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The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011 Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.
Chapter 18: The Collapse of Revisionism (c. 1990), U.S. Hegemony (c. 2004) And Global Capitalism (c. 2008) The Collapse of the Revisionist Regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe left in its wake an extraordinary imbalance in the global positioning of class forces. From the standpoint of Bolshevism, getting rid of the labor-fakir institutionalization of revisionism in those countries was a tremendous positive. There is no credibility whatsoever to the idea that the presence of Stalinist forms of industry and agriculture under the revisionist control of those reactionary de facto anti-communist New Class regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe made them worth defending, and now commiserating over. It is not organizational form of the economy which determines whether it is “socialist” but the intentions of those in command, and the classes upon which they depend. Just the name “communist” usurped by Stalin’s Russian-East European successors, due to historical happenstance, does not mean they really were communist. Mao discovered this to his chagrin in the 1950’s and the not well read or educated Euro-American Left should have learned that lesson long ago as well. On the other hand, the simple fact that the revisionists were fakirs had often required them to play a positive role in the global class struggle; many times after 1953 (and Stalin's death.) As for example in the defense of the Cuban Revolution. It is this simple fact that makes the less educated Left in the West think (or feel) they have lost something worth having. We Bolsheviks are far better off with the Putin-Medvedev New Class leaders in power with their open quasi-capitalist system at work than we were with that whimpering traitor Gorbachev and his gang of labor-fakirs parading around calling themselves communists. The current New Class government is standing up to US imperialism because they have realized we were right all along and there is no living with imperialism forever. In fact we should expect to see the newly reformed and reorganized Communist Party of the Soviet Union to enter the historical scene once again. No one knows exactly how this is going to happen but mark my words a Second Bolshevik Revolution is on the historical agenda. Perhaps the honest and open New Class leaders, Putin and Medvedev, will enter into a formal alliance with the ”new and improved” CPSU. That would be the easiest thing for us and we should certainly consider this as the next step forward in that part of the world. Then the CPSU can lead the reconstituted USSR (and it will be reconstituted in proper Leninist form no matter what the US imperialists or European imperialists say about that). In the US, among the bosses in command of hegemonized world Capital (the US Ruling billionaire families and trillionaire families) the Right Wing (so-called Neo-cons; who would more appropriately be called neo-Nazi) thought they saw an opportunity to act on their most basic motivations (insatiable greed) by seizing control of the world's strategic economic inputs. That is, the pricing, supply and most importantly, financing, of such things as oil, natural gas and precious metals (to name only three.) In so doing they would not only get personally rich, but they presented the US ruling families with the spectacle of global stability in the supply and pricing of such fundamental inputs (again, e.g. Oil and Gas.) As importantly, all of this would be financed through gringo financial centers in New York and Chicago (and secondarily, London.) This financing is a matter of life and death to the US ruling families, who must somehow offset the imbalance in the flow of dollars out of the USA and the flow of dollars into the USA. In the world trade economy they created (which features US capitalist exploitation of foreign cheap Labor - but requires the US consumers buy all the stuff being created abroad) the Achilles Heel is the balance of payments deficit and budget deficit the US Regime runs which requires a minimum, right now, of two billion dollars a day to come into the US from foreign investors (Buyers of US T Bills, and /or other things listed below.) – And, the increasingly larger federal budgetary deficit means it soon it will be three billion a day that is required. In fact, there is no end in sight to the accelerating demands of the USA rulers for foreign money, obtained in anyway! Then they were unable to borrow at all (mid-2008) and were forced to rely on the ultimate last-step of printing (not even printing now just writing numbers down electronically – technically this is what we call money on account) trillions of dollars overnight! This has never happened before in the history of capitalism or in the history of the world for that matter. Inflationary printing in Germany after World War I is famous everywhere because pictures of it found their way into US school textbooks. But this was nothing at all compared to the absolute disregard for any kind of monetary integrity with the mass creation of paper and electronic money! Two and a half trillion dollars were jacked onto this public debt by the imperialist bosses in the three months November, December and January 2008-09! The resulting monetary crisis has not even begun. When it does set in the next general collapse will get underway. All of this began when the greed of the US rulers and their stupid neo-con advisors decided to impose their own brand of fascism on the post-Soviet Camp world. In proposing to stabilize (prop-up) the extraordinarily shaky US economy in this way (via the dream of a "Pax Americana") the US fascist right arose once again like an Alien Phoenix. (The post-1929 period in the USA has been one featuring a see-saw, up and down, now in - now out, struggle between the fascist right and the not-so-fascist remainder of the US ruling class, over foreign as well as domestic policy.) In the event, under Bush II, the US "neo-con's" were given the helm, and given a chance to put their crackpot plans into effect. Why crackpot? Because nothing they proposed in the 90's or currently propose (e. g., in 2010) was or is possible - not in the slightest were these policies of world domination possible then, nor are they now! Except, of course, in the fevered imagination of men and women too ignorant of reality and history to see the world for what it is. - And, the fact that the, often more sober, US ruling families went along with these stupid proposals shows how those families have degenerated from the relatively balanced objectivity of the old Rockefeller leadership in the years following Vietnam. Finally, their total ignorance of world reality was reflected domestically as they ran the economy straight to hell in their greed to maximize their profits. But now, as 2010 closes, it is too late for them. The 2000 families in the world who own the US regime may agree to bail it out in the end but I doubt it. The US capitalist system is tottering now and it won’t take a lot to push it over. Humpty Dumpty won’t get back together this time because the mass movement is going to create a real communist party in the USA. In fact, it is forming today as the Communist Party, USA (Foundation). When history moves as quickly as it is now our Party can get big fast, and all it will need is a clear strategy and the ability to make that strategy clear tactically to the working people of North America. What is happening? The US ruling nutballs were not the only ones acting in an atmosphere of ignorance. One must remember that the North American people have now for four generations been lied to every day, 24 hours a day, about world history, about the US place in it (past, present and future) and about the nature of our economy and the social structure of the few ruling the overwhelming many. Today we hear on the news educated retired people saying things like “we don’t understand what is happening.” Of course they don’t understand what is going on because they have been lied to constantly in all the cap media since the end of World War II and like the workers of 1914, who were tricked and forced into the capitalist imperialist war designed to enrich the cap classes and to liquidate the working classes of Europe and North America, they will pay the price of their ignorance despite their innocence. There are two main theaters of war against working people at the moment: (1) the US War against Arabia and the Muslim World (Europe, Russia and China too) and (2) the collapse of the US economy and the global capitalist economy linked to it. Let us begin with the former and work our way into the latter. But first this is a place you can start The US has been at war or in a state of forward international military deployment constantly since 1945. Yet in that sixty five year period the US has not won a war – unless banana republic invasions (Granada, Panama, Dominican Republic, etc.) qualify. Of course they do not account for the trillions upon trillions of dollars spent on the war contracting. Could it be the real reason for the constant wars and international deployments has to do with the war contracting? What? You say? The reason was not victory, honor and peace in a just cause? You can start here at this point in conversations with fellow civilians. The question the US oligarchs have put off for so long is now front and center: the actual cost of the war in a context of cost analysis of health care, bank bailouts, mortgage relief, credit card relief, etc. Try to get to the point of replacing capitalism as a system – all the data and arguments you will need are in this book – and make a convert. Back to Iraq As I wrote in the winter of 2006 - 2007, the US adventure in Iraq has turned into exactly the disaster predicted in the previous editions of this Handbook. Worse, for US imperialism is that the world has seen for itself that US supposed military superiority is in fact just a “paper tiger.” The US ruling families stumbled fatally this time when they allowed the Nazi fringe of their class the accession to power they had fought for, and stole two elections for and now can not produce for. Remember that the capitalists as a world-wide class are just a wolf pack, and like wolves they turn on the weak (old and young) and consume them too. The US fascist would-be bosses are being consumed by Rockefeller-like new bosses, for the worst thing the US imperialists could have done, they have done, and to themselves! Namely, (1) to have shown that they are so inherently weak that a group of what they considered to be rag-headed, camel-driving, Arabs, without international support (as we provided to the Vietnamese for example) could reduce the great scary “Juggernaut” to a helpless Gringo Gulliver, truly a giant captive, flailing around in its death-throws; Iraqi Lilliputians using the simple expedients of hand grenades, dynamite and shaped-charges, to accomplish this embarrassing ignominious defeat of US imperialism. Munitions available on the shelf everywhere and anywhere in the world! The lesson has been learned and there is no putting that genie back into the bottle. (2) As I said in this book in the 2007 and 2008 editions: “Mark my words it is not the US Left which is going to drive out the crackpot neo-Nazi Bush II regime but the “responsible” imperialist leaders of the US ruling families. The Wolfowitz-Perle-Rumsfeld gang has been consumed by their rival class leaders (perhaps the Bush family will yet go down too, despite their current desperate attempt to avoid and evade responsibility, who knows.)” The way the responsible leaders did it (e. g., Eagle Scout Gates as War Minister, his words), was to buy off some of their strongest enemies with cash and made promises to the others (Sunni and Shia forces respectively) to get out as fast as possible. What do they get for this cash and this promise? They are being allowed to exit out the barroom back door rather than being chased out. Although they are still being forced to back out of that barroom back-to-back. I am rather sure they are praying that something doesn’t happen that will make their ignominious defeat even worse than it is. All of the massive bombings in Baghdad at the end of 2009 are a lot like, getting slammed in the ass multiple times, by that back room door on their way out, once again. Still the picture most iconic and fitting will always be Bush getting the Bum’s Rush from a local Iraqi reporter. At any rate what has happened to them is the best they could do and the only thing left for them to do. Not that you won’t still hear rather comical references to the “success” of the “surge” and the overall war… blah, blah. The Great Iraqi Oil Robbery “This is the essence of the Wolfowitz doctrine, first articulated in the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance document for 1994-1999, first leaked to the press in February 1992. This document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor, (for global strategic economic inputs), and asserts that the United States must use any and all means necessary to prevent that from happening…. …this doctrine…(is) re-emerging as the official global military policy of the Bush II administration. It has now been incorporated as the core principal of the document known as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002), available for download from the White House website. This document states explicitly that the ultimate purpose of American power is to prevent the rise of a competing great power, and that the United States shall use any means necessary to prevent that from happening, including preventive military force when needed, but also through spending so much money on defense that no other peer competitor can ever arise.” (pg 53) The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States with a dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to serve as a spring-board for further conquests and assertion of power in the region. It was aimed as much, if not more, at China, Russia, and Europe as at Syria or Iran. It is part of a larger process of asserting dominant U.S. power in south-central Eurasia, in the very heartland of this mega-continent. But why specifically the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea area, and why now? In part, this is so because this is where most of the world’s remaining oil is located-approximately 70 percent of known petroleum reserves. And you have to think of oil not just as a source of fuel-although that’s very important-but as a source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever controls Persian Gulf oil controls the world economy and, therefore, has the ultimate lever over all competing powers. (pg 55) (The New Geopolitics, by Michael Klare, in Monthly Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, July-August 2003.) (3) The idea that the US had military forces (men and materiel) up to the task of world conquest shows just how out of touch the US neo-con bosses were from reality (it reminds me of the way the same types of foolish men thought that the US Army I had just been in from 1959-1962, was going to do the job they had in mind for it in Vietnam!) However, as bad as Dr. Kissinger’s Vietnam strategy advice turned-out to be, he was at least intelligent. The Wolfowitz-Perle-Rumsfeld gang demonstrated by the way they fucked-up their Iraqi campaign what a group of moronic ignoramuses they really were and were consequently undone. (4) However, as true as all of this is, the at-bottom reason for imperialist expansion against the Arab and Muslim world and the inherent implied threat to Capitalist Europe, New Class Russia, and Socialist China, is the absolute need for the imperialists to find someway to offset the costs of foreign oil resulting in shipping huge quantities of money outside the borders of the US economy. The Saudi example is what they wanted to duplicate. We will discuss this in detail in Part III (Chapter 27); that is, the way in which US imperialism expanded in the 20th century, and how it featured the Gringo rulers engineering, a post-World War II, true sweetheart comprador deal with the Saud family which gave the Saud family ownership of the money paid to them for their oil but featured the requirement that they spend all of it in the USA! All of it minus of course their multi-million dollar a day lifestyles and its other requirements (in other countries.) The same agreement they reached with the Al-Saba family for Kuwait (where they earn a minimum admitted of 280 million dollars a day.) The same agreement reached with the Bahrain monarchy. Their caveat to this was to have in place in Iraq a US style capitalist government rather than a monarchy. In this they have failed absolutely as we see with the opening of 2010. (5) You see at-bottom the general crisis of capitalism also forced the imperialists to send more and more money abroad to utilize the cheap labor available in foreign lands on generation after next generation of new and improved machinery to produce commodities at lower and lower costs. But, how to offset it? If you send all your money outside the boundaries of the USA how will the domestic economy function? In other words, our economy cannot function without money present and available for normal capitalist exchange. In reality the gringo ruling trillionaire and centi-billionaire families confronted an insoluble problem! For decades they printed money against incoming investment capital from foreign central banks and foreign trillionaire and billionaire families. But that came to an end in 2008 and led to the greatest crisis since 1929 for the capitalist rulers. (6) In short, the US politico's stumbled terribly. For us Bolsheviks this has been some incredibly, almost unbelievably, good luck! To begin with the failures encompassed by the Gringo regime's Iraq War include: A) The US rulers losing their command position over all of the capitalist classes outside the English-speaking World (and as 2010 opens they have lost their hegemony over the English-speaking countries as well); B) The Gringo command having accelerated the process of realigning the worlds industrial powers to put the People's Republic of China in a position no one of us could have realistically hoped for in 2001, including putting Communist China in the position of a responsible equal leader with other responsible states (of the capitalist persuasion) internationally! Remember how the Bush fascists started out so provocatively against China? Now the Chinese leadership has stepped-up to the plate in ways they never would have done eight years ago – because the imbeciles in Washington dropped their sheep’s clothing and exposed their plans for naked aggression; (C) The US leaders in their arrogance proceeded to alienate the 1.2 billion people of the globe committed to the Islamic Religion. In so doing they have gone head to head with the radical fundamentalist wing (they had previously trained and used against us in Afghanistan) in a death struggle. Otherwise it would have been our task to liquidate the Islamic crackpots - in fact, some of you may remember that in 2000 I wrote that the Islamic fundamentalists would be our most difficult competitor in the 21st century, and I had thought they would play on a global stage the role they played as imperialism's cat's paw in Afghanistan. Instead our most deadly current enemy, US imperialism, has tasked itself with their destruction. Again, incredibly good luck! (D) The blatant obviousness of the Gringo Regime's strategic planning for world domination has forced the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership to do something it had not wanted to do; that is to take the lead in forming a de facto Global Socialist Alliance of China, Cuba, Vietnam-Laos and progressive countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and even Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Educador. – And now, China has fielded a strategic nuclear tipped ICBM carrying submarine fleet, far earlier than they would have done had Washington not exposed their plans for world conquest. Finally, (E) Washington has scared the living daylights out of those who had thrown in their lot with their would-be "puppet masters" such as the Uribe trafficker-industrialist clique in Bogotá, Colombia. - And, these types, are back treading as quickly as they can from their ill thought out earlier commitments. The August, 2010, transfer of power to a new capitalist President in Colombia opens the possibility that the US long delayed negotiations between Colombia and Venezuela may get underway once again with better prospects for the future than any we have seen for over a half century. Uribe had been on the DEA’s “most wanted” list until he was suborned by the CIA in a deal where he was to be used against all the guerilla forces in the Americas. But, now, in power, and potentially somewhat independent of his imperialist sponsors, he has struck out in an “independent” way that will make his “base”, the Colombian big bourgeoisie (including the worlds richest drug traffickers – some of whom I have known for many years – see my books, Shining Path, the Peruvian Revolution, Rivers of Blood and High Finance, South American Style!), the accomplices of Washington’s new ultimate nemesis Hugo Chavez. Caracas has more money to give Uribe than does Washington and Venezuela’s money comes from “honest” sources (e.g. contracts for building an oil pipeline across Colombia where oil can be shipped directly to China from a Pacific port.) However, at the moment the ultra-right section of Uribe’s base is firmly in the saddle with, of course, backing from the most reactionary sections of the gringo capitalist government and state. This unholy conglomeration of evil forces may yet succeed in triggering a general war in northern South America. This is their program and will involve Venezuela and Ecuador and Peru as well as Colombia before it is over. We shall see how the August 2010 transfer of Presidential power in Colombia plays out. (F) With Bush II, U.S. Imperialism immediately embarked upon a program of seizing defeat from the jaws of the victory they could have had. At the very least they could have maintained their hegemony over the capitalist world for several decades into the 21st century. Instead they threw it away in two short years. This is a historic defeat for them of catastrophic proportions; a defeat from which they shall never recover. For them, as for Hitler seventy years ago, all that remains is the running, and dying. For us, whatever short-term advantages some of the timid among us may have thought we might have lost with the disappearance of the Soviet Revisionist Ruling Clique from the historical stage, the stupidity and ignorance of the US hegemonists has more than offset. (G)
At the moment, there is great instability in the global class struggle and all
of you revolutionary cadre need to continue to study and observe, the past and
the present, in order to deal the telling blows needed to remove the (7) Moving again to the domestic crisis I want to bring to your attention, as I have in each edition of this book since 2005, the fact that the true Achilles Heel of the Gringo Regime and the billionaire-trillionaire families that own it is its desperate financial and monetary situation. Until the present moment Washington has depended upon an inflow of two to three and soon four billion dollars a day from the following sources to offset the flow of cash out of the country to their cheap labor production centers and for critical inputs. These have been: A. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills) B. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper. C. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries. D. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries. E. Sales of high-tech armaments F. US Corporations repatriating profits G. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum. As these sources of income are drying-up, the resulting devastation will make the revolutionary end of capitalism the only logical way forward. In so doing the way will be cleared for the final battle between socialism and capitalism and simultaneously prepare thereby the objective conditions for armed insurrection. (8) Finally, why did the imperialists spin the so-called subprime mortgage crisis? Was this just greed and stupidity? Of course it was both because that is the nature of capitalism. But, what specifically did they do to create the current mess. What was the way in which the current collapse came about? What Caused the Current Crisis? It is not my intention to jump into the daily news lies of the cap media in the USA with regard to the current global capitalist collapse and the place of the US within that context. However, I have been asked daily for continuing input, as my columns over the last five years have been predicting the imminence of the current collapse and explaining why said collapse was imminent. I suspect the least I can be expected to do now is to give whatever my commentary may be worth for the benefit of those who are sufficiently educated to understand what the science of political economy has to say on these matters. Accordingly, I will begin a series of weekly updates of the financial advisory type, as reluctant as I am to do so, as whatever contribution I can make or have been able to make, is simply a product of studying the masters (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels) and their successors, in analyzing the evolution of capitalism in its final imperialist phase. (1) Let us begin with the beginning. What has caused this collapse we are currently witnessing? The answer is the General Crisis of Capitalism. As you learned in Chapter 12 this general crisis is caused by the articulation of the need of capitalists to produce “commodities” at competitive prices with the costs of implanting new and next generations of machinery with cheap labor. A commodity in this context means those articles of production coming into existence as a product of labor-power applied to machinery. An individual capitalist always must produce a given commodity (it is an analytical given that outside influence is limited to being unregulated free enterprise) at a price equal to or lower than his competitors. He must, therefore, reduce the cost of labor-power input (wages) or increase the productivity of his machinery. Or both. (2) Now the point is how specifically did this continuing general crisis of the capitalist stage trigger the immediate (no longer imminent) capitalist collapse? Noting for the record that this is just one more depression in the capitalist cycle of boom and bust (See Part III below). As to the immediate cause of the immediate crisis what? The answer is that in their struggle to find new sources of cheap labor to apply to their newest generations of machinery, the capitalists sent huge quantities of money to foreign cheap labor centers to set up their factories and then they had to buy the stuff being created in them. In other words imperialism always sent capital abroad – that is the definition of imperialism. But this time they had to send money abroad also to buy all the stuff being created abroad. This created an insoluble crisis for them! Because they were so greedy they just kept doing it. If you are making a billion dollars a day then every day you keep up what you are doing you are getting richer. The capitalist bosses knew what they were doing would some day lead to a terrible collapse. But they could not resist their own greed. What is different about this situation is that the cash outflow did not stop with the construction of factories as it used to. What they called “globalization” required, in practice that US consumers buy all the stuff being created by cheap labor power in other parts of the world. The consequence in the USA of this shipment of cash outside the US to implant the machinery and then to bring these commodities back to the USA in order to sell them, is what we are now confronting. (3) As the decades passed the US rulers confronted a continuing budgetary deficit within their own country because of reasons of policy. Then on top of this they began to see a continuing imbalance of payments – meaning, more money going out of the country than coming in. The latter because of the fact of having to buy in this country a heavy percentage of what was being created in the cheap labor factories abroad – and – the cost of oil and gas imported from abroad. We will deal with the policy matters separately. As to the point at hand, the result in sending more and more money outside the economic (essentially the political) boundaries of the USA required new sources of money to be found somewhere outside the USA that could be shifted back into the USA. There are several ways in which this has been done. Including those listed in each previous edition of this book Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. I can’t say this often enough so let’s say it once again: the US ruling families have relied on sources no longer available to them for the cash they needed to offset their crazy international capitalist system, to wit: A. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills) B. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper. C. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries. D. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries. E. Sales of high-tech armaments F. US Corporations repatriating profits G. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum. (4) So, now what we have is a situation where the struggle of US financial engineers to maintain the dollar inflow from outside the US to match or at least decently counterbalance outflow, has failed. (The ruling capitalist families offered promises about the safety of the US economy for which the capitalist engineers offered a variety of what they claimed were undeniable reasons; for decades they got away with this, until it was accepted by all concerned as sustainable ad infinitum). In reality their justifications were nonsense and they knew it and they were taking increasingly risky adventures in finance. They took these risks they knew would result in a crash some day because of their greed. To be sure they had a well oiled working theft machine; they paid incredible salaries and bonuses to sales people running into many billions of dollars. That’s it. Quite simple actually. What precisely did they really do to offset this outflow that has created the current crisis? (5) They had the foregoing sources of cash. They planned on adding to them with certain measures aimed at dramatically reducing the outflow such as the use of sweetheart deals with ruling kings and queens in Arabia which gave these monarchs title to the cash being paid for “their’ oil as long as they agreed to spend all of this money in the USA (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain). This was implemented by having all of the spending being done by these Arabian ruling families being done via US contractors (e. g., the Bush family). (6) When that was insufficient because they needed even more oil they embarked upon their Iraqi war convincing themselves that with that conquest they could put into place a gringo style capitalist government which they foolishly believed would provide them with some insurance against what must eventually happen to the monarchies of Arabia (their eventual inevitable overthrow and dissolution was as obvious to the capitalists as it is to us.) Their (US) military defeat in Arabia (Iraq) and alienation from the entire Muslim world was the actual result of their military adventure and for that they had no answer. It was their Stalingrad. The turning point in the World War of US imperialism against the rest of the world. (7) Remember our point. The underlying cause of the current crisis is the General Crisis of Capitalism – which is to say the antagonistic articulation of the need to implant new generations of machinery to cheap labor sources, all of which had to be found outside the political boundaries of the USA, with the inevitable consequence. Namely, the resulting need to send huge quantities of cash outside those boundaries to pay for the commodities thus produced. (Again let me say at this point you must read chapters 12, 18 and Part III of this book: Fundamentals of Historical Materialism.) (8) To offset the traditional ways of counterbalancing this dollar outflow as listed above something new had to be supplemented. What was that? Subprime mortgages done in “industrial” size, then packaged as new securities and resold all over the world as if they were as “good as US Government T-Bills, full faith and credit.” (9) Subprime refers to the credit rating of the person asking for a home loan. In my day we would drop to 300 on the FICO scale (where 720 is now considered the beginning of prime loans.) Furthermore the offer was sweetened by offering 1% rates for several years before resetting to more proper norms and/or sold as a “choice” where each month you could select one of four payments ranging from 1% to 8%. The pitch being this way you could adjust your monthly real estate payment to what serves your interests best. No one ever mentioned that you could only make 20% of the total number of payments at the lowest (1%) choice. After that you were confronted with three high payment choices none of which were really within the realm of possibility for you. If the buyer was told this he or she was also told “don’t worry you will never pay the higher rates because in two or three years we will refinance you. When the economy collapsed in 2008 they were not around do this. Thus the subprime mortgage holders confronted foreclosure and homelessness. These people were fucked by capitalism on purpose, not by accident. We need to educate them as to this simple fact. Once people know how and why they have been fucked in the ass without Vaseline they often know what to do about it. (10) In other words in the event, the way they did that was to create huge quantities of “derivative” securities based on US house mortgages. Another way of saying it is that they found ways to make North American homeowners put up their homes as guarantees of cash flow which they packaged and sold all over the world like used car sales hucksters. As I have pointed out all kinds of tricks were used to get these mortgages and after they were in hand, in the tens of millions, they were packaged together and sold as supposedly “good as gold” US government backed securities. The plot worked. Bankers all over the world got fucked by one of the oldest cons in financial history. But this time on a far grander scale than Barnum and Bailey could ever have imagined. It turned out that the supposedly good as gold US government guarantee that went with Fannie May and Freddie Mac mortgage-based derivative securities were not guaranteed by the US Government at all! The scope of this con against international capitalist bankers by the US trillionaire centi-billionaire banking families is so vast that a run-of-the-mill con man like Bernie Madoff can make off with fifty odd billion dollars and still be considered small potatoes by these same big ruling families. If this were just bankers fucking other bankers, capitalists fucking other capitalists, I doubt if anyone would care. But, I think you can see the scope of their plot against the other international capitalist bankers is also having terrible consequences for the American people and global humanity. By the way these “securitized” mortgage packages were obtained by issuing mortgages in virtually any way (no money no problem. No income no problem. Just sign here. I know because I worked in the industry.) Some fifteen percent turned out to be worthless; perhaps fifty percent troubled. (11) That is enough for the moment. Just remember, the at-bottom cause of the current crisis is capitalism as a system itself. Capitalism’s need to constantly lower the cost of producing commodities (the dog eat dog of capitalist against capitalist) led to the insoluble crisis of too much money flowing out of the USA and too little coming in. The US capitalist’s desperate financial engineering attempts at offsetting this fatal imbalance (you can’t run a domestic economy if all the money that should be there isn’t) coming ultimately in the form of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and their simultaneous military failure to obtain offsetting sources of cheap foreign oil. (Iraq not only did not produce the sweetheart deal on its oil but has so far cost nearly a trillion dollars in direct spending and since they borrowed this money there is another trillion in interest on top of that!) (12) Finally, the US ruling families knew what they were doing – at the outset, all along and from the beginning. In effect they resorted to the “card mechanic’s” ultimate trick – kicking over the table. Because they knew accounting rules would eventually require the mortgage-based securities to be written down to zero; simultaneously, home prices marked-to-market value collapsed. (13) That collapse occurred because banks would no longer refinance homes except when the credit of the person buying is what it should have been all along. Thus, all the people who had been told “…don’t worry; you will never pay this higher rate because in two or three years we will refinance you” ended up getting fucked too. Now, when the time came, refinancing could no longer be done for people with subprime credit. Thus, the number of potential buyers of California real estate (for example) dropped dramatically. Thus market value dropped and new value calculations on surrounding homes decreased equivalently. The Gringo Capitalists Fucked Their Class Brothers Internationally On Purpose (14) You can’t assess value of an entity with uncertain or even unknown composition and no protection against default, especially when default at a high statistical level is already in process. By loading the other capitalist countries with these poison-pills they would effectively destroy these competitors. In the resulting world the Gringo ruling families given their greater financial and military resources would stand to stay at the front of the capitalist pack in the global dog fight that has to emerge after the most recent capitalist collapse. These are the real and only reasons for the current crisis. – And, the elite trillionaire-billionaire bosses were right. They are emerging on top of the world capitalist wolf pack as 2009 begins to unfold under responsible leadership. However, the rest of the world will not be happy in the emerging Camp Sunshine. Nor, will the North American people be happy. Workers never really recover from a depression. They just live through it; their conditions deteriorate over a larger number of people, as in the Auto industry over the last half century. Some workers will survive and prosper for the moment but they too will inevitably face this fate capitalism has in store for them unless we solve this problem once and for all. (15) To solve the problem once and for all you have to get rid of capitalism and put people in conscious command of their own daily lives – i. e., socialism. – And, what kind of socialism? Look at China with its mixed economy. Then think of what we could do with all of our modernization and without having to overcome the backwardness which remains China’s greatest curse. Nationalization The next critical battle we confront as a people will be to see that the current Bush gang program of socializing risk and privatizing profit is grabbed hold of and gutted. It’s interesting once again that people who call themselves communists failed to demand on our part the immediate nationalization of the banks, commanding heights of capitalism in the form of money market funds, insurance companies and so forth, not to mention failing to demand on our behalf the immediate nationalization of the oil and gas monopolies. Properly undertaken both banking and oil can provide the US people with far more income annually than the federal income tax as currently constructed. In fact, it was as I say George Bush and his financial gang who immediately moved to nationalize banking and finance. But, their plan is to use your money to save themselves and then once we have stabilized the economy they plan on getting their government in Washington to give them back their banks, money market financing and insurance companies. We have to be sure that they do not get these properties back but that they remain public. It wouldn’t hurt for Left parties to start asking the question as to whether their leaders represent change we can believe in or just the same old stale and factually challenged politics. Politics completely wrong theoretically and thus practically. It’s not as if there were not alternatives to this kind of leadership which this book among many publications represents.
Chapter 19: Comparative Analysis: The Simple Chiefdom Stage and the Stage of Stalinist Socialism We can climb the height of Mt. Olympus and look back over all of human history - now that we have the completed prehistoric and historic periodization of that history - which I have summarized foregoing. When we do scale the heights to the Gods, as would Jason have done in his Search for the Golden Fleece, we see that entire panorama, and so much now becomes clear. For those of you who have read this book carefully, and who now understand the fundamentals of causality and process in human sociocultural evolution - that is, those of you who have now become expert in the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism, the time has come. The time for what? To consider "revolution" as a serious near term objective in the USA. Looking to a short transitional period; building rapidly into true communism. We have the technological ability. We are Leninists and we will win. We will fight through to absolute victory or there will be no Americans left alive to carry the guns! We should say as Thomas Jefferson said with regard to the First American Revolution (to paraphrase) “better that there be just one man and one woman left in each country of the world than that things should continue as they have.” First we must impose clarity on ourselves – again, this Handbook. Then act accordingly. Now, we can see where we are, at this historical moment - where, in fact, we are in the Second Transitional Period. We are between two Sociocultural Epochs (The Servitude Epoch and the Second Egalitarian Epoch). - And, in looking back over our history, we can contrast contemporary diagnostics with the key diagnostic features of the First Transitional Period between Epochs. This was what we started out to achieve. What you wanted to achieve when you picked up this book. What I wanted to achieve when I struck out on my Search for the Foundation of Sociocultural Evolution, some forty odd years ago. (The title of my eight volume autobiographical series.) Click on “find in a library” in your browser to see the nearest library with copies. You’re looking for the WorldCat website.) The General Contradictions Now, remember in the first Egalitarian Epoch, the General Contradiction was expressed in the prime directive for production to be limited to Value needed, day to day (avoiding surplus social product) even though the productive potential of both Hunting- And-Gathering Bands and Tribes, and Agricultural Bands and Tribes was far greater than what was required to produce the fundamental needs of life. In the Servitude Epoch, the General Contradiction is expressed in the prime directive that production of Surplus Value be maximized regardless of the fact that the more produced the worse the working and living conditions of the producers become. Therefore, in the First Transitional Period between these two Epochs we should expect to see both of these General Contradictions fighting their way out in both of the two Stages of the transition. Comparing and Contrasting Typical Features For purposes of comparison let us contrast some typical features of any sociocultural Stage - beginning with, say, the feature of population size, and seek some diagnostic aspect. What do we see in the Stage of Tribal Agriculture (the last Stage of the 1st Egalitarian Epoch) and in the succeeding Stage of Simple Chiefdoms (the first Stage of the 1st Transitional Period) in terms of the factor of population size? What we see is an initial imperative favoring additional mouths where the additional mouths helped to absorb trouble creating surplus social product. But, more hands allowed simultaneously the ability to easily create sufficient surplus product to feed many more mouths, and not coincidentally many professional specialist mouths. The more professional specialization of labor there is in a Simple Chiefdom the more effective and efficient production of all articles from food to pottery. Population that exploded to consume surplus social product has now become essential in maintaining the increased rate of production of social product which is no longer just surplus, but often essential (needed produce) to maintain all the professional non-farming specialists. There has been a fundamental at-bottom change in the nature of population size. In other words, in the Agricultural Tribes, surplus social product was unavoidable, and said surplus was gathered by the Tribal Council for storage (and later redistribution as needed). One way that surplus level was kept “institutionally lower” was with the additional mouths to feed that come from being able to sustain population levels higher that 20 to 60 persons (the norm for Hunting and Gathering Bands) with sedentary village life. So, in a sense, there was a new factor favoring higher levels of production, even if it could not be said to be pressure to maximize, at least to a degree, agricultural production. Later, in the Simple Chiefdoms, with professional specialists always in need of farming products, the pressure to maximize production increased. In both cases one result was rapid population explosion. In the first case consumption was used to level the social differences caused by production, and only tangentially resulted in increased overall production. In the second case demand for increased over-all production escalated and in turn determined that an increase in population numbers would have to happen to insure the now extant higher levels of production. In that way the Simple Chiefdom rise in population assured that more production would result. In both cases population exploded, but it requires surgically precise logic, based on accurate General Theory, to see the true significance of population increase in both of these Stages. Nothing here, is simply apparently or obviously true. If it were, there would be no need for science - would there? - And, in a nutshell, that is what comparative cross-cultural Anthropological Economics is all about. With regard to another feature: that of labor-time utilization, we see that in the Stage of Tribal Agriculture people dumped as much labor-time as possible in such things as moving-on, starting over, slash- And-burn, precisely to limit the amount of surplus being produced. In the Simple Chiefdoms people stayed in place, intensified the professional specialization of labor-power and intensified the economic infrastructure for the precisely opposite reason - or, in other words - to maximize the production of surplus. Comparing and Contrasting Key Features Now let us turn to Capitalism in its latter days, up and through 1917, and compare key features of its General Contradiction with that of Stalinist Socialism which is the first Stage of the 2nd Transitional Period. The General Contradiction of Capitalism, like that of all three Stages of the Servitude Epoch, is to produce Surplus Value at any cost. The motive force is the drive of the ruling class (or in the case of the USA, the ruling trillionaire oligarchy) to maximize profits. On the other hand the General Contradiction of the Second Egalitarian Epoch lies in its drive to maximize production for the benefit of people as a whole. This is a sociocultural evolutionary Stage we have never seen and so we don’t yet have it on hand. We must hypothetically project what we shall expect to see in our STAR TREK future in perhaps the 22nd century. Therefore, when we see on the surface of things that more and more surplus value of Stalinist Socialism is going into capital {in the economic category sense "capital" means, constant capital; i.e., machinery} the fact is that there is an amazing apparent similarity with what went before in the Capitalist Stage. But said "similarity" is only "apparent." Remember that one iron law of capitalism is that constant capital (e.g., machinery) often is the only real market for the dumping of all the surplus value being created. (People can’t eat iron, only the machinery, steel, and construction industries can use it - because of the “form” in which this surplus value comes.) - And, so it was in the Stalinist Stage of Socialism. However, it was not for the (private ownership) PROFIT sub-column (competing with NGM) that Soviet Russia’s surplus value was being directed, as it would have been in a capitalist system, when sold by one capitalist to another. No, in Stalinist Socialist systems surplus value capital is being absorbed by NGM, but, for the sake of satisfying, at some point down the road, all the needs of the working and productive people, according to policies and programs of the CP in charge - and, in the meantime, also going into militarily oriented constant capital, in order to supply the military requirements of the working class garrison state apparatus. The working class dictatorship must be constantly on guard - consistently better and better armed, in order to defend itself against the non-stop attacks of the world’s capitalist classes. Lenin said it best when he said to paraphrase “we are socialist because we say we are building socialism.” If the New Class gets more of the GNP than others, or if there is a wage differential throughout society (as there was and is in Socialist societies), in technologically backward countries, the question is not “should this be the case” but “since where we have power under these conditions of backwardness, it has to be the case, how do we prevent differential reward from spiraling into New Class control and conversion of the proletarian party into their own Party.” China is trying to answer that question. Can we answer that question and succeed here in the USA and the advanced capitalist countries? That is the question that communists in the capitalist countries should be asking. The superficial resemblance in the destination of capital, and labor-time being paid at minimal Value, should not be allowed to overshadow and obscure the fact that the drawdown is never for profit of one or some group of capitalists in a First (Stalinist) Socialist Stage country, but is always for the improvement of the constant capital (industrial) base upon which the survival of the Stage is absolutely dependent, and according to a program developed by the Marxist-Leninist Party in command. (Note: Of course, if revisionism has succeeded and the Socialist country in question is not socialist but already under the control of the New Class absolutely then this would not apply, and we would have to say that yes indeed the absorption of capital, whatever its specific destination, is part of a de facto capitalist system. However, these are two distinct categories. You should not confuse the one with the other. Admittedly this is difficult when we are as close to the forests of socialism as we are and we find the viewing of individual trees to require surgically precise observation.) However, speaking of Stalinist Socialism as a distinct (and unsullied) Stage we see that it has featured the demand for more and more production at any cost. Yet this was because there was no choice if Socialism were to survive. This has meant, and may again mean, that generations of working people will have to sacrifice everything in the way of consumer goods. This creates unrest and necessitates stronger state responses at home. This dampens the enthusiasm of working classes in the more advanced capitalist countries for adopting the Stalinist Stage system. - And, that is understandable. Thus, we can see why the working classes in Europe, after the recovery of the 1950’s (supervised by the US occupiers, who sabotaged elections and strikes in Italy and France respectively, for example) were not unanimously in support of a Stalinist Stage system in their countries. Nor, in North America which was living off the fat of the world. Then the gringo ruling class had much more in the way of crumbs to drop from their fat cat table as a result of the centralization and concentration of private capital behind the Rockefeller led oligarchy. One can understand that, in both cases, giving that up, what labor thought it had, in favor of the sacrifice that seemed inherent in Stalinist Socialism found little support in their movements. All this aside from the persistent attacks of the US rulers on the revolutionary parties in organized working class activities. In the US this was an especially virulent attack that came to a peak in the late 1940's with the expulsion of the communists from most of the unions and a de facto alliance between the FBI and organized crime as its framework. (The bedding of Jane Edgar Hoover on a weekly basis by Meyer Lansky’s top boss Frank Costello didn’t hurt the program a bit, either. (For an inside snapshot of Hoover’s live-in lover Clyde Tolson, watch the recent Johnnie Depp movie Public Enemies, and the earlier Oliver Stone film Nixon.) For the inside story of Hoover’s homosexual love affair with Costello see my book The Buccaneer.} Comparing underlying motivation in the prime moving forces of the Simple Chiefdom Stage and the Stalinist Socialist Stage. In the Simple Chiefdoms there were the sincere “front people” who took leadership and there were the less than sincere Chiefs. In both cases there would have been the consigliore, from the clans and/or sodalities, who had their own agendas. We have seen that within the Simple Chiefdoms it only took one person to advocate for increasing professional specialization to maximize production, with an ulterior motive, (getting thereby in a better “position” in the complex economy to improve said person’s welfare at the expense of the others) to make the general trajectory begin to move in a new and completely different direction. – And because the agricultural revolution (Neolithic/Formative archaeological stages in Old and New World prehistory, respectively) had created de facto objective inequality among family farms, the idea of greater personal prosperity via acquisition of things (property) now existed for the first time in human history, in among at least some individuals. The Origin of Modern “Property” Concepts Thus, invisibly, inexorably, if gradually, society was on the road to abandoning the millions of years old societal policy of “sharing for the common benefit” all that was produced, which had been, until now, eliminating envy, jealousy and coveting, and their socially dissolutional centrifugal effects, from said society. The new direction would have been impossible to see at the time, if the advocates, were good at hiding their true motivation; it was nevertheless, a move toward a society where differential reward was best supported by the maximization of surplus value in an increasingly professionally specialized Stone Age economy, and this was the point in time of the origin of modern property concepts. What About the Restoration of Property Concepts in the First Socialist Stage? Is this what we see in Stalinist Socialism? Yes and No. It can go either way, and in the Soviet Union it could have gone either way, although what had to be overcome in order to stay on the road to Communism - or even to stay within the primitive constraints of Stalinist Socialism - would have taken a lot of luck and even better leadership than Joseph Stalin was able to provide. For, in the last analysis the achievements of the 1930's and the victory in the Second World War, and even stopping the drive of the US rulers for world domination after 1945 to his credit, Stalin did fail to properly prepare the succession. In doing so, the “classless intelligentsia” of his creation asserted themselves and in a little under four decades they restored capitalism in the new and even more hellish form we see in Russia and the former constituent Republics today. In the 1930's, the decade of the "new class" of so-called “classless intelligentsia,” there were persons who had the motivation of getting a bigger cut of the pie for themselves, via the route of administering the publicly owned means of production. However, the Bolshevik leadership knew this, and if the political leadership (e. g., Stalin and Mao) had no intention of letting that happen (the New Class get away with separating themselves), and did what Lenin had said someone would have to do (protect the workers from the workers state), then (and only then) could Stalinist Socialism be kept on the right path. Which is to say, upwards and onwards to Advanced Socialism, Communism, etc. Here Stalin ultimately failed. Then Mao Zedong stepped forward to accept the challenge. Preventing such "new class separation" was the task that Mao set himself when he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution The Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-1975 certainly did one thing no one would deny. What could that be? It made every person in China and billions around the world aware of the idea that New Class existence and separation was the key issue facing the international working class movement when in power. – And, this concern had not started then and there, but had and has a long history. After all, regardless of other factors, Trotsky had made Stalin’s bureaucracy the butt of his attacks on Stalinism – essentially accusing these bureaucrats of becoming a New Class and hijacking the revolution. Stalin himself was constantly on guard against what he perceived as attempts of his underlings to lead the USSR along a capitalist road. Mao, throughout the Chinese Party’s history after he became boss, conducted non-stop “rectification” campaigns (e. g., 1940-1941) to prevent “new class” kinds of ideology arising among Party members; and, the Great Leap Forward in China (1955-1959) had been based in part on the idea that the Party bureaucracy was hindering the people in their demand to jump far ahead in a very short time in the industrialization of the nation. In the end the Cultural Revolution failed because it failed to deal with the New Class in any kind of final definitive ”theoretical” way. Following the failure of the Cultural Revolution leaders to step up production, China’s Party leaders turned to a New Economic Policy (Lenin’s 1921 NEP) path. This time everyone was aware of the potential danger of the New Class becoming a ruling class by transforming the Communist Party itself. Accepting the challenge, the Party embarked courageously on the path of fulfilling capitalism’s historical task while retaining state power. Exactly as Lenin et. al., had done in 1921. Wanting and Having are Two Different Categories Over the next three decades the Chinese leadership would come up with a “theoretical” solution, which is consistent with what I have presented herein. However, having a solution and explaining it internationally are often two different things. Perhaps because superficial consistence is not the same as fundamental at-bottom philosophical agreement. In short, I have not heard from the CPC on their agreement or lack thereof with what is presented herein. Furthermore, and however that may be, the Left in the West has always had an ultra-left component that wants communism NOW. But, as Lenin was forced to admit in 1921, wanting communism and being able to have communism are two distinctly different things. Emotion is not enough. One has to accept what Marx and Engels discovered, and that is the mode of production for Communism requires an extremely modern technological component. Until you have it you cannot have modern communism. – And, we don’t want primitive communism. If it comes to that we will be far better off having to fight our way through the current transitional period, even if it means, as it has, we have to create the capitalist industrial infrastructure ourselves from scratch. It’s better to live in poverty standing up and building a common future than to submit to wage slavery and every indignity that insures. During the 20th century we Bolsheviks learned from practice that there is no short cut. We have tried relying principally on the ideological and social organizational components of culture, in lieu of technological advance, and in all instances these attempts have ultimately failed. Without an extremely advanced industry and agriculture communism is not possible in the post-Servitude way anyway. – And, it is not our intention to return to the living conditions of “primitive communism” (the Stages of Hunting and Gathering and primitive agriculture) in order “to share the poverty” (as ultimately was the real social program of Madame Mao and associates). Those who wish to follow that road now, after the experiments of the 20th century, are free to do so but they are not communists nor Marxists nor Leninists – rather a modern form of the old utopian socialists that Marx and Engels first confronted, exposed and defeated. Living in a “commune” in the forests of Oregon is fine for those who wish to do so but it is not what we communists have in mind. Having read this book you know exactly what it is we have in mind – Star Trek levels of advanced technology with the living standards and conditions for everyone that go along with it. I believe that the CPC has done everything it can do over the last three decades to see that controlled capitalism does not lead to counter-revolution They had to finally deal with the problem that was recognized as early as 1922 by Lenin and the Bolshevik Politburo – namely China’s extreme backwardness – the fact that it had barely entered the Capitalist Stage (This would be a good time to re-read Chapter 14). This time around they have placed the bourgeoisie at least partially outside the Party, by encouraging them in “business” pursuits where they are clearly identified and identifiable. As importantly, over the last thirty years the Peoples Republic of China has truly pioneered a new path forward which simply put: “…allows the fullest technological potential of the capitalist stage to be achieved while using the full resources of the socialist state (police-army) to insure that the working class Party remains in power and constructs all those facets of the Socialist Stage it can – both nationally and internationally – as circumstances allow.” This partial restoration of Capitalism in China comes about by necessity as it did in the Soviet Republic when Lenin restored Capitalism in 1921. Namely, the necessity of getting production up to the levels required to build the future we have in mind. That is a future NOT “to share the poverty” but “to share the wealth.” The great, limitless wealth it is within our power to create globally right now! – And it comes about in China in an extremely sophisticated form where the Party is constantly experimenting, testing, and examining the results of a broad-spectrum of sociocultural initiatives, great and small, within both the capitalist and socialist sectors. The human cost of either road is high – that is, the road pursued by Stalin or the road being pursued currently by the Chinese Party. But, we have had no choice and we have no choice now. That is, we Marxists have no choice, because we are the social scientists and not just opportunist ideologues. Why don’t we have a choice? Because, correctly, our every effort since 1917, has been to get to the point of advanced technological development Marx and Engels had assumed as a “given” before they knew society could proceed to Communism. Our job is to get to Communism. There is no “prescription” as to how that is to be done, and we have learned from experience that Stalinist forms of public property are no guarantee against capitalist restoration. So, we might as well deal with the problem of the New Class, and the Bourgeoisie in general, in the most expeditious way we can. For China, we have seen the course that seems to be working for them. For us, the matter is entirely different; we have that capitalist advanced industry and agriculture in hand and we should be able to move to Communism within a short period of time. – And, do so while protecting and gradually evolving working people’s private property rights over a period suitable to them and to us. What Does the Outcome of the Cultural Revolution Mean to Us? Whether these initial struggles will suffice for China is yet to be determined. So far, following the analysis in this book, the CPC has stayed on the right road. This is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. There is only one guarantee of that and that is a fully educated communist cadre that knows what it is doing and why. But one thing we do know is that NOW, it is YOUR TASK to see that this new class does not succeed in separating itself once again, once we have power in North America. Because the New Class will be with us make no mistake about it. In other words, the political leadership of the working classes, with state power in its hands, has free will. Now, especially after the 20th century experiments, you should be able to see that things keep going forward on course. Precisely in order to achieve the ideal theoretical objective of true Socialism, Communism and Humanist society, somewhere down the road. You know what to look for, in other words. – And, finally, it is time for North American communists to break their pattern of adhering to the gringo curse of de facto illiteracy. By which I mean the self-imposed refusal to “read” which characterizes so much of the USA including its supposedly educated members. Ignorance is often the preferred mode of preparation for bourgeois politicians but our leaders and representatives need to be educated and continually so. – And, this is far more important than carping about what the CPC is doing in China. Before U.S. would-be communists say anything more they should bring about a revolution HERE! The Chinese have done and are doing their part. It’s time for us to do our part – a part which the founders expected us to have already played! Now, let us turn to the question of whether the class struggle carries on in the Socialist Stages. Obviously, the class struggle does carry on - very intensively - in these Socialist Stages. (Remember our definitions: we don’t want to confuse the term “Socialism” with “Communism” - these are two different things and we have come to define Socialism as the transitional period of proletarian dictatorship. The Second Transitional Period in this presentation.) Every piece of historical evidence shows us that in the societies in the Second Transitional Period there is ongoing class struggle. Over-night capitalist restoration in the USSR proves it. The necessity to launch the cultural revolution in China to prevent capitalist restoration of the Soviet variety is another proof. (Note: there is a big difference between (a) the sneaking subterfuge approach to capitalist restoration as pursued by the Soviet revisionists after the death of Stalin and (b) the conscious decision of honest Party leaders such as Lenin, or the post-Mao leadership in China, to openly restore capitalism as a controlled portion of the national economy, for their own good reasons.) Finally, one should not confuse Chairman Mao and his thinking with that of his wife. Mao himself has serious doubts about the course the Cultural Revolution was following under her leadership and died before making any final judgment. Compare and Contrast In the case of Simple Chiefdoms the class struggle was incipient - since there were no classes there could be no class struggle - (as in subatomic physics ultra-dense objects without atoms cannot undergo fusion because there are no nucleons to fuse.) What we have in Simple Chiefdoms are special interest groups and ranks of differing privilege which will eventually separate into classes, but which have their origins in the simple part-time avocations of shaman or sodality leader. In Stalinist Stage Socialism we have special interest groups and sectors of society, indeed ranks of differing privilege, which might separate into classes or which might not. – And, their origin is in having been part of an expanding class for six millennia! It’s a struggle. That is what class struggle is all about; although these Stalinist Socialist special interest groups are not classes strictly speaking, some of them want to be, historically they have been, and therefore the character of the struggle to prevent class separation is a form of class struggle. As I have said, it was always chancy that things would succeed in Russia, or after October, the Soviet Union, under the best of circumstances. Russia and the Soviet Union rarely had the “best of circumstances.” You should go on examining feature after feature, comparing and contrasting features, between these two transitional Periods. The point has been made. In the final analysis it is always true that history is unfolding as it should. Therefore, it is proven that the Stage of Stalinist Socialism was exactly what Marx and Engels and Lenin knew it would be - in terms of being a dictatorship of indefinite length. {Because no one could predict ahead of time the specific historical circumstances and therefore the length of time it would take to secure Socialism as Stage(s) on the surface of the planet Earth.} This is obviously true, besides being necessarily true (in theory,) that the class struggle continued and will continue, within the lands of Socialism both in its first Stalinist Stage form and in its current more Advanced Second Stage form. Remember; do not confuse “Socialism” with public ownership of the means of production. The first diagnostic of a Socialist Stage is that a “Communist Party” (Marxist-Leninist Party) has political (state) power in its hands. - And, this should always be the critical, most important single, defining, thus diagnostic, characteristic of the existence of the Second Transitional Period in any country. Whether it is the CP in command of a “capitalist” sector economy and/or a “public” sector economy, to a greater or lesser degree, has nothing to do with the country in question being in The Second Transitional Period. That is a determination based upon whether a working class vanguard Party has state power in its hands. It is this fact of life which makes it possible to have a capitalist sector economy within a working class dominated society – and it always has been this way. Whether it was Lenin restoring Capitalism in 1921 or the contemporary Chinese leadership doing so after 1975, what makes it possible is that we have the military and the secret police in our hands. This should be obvious and I shouldn’t have to explain this to some of you. However, Trotsky made his argument against Stalin theoretically contingent on the premise that what existed in the Soviet Union was economically socialist except for the “deformed” political structure. The idea still infects many would-be revolutionaries. It is this profound error we have to set aside. Regardless of its political utility in Trotsky’s personal fight with Stalin, the concept never had a shred of scientific substance because there was never any socialist economic structure in Russia or the other Republics other than the demand by the Party that working people be given the highest priority when possible in the allocation of national resources. Remember that War Communism turned out to be an expedient ending as quickly as the Civil War and was followed by the introduction of capitalism in the form of a market economy of private owners of industry and agriculture in 1921, with governmental enterprise pushed ahead where possible. Stalin created new forms of management of national resources in both industry and agriculture by introducing the Five Year Plans and forced collectivization of farming much later – seven years later. What made “socialism” authentic had always been and continues to be the program and intention of the vanguard Party to build as soon as it could a truly “socialist” (transitional) and then “communist” society; in this transition however “anything goes” or at least is permissible if it gets us further down the road to where we want to go. Thus, today we have a restructured Socialist Camp which includes authentic First (Stalinist) and Second Socialist Stage countries to wit, and respectively: Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos. (As for the situation in Korea it is impossible for me to determine from what little information I have about the situation in that country, if this is anything more than a degenerated First Socialist Stage society. Frankly, I see very little there admirable. At least not any more. Meaning that Kim Il Sung’s socialist economic program served its purpose at one time but does it any more? I don’t know because we have so little reliable data and must exclude Washington’s fascist propaganda which is why it is difficult for me to tell what is going on.) – And the Koreans have not been helpful in explaining to us (at least in languages other than their own) what it is that they may be doing we don’t understand. The General Crisis of Stalinist Socialism Stalinist Socialism has a general crisis too and it is specifically the product of, which is to say caused by, the backwardness of those societies in which workers first seized power. Marx and Engels had required the full development of capitalism’s productive potential, as they understood it, in then contemporary England, Germany, France, Italy and the USA for example. It didn’t happen that way. Workers in the Soviet Republic (later Soviet Union) were too few, too poorly prepared, and with totally inadequate industrial plants at their disposal, to do without the assistance of a de facto New Class of bureaucrats with its own inherent special interests, its own special privileges. No amount of talk (ideological propaganda about egalitarianism, the communist philosophy, sharing the poverty, etc.) would serve to offset this New Class’s basic interests as its members understood them. Thus, inherently Stalinist societies were on a short fuse (historically speaking) where backwardness would either be overcome, the working classes expanded and fully educated to take control, or the New Class would separate itself becoming a new ruling class in a new kind of Servitude society which would be essentially capitalist. It turned out to be the latter. lp + t = V1, V2 + Surplus Value NGM / New Class NGM = investment in next generations of machinery New Class = Need for New Class vs. Danger of Class Society reappearing (locus of the general crisis) This is what happened eventually in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and in a totally different way in the People’s Republic of China. In the latter case Mao attempted to stop New Class takeover (especially in his last attempt – the Cultural Revolution.) – And, indirectly, via his successors, who understood everything I have explained so far about this process, he may have found a road around backwardness, using the New Class, while simultaneously preventing it from separating as a new ruling class. Thus the Stalinist Socialist Stage prepared the way for China to enter the Advanced Socialist Stage using a formula similar to the NEP formula Lenin devised to get the Soviet Republic out of trouble in 1921. |
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