The IWA led by comrade Joshi organised a tremendous campaign against this racist provocation and victory was eventually secured. Sadly, comrade Joshi passed away some time ago – but some of those he taught and struggled alongside remain active in the ranks of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist – Leninist) and were in Smethwick on Tuesday morning to witness the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to Malcolm X in Marshall Street. The plaque is more than a tribute to a great fighter for civil rights, it also stands as testimony to the work of many anti-racists and anti-imperialists who’ve lived and worked in Birmingham and the surrounding areas, notably Joshi, his comrades, and the the IWA(GB).

L to R Jak Beula, Harbhajan Dardi and Beenie Brown: Malcom X, Marshall Street, Smethwick, Blue Plaque unveiling.Nubian Jak Community Trust; IWA; Indian Workers Association

It is tempting to try to separate ‘real’ [economic] activity, ie, production, on the one hand, from the financial sphere on the other. This seems to correspond with the modern economy. But is this distinction appropriate? We must return to the fundamentals of capitalist development.

Karl Marx approached this question from the starting point of the concept of accumulation. This process has three phases: first, an enterprise creates a profit; second, a part of this profit is reintroduced into the production process by way of investment; third, these investments allow an expansion of production levels and the creation of extra profit as compared to the first cycle … and so on and so forth.

So a firm needs to make as much profit as possible; this is what will determine its entire progress. And it is necessary that enough of this profit should be incorporated in the new process of production to lastingly increase capital. That is the investment. If the greater part of the excess is distributed among shareholders or invested elsewhere, the enterprise will not be able to grow. Finally, capital must itself increase as a result.

These are the three characteristics that will decide whether a company is ‘competitive’ or not. It is not profit alone, because it is the level of capital that will influence future profits. It is not capital alone, because capital on its own does not necessarily give rise to a larger future profit. It is their dynamic combination which gives rise to a company’s ability to accumulate.

A firm that accumulates more, and faster, than its competitors is going to impose its norm on the sector as a whole. Thanks to its extra profits, it is going to be able to invest more, acquire technological innovations more rapidly, and adapt itself more easily to variations in the economic climate and in demand. It is going to ‘grow’, while the others, if they do not keep up the pace, risk being left behind.

For competitors, there are only two possible solutions left: either they must merge, or they must get the capital they need from financial institutions. The supplementary capital supplied by the financial sector (whether through loans or through money raised via the issue of shares on the stock exchange) can give its recipients a real competitive boost.

Just like recourse to drugs in sport, this capital injection can give its user strength at a given moment and even force the market ‘leader’ itself to go in search of funds in order to stay ahead in the sector. In this way, as capitalist competition progresses by means of a furious battle, the financial sector, which started out playing a secondary and supplementary role, becomes absolutely central, because it is this sector that feeds the combatants the capital that is essential for their accumulation.

Historically, it has been the banks that played this essential role. The first to take on this function on a large scale were Belgian establishments, starting with the Société Générale de Belgique, and followed by the Bank of Belgium. From 1835 onwards, they transformed part of their discounting business [ie, the purchase of future assets, especially debts owed to the customer, at a discount in relation to the amount expected to be received, which really amounts to lending at interest against the promise of repayment from future receipts]– that had by then virtually metamorphosed into long-term lending (since ‘discounts’ were being perpetually renewed) – into the purchase of shares in industry, especially in coal and metal mining.

Having acquired control of over 40 percent of Borinage coal production (at the time the most important in the country), the Société Générale reduced the competition between the different mines and attempted to impose monopoly prices on its main markets both in Belgium and in northern France. After 1850, the company became a major player in the development of railways.

The bank thus became a decisive influence in Belgium’s industrialisation, one of the first and most important of the 19th century, having sunk its claws into three crucial sectors: the collieries that provided coke to the metallurgy companies, which were in turn providing rails to the railway companies.

Without the extra funds brought into production by Société Générale, what would have become of Belgian economic development? How many mines would have closed down sooner, not because they were exhausted but because of the bankruptcy of their exploiters? Would the coal-mining companies and the metallurgical industries have been able to stand up to English competition, which was particularly virulent at the time?

The success of the Belgian banks was emulated in other countries. The German banks, soon to be given the nickname of the ‘Four Ds’ because of their names (Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Disconto Gesellschaft and Darmstädter Bank), modelled themselves on their Belgian counterparts to create institutions that attracted deposits and granted loans, but also took a direct part in industrial and commercial businesses. They were what are called ‘universal’ or ‘mixed’ banks, as opposed to commercial banks, which limit themselves to lending and taking deposits. [In English, a bank whose business involves direct investment in companies would be called a merchant bank, though nowadays most banks are mixed to include a merchant banking business besides other types of banking operation.]

As we have explained, the role of the banks was taken over by other forms of financial institution. After the crash of 1929, several countries introduced laws that forbade the same entity to carry on both ‘commercial’ and ‘investment’ activity. And then, the amounts required for certain types of multinational investment became too large to be provided by a single establishment. The close links between industry and the banks weakened.

But this did not imply that industry had regained its independence. On the one hand, a good number of multinationals created their own finance departments, with assets outstripping those of many banks. At its height, between 2004-5, the financial subsidiary of General Motors (GMAC) had assets to the value of $573bn. Only the largest banks in the world administer larger sums.

On the other hand, as we have already seen, the process leading to dependence reconstituted itself, albeit no longer around banks properly so-called, but around the desiderata (requirements) of new financial players such as pension funds, investment funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, and so on.

This shows that the mechanisms that led to the domination of banks [the need for higher concentrations of invested capital] are still operative. There is still today a battle for accumulation – in fact, it is more active than ever, in certain sectors at least. And the two central features of accumulation remain the creation of profit and the supply of capital.

There is nevertheless a very small difference with the past: formerly, a bank that took over a business that was in difficulty, restructured it and reassembled it with a view to this enterprise snatching the role of leader and imposing its authority on others. But the new finance capital is far more destructive, following the logic of immediate profitability: the company taken over has to contribute its share of costs immediately, even if doing so propels it towards certain demise.

The car industry gives an excellent example of this development. In this sector, the uncontested leader is Japanese car maker Toyota. Way back, it put into place a system of production called Toyotism, which perfected traditional Fordism. This system allows it to capture additional surplus value, and to make globally superior profits. Moreover, its methods of providing a return on capital, as is often the case in Japan, offer the possibility of devoting a major part of the profit to investment.

In 1956, Toyota did not make even 50,000 cars. That year, 4 million vehicles rolled out of the General Motors factories. The Nagoya industry’s share only represented 0.4 percent of global production. In 2006, the Japanese car maker overtook General Motors and stripped it of its rank as the world’s foremost vehicle producer.

As far as profits are concerned, the Japanese enterprise has been beating record after record since 2000. In 2003, it was the first car manufacturer to have a net profit higher than $10bn, reaching $15bn in 2007 (Ford had declared a profit of $22bn in 1998, but this was as a result of exceptional circumstances). In 2008, Toyota suffered a loss of $4.3bn as a result of its major exposure to the US market and the fall of the dollar in comparison to the yen.

In 2007, Toyota owned capital amounting to almost $120bn. This total had doubled since 2001! It is a sum equivalent to the combined investment capital of Daimler, Volkswagen and Peugeot.

In order to be able to invest more, the Nagoya company puts pressure on its competitors until they go bankrupt, as is shown by the cases of General Motors and Chrysler. Here, Toyota’s advantage is such that even new finance capital provided by the private equity fund Cerberus, which bought Chrysler and half of GMAC, was unable to save them. That required intervention by the US state.

Finance capital [the domination of industry by banking capital], therefore, is not a deviation from capitalism but a necessity arising from the intense competition between larger and larger enterprises. Its domination over the ‘real economy’ is therefore entirely unsurprising.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the rivalry between capitalist powers has given rise to two opposing models, which are sometimes called the Anglo-Saxon model and the Rhenish model (‘Rhenish capitalism’ is a term popularised by the work of the French economist Michel Albert in his 1991 book, Capitalism Against Capitalism). These models are models of two different kinds of alliance between the world of finance and the world of production.

On the one hand, there is the model that prevails mainly in Germany and Japan, where industry is supported by banks that are almost omnipotent, and this economic whole receives the support of the state machine, with the links between politicians and business being extremely strong. It is more or less a continuation of the structures put in place in the 19th century based on the universal bank.

This is a game at which the US is a loser. Therefore the US ruling class much prefers its own Anglo-Saxon model of development: ie, the supply of the necessary funds by financial markets (above all stock markets), which supply the funds needed for accumulation and are available more or less throughout the world. The US therefore uses all its power, including its state [military] power, to impose this method on the whole world.

These endeavours have been greatly helped by the fall of the USSR, which gave free rein to Washington, and by the creation of the WTO, which simultaneously sanctified free trade in commodities while at the same time defending intellectual property rights, to the advantage of existing multinationals.

With this ‘globalisation’, the German and Japanese models [being largely circumscribed by their countries’ respective frontiers] were at a disadvantage. Of course, companies like Toyota and Honda came out all right. But the mighty Japanese mechanism for accumulation is at a disadvantage. It is not designed for overseas operations. Its credit establishments were driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the bursting in 1989 of another bubble, affecting both financial and real property assets, that was specific to Japan. In order to avoid failure they were obliged to merge. Today, there are only three large banking groups in the archipelago: SMBC, Mizuho and MUFG.

Financial problems also shook Germany. The Dresdner Bank was taken over in 2002 by Allianz, before being resold in August 2008 to one of the other banking giants, the Commerzbank, which was itself obliged by the European Commission to offload half its assets when it had to receive support from the state to avoid bankruptcy. As for the Deutsche Bank, it gradually transformed itself into a strictly financial institution, abandoning its direct influence over German industry.

Financial development over the last few years has been penalising firms, especially banks, that keep hold of their stocks and shares rather than speculating on their rise and fall.

Today, the US, which once lagged behind Germany and Japan as regards competitiveness, has opted for a finance capital formula that can certainly be described as ‘hard’, ie, for autonomous markets where speculation is welcome and where today’s profits are snatched at the expense of the future, because what matters is one’s stock exchange valuation, ie, values which incorporate expected future profits.

Finance capital made in Germany or Japan cannot do the trick, quite simply because in the short term it cannot accumulate as fast. This is why it is in decline and is giving way to the financial domination of the American system …

In the 19th century, too, it was the countries that needed to catch up with globally more profitable British companies that sought support from banks and brought about the development of what became the finance capital of the time. In his analysis of the financial structure of capitalism worldwide, Pierre Grou stresses: “The special problem of control that arose at the end of the 19th century is that relating to the later-developing capitalisms of Germany, Russia, Belgium, the US – where industry needed the banks in order to be able to finance the accumulation of capital, with British industrialisation as their common model.”

It is they who in the end imposed the system of finance capitalism on the whole planet. And British capitalism was eventually overtaken, since it did not have enough companies with sufficient concentration of capital to compete with the American or German companies and others.

In the same way today, the US lags ‘behind’ Germany and Japan as far as competitiveness is concerned. So the US has opted for a different formula for finance capital that provides gigantic short-term profits.

The development of what seems to common sense to be ‘financial exuberance’ is not therefore a deviation within a capitalist system that is basically healthy: it is the logical outcome of a battle between the US, European and Japanese giants, expressed in economic, political and military rivalry between these three centres … On this point, too, the financial crisis is a crisis of capitalism as a whole.

The social and the parasitic

This capitalism is destructive. This is not only because of the development of financial excess – the problem is deeper than that. Financial domination over capitalism is not really surprising. It is the domination of money capital that is privileged at every level because competition prevents any other kind of action or reasoning.

The exaction of tribute by powerful financial conglomerates is nothing but the last stage of a process [the redistribution of profit among different sections of the exploiter classes, to the advantage of some and disadvantage of others] that resides in the very heart of production and is where everything begins to totter (something which tends to get forgotten).

Since the 1980s, the major multinationals have been abandoning the diversification strategies that were especially fashionable a decade earlier, as well as the vertical integration that Ford had developed to the extreme at the start of the last century. The multinationals instead focused, in their own words, on their ‘core business’, the central kernel of their activities, leaving other activities to other firms, be they themselves giant providers or merely entirely dependent subcontractors.

In the car industry, Toyota was one of the forerunners, as was Toshiba in electronics. Japanese companies built a system of production on a pyramid of subcontractors. Above them all is the manufacturer, ie, Toyota, which specialises in the assembly of cars and the production of strategically important components such as the motor.

Below are the high-ranking subcontractors, the suppliers of lesser components, often companies in which Toyota has some equity (although not generally very much). These enterprises, of which there are 168, are relatively large. They themselves obtain their supplies from the 5,427 second-ranking companies, which are smaller and which manufacture the components needed by the first-ranking subcontractors.

Finally, the base of the pyramid is made up of third-ranking and even sometimes fourth- or fifth-ranking companies. These 41,703 businesses generally employ fewer than 10 workers and produce parts of components or components of components to second-ranking suppliers. This reliance on the smallest of subcontractors tends to involve workers being subjected to the most precarious of working conditions.

This system has been copied by firms in other countries and in several sectors, including in car production. In the US, this system was accompanied by modularisation, ie, the production of modules, a kind of integrated sub-assembly that can be finished off by franchisees. Whereas Toyota developed a network centred on its geographical location in Toyota City, US companies use the new methods to decide which location will be the most suitable for production. “Thanks to modularisation, one can divide up the system of production and distribute it to the four corners of the earth.” (Suzanne Berger, Made in Monde: Les Nouvelles Frontières de l’Économie Mondiale, Paris, 2006)

As from the middle of the 1990s, giants such as IBM or Hewlett-Packard turned towards the provision of ‘services’ and sold off a proportion of their factories. The owner of Alcatel, Serge Tchuruk, hailed ‘the factory-free enterprise’. Multinationals focused on technological activities: design, research, marketing, image and the manufacture of strategic components.

In the textile industry, a similar phenomenon took place. Phil Knight, the Nike CEO, explained the change within his company: “For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product.” (Quoted in Benjamin R Barber, Consumed – How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilise Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole, New York, 2007)

Nike no longer makes anything. It gets its subcontractors situated in the third world to do it. This situation is imitated by its competitors Reebok and Adidas.

This process is sometimes described as the ‘end of the giant dinosaurs’, ie, giant enterprises. But in reality, this network of small units, which all labour in a single chain of value to create the same merchandise, is all under the tight control of the corporation that issues the instructions. This is the case in the car industry, where the manufacturer always retains control over the network by controlling prices or quality criteria. It always sends in its teams to verify how the manufacture is being done and to give appropriate advice as to cost reduction.

In the matter of distribution, the big food or clothing manufacturing chains equally impose their conditions. A giant such as Wal-Mart sits on a network of 68,000 suppliers. To ensure ever-lower prices, it presses on them even to relocate, notably to China. It has established there a purchasing depot in Shenzhen (in the south near Hong Kong), whose purpose is to find companies that can deliver at unbeatable prices, and also to incite competition between its suppliers.

This system facilitates what in Marxist language is called the transfer of surplus value. In other words, the value that is created by a subcontractor is not retained by him. As a result of the low prices at which components or goods are bought, it is the company that places the orders that obtains this advantage.

For example, in the case of Wal-Mart, as is explained by the head of a large sports clothing manufacturer, the following are the conditions in which he is expected to deal: “Wal-Mart’s philosophy is ‘always more’. They don’t always want the cheapest, but the best quality at the lowest price. If I sell a product for ten dollars this year and try to sell it for ten dollars the following year, they won’t be happy. Every year, what we do has to be ‘always more’ advantageous to them.”

Thanks to this constant pressure, the profits of the distribution giant went up from $482,000 in 1967 to $13.4bn in 2008. Since 1967 it has never shown an annual loss.

This is also true in the car industry. Toyota, and following it other car makers, insists on continual rises in productivity among its subcontractors. If necessary, the Nagoya company will assist. In this way, Toyota organised its subcontractors from 1965 onwards to move to just-in-time and total quality management, two fundamental concepts of Toyotism.

If a supplier’s costs remain too high, it is pitilessly eliminated. If, on the other hand, it can reduce them, Toyota will allow it to keep the extra profit obtained in the current year. The following year, however, that profit will be swallowed up in the lower prices that the subordinate company will be required to accept. This system allows Toyota to encourage the supplier to seek out ways of increasing productivity while in the end winning for itself the gain in surplus value.

Furthermore, this method is deployed throughout the production network, since the top-level subcontractor is supplied by second-rank subcontractors, towards whom he will behave in like manner.

US statistics show that in 2006 a production worker in a car factory [apparently] created on average a value of $190 an hour, while his colleague working for a subcontractor only provided $86 – only about half. The only plausible explanation for this difference is the transfer of value (and of surplus value) from the components sector to the assembly sector, a mechanism achieved through the constant lowering of the price of the components purchased by the multinationals. In this way, part of the value created by subcontractors is transferred to the manufacturers and accumulated in the form of profit.

This same process applies when the suppliers come from the third world. Let us stress that the multinational is not only taking advantage of the low wages that prevail there, but also of the under-valuation of values produced abroad, an undervaluation that can be reflected in the continual depreciation of the currencies of the countries of the South.

Table 1 shows the evolution of hourly value added in different countries that are the main exporters to the US.

It can be observed that, in general, there is a large gap between the value attributed to an hour’s labour in the US as opposed to that produced in other countries. In 1981, an hour’s labour was productive of about $16 in the US, $4.6 in Singapore, $2.6 in south Korea, etc.

It is obvious that the hourly added value can depend on the technological structure of the country’s manufacturing industry. If the country attracts a large number of clothing companies it will generate low hourly added value; but if, on the contrary, it is stuffed with IT, pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, the hourly added value will be large.

Nevertheless, by and large, in 2006 an electronic component produced in Taiwan for the equivalent of £12 was worth on average £15.50 as part of the product when finished in the US. One can readily appreciate the profits to be made by the commissioning companies.

The advantage for these multinationals is not confined to this transfer. It extends also to the great flexibility of production, which would be impossible if the factories belonged to them.

Toyota makes sure it always has two subcontractors for every component it buys. In 1988, feeling that it was becoming too dependent on its electronics subsidiary, Denso (in which it had a 33 percent stake), it built a factory at Hirose (in the north of Hokkaido island) and recruited electronics engineers to work there. It considered that it could not allow itself to be tied to Denso alone for strategic components that made up 30 percent of the value of each vehicle.

The consequence of this system has been an explosion in the profits of the big manufacturing industry enterprises, as is shown in the graph in Table 2 …

Until 1991 the increase was relatively constant. Then profits doubled in 1995 to $188bn. And then almost doubled again in 2000. The crash of 2000 caused a fall: in one year the companies lost half of what they had gained. But six years later their profits multiplied by five. A record gain of $790bn was realised in 2007, a sum equivalent to the production of the whole of Africa excluding South Africa, or to the production of 900 million people! In 2008, the crisis again brought a fall in profits.

It is from these gains that finance draws its income. Without this phenomenal growth, there is no way of securing the minimum expected return [on invested capital] of 15 percent. Here, too, the disproportionate development of international finance is reflected in the insistence of the ‘industrial’ or ‘commercial’ multinationals on extracting for themselves all surplus created on the planet. It supposes a massive transfer of revenues in favour of those who control these giants’ capital …

It would be presumptuous to affirm that it is the financial sector that has caused this phenomenon and that it was this sector that, by demanding a return of 15 percent, gave rise to subcontracting, relocation and transfers in favour of the north. Even though they are linked to finance capital, Toyota and Wal-Mart are controlled by proprietor families (the Toyoda family in the case of the former and the Waltons in the case of the latter). The relevant changes were often introduced in relatively quiet times, well in advance of any financial exuberance.

It is nevertheless obvious that the requirements of the financial sector for a return of this magnitude had the effect of accelerating the adoption of these methods of capturing profit on a planetary scale …

The income produced by the lowest-level subcontractors, many of whom are in the third world, are not retained by them; they are absorbed by the larger suppliers. Subject to exceptions, the latter cannot retain these advantages; they are obliged to transfer them to the biggest multinationals, which dominate the world market and make everybody pay for the ‘surplus value’ of their technology, their names and their trademarks.

Of course, the mechanisms through which the gains make their way up the chain to the financiers can differ: through payment of dividends, payment of interest or other income, or incorporation into stock exchange values of expected future results.

Contrary to the traditional links between the banks and industry, which put credit in charge of conglomerates that are sometimes totally productive, the new finance capital grabs all it can in whichever way is quickest. Thus the average participation of hedge funds in the capital of major firms has risen to about 10 percent of the latter. Direct control is not the main objective; if the fund is not happy with the management then either it changes it, if it is strong enough to do so, or it moves its investment elsewhere. This predominance of short termism bothers quite a few commentators.

Above all, contrary to what is often believed, the socialisation of production has never been taken to such a level as it is at present. The 200 largest industrial companies in the world have since 1973 employed between 18-19 million people. In fact, they have vastly greater control than did the big enterprises formed at the beginning of the 20th century, and their power stretches across national boundaries.

Analysing this development, David Korten, an active participant in the World Social Forum, writes (retranslated from the French): “The pro-multinational liberals regularly insist that centralised economic planning is totally inefficient and incapable of responding to consumer preference. Nevertheless, the prosperous multinationals exert more control over the economies bordered by their product networks than the planners in Moscow ever had over the Soviet economy.

“Central management buys, sells, dismantles and closes production units according to its whim; it recruits and dismisses individuals with a stroke of the pen; it moves its factories to wherever it wants in the world, and decides on the percentage of receipts to be provided by subsidiaries to the parent company; it appoints and dismisses the directors of the subsidiaries; it fixes the amounts of transfers and other conditions governing the transactions taking place between the different companies that are members of the group; and it decides whether independent suppliers are able to buy and sell on the open market or are restricted to dealing with subsidiaries belonging to the group.”

All this amounts to an unimaginable development of financial parasitism, since the decisions taken by private individuals have only one aim: personal profit. It results in the routine killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs through demanding returns of a magnitude that are unobtainable in the long term. This in turn gives rise to an increase in fraudulent operations [as companies try to pretend they are delivering to the required standard in order to keep their investors happy] (Boesky in the 1980s, Enron in 2001 and Madoff more recently).

Even the defenders of capitalism are worried about these facts. For example, George Soros has said: “If people like me can bring down governments, there is something rotten in the system” …

Joseph Stiglitz makes a comparison with the ‘robber barons’ of the end of the 19th century – the Vanderbilts, Fisks and Goulds – who enriched themselves in a scandalous manner on the backs of the workers of the epoch through operations that were not far off being fraudulent, or were of dubious morality. But he is far more critical of today’s speculators:

“The rail barons of the 19th century, who enriched themselves through use of their political influence, at least left behind them an inheritance: railways, rolling stock, which unified the country and dynamically promoted its growth. What inheritance has been left by so many dot.com millionaires and billionaires, the management of Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom or Adelphi, except horror stories to tell future generations?”

Find out more about the crisis, watch this:

:: About Comrade Khwezi ::

Khwezi Kadalie was a fighter in the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa and is a lifelong communist and marxist-leninist revolutionary.

His grandfather organised the first all-black trade union in South Africa (the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union of Africa). A qualified typesetter and printer, Khwesi was arrested by the Apartheid secret police shortly after the 1976 Soweto uprising. He was tortured for four months.

After prison, Khwezi worked for the ANC in the diplomatic service and the information department in Germany and Britain. After the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations he served the movement in different capacities and between 2000 and 2005 he worked in the Department of Trade and Industry in a senior position.

Since 2006, together with other comrades, he has built the Marxist Workers School in South Africa. Today he works as a journalist for communist and working-class newspapers and magazines around the world.

Khwesi’s talk will touch on the important lessons he draws from his time in the movement and his feelings about the present fight against the recolonisation of Africa.

LONDON: Saturday 11 February, 6.00pm
Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, UB2 5AA
venue: Saklatvala Hall map

:: READ ABOUT AFRICA AND IMPERIALISM ::

Imperialism steps up its moves to recolonise Africa (Proletarian, December 2011)
US and European interference in African affairs assuredly did not begin with the assassination of Libya, but that crime marks the onset of a renewed and most desperate effort to turn the clock back to the days of the most brazen colonialist meddling.
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=773

Communists and the struggle against imperialism (Proletarian, December 2011)
With imperialism convulsed with crisis and hurtling towards new and ever more dangerous wars of aggression, the work of reuniting and reinvigorating the entire international communist movement on a principled and revolutionary basis is one which will brook no further delay.
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=778

Ivory Coast: No recolonisation of Africa! (Lalkar, May 2011)
The violent overthrow of Ivory Coast’s government by French imperialism, in cahoots with northern rebel militia and with the hypocritical blessing of the UN, signals not the end but the beginning of yet another round of cruel civil strife inflicted on the Ivorian people by imperialism.
http://lalkar.org/issues/contents/may2011/ivorycoast.html

South Africa: the fight for equality continues (Lalkar, May 2010)
The struggle against Apartheid was an important step along the road to emancipation for South Africa’s poor majority, but this does not mean that all those who fought against Apartheid want to carry on to a socialist revolution. Black skin does not, any more than white skin, come with a guarantee of common sense, social conscience or saintliness attached.
http://lalkar.org/issues/contents/may2010/southafrica.html

Ethinic cleansing in Nato’s ‘new’ Libya (Proletarian, December 2011)
More than 100 militia brigades from Misrata have been operating outside of any official military and civilian command since Tripoli fell in August. Members of these militias have engaged in torture, pursued suspected enemies far and wide, detained them and shot them in detention. They have stated that the entire displaced population of one town, Tawergha, who are largely descendants of African slaves, cannot return home.
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=774

Africans need true independence not imperialist ‘charity’ (Proletarian, August 2005)
The US and European monopoly capitalists are shedding crocodile tears over the havoc they have wrought in their latest scramble for Africa, but the African people will find that charity is no substitute for revolutionary struggle to attain true independence and freedom.
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=118

After the xenophobic violence South Africa will never be the same again (Lalkar, July 2008)
The 11th of March 2008 will go down in the history of our country as the day of national shame. It is the day a pogrom against foreign workers started in Alexandra and then spread from township to township, squatter camp to squatter camp, and from one town to the next.
http://lalkar.org/issues/contents/jul2008/safrica.php

Chimurenga! The liberation struggle in Zimbabwe (Proletarian, August 2005)
“The struggle in Zimbabwe and indeed in southern Africa as a whole has never been against the white man per se. It is not a struggle for exclusive African rights. On the contrary, our struggle is against an unjust system — a system of exploitation, oppression and racial discrimination. It is a struggle for human equality and dignity. The struggle, as we see it, is fundamentally between the exploiting class and the exploited class.” — Robert Mugabe
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=111

:: WATCH VIDEOS ABOUT AFRICA AND IMPERIALISM ::

Flowers and famine in Ethiopia
Comrade Mohammad Hassan of the PTB (Belgian Workers’ Party) delivers a powerful speech condemning the puppet regime of Ethiopia for selling his country to imperialism, and engineering a famine with its pro-imperialist policy and at the behest of US/British imperialism.
http://youtu.be/0TJZP0p5NcM

Famine in the midst of plenty: the truth about the world food crisis
Comrade Ella Rule explains that although enough food is produced globally to make every person on the planet FAT, the inequality of distribution built into capitalism means that vast amounts are wasted, millions are overfed and obese in the West, while hundreds of millions starve in the rest of the world. These problems can be fixed, but not by capitalism.

China’s meaning to African freedom fighters
Comrade Kojo Gotfreid, former Ghanian liberation fighter and ambassador to China, recounts meeting Mao and the inspiration drawn by African anti-colonial liberation fighters from China’s successful liberation struggle and building of a bright new socialist future.
http://youtu.be/RJhlWzFGcS8

Guinea Bissau revolutionary comrade on Libya’s role in Africa
Comrade Teodora Ignacia Gomez of the PAIGC, the party that liberated Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, outlines the supportive relationship that Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya had fostered both with her country and other African nations. Libya had tried to bring about sustainable infrastructural and agricultural development in Guinea Bissau, she tells us, both through the African Bank and through independently granted aid.
http://youtu.be/xcBTxFy0ql8

Gaddafi tribute in London
In the 42 years of his leadership, the Libyan people rose from being literally the poorest on earth, to the wealthiest and most egalitarian in Africa. Contrary to the vile assertions of the western media, Colonel Gaddafi faced his executioners, vile mercenaries and unthinking tools of Nato imperialism, as the proud defender of independent and free Libya. He died a hero’s death in battle, facing his enemies with steely resolve, and refusing to desert his post, his country or his people at their hour of greatest need.
http://youtu.be/t8AhEiTQTJs

Zimbabwe speaks
Anastancia Ndhlovu, Zimbabwe’s youngest MP, speaks to a British correspondent about Zimbabwe at the 17th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pretoria, South Africa. She addresses many issues including Robert Mugabe’s ongoing leadership, the MDC’s role in coalition government, British and US sanctions and Chinese economic involvement in the country.

Africa: black nationalism, capitalism or socialism?
Comrade Ajamu of the A-APRP talks about his ideological development from black nationalism to socialism, and discusses, in particular, the experience of the African national liberation struggles. With reference to the experiences of Ghana, Nkhrumah, Sekou Toure, and others, he underlines the lesson that capitalism has failed Africa.

Come and listen to comrade Khwezi Kadalie in February as part of the CPGB-ML’s ongoing work to bring about a really anti-imperialist understanding in the anti-war and solidarity movement in Britain today.

Khwezi was a fighter in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and is a life long communist and marxist-leninist revolutionary, his grandfather organised the first all-black trade union in South Africa (the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union of Africa) and attended the First Congress of the Communist International. His talk will touch on the important lessons he draws from his time in the movement and his feelings about the present fight against the re-colonisation of Africa.

The CPGB-ML will be taking Khwezi to the following destinations:

*BRISTOL*: Sunday 5 February, 2pm – 5pm @ Hamilton House, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol

*BIRMINGHAM*: Tuesday 7 February 6pm – 9pm @ Carrs Lane Church Centre, city center (opposite Moor Street Station)

*LEEDS*: Thursday 9 February 6pm – 8pm @ Swarthmore Education Centre. 2-7 Woodhouse Square, Leeds, LS3 1AD

*LONDON*: Saturday 11 February, 6pm – late @ Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, London

Khwezi is a qualified type-setter and printer, he was arrested by the Apartheid secret police shortly after the 1976 Soweto uprising and tortured for 4 months in their prisons. After prison he worked for the ANC in the diplomatic service and the information department in Germany and Britain. After the un-banning of the ANC and other organisations he served the movement in different capacities and between 2000 and 2005 he worked in the Department of Trade and Industry in a senior position.

Since 2006, together with other comrades, he has built the Marxist Workers School in South Africa. Today he works as a Journalist for communist and working class newspapers and magazines around the world and is one of the leading forces behind EK FM, the Voice of the Voiceless in the township Tskane, watch a video of the CPGB-ML’s visit to EK FM here and donate to the radio using the link below:

Please think about helping the comrades by making a donation:

https://apps.facebook.com/fundrazr/activity/4da3f8ee470c4596a13e9fcf3600a12e

Stalin Society reply to a Daily Telegraph article written in ‘response’ to it’s educational program.

The Stalin Society was formed in 1991 to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him.

Stalin’s name is synonymous with communism, the October revolution, and the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and imperialist tyranny. For this reason, the international bourgeoisie have spearheaded their attacks on working and oppressed peoples by slandering Stalin and the Soviet Union.

They have employed a variety of tactics to this end over the last 90 years, but have been guided to a large extent by dissidents who betrayed the Soviet people, most notably Trotsky and his followers. The powerful US Based Hearst press, sympathetic to Hitler, was a pioneer in these methods, but the rest of the capitalist world’s media and political elites have not lagged behind.

It is worth reading “Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union” for an exposition of the main planks of this anti-soviet propaganda.

One of the main post-war tactics has been to conflate Hitler and Stalin, Fascism and communism. While these trends — of working class power and extremely reactionary aggressive expansionist capitalist imperialism — are in reality opposite ends of the political spectrum, so much effort has poured into generating this filthy propaganda, that attacks of the type dealt with here are all too common.

Guy walters, a student at Sheffield, had the columns of the Telegraph opened to him to pen the following diatribe, which we answer in this video:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/guywalters/100059405/if-its-ok-to-have-a-st…

Fear not the fight for truth – it will set you free!

Come and listen to comrade Khwezi Kadalie in February as part of the CPGB-ML’s ongoing work to bring about a really anti-imperialist understanding in the anti-war and solidarity movement in Britain today.

Khwezi was a fighter in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and is a life long communist and marxist-leninist revolutionary, his grandfather organised the first all-black trade union in South Africa (the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union of Africa) and attended the First Congress of the Communist International. His talk will touch on the important lessons he draws from his time in the movement and his feelings about the present fight against the re-colonisation of Africa.

The CPGB-ML will be taking Khwezi to the following destinations:

*BRISTOL*: Sunday 5 February, 2pm – 5pm @ Hamilton House, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol

*BIRMINGHAM*: Tuesday 7 February 6pm – 9pm @ Carrs Lane Church Centre, city center (opposite Moor Street Station)

*LEEDS*: Thursday 9 February 6pm – 8pm @ Swarthmore Education Centre. 2-7 Woodhouse Square, Leeds, LS3 1AD

*LONDON*: Saturday 11 February, 6pm – late @ Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, London

Khwezi is a qualified type-setter and printer, he was arrested by the Apartheid secret police shortly after the 1976 Soweto uprising and tortured for 4 months in their prisons. After prison he worked for the ANC in the diplomatic service and the information department in Germany and Britain. After the un-banning of the ANC and other organisations he served the movement in different capacities and between 2000 and 2005 he worked in the Department of Trade and Industry in a senior position.

Since 2006, together with other comrades, he has built the Marxist Workers School in South Africa. Today he works as a Journalist for communist and working class newspapers and magazines around the world and is one of the leading forces behind EK FM, the Voice of the Voiceless in the township Tskane, watch a video of the CPGB-ML’s visit to EK FM here and donate to the radio using the link below:

Please think about helping the comrades by making a donation:

https://apps.facebook.com/fundrazr/activity/4da3f8ee470c4596a13e9fcf3600a12e

Whatever part of the country you live in, the problems are the same. Unemployment and poverty appear to be the future for the poor, while the children of the rich get to live a life of luxury. Britain is the sixth wealthiest country in the world, so why is it that only a small section of the population has all the money, all the good jobs, all the advantages?

Class system

Our society is a capitalist society. A tiny number of people own all the wealth, while the rest of us have to work for them to make ends meet. In capitalist society, it’s okay for the rich to rob the poor – to give us bad wages and poor housing, to take away our education and benefits – but it’s illegal for the poor to take from the rich.

There are two main classes in capitalist society: the working class and the ruling class. Working-class youth have to find a job in order to have a life. If we don’t get into education or work we don’t have a future. We don’t have houses we can rent to other people, we don’t own factories or shops, and we can’t invest our millions on the stock exchange in London like the wealthy sons and daughters of the rich.

It doesn’t matter what Alan Sugar says on The Apprentice, it’s not possible for us to become multimillionaires – we just don’t have those opportunities. Our ‘choice’ is more likely to be between a life of poverty and a life of crime. But there is an alternative to this system; there is a change we can make. The change we need to make is called socialism, and Red Youth wants to organise working-class youth to make it happen.

Unemployment

Not only is the capitalist system inherently unfair, it has a catastrophic flaw built into it: economic crisis. Capitalism runs on profits – essentially, nothing gets made or done unless someone can make a profit out of it. So here’s the problem: the only way to keep making profits is to sell more and more goods to the masses, but the best way to keep production costs down is to employ fewer people on lower wages.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that if people’s wages are reduced and the numbers employed go down, there will be fewer people who are actually able to buy the stuff that the capitalists are trying to sell. And since capitalism went global, we now have a global economy, so the crisis isn’t just here, it’s everywhere. Vast masses of people are being pushed out of work because they can’t afford to buy all the stuff they made and the capitalists are trying to sell back to them!

This leads to a vicious downward spiral, where people aren’t buying enough goods, so capitalists go out of business, leading to more job losses and fewer people able to buy – which leads to more job losses, and so on. In this crazy situation, food and essential goods of all kinds sit uselessly in warehouses or are destroyed, while the people who need them starve and go without.

There are well over 2 million unemployed in Britain today, even by official counting methods. Young people are the worst-hit section, accounting for nearly half of all those on Jobseekers Allowance. And that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people who don’t sign on the dole for various reasons. It was no different in the past, this misery repeats itself whilst we remain stuck with capitalism.

Any day down at the job centre it’s the usual rubbish; it’s even getting hard to get a job in Asda or Tesco. The entire experience makes thousands of young people ill and depressed every year. How often have you applied for a job but not even been given an interview? It’s not because you’re not good enough, or your application was bad; it’s because there were probably hundreds of other applicants, and yours, at the bottom of the pile, got put in the bin.

Don’t get depressed about it, get angry!

Education

For millions of us, education offers the only way to a better future. But education doesn’t come cheap. Just as the government was scrapping the £30 a week EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) they decided to give the banks £850bn! The ruling class believes that propping up a dying system is far more important than giving hundreds of thousands of working-class youth the chance to continue their education.

Not content with denying us the right to further education at college, the ruling class has now decided to shut the doors to higher education too. New degree students in England and Wales will need to find £9,000 every year for fees – and that’s on top of living expenses! The result is that even if you manage to stay in college, and even if you manage to get good grades, the chances of affording a university education are extremely slim.

It’s clear that the ruling class is cutting off our access to work and education – we’re being trapped in a cycle of endless poverty, desperation and degradation. No wonder that in these circumstances so many young people are driven to join the British army.

War

It seems that the ruling class gets all the benefits from war, while workers get nothing but injury or death. Films, TV and games glorify war and make it seem exciting, but the reality is different.

When you join the army you don’t get to learn a skill or do any of the really exciting stuff like fly a helicopter – that’s too important for the likes of us. All those cushy jobs go to the rich kids like Prince William, who are automatically put in charge. They’re the ‘officers’ whilst we (the ‘squaddies’) are expected just to take orders and do all the fighting – and dying.

They make us fight our foreign working-class brothers and sisters so that they and their ruling circles can plunder and steal all the wealth and natural resources (like oil) of the countries we attack. But why should we do their dirty work for them? Why should we steal and plunder other people’s wealth? If the rich want to steal the oil, let the prime minister and the bankers send their children to get killed while we stay here and look after our own interests.

In fact, if you think about it, we have more in common with the working-class youth of foreign countries than we do with the rich youth in Britain. When our foreign brothers resist our ruling class they are teaching us by example. We need to unite with our class brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere in order to defeat our common enemy – the British ruling class – and build a happy, prosperous and cultured existence, free from endless poverty and war.

Divide and rule

It’s obvious that this system isn’t in the interests of the vast majority of people, so how has it survived for so long?

On top of having a huge state machinery of coercion – police, courts, prisons etc – to keep people in line, the capitalists also control the media. From school textbooks to BBC and Sky news to the Sun and the Guardian, their ideas are pushed onto us every day: a way of looking at the world that teaches us that this system is inevitable and logical, and that cuts and wars are necessary to defend ‘our way of life’, as opposed to protecting their profit margins.

One of the biggest lies we are told is that the problems we face – lack of jobs, cuts in public services, no access to education or housing and so on – are caused by immigrants putting a ‘strain’ on Britain’s resources. But long before there were large numbers of immigrants in Britain there was mass unemployment and capitalist crisis!

Groups like EDL and the BNP pretend to be addressing workers’ problems, but by reinforcing the lies about immigration being the root cause of those problems, what they actually do is help the capitalists stay in power and keep the working class divided and weak.

What is to be done?

The fact is that the ruling class stays in power by encouraging those it rules over to fight each other – instead of getting together to fight the capitalists! The one thing that would really threaten our rulers’ grip on power is if the workers of Britain united and got organised. The police and the army combined couldn’t do much in the face of the masses of people once we decided to stop obeying their orders and believing their lies!

An understanding of society (theory) and a way of uniting to change it (organisation) are the two things that we need to make a socialist revolution. Young people have everything to gain by getting involved in this process sooner rather than later. This world isn’t working for us and we deserve better!

Not only do we need to campaign against the bad conditions and lack of prospects for the youth in Britain today, but we need to work for a completely different type of society – one where people’s needs decide everything.

So many problems face this world: environmental catastrophe, poverty, disease, racism and war. They’ll never be solved while capitalism remains, but they could all be sorted if society was set up for the benefit of the majority rather than the private gain of a few billionaires.

Studying Marxism, organising the young people in your area and learning about how we fight for socialism is the only way we can defeat the ruling class.

Get involved with Red Youth to find out more!

Peter Marshall, Hedge fund manager and ‘philanthropist’, claims that “capitalism can save the planet” at the Oxford Union on November 6th 2008 – just after the collapse of Northern Rock, the Royal bank of Scotland, the US stock Exchange, Freddie May and Fannie Mac, and the housing market. Nothing if not sublimely confident that none of this will change his ‘beautiful life’

He quotes Harpal’s book, without much comprehension. But happily, Harpal was on hand to explain it to him… see the links in the video to Harpal’s debate contribution, and to his recent summary of his work “Trotskyism or Leninism?”

Marshall asserts, in the vein of “trickle down” – and seemingly unaware that 1/2 the world (3.5 billion) languishes in absolute penury on 1-2 dollars a day – “Capitalists create the wealth – and all its detractors are beneficiaries of the wealth we produce; they are like dogs biting the hand that feeds them!”

Capitalism, he goes on to assert, with no apparent hint of irony, will save the planet! “Capitalism has cured HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and will solve Global Warming”(!)

The details are hazy, but the claims are certainly bold!

“Politics UK
Red Youth Blog: Trotskyism or Leninism? – Are they the same thing? What are the differences?

Trotskyism or Leninism?
redyouthuk.wordpress.com
Harpal Brar delivers a 45-minute presentation on the theory and practice of Trotsky and ‘Trotskyites’, followed by Q&A at the CPGB-ML’s Party Study School, November 2011. One of the my…
Like · · Share · 4 hours ago ·
Mark Caudery and Richard Frazer like this.

Chris Rawlinson Harpal Brar is a joke. This is a man who believes that North Korea is a successful workers’ state, that Kim Jong Il was a great leader, and that his son is a legitimate successor. Of course, Brar’s own son is a prominent member of his little organisation, so it’s hardly surprising that he has shown support for nepotism.
4 hours ago · Like · 4

Richard Frazer He still has a lot of influence in the ultra left wing
4 hours ago · Like

Mark Caudery It is interesting to compare different political schools of thought though, even if they are “ultra left”.
4 hours ago · Like

Sarah Whittaker These will not work in western society and probably not work well in any other society either. Does not matter the minor differences between them.
4 hours ago · Like

Chris Rawlinson Richard, I’m not sure he does. Far-left socialists in this country more often than not are Trotskyites, but even amongst the Stalinists, Brar’s group is small.
4 hours ago · Like

Chris Rawlinson Sarah, the differences are rather large, actually.
4 hours ago · Like · 2

Paulo Cannon don’t really see how you can criticise a man (or woman) for bringing their children into the socialist movement – even if you don’t like his particular brand of marxism. Most leftists fail miserably to bring wives, children and family into political work.
4 hours ago · Like

Chris Rawlinson That’s not really my criticism, is it?
4 hours ago · Like

Matt Beebee Trotsky considered himself a Leninist; Trotsky and ‘Trotskyists’ believe in proletarian internationalism and continual revolution rather than the ‘socialism in one country of Stalin’. Ideologically, Lenin and Trotsky were very much the same.
3 hours ago · Like · 4

Peter Kalve Brar is a millionaire businessman in Indian textiles (=sweatshop work) and his son is an arrogant heart surgeon and heir to the political grouplet. They clain to be erstwhile Stalinists, yes – they think the dictator was the best thing since sliced bread. I have no doubt they applaud the gruesome murder of Trotsky, his son, and other family members. Of course, if they actually lived during Stalin’s era (like my grandfather did in Latvia) they probably wouldn’t be around now. My grandfather was sent to Siberia for 10 years for having given water to some Polish NKVD prisoners who passed through his village in the late 1940s. The Brars are an elitist scum – no self-respecting communist should have any time for them, or their grouplet. Real Marxists should avoid them like the plague.
3 hours ago · Like · 2

Jack Mcnally Screw Marx-Leninism, Stalinism is a failed experiment but Trotskyism is the only ideology(except perhaps left communism) which has genuine potential to advance the world and free it’s people.
3 hours ago · Like

Jack Mcnally Seriously this guy quotes Stalin, who was an amateur when it came to Marxian analysis. He has no credibility.
3 hours ago · Like

Paulo Cannon Thats a bit OTT Peter. You have no information at all or evidence of any sweatshop other than idle gossip you came across from CPB and NCP members – your quarrel with Ranjeet was when he refused to give you £200 so that you could buy Lenin’s Collected Works and write ‘theoretical’ essays for the CPGB-ML. If you have any factual evidence,indeed if you’d even ever had a conversation with Harpal or any member of the cpgb-ml in person you could at least have some justification for basing an opinion (even an incorrect one). To just slander and chuck about mud is a bit rich. The video makes it quite clear that there is a chasm between Leninism and Trotskyism, not one of character and personality but politics. Try to moderate your unjustifiable behaviour.
3 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve Why don’t you admit Stalin was the mass murderer that he was – oh I forgot, Stalinists never face up to anything – good job you weren’t around in Russia in the late 1930s…what a joke
3 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve Stalin’s policy of Collectivisation – how many deaths, Paulo? How many millions starved because of that prat?
3 hours ago · Like

Paulo Cannon No need to get carried away. Yes I uphold the work of the CPSU in the thirties, I think there was far more blood on the colonial flag of this country then ever there was on Stalin or the USSR. I think they did a great job smashing the Nazi’s and its a good job they were around in the 1930′s because we certainly wouldn’t be here now if Hitler had got his way. I’ve got a lot of time for Harpal,a s I have for anyone who talks rationally and in a calm and dignified manner. You could learn some lessons.
3 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve Bull – you and your little grouplet do not deserve such respect – even Goebels (not that different from a Stalinist in his ability to lie) was able to speak politely. But this is no time for politeness. This is the time to call an irrelevant sect an irrelevant sect/
3 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve So you support the CPSU in the 1930s. Bully for you. Do you support the murders Stalin ordered? Do you support the starvation created by that butcher? Do you? Don’t give me your weasel words about colonial blood, that your irrelevant sect uses to try and avoid answering the questions asked. You know nothing about the USSR under Stalin, you, King Brar and his Crown Prince. This is no longer the time for polite discourse, but the time for polemmic against a bunch of self-deluded, self-important fools, who know nothing about history, the real meaning of socialism and the dialectic, or about the real working class.
3 hours ago · Like · 1

Politics UK Please keep the personal insults out of here. Let’s debate this maturely.
3 hours ago · Like · 2

Peter Kalve We all know how violent Capitalism, imperialism and fascism were. I do not need lessons from quasi-Stalinist joke grouplets to tell me that. I know. But you know nothing about Stalin, or, if you do, you lie
3 hours ago · Like

Politics UK Please refer to the Politics UK posting rules: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=295872730445773
PoliticsUK Posting Rules
PoliticsUK Posting Rules Please read carefully before posting. R…
by: Politics UK
3 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve apologies – Stalinists make me very angry.
3 hours ago · Like · 4

Richard Frazer Gotta say I know little about the ideologies hence why we have the thread on here. However it seems a little far fetched to suggest Stalin was not responsibile for thousands upon thousands of innocent people. There are mountains of evidence of this
3 hours ago · Like

Richard Frazer So what are the key differences between Leninists, Stalinists and Marxists generally?
3 hours ago · Like

Richard Frazer Sorry Trotskyism as well
3 hours ago · Like

Paulo Cannon Truth is there is not ‘mountains of evidence’ for any of those claims. Pretty much everything we are told has an angle on it, thats because we live in a class society. The ruling class use the media, indeed all their institutions (which they control through private funding and the like) to deliver their world view into our school books, TV programmes and culture. We know that they lie when they tell us ‘we’re all in this together’. We know they lied about weapons of mass destruction Iraq and we know they lied and broke everyone of their ‘own’ laws of conduct in international relations when they removed and executed Saddam, Milosevic and Gaddafi. So why should we treat as shibboleths all the ‘factual’ and ‘authentic’ reports their institutions have pumped out denigrating the USSR and Stalin? Of course we shouldn’t trust that information any more than we would the reports of the BBC/IPCC when they said Mark Duggan had fired first! Have a read of this, its a nice, easy to read and good summation of some of the arguments by a Swedish communist. In the meantime, don’t take too much offence at the erratic and excitable behaviour of Peter, I’m sure he thinks he’s doing the right thing by the working class and oppressed people’s of the world – the tragedy is he spends his time defaming Stalin and or any other communist regime because he’s fallen well and truly into the bourgeois trap. The terrible results of the collapse of the USSR are still to be seen in the poisonous effects it had on many a good communist and revolutionary.

http://www.cpgb-ml.org/download/publications/sousa_liesconcerning.pdf

2 hours ago · Like · 1

Hex Austen http://www.johndclare.net/Russ_LeninandTrotsky.htm
2 hours ago · Like

Richard Frazer Paulo – I assure you I will read more about this and start a new thread in a few days. With a fraction more knowledge :p
2 hours ago · Unlike · 1

Paulo Cannon lol! sound. One thing with the ‘left’ in general is they’re not shy of writing voluminous essays on every topic imaginable – enough to keep you busy for more than a few days! enjoy
2 hours ago · Like

Peter Kalve Paulo, Stalin needs no defaming, only burying in the defecation of his own making. Tell me – for how many millions’ of Soviet deaths was he responsible? No changing the subject – no recourse to a common ground over the evils of capitalism that we both share, just answer a straight and simple estimate on your part – for how many deaths of his own people was Stalin responsible?
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Jack Mcnally Most of the people executed by Stalin were fellow socialists and communists, how can you justifying killing over a million comrades?
about an hour ago · Like

Peter Kalve He can’t – hence his refusal to even go near answering the question
about an hour ago · Like

Matt Beebee ‎@ Richard Frazer:

Now I will start by saying that I too am no expert on the matter, yet I will outline a basic difference between he ideologies for you.

Marxism is first and foremost an economic critique of capitalism through the labour theory of value, surplus value and a study of the progression of human development through historical materialism. Marxism outlines a specific view of history that has progressed from hunter gatherers (primitive communism), serfdom, feudalism and we are now in the capitalist stage of history.
Marx’s critique of capitalism led him to see society split into the bourgeois, those who own capital, and the proletarian, those who work capital and this concluded that the capitalist mode of production was exploitive of the proletarian.
Marx actually wrote little on the stages he thought would follow capitalism, he predicted a revolution of the proletarian who would establish a socialist mode of production under a ‘dictatorship of the proletarian’ where the state would operate for the benefit of the proletarian and be a transition stage between capitalism and communism. In the long run, the state would wither away, and communism – the final stage of human development would be established. By this, Marx meant a stateless, classless, moneyless society build on common ownership.

Lenin, theoretically at least, was a Marxist. However where he disagreed was with how the dictatorship of the proletarian should be set up, meaning how a capitalist mode of production becomes a socialist mode of production. For this, Lenin believed the proletarian would no just spontaneously rise up against the capitalists and rather they needed to be ‘nudged’ by as group of individuals who would lead the revolution. He called this group the vanguard party, as by definition, they would lead the revolution and set it in motion. He believed that the vanguard party should be democratically centralised wherein free political-speech was recognised legitimate until policy consensus; afterwards, every member of the Party supported the official policy established in consensus.

Trotskyism basically follows the same theory as Lenin, except Trotsky emphasised the idea of continual revolution and ‘proletarian internationalism’ i.e. that the revolution and the spread of socialism should be an international phenomenon. Trotsky believed that socialism in Russia would only survive if the state controlled the allocation of all output. Trotsky believed that the state should repossess all output to invest in capital formation. This, he believed was the only was the save Russia from the ‘state capitalism’ that Lenin’s NEP had created.

Stalin supported the more conservative members of the Communist Party and advocated for a state run capitalist economy. Stalinist philosophy was in favour of rapid industrialization, Socialism in One Country, a centralized state, collectivization of agriculture and in practice employed many ‘terror’ tactics associated with totalitarianism. Most do not consider Stalinism as left-wing (called red fascism by many political commentators) and a deviation from the true meaning of socialism to further the ambition of one man.
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Daniel Gilfeather One day i hope that socialism will move on from the tiresome and endless argument that is “My dead Russian is better than your dead Russian”
25 minutes ago · Like

Matt Beebee ‎^ Oh I don’t necessarily agree with what I posted, I was just stating the facts as I’ve alwys seem them concerning the UUSR.
11 minutes ago · Like

Paulo Cannon Hi Matt, with the greatest of respect your not doing justice to Trotsky. He differed with Lenin on a whole host of problems and to reduce it to the level of ‘Trotsky emphasised ‘continual revolution’ and the ‘spread of socialism’ is innacurate. Trotsky would’ve been quick to make a few corrections which I’ll summarize as best I can, and if we’re going to reflect his views we should better understand them (to aid in that I’ve included some references to some of his stuff).

On the question of what kind of Party to build Trotsky opposed the position of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, voted against Lenin’s resolutions in 1902 and wrote an attack (Our political tasks) wherein he tried to equate Lenin’s vision of building a vanguard Party with the oppression and exploitation meted out in factories to the workers (he basically tried to say Lenin wanted a class of bosses and workers in the Party! “I say, you do!”). he wrote “This evil minded and morally repugnant suspicion of Lenin, this shallow caricature of tragic intolerance of Jacobinism…must be liquidated at all costs, otherwise the Party is threatened by moral and theoretical decay”. Hence Lenin is ‘evil minded’ and ‘suspicious’ in his approach to vanguard Party building.

On the question of ‘permanent revolution’ every Trotskyist knows that Trotsky held at least three different conceptions of this ‘theory’ from 1902 onwards! Initially he disagreed with the Leninist thesis of the working class making an alliance with the peasantry in the bourgeois democratic revolution. This led Lenin to declare (in Notes of a Publicist 1910) “Trotsky distorts Bolshevism, because he has never been able to form any definite views on the role of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois revolution”. Lenin said that the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ at this time was ‘playing at the seizure of power’ by ignoring the role of peasantry. This ongoing antagonistic conflict on the nature of the revolution in Russia led Trotsky to famously declare in a letter to the Menshevik Chkeidze (1913) “The entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsifications and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay”. Nice! I dont want to labour this point but Trotsky adapted his theory prior to the revolution which led Lenin to declare (in Two Lines of the Revolution 1915) “Trotsky repeats his ‘original’ theory of 1905 and refuses to stop and think why, for ten whole years, life passed by this beautiful theory”. Trotsky joine dthe Bolsheviks in July 1917 at the Congress presided over by Stalin. He again attempted to revise his theory of ‘permanent’ revolution post-1917 which led him to declare “In the absence of direct state support on the part of the European proletariat, the Russian working class will not be able to keep itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a stable socialsit dictatorship. There is no doubt about it” As in 1906, so in 1922, Trotsky was wrong. In the light of such a ‘theory’ Trotsky only really offered to the Russian working class the option of all-out war in some adventurist drive into Europe and certain defeat, or a total capitulation to capitalism. Leninism, chose the only real alternative to such schemes and set about building up a socialist country – one that was more than capable of defending its rule as its shopwed in the war against Nazi Germany.

Anyway, that was much longer than I intended. Since most of this is in the video shouldn’t we stick to critiquing, using facts and sources, the specific parts we find objectionable. Otherwise its alot of writing and it doesn’t move the conversation on.

As for Peter, he’s obviously not taken his pills today, can’t we ‘liquidate’ him in the style of his favourite historical nemesis?

Harpal Brar delivers a 45-minute presentation on the theory and practice of Trotsky and ‘Trotskyites’, followed by Q&A at the CPGB-ML’s Party Study School, November 2011.

One of the myths perpetrated by the Trotskyites, with not inconsiderable help from the imperialist bourgeoisie, is that Leninism and Trotskyism are synonymous, that Trotsky was, after Lenin, the most brilliant and greatest Bolshevik (some even implying that Lenin was a great Trotskyist); that Trotsky was the true inheritor of Leninism and a worthy successor to Lenin, but was, alas, deprived of his rightful place by the cunning manoeuvres of a third-class mediocrity and oriental despot to boot, ie, Joseph Stalin.

This anti-communist myth, repeated ad nauseam decade after decade in truly Goebbelsian fashion, has acquired the force of a public prejudice. Anyone with the least knowledge of the subject cannot but be aware of the total falsity of this myth.

It is the aim of this video presentation, (like the book – see link below) to expose this myth and lay bare the truly reactionary, counter-revolutionary, essence of the petty-bourgeois ideology of Trotskyism, which is as irreconcilably hostile to Marxism Leninism as is the bourgeoisie to the proletariat – notwithstanding its pseudo-Marxist, ultra-‘left’ and ultra-‘revolutionary’ terminology.

Trotskyism met with dismal failure both during Lenin’s time and after his death, and it failed “because”, to use Stalin’s words, “the leading group of the opposition proved to be a group of petty-bourgeois intellectuals divorced from life, divorced from the revolution, divorced from the party, from the working class”.

This, and not any personal factor, explains the total rout of the Trotskyite opposition by the Bolshevik Party.
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A CPGB-ML Party School production
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RELATED READING

1. Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union, by Mario Susa:
http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/lies.html

2. Trotskyism or Leninism (book), by Harpal Brar:
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=books&subName=display&bookId=7

Preface on-line:
trotvslenin.htm

Table of Contents:
http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/brartoc.htm

Buy the book:
mailto:books@cpgb-ml.org

3. Lenin on the slogan “for a united states of Europe”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm

4. Lenin: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/index.htm

5. Trotsky’s “United States of Europe” article:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/06/europe.htm

6. JV Stalin: Trotskyism or Leninism (Article):
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/trotskyism.htm

7. Grover Furr’s website (Khruhschev Lied – Links to buy)
http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/

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RELATED VIDEO PRESENTATIONS
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What does the Soviet Union mean to our generation?
http://www.youtube.com/user/ProletarianCPGBML?feature=mhee#p/c/CAA06B450C2198B7/0/0GgbG4x1cSY

Spanish Civil War:

Comintern and China:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ProletarianCPGBML?feature=mhee#p/c/3E62714A58B53EB5/0/0omBEr1SbI4

Khruhschevite Revisionism and the collapse of the USSR:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ProletarianCPGBML?feature=mhee#p/c/C17F6326B0AD2497/0/Ht1v2W4mSAE

Britain’s Road to Socialism:

Revolution in Britain:

Join the Struggle:

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More form the CPGB-ML – Join us!
http://www.cpgb-ml.org