Socialism: Theory & Practice: People First!

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

People First!

http://www.ofl.ca/index.php/news/index_in/people_first_we_deserve_better/

--- En date de : Mer, 23.6.10, Communist Party of Canada a écrit :

De : Communist Party of Canada
Objet : CP of Canada Statement on the G8/G20 Summits
À : "Recipient List"
Date: mercredi 23 juin 2010 12 h 06
Re: G8/G20 Summits to be Held in Toronto

Dear comrades and Friends,

As you are well aware, the G8/G20 Meetings are being held in Toronto this week. We are enclosing the statement issued by the Central Executive of our Party with respect to these imperialist-dominated ‘Summits”. For those of you who plan to be in the Toronto area during the G20, we also enclose a mail-out regarding the June 26th People First!” march and rally.

Comradely yours,

Central Office,
Communist Party of Canada

___________________________________

G8/G20: Fight for a Real Alternative
to the new Capitalist “Consensus”

On the eve of the G8/G20 meetings, mass labour and democratic mobilizations are building in Southern Ontario and across Canada to protest this wasteful, security obsessed extravaganza. The Communist Party of Canada salutes this resistance and takes its rightful place alongside workers, students, women, Aboriginal peoples and social activists in denouncing these summits which aim to hammer out a strategic line among the ruling imperialist states and international finance capital on how best to advance their shared interests, and then present their agenda as a fait accompli to the world’s peoples.

This set of G summits is particularly important because global capitalism continues to be mired in a profound economic and structural crisis, notwithstanding the soothing media reports that the ‘worst is behind us’ and that recovery is well under way. Saving capitalism and restoring profit margins are the main concerns of these ‘leaders’, rather than solving the burning problems afflicting the world today. That is why issues like climate change, the world food crisis, ending wars of occupation and rampaging military spending, and the worsening problem of “under development”, especially in Africa, have all be swept off the agenda of the G8/G20 meetings.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney admitted as much this June when he declared that the Summits must focus attention on the continuing crisis, especially in Europe , which has had a serious “impact on financial conditions ... [and] it’s not over.” He then parroted the World Bank which earlier raised the possibility of a “second recession affecting most of the industrialized world if governments don’t deal successfully with the unfolding European debt crisis.”

In fact, the leading imperialist countries, including Canada , want to use the Summits to showcase their determination to impose further social and economic austerity on all states and peoples, as the only viable solution to overcome the crisis. But this is a false ‘international consensus” one that serves the interests of finance capital, but which consigns the vast majority of the world’s working class and oppressed peoples to even more hardship and suffering.
In Europe , the Austerity agenda pushed by the European Union brass and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already having a devastating effect, especially on public sector workers, youth, and pensioners. Minimum wages are being slashed, social programs cut, and the retirement age extended for workers.
But this savage attack is being met by heroic resistance across the European continent, especially in Greece and Portugal where the left, Communist led unions and popular movements are mounting escalating general strikes and other forms of mass resistance to fightback against this anti social onslaught of Big Capital and its governments.

In Canada , we need to replicate the kind of militancy building in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere around the world. The right wing Harper government and their pro corporate provincial counterparts (both Conservative and Liberal) are also moving to deepen the assault on workers’ conditions, social programs, and democratic and equity rights. And they will succeed in pushing through these reactionary ‘reforms’, unless the labour and people’s forces move quickly to mount a militant, coordinated, Canada wide counter attack.

There is such a progressive alternative to this reactionary, pro capitalist ‘solution’, but it must go beyond, palliative demands to soften the impact. It must include sweeping measures which challenge the dominance of monopoly capital, such as the nationalization of the banks, the big energy monopolies, and other key sectors of our economy. These steps need to be combined with social measures like expanding access to healthcare, public and post secondary education, raising the minimum wage to $16/hour, reducing the workweek with no loss in take home pay, and improving public pensions. And with sweeping tax reform which would shift the burden from working people onto the corporations and the wealthy, and with an immediate withdrawal from the disastrous war of occupation in Afghanistan , along with a 50% cut in military spending which would save another $10 billion every year.

As we state in our May Day 2010 statement, “the big monopolies and banks want to make working people pay for the economic recovery through lower wages, higher unemployment, and huge cuts in social spending. We say: those who reap billions in profits must pay! Unite and fight for a fundamentally new direction, placing the needs of working people and our environment before corporate greed, [and for policies] based on peace and disarmament!”

Issued by the Central Executive Committee
Communist Party of Canada
June 2010

_______________________________
Protest the G20
this Saturday!

Dear friends and comrades,

Protests against the pro-corporate agenda of the G8/G20 Summits are already building, despite Harper’s attempt to ‘lock down’ Toronto and ‘lock out’ dissent. Whatever the diversity of these actions, they reflect various aspects of popular anger and the people’s demands for change – for peace, for protection of our environment, for jobs and living standards, for healthcare, education, pensions and social programs, and not least, for equality and democratic rights.

Of all the myriad events making place around Toronto leading up to and during the G20 meetings this coming weekend, the most important will be the “People First!” march and rally to be held on Saturday, June 26 at 1:00 pm, starting at Queen’s Park. This is because Saturday’s “People First!” march & rally will be the one event which brings together all the streams of protest into one united action – workers, environmentalists, Aboriginal peoples, anti-imperialist and anti-racism groups, youth & students, women’s, GLBT and equality activists, and other social movements.

A massive outpouring of opposition to the reactionary agenda of the imperialist world order is the worst nightmare for Harper, Obama, Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi and co. That is why the G20 organizers have unleashed a campaign of intimidation and fear-mongering to keep working people away from the streets, especially for the big rally on Saturday.

The best response or antidote to this anti-democratic campaign is for all of us – each one of us individually and collectively – to redouble our efforts to bring as many people as possible out for the big march and rally this Saturday!

The Communist Party of Canada , the Young Communist League, and all of our friends and comrades will be marching together in a contingent during the march and we cordially invite you to join and march with us! We will be assembling at 12:30 p.m. on the south side of Queen’s Park, close to College St where University Ave. turns into an oval road (see photo).

Bring your friends, family, neighbours and co-workers; your flags, placards (although we will have some on hand as well!) and noisemakers. See you there!

A Word About Tactics

As many of you have already heard, some groups have announced their intention to join the “People First!” march, but will attempt to split the march on route, taking some participants directly to the security perimeter, and possible confrontation with the police.

Even if well-intended, this is a wrong and divisive tactic in our opinion. The main political value and impact of the “People First!” action is to demonstrate the ‘all-in unity’ of the labour and people’s movements, notwithstanding whatever differences around specific policies our tactics exist within our ranks. To attempt to divide the people’s forces during this critical action would create confusion and acrimony, would send the wrong message, and would play into the hands of those who stand to benefit from such an overt display of division within the ranks of the labour/people’s resistance to the G20. For this reason, the Communist Party will abide by the route approved by the “People First!” organizers.

All Out for the “People First!” March and Rally!

See you Saturday!!!

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

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

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Working Class USA

Floyd B. Olson Park

This is the story of how rank and file workers built the union at Ford.

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...