From: L.A. Metro Club
Los Angeles, CA.
Let us begin by saying that we appreciate the work it took to produce the
essay. It was put together with honesty and I believe that Sam Webb truly
believes what he writes. That being said, we offer a different perspective.
We cannot afford to do away or retire the term, Marxism-Leninism. For one
thing, to say that “it has a negative connotation among ordinary Americans,
even in left and progressive circles” is running from the class struggle.
Our job as communists is to educate ordinary Americans about communism and
what it is all about. For instance, production and manufacturing in this
country are at an all time low. What little there is being produced is not
socially useful production. That is one reason why unemployment levels are
so high. To begin with, our party should review its industrial
concentration policy and call for a return of manufacturing jobs to the USA. We
should
use all legal means at our disposal to initiate unemployed councils, lobby
for legislation, work with industrial unions that are on the same page, and
put out information in our communities that says that the Communist Party
is for full employment and we have the science to prove it. The pamphlet, “
Feeling locked out of the American Dream?” is a good start. We should
return to our roots. The term Marxism-Leninism has served our party well for
ninety years. Running away from it gains us nothing.
As for Stalin, the main reason for using the term, Marxism-Leninism has to
do with his (and Lenin's) work on the national question. He was faced with
uniting a nation by protecting the rights of peoples that were not
Russian, fighting against great Russian chauvinism, while at the same time,
fighting against nationalism. Using the science of Marxism-Leninism this was
accomplished, culminating in the so-called Stalin constitution of 1936
which guaranteed the rights of all citizens in the U.S.S.R. Further, the
science of Marxism-Leninism corrected the error in the theory of Marx and Engels
that assumed that socialism would first come to the industrially advanced
countries of the world. As we now see, socialism first came to Russia (the
U.S.S.R.), the eastern bloc countries, and then China, and then Korea, and
then Cuba, and then Viet Nam and Laos. None of these countries were
industrially advanced. Stalin wrote volumes on the need to support national
liberation movements to bring about socialism in underdeveloped countries and
provided material support toward that end.
To say that Marxism-Leninism “took formal shape during the Stalin period
during which Soviet scholars, under Stalin's guidance, systematized and
simplified earlier Marxist writings-not to mention adapted ideology to the
needs of the Soviet state and party” does not mean that we can not do the same
in the United States. Of course Stalin and the Central Committee of the
party adapted ideology to the needs of the soviet state and party! That is
what every political party that takes power does. That is what we should do.
But that does not mean that the term Marxism-Leninism is foreign by any
means. Stalin learned from Lenin. Hence the term, Marxism-Leninism.
Where it is said, “Marxism is revolutionary in theory and practice, but it
doesn't consider “gradual” and “reform” to be dirty words,” no one is
suggesting that about Marxism-Leninism. Perú and their party led by
Secretaty General Roberto De La Cruz Huamán are leaders of large numbers of
masses. At a recent demonstration that was called by a “coalition” of left
parties of which the PCP is a part, along with the Confederación General de
Trabajadores de Perú (CGTP) the workers of Perú made minimum demands. It was a
huge legal demonstration against neo-liberalism and the selling off of
public entities (privatization). This demonstration is just part of the
effort by the five left parties that includes the PCP and the CGTP to win the
Presidency of the nation on April 10. There is a good chance. Of course, they
are using Marxist-Leninist tactics that work in their country, as the
Chinese party is fond of saying ,with their own “characteristics.”
Before we fight for the interests of the entire nation, we must fight for
the interests of the working class. When people see us fighting for the
workers, many will join us, including small business people and people from
other parties. To wait until the working class is destroyed “to fight for the
interests of the entire nation” is just wrong.
“The deterioration of infrastructure, the destruction of the social safety
net, the undermining of the public school system, the decay of urban and
rural communities, the privatization of public assets, the growth of poverty
and inequality, the hollowing out of manufacturing and cities, the
lowering of workers wages, and a faltering -now stagnant-domestic economy” are the
reasons why we should be fighting for the working class first.
It is no secret that pension funds in OECD countries lost $3.5 trillion
(US) in market value during the global financial crisis and are still unable
to fully restore savings to their 2008 levels. Defined benefit pension
funds are underfunded because of wild speculation throughout the world's
capitalist markets. The workers are punished through no fault of their own. This
is one area of the financial mess that needs to be properly explained. The
CPUSA should issue a position paper on the subject of pension funds,
noting first of all that workers take less money in wages with the expectation
that pension funds will be available when they reach retirement age.
This is not to say that there are problems that effect all of humanity,
like global warming, nuclear power and weapons, and natural disasters. Of
course we do all we can to identify these problems and make the struggle for
a better world part of our program.
“The struggle for socialism goes through phases and stages, probably more
than we allow for in our current writings and program.” Exactly! We have a
defeat and retreat strategy. The CPUSA seems to be afraid of the capitalist
system. Workers can sense this. They know when the party is weak. That is
one reason they don't join in greater numbers.
“A party of socialism understands that in any broad coalition of social
change, competing views are inevitable.” The role of the left is to express
its views candidly, but in a way that strengthens rather than fractures
broad unity, which is a prerequisite for social progress.” That is why Lenin
and the bolsheviks formed “a party of a new type.” A communist party.
They found that working with the social democrats was a defeatist policy.
Later they found that working with the Trotskyites was a bad idea. It depends
on how one defines left. We all know that the CIA works overtime since the
end of the cold war setting up left groups that are for the purpose of
discrediting the communist movements and parties. There is another very
important reason they form these groups. They finance them to fool workers who are
looking for solutions to their problems. A party of the 21st century must
be ideologically strong so as not to be enamored by the glitz and glamor of
capitalism. Now the social-democratic elites have cell phones and
blackberries, and laptops and they drink their Starbucks coffee in the morning
and they travel like kings while the majority of people in the world have
nothing to eat! We must have humility if we are to be real communists.
“Don't be surprised to see a movement back to class concepts and
historical materialsm -not to mention a new interest in the theoretical
contributions and political biography of Lenin. No one in this or the last century
can
match his theoretical body of work on questions of class, democracy,
alliance policy, nationality, power, and socialist revolution.” In fact in the
former Soviet Union, there is renewed interest in the lives of Lenin and
Stalin, and their popularity there is rising. The Communist Party of the
Russian Federation placed second in the regional elections, passing the Russia
United party. All the more reason not to change Marxism-Leninism to simply
Marxism.
“A party of socialism in the 21st century doesn't irrevocably lock social
forces, organizations and political personalities into tightly enclosed
social categories that allow no space for these same forces, organizations
and personalities to change under the impact of issues, events, and changing
correlations of power.” We seriously doubt that a party as small as the
CPUSA can have this kind of power. We had better grow first, before we assume
such things.
Regarding immigrants having a tradition of struggle, suggesting that their
spirit is militant and anti-capitalist while failing to mention the neo -
liberal policies in their countries of origin that caused them to emmigrate
makes the assumption that they were born that way and that all immigrants
are that way. They have to continue the fight in their own communities in
the United States which is why many immigrants don't join the party. We have
witnessed this with my own eyes. We work with immigrants every day. Immigr
ants work within their own community. We have worked many years in the
past within the Irish community and had to fight against nationalism and
anti-communism. Despite this, we were able to establish a party club of Irish
immigrants, and they were mainly concerned with problems back home. We are
not suggesting that all communities are the same, but we are patient, and we
observe how immigrants react to our party. Are we really interested in
their problems or are we just using them? It is something we should discuss
before assume that all immigrants will jump at the chance to join the party
because they are immigrants.
We have to ask, why take over the Democratic Party? What can be gained by
such talk? Are we organizing them or are they organizing us? Are we having
influence with them, or are they having influence with us? Who is leading
whom? Wouldn't it be better to work with workers' organizations directly,
that is to say, the unions and the union movement? Wouldn't it be better to
organize a coalition of parties and left forces into an electoral coalition
that can win real political power like they have done successfully in Perú
and El Salvador? A party with its own independence and it's own name, led
by labor and communists? That is what we see . And it is working. First we
tried to work with the old parties, and we were sold out. That is what the
Democratic Party is good at.
When we speak of Stalin, we need too speak of him in the continuum of
history. Before there was a Soviet Union there was Russia, with its culture,
tradition, and its brutality. Stalin acknowledged publicly that “the purges
and executions of hundreds of thousands of communists and other patriots
and the labor camps that incarcerated,
exploited and sent untold numbers of [innocent] Soviet people to early
deaths, and the removal of whole peoples from their homelands.” The most
precise number of deaths from purges and executions of innocent Soviet citizens
is 640,000. Most of this was done by Nicolai Eshov, a German spy working
under direct orders of the German SS. When he was discovered, he tried to
hide his crimes. He was promptly tried and executed. Others with authority
high in the Soviet government were also found to be murdering innocent Soviet
citizens. They were also double dealers working for the Germans. Following
Lenin's death, many intellectuals doubted that the Soviet Union would
continue. They joined the party, acted like loyal party members, worked their
way up into positions of authority and worked as spies Germany. The
assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934 was the first major provocation of the Bloc
of Rights and Trotskyites. There was sabotage including falsifying of grain
and cotton harvest reports, killing of livestock including horses,
destroying railroads, blowing up mines, and so on. In short, there was a fifth
column operating in Soviet Russia. The threat was real. And the man who was
charged with stopping the sabotage , Nicolai Eshov, was protecting the
spies, and conducting trials of innocent Soviet citizens, and lying to the
Central Committee of the CPSU the whole time. What do you do when people lie to
you? Do you take their testimony at face value? Can they be trusted? Are
they loyal comrades? Or are they lying and destroying the lives of innocent
people?
When Stalin acknowledged the atrocities, he did not call them a mistake.
He said that horrible crimes were committed that have nothing to do with
socialism, and those crimes were committed by Nicolai Eshov, a German spy.
When we speak of war crimes or crimes against humanity, we have to put the
blame where it belongs, not on the people who discovered the horrible crimes,
Stalin and Beria. There are many witnesses to Stalin's leadership of the
USSR. Firstly, there is the American ambassador to the USSR, Joseph E.
Davies, author of the book, Mission to Moscow. Then there is Anna Louise Strong,
who wrote, The Stalin Era, which is her account of her time in the USSR
under Stalin's leadership. There is also the book, Stalin, written by a
German biographer, Emil Ludwig. There is also The Red Archbishop, the Dean of
Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson and his book, The Soviet Power. There is plenty
to read on the subject of the soviet Union during WW II.
On the subject of war crimes and labor camps, it should be pointed that
the United States bombed Dresden and murdered hundreds of thousands of
German citizens, and later dropped not one but two atom bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens.
These bombs were dropped on civilian targets where they would do the most
damage. The reason for these atrocities had nothing to do with winning the
war. The goal of the capitalism was to destroy the industrial capacity of
Germany and Japan so that the United States and United Kingdom would be
unchallenged superpowers in the world. The Soviet Union decided not to use
nuclear weapons and instead attacked the Japanese main land, liberated the
Sakhalin Islands, and kept the Japanese Army from valuable fuel to continue
the war. In short, the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary.
Before and during the war, there was no “forced” collectivization of
Soviet agriculture. It was entirely voluntary. “it was found that the voluntary
principle of forming collective farms was being violated, and that in a
number of districts the peasants were being forced into the collective farms
under threat of being disspossed, disfranchised, and so on.” (History of
the CPSU, p.307, International Publishers, 1939 ed.)This was in direct
violation of the order of the Central Committee of the CPSU which was “against
any attempts whatsoever to force the collective-farm movement by 'decrees'
from above, which might involve the danger of the substitution of
mock-collectivization for real Socialist emulation in the organization of collective
farms.” (Resolutions of the C.P.S.U.[B] russ. ed., Part II, page 662.)
What there was was a discontinuation of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which
had become outdated. Stalin needed to ramp up agricultural output so that
there would not be food shortages during and after the war. There was
nothing forced about it. In fact having received a number of alarming signals of
distortions of the Party line that might jeopardize collectivization, on
March 2, 1930 Stalin's article “dizzy With Success,” was published. This
article was a warning to all who had been carried away by the success of
collectivization.
When whole peoples were relocated from their homelands, this was done
because their homelands were under attack. In fact, Soviet troop trucks were
sent to Poland to relocate Jewish people behind the Ural mountains so that
they would be safe. Once again, the threat was real.
With regard to Stalin's so-called labor camps, we should consider that
most of the people in the camps were deserters from the armed forces that
were captured.
This has been researched and verified by the writer Geoffrey Roberts in
his book, Stalin's Wars.
Secondly, we had labor camps of our own. Japanese-Americans were
relocated from the major cities on the west coast into internment or concentration
camps. These people were American citizens, many of whom served in the
244th army regiment in Europe while their families stayed behind. This was a
great violation of civil rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Before
we find fault and throw stones at Stalin, who has been dead for more than 50
years, who led the USSR in the great patriotic war and saved socialism, th
e legacy of Lenin, we should first look at our own country's “mistakes.”
The United States also had a “cult of personality.” His name was Franklin
D. Roosevelt, and while he did many good things, internment of
Japanese-Americans wasn't one of them.
Regarding the statement that “The state isn't simply the instrument of the
ruling class – a monolithic and tightly integrated class bloc and weapon.
While the capitalist class is dominant, the state is filled with with
internal contradictions and is a site of class and democratic struggles – not
just any site though, but a crucial and decisive site.” What you fail to
mention is that Gorbachev and his social-democratic friends used this idea to
destroy socialism and the USSR. The history of social-democracy of one of
anti-communism and anti-Leninism. The social-democrats do not want
socialism. They want to reform capitalism. The communists on the other hand,
have always been guided by the revolutionary teachings of Marxism-Leninism.
In the new conditions of the era of imperialism, imperialist wars and
proletarian revolutions, its leaders further developed the teachings of Marx and
Engels and raised them to a new level. That is what the CPUSA must do if
we are to call ourselves “communist.”
regarding the statement. “Bureaucratic collectivism and a command economy
that reduce people to cogs, social relations into things, and culture to a
dull gray will be resisted by a 21st century party of socialism” who is
suggesting that a command economy has to reduce people to cogs? The command
economy will be run by the workers themselves, not the party. That is what
socialism is! Why assume that the party will run everything? It certainly
does not in Brazil or Venezuela, or Cuba.
As for the statement that “Our socialism will embrace a new humanist ethos
and value system, that is what Marxism-Leninism does. Marxism-Leninism is
synonymous with humanism. This has nothing to do with whether or not there
is a command economy under socialism. Furthermore, a command style economy
with bureaucratic collectivism could be construed as trade unionism,
something that will be replaced by socialism in the 21st century. The dream that
“the builders of socialism should put into place a dense network of worker
and community organizations that are politically and financially empowered
to govern” assumes that everyone will participate. Unless incentives are
put in place, this will not work.
As for dropping the term democratic centralism, this cannot be done in a
communist party. This is how we function. Democratic Centralism “is” force
of argument. That is how unions decide questions of major importance such
as the decision to strike. The conscience of the majority, by unity of will.
Remember that the Bolsheviks we busy in 1917 too. Workers worked more than
the customary 8 hours a day. What makes us any different. Membership in
our party is voluntary. If members can't follow what is in our constitution,
they shouldn't be members. That is what distinguishes us from other
political parties. We are disciplined. We make a plan and we stick with it. We are
not like the social-democratic parties that spend all their time in
endless debates.
Regarding the internet, the party should not abandon ground organizing if
favor of the internet. It should use both. Our clubs depend on literature
to reach people in our communities. We can't neglect this work. The internet
that we have seen is very limited. There isn't much there to see. There
has to be more on those pages like the CPUSA website. There should be a
direct link to International Publishers on the home page. We shouldn't have to
surf through endless links to find it. International Publications is a
party entity and should be treated as such. Currently there is no members
section. There is no on-line store to purchase party supplies or to order
pamphlets in print. We should have position papers on things effecting the
working class: a paper on the foreclosure crisis, a paper on homelessness, a
paper on war and peace, a paper on the struggle to reform labor law, a paper on
immigration and citizenship. If these were on the web page,in PDF format,
our clubs could download them and use them in our communities. If we are
concentrating on the web so much, we need to use it to our advantage. Right
now it looks like something of a command style bureaucracy.
Regarding the statement that, “No party , including ours, is mistake free;
we make mistakes and we make them in the present as well as the past.
Politics is complex and fluid, and mistakes in theory, assessments and
practices are inevitable” it would be nice if the party of the first country of
socialism was afforded that same luxury! What gives us the right to judge
Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union in the great patriotic war? What right
do we have to distance ourselves from him? None. What was achieved until
1953, the year of Stalin's death could never be achieved by the CPUSA.
Never! The USSR saved the world from fascism and fought a war on two fronts. To
distance ourselves from Stalin is anti-communism at its worst. This is not
worthy of our party. Let us reunite ourselves with the legitimate
communist and workers parties of the world. It is ours to win in the 21st century.
