Socialism: Theory & Practice: May 2008

Friday, May 9, 2008

Communist Workers' Party of Finland

Comrade Hannu Harju, delegates, guests and members of the Communist Workers’ Party of Finland;

Greetings and success in your deliberations during your 18th Party Congress. Your deliberations will be important contributions to the communist and working class movements around the world.

Your Party Congress comes during the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 160th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. Without the active leadership from Communist Parties the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights will remain mere words on a piece of paper which will never materialize under capitalism; socialism will be required for full implementation.

Your Party Congress comes at a time when a great deal of disorientation and unclear thinking detached from the struggles of working people for a better world still remains within the Communist and working class movements which has become fertile ground for revisionism to fester, grow and spread.

The imperialists have had temporary successes to one degree or another in overturning socialist revolutions from the Soviet Union to trying to undermine socialism in China.

The imperialists responded to the democratic aspirations and the struggles for justice, human dignity and socialism on the part of the Finnish people and the working class by drenching the revolution in blood using the most bestial, repressive and undemocratic methods ninety years ago--- murdering tens of thousands, and forcing many tens of thousands more Finns to flee their homeland lest they be beaten, imprisoned, hacked to death or shot before firing squads by the agents of the feudal lords and the rising capitalist class and their international backers with the Wall Street coupon clippers always at the helm of reaction in orchestrating this repression and terror.

Among the “red” Finns who fled the repression in their homeland were those who became organizers of the powerful industrial unions in mining, forestry, auto and steel in North America.

We have found great strength and inspiration and support from among the “red” Finns of the Iron Ranges of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan in our current struggles to organize casino workers, and in the struggles to end the war in Iraq and for socialized health care.

Gus Hall, the former Chair of the Communist Party USA, came from a family of “red” Finns on the Mesaba Iron Range in Minnesota.

Gus Hall led the Communist Party USA in the struggles for peace and socialism and was a relentless battler against revisionism, and against all forms of national, racial and ethnic chauvinism. Gus Hall was North America’s most well known Finnish-American and true son of our working class; Hall kept the Communist Party USA on a straight and steady course of working class internationalism in solidarity with the heroic Soviet peoples who blazed the path for the great accomplishments the working class made under socialism.

The imperialists drenched the Finnish revolution in blood in order to thwart the aspirations of the people for socialism; in the Soviet Union these imperialists tried time and again to halt, through armed intervention and fascist war and economic blockade and sabotage, the forward march of working people in peacefully and cooperatively building socialism--- resulting in tens of millions dead, leaving millions more to live in misery as millions starved as the capitalist “philanthropists” looked on with glee and delight; then the imperialists used the threat of nuclear annihilation against socialism, and the peoples of the former first successful socialist revolution fought back each and every attempt to destroy their progress in building a prosperous country for working people--- agriculture was successfully collectivized to feed a hungry nation as a huge, powerful industrial base owned by the people was built up to provide--- for the first time in human history--- for the general welfare of all the people.

Because of weak, muddle-headed and confused leaders who gave in to revisionism, and others, like Gorbachov, who sold out the Soviet people--- working people of the former Soviet Union are now being subjected to a most vicious form of gangster capitalism as punishment for having had the courage to stand up to the imperialist beast. Finnish people know only too well how imperialism punishes the working class and farmers for having the courage to stand up to feudal lords and the capitalist masters.

The imperialists have never missed an opportunity in distorting Finland’s history; to spread the most outrageous slanders about socialism using the most disgusting and malicious lies concocted to distort and twist history with regards to the so-called “Winter War” where the capitalist sooth-sayers turn history on its head and turn Hitler’s fascist henchmen and butchers into heroes while revolutionary workers fighting for human dignity are demonized. Finnish Communists, almost alone, have struggled to tell the truth to the world regarding this big-lie.

Your Party, the Communist Workers’ Party of Finland, carries on in the great, best and important traditions of the progressive Finnish people… from the heroines and heroes of the epic Kalevala, to Minna Canth the great advocate of women’s rights, to A. B. Mäkelä the heroic Finnish Communist and Marxist theoretician who after being forced from Finland by the reactionary feudal lords led the efforts to establish Sointula--- a cooperative community in British Columbia, Canada, to the great Marxist teacher, heroic Communist and true internationalist--- Otto Ville Kuusinen.

The revisionists have given up on building Communist Party Clubs among the working class in their communities and places of employment; these Clubs are fundamental to all progressive advance and social change because they are the “think-tanks” and “action centers” of the working class and progressive movements for peace and social and economic justice; the Communist Party Clubs are basic and fundamental to establishing working class power. The so-called “non-Marxist socialists” and the anti-Leninist “Communists” have abandoned the Marxist-Leninist method of building Communist Party Clubs essential and fundamental to fighting for needed reforms and the day-to-day needs of working people as the working class struggles for--- and to attain and hold on to--- working class political power. Grassroots and rank-and-file working class activism through these Communist Party Clubs has always been, and always will be, the key to building strong and powerful Communist Parties capable of leading the working class in the struggle against capital--- locally, nationally and internationally. Through these Communist Party Clubs we seek to educate, organize and bring the working class into united, militant action against capital… it is with this in mind that we extend warm, Comradely greetings in the class struggle to the Communist Workers’ Party of Finland as you deliberate at your important 18th Party Congress.

The struggle against revisionism is an integral part of the struggle for socialism and international working class solidarity and unity!

The future belongs to the working peoples of the world who will find peace, justice, dignity, freedom and happiness through socialism!

Long live the Communist Workers’ Party of Finland!

All power to the working class!

For international working class solidarity in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism!

On behalf of the Minnesota/North Dakota District of the Communist Party USA and the Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council;

Yours in the struggle,

Alan L. Maki
Secretary-Treasurer,
Minnesota/North Dakota District, Communist Party USA

Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council

Representing over two-hundred thousand casino workers struggling for union recognition in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa... presently employed in loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages without any rights under state or federal labor laws.

Cc: Rita Polewski, District Organizer, Minnesota/North Dakota District, CPUSA
Jeff Sippila, Chair, Iron Range Club, CPUSA
Dean Gunderson, Chair, St. Paul Club, CPUSA
Gus Hall Action Club, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sam Webb, Chair, CPUSA
Maggie Bird, President, Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council (sent by U.S. mail)
David Bednarczuk, Mesaba Cooperative Park; Hibbing, Minnesota

58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota USA 56763
Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell phone: 651-587-5541
E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my blog, a voice for rank-and-file working class activism:

Thoughts From Podunk

http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

Gus Hall to be topic of talk at Petrell Hall

Pancake Breakfast Sunday, August 31, 2008, 8:00-11:00 a.m. Petrell Hall; Brimson, Minnesota

Cost: Adults $5.00, Children, 5-12 $3.00, Children under 5 Free.

Guest Speaker: Tuomas Savonen, Finnish News Agency STT, Helsinki, Finland

Topic: Gus Hall and the Communist Party USA

Time: 10:00-11:00 a.m.

Tuomas Savonen, a journalist and graduate student of history at the University of Helsinki will give a presentation on the labor leader Gus Hall, the long time General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, and his political thought.

Gus Hall (1910-2000) was born Arvo Gustav Halberg in Cherry, Minnesota. His parents were immigrants from Lapua, Finland who had been involved in the Industrial Workers of the World and were founding members of the Communist Party.

Gus was the Party’s candidate for U.S. President on four occasions and is most closely associated with the “Little Steel” Strike of 1937, an effort to unionize the nation’s smaller, regional steel manufacturers.

Alan L. Maki

58891 County Road 13

Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432

Cell phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my blog:

Thoughts From Podunk

http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

Palmiro Togliatti

Italian Communist Party leader and courageous anti-fascist. Togliatti helped to shape and create the modern-day Communist Party club which has successfully been used by the working class to defeat the fascist menace, build unions, and fight capitalist exploitation, colonialism, & imperialism all over the world. These Communist Clubs are not only working class think tanks; but, centers of working class activity which strengthen the all peoples' united fronts in the struggles for peace and social & economic justice. Without Communist Clubs working people can not take power from the capitalist class and build a socialist society. Communists build Clubs in working class communities and workplaces. Only Communist Parties have developed and fine-tuned these Clubs which strive to educate while carrying on organizational activity intended to unite working people in common action for the specific purpose of making life better for working people.

Working Class USA

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism by V. I. Lenin

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.

I

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

II

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

III

When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.

Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organisations of the proletariat are multi plying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

Socialism: Theory & Practice

Friday, May 9, 2008

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For an end to imperialist wars...

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism by V. I. Lenin

I

II

III

For an end to imperialist war...