materialists approach the evolution of culture by deciphering how one type of core causal
p phenomena transforms into its opposite step by step, from the earliest to the most recent, and then we try to project into the future the likely next dialectical resolution. Rather than continue to speak in the abstract let us turn to the text to see how this method works in practice.
p The general contradiction can be reduced to a prime directive for our purposes. There are two general contradictions with which we are preoccupied in our studies and each of these will have its own prime directive. The general contradiction describes the two polar opposite keys to understanding the social organization of an epoch. The prime directive is the resulting cultural commandment for all citizens of the group in question in the epoch being studied.
p In our case we begin by describing two General Contradictions that occupy two “epochs” in human history. The first of these is the general contradiction of the first egalitarian epoch (the epoch of primitive communism) consisting of the bands and tribes of the hunting-gathering and early agricultural modes of production which simply put is that “every step taken to prevent surplus social product, and the social dissolution, inevitably created by it, becomes in addition a step in making the creation of surplus social product a certainty. —And, as importantly, this fact makes it certain that even though a given step may gain a temporary respite in the burgeoning of surplus social product, the process is even more certain to end in social dissolution.” The prime directive of this general contradiction is to avoid the production of surplus social product at virtually any cost.
44p The second general contradiction is that of the servitude epoch (the stages of slavery, feudalism and capitalism) where “every step taken is aimed at maximizing production but despite this the results are less and less of a share for those doing the work; a worse living condition for the producers themselves and these facts make it certain that the dissolution of this epoch will also occur as slaves, serfs and workers revolt, sharpening the class struggle and requiring armed force (the “state”) in the hands of the domesticating classes to pacify the masses who are resisting the process of being domesticated. The prime directive of this general contradiction is to maximize production regardless of all other factors.
p The task confronting us is to explain how the first contradiction transformed into the second “opposite” contradiction.
p The Evolution of Culture: Crises Dialectics
p A General Crisis on the other hand is the engine that drives a particular “stage” (within the epochs) through growth, maturation and eventual dissolution. For example, in the Slave Stage (as part of the second or Servitude Epoch with its specific general contradiction) the general crisis arises as a result of the need to have a larger and larger ever growing army and police (i.e., the “state” itself in other words) to keep the slaves in servitude. The cost of the state (army/police) is a drawdown, or cost, charged against the surplus value column as you will see, and the generals (or sergeants) will eventually realize they can replace their employers, a more intangible cost. Both (a) the drawdown on surplus value and (b) the rise of “the state” (army and police) over society, lead to the end of Slavery as a stage, and the necessity of the half-way house of Feudalism to replace it, and can be expressed in the form of an equation or formula, which I will teach you herein. This resolution should also be viewed dialectically in that the origin of the “state”
45p occurs to insure the status quo yet its very success dooms the status quo.
p In Capitalism the general crisis is caused by the financial cost to the capitalist of the constantly increasing investment required of him to stay competitive. He must buy into more and more, increasingly expensive, next generations of machinery, which is a drawdown on the surplus value column. Eventually, as you will see, one capitalist eats the other and capital is concentrated. This also can be expressed in the form of an equation. In short, we say that it is the Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit which results from this inherent need of each capitalist to stay competitive by buying into more and more new machinery which is the engine both causing and driving the General Crisis of Capitalism, for reasons which will be explained to you in detail in this text.
46p This resolution should be viewed dialectically in that investment in the next generation of machinery (NGM in the equations you will learn) occurs to increase production, and to increase its efficiency, yet the ultimate outcome is great poverty for the mass of producers, so that workers must revolt to put an end to the steady deterioration of their lives, as they are getting less and less value for themselves, even though they produce more and more value overall (expropriated by the capitalist.) You will learn this equation, among many others.
p -And, in so doing, you will see that all of human culture and societal affairs can be reduced to the few simple elements mentioned above, and in detail below, in the same way that all of life on Earth can be reduced to a few simple nucleotides. This is what science is all about — getting to the core of causality and process and laying bare the key driving elements, stripping away all the non-essential factors, adornments, and related manifestations.
p Do Not Get Confused
p Violence, Armed force, Government, Class and State
p I want you to notice that we Marxists do not confuse “the state” with violence. Violence existed before class-and-state society and will continue after class-and-state society. Neither do we confuse “the state” with “armed force”, for “armed force” of the people as a whole existed before the emergence of class-and-state societies and will exist after the disappearance of class-and-state society. We do not confuse “the state” with “government” for people governed themselves before class-and-state society and their governments, and they shall govern themselves after the disappearance of the class-and-state society of the Servitude Epoch (Slavery, Capitalism and Feudalism.) The state refers to thuggery (a private monopoly of armed force) in the hands of an already separated, or in the process of separating, ruling class. Class refers to a group of people with a distinct relationship to the means of production: the most important relationship being that between those who own, and those who do not own, said means of production. In class divided society (existing for only some 6000 years) other classes exist as well, particularly those who find employment serving ruling classes (soldiers, cops, and priests for example; also, small proprietors and occasional entrepreneurial workers, and in time a “New Class” of technocrats.)
47p The Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit
p There is continuing confusion over the Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of
p Profit. Marx found confusion abundant on this subject during his lifetime and he had a great deal to say about this misunderstanding in the post-1867 period (and the publication of Capital Volume One). Yet, because macro-theoretical economics is such a rarely understood, let alone taught, science in the USA, and most readers, therefore, have no previous experience with the subject matter, it is worth reframing the question here.
p The crux of confusion lies in understanding the difference between the absolute decline in the rate of surplus value production and the absolute decline in the rate of profit. These are two separate categories. Two separate things. Yet, intimately related all the same.
p You will become familiar with many equations, which are short-hand ways of describing relations between key elements of human productive activity. Let us jump ahead for just a moment, using the formula for the capitalist stage as the example:
p labor power (lp) + technology (t) àValue 1 + Value 2 + Surplus Value (SV)
p Profit / NGM
p In the case of Capitalism we are always discussing the application of human labor-power (homogenized collective output of factory workers, for example, measured by the factory clock) applied to machinery (“t” technology: which is machinery in the capitalist stage.) What is thereby produced repays the workers for their labor-power (only in part) (Value 1 — i.e., wages and benefits) and pays for the factory installation and upkeep of the machinery (Value 2). We call both value 1 and value 2 “value.” What is left over is what we call “surplus value.“ From the surplus value column there are many possible deductions the capitalist can make but the ones of greatest concern to us are those that account for (as sub-columns in our equation) the capitalist’s “profit” and those that account for his investment in the Next Generation of Machinery (NGM).
48p When new machinery is installed (under “t” or technology in our equation) it is done precisely to lower the amount of labor-power (lp) that is required to produce a given commodity. This allows the capitalist to hire fewer workers. Or, another way of putting it is that workers previously hired will be sent to the street unemployed.
p The rate of surplus value production must decline because to buy the new machinery, install and maintain it, the capitalist must shift more overall output from surplus value to value 2 (the cost of installing and maintaining the newly purchased machinery) and also (and most importantly) take more of this overall output and shift it to cover the cost of this newly purchased (next generation of) machinery (NGM).
p In order to avoid this, the capitalist would have had to hire more workers, and/or work the same workers longer hours, so that labor-power input increases at a one-to-one ratio with that of the increased productive power of the new machinery, thereby maintaining the same rate of surplus value creation. In this way he would stay competitive (it is for this reason that Capitalism as a Stage hates competition because) this he cannot do; his idea was to reduce the amount of labor-power going in, not to increase it (and thus his costs.) Therefore, right off the bat, while the introduction of new machinery means a reduction in the cost of his labor force (in hours and/or numbers of workers) it also means an increase in the cost of installing new machinery and maintaining newly equipped factories and therefore results in less surplus value being created; and because simultaneously the capitalist must invest more and more of his
49p remaining overall output in the purchase of the new machinery. This means, all other things being equal, that this absolute decline in the rate of surplus value creation is exacerbated and indeed brought to “crisis” by these new costs of each successive generation of machinery (NGM). This latter fact results always in an absolute decline in the rate of profit. This is why as Karl Marx discovered it is the antagonistic articulation of profit with the costs of the Next Generation of Machinery under Surplus value which is the major loci of the General Crisis of Capitalism (what causes it — the cause of the so-called “business cycle” of boom and bust.)
p Yes, of course, there are short-term things a capitalist can do to offset the absolute decline, at least temporarily, by choosing new ways (eliminating previous ways) of using his surplus value that had hitherto been choices he found desirable. The best long-term way for him is (i) monopoly and/or fixed corrupt contracting, and (ii) slave labor, but these generate massive social resistance. No matter what he does short of these two things, in the end, he is still confronted with the necessity of investing in new machinery or losing competitive advantage; thus in the end he will have less surplus value available for profit. This is the Iron Law of Capitalist Relations.
p In short, the decline in the rate of surplus value creation (as the cost of value 2 must increase even when labor costs (V1) decrease as he sends workers to the street) sets the stage for a general crisis because what surplus value is available must be shifted on an increasing scale to cover the cost of the next generation of machinery (NGM). Thus, in the end there is less surplus value available for whatever other expenditures he may have in mind — especially profit - and this means that the rate of profit must also decline. That is why I said that while these two absolute declines in rate are totally separate categories they are at the same time intimately related.
p I want you to read the chapter on Capitalism (12) carefully for the detailed exposition, but this summary may assist you in understanding what is going on. It may be especially helpful to re-read this short essay after reading Chapter 12.
p All of these technical data on the operation of the capitalist system are not just for economists. These internal operations of all capitalist systems always end up in terrible social and thus political crises that close factories, sending masses of workers to the street, leaving higher priced commodities for consumers, and undercutting all the social programs that workers have fought for (and which can no longer be paid for in “the black”) You are witnessing the truth of all I have written above today in your everyday lives.
p Laws
p Before proceeding to the text let me make one final comment on the definition of terms. In the initial version of this book I discussed certain terms and their definition around which confusion often exists. Since then I have found some confusion also over the use of the terms “law of value,” “laws of history,” “laws of sociocultural evolution,” and so forth. When we use the phrase “laws of history” we should be referring to Marx’s and Engels’ discovery of the concept that history is determined by people using “culture” (anthropological definition) as a buffer between the environment and society. This is the broadest stroke of the use of the term “law” and refers to the fact that ALL of human social and cultural evolution must be understood in terms of the evolution of culture’s three components, technology, social organization and ideology. (The “Mode of Production” being the forces and relations of production; ideology is the Superstructure.)
50p These laws apply to all human sociocultural formations. This is, as Engels said in his funeral eulogy to Karl Marx, one of the two greatest discoveries of Marx. The other greatest accomplishment was Marx having unlocked the secrets of operation of the Capitalist Stage.
p —And, if I may say so, I think a third great accomplishment of Marx at this level was his formulation of the Marxist theory of psychology where the relationships exhibited in production are known to appear in new and different forms (to paraphrase Marx in Volume One of Capital, “the material relations among people appear as social relations between things.”)
p On the other hand the phrase “law of value” refers specifically to the law by which capitalism operates, and not pre-capitalist formations, except, of course, where capitalist germinal elements are present in pre-capitalist stages of the Servitude Epoch, and then the law of value operates only within the germinal capitalist sector. The law of value in this sense always refers to the “socially necessary labor-time” required in the production of a commodity. The relative value of a commodity produced by different factories is the socially necessary labor-time involved in the production of a commodity in factory X as compared to factory Y, and so forth. This is usually a function of the amount of new advanced machinery installed in a given factory — the newer that machinery, the less socially necessary labor-time is required in the production of a given commodity.
51p Laws of sociocultural evolution will be explained as we proceed but again these refer to all stages in some cases and only specific stages in others. Laws of history refer in general to all of the above.
p These are important considerations and not simply matters of technical definition. They are important because Marxists believe in history being determined by cause and processual interaction of these causes in a “lawful” manner as in any other case of natural phenomena. Marx dealt primarily with the laws of operation of the capitalist stage and was spending the latter years of his life deciphering the laws by which pre-capitalist formations operate (a task he left uncompleted). Marx never made the mistake of projecting into the past, capitalist formation laws onto pre-capitalist society. Even Soviet textbooks, originally at least supervised by Stalin, tended to blur these distinctions and it is important that we do not duplicate that error (Mao pointed this out in his A Critique of Soviet Economics, see the 1977, Monthly Review Press edition of this work of Mao Zedong).
52p The First Presentation of Stage Sequential Laws of Operation
p It is fine to assert that such universal laws exist because on the one hand we know epistemologically and in our general theory that such laws must exist. It is quite another to assert that the laws of operation of pre-capitalist systems are known when in fact they are not. To the best of my knowledge this book is the first one to project a series of laws of specific operation of each stage of pre-capitalist society which conform in every way to the model established by Marx in his analysis of capitalism.
p For some informal discussion of Marx’s work in the last seven years of his life and his struggle to understand pre-capitalist society especially primitive communist society, listen to the audio portions of my website at http://www.communistfoundationpartyusa/org .
p One Final Word on the Future
p For Marxists, there has always been one clear vision of the future. It was laid out for us by the “founders of our science” themselves: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Their vision was, and is, part and parcel of the science of society and culture and their history; that is to say, it is a product of, and mandated by, our scientific understanding of sociocultural evolution. Virtually every subsequent great thinker in our tradition has identified with that vision, including V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi-Minh, and Deng Xiaoping. So what precisely is this vision.
p The Future Mode of Production
p For Marxists and Leninists, the future features highly advanced industrial technology alongside social relations of absolute egalitarianism, and the full freedom of each individual to the fullest expression of their inner-most desires in daily productive activity, sexual orientation, and family life.
p Technology, in the future we shall build, is so advanced as to assure the production of unlimited quantities of heavy and light industrial goods, and consumer articles, and the distribution of all such produce to every industry and every person. The future, in other words, features society where unlimited access to the articles of production for every person, is a simple fact of everyday life. Since we did not inherit the most advanced technological preparation in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, or Cuba, we have had to build the industrial base from scratch. But, all observers can see that we have done so.
p Bidding “the State” Good Bye
p For Marxists and Leninists our goal is also a future society in which “the state” (army and police) has ceased to exist and withered away. How can this instrument of class oppression be made to disappear? The answer is, only by doing away with social classes first. Once we have done away with social classes we have also done away with the role of the state, in all societies. The role of “the state” is a role for a social institution which is nothing more than an institution of repressive violence in the hands of an exploiting or ruling class. Once class society ceases to exist — and class society did not exist for 99.99% of human history (nor did the state) — then the need for the state will be gone too.
p When the state is no longer needed as an instrument of class rule, then and only then, can we finally do away with it altogether. Until that time, one class or another will rule. —And, the way one class or the other rules is through the use of police, intelligence services, military force, judicial systems, torture chambers, prisons and execution. There are no exceptions now nor have there ever been any exceptions, anywhere, to this form of class rule — nor shall there ever be. In contemporary times, when the capitalists have state power in their hands, they use it against us. When we seize power we establish our own state and we use that power (in new, loyal, hands) against them. Who will persevere? Science tells us that we will. But, science cannot tell us how long it will take us to win; for better or for worse in the meantime, before the final solution, we are free agents with free will; we are free to win and we are free to lose.
53p The Problem of Trotsky and Trotskyism
p Beginning in 1965, when I took my first SWP course on Trotsky and Bolshevism I found myself quietly at odds with the conclusions and general tenor of the instructor and the majority of already convinced students. To me Trotsky’s book Permanent Revolution seemed extraordinarily shallow. There was nothing in this book that was not already established doctrine among Leninists as far as the idea of continuing the bourgeois revolution into the proletarian phase was concerned. As the course proceeded it became obvious to me that the then popular idea that Trotsky had the right “take” on art and literature was in fact ludicrous. It should have gone without saying that whatever art and literary forms exist at any point in time are reflective of the class interests of the ruling classes of that time, period. —And as the decades passed, and I learned more about Trotsky as a person, the more disgusting I found him to be. How could a Marxist of whatever stripe act so haughtily and arrogantly toward working class cadre of the social democratic movement unless he was fundamentally flawed as a person — carrying over the worst rather than the best of what had gone before, in terms of individual cognizance of his own importance.
54p Gradually, I came to the conclusion that Trotsky was the author of a mythology as deadly to our side as the fantasy world in which the capitalists live is to their side. I mention this up front, so as to make it clear what side I would have been on in the Trotsky-Stalin split. My prejudices allowed to precede me, for your benefit. Take them as you will.
p For our purposes, the most important thing we need to make clear about Trotskyism is, in my opinion, the at-bottom fundamental difference between world Trotskyism and the world international Communist movement is the idea that the New Class is a temporary deformation of a working class-ruled world Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage, when in fact it is no such thing. What we have in Stalinist Socialism is a distinct worldwide Stage (in its own right) of Sociocultural Evolution characterized by backwardness that has necessitated a New Class, potentially dominating and ruling. This is, in fact, the General Crisis of this new Stage in social and cultural evolution — not a deformation. In other words, what we have seen is a new transitional stage; a Stage which features a necessary technocrat class with certain privileges, because there has been no choice, given the technological (almost pre-capitalist) backwardness in which we first seized power.
55p Had we seized power in the most advanced capitalist countries the role of this technocracy would have been quite different; many workers, sufficiently educated, would have been in place to quickly ascend into these technocratic roles. That was not the case as history has proven. Rather we seized power where we could — meaning in countries where the ruling capitalist classes were relatively weak and thus more easily defeated. But, the consequences of victory first in these countries, led to the necessity of the vanguard Party having to create the conditions that Marx and Engels had assumed we would inherit.
p We did not inherit them. We inherited the presumptive wind of a global hurricane. From nearly empty air we had to build the technological foundations without which Socialism is not possible.
p Two New Sociocultural Stages
p This type of “Soviet” socialism occurs again and again in many countries in the period after 1917. Furthermore despite all odds it continues and despite all odds it continues to evolve. Thus, we are seeing for the first time a distinct sociocultural Stage emerge and evolve on the Planet Earth. To get from here to the Stage of Communism as we conceive it implies at least one more sociocultural Stage will emerge along the way. Probably two or more, I suspect. China marching into the Stage of Advanced Socialism shows us what that Stage looks like and it also is a New Sociocultural Stage. In about 200 years at this rate the entire globe may well have entered the Communist Stage although political liberation will occur long before that period of time passes. —And advanced capitalist countries like the USA could literally skip over these two Stages (or at least shorten them to one or two decades) and go directly to the stage of Communism.
56p Back at the Ranch
p Preparing to Understand Trotsky’s role in Chapter 13
p The Stage of Stalinist Socialism
p An administrative caste, if you will, was clearly necessary for the Bolsheviks in power and in uniform. In the latter part of his life Leon Trotsky made this de facto New Class the principal bugaboo of his theoretical position. Yet even perfunctory historical analysis shows us that when he was on top, Trotsky was all in favor of a bureaucratization of everything, including the working class itself, he would have placed under military discipline in their factories! (As he proposed at the 9th Party Congress in the Spring of 1920.) It was Trotsky, not Stalin, that Lenin found guilty (in his Testament) of too much attention to the bureaucratic aspect of things.
p Alternatively, Trotsky later proposed a variety of solutions, but finally, and most often, he spoke of "internationalism" - meaning the support of workers from other successful revolutions in advanced capitalist countries - coming to the assistance of the Soviet Union. -And, he blamed the Stalin "gang" for staging what he called a "coup" against the legitimate representatives of proletarian power in the Party and the State and of course with filling the Government with their own. This is another of those historical problems that requires surgically precise logic and very accurate historical knowledge to get to the bottom of the contention. I find it useful to separate Trotsky the man from Trotskyism the strategy, and indeed the Trotskyist "theory".
57p Beginning with the former, I think Trotsky in the last analysis had no one to blame but himself for the alienating of the Bolshevik "Old Guard." With his very wealthy family background and privileged upbringing, his arrogance and air of superiority, his tendency to lord it over the less verbal Bolshevik Old Guard, he was everything that the Bolshevik working class originating old cadre hated. He had opposed Lenin and Bolshevism virtually his entire life. He came over to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party very late — in late June and early July of 1917 - only after rigorous argument with Lenin, where he made demands so infuriating to the rest of the Bolshevik Party (such as demanding they change their name, if Lenin wanted to gain his membership and indeed leadership mantle) he made many enemies - for life. Among the Bolsheviks only Lenin wanted him. Because Lenin wanted him the rest went along.
58p Lenin wanted Trotsky in the summer of 1917 because Trotsky had a big mouth, and he could put the Bolshevik position forward consistently and clearly in the all-important Petrograd Soviet. —And, eventually in the national Congress of Soviets.
p Trotsky’s Bolshevik candidacy was feasible because he was a Marxist, and he had one critical point upon which he agreed with Lenin and that was in turning the bourgeois February Revolution into a Proletarian Revolution as quickly as possible. Trotsky had a small group of followers he could throw into the mix and they were people of competence and ability, so Lenin would pick them up along the way as part of the deal with Trotsky. Lenin knew Trotsky would be a spoiler in the Petrograd City Council upon his return if he was not brought under control and the only realistic way he could bring him under control was to bring him into the Party.
p As the years have progressed I have often found myself thinking that bringing Trotsky into the Party was Lenin’s greatest single mistake. Yet, on the other hand, the most important thing in May and June of 1917 was seizing state power. Lenin knew Trotsky could be invaluable in this respect because he knew Trotsky would have a tremendous influence in the Petrograd City Council (Soviet) which was the most important political body in the Empire at that point in time. Without Trotsky the Bolsheviks would probably win. With Trotsky the Bolsheviks would definitely be successful in the seizure. Nothing was more important than the seizure. With it everything became possible. Without seizure, nothing would have been possible. History is unfortunately, often messy, and this is just one of those unavoidable examples. So, in the end bringing Trotsky in was the right thing to do. Frankly, I suspect that everything would have gone much smoother if Stalin had disposed of him in 1919 rather than 1940 but that is just speculation.
59p Trotsky would later claim to have been the originator of the idea of going over quickly to an armed struggle for proletarian dictatorship once the bourgeois revolution began, and attached the label "permanent revolution" to it, but this is simply not true. It had been the policy of Bolshevism since it became Bolshevism in 1903 to argue for going over to working class seizure of power from the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible once the bourgeois revolutionary process might begin. In a somewhat different form the idea goes back to Karl Marx and the revolutionary period 1848-1850. —And, as a matter to note, for still different reasons, it was Mao Zedong who pressed the idea of permanent revolution on the Chinese Party throughout the period after 1952.
60p Now in the summer of 1917, Lenin needed Trotsky’s ability in the Petrograd (earlier St. Petersburg, later Leningrad) Soviet, where debating and oratory were a daily necessity for Party leaders of every persuasion - and the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies in Petrograd was a de facto proletarian parliament, which the capitalist parties dominated at the beginning of the six month period from February to October 1917. Lenin had seen from the very first that it would be the Petrograd Soviet and others like it that would be the organizational form around which the Bolsheviks would move for power and he had the experience of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet to learn from.
p In the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky had played the leading role, and thus, was admired by the relatively sophisticated workers of 1917 Petrograd. In their mind he was a man who could hold his own with the best of the Cadet, SR (Socialist Revolutionary Party, Left and Right) and Menshevik orators with the debating skills of his upper bourgeois class background - and he was on their side! He made them proud and they would listen to him. At least that is what Lenin thought and hoped, and was the reason he put up with Trotsky’s stifling arrogance in their negotiations. Lenin certainly had more important things to do than bullshit, day-in and day-out, in the Petrograd
p Soviet.
p Trotsky’s followers later maintained that it was he who had led the actual seizure of 24-26 October, 1917, and that is merely true. He was one member of the committee formed for the purpose of seizure three weeks prior to 24 October, 1917 (the origin of the first Politburo). He played an assigned role as did everyone else on the committee except for Kamenev and Zinoviev who betrayed the revolution on the eve of the Revolution. But that’s it. (Lenin forgave these two their treason and they were readmitted into the Party. Stalin did not. They were shot in 1936.) In fact, the seizure took place in many other cities simultaneously and was hard fought and took several weeks. What is true is that in Petrograd, which was the capital of the Empire, “the practical work of organizing the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviets and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.” (Joseph Stalin writing on Trotsky’s role in a Pravda article of November 6, 1918, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and quoted by Stalin in his 1934 book The October Revolution.) Furthermore, the Bolshevik revolution was not confined to Petrograd. Bolsheviks under other leaders seized power simultaneously in Moscow, Kiev, Samara, Minsk and many other cities, beginning 24 October and continuing over the next several weeks.
61p In the military struggle it is often thought that Trotsky was the sole brain behind the eventual success of the Red Army and that certainly is not true. As I explain in Chapter 13, there was from the beginning and throughout the Civil War a sub-rosa conflict between Trotsky and Stalin with regard to military strategy and tactics, and in April of 1919 the Stalinists finally won control of the Red High Command (Party Military Committee) and kept it, despite the fact that Trotsky was allowed to remain as War Commissar (because Lenin wanted it that way.) From that date forward Trotsky’s policies would be closely watched by the worker-general Mikhail Frunze, the candidate of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. Frunze, the new Chief of Staff, now would have three of the five seats, in addition to himself (for 4 out of 5) in the Red High Command. So, if there was a “gang” of Stalinists they emerged immediately, and the “coup” against Trotsky began in the first months and years of the October Revolution, not years later after Lenin’s death.
62p In other words there was no coup by any gang. Accurate historical reconstruction shows us that the Stalin-Trotsky Party and Army split existed from the beginning and deepened through the entire Bolshevik experience, until one or the other had to prevail. The divisions between these two and other Party leaders were so bitter by 1921 that Lenin feared factionalism could destroy the Party. At any rate, so much for the myth of a Stalin gang and coup. Logically, this tell us, in my mind, along with other aspects of the way Trotsky conducted himself, that he had a tendency to exaggerate and distort history, to suit his purposes as he saw fit, with the passage of time.
p -And, when it was all said and done it was Trotsky’s disastrous leadership of the 1920 Polish-German-West European campaign, that left the Soviet Republic high and dry without the hope of any immediate international linkage to the essential advanced industrial bases of the West except for what could be gained by the more normal type of bourgeois statecraft to which Lenin was now reduced.
p In fact, even Trotsky spoke by 1922 of the new situation internationally where the Soviet Republic could expect to participate on an equal basis in the international grouping of capitalist states. Hardly a call for a “revolutionary internationalist” solution to the problems confronting Bolshevism.
p The second bugaboo of the Trotsky theory has to do with the idea that what was needed was more workers participatory democracy. But Trotsky was rather slovenly in coming to this position also. It was Trotsky who in 1919 started the program of labor armies to replace the soldier armies that were being disbanded, the soldiers discharged. It was Trotsky who in early 1920 called for the total militarization of the Russian proletariat and to hell with the trade unions. This proposal being justified by the idea that since the workers now owned the state and government and were led by a worker’s party that they were well enough represented and could be reduced to what amounted to automatons. Lenin had to step in at the 9th Party Congress in the spring of 1920 saying someone would have to defend the workers from their own state if Trotsky’s ideas were to be given serious consideration. That’s how precarious the situation was at that time.
63p -And Party democracy is the other side of this second theoretical coin Trotsky tosses out in the 1920’s. However, it was Lenin who kicked off the campaign in 1921 to tighten inner Party discipline because he saw the need for ending factionalism in the Party (and with it the endless debates) and demanded it. Lenin saw that the time had come "to go to work." It was time to face the facts: namely, that the proletariat had failed to seize power in any other capitalist country. That situation was not going to change in the foreseeable future. Certainly it wasn’t going to change right away, after the failure of Trotsky to complete his mission to seize Warsaw and Berlin in 1920 (for details see Chapter 13 below.) In fact, the situation in Russia had grown so intolerable that the better part of 1921 had to do with crushing the massive Tambov, and other, peasant rebellions (not to mention the Kronstadt sailors mutiny) and was only successfully concluded because of the re-introduction of capitalism by Lenin’s fiat in the spring of 1921 (the New Economic Policy or NEP).There was no possibility of an internationalist solution, to use a popular Trotskyist phrase, to the problem of Russia’s technological backwardness at that time. It would have to be done by the Bolsheviks themselves at home where they did have state power. -And, Trotsky agreed at the time with the demand that debate and discussion end and that a policy of carrying out orders be adopted. Except during a “campaign period” if you will of a few weeks before a Conference or a Congress.
64p Lenin saw the grave danger confronting the Soviet Republic because of its technological backwardness and improvised accordingly. To make up for the fact that Russia’s initial technological backwardness had been exacerbated by the loss, in the civil war, of up to 90% of the politically conscious proletariat by 1921. The Government would have to lick its wounds and start to educate and train the necessary cadre at home - as slow and painful as that might be - and, in the meantime, gain as much time as possible, before the next inevitable imperialist onslaught, with a new foreign policy.
p Finally, the bureaucracy bugaboo in the Trotsky theory claims that the power to appoint secretaries and functionaries from the center — which had replaced the earlier, inefficient (for military purposes), electoral forms of democratic centralism within the Party during the Civil War — was carried to an extreme by Stalin and used in essentially undemocratic ways to win his political fights. In other words, Trotsky claimed Stalin won his fights in the Party by rigging the elections, since the delegates were often his hand-
p picked secretaries and other functionaries. All of which may well be true. But that is just organizational politics. What is important is what lies behind or below the surface in such matters.
p The role of the Party was dramatically and in fact drastically different in power than it had been out of power. Out of power a great deal of input from below on every issue had been the norm. Then, after a decision had been reached, it was the responsibility of the Party leadership to carry out the decisions and the membership to do as they were told, to implement the decisions. Now, in power, without the necessities demanded by Marx and Engels (fully modernized capitalist industry) the Party had to get to work and build virtually everything from scratch. Its role demanded that it transform itself into an enabling organization — an organization charged with building the foundations of Socialism however it could. A Party of “builders” as opposed to a Party of “destroyers.” A Party without such rigid internal control would not have been able to carry out the gigantic historical tasks it would soon confront. Not the least of which would be the collectivization of agriculture (which would not begin until 1928 so they had seven years to get their act together.) Not to mention winning the inevitable imperialist second world war.
65p We shall mention all of these consequences again in this book but the point here is that the ideas which form the mainstay of what would eventually be called Trotskyism are historically ill-founded. I think the Trotskyist analysis makes no sense when reviewed within the context of the reality of those times.
p Does this mean that the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was not a new class? Does it mean that they would not separate themselves as a New Class with title deed to property if they got the chance and in the meantime act as if they did? No, of course, it doesn’t. It does mean that the Trotskyist analysis is flawed fatally in both theory and practice and in the real test of the facts of history.
p Trotsky as a person (and, thus, Trotskyism as a strategy/theory) became irrelevant except as a straw-man whipping-boy for Joseph Stalin who found it convenient to use him, and it, that way until he disposed of him in Mexico City in 1940. When Trotsky was reduced to nothing more than whining about the pace of the very programs he had advocated - i.e., massive industrialization and agricultural mechanization/collectivization - he became irrelevant to Communists almost everywhere. —And carping still more about Stalin’s management methods left him even more outside the fold of “legitimate critic” in the minds of most communists.
p Except for the perceptive few who saw the problem created by the New Class and were honestly trying to do something about it - the Trotskyists. It is because of their sincerity that we should welcome them into the New Bolshevik movement, as I have done for many decades. I remember my friend Arne Swabeck, one of the leaders of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, (see the movie Reds for Arne’s last public appearance) and many other Trotskyists in the 1960’s for their support of Chairman Mao’s attempts to reign in the New Class, and among the Trotskyist youth also in Los Angeles for their willingness to pursue common objectives with us (Progressive Labor Party), as in the Los Angeles Anti-Vietnam War Committee they created. The fact that Mao’s attempt was tortured along the way by reality is another matter altogether, which we shall be discussing at several points below. I like to think that it has all worked out in the end for China. But, what about for us?
66p At the end of this handbook you will see that a New Class of managers and bureaucrats has been necessary for the construction of Socialism in backward countries. Inherent in that recognition is also the insistence that we see to it that they play only this role and are not allowed the role of a new ruling class.
p We shall also see that backward countries may well have to witness capitalism developing alongside socialist institutions, as in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, for example. Given the backwardness of those economies a Chavez-Morales-Ortega triumvirate in alliance with Socialist Cuba is not just the “best” we could expect but by far good enough! With our Marxist theoretical understanding as outlined above, and explained herein, you will see that it has been Bolshevik policy to support exactly this, as circumstances require, since 1921.
p However it may end up in the future, for the moment, the Chinese Communist Party is doing exactly this, because as in the case of Lenin’s Russia, China has had no choice. The Russians tried jumping straight away from capitalism to communism; failed; restored capitalism and then tried again, this time with limited (i.e., “socialist” as opposed to “communist”) goals, by “building” into the planned economies of the Stalinist Socialist Stage. In China’s case its first ten years (1949-1959) under Bolshevism were all about getting to communism as quickly as possible (ending capitalism and feudalism in agriculture; collectivization; peoples communes) requiring in the succeeding twenty years, two new revolutionary struggles; all the while trying to stay on the right road (1966-1975; 1976-78). Not an easy task, without historical precedent, and when one is uncertain as to which road is the right one. In both the Russian and Chinese cases these initial attempts at jumping into communism failed, and new forms of social organization had to be invented. In both cases Bolshevism has had to step back and deal with the reality of backwardness.
67p Can we do our part — meaning fight for and seize state power, build the socialist transition and move rapidly into communism all the time struggling to prevent New Class separation? We should be able to do so now. We have the technological foundations the founders required; we should be able to invent the democratic proletarian forms to prevent the negative aspects of the initial experiments in Russia and China from happening once again, as we replace oligarchic ownership of our factories and land with ownership of the working people in those factories and on that land.
p Stalin and Stalinism
p One might wonder why the question of Stalin and Stalinism has been so terribly distorted in the English-speaking world. The answer should be obvious. The ruling capitalist classes, and their academic toadies, desperately needed to attack Stalin and they found the most convenient way of attacking him to utilize the mythology spread by Trotsky about him.
p An excellent example is now playing; in May of this year PBS broadcast the most recent attack of Gringolandia academics against Stalin. It starts out with a great lie of omission (ignoring the twenty two year history of Britain and France against the USSR including their every attempt at sending Hitler against the USSR during the years 1933—1941) and the PBS lies continue, one compounded on the other, throughout this miserable series — hopefully no one of you will ever give a penny to the scumbag PBS (they are worse than FOX because everyone knows what FOX is.) Far worse yet is the attack
p ongoing in the USA by Left traitors and paid FBI agents. In fact, this PBS pack of lies was rushed out to counter the truth as now is being published herein and in other books. Especially since the earlier excellent movie World War II: When There Were Giants with major actors (Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, John Lithgow) playing the roles of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt has had such an impact on contemporary thinking in Gringo academia of a positive (which is to say truthful) way; meaning a truthful exposition of World War II and its conduct. PBS is after all, just another capitalist outlet for lies and misstatements of history, albeit unlike FOX (Fascist Oxymoron) it is aimed at “educated” North Americans as opposed to the ignorant and unwashed targeted by the latter.
p As the years since 1965 progressed and I read more and more of the original documents I came to see an entirely different Stalin than the one Trotsky propagandized. So different that it is truly shocking. Furthermore, because of my own involvement in the intelligence service I began to see how Stalin organized and led the most important combat part of the international communist movement — the Red Secret Service — and, accordingly, have been writing a book about it (Red Sword, Red Shield). Let me give you an accurate assessment of Stalin’s originating role in the Bolshevik Party.
p Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili on December 9, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. Nicknamed Soso by others, he chose the name “Koba” for himself by the time of his adolescence. In time he would take on a new name. His official new name would be Stalin, the man of steel. But that was some time into the future. For now Stalin would be Joseph, Soso, or Koba.
p Koba was the hero of a Robin Hood novel about a Georgian who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Joseph continued to use Koba as his first name in the underground world of the RSDLP. The main book that Koba read was The Patricide, its author Alexander Kazbegi — perhaps the wealthiest landowner in Georgia - had released his serfs from their serf obligations, given away his own wealth, and gone to living as a simple herder of sheep in the mountains of Georgia. Writing his Koba stories occupied Kazbegi’s plentiful spare time as a shepherd during the years 1880 to 1886. The first six years of Joseph’s childhood.
p At the age of 8 Joseph’s mother enrolled him in elementary school. Here he was forced to learn Russian, as instruction was done only in Russian, and he completed elementary and middle schooling therefore in the Russian language. He graduated with honors from this church school in 1894 and at the age of 14 was admitted to the seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, for high schooling, which was the only way toward a higher education for a poor boy. The following year at the age of 15 he joined the Russian Social Democratic circle (called Mesame Dasi) in Tiflis. There he caught the attention of the man who would become his mentor, Leonid Krassin. Krassin was a well-educated capitalist, working for Russian wildcatters and foreign oil concerns as a manager, company man and sometimes as an entrepreneur for himself, wildcatting in the rough-and-tumble oilfield culture of Georgia, especially around Batum and Baku. —And, Krassin was a secret Social Democrat of the Lenin variety.
68p Now, note two things: (1) at the turn of the century three families dominated the Russian oil industry: the Nobels, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and (2) in these days the seminaries were producing revolutionaries like hot house plants. Not only in Trans-Caucasian Russia, but also in Georgia and Armenia.
p In Tiflis (renamed Tbilisi in 1936 by Koba, now Georgia’s favorite son, known as Stalin) as a member of the Social Democratic organization, Joseph and other seminarians met revolutionary factory and oilfield workers, studying in secret, and immersed themselves in these workers activities. They were studying Russian translations of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels principal works including Marx’s Capital Volume One. Caught reading these materials at the seminary Joseph was expelled in 1899. However, in the five years from this initial meeting, which is to say when Koba grew from 15 to 20 years of age, Krassin taught him how to organize workers, and as importantly, how to rob banks, stage-coaches and steamships. Krassin was such an obvious and enthusiastic capitalist, the Czarist secret police missed him altogether, and thus, for some time they also missed his most promising student. Krassin would work his way up the Czarist bureaucracy, in time, to become what Lenin would eventually call (during the First World War) the “Finance Minister of the Bolshevik Revolution” for reasons you will come to understand in the text.
69p In 1900, Joseph met his first face-to-face intermediary to Lenin. Arriving in Tiflis from internal exile in that year was Victor Kurnatovsky who had met their future leader while in exile (Lenin was exiled to the Siberian town of Minusinsk at the time) and come under his sway. Kurnatovsky told Koba about Lenin whom he described as a genius who would lead them all to victory. By this time Lenin had been released, having served his prison sentence and had made his way to London. Unlike other émigrés Lenin arrived in London with a plan of action. Sewing circle reading and discussion groups would give way under the new leader to a secret professional organization of militarily organized combat revolutionaries. The central instrument Lenin proposed to implement the policy of the General Staff of the Revolution was a newspaper. The following year, 1901, The Spark (Iskra) began to arrive in Tiflis via sailors on shore leave at the Black Sea ports. Joseph became a follower of Lenin among the Social Democrats; following the split of the RSDLP into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Joseph, now known in the Party almost always as Koba, joined unhesitatingly with the Bolsheviks.
70p In 1901, following instructions received via Iskra, Koba threw himself into organizing the oilfield workers and organizing armed strikes at Baku and Batum and then into organizing bank hold-ups stage-coach and steamship robberies, and other armed “expropriations” (known as “exes” by the Bolsheviks.) Shortly after the 1903 formation of the Bolshevik Party, Koba and Krassin became the number one in-country “provider Team” of cash to Lenin’s cause; organizing for example, the Great Tiflis Stage-coach and State Bank Robbery that netted Lenin some 300,000 gold rubles! In other words, at just the right time Koba provided Lenin with the two things he needed most: (1) a real organized labor movement which had won armed strikes and put their union into the oilfield on a permanent basis and (2) money. This was the first successful organized labor movement in the Russian Empire and it was Leninist thanks to Koba and his fellow Bolshevik-to-be organizers. The soon-to-come Bolshevik Party had also become the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world; again thanks to Koba and associates. Lenin recognized all of this and began to put Koba on the top of his list of people to be pushed ahead.
71p Among these principal organizers in the Caucuses were not only Koba but his closest friends including Kliment Voroshilov, future head of the entire Red Army, and
p Michael Kalinin, future President of the Soviet Union. Of course, Leonid Krassin continued as the senior advisor of this Young Communist cadre.
p Taking on the Rothschild’s: 1901
p As we have seen there were three major international oil concerns operating in Russia at the turn of the century; those owned by the Nobel’s, the Rothschild’s and the Rockefeller’s. All three were well represented on the Caspian, especially in the oil cities of Baku and Black Sea Batum where Koba had risen to be the de facto chief of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party strike organizing operations by 1901. Having built a union in the oilfields, the following year Koba took on what he considered to be the weakest of the foreign oil combines. Namely, that of the Rothschild’s. However, as the unfolding began, the strike once again brought out the Czarist troops and gendarmerie. Koba and his associates jumped into the fight with guns and every other weapon they could get their hands on and the fighting was underway. Troops burned the workers quarters and shot down men, women and children daring to engage in open protest and refusing to work. Koba’s teams of armed workers fought back and forced the cops and troops to retreat or face hundreds of burning wells. The capitalists decided this was a higher price than they were willing to pay and called off their troops. The workers won the strike and went back to work with a union! It was the first Social Democratic victory in an armed strike and it electrified the Empire.
72p Meanwhile in London, Lenin was thrilled to learn that his brand new newspaper was considered by the Czar’s secret police, and by his own Party, as responsible for the Caucuses being in flames. Lenin had believed from the moment of his arrival in the United Kingdom the previous year that the Czarist regime was very weak and open to direct attack by workers. Workers could and would engage in massive work stoppages regardless of the sacrifice in wages required to do so. Furthermore, he had proven that workers would take up arms and fight for socialism whether or not Russia was considered by bourgeois intellectuals to be too primitive for Socialism. All the workers needed was encouragement and that came from the underground newspaper Spark (Iskra). The text or “copy” to be printed was smuggled to the Caspian on ships with friendly sailors and then printed in one of the underground print shops Koba and associates maintained. All the intellectuals needed were some balls. Then they could understand that it didn’t matter whether the revolution started in Russia or in England. What mattered was that it started, and then got international, as quickly as possible. Workers with advanced industry would come to the aid of workers with backward industry, and would be more than happy to do so, since the latter would have started the conflagration that had led to their own liberation. —And, that was Lenin’s program in short. Action now for proletarian revolution. The Russian Workers Revolution would come to power in a period of transition with “the state” (Army and secret police) in its hands, and full scale industrialization would occur as workers in the advanced capitalist countries got their act together and joined in.
73p First in Batum, and now in Baku, Koba and his fellow organizers had implanted the Party printing presses. Code named “Nina” the Russian printing press operation by 1902, was hidden in a dugout cellar eventually expanding under several homes and city streets in the mainly Mongol working class quarter of Baku. From here, bundles of the paper were printed and smuggled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg in the North and
p then to every working class quarter in the country, as opportunity provided. The distribution network for petroleum products that flowed northward and eastward from the Black Sea functioned for many years as the backbone of secret Bolshevik newspaper distribution, another gift to Lenin from his devoted Baku-Batum followers led by Koba. Accordingly this network became the vertebral chord of secret Bolshevik Party cell organizing as well.
p The working class action committees of Baku and Batum had set the pace and provided the model for what workers could do in other cities. —And, Lenin knew from his growing network of informers and couriers that workers in every other city of the Empire, aware of what was happening in the Caucuses, were seeing in those committees, the model for their own organizations. Inside the newly created Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, those who had seen Lenin as just another intellectual in exile now saw him in a quite different way. Unfortunately, some such as the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, were simply jealous of this young upstart’s success. Plekhanov chose to see Lenin thrusting ahead of himself and felt his long suffering service in presenting Marxism to Russia to begin with, was being forgotten. Others, like the newcomer Leon Bronstein (Trotsky), initially sided with Lenin but then went over to the other side within the exile RSDLP leadership. Perhaps because they too were being sidelined by Lenin’s ability to get things done. However, their varying motivations may have been, the fact was that what would be, in the Russian revolutionary workers movement, was being decided on the ground, and Lenin had all the troops.
74p The Empire Atremble
p Even Lenin was surprised when his as yet unmet leaders in the Caucuses, principal among them being Koba, succeeded in 1903, in organizing the most eventful workers action in the history of Europe since the Paris Commune of 1876. A general strike that not only shut down the oilfields of the Caspian Sea and everywhere else but also shut down every industrial city in the Russian Empire. For a moment the Empire wobbled. Could it all be over that fast?
p In theory yes. Marx had said in the Communist Manifesto it was just a matter of workers changing ownership of the means of production, putting themselves and those in need among the people, at the top of the national priority list, instead of at its bottom, as the capitalists had done, and you would have socialism. Eventually, with the abolition of private property you would have a paradise on Earth where all the advantages of industrial production would be at the service of the working people rather than the other way around as the capitalists had arranged it. -And with publicly owned means of scientifically advanced industrial production, making the slogan “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” a reality, you would have communism. But, what about the resistance of the exploiters? Surely, they would mount powerful counter attacks. The capitalists were already sending the Czarist secret police (Okhrana) in huge numbers; the Army and the Cossacks could not be far behind.
75p The Revolution of 1905
p The General Strike of 1903 left the Czar’s top advisors unanimous in wanting to start a war to refocus national thinking off of the internal problems confronting them. Rather than seeking social reform with the liberal capitalists and the new class of petty
p bourgeois intellectual and educated bureaucrats, the Czarists preferred to start a war. This time they planned for a successful war.
p The problem came when they failed in their elective war. They had chosen the wrong victim. Japan. In this case the Japanese nation was prepared, although ruled by a small tight-knit coterie of formerly feudal aristocratic and noble families. Families that had kept the discipline of their rule over slaves and serfs while voluntarily transforming themselves into capitalist ruling families. As they applied this feudal discipline to their rule over workers they were able to catapult themselves into the modern industrial world of international capitalism. The Okhrana, focused as it was on internal dissent, had missed all of this. Russia acted as if it had not known of Japan’s industrialization and its immediate application to the construction of steel war ships with fully modern big guns.
76p The setting chosen by the Russians for their conflict was Korea. But, in the event, the Czar’s Army and Navy proceeded to disgrace themselves in a series of embarrassing military debacles. The war climaxed with virtually the entire Czarist fleet being buried at sea!
p In response the Russian nation rose up. Many in the capitalist class, hitherto allied seemingly inextricably with the feudal Lords, intermarried and interbred, wanted west European style parliamentary democracy, as did the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie - especially the New Class of technocrats upon which the Czarist Regime depended increasingly. The farmers rose up under their Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders demanding redistribution of land along the lines they imagined it had existed before Peter the Great. The workers rose up under their political parties: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. As the year progressed the Bolsheviks began to get the upper hand among them. —And, along the way a variety of individualists such as Leon Bronstein (Trotsky) arose to espouse their own doctrines and acquire in the milieu of revolution their own following.
77p Trotsky cut out his following from the masses gathering around the St. Petersburg City Council (Soviet is the Russian word for Council.) The Bolsheviks gained a mass following in the workers quarters which was also reflected in the City Council. In the end the Czar outfoxed the revolutionaries and crushed the Petrograd City Council and along with it the rest of the revolutionary councils that had arisen throughout the nation.
p Koba’s first importance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks was precisely his clarity on the nature of the enemy and what was to be done about them.—And, this clarity was achieved first of all in the real school of life. Furthermore, he was willing and able to get done, what needed to be done, for his Party and his Chief. Lenin recognized these qualities in Koba, calling him “that wonderful Georgian.”
p During the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin came to depend on Koba. Koba could get things done. He had a wide range of working-class political contacts and was developing an even wider range of bourgeois contacts including those of the underworld as a result of his prison experiences which had only begun. Lenin would, in the years up to the October Revolution in 1917, rely on Koba to carry out the most dangerous and sensitive and the most important secret tasks confronting the Party.
p For example, all the bourgeois socialists including Leon Trotsky, were opposed to Lenin’s program of bank hold-ups, and other armed robberies to finance Party activities, organs, and the press — strong-arm work of which he had placed Koba (Stalin) in charge, and which policy Lenin defended in open debate against the Mensheviks and Trotsky at
p the 5th (1907) RSDLP Congress in London. After all, Lenin argued, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie had stolen all this money from the people to begin with and it was only right that the people’s champions should expropriate it on their behalf. Lenin dismissed his opponents politically, considering them bourgeois sissies, and went on with the business of building his own (Bolshevik) Party. A Party which of course did not include Trotsky or any of the other bourgeois socialists (Mensheviks.) For Lenin it was politics not personal.
p Stalin, however, as we have seen, pictured himself as a kind of “Robin Hood” of the Revolution. So much so that even before he became a Social Democrat, as we have also seen, he had taken the name of the legendary Georgian Robin Hood, “Koba”; a name his friends would use for him all of his life. The anger he felt toward the haughty Trotsky was not so easily assuaged.
p Lenin also handed Stalin much of the responsibility for organizing the secret financial investments of the Party in a variety of Russian banks; arranging transfers of cash and securities to Party safe-drops in West European banking centers, and so forth. — And these are just a few examples of the important secret work that Lenin entrusted to Stalin.
p As a matter of historical note, Stalin’s first face-to-face conflict with Trotsky occurred as a product of this 1907 RSDLP (5th) Congress (Joint Congress with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks attending) debate in London, and went far to shape his dislike for the man he considered to be an “aristocrat-bourgeois” socialist. In a short time a mutual hatred emerged between these two. Hatred destined to shape so much of the Party’s future experience. If Trotsky had been less aristocratic in his bearing and less presumptuous toward those doing all the work, and taking all the risks, perhaps even showing appreciation for those such as Stalin, the latter might have been less likely to politicize his personal feelings. I suspect Stalin’s feelings were hurt and he did politicize them.
78p I imagine that the more Stalin thought about Trotsky, the exact kind of privileged person he hated the most, and his absolute failure to understand the dedication and importance of his (Stalin’s) work, the more he internalized his hatred of Trotsky, until it was part of the marrow of his bones. Stalin “went off” on Trotsky within weeks of the beginning of the armed struggle in 1918 and I don’t think it was just because of their principled military disagreements. However that may have been, before this was all over Stalin would bury an axe in Trotsky’s head. Albeit via a surrogate and far from home.
p Trotskyist Mythology
p We will return to Stalin and his role in the creation of the world’s first worker’s Government and State in Chapter 13. For now, let me say again that the Trotskyist mythology which has cursed a certain portion of our movement for many decades has necessitated this factual review of early Bolshevik history. Also, it sets to rest, permanently I believe, the slander Trotsky spread far and wide about Stalin being some kind of late-coming usurper of the throne that should have been his. This mythology has two main threads. The first that spun by Trotsky himself. The second the impression left by history on foreign communists about the relative importance of the Russian Bolshevik leaders. The former speaks for itself and is seen in all of Trotsky’s writings. The latter is something I witnessed myself and, thus, had to come to understand.
79p In 1965 when I was helping Phil Taylor organize Los Angeles for the Progressive Labor Party I met long time Trotskyist Arne Swabeck and his wife. (See the movie Reds for Arne’s last public appearance.) I spent a number of hours throughout that year listening to Arne talk about meeting Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders in 1919 and many times thereafter. He told me that at the Comintern Congresses he attended he never heard of Stalin. I believed him and it is something that has stuck with me and which I had to confront and answer for myself.
p Now, after decades of research, I think I can see how Trotsky’s shameless proselytizing on his own behalf utilized certain historical features of 1917 and the subsequent six or seven years, to spread and reinforce the idea that Stalin was an outsider and a usurper. This as we have just seen is the furthest possible thing from the truth one could imagine. I think what Lenin is purported to have said to Michael Borodin upon his return to Russia from Chicago, about Trotsky having been brought into the Bolshevik Party by Lenin to handle the Petrograd City Council where otherwise he would have been a spoiler, is probably exactly what happened. Things worked out and according to Lenin when Trotsky turned his attention to military affairs that worked out also. I will leave this military question to the text and return to the second issue at hand.
80p Namely, that foreign communists and indeed foreign capitalist leaders of Germany, England, Italy, France, the UK and so forth, got the impression that Trotsky was one of the principal Bolshevik leaders on the same level as Lenin because Trotsky had a big mouth, had been in charge of peace negotiations that eventually took Russia out of the world war, and was the public face for a long time of the Red Army. Combine this with the fact that most of these foreigners had no command of the Russian language whatsoever and no familiarity with Bolshevik history or even its most basic publications left the field wide open for assuming that whoever was standing up front and talking the most must be the boss. Well that certainly put Trotsky right up there as public face number two — right next to that of Lenin — and Trotsky was always shooting his mouth off to the press, foreign as well as domestic, so he got even more Press than Lenin! This led to people such as Arne Swabeck getting the wrong impression about the relative importance of Trotsky (who was the real late-comer) and the relatively quiet Stalin. It also explains why Stalin found it so easy to isolate Trotsky from the rest of the Russian Party rather quickly as we shall see in the text.
81p Finally, most foreign communists knew the Russian Bolsheviks almost exclusively through the prism of the Comintern. Here there were many such leading mouths: e.g., Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev not to mention Trotsky, etc. Stalin was there, but very quietly, as the boss of the Comintern’s secret department. This decision to make Stalin the real Comintern boss as far as real world operations were concerned had been made by Lenin in an almost offhand way when Lenin was single handedly organizing the Call and Structure of the Comintern and its First Congress during January and February of 1919. It was rather natural that Lenin would have continued to show complete confidence in Stalin in this matter in that he had long since placed Stalin as the head of the Russian Communist Party’s (Bolsheviks) secret department. (Stalin, from the beginning, and always thereafter, for the rest of his life, had been and would be head of Bolshevik secret operations at home and abroad no matter what organizational, bureaucratic, structure and name had been or would be involved.) The other Bolshevik leaders were intellectuals well suited to the development of the intellectual side of
82p Bolshevism. Now they were the public face of the Comintern and contributed all the talk and stuff of the Comintern press. Stalin on the other hand rarely spoke in Comintern meetings or publications. His secret role was the most important job in the Comintern but only those members with a “need to know” would have had any indication of this.
p The Trotskyists are for the most part quite sincere people. At least that is my experience. But they have been badly misled and in our country they suffer the gringo curse of failing to read. However, education is the cure for both deficiencies and perhaps we have laid a good foundation for imposing clarity here in this foreword. Now let us move on to the central theoretical false premise of Trotskyism.
p The New Class is Not a Deformation but Part of a New Necessary
p Transitional Stage — of which there will be several
p Before we arrive at Communism
p The most important theoretical difference between international Trotskyism and the international Communist movement in 2011 is on the question of the nature and role of the Soviet New Class. (-And, by extension that of the New Class in the Socialist Stage in China, East Europe, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. as the Trotskyists maintain today.) Is the New Class, just as Trotsky maintained, an aberration?
p Trotsky’s thinking made the New Class into a historically accidental, peculiar, social structural deformation. According to him this was due to idiosyncratic developments in Russia (namely his main bugaboo, Koba or Joseph Stalin.) If, for example, he and associates had been on top, the bureaucracy would have been controlled in an otherwise well put together working class sociocultural evolutionary stage. A single transitional Stage of Socialism. Or, rather conversely, is the New Class a part of a new and specific transitional Stage of Socialism, which features working class, farmer, and petty bourgeois technocrats in alliance? (By extension this implies that there will be one or more additional transitional Stages of Socialism yet to come.) Trotsky claimed the former. In fact, the historical evidence — combined with the archaeological evidence — tells us the latter is the case. Let us see why.
83p As I said in the Preface to the 2006 edition of this book, we are indebted to Professor Antonio Gilman for identifying a deficiency in my writing the first edition of this book (Fundamentals of Historical Materialism, Bolshevism 2005.) Namely, that I had failed to be sufficiently explicit about the origin and evolution of the New Class in Socialist Societies, the central problem in the construction of Socialism since 1917. I accepted this criticism as correct and so, we shall now outline this origin and evolution.
p The New Class is our #2 Problem
p In fact, the number two problem, after survival (which to date has been our number one problem), so far encountered in countries undergoing socialist construction, has been how to live with, meaning how to properly reward, the bureaucratic infrastructure essential to the construction of the scientific and technically advanced industry and agriculture in societies which were only pubescent with the high levels of development initially proposed by the founders (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.) Because the consequences of this central fact of having inherited technological backwardness in the homelands of proletarian revolution, have been, and are being, used by the propagandists for capitalism, to discredit the Marxist-Leninist strategy, and indeed
p our entire historical analysis, an evolutionary trajectory for the New Class, as it should be understood (nothing emerges unique and pristine without antecedents in sociocultural evolution), is now a centerpiece of this handbook.
p To begin with then, as you will see in this Bolshevism 2011 version of Fundamentals of Historical Materialism now The ABC’s of Communism, the problem of the New Class has to be understood in theoretical terms — Marxist theoretical terms.
p What does this mean?
p In practical terms it means we continue to use the methodology of historical materialism’s analysis of pre-capitalist formations as explained in this handbook. —And, in so doing we lay out the origin and transformation of this New Class over the past 6000 years. As you will see, when we precede in this way it becomes clear that the administrative bureaucracy of Socialism is actually a very old class, with its origins in the Simple and Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom Stages.
p Why is it true we must proceed in this way, besides the fact that this method works?
p Backwardness in Technology
p Is Not What Marx and Engels Proposed
p So far, with regard to technology, it has been “national backwardness” we have encountered in the homelands of socialist construction. This is not what Marx and Engels had proposed — exactly the opposite, as a matter of fact, is what they required before one could realistically hope to construct socialist, let alone communist, society. They had proposed a completed capitalist stage with all its “modernizations” in place. What we got was the extreme backwardness of Russia and China, with only the post-World War II German and Czechoslovak exceptions, too little and too late to make any real difference.
p The problem of the Soviet Union and China with the New Class is not the same problem we should expect to have, at least to the same degree and intensity, when working class revolution comes to the advanced capitalist countries. However, having said this let me also assert that a New Class of administrators will still be needed through the transitional Stages of Socialism in the USA, and the other advanced capitalist countries, as we enter the transitional period. —And, while the transition in our advanced countries will be fast (the productive forces fully developed — i.e., as fully as possible anyway under Capitalism) there will still be a transition and it may last a decade or even two. Although, hopefully, it will be this time a truly "classless intelligentsia" as Stalin named it in the 1930’s, and not a would-be new class of wolves parading in sheep’s clothing. It is up to you to be sure that this time the Nomenklatura (Soviet term for the New Class) meaning persons named to the different bureaucratic positions determined by the leadership, is held directly responsible and immediately recallable by democratic proletarian organs. Given the proven dangers, experience has taught us of not doing this; you should make it a priority when the time comes. —And, this time, the New Class of Party and Government administrators should be a class that will be consciously building itself out of existence, over a period of time, as it works alongside the other working classes, toward the day when all working people share the responsibility of managing the affairs of the economy and government democratically, as the founders planned in 1848 (with the January appearance of The Communist Manifesto.) It certainly seems possible
84p to me that a person starting on Day One, after the revolution in the USA, could be a bureaucrat for a decade and then have phased herself into a role she may more truly appreciate (perhaps being a scientific researcher, or a High School coach.)
p Today a management of the whole economic and political life of society by the people as a whole is more than ever possible and absolutely essential. It is possible because of the cybernetic revolution that makes every person into a potential manager and monitor of the economy as a whole with worksites at home and in their professional capacities. It is essential because we did not overthrow the class system of the Servitude Epoch simply to create an Orwellian nightmare, nor to “share the poverty,” but instead to create limitless goods and services of the most advanced (indeed STAR TREK like) nature. —And, with it the only real world possibility to create a society world-wide where it can be realistically and common-sense wise, true, that each person contributes what she can and is rewarded as she wishes. It is possible and essential, but only can happen if we create an altruistic mental template in society that can only be made permanent by the vast increase in productive capability which makes selfishness anachronistic; an increase the advanced capitalist countries have achieved. (-And, in the case of China, the vast increase which we project to be extant there by 2050).
85p So now as to the New Class (i.e., the bureaucracy in the Party, State and Government apparatus’ of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.) What was it? What were its sociocultural evolutionary predecessors? What were the specifics of its development? What about the New Class in China; what forms does it occupy; where did they come from and where can they be directed, as a class, while accomplishing the objectives of the proletarian Party in power as it is in China?
p Prehistoric Origins of the New Class
p In the mid 1990’s, I noticed an article in a popular magazine from an archaeologist in one of the USA Southwest’s National Parks about evidence for compartmentalization of the holdings of a Chiefdom storehouse - a Simple Chiefdom at that. It set me thinking. Perhaps, as we archaeologists look for evidence of state origins by finding the material remains of barracks (army garrisons) and cop-shops, we could also find evidence of the origins of professional specialization as "administrators" by finding evidence of the things that reflect administrative tasks (such as differential storing and accounting for different agricultural contributions). For that matter, as we find evidence for professional specialization in the production of pottery by searching for evolving uniformity and standardization, in the early chiefdom levels of archaeological sites. (As opposed to the idiosyncratic features of individual household pottery manufacture of the tribal domestic mode of farming production.) My analysis of such remains has been discussed elsewhere. The point is, there is in fact clear evidence in the remnant material culture of such early administrative tasks and eventually they become truly specialized. A "new class" can emerge from this "new specialty." -And it often does. Always, as a matter of fact, in the five known centers of the origin of civilization (by “civilization” be sure to note that historians are always referring to the emergence of the Slave Stage) and we can see the beginnings even in the outlying independent centers (e.g. the USA Southwest) that never got quite as far as class division and state emergence for a variety of reasons. This is a "handbook" so I won’t pursue the subject except to say that our contemporary Socialist society “New Class” has its distant origins along the banks of the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile,
86p Huang-ho and Yangtze Rivers in the Old World, and in the highlands of the Central Andes, as well as the lowlands and highlands of Mesoamerica in the New World. This is the beginning of our specific theory of the contemporary New Class in socialist societies.
p In the Slave and Feudal Stages
p As you will see the ruling families that constituted the ruling classes of the Ancient World (the term Ancient World means the Slave and Feudal Stages of the Old World and the Slave Stage of the New World) had a deadly problem of their own with regard to their boss-hierarchy (which will become the technocrat bureaucracy of modern times in Capitalist and Socialist society) and they attempted to resolve it in a variety of ways. Sometimes they were successful but just as often they were not. Among the successful techniques they used we shall see two that were continuous and especially important: (a) the construction of monumental architecture (to keep labor-power in servitude out of the hands of the boss-hierarchy) as one way they dealt with the problem (e.g. the pyramids of Egypt and China’s Great Wall.) Another (b) was to keep the boss-hierarchy deeply in debt by encouraging all sorts of expenditures on high living and luxury items. Without labor power and without cash they could not very effectively challenge the ruling and richest families.
87Yet, keeping labor-power in servitude (whether it be slave, feudal or capitalist; i.e. chattel or wage slavery) requires a military-police establishment. Increasing the number of slaves requires a large constantly growing military and police establishment. Under these circumstances it’s only a matter of time until some of generals realize they can replace their employers. Thus, slave stage forms always result in military dictatorship and usually begin that way as well.
p (This tendency is ever present, even in capitalist societies such as the USA with a parliamentary tradition, as we can see at present, where some the richest families want to do away with much of the democracy that exists among themselves, and move toward a more efficient dictatorship of the police-military sort. Fortunately, for some of them, the moron Bush has failed - but next time there may be someone of a more than Forest Gump capability - a Clinton, a McCain, or a Kerry — a smarter fascist leader - who will succeed in replacing the quaint notions of constitutional safeguards the US ruling class has enjoyed for so long. Either way it’s their problem not ours. Our task is to destroy all of them.)
p -And don’t panic over the Patriot Act - they have been doing all this for many decades anyway and they will keep doing it, with or without legal authorization, until the day they are overthrown and liquidated root and branch. They have been tapping my phones, following me to school and to work, conducting surveillance of my mail, etc. since I was ten years old and this is not unique. For the details see the first volume of my autobiography entitled The Buccaneer. So, this is a ruling class problem — not ours. That is to say the bourgeoisie must fight out their own battles with the billionaire-trillionaire oligarchy to protect their own turf. We know the US ruling class state apparatus will try to do whatever they like with regard to us as they always have. (We will fight back, overcome them, and liquidate them. But, on our terms, as we see fit.)
88p Capitalism and the Technocrats
p Feudalism was the half-way house stage between the chattel slavery and the wage
p slavery of the preceding (Slave) and succeeding (Capitalist) stages, where the role of the administrative bureaucracy, as part of the overall boss-hierarchy, assumed its special “Eastern” and “Western” characteristics. Specifically, for example, the highly sophisticated 250,000 strong corps of eunuch scholar-bureaucrats, administering China for the Chinese ruling classes, in the east, and the rather puny castle-bound individuals in the pay of European fiefdom princes (still, however, with their testicles), responsible for financial affairs in the west (the vast territories around the Mediterranean Sea). But as I have pointed out in the text, Feudalism was doomed, not because it was an historic compromise that gave more freedom to farming families in exchange for labor-peace, but because its system of productive forces was primitive — just as primitive as it had been in the Slave Stage.
89p Capitalism, on the other hand, introduced machinery (in part at least of iron and steel made by machine tools) with its own independent power sources (e.g., steam engines) to which unskilled, untrained labor-power could be put to work in the factory installed machine manufacture (machinofacture) of commodities and this changed the entire nature of wealth acquisition. —And with it the jobs spectrum of the boss-hierarchy; especially for persons involved in things other than enforcement. —And these technocratic sectors expanded quickly and became during the 1700’s in Europe and the Americas by far the biggest part of the boss-hierarchy, with enforcement relegated strictly to a specialized state (military, intelligence, police) establishment. For capitalist machinery obviously takes brains to make, maintain, and most importantly improve — generation of machinery, after generation of machinery.
90p The myriad of productive tasks and professional activities involved in machinery produced commodities, would require a new and far superior method of technical education for the boss-hierarchy. Thus, arose the technocrats.
p In economies as advanced in the capitalist way as those of the major eight capitalist countries, this New Class is not as obvious as it is in the newly emerging economies of places like Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela (for that matter essentially all of South America, and many developing countries in Africa and Asia as well) where the technocrats stand out clearly, and are often a political force as well. However, we don’t want to forget that the most advanced eight capitalist countries had an emergent class of technical people that looked in the 1700’s and 1800’s much like these contemporary “technocratic New Class” elements in the developing capitalist countries.
p Furthermore, where the Marxist parties did take power beginning in 1917, it was often from this “new” Technocrat Class the leadership first arose (e.g., V.I. Lenin, Mao Zedong) — petty bourgeois and bourgeois in class outlook — and continues to arise (e.g. Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara). Our leaders often come from this special part of that class “in service” to the ruling families and ruling classes, where their intellectual preoccupation and commitment to science and scientific method led, and leads, some of them to accept Marx’s scientific discoveries of the laws of history, and as importantly the laws of operation of the capitalist system. Among these individuals were those who decided, and who continue to decide, to side with the working class — the proletariat — and its farmer allies.
91p Socialism and its New Class
p The very first problem confronting Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Petrograd on the
p night of 24 October, 1917, was how to build a new Government. The second was how to build a new State (military/police). Surprisingly, little thought had been given to these tasks when everyone’s eyes were fixed on the seizure. It was chaos at the Smolny Institute where Lenin’s leadership established their first ministries (commissariats) by tacking pieces of paper on doorways announcing that this room was for Education and Enlightenment, this for Nationalities, this room for this, and that room for that. Within hours they had to confront the old bureaucracy of the bourgeoisie which either walked away altogether or refused to obey orders or in a few cases tried to help. The same was true in the military. The crude use of power was all that the Bolsheviks could do in those first days to open the financial system (blow the vaults open) and make the military command submit (by shooting officers refusing to carry out Lenin’s commands by telephone, or in person).
92p It soon became apparent (for their Government) the Bolsheviks would have to use those who were willing, among the old technocratic petty bourgeoisie, and as soon as possible to add to their ranks or supplant them altogether with persons coming from the ranks of the proletariat or poor peasantry, who could read or write, or soon would learn how, and who could be educated quickly to assume minimal responsibilities. The Bolsheviks had no choice.
p Even for their State (the Army, Navy and special police) it would be necessary to use officers of the Czar, when they were willing. -And, it was safe to do so, or at least as safe as such a policy could be, if there was a Red political officer counterpart next to every command officer with the ability and willingness to shoot said command officer if the slightest perfidy was suspected.
p Russia and the soon-to-be constituent Republics of the Soviet Union featured nearly universal female illiteracy among the peasantry and most of the males too, in a country that was 90% peasant. Needless to say it would be hard to make technical administrators out of these people quickly. It would take time. It did take time. In the meantime the Bolsheviks improvised as best they could, always believing that international assistance from working class revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries was inevitable, and most importantly, hoping and believing it would arrive soon!
p You will learn how such illusions, among the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, dissipated by 1921. You will also learn about the consequences of Trotsky’s failure to successfully conclude the Polish-German campaign in 1920. With that campaign however, the Civil War proper had come to an end (meaning the period of White Russian Armies against Red Russian Armies, with the former supported by all the imperialist countries [yes, including the USA, but also the UK, France, Italy, Serbia, and Japan; the Soviets supported by working classes in those countries and by peoples of the colonial world].) Yet, 1921 began for the Bolsheviks with the necessity of having to stifle another Civil War in the bud. —And this time, given the failure of the 1920 Polish-German offensive, meaning no assistance from the advanced workers of the West, and confronting the 1921 Tambov peasant uprising, and the Kronstadt sailors mutiny of 1921, Lenin was forced to restore capitalism at home, and to embark upon a new kind of international statecraft abroad.
93p The Party didn’t like the New Economic Policy (NEP) and went along with it only because Lenin insisted — they trusted Lenin. After all, without Lenin they never would
p have gotten this far and they all knew it. Even so, the Party wanted to move on with the abolition of private property and everything that went with it, with or without advanced technical assistance from Europe or North America. But that was not possible in the foreseeable (day to day planning) future as far as could be seen at the beginning of 1921. Nor did Lenin think that it was a matter of critical importance. There was no Marxist prescription on how long the revolution against private property would take — nor, more importantly, any prescription left by the founders (other than some broad social notions — see Chapter 2 paragraph 22 of The Communist Manifesto) as to what form(s) and phases the transition to public from private property would encompass.
p Lenin knew that the key thing was that the Party had state power. Its key first task was to preserve itself and its hold on state power. Always, and first and foremost, is and was the question of ‘could the Bolsheviks retain state power’ — everything else that was and is to be accomplished depends on this. This was Lenin — always — first — foremost — preaching and demanding that the Bolsheviks retain state power no matter what; no matter what the cost!
If that meant the temporary restoration of Capitalism so be it. —And, it did mean this. To fail to restore capitalism in 1921 as Lenin insisted, would have led to the overthrow of the Bolshevik Party and the loss of state power. Lenin realized by now that it was War Communism which had led to the defeat of Bela Kun and his Communist Government in Hungary, and worse, that Rosa Luxembourg’s radicalism in proposing permanency to the abolition of private farming had led to the defeat of the insurrection in Berlin. He realized he had tried to go too far too fast. It would take time to educate the farmers and to prepare a transition to US-style large-scale mechanized and indeed industrialized agriculture, although this time publicly owned.
94To Review
p The whole point behind my decision to go into archaeology to begin with was to uncover prehistoric sociocultural stage evolutionary indicators which by comparative analysis might help us determine where we are today and why. This is what Marx spent the last seven years of his life trying to find. What I have discovered is that the Stage of Stalinist Socialism is structurally, comparable to the Sociocultural Stage of Simple Chiefdoms, especially in the latter’s initial few centuries. This archaeological comparative evidence tells us that what we have been witnessing since 1917, is the emergence of a distinct sociocultural stage (comparable to that of Simple Chiefdoms, structurally) with its own class characteristics. It also, implies, what must come next. The next Stage in Sociocultural Evolution being that of Advanced Socialism. —And there may yet be another Stage after that, before we can make the transition to communism.
95p In each of these twentieth century examples, what we have is not a workers Government alone; nor even a workers and farmers Government; but Government whose support requires a technocratic New Class and a police-military force of modern type. These classes being somewhat differentially rewarded. This will continue until we seize power in an advanced capitalist country and get to the point Marx and Engels thought we would have reached by the time a working class revolution took power. Then, and only then, will we be able to march, inevitably, to Communism. In other words, at least one more transitional Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage will be required to finish up Advanced Socialism. Unless and until an advanced capitalist country has a working class
p revolution there will be no other route to a truly Communist Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage. All of this will take one or two centuries more. This means a lot more fighting and dying and perhaps annihilation. Freedom or death! There is nothing to be gained by a denial of historical inevitability; knowing where we are and how we got here, should help us avoid the latter.
p Two Ugly Facts You Must Face
p Lenin’s Party membership had an emotional commitment to end private property. They had often interpreted their emotions as being the same thing as objective realistic assessment. Meaning, the Party membership wanted the transition to total public property to happen overnight. As we were about to see, given the peculiar conditions of working class dictatorship in the 20th century (happening first in the least advanced capitalist countries of Russia and China) it was not going to happen overnight. It was going to take a long time. In 1921 Russia, no one knew how long. The Russian Bolsheviks had to face up to the ugly fact that there is a big difference between wanting Communism and being able to have Communism. Something the Chinese would have to face up to by 1975-78. —And, that the Communist International Movement must face up to today!
96p Nor would people suddenly become altruistic and give their “all” for their fellow humans in the construction of a new and just society. In time, we would learn that people carry with them the psychological template of the “Epoch” (in this case the template of selfishness-sadism that characterizes the Servitude epoch and is imprinted in nearly everyone to greater or lesser degrees regardless of class) into which they were born and that would not change overnight either. In fact, even under the best of circumstances (fully developed near-Star Trek levels of technology) it will take generations.
p This means that backward countries must build the capitalist mode of production first (at least the technological component) before they can even begin to consider building the communist one. We tried jumping into communism time and time again, only to fall back time and time again, for lack of mode of production preparation first and superstructural (ideological) preparation second. It also means that it is high time revolutionaries in the advanced capitalist countries bring about revolution in those countries if they want to get to communism more quickly. We know this is true not only because we have tried to jump and failed, but because the proof lies in the fact that this is the way history played out and history is always unfolding as it should.
p In short, (1) wanting communism and having communism are two different things — communism cannot exist in its modern form without the most advanced, indeed Star Trek-like, technology. (2) People are not inherently good. Even working people. People are not inherently bad either. They are just people and the way they think is conditioned first and foremost by their environment. The principal component of their environment is culture. The ideology arising is either altruistic (the primitive communism of the bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers and early farmers) or it is sadistic (as we see all so clearly in the history of slavery, feudalism and capitalism.) These are ugly facts but they are nevertheless facts and Bolsheviks must face them and accept them. It will take generations of inculcating modern altruism, after we have state power, before we will see the final disappearance of the selfish-sadistic ideology of the servitude epoch.
97p Back to Our Story in Russia
p Meanwhile the Soviet New Class began to emerge as the bureaucracy the Leninists had to have to run the Party, the Government, the State and the public sectors of the economy (and, after the Spring of 1921, to regulate the private sectors.) Initially it was composed of Party people, old Czarist era bureaucrats of the willing variety, and a new kind of opportunist. No longer did we have just the romantic idealists of the pre-Revolutionary period or even the self-sacrificing Bolshevik and trade unionist shock troopers of the Civil War. Now, joining up were all those looking for advantage. For there was only one way forward and you had to talk a good show to get a job with these guys. How to tell the real revolutionaries from the opportunists? Well, there is no sure way. The secret police can only do so much (i.e. the Cheka.) Or the Party Control Commission or the Commissariat of Workers and Peasants Inspectors, etc. Periodic reform campaigns and purging of Party ranks helped but didn’t ever fully succeed.
98p As we shall see, the bureaucracy was also an open road for the honest and forthright and just as often manned and staffed by them. Bureaucracy, as a class, had and has, a legitimate role and it has lasted 6000 years in its evolution. In this volume you will see that origin and watch the evolution of the bureaucracy of the Chiefdoms, through the Stages of the Servitude Epoch, where it functions as one or another kind of “boss-hierarchy” for the ruling family or families or indeed class. The question is (1) how is it to be rewarded in the transitional stages of Socialism and (2) can differential reward be established without threatening the internal foundations of proletarian power (i.e., without corrupting the Party.) -And, in this historical explanation, we have that specific Marxist theory which explains (a) both the rise of modern revisionism and its collapse in the USSR and East Europe and (b) the totally different way in which the New Class is being handled in China.
99p Construction of Russian Socialism is both fast and slow
p The first and most important part of the bureaucracy the Bolsheviks had to replace was in the state apparatus, that is to say the military, and by the end of the Civil War they had pretty much succeeded in weeding out the Czarist officers and replacing them with officers of proletarian origins. War is an exceptionally fast way of naturally selecting the best (among the new people of proper origins) and for elevating them to higher positions of command.
p Things were not nearly so smooth in Government as far as industry is concerned. It took years - the years from 1917 to 1934 - to fully train the first generation of technocrat managers. -And, although politics was emphasized in the new schools and technical training institutes as much as performance in the subject matter, the truth is that the extreme poverty of Russia would see that much was left to be desired in terms of being able to create a communist consciousness in these students. The new system of restored and controlled capitalism was extant to the degree that it could be explained by Bukharin one year after Lenin initiated NEP in his Economic Organization in Soviet Russia. An argument essentially the same as that of Deng in China in 1975-1978.
p Lessons of the Cultural Revolution
p In the end, as you will see in this book, the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1975) failed because it failed to deal with the New Class in any kind of final
p definitive ”theoretical” way. On the contrary, China’s ultra-left demonstrated the futility of its ideological campaigns to get production moving in China, and in the end they were shown to have no real program to offer the Chinese people except to “share the poverty.” To the degree that the Cultural Revolution may be said to have succeeded, it is to the degree that everyone in China and much of the rest of the world, now knows that New Class separation is our number two enemy after US imperialism. The biggest problem we have coming up, after we liquidate the Gringo trillionaires and their sorry government, will be to establish our own rapidly transforming socialist stage and to do so without creating a permanent New Bureaucrat Class cum New Ruling Class.
100p At any rate, in 1975 — 1978 the Chinese Party examined its heritage and especially the results of its first thirty years and there was a turn to a course very similar to the one Lenin launched in Russia in 1921 (the NEP, which we have reviewed and will do so in more depth in the text —especially in Chapters 13 and 15) and about which Politburo spokesman Nicolai Bukharin wrote in detail in 1922. Of course now thirty four years later (i.e., after 1975) in China, what has emerged is a far more complex mixed economy than the Russians had ever had an opportunity to achieve in their seven years of NEP. After seven years of restored capitalism opposed at every turn by the imperialist encirclement Stalin had no choice but to go to a war footing as the necessity of getting serious about the coming war with capitalism in technological preparation. To do that he also had to complete the social revolution at home. This necessity for the survival of Socialism led to the Five Year Plans beginning in August 1928. In other words if the pressure had been off and the Soviet Union could have had access to capitalist bank credits and financing the Soviet Union could have industrialized under NEP. Only the agricultural pace toward collectivization and coops would have had to have been stepped up and that was already part of the NEP program. However the global capitalist class of this historic period could emerge with no policy other than the total destruction of Socialism and especially Bolshevism by aggression and eventual cataclysmic world war. The die was cast and we know how it played out in the form of World War II as it eventually came down.
101p At least this time, as the 21st century unfolds, everyone is aware of the potential danger of the New Class becoming a ruling class by transforming the Communist Party itself. It took several years for the Chinese Party to complete this turn. Over the next three decades (1976 - 2006) the Chinese leadership would come up with a “theoretical” solution, which is consistent with what I have presented herein.
p Wanting Communism is not enough to have Communism
p However, having a solution and explaining it internationally are often two different things. Especially since the rank-and-file Left in the West is not well read, nor well educated, and does not have the discipline to sit down and study the progress of the NEP-like program of the CPC over the last 30 years. Furthermore, as the Left in the West has always had an ultra-left component that wants communism NOW, Euro-American leftists have been especially resistant to the idea of a mixed economy in China. But, as you will also see in this book, and as Lenin was forced to admit in 1921, wanting communism and being able to have communism are two distinctly different categories. Emotion is not enough. One has to accept what Marx and Engels discovered, and that is that the mode of production for modern Communism requires an extremely
102p modern technological component. There is no short cut.
p We have tried relying principally on the ideological and social organizational components of culture, in lieu of technological advance, and in all instances these attempts have ultimately failed. Without an extremely advanced industry and agriculture, communism is not possible in the post-Servitude Epoch way, anyway. —And, it is not our intention to return to the primitive living conditions of “primitive communism” (the Stages of Hunting and Gathering and primitive agriculture) in order “to share the poverty.” Those who wish to follow that road now, after the experiments of the 20th century, are free to do so, but they are not communists nor Marxists nor Leninists, nor Maoists — rather, they are a modern form of the old utopian socialists that Marx and Engels first confronted, exposed and defeated. Living in a “commune” in the forests of Oregon or the slums of Chicago is fine for those who wish to do so, but it is no more representative of what we communists have in mind for society overall, than the Kibbutz is representative of capitalist Israel. After reading this book you will know exactly what it is we have in mind — in a phrase, modern communism, with Star Trek levels of advanced technology; that is, with the highest living standards and conditions possible, for everyone, to go along with it.
103p Epilogue as Prologue
p You revolutionary cadre (from a variety of political parties and tendencies) need this textbook summary in handbook form, so that you can better use our scientific grasp of causality and process in history to successfully defeat the tiny US ruling oligarchy, for it is the intention of this tiny group of super-billionaires and trillionaires that rule the USA to kill you and yours. Their ruling ancestors consciously set about killing tens of millions of US and European workers when they started the First World War. As I say, it is the intention of their descendants, now in power, to kill you! —And, they have new means at their disposal, such as intercontinental disease, and environmental catastrophe of geologic epoch proportions, in addition to war, to use against you, and they will use them against you. These are examples of what they have in store for working people around the globe, but they do not include all of the evil plans of the billionaire and trillionaire elite in the USA and abroad. These are the families Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, DuPont, Bush, and their foreign allies such as the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (to name only a few.) You see, this gang of killers no longer need you. They see you as the enemy within. Ironically you are an enemy they have created, as a consequence of the laws of capitalist production. I am going to teach you about these laws of capitalist production, herein. —And, along the way I will teach you about how capitalism as a “stage” in social and cultural evolution came about.
104p You will learn, for example, in this book, why the capitalist ruling classes undertook the mass murder of tens of millions of European and North American workers in what they called The Great War of 1914. By the time you finish this book you will know why mass murder by war was the conscious policy of the capitalist ruling elite of North America and Europe; why it was one of the two main reasons the capitalists started their First World War. To stop them from doing the same thing again, this time against you and your families and friends, you must act first, now, before they succeed.
p For the moment, US imperialist policies are primarily aimed at global domination of raw material inputs (e.g., oil and gas) to the factories they own on all the continents of
p the globe. Also, for the moment, US imperialist policies are primarily aimed at controlling the globes cheapest labor-power resources. In part, this is because the tiny group of US ruling billionaire and trillionaire families is in desperate straits; they are far weaker today, than at any time since they established their hegemony over the Capitalist World in 1945. (Hegemony means asserting a predominate influence over others — in this case, the US ruling families exerting dominance over the ruling families and classes of the other advanced capitalist countries.) In fact, the US ruling oligarchy of billionaire families and their (U.S.) Government have lost that hegemony in the past eight short years, as you will see, and they, and it, are now desperately striving to stave off total financial collapse. Thus, your first acts must encompass the concept of stopping their drive for global domination.
105p We are in the last days of the imperialist phase of the Capitalist Stage. (Imperialism means shipping constant capital [machinery and factories] to colonial [now Third World] countries to take advantage of their cheap labor.) Imperialism is a phase of the Capitalist Stage which began soon after Capitalism was fully extant in Great Britain c. 1850, and reached a zenith in global terms, in the First World War period (1914-1918). Since then, imperialism has been the only form of large scale Capitalism, and it has become increasingly centralized. -And, in the aftermath of the Second World War, was (until very recently) hegemonized under the leadership of the US ruling financial families. The fact that US hegemony has collapsed during the last few years is a new development - very positive for our side - with special ramifications, not all of which we can yet foresee. Some of which we shall discuss at the close of this Handbook.
106p As you read you will see why I say that the strategy of liquidating billionaire-trillionaire control over the North American People is a feasible and correct strategy to follow as the 21st Century unfolds. (This billionaire control exists as an unholy alliance of US comprador billionaires and foreign trillionaire families - as for example the Bush family and the Saudi so-called Royal Family, as demonstrated so well by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11). Along the way, you will figure out which tactical approaches may best be honed to your long term goals.
p However, fighting the US ruling billionaire-trillionaire elite (and their foreign allies) over their policy of global domination of raw resource and cheap labor inputs, does not mean that you should spend all your time and energy in the Anti-Iraq-War Movement or for that matter in the anti-Afghanistan War movement. After all the more troops imperialism sends against the religious crackpots in these countries the fewer gringo troops we have to confront in this hemisphere! —And if they don’t destroy the nutballs we would have to do it anyway. At the same time if anti-Islamic war activity corresponds to “base building” fine. Otherwise, it is far more important to devote as much time as possible to organizing working people to (1) fight for popular power, and; (2) organize workers, union and non-union, organized and unorganized, (especially, the lowest ranks, the most oppressed) for the seizure of political power at the opportune moment, somewhere down the road. -And, (3) remember that in the end, it is the “conscious” working class mass base which will provide the ultimate block to the ruling oligarchy, by destroying imperialism (the final stage of capitalism) root and branch, once and for all. The final solution to the problem of those who would kill us, in their drive for super profits, is to seize power!
107p Make no mistake, the final solution in the US will involve an armed struggle to
p defend democracy from the fascist regime in Washington, and to go over, all the way, to the fight for Socialism! This is not going to end well for the enemies of the people; or, it will not end well for us. Unless I miss my bet altogether what is coming will make the French Revolution look like a Sunday School Picnic! You must either stop the elite or they will liquidate you. The armed struggle for a final solution is not going to be a pretty picture.
p History is with Us
p Remember this: We Bolsheviks have never admitted the word “defeat” into our vocabulary. We fight to the bitter end or until there is no one left to carry the guns. We do know the word Victory! Victory belongs to those who believe in it the most and who believe it the longest — who sacrifice everything for it.
Remember what we are fighting for: the future we Bolsheviks have in mind is Star Trek like; a United Federation of Peoples. Our objective is to establish a Communist social order with such massive production that the slogan “from each according to her ability to each according to her needs” is the obvious way to live. The future our capitalist enemies of the people have in mind for you would have you made into Borgs!
Part I
Pre-Socialist Humanity
Notes
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