Socialism: Theory & Practice: November 2009

Friday, November 13, 2009

Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU

This is the "Letter to the Editor" I submitted in response to this article:

Regarding your article, "Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU."

Jarvis Tyner stated:

"He's only the beginning,I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner only speaks for a very few Communists in stating this.

Such thinking is very dangerous because it leads people to think that Obama is some kind of friend of working people when he is nothing of the sort. Barack Obama's agenda is now very clear; his main priority is Wall Street profits; working people pay the bill and suffer... this is "the new normal"--- Wall Street made this mess and the coupon clippers brought in Barack Obama to help them profit some more from solving their problems on the back of the working class.

The Associated Press pointed out in an article, "Obama wants domestic spending cuts in next budget." These cuts are sure to hurt working people on the bottom the worst.

The article continues:

"The flow of red ink has been increased by war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, recession-fighting stimulus and bank bailout spending and by reduced tax revenues from high unemployment and reduced personal and business income."

Obama can create all the "green" jobs he wants to but if those jobs continue paying working people nothing but poverty wages the economic mess our country is in is going to worsen.

Obama has even refused to enforce longstanding affirmative action policies leaving people of color and women who are already suffering horrible poverty to fend for themselves.

Obama is not a liberal, nor is he progressive; he is no friend of working people... he has refused to provide the change people thought they were voting for.

Barack Obama has shown himself to be nothing other than a slick talking insurance salesman.

Sounds to me like Jarvis Tyner is a member of the Democratic Party out on the stump campaigning for Barack Obama's second term when he should be leading the struggles for peace and for improving the lives of working people.

Tyner should be holding Obama accountable by telling him:

No peace; no votes.
No single-payer universal health care; no votes.
No living wage jobs; no votes.

Alan L. Maki
Another long-time Communist
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
218-386-2432

Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2009/11/13/jarvis-tyner-speech/

Friday, November 13, 2009

COLUMBIA — Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA, spoke at MU on Thursday and said the election of President Barack Obama opens the door for the left wing, which he feels has allowed itself to be pushed to the sidelines and overcome with progress-impeding cynicism, to mobilize.

"He's only the beginning," Tyner said. "I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner spoke to an audience of about 70 people at MU's Ellis Auditorium. He focused on the transitional phase he feels the United States is in because of Obama's election.
Although the president is neither a communist nor socialist, his administration marks the country's movement away from the right-wing governments that have been dominant in the U.S. since the Reagan administration, Tyner said.

He said that while the Democratic Party is not without blame, the Republican leadership has been the source of the nation's problems that include an increase in poverty, a ruined economy, the continuation of global warming, impeded scientific research and the destruction of public schools by No Child Left Behind.

Tyner said he and his party are not completely satisfied with the work Obama has done since taking office, listing the need to withdraw troops more quickly from Iraq, for initiatives to end nuclear weapons and to re-establish trading relations with Cuba.

However, Tyner praised the public option in the recently passed House health care bill, saying Americans need to put massive pressure on the Senate to pass the legislation with the option intact. He also felt there should be public options for the auto and housing industries and for student loans.

A Communist Party USA member for more than 50 years, Tyner joined the party as a young worker in Philadelphia. He was the party's vice presidential nominee in1972 and 1976. Also a founding member of the Black Radical Congress, Tyner has fought for racial justice and workers' rights since the 1960s when he became active in the Civil Rights and Labor movements.

He said the next step for the Communist Party USA is to move more into the mainstream.

"We're not ready to run for president, but we are ready to run for City Council, school boards. And we're going to do that more," Tyner said.

MU senior Alaina Boyett, who attended the event, said she was already familiar with much of the material Tyner discussed because of a Marxism class she's enrolled in. She liked that he made a point to separate the Communist Party and ideals from what she felt they are associated with in the mass media.

"I thought he was fair in his criticism of Obama and the right-wing talking heads," Boyett said.

MU's Karl Marx Reading Group, which meets to discuss communist texts and how their arguments apply to political action today, organized the event because members were interested in hosting a speaker. Leadership in St. Louis suggested Tyner.

"I thought Jarvis would be a good spokesman for what we're all about because he's been fighting for social justice for so long and a party member for so long," said Jack Buthod, the group's president.

Buthod, who joined the group as a sophomore, said it has been around for a few years but wanted to bring a guest speaker in to draw attention and generate new membership. Although he identifies himself as a Marxist, he said not everyone in the group does.

"I'd say it's definitely a mix. There's multiple communists in the group, but there's also people more interested in talking about the ideas from different perspectives," he said.

A group of seven MU students set up a mock-gulag in Speakers Circle on Thursday evening as a reaction to the Tyner event, a demonstration referencing the Soviet labor camps used to imprison political dissenters as well as criminals.Gulags were at their most prominent during Joseph Stalin's reign. One protester dressed up as a Soviet guard and held three others captive in a white metal canopy surrounded by barbed wire. Others handed out flyers and spoke to passersby.

One protester held a cardboard sign that said, "This is the Communism Jarvis Tyner is promoting."

The group hoped the demonstration's proximity to Ellis Auditorium would attract the attention of attendees of Tyner's speech and lead them to come ask questions, although they said they were protesting communism in general and not Tyner specifically.

MU senior Eric Hobbs, who played the role of guard dressed in a forest green button-down shirt and trousers and a Soviet-style hat with earflaps, decided to protest when he saw a flier for Tyner's speech on campus Monday.

"I thought communism's message was going to be spread, and I thought it would be good to spread the message communism isn't that good," Hobbs said, who believes the governing philosophy leads to government abuse of power and oppression.

"The main goal of the protest is to most importantly remind people of the damage of communism, what can happen when the government has too much power," Hobbs said, giving the examples of the Soviet Union and Communist China.

MU sophomore Megan Roberts organized the mock-gulag, modeling the demonstration after one at Washington University in St. Louis, which students held Monday to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Roberts, who was out of town Thursday night, said she anticipated that Tyner would either talk about the evils of capitalism or the glories of communism and wanted the protest to remind attendees, as well as Tyner himself, of the oppression and deaths caused by the philosophy.

"Communism is a very idealistic thing, and I think people lose sight of its evils and what it's done to humanity," Roberts said.

This is the "Letter to the Editor" I submitted in response to this article:

Regarding your article, "Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU."

Jarvis Tyner stated:

"He's only the beginning,I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner only speaks for a very few Communists in stating this.

Such thinking is very dangerous because it leads people to think that Obama is some kind of friend of working people when he is nothing of the sort. Barack Obama's agenda is now very clear; his main priority is Wall Street profits; working people pay the bill and suffer... this is "the new normal"--- Wall Street made this mess and the coupon clippers brought in Barack Obama to help them profit some more from solving their problems on the back of the working class.

The Associated Press pointed out in an article, "Obama wants domestic spending cuts in next budget." These cuts are sure to hurt working people on the bottom the worst.

The article continues:

"The flow of red ink has been increased by war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, recession-fighting stimulus and bank bailout spending and by reduced tax revenues from high unemployment and reduced personal and business income."

Obama can create all the "green" jobs he wants to but if those jobs continue paying working people nothing but poverty wages the economic mess our country is in is going to worsen.

Obama has even refused to enforce longstanding affirmative action policies leaving people of color and women who are already suffering horrible poverty to fend for themselves.

Obama is not a liberal, nor is he progressive; he is no friend of working people... he has refused to provide the change people thought they were voting for.

Barack Obama has shown himself to be nothing other than a slick talking insurance salesman.

Sounds to me like Jarvis Tyner is a member of the Democratic Party out on the stump campaigning for Barack Obama's second term when he should be leading the struggles for peace and for improving the lives of working people.

Tyner should be holding Obama accountable by telling him:

No peace; no votes.
No single-payer universal health care; no votes.
No living wage jobs; no votes.

Alan L. Maki
Another long-time Communist
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
218-386-2432

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, November 13, 2009

Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU

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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...