Revisionism is the systematic revision of and deviation from Marxism, the basic revolutionary principles of the proletariat laid down by Marx and Engels and further developed by the series of thinkers and leaders in socialist revolution and construction. The revisionists call themselves Marxists, even claim to make an updated and creative application of Marxism but they do so essentially to sugarcoat the bourgeois antiproletarian and anti-Marxist ideas that they propagate.
The classical revisionists who dominated the Second International
in 1912 were in social-democratic parties that acted as tails to
bourgeois regimes and supported the war budgets of the capitalist
countries in Europe. They denied the revolutionary essence of
Marxism and the necessity of proletarian dictatorship, engaged in
bourgeois reformism and social pacifism and supported colonialism
and modern imperialism. Lenin stood firmly against the classical
revisionists, defended Marxism and led the Bolsheviks in
establishing the first socialist state in 1917.
The modern revisionists were in the ruling communist parties in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They systematically revised
the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism by denying the
continuing existence of exploiting classes and class struggle and
the proletarian character of the party and the state in socialist
society. And they proceeded to destroy the proletarian party and
the socialist state from within. They masqueraded as communists
even as they gave up Marxist-Leninist principles. They attacked
Stalin in order to replace the principles of Lenin with the
discredited fallacies of his social democratic opponents and
claimed to make a "creative application" of Marxism-Leninism.
The total collapse of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, has made it so much
easier than before for Marxist-Leninists to sum up the emergence
and development of socialism and the peaceful evolution of
socialism into capitalism through modern revisionism. It is
necessary to trace the entire historical trajectory and draw the
correct lessons in the face of the ceaseless efforts of the
detractors of Marxism-Leninism to sow ideological and political
confusion within the ranks of the revolutionary movement.
Among the most common lines of attack are the following:
"genuine" socialism never came into existence; if socialism ever
existed, it was afflicted with or distorted by the "curse" of
"Stalinism", which could never be exorcised by his anti-Stalin
successors and therefore Stalin was responsible even for the
anti-Stalin regimes after his death; and socialism existed up to
1989 or 1991 and was never overpowered by modern revisionism
before then or that modern revisionism never existed and it was
an irremediably "flawed" socialism that fell in 1989-1991.
There are, of course, continuities as well as discontinuities
from the Stalin to the post-Stalin periods. But social science
demands that a leader be held responsible mainly for the period
of his leadership. The main responsibility of Gorbachov for his
own period of leadership should not be shifted to Stalin just as
that of Marcos, for example, cannot be shifted to Quezon. It is
necessary to trace the continuities between the Stalin and the
post-Stalin regimes. And it is also necessary to recognize the
discontinuities, especially because the post-Stalin regimes were
anti-Stalin in character. In the face of the efforts of the
imperialists, the revisionists and the unremoulded petty
bourgeois to explain everything in anti-Stalin terms and to
condemn the essential principles and the entire lot of
Marxism-Leninism, there is a strong reason and necessity to
recognize the sharp differences between the Stalin and
post-Stalin regimes. The phenomenon of modern revisionism
deserves attention, if we are to explain the blatant restoration
of capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship in 1989-91.
After his death, the positive achievements of Stalin (such as the
socialist construction, the defense of the Soviet Union, the high
rate of growth of the Soviet economy, the social guarantees,
etc.) continued for a considerable while. So were his errors
continued and exaggerated by his successors up to the point of
discontinuing socialism. We refer to the denial of the existence
and the resurgence of the exploiting classes and class struggle
in Soviet society; and the unhindered propagation of the
petty-bourgeois mode of thinking and the growth of the
bureaucratism of the monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie in command
of the great mass of petty-bourgeois bureaucrats.
From the Khrushchov period through the long Brezhnev period to
the Gorbachov period, the dominant revisionist idea was that the
working class had achieved its historic tasks and that it was
time for the Soviet leaders and experts in the state and ruling
party to depart from the proletarian stand. The ghost of Stalin
was blamed for bureaucratism and other ills. But in fact, the
modern revisionists promoted these on their own account and in
the interest of a growing bureaucratic bourgeoisie. The general
run of new intelligentsia and bureaucrats was petty
bourgeois-minded and provided the social base for the monopoly
bureaucrat bourgeoisie. In the face of the collapse of the
revisionist ruling parties and regimes, there is in fact cause
for the Party to celebrate the vindication of its
Marxist-Leninist, antirevisionist line. The correctness of this
line is confirmed by the total bankruptcy and collapse of the
revisionist ruling parties, especially the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, the chief disseminator of modern revisionism on a
world scale since 1956. It is clearly proven that the modern
revisionist line means the disguised restoration of capitalism
over a long period of time and ultimately leads to the
undisguised restoration of capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship.
The supraclass sloganeering of the petty bourgeoisie has been the
sugarcoating for the antiproletarian ideas of the big bourgeoisie
in the Soviet state and party.
In the Philippines, the political group that is most embarrassed,
discredited and orphaned by the collapse of the revisionist
ruling parties and regimes is that of the Lavas and their
successors. It is certainly not the Communist Party of the
Philippines, reestablished in 1968. But the imperialists, the
bourgeois mass media and certain other quarters wish to confuse
the situation and try to mock at and shame the Party for the
disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes.
They are barking at the wrong tree.
There are elements who have been hoodwinked by such catchphrases
of Gorbachovite propaganda as "socialist renewal", "perestroika",
"glasnost" and "new thinking" and who have refused to recognize
the facts and the truth about the Gorbachovite swindle even after
1989, the year when modern revisionism started to give way to the
open and blatant restoration of capitalism and bourgeois
dictatorship. There are a handful of elements within the Party
who continue to follow the already proven anticommunist,
antisocialist and pseudodemocratic example of Gorbachov and who
question and attack the vanguard role of the working class
through the Party, democratic centralism, the essentials of the
revolutionary movement, and the socialist future of the
Philippine revolutionary movement. Their line is aimed at nothing
less than the negation of the basic principles of the Party and
therefore the liquidation of the Party.
I. The Party's Marxist-Leninist Stand Against Modern
Revisionism
The proletarian revolutionary cadres of the Party who have
continuously adhered to the Marxist-Leninist stand against modern
revisionism and have closely followed the developments in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the early 1960s are not
surprised by the flagrant antisocialist and antidemocratic
outcome of modern revisionism. The Party should never forget that
its founding proletarian revolutionary cadres had been able to
work with the remnants of the old merger Party of the Communist
and Socialist parties since early 1963 only for so long as there
was common agreement that the resumption of the anti-imperialist
and antifeudal mass struggle meant the resumption of the
new-democratic revolution through revolutionary armed struggle
and that the old merger party would adhere to the revolutionary
essence of Marxism-Leninism and reject the Khrushchovite
revisionist line of bourgeois populism and pacifism and the
subsequent Khrushchovism without Khrushchov of the Brezhnev
regime.
So, in April 1967 when the Lava revisionist renegades violated
the common agreement and ignored the Executive Committee that had
been formed in 1963, it became necessary to lay the ground for
the reestablishment of the Party as a proletarian revolutionary
party. Everyone can refer to the diametrically opposed
proclamations of the proletarian revolutionaries and the Lava
revisionist renegades which were disseminated in the Philippines
and published respectively in Peking (Beijing) Review and the
Prague Information Bulletin within the first week of May 1967.
The reestablishment of the Party on the theoretical foundation of
Marxism-Leninism on December 26, 1968 necessarily meant the
criticism and repudiation of all the subjectivist and opportunist
errors of the Lava revisionist group and the modern revisionism
practised and propagated by this group domestically and by one
Soviet ruling clique after another internationally.
The criticism and repudiation of modern revisionism are a
fundamental component of the reestablishment and rebuilding of
the Party and are inscribed in the basic document of
rectification, "Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party" and the
Program and Constitution of the Party. These documents have
remained valid and effective. No leading organ of the CPP has
ever had the power and the reason to reverse or reject the
criticism and repudiation of modern revisionism by the Congress
of Reestablishment in 1968.
In the late 1970s, the Party decided to expand the international
relations of the revolutionary movement in addition to the
Party's relations with Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations
abroad. The international representative of the National
Democratic Front began to explore possibilities for the NDF to
act like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, African
National Congress and other national liberation movements in
expanding friendly and diplomatic relations with all forces
abroad that are willing to extend moral and material support to
the Philippine revolutionary struggle on any major issue and to
whatever extent. This line in external relations was in
consonance with the Marxist-Leninist stand of the Party and the
international united front against imperialism.
In 1983, a definite proposal to the Central Committee came up
that the NDF or any of its member organizations vigorously seek
friendly relations with the ruling parties in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe as well as with parties and movements closely
associated with the CPSU. However, this proposal was laid aside
in favor of the counterproposal made by the international liaison
department (ILD) of the Party Central Committee that the Party
rather than the NDF explore and seek "fraternal" relations with
the ruling parties of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and
other related parties.
Veering Away from the Antirevisionist Line
This counterproposal disregarded the fact that the Lava
revisionist group had already preempted our Party from the
possibility of "fraternal" relations with the revisionist ruling
parties. More significantly, the counterproposal did not take
into serious consideration the Marxist-Leninist stand of the
Party against modern revisionism.
Notwithstanding the ill-informed and unprincipled basis for
seeking "fraternal" relations with the revisionist ruling parties
and the absence of any congress withdrawing the correct
antirevisionist line, the staff organ in charge of international
relations proceeded in 1984 to draft and circulate a policy
paper, "The Present World Situation and the CPP's General
International Line and Policies" describing the CPSU as a
Marxist-Leninist party, the Soviet Union as the most developed
socialist country and as proletarian internationalist rather than
social-imperialist, as having supported third world liberation
movements and as having attained military parity with the United
States. This policy paper was presented to the 1985 Central
Committee Plenum and the latter decided to conduct further
studies on it.
In 1986, the Executive Committee of the Central Committee
commissioned a study of the Soviet Union and East European
countries. The study was superficial. It was done to support the
predetermined conclusion that these countries were socialist
because their economies were still dominated by state-owned
enterprises and these enterprises were still growing and because
the state still provided social guarantees to the people. The
study overlooked the fact that the ruling party in command of the
economy was no longer genuinely proletarian and that state-owned
enterprises since the time of Khrushchov had already become
milking cows of corrupt bureaucrats and private entrepreneurs who
colluded under various pretexts to redirect the products to the
"free" (private) market.
By this time, the attempt to deviate from the antirevisionist
line of the Party was clearly linked to the erroneous idea that
total victory in the Philippine revolution could be hastened by
"regularizing" the few thousands of NPA fighters with
importations of heavy weapons and other logistical requisites
from abroad, by skipping stages in the development of people's
war and in building the people's army and by arousing the forces
for armed urban insurrection in anticipation of some sudden "turn
in the situation" to mount a general uprising.
There was the notion that the further development of the people's
army and the people's war depended on the importation of heavy
weapons and getting logistical support from abroad and that the
failure to import these would mean the stagnation or
retrogression of the revolutionary forces because there is no
other way by which the NPA could overcome the enemy's
"blockhouse" warfare and control of the highways except through
the use of sophisticated heavy weapons (antitank and laser-guided
missiles) which necessarily have to be imported from abroad.
In the second half of 1986, with the approval of the Party's
central leadership, a drive was started to seek the establishment
of "fraternal" relations with the CPSU and other revisionist
ruling parties as well as nonruling ones close to the CPSU. A
considerable amount of resources was allotted to and expended on
the project.
In late 1986, some Brezhnevites within the CPSU and some other
quarters made the suggestion that the Communist Party of the
Philippines merge with the Lava revisionist group in order to
gain "fraternal" relations with the CPSU. But such a suggestion
was tactfully rejected with the countersuggestion that the CPSU
and other revisionist ruling parties could keep their fraternal
relations with the Lava group while the CPP could have friendly
relations with them. We stood pat on the Leninist line of
proletarian party-building.
Up to 1987 the failure to establish relations with the
revisionist ruling parties was interpreted by some elements as
the result of the refusal on the part of our Party to repudiate
its antirevisionist line. These elements had to be reminded in
easily understood practical terms that if the antirevisionist
line of the Party had been withdrawn and the revisionist ruling
parties would continue to rebuff our offer of "fraternal" or
friendly relations with them, then the proposed opportunism would
be utterly damaging to the Party.
By 1987, the Party became aware that the Gorbachov regime was
already laying the ground for the emasculation of the revisionist
ruling parties in favor of an openly bourgeois state machinery in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by allowing his advisors,
officials of the Academy of Social Sciences and the official as
well as independent Soviet mass media to promote pro-imperialist,
anticommunist and antisocialist ideas under the guise of social
democracy and "liberal" communism. On the occasion of the 70th
anniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachov himself
delivered a speech abandoning the anti-imperialist struggle and
describing imperialism as having shed off its violent character
in an integral world in which the Soviet Union and the United
States and other countries can cooperate in the common interest
of humanity's survival.
In 1987, the chairman of the Party's Central Committee made an
extensive interview on the question of establishing relations
with the ruling parties of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and
elsewhere. This was made in response to the demand from some
quarters within the Party that the Party repudiate its line
against revisionism and apologize to the CPSU for having
criticized the Soviet Union on the question of Cambodia and
Afghanistan. The interview clarified that the Party can establish
friendly relations with the ruling parties even while the latter
maintained their "fraternal" relations with the Lava group.
Failed Efforts at Establishing Relations
In June 1988, the "World Situation and Our Line" was issued to
replace "The Present World Situation and the CPP's General
International Line and Policies". The correct and positive side
of the new document reiterated the principles of national
integrity, independence, equality noninterference and mutual
support and mutual benefit to guide the Party's international
relations; and upheld the basic principles of socialism,
anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism and peaceful
coexistence as a diplomatic policy. Furthermore, it noted and
warned against the unhealthy trends of cynicism, anticommunism,
nationalism, consumerism, superstition, criminality and the like
already running rampant in the countries ruled by the revisionist
parties.
The negative side included accepting at face value and endorsing
the catchphrases of Gorbachov; describing the revisionist regimes
as socialist under a "lowered" definition; and diplomatic
avoidance of the antirevisionist terms of the Party.
In the course of trying to establish friendly relations with the
revisionist ruling parties in 1987 and onward, Party
representatives were able to discern that Gorbachov and his
revisionist followers were reorganizing these parties towards
their eventual weakening and dissolution. Despite Gorbachov's
avowed line of allowing the other East European ruling parties to
decide matters for themselves, Soviet agents pushed these parties
to reorganize themselves by replacing Brezhnevite holdovers at
various levels with Gorbachovites and subsequently paralyzed the
Party organizations. However, it would be in 1989 that it became
clear without any doubt that all the revisionist ruling parties
and regimes were on the path of self-disintegration, blatant
restoration of capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship under the
slogans of "multiparty democracy" and "economic reforms".
It is correct for the Party to seek friendly relations with any
foreign party or movement on the basis of anti-imperialism. But
it is wrong to go into any "fraternal" relations involving the
repudiation of the Party's Marxist-Leninist stand against modern
revisionism.
In this regard, we must be self-critical for wavering or
temporarily veering away from the Party's antirevisionist line
and engaging in a futile expedition. The motivation was to seek
greater material and moral support for the Filipino people's
revolutionary struggle. Although such motivation is good, it can
only mitigate but cannot completely excuse the departure from the
correct line. The error is a major one but it can be rectified
through education far more easily than other errors unless
ideological confusion over the developments in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe is allowed to continue. Most comrades assigned
to do international work were merely following the wrong line
from above.
The worst damage caused by the unconsummated and belated
flirtation with the revisionist ruling parties in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe is not so much the waste of effort and
resources but in the circulation of incorrect ideas, such as that
these parties were still socialist and that the availability or
nonavailability of material assistance from them, especially
heavy weapons, would spell the advance or stagnation and
retrogression of the Philippine revolutionary movement. It should
be pointed out that the Lava group had the best of relations with
these parties since the sixties but this domestic revisionist
group never amounted to anything more than being an
inconsequential toady of Soviet foreign policy and the Marcos
regime.
At this point, the central leadership and entirety of the Party
must renew their resolve to adhere to Marxism-Leninism and to the
antirevisionist line. We are in a period which requires profound
and farsighted conviction in the new democratic revolution as
well as the socialist revolution. This is a period comparable to
that when the classical revisionist parties disintegrated and it
seemed as if socialism had become a futile dream and the world
seemed to be merely a helpless object of imperialist oppression
and exploitation. But that period was exactly the eve of
socialist revolution.
II. The Legacy of Lenin and Stalin
The red flag of the Soviet Union has been brought down. The
czarist flag of Russia now flies over the Kremlin. It may only be
a matter of time that the body of the great Lenin is removed from
its mausoleum in the Red Square, unless Russia's new bourgeoisie
continue to regard it as a lucrative tourist attraction for
visitors with hard foreign currency.
The Soviet modern revisionists, from Khrushchov to Gorbachov, had
invoked the name of Lenin to attack Stalin. But in fact, the
total negation of Stalin was but the spearhead of the total
negation of Lenin and Leninism, socialism, the Soviet Union and
the entire course of Bolshevik and Soviet history. The
bourgeoisie in the former Soviet Union was not satisfied with
anything less than the open restoration of capitalism and the
imposition of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
It is necessary to refresh ourselves on the legacy of Lenin and
Stalin in the face of concerted attempts by the imperialists, the
modern revisionists, the barefaced restorationists of capitalism
and the anticommunist bourgeois intelligentsia to slander and
discredit it. The greatness of Lenin lies in having further
developed the three components of the theory of Marxism:
philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism. Lenin is
the great master of Marxism in the era of modern imperialism and
proletarian revolution.
He delved further into dialectical materialism, pointed to the
unity of opposites as the most fundamental law of material
reality and transformation and contended most extensively and
profoundly with the so-called "third force" subjectivist
philosophy (empirio-criticism). He analyzed modern imperialism
and put forward the theory of uneven development, which
elucidated the possibility of socialist revolution at the weakest
point of the world capitalist system. He elaborated on the
Marxist theory of state and revolution. He stood firmly for
proletarian class struggle and proletarian dictatorship against
the classical revisionists and actually led the first successful
socialist revolution.
The ideas of Lenin were tested in debates within the Second
International and within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor
Party (RSDLP). The proletarian revolutionary line that he and his
Bolshevik comrades espoused proved to be correct and victorious
in contention with various bourgeois ideas and formations that
competed for hegemony in the struggle against czarist autocracy.
We speak of the socialist revolution as beginning on November 7,
1917 because it was on that day that the people under the
leadership of the proletariat through the Bolshevik party seized
political power from the bourgeoisie. It was at that point that
the proletarian dictatorship was established. For this, Lenin is
considered the great founder of Soviet socialism. Proletarian
dictatorship is the first requisite for building socialism.
Without this power, socialist revolution cannot be undertaken. By
this power, Lenin was able to decree the nationalization of the
land and capital assets of the exploiting classes and take over
the commanding heights of the economy.
Proletarian class dictatorship is but another expression for the
state power necessary for smashing and replacing the state power
or class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, for carrying out the
all-rounded socialist revolution and for preventing the
counterrevolutionaries from regaining control over society.
Proletarian dictatorship is at the same time proletarian
democracy and democracy for the entire people, especially the
toiling masses of workers and peasants. Without the exercise of
proletarian dictatorship against their class enemies, the
proletariat and the people cannot enjoy democracy among
themselves. Proletarian dictatorship is the fruit of the highest
form of democratic action-the revolutionary process that topples
the bourgeois dictatorship. It is the guarantor of democracy
among the people against domestic and external class enemies, the
local exploiting classes and the imperialists.
The Bolsheviks were victorious because they resolutely
established and defended the proletarian class dictatorship. They
had learned their lessons well from the failure of the Paris
Commune of 1871 and from the reformism and treason of the social
democratic parties in the Second International.
Wielding proletarian dictatorship, the Bolsheviks disbanded in
January 1918 the Constituent Assembly that had been elected after
the October Revolution but was dominated by the Socialist
Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, because that assembly refused
to ratify the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and
Exploited People. The Bolsheviks subsequently banned the
bourgeois parties because these parties engaged in
counterrevolutionary violence and civil war against the
proletariat and collaborated with the foreign interventionists.
In his lifetime, Lenin led the Soviet proletariat and people and
the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers to victory in the
civil war and the war against the interventionist powers from
1918 to 1921. He consolidated the Soviet Union as a federal union
of socialist republics and built the congresses of soviets and
the nationalities. As a proletarian internationalist, he
established the Third International and set forth the
anti-imperialist line for the world proletariat and all oppressed
nations and peoples.
In 1922 he proclaimed the New Economic Policy as a transitory
measure for reviving the economy from the devastation of war in
the quickest possible way and remedying the problem of "war
communism" which had involved requisitioning and rationing under
conditions of war, devastation and scarcity. Under the new
policy, the small entrepreneurs and rich peasants were allowed to
engage freely in private production and to market their products.
The Record of Stalin
Lenin died in 1924. He did not live long enough to see the start
of fullscale socialist economic construction. This was undertaken
by his successor and faithful follower Stalin. He carried it out
in accordance with the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin:
proletarian dictatorship and mass mobilization, public ownership
of the means of production, economic planning, industrialization,
collectivization and mechanization of agriculture, full
employment and social guarantees, free education at all levels,
expanding social services and the rising standard of living.
But before the socialist economic construction could be started
in 1929 with the first five-year economic plan, Stalin continued
Lenin's New Economic Policy and had to contend with and defeat
the Left Opposition headed by Trotsky who espoused the wrong line
that socialism in one country was impossible and that the workers
in Western Europe (especially in Germany) had to succeed first in
armed uprisings and that rapid industrialization had to be
undertaken immediately at the expense of the peasantry.
Stalin won out with his line of socialism in one country and in
defending the worker-peasant alliance. If Trotsky had his way, he
would have destroyed the chances for Soviet socialism by
provoking the capitalist powers, by breaking up the
worker-peasant alliance and by spreading pessimism in the absence
of any victorious armed uprisings in Western Europe.
When it was time to put socialist economic construction in full
swing, the Right opposition headed by Bukharin emerged to argue
for the continuation of the New Economic Policy and oppose Soviet
industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. If
Bukharin had had his way, the Soviet Union would not have been
able to build a socialist society with a comprehensive industrial
base and a mechanized and collectivized agriculture and provide
its people with a higher standard of living; and would have
enlarged the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois nationalists in the
various republics and become an easier prey to Nazi Germany whose
leader Hitler made no secret of his plans against the Soviet
Union.
The first five-year economic plan was indeed characterized by
severe difficulties due to the following: the limited industrial
base to start with in a sea of agrarian conditions, the
continuing effects of the war, the economic and political
sanctions of the capitalist powers, the constant threat of
foreign military intervention, the burdensome role of the pioneer
and the violent reaction of the rich peasants who refused to put
their farms, tools and work animals under collectivization,
slaughtered their work animals and organized resistance. But
after the first five-year economic plan, there was popular
jubilation over the establishment of heavy and basic industries.
To the relief of the peasantry there was considerable
mechanization of agriculture, especially in the form of tractor
stations. There was marked improvement in the standard of living.
In 1936, a new constitution was promulgated. As a result of the
successes of the economic construction and in the face of the
actual confiscation of bourgeois and landlord property and the
seeming disappearance of exploiting classes by economic
definition, the constitution declared that there were no more
exploiting classes and no more class struggle except that between
the Soviet people and the external enemy. This declaration would
constitute the biggest error of Stalin. It propelled the
petty-bourgeois mode of thinking in the new intelligentsia and
bureaucracy even as the proletarian dictatorship was exceedingly
alert to the old forces and elements of counterrevolution.
The error had two ramifications.
One ramification abetted the failure to distinguish
contradictions among the people from those between the people and
the enemy and the propensity to apply administrative measures
against those loosely construed as enemies of the people. There
were indeed real British and German spies and bourgeois
nationalists engaged in counterrevolutionary violence. They had
to be ferreted out. But this was done by relying heavily on a
mass reporting system (based on patriotism) that fed information
to the security services. And the principle of due process was
not assiduously and scrupulously followed in order to narrow the
target in the campaign against counterrevolutionaries and punish
only the few who were criminally culpable on the basis of
incontrovertible evidence. Thus, in the 1936-38 period,
arbitrariness victimized a great number of people. Revolutionary
class education through mass movement under Party leadership was
not adequately undertaken for the purpose of ensuring the high
political consciousness and vigilance of the people.
The other ramification was the promotion of the idea that
building socialism was a matter of increasing production,
improving administration and technique, letting the cadres decide
everything (although Stalin never ceased to speak against
bureaucratism) and providing the cadres and experts and the
toiling masses with ever increasing material benefits. The new
intelligentsia produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet
educational system had a decreasing sense of the proletarian
class stand and an increasing sense that it was sufficient to
have the expertise and to become bureaucrats and technocrats in
order to build socialism. The old and the new intelligentsia were
presumed to be proletarian so long as they rendered bureaucratic
and professional service. There was no recognition of the fact
that bourgeois and other antiproletarian ideas can persist and
grow even after the confiscation of bourgeois and landlord
property.
To undertake socialist revolution and construction in a country
with a large population of more than 100 nationalities and a huge
land mass, with a low economic and technological level as a
starting point, ravaged by civil war and ever threatened by local
counterrevolutionary forces and foreign capitalist powers, it was
necessary to have the centralization of political will as well as
centralized planning in the use of limited resources. But such a
necessity can be overdone by a bourgeoisie that is reemergent
through the petty bourgeoisie and can become the basis of
bureaucratism, decreasing democracy in the process of
decision-making. The petty bourgeoisie promotes the bureaucratism
that gives rise to and solidifies the higher levels of the
bureaucrat bourgeoisie and that alienates the Party and the state
from the people. Democratic centralism can be made to degenerate
into bureaucratic centralism by the forces and elements that run
counter to the interests of the proletariat and all working
people.
In world affairs, Stalin encouraged and supported the communist
parties and anti-imperialist movements in capitalist countries
and the colonies and semicolonies through the Third
International. And from 1935 onward, he promoted internationally
the antifascist Popular Front policy. Only after Britain and
France spurned his offer of antifascist alliance and continued to
induce Germany to attack the Soviet Union did Stalin decide to
forge a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939. This was a
diplomatic maneuver to forestall a probable earlier Nazi
aggression and gain time for the Soviet Union to prepare against
it.
Stalin made full use of the time before the German attack in 1941
to strengthen the Soviet Union economically and militarily as
well as politically through patriotic calls to the entire Soviet
people and through concessions to conservative institutions and
organizations. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church was
given back its buildings and its privileges. There was marked
relaxation in favor of a broad antifascist popular front.
In the preparations against fascist invasion and in the course of
the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, the line of Soviet patriotism
further subdued the line of class struggle among the old and new
intelligentsia and the entire people. The Soviet people united.
Even as they suffered a tremendous death casualty of 20 million
and devastation of their country, including the destruction of 85
percent of industrial capacity, they played the pivotal role in
defeating Nazi Germany and world fascism and paved the way for
the rise of several socialist countries in Eastern Europe and
Asia and the national liberation movements on an unprecedented
scale. In the aftermath of World War II, Stalin led the economic
reconstruction of the Soviet Union. Just as he succeeded in
massive industrialization from 1929 to 1941 (only 12 years)
before the war, so he did again from 1945 to 1953 (only eight
years) but this time with apparently no significant resistance
from counterrevolutionaries. In all these years of socialist
construction, socialism proved superior to capitalism in all
respects.
In 1952, Stalin realized that he had made a mistake in
prematurely declaring that there were no more exploiting classes
and no more class struggle in the Soviet Union, except the
struggle between the people and the enemy. But it was too late,
the Soviet party and state were already swamped by a large number
of bureaucrats with waning proletarian revolutionary
consciousness. These bureaucrats and their bureaucratism would
become the base of modern revisionism.
When Stalin died in 1953, he left a Soviet Union that was a
politically, economically, militarily and culturally powerful
socialist country. He had successfully united the Soviet people
of the various republics and nationalities and had defended the
Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. He had rebuilt an industrial
economy, with high annual growth rates, with enough homegrown
food for the people and the world's largest production of oil,
coal, steel, gold, grain, cotton and so on.
Under his leadership, the Soviet Union had created the biggest
number of research scientists, engineers, doctors, artists,
writers and so on. In the literary and artistic field, social
realism flourished while at the same time the entire cultural
heritage of the Soviet Union was cherished.
In foreign policy, Stalin held the U.S. forces of aggression at
bay in Europe and Asia, supported the peoples fighting for
national liberation and socialism, neutralized what was otherwise
the nuclear monopoly of the United States and ceaselessly called
for world peace even as the U.S.-led Western alliance waged the
Cold War and engaged in provocations. It is absolutely necessary
to correctly evaluate Stalin as a leader in order to avoid the
pitfall of modern revisionism and to counter the most strident
anticommunists who attack Marxism-Leninism under the guise of
anti-Stalinism. We must know what are his merits and demerits. We
must respect the historical facts and judge his leadership within
its own time, 1924 to 1953.
It is unscientific to make a complete negation of Stalin as a
leader in his own time and to heap the blame on him even for the
modern revisionist line, policies and actions which have been
adopted and undertaken explicitly against the name of Stalin and
have - at first gradually and then rapidly - brought about the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.
Leaders must be judged mainly for the period of their
responsibility even as we seek to trace the continuities and
discontinuities from one period to another.
Stalin's merits within his own period of leadership are principal
and his demerits are secondary. He stood on the correct side and
won all the great struggles to defend socialism such as those
against the Left opposition headed by Trotsky; the Right
opposition headed by Bukharin, the rebellious rich peasants, the
bourgeois nationalists, and the forces of fascism headed by
Hitler. He was able to unite, consolidate and develop the Soviet
state. After World War II, Soviet power was next only to the
United States. Stalin was able to hold his ground against the
threats of U.S. imperialism. As a leader, he represented and
guided the Soviet proletariat and people from one great victory
to another.
III. The Process of Capitalist Restoration
The regimes of Khrushchov, Brezhnev and Gorbachov mark the three
stages in the process of capitalist restoration in the Soviet
Union, a process of undermining and destroying the great
accomplishments of the Soviet proletariat and people under the
leadership of Lenin and Stalin. This process has also encompassed
Eastern Europe.
The Khrushchov regime laid the foundation of Soviet modern
revisionism and overthrew the proletarian dictatorship. The
Brezhnev regime fully developed modern revisionism for a far
longer period of time and completely converted socialism into
monopoly bureaucrat capitalism. And the Gorbachov regime brought
the work of modern revisionism to the final goal of wiping out
the vestiges of socialism and entirely dismantling the socialist
facade of the revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union. He destroyed the Soviet Union that Lenin and Stalin
had built and defended.
To restore capitalism, the Soviet revisionist regimes had to
revise the basic principles of socialist revolution and
construction and to go through stages of camouflaged
counterrevolution in a period of 38 years, 1953 to 1991. It is a
measure of the greatness of Lenin and Stalin that their
accomplishments in 36 years of socialist revolution and
construction took another long period of close to four decades to
dismantle. Stalin spent a total of 20 years in socialist
construction. The revisionist renegades took a much longer period
of time to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union.
In the same period of time, the revisionist regimes cleverly took
the pretext of attacking Stalin in order to attack the
foundations of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice and
eventually condemn Lenin himself and the entire course of Soviet
history and finally destroy the Soviet Union. The revisionist
renegades in their protracted "de-Stalinization" campaign blamed
Stalin beyond his lifetime for their own culpabilities and
failures. For instance, they aggravated bureaucratism in the
service of capitalist restoration but they still blamed the
long-dead Stalin for it.
Tito of Yugoslavia had the unique distinction of being the
pioneer in modern revisionism. In opposing Stalin, he deviated
from the basic principles of socialist revolution and
construction in 1947 and received political and material support
from the West. He refused to undertake land reform and
collectivization. He preserved and promoted the bourgeoisie
through the bureaucracy and private enterprise, especially in the
form of private cooperatives.
He considered as key to socialism not the public ownership of the
means of production, economic planning and further development of
the productive forces but the immediate decentralization of
enterprises; the so-called workers' self-management that actually
combined bureaucratism and anarchy of production; and the
operation of the free market (including the goods imported from
Western countries) upon the existent and stagnant level of
production. In misrepresenting Lenin's New Economic Policy as the
very model for socialist economic development, he was the first
chief of state to use the name of Lenin against both Lenin and
Stalin.
First Stage: The Khrushchov Regime, 1953-64
To Khrushchov belongs the distinction of being the pioneer in
modern revisionism in the Soviet Union, the first socialist
country in the history of mankind, and of being the most
influential in promoting modern revisionism on a world scale.
Khrushchov's career as a revisionist in power started in 1953. He
was a bureaucratic sycophant and an active player in repressive
actions during the time of Stalin. To become the first secretary
of the CPSU and accumulate power in his hands, he played off the
followers of Stalin against each other and succeeded in having
Beria executed after a summary trial. He depended on the new
bourgeoisie that had arisen from the bureaucracy and the new
intelligentsia.
In 1954, he had already reorganized the CPSU to serve his
ideological and political position. In 1955, he upheld Tito
against the memory of Stalin, especially on the issue of
revisionism. In 1956, he delivered before the 20th Party Congress
his "secret" speech against Stalin, completely negating him as no
better than a bloodthirsty monster and denouncing the
"personality cult". The congress marked the overthrow of the
proletarian dictatorship. In 1957, he used the armed forces to
defeat the vote for his ouster by the Politburo and thereby made
the coup to further consolidate his position.
In 1956, the anti-Stalin diatribe inspired the anticommunist
forces in Poland and Hungary to carry out uprisings. The
Hungarian uprising was stronger and more violent. Khrushchov
ordered the Soviet army to suppress it, chiefly because the
Hungarian party leadership sought to rescind its political and
military ties with the Soviet Union.
But subsequently, all throughout Eastern Europe under Soviet
influence, it became clear that it was alright to the Soviet
ruling clique for the satellite regimes to adopt
capitalist-oriented reforms (private enterprise in agriculture,
handicraft and services, dissolution of collective farms even
where land reform had been carried out on a narrow scale and, of
course, the free market) like Yugoslavia along an anti-Stalin
line. The revisionist regimes were, however, under strict orders
to remain within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)
and the Warsaw Pact.
The unremoulded social-democratic and petty-bourgeois sections of
the revisionist ruling parties in Eastern Europe started to kick
out genuine communists from positions of leadership in the state
and party under the direction of Khrushchov and under the
pressure of anticommunist forces in society. It must be recalled
that the so- called proletarian ruling parties were actually
mergers of communists and social-democrats put into power by the
Soviet Red Army. At the most, there were only a few years of
proletarian dictatorship and socialist economic construction
before Khrushchov started in 1956 to enforce his revisionist line
in the satellite parties and regimes.
The total negation of Stalin by Khrushchov was presented as a
rectification of the personality cult, bureaucratism and
terrorism; and as the prerequisite for the efflorescence of
democracy and civility, rapid economic progress that builds the
material and technological foundation of communism in twenty
years, the peaceful form of social revolution from an
exploitative system to a nonexploitative one, detente with the
United States, nuclear disarmament step by step and world peace,
a world without wars and arms.
Khrushchov paid lip service to proletarian dictatorship and the
basic principles of socialist revolution and construction but at
the same time introduced a set of ideas to undermine them. He
used bourgeois populism, declaring that the CPSU was a party of
the whole people and the Soviet state was a state of the whole
people on the anti-Marxist premise that the tasks of proletarian
dictatorship had been fulfilled. He used bourgeois pacifism,
declaring that it was possible and preferable for mankind to opt
for peaceful transition to socialism and peaceful economic
competition with the capitalist powers in order to avert the
nuclear annihilation of humanity; raising peaceful coexistence
from the level of diplomatic policy to that of the general line
governing all kinds of external relations of the Soviet Union and
the CPSU; and denying the violent nature of imperialism.
In the economic field, he used the name of Lenin against Lenin
and Stalin by misrepresenting Lenin's New Economic Policy as the
way to socialism rather than as a transitory measure towards
socialist construction. He carried out decentralization to some
degree, he autonomized state enterprises and promoted private
agriculture and the free market. The autonomized state
enterprises became responsible for their own cost and profit
accounting and for raising the wages and bonuses on the basis of
the profits of the individual enterprise. The private plots were
enlarged and large areas of land (ranging from 50 to 100
hectares) were leased to groups, usually households. Many tractor
stations for collective farms were dissolved and agricultural
machines were turned over to private entrepreneurs. The free
market in agricultural and industrial products and services was
promoted.
In the same way that the revisionist rhetoric of Khrushchov
overlapped with Marxist-Leninist terminology, socialism
overlapped with capitalist restoration. The socialist system of
production and distribution was still dominant for a while. Thus,
the Soviet economy under Khrushchov still registered high rates
of growth. But the regime took most pride in the higher rate of
growth in the private sector which benefited from cheap energy,
transport, tools and other supplies from the public sector and
which was credited with producing the goods stolen from the
public sector.
In the autonomization of state enterprises, managers acquired the
power to hire and fire workers, transact business within the
Soviet Union and abroad; increase their own salaries, bonuses and
other perks at the expense of the workers; lessen the funds
available for the development of other parts of the economy; and
engage in bureaucratic corruption in dealing with the free
market.
With regard to private agriculture, propaganda was loudest on the
claim that it was more productive than the state and collective
farms. The reemergent rich peasants were lauded. But in fact, the
corrupt bureaucrats and private farmers and merchants were
colluding in underpricing and stealing products (through
pilferage and wholesale misdeclaration of goods as defective)
from the collective and state farms in order to rechannel these
to the free market. In the end, the Soviet Union would suffer
sharp reductions in agricultural production and would be
importing huge amounts of grain.
The educational system continued to expand, reproducing in great
numbers the new intelligentsia now influenced by the ideas of
modern revisionism and looking to the West for models of
efficient management and for quality consumer goods. In the arts
and in literature, social realism was derided and universal
humanism, pacifism and mysticism came into fashion.
The Khrushchov regime drew prestige from the advances of Soviet
science and technology, from the achievements in space technology
and from the continuing economic construction. All of these were
not possible without the prior work and the accumulated social
capital under the leadership of Stalin. Khrushchov went into
rapid housing and office construction which pleased the
bureaucracy.
The CPSU and the Chinese Communist Party were the main
protagonists in the great ideological debate. Despite
Khrushchov's brief reconciliation with Tito, the Moscow
Declaration of 1957 and the Moscow Statement of 1960 maintained
that modern revisionism was the main danger to the international
communist movement as a result of the firm and vigorous stand of
the Chinese and other communist parties.
Khrushchov extended the ideological debate into a disruption of
state-to-state relations between the Soviet Union and China. In
the Cuban missile crisis, he had a high profile confrontation
with Kennedy. He first took an adventurist and then swung to a
capitulationist position. With regard to Vietnam, he was opposed
to the revolutionary armed struggle of the Vietnamese people and
grudgingly gave limited support to them.
The deterioration of Soviet industry and the breakdown of
agriculture and bungling in foreign relations led to the removal
of Khrushchov in a coup by the Brezhnev clique. Brezhnev became
the general secretary of the CPSU and Kosygin became the premier.
The former would eventually assume the position of president.
Second Stage: The Brezhnev Regime, 1964-82
While Khrushchov was stridently anti-Stalin, Brezhnev made a
limited and partial "rehabilitation" of Stalin. If we link this
to the recentralization of the bureaucracy and the state
enterprises previously decentralized and the repressive measures
taken against the pro-imperialist and anticommunist opposition
previously encouraged by Khrushchov, it would appear that
Brezhnev was reviving Stalin's policies.
In fact, the Brezhnev regime was on the whole anti-Stalin, with
respect to the continuing line of promoting the Khrushchovite
capitalist-oriented reforms in the economy and the line of
developing an offensive capability "to defend the Soviet Union
outside of its borders". It is therefore false to say that the
18-year Brezhnev regime was an interruption of the anti-Stalin
line started by Khrushchov.
There is, however, an ideological error that puts both Khrushchov
and Brezhnev on board with Stalin. This is the premature
declaration of the end of the exploiting classes and class
struggle, except that between the enemy and the people. This line
served to obfuscate and deny the existence of an already
considerable and growing bourgeoisie in Soviet society and to
justify repressive measures against those considered as enemy of
the Soviet people for being opposed to the ruling clique.
Under the Brezhnev leadership, the Khrushchovite
capitalist-oriented reforms were pushed hard by the
Brezhnev-Kosygin tandem. Socialism was converted fully into state
monopoly capitalism, with the prevalent corrupt bureaucrats not
only increasing their official incomes and perks but taking their
loot by colluding with private entrepreneurs and even criminal
syndicates in milking the state enterprises. On an ever widening
scale, tradeable goods produced by the state enterprises were
either underpriced, pilfered or declared defective only to be
channeled to the private entrepreneurs for the free market.
Sales and purchase contracts with capitalist firms abroad became
a big source of kickbacks for state officials who deposited these
in secret bank accounts abroad. There was also a thriving
blackmarket in foreign exchange and goods smuggled from the West
through Eastern Europe, the Baltic and southern republics.
The corruption of the bureaucrat and private capitalists
discredited the revisionist ruling party and regime at various
levels. At the end of the Brezhnev regime, there was already an
estimated 30 million people engaged in private enterprise. Among
them were members of the families of state and party officials.
Members of the Brezhnev family themselves were closely
collaborating with private firms and criminal syndicates in
scandalous shady deals.
The state enterprises necessary for assuring funds for the ever
expanding central Soviet bureaucracy and for the arms race were
recentralized. A military-industrial complex grew rapidly and ate
up yearly far more than the conservatively estimated 20 percent
of the Soviet budget. The Brezhnev regime was obsessed with
attaining military parity with its superpower rival, the United
States.
The huge Soviet state that could have generated the surplus
income for reinvestment in more efficient and expanded civil
production of basic and nonbasic consumer goods, wasted the funds
on the importation of the high grade consumer goods for the upper
five per cent of the population (the new bourgeoisie), on
increasing amounts of imported grain, on the military-industrial
complex and the arms race, on the maintenance and equipment of
half a million troops in Eastern Europe and on other foreign
commitments in the third world. Among the commitments that arose
due to superpower rivalry was the assistance to the Vietnamese
people in the Vietnam war, Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua. Among the
commitments that arose due to the sheer adventurism of Soviet
social-imperialism was the dispatch of a huge number of Soviet
troops and equipment to Afghanistan at the time that the Soviet
Union was already clearly in dire economic and financial straits.
The hard currency for the importation of grain and high-grade
consumer goods came from the sale of some 10 percent of Soviet
oil production to Western countries and the income from military
sales to the oil-producing countries in the Middle East.
The Brezhnev regime used "Marxist-Leninist" phrasemongering to
disguise and legitimize the growth of capitalism within the
Soviet Union. Repressive measures were used against opponents of
the regime, including the pretext of psychiatric confinement.
These measures served the growth of bureaucrat monopoly
capitalism and constituted social fascism. The Brezhnev regime
introduced to the world a perverse reinterpretation of
proletarian dictatorship and proletarian internationalism, with
the proclamation of the Brezhnev doctrine of "limited
sovereignty" and Soviet-centered "international proletarian
dictatorship" on the occasion of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was also on this occasion that the
Soviet Union came to be called social-imperialist, socialism in
words and imperialism in deed. With the same arrogance, Brezhnev
deployed hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops along the
Sino-Soviet border.
The Soviet Union under Brezhnev tried to keep a tight rein on its
satellites in Eastern Europe within the Warsaw Pact. Thus, it had
to expend a lot of resources of its own and those of its
satellites in maintaining and equipping half a million Soviet
troops in Eastern Europe. Clearly, the revisionist ruling parties
and regimes were not developing the lively participation and
loyalty of the proletariat and people through socialist progress
but were keeping them in bondage through bureaucratic and
military means in the name of socialism.
The Soviet Union under Brezhnev promoted the principle of
"international division of labor" within the CMEA. This meant the
enforcement of neocolonial specialization in certain lines of
production by particular member-countries other than the Soviet
Union. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the other
CMEA member-countries was no different from that between
imperialism and the semicolonies. This stunted the comprehensive
development of national economies of most of the member countries
although some basic industries had been built and continued to be
built.
Eventually, the Soviet Union started to feel aggrieved that it
had to deliver oil at prices lower than those of the world market
and receive off-quality goods in exchange. So, it continuously
made upward adjustments on the price of oil supplies to the CMEA
client states. At the same time, among the East European
countries, there had been the long-running resentment over the
shoddy equipment and other goods that they were actually getting
from the Soviet Union at a real overprice.
Before the 1970s, the Soviet Union encouraged capitalist-oriented
reforms in its East European satellites but definitely
discouraged any attempt by these satellites to leave the Warsaw
Pact. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union itself wanted to have
a detente with the United States, clinch the "most favored
nation" (MFN) treatment, gain access to new technology and
foreign loans from the United States and the other capitalist
countries. However, in 1972, the Brezhnev regime was rebuffed by
the Jackson-Vannik amendment, which withheld MFN status from the
Soviet Union for preventing Jewish emigration. The regime then
further encouraged its East European satellites to enter into
economic, financial and trade agreements with the capitalist
countries.
During most of the 1970s, these revisionist-ruled countries got
hooked to Western investments, loans and consumer goods. In the
early 1980s, most of them fell into serious economic troubles as
a result of the aggravation of domestic economic problems and the
difficulties in handling their debt burden, which per capita in
most cases was even worse than that of the Philippines. Being
responsible for the economic policies and for their bureaucratic
corruption, the revisionist ruling parties and regimes became
discredited in the eyes of the broad masses of the people and the
increasingly anti-Soviet and anticommunist intelligentsia. The
pro-Soviet ruling parties in Eastern Europe had always been
vulnerable to charges of political puppetry, especially from the
direction of the anticommunist advocates of nationalism and
religion. In the 1970s and 1980s these parties conspicuously
degenerated from the inside in an all-round way through
bourgeoisification and became increasingly the object of public
contempt.
The United States kept on dangling the prospect of MFN status and
other economic concessions to the Soviet Union. Each time the
United States did so, it was able to get something from the
Soviet Union, like its commitment to the Helsinki Accord
(intended to provide legal protection to dissenters in the Soviet
Union) and a draft strategic arms limitation treaty but it never
gave the concessions that the Soviet Union wanted. The United
States simply wanted the Cold War to go on in order to induce or
compel the Soviet Union to waste its resources on the arms race.
The only significant concession that the Soviet Union continued
to get was the purchase of grain and the commercial credit
related to it.
When the CPP leadership decided to explore and seek relations
with the Soviet and East European ruling parties in the middle of
the 1980s, there was the erroneous presumption that the
successors of Brezhnev would follow an anti-imperialist line in
the Cold War of the two superpowers. Thus, the policy paper on
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe praised the Brezhnev line in
hyperbolic terms.
Although the Gorbachov regime would pursue worse revisionist
policies than those of its predecessor, it would become a good
source of information regarding the principal and essential
character of the Brezhnev regime on a comprehensive range of
issues. By using this information from a critical
Marxist-Leninist point of view, we can easily sum up the Brezhnev
regime and at the same time know the antisocialist and
anticommunist direction of the Gorbachov regime in 1985-88.
The Third and Final Stage: The Gorbachov Regime, 1985-91
The Gorbachov regime from 1985 to 1991 marked the third and final
stage in the anti-Marxist and antisocialist revisionist
counterrevolution to restore capitalism and bourgeois
dictatorship.
It involved the prior dissolution of the ruling revisionist
parties and regimes in Eastern Europe, the absorption of East
Germany by West Germany and finally the banning and dispossession
of the CPSU and the disintegration of the Soviet Union no less,
after a dubious coup attempt by Gorbachov's appointees in the
highest state and party positions next only to his.
The counterrevolution was carried out in a relatively peaceful
manner. After all, the degeneration from socialism to capitalism
proceeded for 38 years. Within the last six years, the corrupt
bureaucrats masquerading as communists were ready to peel off
their masks, declare themselves as excommunists and even
anticommunists overnight and cooperate with the longstanding
anticommunists among the intelligentsia and the aggrieved broad
masses of the people in setting up regimes that were openly
bourgeois and antisocialist.
Because they were manipulated and directed by the big bourgeoisie
and the anticommunist intelligentsia, the mass uprisings in
Eastern Europe in 1989 cannot be simply and totally described as
democratic although it is also undeniable that the broad masses
of the people, including the working class and the
intelligentsia, were truly aggrieved and did rise up. The far
bigger mass actions that put Mussolini and Hitler into power or
the lynch mobs unleashed by the Indonesian fascists to massacre
the communists in 1965 do not make a fascist movement democratic.
In determining the character of a mass movement, we take into
account not only the magnitude of mass participation but also the
kind of class leadership involved. Otherwise, the periodic
electoral rallies of the bourgeois reactionary parties which
exclude the workers and peasants from power or even the Edsa mass
uprising cum military mutiny in 1986 would be considered totally
democratic, without the necessary qualifications regarding the
class leadership involved.
It is possible for nonviolent mass uprisings to arise and succeed
when their objective is not to really effect a fundamental change
of the exploitative social system, when one set of bureaucrats is
simply replaced by another set and when the incumbent set of
bureaucrats does not mind the change of administration. It was
only in Romania where there was bloodshed because it was not
completely within the reorganizing that had been done by the
Gorbachovites in 1987 to 1989 in Eastern Europe. Ceaucescu
resisted change as did Honecker to a lesser extent. In the
dissolution of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, the anticommunist
combination of Gorbachov and Yeltsin simply issued the decrees
and did not even bother to conjure any semblance of popular
demand in the form of huge mass uprisings. As the last
revisionist ruler of the Soviet Union, Gorbachov could accelerate
the destruction of the CPSU and the Soviet Union because of the
previous work of Khrushchov and Brezhnev. What he did in the main
in his brief regime was to engage in a systematic campaign of
deception. He described his regime as being engaged in socialist
renewal and at the same time encouraged the forces of capitalist
restoration to do their work under the slogans of democracy and
economic reform.
From time to time, he paid lip service to Marxism-Leninism and
socialism and made frequent protestations that he was a convinced
communist. But in the end he came out openly as an anticommunist.
In his final message as President of the Soviet Union on December
25, 1991, he used the language of the imperialists in the Cold
War to describe his principal achievement, which is "giving
freedom" to the people from "totalitarianism" and "civilizing"
what he implied as the "uncivilized" Soviet state and people.
In laying the ideological premises of his regime, Gorbachov went
back to the strident anti-Stalinism of Khrushchov and described
the Brezhnev period as an interruption of the work initiated by
Khrushchov. He rehabilitated Bukharin and put him up as a source
of wisdom for "economic reforms".
It became the fashion for Gorbachov and his colleagues at various
levels of the CPSU and the state to describe themselves as
"liberal communists" and to attack - under the guise of being
completely anti-Stalin and depicting Stalin as being worse than
Hitler - the entire course of Soviet history. They put forward
propositions in abstract supraclass, universalistic, humanistic
and ahistorical terms and drew from social democracy and
bourgeois liberalism in order to denigrate, deviate from and
attack Marxist-Leninist theory and the proletarian revolutionary
standpoint.
Gorbachov and his colleagues systematically adopted barefaced
anticommunist "advisers" and placed the anticommunists in the
various branches of government, the Congress of People's
Deputies, the institutes and mass media in order to churn out a
constant stream of anticommunist propaganda. Gorbachov himself
took the lead in ridiculing the proletarian revolutionary stand
as outdated and Marxism-Leninism as having no monopoly of the
truth and won the adulation of the officials, ideologues and
publicists of the United States and other capitalist countries as
he used the language of social democracy and bourgeois liberalism
and ultimately U.S. Cold War terminology.
"Glasnost"
The main and essential feature of "glasnost" (openness) was the
crescendo of anticommunist propaganda. The field of propaganda
was monopolized by anticommunism. This was expressed in a variety
of ways, modern revisionist, social-democratic,
bourgeois-liberal, populist, nationalist, fascist, religious,
racist and purely cynical terms. The pluralism of anticommunist
ideas, including the most antidemocratic ones, was described as
democracy. But the key idea in the welter of anticommunist
propaganda was the advocacy of capitalism and bourgeois
liberalism. Gorbachov attacked Stalin to be able by implication
to attack Lenin, Marxist-Leninist theory and the entire course of
Soviet history. But his subalterns explicitly attacked all these
in the entire course of the Gorbachov period.
After eliminating the Brezhnevite holdovers in the Politburo in
the most undemocratic manner, replacing them when they were on
foreign trips or knocking them down at lower levels of the Party
and state bureaucracy, Gorbachov played the middle between the
"conservative" Ligachev who accepted "perestroika" but not
"glasnost" and the "radical progressive" Yeltsin who went gung ho
for both "glasnost" and "perestroika". Then, he used Ligachev in
1987 to push out Yeltsin from the Politburo only to let the
latter continue as his cooperator in attacking the CPSU from the
outside.
In the years leading up to 1989, the anticommunist followers of
Gorbachov invented all kinds of lies against the socialist course
of Soviet history and its great proletarian leaders and clamored
for the rehabilitation of counterrevolutionaries and the freedom
of all kinds of monsters. The people were fed with all kinds of
illusions about a better life under capitalism. In 1989, he had a
new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies dominated by an
anticommunist intelligentsia most of whom were at first formally
communists but would eventually declare themselves as
excommunists and even anticommunists. The congress included from
the very start prominent anticommunists of longstanding.
In early 1990, Gorbachov used the congress to disempower the CPSU
and to give him autocratic presidential powers. In the autumn of
1990 he took the posture of siding with the "conservatives" in
the CPSU and the state against the "radical progressives"
Yakovlev and Schevernadze. But at the same time he agreed to
putting the sovereignty of the Soviet Union under question
through a referendum in early 1991.
The popular voting in the referendum was for the retention of the
Soviet Union. But again he agreed with the nationalist forces in
the various republics to make a new "union treaty" whose terms
(like having separate armies and currencies, etc.) meant the
break up of the Soviet Union. In this period before the alleged
coup to save the Soviet Union, Gorbachov announced that it was
wrong to stress the role of the proletariat and that he was going
to dissolve the CPSU and establish a social-democratic party.
Although the alleged coup of Gorbachov appointees from August 19
to 22, 1991 involved only a few plotters by its very nature,
Gorbachov and Yeltsin collaborated in using it as a pretext for
dissolving the entire CPSU and the Soviet Congress of People's
Deputies. Although the Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Union
were still existing and Gorbachov himself had a presidential term
extending to 1995, he decreed the dissolution of the Soviet Union
and resigned in favor of a commonwealth of independent states
(CIS) still on the planning board. Thus, mouthing the slogan of
democracy, the anticommunist duo of Gorbachov and Yeltsin
autocratically issued decrees, committed the most antidemocratic
acts and carried out their own coup against the Soviet state.
In the first place and in the final analysis, "glasnost" was
devised by the monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie to pave the way
for openly installing the bourgeois class dictatorship. The din
of the petty-bourgeoisie about "democracy" is waning after all
the drumbeating for the restoration of capitalism and the
bourgeois class dictatorship. The monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie
remains in control of the levers of political power and the
economy while the petty bourgeoisie is being relegated to a worse
life of massive unemployment, frustration and misery.
"Perestroika"
Perestroika in reality meant capitalist restructuring and the
disorganization and breakdown of production, despite the avowals
of renewing socialism and raising production through better
management, a campaign against alcoholism and absenteeism, higher
wages and availability of domestic and imported consumer goods,
higher profits for the private entrepreneurs, the expansion and
retooling of the means of production and the conversion of
military enterprises to civilian uses.
The main line of perestroika is the privatization and
marketization of the economy by domestic and foreign investors.
One plan after another (the 500-day Shatalin Plan, the Grand
Bargain, etc.) was considered and made dependent on foreign
direct investments and loans as domestic savings disappeared and
the real income of the people was cut down by inflation due to
the wanton printing of money by Moscow and the price gouging in
the free market. The free marketeers bought cheap or stole from
the state enterprises and emptied the state stores. Thus, the
people were compelled to buy from the free market.
The most favored among the private businesses were the joint
ventures (joint stock companies) with foreign investors and the
private cooperatives. Going into joint ventures with foreign
investors mainly in the importation of consumer goods and in the
repackaging or assembly of these, the high bureaucrats of the
ruling party and the state and their family members appropriated
for themselves state assets and drew from foreign loans in what
may be considered as one of the biggest insider operation and
management theft in the entire history of capitalism. These joint
ventures were no different from the big comprador operations of
high bureaucrats in the Philippines and many other countries in
the third world. However, the most widespread form of business
was the private cooperatives of varying scales in industry,
agriculture and services. Their operations included the
rechanneling of goods and services from the state to the private
sector, small and medium private manufacturing and the private
export of whatever Soviet goods, including oil and weapons, and
the importation of high-grade consumer goods like cars,
computers, videorecorders, etc. At least 50 million people out of
a population of 290 million were registered as members of small,
medium and big private cooperatives. Many people joined these
private cooperatives if only to gain access to basic commodities
which disappeared from the much cheaper state stores.
The capitalist restructuring or economic reforms did not
stimulate production and improve the quality of goods but
aggravated the breakdown of production and brought about scarcity
of the most essential goods. Yet, it was the long-dead Stalin who
got blamed by revisionist and imperialist propaganda for the
economic chaos brought about by perestroika. The corrupt
bureaucrats who continued to call themselves communists connived
with private businessmen more scandalously than ever before in
plundering the economy.
From 1988 to 1990, Gorbachov increased the money supply by more
than 50 percent even as from year to year production had fallen
by 10 to 20 percent or worse and in 1991 alone he increased the
money supply by more than 100 percent amidst a production fall of
more than 20 percent. The Gorbachov regime had to keep on
printing money to maintain the central bureaucracy and the
military in view of inflation, corruption, the nationalist
refusal of the republics to send up taxes and foreign exchange to
the center, the ethnic conflicts and the justifiable workers'
strikes.
At the beginning of the Gorbachov regime, the Soviet foreign debt
was only US$ 30 billion. The previous regimes had not been able
to borrow more because of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Cold
War. But in the period of only six years, the Gorbachov regime
was able to raise the foreign debt level to US billion
(according to the Soviet Central Bank report to the International
Monetary Fund) or to US$ 100 billion (according to the Soviet
Central Bank report to the Group of Seven). In the final year of
1991, the Soviet Union borrowed US billion. In view of the
production breakdown, the foreign funds were used mainly to
finance the importation of consumer goods and the sheer
bureaucratic thievery under the cover of the joint ventures. The
Soviet Union practically became a neocolony of Germany which had
become its main creditor and supplier. Germany accounted for the
biggest bulk of foreign supplies and investments (at least 30
percent as of 1991) in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The
ghost of Hitler can never be more happy with the success of the
German big bourgeoisie. There was a chain reaction of closures of
state enterprises due to the lack of fuel, spare parts and raw
materials; the diversion of funds to import foreign products; the
lack of purchase orders; and the private appropriation of state
assets and funds through real or fake joint ventures. Agriculture
also suffered from the lack of inputs and transport. Conversion
of military to civilian enterprises was negligible. The
military-industrial complex continued to suck up large amounts of
resources. As in Eastern Europe, the economy fell apart in the
Soviet Union, with each part throwing away past advantages of
cooperation and trying to strike disadvantageous deals with the
bourgeoisie abroad.
Massive unemployment surfaced. Hyperinflation started to run at
more than 200 percent before the break up of the Soviet Union and
was expected to run faster after the decontrol of prices
scheduled by Yeltsin for January 2, 1992. Even then more than 100
million Soviet people were living below the poverty line. Most
victimized were the pensioners, children, the youth, the women,
the unemployed and the low-income people. The shortage or absence
of basic necessities was widespread. As in 1990, the leaders of
capitalist restoration shamelessly begged for food aid from
abroad in 1991. On each occasion, the handling of food aid was
attended by corruption as the food was diverted to the free
market.
"New Thinking"
The key element in Gorbachov's "new thinking" in international
relations was "de-ideologization", which actually meant doing
away completely with the proletarian class stand and proletarian
internationalism and capitulating to imperialism under the guise
of cooperation. Gorbachov asserted that imperialism's violent
nature had changed to peaceful and that humanity has integral
interests and a supraclass concern about weapons of mass
destruction, ecology and other issues. Gorbachov's
"de-ideologization" actually meant the total rejection of the
proletarian class stand and the adoption of the bourgeois class
stand. All Marxists recognize the common interests of mankind and
the march of human civilization; and at the same time the fact
that the world and particular societies are dominated by
imperialist and local reactionary classes and that the historic
class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is
still going on. What Gorbachov did was to use abstract,
universalistic and supraclass terms in order to obscure that
historic class struggle and find common cause with imperialism.
He considered "legitimate national interests" of states as the
most important building material in international relations.
After the 70th anniversary of the Great October Socialist
Revolution, he scaled down the international activities of the
Soviet Union related to cooperating with third world countries
and anti-imperialist organizations and movements. Prominent
advisers of his also proposed that the international people's
organizations financed by Soviet organizations could unite with
their counterparts financed by the forces of capitalism to form
bigger "nonideological" organizations. What they meant of course
was outright capitulation to imperialist ideology.
Gorbachov touted the principle of peaceful coexistence among
states, irrespective of ideology and social system. He repudiated
the Brezhnev Doctrine and stressed that other countries as well
as communist parties could decide for themselves. But he was
being hypocritical because Gorbachovite agents busied themselves
in reorganizing and then scuttling the ruling parties and regimes
in Eastern Europe.
He called for an end to the Cold War, for accelerated nuclear
disarmament and reduction of conventional forces and for the
dissolution of the NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Arms reduction
treaties were forged faster than at any previous period in the
Cold War. The Gorbachov regime undertook all these in the vain
hope of attracting foreign investments and new technology to
shore up the Soviet economy. But the Group of Seven took the firm
position that they would not throw good money after bad and shore
up an increasingly decrepit and corrupt bureaucratic economy.
Under the Gorbachov leadership, the Soviet Union collaborated
with the United States and other countries in the settlement of
so-called regional armed conflicts such as those centered in Iran
and Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua. The Soviet Union
committed itself to unilateral withdrawal of military forces in
Eastern Europe and to German reunification in exchange for
economic assistance from the West in the form of direct
investments, loans, technology transfer and trade accommodations.
Among the capitalist powers, Germany gave the most assistance in
the form of loans, consumer supplies and housing aid for Soviet
troops returning from Eastern Europe. But even the funds advanced
for housing these troops became the object of Soviet
mismanagement and theft.
As early as 1987, the revisionist ruling parties and regimes in
Eastern Europe were already being pushed to reorganize themselves
and to put Gorbachovites on top of the Brezhnevites. The word
also went around within and outside the ruling parties and
regimes that the Soviet Union was decided on withdrawing its
forces from Eastern Europe and not interfere in what would happen
in the region. Thus, the anticommunist forces had advance notice
of what they could do under the new circumstances. They could
play on the real grievances of the people and bring down the
already much-discredited ruling parties and regimes.
The socioeconomic and political crisis of the various revisionist
regimes and the wide open knowledge that the Soviet Union was no
longer interested in the preservation of the Warsaw Pact and the
rouble-controlled CMEA were sufficient ground for the
anticommunist forces to activate themselves and grow. The
increasingly clear message from 1987 to 1989 that the Soviet
Union would not intervene in any popular action against the local
regimes gave the anticommunist forces the confidence to aim for
their toppling. Most important of all, the overwhelming majority
of the revisionist bureaucrats in the ruling party and the state
(with the exception of a few like Ceaucescu who was relatively
independent of the CPSU and Honecker and Zhikhov who were
longtime Brezhnevites) were just too willing to drop off their
communist masks, retain their privileges, exploit the new
opportunities and avoid the wrath of an already aggrieved people.
In the critical references of this discussion to the
responsibilities of the Gorbachov regime and the East European
satellite regimes in the collapse of the latter, there should be
no misunderstanding that we wish a certain policy or a certain
flow of events to have gone another way. We are merely describing
at this point the final stage of the unmasking and
self-destruction of the revisionist parties and regimes.
Next only to the destruction of the CPSU and the Soviet Union,
the biggest service done by the Gorbachov regime to the
capitalist powers was the rapid delivery of Eastern Europe to
them and the destruction of the Warsaw Pact and the CMEA.
Within the final year of its existence, the Soviet Union under
Gorbachov supported the United States in carrying out a war of
aggression in the Gulf region and in asserting itself as the
unrivaled policeman of the world.
Gorbachov fully revealed himself in 1991. The destructive
consequences to the Soviet Union of his kind of leadership became
very clear. It is untenable for any revolutionary to make an
apologia for him and to try to make him out as a hero. Those who
had been deceived into believing that Gorbachov was engaged in
socialist renewal should take a long hard look at the
incontrovertible fact that he completed the process of capitalist
restoration started by Khrushchov and presided over the
destruction of the Soviet Union.
The officials, ideologues and propagandists of imperialism and
reaction continue to hail Gorbachov as one of the greatest men of
the 20th century for bringing about "democracy" in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed they have cause to rejoice. He
has brought about the flagrant restoration of capitalism and
bourgeois dictatorship. The peoples of the former Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe are now thrown open to further capitalist
exploitation and oppression, suffer the pangs of hunger and
greater loss of freedom and face increased political turmoil,
widening civil war and military fascism.
The Commonwealth of Independent States
The commonwealth of independent states (CIS) that has replaced
the Soviet Union is dominated by Russia, which is flaunting the
old czarist flag of Great-Russian chauvinism, and is afflicted
with serious contradictions between Russia and the other
republics, among republics with common borders, between Russian
enclaves and local nationalities in non-Russian republics and
among different nationalities within each of the republics. The
contradictions involve political, economic, financial, security,
ethnic and border issues. There is political chaos all over the
so-called commonwealth. Serious differences between Russia and
Ukraine have already arisen regarding economic and financial
issues and on the question of dividing the Soviet army, navy and
air force, the handling of nuclear weapons and border issues on
land and sea. There are independence movements among minority
nationalities in Russia and civil wars in Georgia and between
Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The economic chaos has been aggravated by liberalizing prices on
January 2. The prices of many basic commodities have multiplied
up to more than twenty times. The state stores are being emptied
by backdoor sales to the free market. Even food aid from abroad
has flowed into the free market. More than half of the population
have fallen below the poverty line and are in danger of starving.
Ninety per cent of the population is expected to fall below the
poverty line. Under these circumstances, street demonstrations
and workers' strikes are occurring against the openly capitalist
regimes. The trade unions are agitated by the severely oppressive
and exploitative conditions and have begun to conduct strikes on
a wide scale. The Unity for Leninism and Communist Ideals, the
United Front of the Working People, the Russian Workers'
Communist Party and the Communist Party of Bolsheviks in
Leningrad (St. Petersburg) have been among the most militant in
staging mass actions against the Russian bourg eois regime of
Yeltsin.
In the Soviet Union, more than 90 percent of the major industries
are still owned by the state. This is also true in the case of
the East European countries, with the exception of Poland whose
privatisation has gone fastest and whose state-owned enterprises
are still about 65 percent, according to one report. This
continuing predominance of state-owned enterprises does not mean
socialism. Since a long time ago, many of these enterprises have
acquired a capitalist character. They have long come under the
control and have become instruments of the bureaucrat capitalists
and the private entrepreneurs although these are state-owned. The
ongoing privatisation of these state enterprises is slowed down
by the dearth of genuine private venture capital, the
disappearance of savings among the people and the lack of foreign
interest in acquiring outmoded plants and investing in new ones.
The excommunist bourgeoisie and the foreign investors are most
interested in acquiring at scandalously low prices those state
assets that yield quick and large profits. Inefficient and
decrepit state enterprises are maintained only as they are still
needed and continue being the milking cows of private
entrepreneurs (e.g., steel and other metals, energy and other raw
materials, transport, etc.) Closures and reduced production are
continuing at an accelerated pace. In the process, millions of
workers are laid off. There is a process of deindustrialization
throwing back the former Soviet Union or the republics of the
so-called CIS and Eastern Europe into the quagmire of third world
capitalism.
A strong political and economic center is absent in the CIS. But
in the meantime, there is a strong military center because the
central command of the former Soviet armed forces is retained.
Even the leaders of the capitalist countries who are worried
about the nuclear and other strategic weapons insist that these
be under a single military command. However, the political and
economic chaos can induce the military officers to take matters
into their hands as the military rank and file and the broad
masses of the people are already gravely discontented.
It is still a matter of conjecture for outside observers whether
there will be a social upheaval in the tradition of the
Bolsheviks (the military rank and file linking up with the
workers' organizations) or a coup to install military fascism
over the entire scope of the so-called commonwealth or in a
series of republics (like now in Georgia). The prevalent view is
that the new bourgeoisie inside and outside the armed forces is
so powerful that for the time being the likelihood for military
fascism to rise is greater than the return to the socialist road
if there is going to be any new drastic development.
IV. Certain Lessons from the Collapse of Modern Revisionism
in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
It is of crucial importance to make a precise description of the
ruling parties and regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, the crisis that conspicuously beset them since the early
1980s and their collapse from 1989 to 1991. These ruling parties
and regimes were revisionist. Their crisis and collapse are not
those of socialism but of modern revisionism or capitalist
restoration masquerading as socialism. The blatant restoration of
capitalism and the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie are the
indubitable proof. The unraveling of the revisionist systems and
the unfolding of the truth in the few years before the collapse
occurred right before our eyes.
There is ideological and political confusion if the crisis and
collapse of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes are
described as those of socialism or Stalinism rather than of
modern revisionism. Such a description would continue to pass off
modern revisionism as socialism. All Marxist-Leninists must
firmly recognize the fact that modern revisionism had undermined
and prevailed over socialism long before the former itself
plunged into a crisis and led to the collapse of the revisionist
ruling parties and regimes from 1989 to 1991.
One may speak of a crisis of socialism only in the thinking of
some of those who presume modern revisionism to be socialism and
observe the crisis and collapse of the ruling revisionist parties
and regimes. The imperialists, the revisionists themselves and
the bourgeois intelligentsia simplistically call the crisis and
collapse of these anti-Stalin parties and regimes as the "crisis
of Stalinism" or the "Stalinist model of socialism". Stalin has
been dead for 38 years and a process of "de-Stalinization" has
been going on for the last 35 years. It is preposterous that long
after his death Stalin is still being blamed for what his
detractors have done or not done all these years in order to
promote modern revisionism and restore capitalism. This is pure
obscurantism and personality cult in reverse! The merits and
demerits of any leader must be considered only within his period
of responsibility, unless the objective is not to make a
historical assessment but to demonize a leader and use psywar to
attack Marxism-Leninism and socialism in a bourgeois
personalistic manner. The modern revisionists should not be
allowed to cover up their responsibility within their own period
of rule. As a matter of fact, Stalin's great achievements in
socialist construction and defense of the Soviet Union are
diametrically opposed to the restoration of capitalism and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union by the modern revisionists.
We must draw the correct lessons from the betrayal and sabotage
of socialism by the modern revisionists from Khrushchov through
Brezhnev to Gorbachov. We must combat those forces and elements
that wish to destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement
from within by aping Gorbachov and the like and opposing the
basic revolutionary principles of the Party.
The Antirevisionist Line
The reconsideration of the revisionist ruling parties as
Marxist-Leninist and the revisionist regimes as socialist since
1982 by certain elements within the Party has generated
misunderstanding of scientific socialism and a deviation from the
antirevisionist line of the Party. This must be rectified in view
of the undeniable fact of the collapse of the revisionist ruling
parties and regimes and in connection with the correction of the
exaggerated, incorrect and futile notion that these parties and
regimes could extend assistance for accelerating the victory of
the Philippine revolution.
As a result of the collapse of these parties and regimes, the CPP
is ever more resolved to adhere to the theory and practice of
Marxism-Leninism and to pursue the antirevisionist line and
persevere in armed revolution. The anticommunists who seek to use
the collapse of modern revisionism as an invalidation and
complete negation of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism
deserve nothing but contempt.
The CPP upholds the fact that Marxist-Leninist theory has
correctly guided the proletarian revolutionaries and more than a
billion people to victory in new-democratic revolution and in
socialist revolution and construction. As far as the Philippines
is concerned, the working class is the leading class in the
new-democratic and socialist stages of the revolution. The
advanced detachment of this class is the CPP. Without this party,
the revolutionary mass movement of the people would not have
resurged in Philippine history along the anti-imperialist and
antifeudal line, with a socialist perspective. The petty
bourgeois groups that seek to confuse, discredit, weaken and
destroy the CPP can only continue being servitors of the
oppressors and exploiters without the Party and the toiling
masses of workers and peasants carrying out the revolution most
determinedly.
What the CPP considers now as the greatest challenge in
theoretical work among all proletarian revolutionaries, including
Filipino communists, is learning lessons from the long-term and
peaceful restoration of capitalism in socialist countries and
understanding the way of continuing the revolution, combating
modern revisionism and preventing the restoration of capitalism
in socialist society as well as of fighting for socialism
wherever it has been replaced by capitalism.
In countries where modern revisionism has had its way and
restored capitalism, the challenge in theoretical and practical
work among proletarian revolutionaries is to bring back socialism
and bring it to a new and higher level. The forces of socialism
can probably win again only after undergoing the violence of
capitalist oppression and exploitation and defeating this through
revolutionary violence. There is yet no historical example of a
nonexploiting society replacing an exploiting class society
without revolutionary violence although it has been demonstrated
repeatedly in history that a higher form of society can
degenerate into a lower form through peaceful evolution.
In the course of both the new-democratic and socialist stages of
the Philippines, the basic factors of counterrevolution (big
bourgeoisie and landlord class) are never obliterated completely
(especially in the sphere of ideology and social psychology) by
the main factors of revolution (working class and peasantry). And
there are intermediate factors (urban petty bourgeoisie and
national bourgeoisie) that operate between the two poles of
revolution and counterrevolution. The main factors of revolution
can come on top of those of counterrevolution and in the process
win over the intermediate factors, which in turn exert both
positive and negative influences on the main factors of
revolution.
In the complexity of waging the new-democratic and socialist
stages of the revolution, the proletarian party must uphold its
revolutionary integrity through adherence to Marxism-Leninist
theory, from philosophy down to strategy and tactics, and must
always conduct concrete analysis of concrete conditions in order
to lead the broad masses of the people from victory to victory.
Marxism-Leninism is on the high road of human civilization,
cherishing the heritage from the past, availing of all current
factors that make for progress; and always aiming for a better
future. But it is wrong to use such terms of idealism as
universal humanism, classless populism, supraclass state,
pacifism and such other abstract terms in order to obscure and
negate the proletarian class stand and in fact give way to the
hegemony of the bourgeoisie and other backward forces in the real
world.
It is wrong to declare prematurely the end of exploiting classes
and class struggle while in fact they continue to exist both
domestically and internationally during the entire historical
epoch of socialism. The seeming disappearance of the exploiting
classes by socio-economic definition does not mean that the
proletarian character of the ruling party and the state has
become unnecessary and that the intelligentsia automatically
becomes proletarian in socialist society. In fact, the
bourgeoisie first reemerges through the bureaucracy and the
intellectual sphere as petty bourgeois and then in the social
economy as bureaucrat capitalists colluding with the private
capitalists.
It is wrong to propagate, under the cover of idealist and
metaphysical terms, mechanical materialism, specifically in the
form of the theory of productive forces which posits that the
development of the "productive forces" can onesidedly and
automatically bring about socialist progress. Revolution in the
relations of production as well as in the superstructure must
take the lead over production. Otherwise the idea gains ground
that socialism with a low technological and economic level can
advance only through domestic capitalist-oriented economic
reforms and submission to the industrial capitalist countries.
The Proletarian Dictatorship
Upon the basic completion of the new-democratic revolution
through the seizure of political power in the Philippines, the
people's democratic government is established. This is the form
that the proletarian dictatorship takes in consonance with the
basic worker-peasant alliance under proletarian leadership. Thus,
the socialist revolution can begin in every aspect of society.
The building of a socialist society and not a "national
democratic society" begins, even if there are still transitory
bourgeois democratic measures to undertake.
The people's democratic government or socialist state must of
course serve the entire people. But it cannot be really classless
or supraclass. There is a definite class hegemony, either
proletarian or bourgeois. For communists to waiver about this is
to concede to the initiative of the bourgeoisie and its
intellectual and political agents. The socialist state is
categorically a class dictatorship of the proletariat to preclude
the counterrevolution of the exploiting classes and make
instantly possible the substance and process of democracy for the
entire people. The party must never relinquish its leadership
over the entire state and the people's army and must retain its
Party organization therein until the time comes for the state to
wither away, after a whole historical epoch of building
socialism, defeating imperialism and neocolonialism and preparing
the way for communism.
The modern revisionist bureaucrats systematically opposed the
concept of proletarian dictatorship under the cover of populism
and "no more exploiting classes and no more class struggle" or
the "dying out of the class struggle" in order to resurrect the
bourgeoisie within the bureaucracy as well as in society through
capitalist-oriented reforms. Proletarian dictatorship should
comprehensively guarantee national freedom of the people against
imperialism; class freedom of the exploited against the
exploiting classes; and individual freedom against the ever
potential alienation and abuse of state power.
The socialist constitution and the proletarian dictatorship must
guarantee the civil rights of individuals and organizations that
adhere to socialism, promote public participation in the affairs
of the state and put restraints on the possible abuse of power by
the state and its officials. These restraints include the basic
freedoms, electoral process, popular power of recall, definite
terms of office, age limits and restrictions on personal incomes
and privileges and against any kind of privilege or favor which
is not based on merit.
No elective national leader may be elected for a period longer
than two five-year terms and all officials may retire optionally
at 65 and obligatorily at 70. Any individual or organization has
the right to express anything in any legal way, be this criticism
or constructive proposal without fear of reprisal. Due process is
guaranteed. A person is presumed innocent, unless proven guilty
in a court of law on the basis of evidence and through a fair
trial. Thus, in the popular struggle against counterrevolution,
the target is narrowed and the danger of abuse is averted.
But as already demonstrated in the collapse of the revisionist
ruling parties and regimes, it is incorrect to promote individual
freedom outside of the clear framework of anti-imperialism
(national freedom) and socialism (freedom from the exploiting
classes). Individual freedom should not become the license for
the imperialists and the local bourgeoisie and other
reactionaries to oppose socialism and regain control over
society.
In the entire historical epoch of socialism, the proletariat must
see to it that the leading role of the proletariat is upheld in
the constitution. Subsequent to the democratic coalition
government by consensus, there can be an upper house of congress
as the house of the working people under proletarian leadership
and a lower house of congress as the house of the district
representatives of the people. Retired but still mentally able
revolutionary leaders can be in advisory councils enjoying high
moral authority, most useful in any moment of constitutional
crisis that may threaten the revolution.
The proletarian revolutionary party should never be thought of as
just any party, comparable to any party in the multiplicity of
permitted parties in the bourgeois political system as in the
current multiparty system of the Philippines which is actually
monopolized by political factions of the exploiting classes. The
Party is a revolutionary party that seeks and effects a radical
rupture from private ownership of the means of production and all
exploiting societies which have existed in various forms for
millennia.
Notwithstanding the radical rupture sought and the mission of the
working class to build socialism in a whole historical epoch,
working class parties which come to power have limited their
memberships to a small part of society (typically five to ten
percent of the population), with the Party expanding its
influence in society through mass organizations and state
agencies. It is understandable that the Party is a small part of
society in the course of the fierce struggle to seize power
because of the coercive power of the reactionary state and the
dangers to life, limb and liberty to Party members and that there
is a limit to the expansion of Party membership soon after the
seizure of political power to avert the avalanche of overnight
communists and opportunists coming into the Party. But after the
consolidation of political power and proletarian control of all
aspects of society, especially the educational and cultural
system, there is no reason why the Party should not increase its
membership up to the point of including the majority of the
people.
The Party has a cadre and mass character now. It should continue
to be so after the seizure of political power. The cadres can
ensure the high quality of the Party and the mass membership, the
strong democratic foundation formed by workers and peasants. The
Party cannot automatically ensure its high revolutionary quality
by simply remaining small. On the other hand, it is liable to be
swamped by an excessively high proportion of intelligentsia,
including fictitious communists. Worse, the party will be
increasingly regarded as a small and privileged part of society.
If the Party remains small, it can be challenged any time by any
political group or movement which has a comparatively large or
even larger membership; or by the traditionally dominant church
which registers most or much of the population as its members and
claims the religious or moral allegiance of these people.
In accordance with the historic mission of the working class to
build socialism, the representatives of the Party must be assured
of at least one third of elective positions in the state
alongside the representatives of the mass organizations of the
working people and other sections of society. But within every
slot allotted to the major components of society, the people
inside and outside the Party must be able to choose candidates
from a list in an electoral process.
With a large mass membership, the Party can confidently engage in
multiparty cooperation along the united front line. The worst
kind of model is a political system of only one party which
includes only a small fraction of society. The socialist society
must be able to allow the existence and cooperation of several
parties which offer lists of candidates subject to the consensus
in the socialist united front, the electoral will of the people
and the constitutional framework of socialist revolution and
construction.
Socialist Revolution and Construction
Upon the basic completion of the new-democratic revolution
through the seizure of political power, the proletariat and the
people under the leadership of the Party can begin socialist
revolution and construction. The means of production and
distribution owned by the imperialists, big compradors and
landlords are put under public ownership. The strategic
enterprises and the main lines of production and distribution are
nationalized. These comprise the initial base for socialist
construction. Then the socialist state sector of the productive
system can be expanded with further investments from the
available domestic capital, export income and productive foreign
borrowing.
But there are bourgeois-democratic economic reforms that still
need to be undertaken as transitory measures, such as land reform
and concessions to peasants of all strata and petty and middle
bourgeois nonmonopoly commodity producers. These reforms and
concessions do not mean the building of a "national-democratic
economy" in lieu of a socialist economy. The cooperativization of
agriculture and nonagricultural enterprises as well as joint
state-private ownership can be carried out from one stage to a
higher one in conjunction with socialist construction and further
industrialization.
In view of the fact that so far in history socialist economies
have been established upon a low economic and technological level
and worse after a ruinous war, the proletarian revolutionary
party is obliged to adopt transitory measures. How long these
measures should run depends on the concrete conditions. In the
Soviet Union, Lenin had to adopt the New Economic Policy. And
Stalin subsequently pioneered in drawing up and implementing the
series of five-year plans of socialist construction. He succeeded
in building a socialist industrial economy. But even after a
socialist industrial economy had been established, the modern
revisionists misrepresented Lenin's New Economic Policy as the
way to socialism rather than as a mere transitory measure. Thus,
Khrushchov, Brezhnev and Gorbachov made this misrepresentation by
using the name of Lenin against Lenin. They justified the
retrogression to capitalist-oriented reforms by counterposing
Lenin's transitional policy to Stalin's program to build
publicly-owned heavy and basic industries and collectivize
agriculture in a planned way. After the New Economic Policy
served its purpose, Stalin carried out fullscale socialist
construction. It was prompt and absolutely necessary to do so in
the face of the growth of capitalism threatening the socialist
revolution. Anti-socialist critics decry overinvestment in heavy
and basic industries, the suppression of the rebellious rich
peasants and the exploitation of the peasantry. But they fail to
mention that the hard work, the struggle against the
counterrevolutionaries and the sacrifice resulted in the raising
of production and standard of living, the mechanization of
agriculture and the expansion of urban life in so short a period
of time. If Bukharin had had his way and prolonged the NEP, the
Soviet Union would have generated an uncontrollable bourgeoisie
and a widespread rich peasantry to overpower the proletariat,
would have had less economic well-being and less defense
capability, would have been an easier prey to Hitler and would
have been attacked earlier by Nazi Germa ny.
After World War II, China under the leadership of Mao Zedong and
the Communist Party of China was able to demonstrate that there
could be a well-balanced growth of agriculture as the foundation
of the economy, heavy industry as the leading factor and light
industry as the bridging factor between the first two. The line
of Mao was to provide as quickly as possible the producer and
consumer goods for the people, especially the peasant masses. But
even Mao was unfairly accused by modern revisionists of
industrial overinvestment and premature cooperativization. At any
rate, the Chinese example under the leadership of Mao bettered
the Soviet example under the leadership of Stalin in
well-balanced development in a poor country engaged in socialist
construction. The theory and practice of scientific socialism,
therefore, is ever developing.
All modern revisionists are carried away by the theory of
"productive forces" and economism. They prate about the law of
value but at the same time they obscure the critical Marxist
theory of surplus value and the creative line of using what is
otherwise private profit as social profit and of converting what
is otherwise an anarchic yet monopolistic production for private
profit into a system of planned production for use and for the
benefit of the entire society.
Marxists have always agreed with Adam Smith and his followers
that the value of a commodity is equivalent to the average
socially necessary labor time and that the exchange value (price)
is realized in the market. In the socialist system, there is a
system of wage differentials paid according to quantity and
quality of work done. Within the system of public ownership of
the means of production and economic planning, the new value
created is allocated for the wages fund for consumption, economic
reinvestment not only to cover depreciation but also expansion of
production, general welfare (education, health, infrastructure,
etc.), administration and national defense.
Aside from the wage system with differentials which corresponds
to the system of commodity values, the commodities produced
incorporate inputs which are bought from other parts of the
domestic or world market at certain prices and which are taken
into account in the market price of the commodities. Price
comparisons can also be made with similar commodities produced
abroad.
The socialist system of production has proven to be effective in
creating full employment, attaining high rates of economic
growth, responding to the basic needs of the people and providing
social services until a new bourgeoisie starts to appropriate an
increasing part of the surplus product and develops a taste for
highgrade consumer goods which it at first acquires through
institutional buying from abroad.
In addition to the high consumption and excessive privileges of
the new bourgeoisie, another big drain is the misallocation of
resources towards military expenditures because of the
imperialist threat. This in fact constituted the biggest drain on
the resources of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe under the
long reign of Brezhnev. But this is obscured by imperialist
propaganda whenever it asserts that socialism is inherently
flawed or that the so-called Stalinist model pursued by the
modern revisionists has failed. In going for the arms race, the
Brezhnev regime deviated from the concepts of people's defense
and all-round consolidation adhered to by Stalin when the Soviet
Union was militarily weaker and faced bigger threats from the
capitalist powers.
The fact is that the socialist economies progressed for a certain
number of decades and it would take another number of decades for
the modern revisionists to make these economies retrogress into
capitalism, under such bourgeois notions as stimulating
production and improving the quality of production through
private enterprise and the free market.
The adoption of capitalist-oriented reforms to "supplement" and
"assist" socialist economic development is thereby wrongly
rationalized. But the bourgeoisie, the corrupt bureaucrats and
rich peasants are recreated and generated to undermine and
destroy socialism from within. After a certain period of
liberalization of the economy, the bourgeois forces can demand
further privatisation and marketization more vigorously and
ultimately claim political power as in Eastern Europe and Soviet
Union.
But usually at the beginning of their effort to subvert the
socialist economy, when there are yet no significant number of
private entrepreneurs within the country, they wage a campaign
for learning "efficient management" from capitalist countries
(unmindful of the wasteful business cycles and wars and the
centuries of exploiting the proletariat, the colonies and the
spheres of influence), for expanded trade with the capitalist
countries, foreign investments, loans and technology transfer and
therefore for an investment law attractive to the multinational
firms and banks as well as to the domestic bourgeoisie which must
be promoted if even the foreign bourgeoisie is allowed to enjoy
the freedom of investing and owning assets in the country and
hiring local people.
Without having to breach or abandon basic socialist principles
and without having to enlarge domestic and foreign private
ownership of the means of production, it is possible to use wage
differentials and bonuses as incentives for raising the quantity
and quality of goods according to reliable and accurate
information on productive capacity and consumer demand and
according to the resultant economic plan, to satisfy the basic
needs of the people first and then to proceed to produce nonbasic
goods for improving the standard of living, to build one
generation of better housing after another as a lifetime
incentive and to decentralize economic activities with better
results.
The production of both basic and nonbasic consumer goods are
complementary and interactive. When basic needs are satisfied and
private savings mount, the people start looking for things to
spend on in order to improve or make their lives more
interesting. Some highgrade consumer goods can be locally
produced. Others can be imported without prejudicing the priority
given to the development of the entire economy and the
importation of essential producer and consumer goods.
In the case of the Soviet Union, before there could be a
Gorbachov, there was the prolonged period of Brezhnev in which
the new bourgeoisie developed domestically and resources were
wasted in the arms race and in the costly commitments abroad
under the theory of defending the Soviet Union by developing the
strategic offense capability and by being able to wage wars
abroad.
We have seen that the concept of people's defense or people's war
against an aggressor, within the people's self-reliant
capabilities, within their own national borders and without
undermining the growth of the socialist economy, still
constitutes the correct policy. The Soviet corps of research
scientists, engineers and technologists was the largest in the
world. They made great advances in basic research, experiments
and prototyping. But only those advances suitable to the high
technology requirements of the arms race were used in a big way.
And because of disorientation and some false sense of economy in
civil production, old and outmoded equipment tended to be kept
and reproduced so that this exceedingly important area of the
economy was deprived of the benefits of high technology.
In a socialist economy, the planners must adopt a reasonable
measure for depreciation of productive equipment, durable
consumer goods and infrastructures so that there is room for
innovation and enlivening of production. It is not true that
there has to be competition among capitalists in order to
generate new and better products. The Soviet Union was able to
keep on raising its military and space technology in a planned
way.
In carrying out socialist construction, after the transitory
period of reviving the economy from the ravages of war and
completing the bourgeois-democratic reforms, we shall uphold the
principle of instituting the socialist relations of production to
liberate the productive forces and promote their growth; and
after having advanced along the socialist line and gone beyond
certain transitory measures, we shall never retrogress to the
revisionist line of using capitalist-oriented reforms to push
socialism forward.
The Cultural Revolution
In continuing the revolution, combating revisionism and other
counterrevolutionary forces and preventing the restoration of
capitalism in socialist society, the cultural revolution must be
carried out coextensively and interactively with the political
and socioeconomic revolution. If we are to avoid the errors which
caused the failure of the great proletarian cultural revolution
in China, we must grasp that the cultural revolution is a
persuasive democratic process with Marxist-Leninist theory in the
lead carried out along the general line of the people's
revolutionary struggle, that the process is a protracted one and
so many times more protracted than either the people's war or
socialist economic construction and should not be rushed in order
not to be persecutory; and that to preempt anarchy institutions
like the Party, the state, the people's organizations, the
educational system, the mass media and so on should take on
responsibility for leadership over the cultural mass movement,
with due process rigorously followed and the rights of
individuals and groups respected. The cultural revolution is an
important process for keeping high the proletarian revolutionary
consciousness and the spirit of selflessness and service to the
people. As one generation after another draws away from the
accomplished process of seizing political power from the
reactionaries and the heroic efforts to establish a socialist
society, those who are in the bureaucracy of the ruling party,
the state and even in the mass organizations can degenerate into
a new bourgeoisie and adopt modern revisionism and other
retrograde ideas and policies. The youth and intelligentsia can
adopt petty-bourgeois attitudes and grow cynical towards those in
power and fall for anticommunist views and adulate the ideas and
fashions of the domestic and international bourgeoisie.
Even while we are still engaged in the new-democratic revolution
in the Philippines, we are already carrying out a cultural
revolution among the people. We are promoting a cultural
revolution with a national, democratic and scientific character.
At the core of this revolutionary mass phenomenon are proletarian
revolutionary cadres guided by the theory of Marxism-Leninism.
Our cultural revolution of a new-democratic type is distinct from
and yet continuous with the socialist cultural revolution. Like
now, we shall continue to combine Party leadership, the mass
movement and a strong sense of the rights of the individual
within the anti-imperialist and socialist framework. We shall
take all the necessary time, no matter how long, to raise the
people's revolutionary consciousness from one level to another
through formal and informal educational and cultural activities
and to isolate and defeat the ideas that run counter to
socialism.
In socialist society, we shall carry out the cultural revolution
to promote the proletarian revolutionary stand and the spirit of
service to the people. The cultural revolution shall ceaselessly
put revolutionary politics (patriotic and proletarian) and moral
incentive in command of production and other social activities.
The revolutionization of the superstructure shall complement and
interact with the revolutionization of the mode of production.
When the bourgeoisie is deprived of its economic and political
power, it seeks to make a comeback at first in the ideological
and cultural fields. When it succeeds at ideological revision and
cultural pollution, then it can undertake the changes in
political and economic policies which favor capitalist
restoration. The bourgeoisie is most effective when it can work
through unremoulded and degenerate elements within the state and
the ruling party. The proletarian revolutionaries have therefore
to be ever vigilant and resolute in maintaining the correct line
and in militantly waging the socialist cultural revolution.
The main contradiction in socialist society is the one between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The old bourgeois class and
the landlord class are easy to identify and the people are
vigilant towards them. So the members of these defeated classes
would rather encourage the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy to
start adopting the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking and behavior.
On the basis of this, the bourgeoisie can regain lost ground,
especially in the ideological and cultural fields. When the
proletariat loses the fight in these fields, the already
pronounced bourgeois revisionists can push the anti-proletarian
change of political and economic policies under the guise of
transcending classes and class struggle.
By that time, the bourgeoisie shall have been well on the way of
reimposing itself on the proletariat and the people and restoring
capitalism. The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe proves that the victory of socialism is not
irreversible in the era of imperialism and proletarian
revolution. All proletarian revolutionaries can learn important
lessons from the way the bourgeoisie has come on top of the
proletariat in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through
peaceful evolution from within the state and the party and by
using the state against the party, particularly the dwindling
proletarian revolutionaries in the party.
In building socialism as the long-term preparation for communism,
we shall strive to reduce the gap and solve the contradictions
between the proletariat and peasantry, between mental and
physical labor and between urban and rural life. We shall do so
by mustering the capabilities of the proletariat and the rest of
the people, utilizing science and technology and fostering a
socialist civilization.
We owe to Mao the theory of continuing revolution, combating
modern revisionism and preventing capitalist restoration in
socialist society; and the application of this theory in the
great proletarian cultural revolution, which succeeded for a
number of years until the errors accumulated and resulted in a
Rightist backlash. If the positive aspects are upheld and the
negative aspects are corrected, then Mao's theory and practice of
the cultural revolution can be the treasury of knowledge on the
basic principles and methods for continuing the revolution in
socialist society. The theoretical work on the cultural
revolution is a wide and open field for study.
The failure of a revolution is never the permanent end of it. The
Paris Commune of 1871 succeeded briefly and failed. But the
theory of class struggle and proletarian dictatorship was never
invalidated. After 46 years, the Great October Socialist
Revolution triumphed. Then, the forces of fascism wiped out the
working class parties in many European countries and eventually
invaded the Soviet Union. But soon after World War II, several
socialist countries arose in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Modern revisionism would emerge to afflict a number of socialist
countries. And finally from 1989 to 1991, we witnessed the
collapse of revisionist parties and regimes. This confirms the
correctness of the Marxist-Leninist criticism and repudiation of
modern revisionism and eliminates a certain number of revisionist
parties and regimes which have caused theoretical and political
confusion in the socialist and anti-imperialist movement.
Unfortunately, the capitalist powers have become more arrogant
and cruel upon the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a
superpower rival of the United States. But they are beset by the
crisis of overproduction and contradictions are growing between
them and their client states in the imperialist and neocolonial
framework. In fact the continuing crisis of the countries in
which capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship have been restored in
a blatant manner, has all along been part of the global
capitalist crisis. The former Soviet republics and the East
European countries have become hotbeds of nationalism, ethnic
conflicts, militarism and civil war and lay bare the rottenness
of the capitalist system.
Upon the aggravation of capitalist oppression and exploitation,
the anti-imperialist and socialist cause is bound to surge to a
new and higher level. The high technology in the hands of the
capitalist powers has already deepened and aggravated the crisis
of overproduction. The trade war among the capitalist powers is
developing in the wake of the end of the bipolar Cold War. The
United States is disturbing the balance among the capitalist
powers as it seeks to revive its productive capacity, expand its
trade and solve its huge deficit and debt problems in an
environment where the other capitalist powers are holding tightly
on to their productive and trade advantages and all neocolonial
client states (except a few earners of export surplus due to U.S.
market accommodations) in the South and East are long depressed
and find no relief from deficits, debt problem and austerity
measures.
For sometime, notwithstanding the disappearance of the
two-superpower rivalry, the social turbulence and political
violence will increase throughout the world. From these will
reemerge the anti-imperialist and socialist movement at a new and
higher level. The increased oppression and exploitation of the
peoples of the world can only serve to generate the revolutionary
movement. What has come about as a hostile environment for this
movement is a precondition and a challenge for its resurgence.
Proletarian Internationalism
The ever worsening crisis of the Philippine ruling system
provides the fertile ground for the continuance and growth in
strength of the revolutionary mass movement led by the Communist
Party of the Philippines. But to gain total victory in the
new-democratic revolution and proceed to the socialist
revolution, the Party must take fully into account the
international situation and draw further strength from the world
proletariat and other positive forces abroad.
In international relations, we must be guided above all by the
principle of proletarian internationalism. Especially in the
current situation, we must unite and close ranks with the working
class parties and organizations that adhere to Marxism-Leninism
and are waging revolutionary struggles in their respective
countries.
The ever worsening crisis of the world capitalist system and the
ever escalating oppression and exploitation are prodding the
proletarian revolutionaries and peoples in countries to reaffirm
the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism. Even now, it is
clear that the current decade is one of social turmoil in the
world capitalist system and popular resistance to neocolonialism.
It is not going to be a decade of Pax Americana and capitulation
by the forces of revolutionary change.
More than a billion people (a quarter of humanity) continue to
live and work in societies that consider themselves socialist and
are led by parties that consider themselves communist. The crisis
of world capitalist system shall have become far worse than now
before the degree or semblance of socialism that exists in the
world can be erased.
The disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their counterparts
abroad is part of the crisis of the world capitalist system and
is in fact a positive development in the sense that it provides
alerting lessons to all proletarian revolutionaries, demonstrate
the folly of straying from Marxism-Leninism and from the road of
socialism and argues against the illusions that the modern
revisionists have conjured for a long time on a world scale.
In accordance with the principle of proletarian internationalism,
the Communist Party of the Philippines is more than ever
determined to engage in all possible ways to develop mutual
understanding, fraternal relations, and mutual support and
cooperation with all working class parties and proletarian
revolutionaries the world over.
The Party is grateful to all fraternal proletarian parties for
the moral and concrete support that they extend to the resolute
revolutionary struggle of the Filipino people and for recognizing
the Party as one of the advanced detachments of the world
proletariat which can contribute to the restrengthening of the
world socialist and anti- imperialist movement in theory and
practice. Like today when it sincerely follows the slogan,
"Workers of all countries, unite!" and gives uppermost importance
to the world unity of workers through party-to-party relations,
the Party shall uphold proletarian internationalism as the
highest principle and general line of international relations
when it is in power and shall give the uppermost importance to
the world unity of workers through party-to-party relations as
well as through the relations of the socialist state with other
socialist states.
Fidelity to proletarian internationalism is a necessary measure
of whether a party is Marxist-Leninist or not and whether a state
is socialist or not. It is aimed at creating the world conditions
for socialism to prevail over capitalism, for the working class
to defeat the bourgeoisie and all reaction, and paving the way
for communism; and therefore at realizing the mutual support and
cooperation of all proletarian revolutionary forces, without any
party or state infringing on the independence and equality of
others.
We have seen parties and states that start out as proletarian
revolutionary but later degenerate and become revisionist and
relate with other parties and states only as these become
subservient and become their foreign policy tools. They
subordinate the principle of proletarian internationalism to
diplomatic and economic relations with bourgeois states. They
stop mentioning proletarian internationalism as if it were a
dirty phrase as cosmopolitan relations with transnational
corporations and banks gain the uppermost importance.
Learning lessons from recent history, the Communist Party of the
Philippines is resolved that in the future the foreign policy of
the new Philippines shall encompass relations with other
socialist states, with working class parties, with peoples and
revolutionary movements and with states (irrespective of ideology
or social system) in that order of importance, under the guidance
of proletarian internationalism in basic correspondence to the
socialist character of the state and the proletarian
revolutionary character of the ruling party.
The Party is confident that the ever worsening crisis of the
world capitalist system and the resurgence of the socialist and
anti-imperialist movement will create the global conditions
favorable for their winning total victory in the new-democratic
revolution and for establishing a socialist society that requires
the proletarian party and state to practise proletarian
internationalism at a new and higher level. #
Armando Liwanag
Chairman, Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
________________________________________
Political Parties advocating National Democracy:
Argentina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Argentina%29
Egypt : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Egypt%29
Germany: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany_%28NPD%29
Italy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Italy%29
Lithuania : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Lithuania%29
Nepal : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Nepal%29
Pakistan : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28Pakistan%29
Poland : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democracy
UK : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_%28UK_1960s%29
USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Institute