The essence of democracy is the belief in and reliance upon popular government. Where does Marxism-Leninism stand on this fundamental question? The supreme conceit of Engels, his contemptuous regard for the common people was forthrightly expressed in his letter to Marx, his mentor, on December 3, 1851, demonstrating that the Commúnists consider the people as merely human material to be manipulated at will. Said Engels: But the people, the people! The people does not care a damn about all this business, is as pleased as a child at its boon of the franchise and will probably use it like a child * * *. But after what we saw yesterday, the people cannot be relied on for anything ***. The behaviour of the people of Paris was childishly stupid **82 Equally contemptuous was V. I. Lenin, who stressed the superiority of civil war over mere voting: They imagine that serious political questions can be decided by voting. As a matter of fact, such questions, when they have been rendered critical by the struggle, are decided by civil war.83 PARLIAMENTARY INSTITUTIONS In all democratic countries throughout the world, including the United States, Communists make it a practice to run candidates for election to existing parliamentary bodies. In some countries like France and Italy they have a significant number of parliamentary representatives. One might therefore conclude that they go to all this trouble and expense because they have faith in the efficacy of these institutions. What are the facts? The Second Congress of the Communist International, under Lenin's leadership, made the Communist position clear: The Communist Party enters such institutions not for the purpose of organization work, but in order to blow up the whole bourgeois machinery and the parliament itself from within ***. Each Communist member must remember that he is not a "legislator," who is bound to seek agreements with the other legislators, but an agitator of the Party, detailed into the enemy's camp in order to carry out the orders of the Party there.84 According to Lenin, the proletariat "does not deceive itself or others with talk about 'popular elected' government 'sanctified by the whole people.'" 85 Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, Dec. 3, 1851, re coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte (Marx-Engels, "Selected Correspondence," International Publishers, New York, 1936), pp. 50, 51. Lenin. "Selected Works" (International Publishers, New York, 1943), vol. VI, p. 477. Theses and Statutes of the Third (Communist) International (Publishing Office of the Communist International, Moscow, 1920), reprinted by the United Communist Party of America and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, pt. 1, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, pp. 131 and 134. V. I. Lenin, "Selected Works" (International Publishers, New York, 1943), vol. IX, p. 137. REFORMS The Communist Party, U.S.A., according to its latest constitution, "champions the immediate and fundamental interests of the workers, farmers, the Negro people and all others who labor by hand and brain ***" 86 **" 86 In other words it seeks to give the impression that it advocates social reforms in order to improve the lot of the workers and farmers. However, Stalin envisaged an entirely different motive for pushing reforms in democratic countries, namely, as a means of distintegrating and destroying these democracies, as a cover for illegal work: To a revolutionary *** the main thing is revolutionary work and not reforms; to him the reforms are byproducts of the revolution. That is why, with revolutionary tactics under the bourgeois regime, reforms are naturally transformed into instruments for disintegrating this regime, into instruments for strengthening the revolution, into a base for the further development of the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary will accept a reform in order to use it as an aid in combining legal work with illegal work, to intensify under its cover, the illegal work for the revolutionary preparation of the masses for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.87 Marx was not sincerely interested in reforms per se but proposed to use campaigns for reform measures in order to push the bourgeoisie (capitalists) step by step "to the extreme" and ultimately to actual ruin. At the beginning of the movement, of course, the workers cannot yet propose any directly communist measures. But they can: 1. Compel the democrats to interfere in as many spheres as possible of the existing social order, to disturb its regular course and to compromise themselves, as well as to concentrate the utmost possible productive forces, means of transport, factories, railways in the hands of the state; 2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats, who in any case will not act in a revolutionary but in a merely reformist manner, to the extreme and transform them into direct attacks against private property ***. If the democrats propose proportional taxes, the workers must demand progressive taxes; if the democrats themselves put forward a moderate progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax with rates which rise so steeply that large-scale capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of state debts, the workers demand state bankruptcy** *88 Proceedings of the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., Feb. 9-12, 1957 (New Century Publishers, 1957, New York), p. 335. 87 J. Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism" (1924), Problems of Leninism (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1947), pp. 78-79. 8 Karl Marx, "Address of the Central Council to the Communist League," London, March 1850, Karl Marx" Selected Works," vol. II (Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Moscow, Leningrad, 1936), pp. 167, 168. PATRIOTISM The main political resolution adopted at the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA in February 1957 declared: We are American Communists, patriots. Our allegiance is to our own country, the United States.89 The representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties of Socialist countries met in Moscow on November 14 to 16, 1957, and adopted a weasel-worded resolution giving the impression that Communists, everywhere, were essentially patriotic. The resolution said in part: The Communist and Workers' Parties are loyal defenders of the national and democratic interests of the peoples of all It is difficult to understand how the American Communists or their foreign confreres can consistently maintain this position and still consider themselves the foremost and most dedicated exponents of the doctrines of Marx, who explicitly stated in "The Communist Manifesto" that: While the Communists still devotedly adhere to Marx's "Communist Manifesto," which claims that "The workers have no country,' and while they continue to avow their patriotism toward their own country, they have assumed a third contradictory but overriding position, namely, of pledging unquestioned loyalty to the Soviet Union. The model position for Communists in all countries has been laid down by Stalin. It reads: A revolutionary is he who without arguments, unconditionally, openly and honestly *** is ready to defend and strengthen the U.S.S.R., since the U.S.S.R. is the first proletarian, revolutionary state in the world * * *. An internationalist is he who, unreservedly, without hesitation, without conditions, is ready to defend the U.S.S.R. because the U.S.S.R. is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and to defend, to advance this revolutionary movement is impossible without defending the U.S.S.R.92 INTERNATIONALISM The Communists are constantly torn between the desire to appear as an independent, political party indigenous to their native soil and free from foreign ties and the necessity, on the other hand, of maintaining their loyalty and ties to the international Communist conspiracy. At the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA, General Proceedings of the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., Feb. 9-12, 1957 (New Century Publishers, New York, 1957), p. 321. Declaration of Communist and Workers' Parties of Socialist Countries, adopted in Moscow, Nov. 14-16 1957 (Political Affairs, December 1957, p. 92). "Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manfesto," written in 1847 (International Publishers, New York, 1930), p. 49. Joseph Stalin, "The International Situation and Defense of the U.S.S.R." (Aug. 1, 1927) reprinted Sochineniya (Cospolitizdat, Moscow, 1949), vol. X, p. 61, also Pravda, Moscow, May 30, 1949. Secretary Eugene Dennis proclaimed the party's independence in these terms: We American Communists, who have always constituted an independent American political party, have been unaffilated with and organizationally independent of other Marxist parties for nearly twenty years. 93 In a similar vein, Stalin sought to disclaim, to an American labor delegation, Moscow's authority over the Communist Party, U.S.A.: The assertion that American Communists work "under orders from Moscow" is absolutely untrue." These disclaimers, of course, fly in the face of Marx' basic maxim of international solidarity upon which the Communist movement was founded: Workingmen of all countries, unite! 95 The aid and direction given to the CPUSA by Moscow is attested by leading Communist spokesmen. Here again is Stalin speaking to the American labor delegation: What would happen if the Communist Party of the U.S. would appeal for aid to the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.? I think the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. would render whatever assistance it could.96 Alexander Bittelman, longtime member of the National Committee of the CPUSA, testifies to the services of the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow over a long period of the American party's history: * ** A unified and single Communist Party was materialized Proceedings of the 16th National Convention, Communist Party, U.S.A., Feb. 9-12, 1957 (New Century 95 "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (International Publishers, New York, 1932), sec. IV. 6 J. Stalin, "Interview with American Labor Delegation" (Sept. 9, 1927), "Leninism" (Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers, Moscow, 1934), vol. I, p. 385. "outside" influence of the Comintern; and what did it say? It said that the struggle against discrimination and for Negro rights is a revolutionary struggle for the national liberation of the Negroes, that must fight for complete Negro equality, and that in the Black Belt the full realization of this demand requires the fight for the national self-determination of the Negroes including the right of separation from the United States and the organization of an independent state ***. The Comintern undertook to prepare the proletarian vanguard, the Communist Party, and through it the whole working class for effective struggle against unemployment."7 At the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA held February 9-12, 1957, Eugene Dennis, general secretary, declared: We welcome and are proud of the fraternal greetings we have received at this convention from so many Communist Parties of other lands (p. 51). Included among those sending greetings of international Communist solidarity were the parties of France, Italy, Japan, Bolivia, Colombia, Great Britain, Australia, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Canada, Bulgaria, Belgium, Trieste, Korea, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, Chile, Rumania, Argentina, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Venezuela, Albania, Cuba, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union.98 Political Affairs, official theoretical monthly organ of the CPUSA, in its issue which simultaneously with the party's 16th national convention, in February 1957, published the following clear statement of Palmiro Togliatti, internationally known leader of the Italian Communist Party, describing the attitude of the international Communist movement toward the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: In the working class and socialist movement of the entire world, and for us Communists, especially as the conscious vanguard in this movement, the most important fact of the recent period has been the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ***. From the Congress discussions, important conclusions have been drawn in regard to the strategy and tactics of the Communist movement *** The position which the Soviet Union and the Party which direct it occupies in the socialist world, of which it is the axis and the main moving force is a reality historically determined and which cannot be destroyed.99 As another token of international solidarity, Political Affairs of December 1957 published the "Declaration of Communist and Workers' Parties," which explicitly stated: This meeting of the representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties testifies to the international solidarity of the Communist movement.1 Alexander Bittelman, "Milestones of Comintern Leadership" (Communist, March 1934), pp. 235-249. "Proceedings of the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A.," Feb. 9-12, 1957 (New Century Publishers, New York, 1957). Political Affairs, February 1957, pp. 27 and 38. Report to Congress of CP of Italy (extract) by Palmiro Togliatti. 1 Political Affairs, December 1957, pp. 89, 91, and 92. |