Written by Government of Cuba
Statement of the Revolutionary Government:

It was with profound and searing grief that our people and the Revolutionary Government learned about the decease of President Hugo Chávez Frías and are therefore preparing to pay a heartfelt and patriotic tribute to him, for he will go down in history as a Hero of Our America. We convey our sincere condolences to his parents, brothers, daughters and son as well as all of his relatives, whom we feel are already ours, for Chávez is also a son of Cuba, Latin America, the Caribbean and the whole world.

In this moment of profound sorrow, we share our deepest feelings of solidarity with the brother people of Venezuela, whom we will continue to accompany under any circumstances.

The Bolivarian Revolution will be able to count on our resolute and unrestricted support at these difficult moments.

We reiterate our support, encouragement and confidence in victory to our comrades of the Bolivarian political and military leadership and the Venezuelan Government.

President Chávez has been waging an extraordinary battle throughout his young and fruitful life. We will always remember him as a patriotic military to the service of Venezuela and the Bigger Homeland; as an honest, clear-sighted, audacious and courageous revolutionary fighter; as a leader and supreme commander in whom Bolivar reincarnated in order to conclude what he had left unfinished; as the founder of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States.

His heroic and indefatigable struggle against death is an insuperable example of firmness. The admirable commitment shown by his doctors and nurses have been a feat of humanism and dedication.

The return of the President to his beloved Venezuelan homeland changed the course of history. “We have a homeland,” he exclaimed, filled with emotion, on December 8 last, and he returned to his homeland to confront the biggest risks imposed by his disease. Nothing and no one could ever take away from the Venezuelan people the homeland that they have recovered.

The work of Chávez emerges undefeated before our eyes. The achievements attained by the revolutionary people who saved him from the coup orchestrated on April of 2002, who have followed him without hesitations, are already irreversible.

The Cuban people considers him to be one of its most outstanding sons and has admired, followed and loved him as if he were its own. Chávez is also Cuban! He also suffered our difficulties and problems and did everything he could, with extraordinary generosity, especially during the harshest years of the Special Period. He accompanied Fidel as a true son and forged a very close friendship with Raúl.

He excelled in all the international battles against imperialism, always in defense of the poor, the workers and our peoples. Filled with passion, persuasively, eloquently, ingeniously and excitedly he spoke from the roots of the peoples; he sang our joys and recited our passionate verses with ever-lasting heroism.

The tens of thousands of Cubans who work in Venezuela will pay tribute to him through the fervent accomplishment of the international duty and will continue to accompany, with honor and altruism, the heroic deeds of the Bolivarian people.

Cuba will remain forever loyal to the memory and the legacy of Commander President Chávez and will continue to pursue his ideals in favor of the unity of the revolutionary, integration and independence forces of Our America.

His example will guide us in our future battles.

Ever Onwards to Victory!

March 5, 2013
Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations
www.cubadiplomatica.cu/onu

By Mark Solomon

Read the full article at:

http://portside.org/2013-03-06/whither-socialist-left-thinking-%E2%80%9Cunthinkable%E2%80%9D

This is a quote from the article:

There are socialist organizations already airing divergent views within their ranks – reflecting positions that overlap with other socialist organizations committed to democratic struggle and socialist education. The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization have been meeting to explore areas for cooperation in advancing the fight to defend the needs and interests of all working people. With involvement of their members, and with all who honestly wish a unity project to succeed, those organizations could constitute a starting point for other left and socialist groups and individuals to join as equal participants in building an imaginative, revitalized socialist presence.

Looter’s feast

The pillage of the USSR

In 1987 the external debt of the U.S. rose to $246 billion. On the 19 of October 1987, Wall Street crashed! Only a miracle could save the U.S. in dire straits. And the miracle took place, and its saviour was Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, saved the U.S. economy, by ruining that of the USSR.

Would you like to know how?

In January 1987 the restrictions on foreign trade were repealed. These restrictions protected the domestic market of the USSR from collapse. Without them the domestic market of the USSR – with its ridiculously low prices for food and essential consumer goods, in comparison with the foreign markets – could not maintain itself for a single day.

And all of a sudden, companies and individuals were authorised to export overseas foodstuffs, raw materials, electronics equipment, energy, chemical products, just about … everything!

It was as if a powerful hurricane had swept over the vast territory of the USSR. In a moment it sucked outside the country all products of value. Groceries and manufactured objects disappeared from store shelves.

The pillage of the gold reserves

On 21 July 1989 new customs regulations repealed all restrictions on the export of gold and precious stones.

The work of the Soviet customs for the last 70 years was instantly wiped out.

Gold, in quantities up to then unheard of, was thrown onto the internal market, to be bought at an internal price, and then exported overseas.

At the time the newspaper “The Moscow Komsomol” described the jewellery trade thus: “A glittering picture of unrestrained speculation, the sales quota of the State Treasury (Gokhran) for jewellery was allocated over and over … The counters were under assault, the State Treasury was bombed with mail requesting new supplies of gold and precious stones … “.

The newspaper “Izvestia” requested that as a control measure against queues for gold and diamonds: “Be put on the market a formidable quantity of gold such as the State’s gold reserves.”

The newspaper “Soviet culture” called outright for the removal customs barriers for the export of gold.

After some time G. Yavlinsky (responsible for the economy in the government at the time) alarmed the press with a statement about the disappearance of the gold reserves. But it all calmed down rather quickly.

It got worse and worse

That same year individuals exported 500,000 colour televisions and 200,000 washing machines. In 1988 just one single family exported: 392 refrigerators, 72 washing machines, 142 air-conditioning machines… The personnel of one of the thousands of foreign organisations exported: 1,400 irons, 174 fans, 3,500 pieces of soap and 242 kg of washing powder, products that were specifically bought by the State – at the insistence of MPS – with foreign currency supposedly for the use of Soviet citizens.

These data appeared inadvertently in the press at the time. In 1989 alone, at just one of the many customs controls points, individuals exported more than 2 million tons of products that were in short supply in the USSR.

The entire production of the Krasnoyarsk cotton combine was exported. At the time a good bed-sheet cost 5 roubles, a double sheet 8 roubles. The exports of cloth tripled, those of cotton nearly quadrupled, while those of linen multiplied by 7.

These are figures about State exports alone. Private exports surpassed those of the government. Moreover, determining the exact figures of exports was impossible. The same newspaper “Izvestia” wrote at the time: “Our State is one of the few in the world that does not compile customs statistics.”

What is the Balcerowicz miracle about which so many media talk about?

American experts have suggested to Balcerowicz (the organiser and inspirer ideological economic reforms in Poland) to reduce production and normal trade and instead encourage unreservedly small business dealings from hand to hand.

That is to say debase the labouring population and transform it into a “nation of hucksters.” All these downgraded individuals, by the million, flocked into the USSR like grasshoppers and began to export everything they could lay their hands on, from imported furniture to toothpaste, and by the ton.

In the Congress of Deputies there was a terrible scandal and shouting about the lack of toothpaste for the Soviet population. It never occurred to the Representatives of the people to question themselves as to the causes that brought about that glaring penury of toothpaste. They simply decided to buy abroad $60 million worth of toothpaste.

Who got rich with these $60 million?

In France, from where it was imported, the toothpaste tube cost 15 Francs, while in the USSR it sold for a rouble. Of course, in no time, the toothpaste found once again its way abroad. It was sent to Poland in packs of 500 tubes (the original package of the French factory) and again without any restrictions.

It was transported in car boots, entire train compartments, or containers on decks of boats. Just like ants who only leave the skeleton of the body of a dead lion, the “Balcerowicz piranhas” took everything and left the Soviet people with empty store shelves. There was not an article of consumption, from foodstuffs to household appliances that was not exported.

We were left to wonder about how these goods had disappeared, because industry over the years continued to produce at full capacity.

“The Leningrad Pravda» 1992

“In the USSR until 1990-1991, we produced 38 meters of cloth per capita. This represented 75% of the world production of linen cloth, 16% of wool and 13% silk. According to official State figures, only 50% of linen products and 42% of wool products were exported.”

But these figures did not take into account exports by private individuals. Because, like locusts, they exported everything they could buy.

The USSR produced 21.4% of the world production of butter (the Soviet population was 4.88% of the world population). Butter production continued to increase, but because of exports, rationing tickets had to be introduced. In the Soviet Union the production of butter per capita was 26% more than that in Great Britain. This being so, there was no butter in Soviet stores but one could buy it in Britain without any problem. Strange, is it not?

Official statistics regarded as consumed in the USSR all the butter and the meat that were sent to storage warehouses that supplied the grocery stores. For the purchase of butter and meat, passports were not required, consequently products purchased in the USSR, yet exported beyond its borders, were considered as contributing to the well-being of the Soviet people. In fact tons of meat and butter, bypassed the retail stores, and went directly to warehouses abroad by sea in containers, by land (road and rail) and by air.

All the while statistics demonstrated that the insatiable Soviet people had devoured it all.

In the late-80s and early 90s, everything had disappeared. Socks and refrigerators, televisions and plates, sheets and washing machines! The flying grasshopper had devoured it all, the sausages and the fish, the semolina and the sugar. Aluminium pots, soup-bowls and spoons were exported as cheap very valuable material that had gone through the stages that require a lot of energy and polluting treatment. The wood boring insects and exporters eroded the once powerful ship that was the Soviet economy and reduced to dust.

In 1991 it collapsed.

Tatiana Yakovleva 6-07-2012

(French translation YB)

http://south-worker.com/?p=556

by Zoltan Zigedy is available at:

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Notes from the Brink: March 2013

More Workers’ Woes

If it seems like I’m picking on the United Auto Workers union, it’s only because its descent from its once lofty, exemplary stature as one of the most democratic and militant CIO unions has been the steepest. Last month, I wrote of the leadership’s complicity in the gutting of union wage and benefit standards, a gutting that has left starting wages often lower than for their non-union counterparts. I reported that UAW contracts were pressuring management at non-union Toyota to buy out older workers in order to establish a new, lower starting wage to compete with their unionized competitors. UAW union contracts are now the corporate tool for slashing labor costs!

But it’s even worse than I thought. A retired autoworker pointed out that my claim of two-tier employment at UAW shops was incomplete. At Ford, the UAW has acceded to a three-tier system! Below the “entry” level tier, Ford, with UAW agreement, has established a classification of “long term supplemental” that offers the $14-16 entry-level starting wage, but with no job security or benefits! In some suburban, high- income areas, fast food restaurants offer better wages and benefits than this!

Labor Notes Ken Paff reports on a shameful act of treachery against workers employed at a car-hauling company under a Teamster contract. As revealed by a National Labor Relations Board decision, Ford colluded with a UAW local to underbid the Teamster contract and award the work to a lower-paying competitor. The NLRB administrative law judge ordered the voiding of the UAW contract and the re-employment of the laid-off workers with full back pay. According to the decision, Ford arranged the sub-standard contract with the UAW beforehand to secure a lower bid. As a result, the Teamster members who had made about $20 an hour were replaced with workers employed under a UAW contract at $11-14 per hour. According to a leaked document, the collusion would save Ford $9.8 million a year. This sorry deal was known to the top union leadership.

Treachery of this dimension transcends class collaboration and business unionism and sinks to the level of scabbing. Those who gave their lives to organize the UAW must be turning in their graves. Their legacy deserves much better than this insult to labor solidarity.

Currency War

Why is the escalation of the global currency war by the Abe government in Japan significant?

Until now, the leaders of all of the leading capitalist countries have proclaimed open and unrestrained trade—free markets—as a mark of a new level of international cooperation. They have advertised the dramatic growth of international trade as establishing bonds of mutual dependence that strengthen relations and lessen tensions.

But these “interdependencies” were tenuous at best. They temporarily concealed the ever compelled, inevitable drive for competitive advantage, to win at the expense of competitors. Cooperation is alien to a system—capitalism—based upon ever greater accumulation. A deepening crisis quickly surfaced these tendencies.

It was not the Abe government that opened the currency wars, but the US. The doses of “quantitative easing” adopted by the US Federal Reserve cheapened the dollar, making US exports more attractive and foreign imports less so. As a result, there was a marked revival of US manufacturing. In short, US policy makers broke with international cooperation and set out on the road to securing national advantage.

The first to feel the bite from this unilateral policy were many economies in Latin America. Despite the justifiable complaint of their leaders, US investment money flooded these markets, disrupting capital markets, and attacking their exports. Two years ago, Brazil lodged loud complaints against US quantitative easing and its negative impact on Brazilian exports.

Other countries, like the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and Israel, have acted to protect their currencies, while Australian manufacturing has been seriously slowed because it has refrained from reacting.

The already seriously wounded EU economy has been further disrupted by the currency wars, with the European Central Bank reluctant to retaliate. Germany, with its manufacturing largely immune to price competition, has successfully blocked any strong reaction. The rest of the EU has consequently felt the loss of competitiveness.

It was the Abe government in Japan that brought this escalating contest into the open. Their explicit determination to weaken the yen served as the basis for Abe’s election campaign.

Despite a frantic attempt to get some agreement among the G7 powers, the battle only promises to become more aggressive and destructive. The Brazilian Finance Minister was recently quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “The currency war has become more explicit now because trade conflicts have become sharper. Countries are trying to devalue their currencies because of falling global trade. So many of them are in a difficult situation.”

The tensions emerging in the currency war are leading to sharp military confrontations and threats, especially among Asian Pacific countries. The capitalist sharks are turning on each other.

Here We Go Again!

Signs are eerily pointing toward developments reminiscent of the 2008 crash. Once again an enormous pool of capital is accumulating and overflowing into riskier and riskier areas to find a return. As reported in the WSJ, $149 billion has channeled into money market funds since November of 2012. The Journal notes that these funds are increasingly accepting risk (for example, French bank debt) to secure better returns.

Cash is also flooding equity markets. In only four weeks in the New Year, $38.1 billion was invested in stock mutual funds, more than the previous record in February, 2000 (remember that moment?).

A recent bank of charts published in the WSJ tellingly demonstrates the many signs of an overheated, dangerously speculative economy:

● Issuance of high-yield corporate bonds below investment grade is nearly double what it was in 2007.

● Business loans not required to meet traditional standards have risen sharply (though still well below

2007).

● Total assets in US high-yield, junk bond funds and exchange traded funds are more than double what

they were in 2007.

● Iowa farmland prices are more than double what they were in 2007.

As if there were not enough danger signs in the global economy, another over-accumulation event approaches. Hold on to your hats!

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

——————————————————————————–

Published: Prosveshcheniye No 3., March 1913. Signed: V. I.. Published according to the Prosveshcheniye text.
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 19, pages 21-28.
Translated: The Late George Hanna
Original Transcription:Lee Joon Koo and Marc Luzietti
Re-Marked up by: K. Goins (2008)
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (1996). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

——————————————————————————–

This article was published in 1913 in Prosveshcheniye No. 3, dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx’s death.

Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) was a Bolshevik social, political and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg from December 1911 onwards. Its inauguration was proposed by Lenin to replace the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), a Moscow publication banned by the tsarist government. Lenin directed the work of the journal from abroad and wrote the following articles for it: “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign”, “Results of the Election”, “Critical Remarks on the National Question”, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, and others.

The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Publication was resumed in the autumn of 1917 but only one double number appeared; this number contained two articles by Lenin: “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” and “A Review of the Party Programme”.

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.

I

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

II

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

III

When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.

Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organisations of the proletariat are multi plying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

Check out this website:

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/search?q=+Cuba

Via: http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2013/2013-02-26-elisaio-kkro

On Monday 25/2 the proceedings of the “round-table discussion” organized by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) were held in Moscow, on the topic “The Image of Socialism we are Fighting for”, with the participation of foreign delegations, which participated in the 15th Congress of the CPRF.

Elisseos Vagenas, member of the CC and Responsible for the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE, made a contribution to the “round-table discussion” on behalf of the KKE. The speech was as follows:

The socialism which we are struggling for

Dear comrades,

We thank the CPRF for the opportunity that it is providing us today to exchange thoughts about this important issue.

The KKE, after the counterrevolutionary changes in the Soviet Union in 1991, despite the fact that it emerged organizationally weakened, due to the inner-party struggle with the opportunist forces which in the end left the party, maintained its communist identity: Its faith in the Marxist-Leninist worldview and the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It defended the hammer and sickle and its other historical symbols and at the same time began long-term research and inner-party work on the causes which led to the defeat of socialism in the USSR. Through this work, which was consolidated in the Decision of the 18th Congress of our party, our party enriched its conception of socialism. An enrichment which in turn is expressed in the new draft programme of our party, which will be the work of our 19th Congress in about a month.

Today we are certainly “one step” forwards compared to the revolutionaries before the Great October Socialist Revolution. This is because today there is the vast experience, positive and negative, of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and other countries. The KKE, in contrast with the forces of the so-called “Party of the European Left” (PEL), defends the enormous contribution of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries to the progress of humanity as a whole. Socialism which existed in the 20th century was able to satisfy important needs of the people, which capitalism not only cannot but does not want to satisfy: free education, health, social security, vacations, housing, pensions at 55 for women and 60 for men, certainty about the future and many other things.

It is no accident that that this experience, the construction of socialism in the 20th century, is subject to the rabid attack of the bourgeois political forces, the EU, the USA, as well as of the opportunist forces, with as a “common denominator” the attack against the person of Joseph Stalin, who was head of the CP and the soviet state, when the foundations of socialism were laid. Our party is of the assessment that this socialist soviet experience must be studied and utilised regarding the issue as to what the socialism we are struggling for should be like.

The overthrow of socialism did not occur due to “totalitarianism”, or because the workers had exaggerated gains and rights, as various forces, which are struggling against the communists, claim. The overthrow of socialism happened because in conditions of the aggressiveness of capital’s forces, basic laws of socialist construction were violated, such as the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the “state of the whole people” and the strengthening of commodity-money relations in the decades after 1950.

A second point that the KKE has come to is that the socialism which we are struggling for cannot arise from bourgeois parliamentarianism, through “left-patriotic governments”, which promote the “gradual” correction, “democratization”, “humanization” of capitalism, without a socialist revolution, without the destruction of the bourgeois state structures, without the construction of new popular organs of power.

Socialist construction is an uninterrupted process, which starts with the conquest of power by the working class. Our party has a different view from those parties, which in the name of “national specificities” or “21st century socialism” retreat from the fundamental characteristics of the socialist-communist society. In our evaluation socialism is the first phase of the communist socio-economic formation; it is not an independent socio-economic formation. It is an immature communism. The basic law of the communist mode of production is valid: “Planned production for the extended satisfaction of social needs.”

A basic feature of socialist society is the socialization of the means of production.

The socialisation of the means of production in industry, energy-water supply, telecommunications, construction, repair, public transport, wholesale and retail trade and import-export trade, the concentrated tourist –restaurant infrastructure, the capitalist agricultural cultivations.

The socialization of land and the mineral resources. State production units will be created for the production and processing of agricultural products whether as raw material or consumer products.

The abolition of private ownership and economic activity in education, health-welfare, culture and sports, in the mass media. They are completely and exclusively organized as social services.

The abolition of the use of alien labour, i.e. wage labour, by those who still possess isolated means of production in sectors that have not been compulsorily socialized, e.g. in crafts, agricultural production, tourism-restaurants, in certain auxiliary services.

Means of production, raw materials, industrial materials and resources, and labour power will enter a process of production and organization of social and administrative services via central planning.

Industry and the largest part of agricultural production will be carried out with relations of social ownership, central planning, workers’ control over the whole spectrum of management and administration.

The development potential of the country will placed at the service of the people and their needs through central planning, as well as whatever has been created by human activity in Science, Technology and Culture. This will safeguard a higher standard of living and of the development and cultivation of the intellect. Unemployment and labour insecurity will be eradicated, free time will be increased, so that the working people will have the ability to actively participate and exert workers’ control in order to safeguard the character of working class power.

Agricultural productive cooperatives will be promoted, which will have the right to utilize the socialized land as a means of production. The integration of small farmers will be carried out on a voluntarily basis. The incentives for cooperativization are: the reduction of the cost of production through collective cultivation work and collection of agricultural products. The protection of agricultural production from natural phenomena through the state infrastructure and scientific and technical support. Agricultural produce will be made available through its concentration via the state retail sector.

In addition, we are of the assessment that socialist construction is incompatible with the participation of the country in any imperialist union, such as the EU and NATO, IMF, OECD, and with the existence of US-NATO military bases in our country.

The new working class power, depending on the international developments and regional situation, will seek to develop mutually beneficial inter-state relations between Greece and other countries, especially with countries whose level of development, the nature of their problems and immediate interests can ensure such a mutually beneficial cooperation.

The socialist state will seek cooperation with countries and peoples who have objectively a direct interest in resisting the economic, political and military centres of imperialism, first and foremost with the peoples who are constructing socialism in their countries. It will seek to utilize every available “rupture” which might exist in the imperialist “front” due to inter-imperialist contradictions, in order to defend and strengthen the revolution and socialism. A socialist Greece, loyal to the principles of proletarian internationalism, will be, to the extent of its possibilities, a bulwark for the world anti-imperialist, revolutionary and communist movement.

Social needs are determined based on the level of development of the productive forces that have been achieved in the given historical period.

Basic social needs (education-healthcare- welfare) are covered for free in a universal way, according to the needs, while another part of them are covered by a relatively small part of the labour monetary income (housing, energy-water supply- heating, transport, nutrition).

A characteristic of the first stage of communist relations, i.e of the socialist relations, is the distribution of a part of the products “according to labour”. The distribution of a part of socialist production “according to labour”, which resembles commodity exchange only in terms of its form, is a result of the capitalist inheritance.

The new mode of production has not managed to discard it yet, because it has not developed all of the necessary human productive power and all the means of production to the necessary dimensions through the widest use of new technology. Labour productivity does not yet allow a decisively large reduction of labour time, the eradication of heavy and one-sided labour, so that the social need for compulsory labour can be abolished.

The planned distribution of labour power and of the means of production entails the planned distribution of the social product. This is a fundamental difference compared to the distribution of the social product through the market, based on the laws and categories of commodity exchange.

The socialist power is the revolutionary power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The revolutionary workers’ power requires a high level of organisation with all the available means. It requires workers’ control in the exercise of the administration of the industrial units in the sectors of strategic importance so that it carries out its creative, economic-social and cultural work, in order to achieve the supremacy of the workers’ and people’s majority against the organised domestic and foreign resistance of capital, their counterrevolutionary activity after the loss of their power.

The extent and the forms that the revolutionary working class power uses for the repression of the counterrevolutionary activity depend on the stance of the political and social organisations towards the two conflicting powers, the working class and the capitalist class.

The socialist state as an organ of the class struggle, which continues with other forms and under new conditions, does not have merely a defensive, repressive and organisational function. It also has a creative, economic, cultural, educational operation under the leadership of its ideological –political vanguard, of its party. It expresses a higher form of democracy whose chief characteristic is the active participation of the working class and generally of the people who are educated on the basis of (non monetary) incentives that arise from the superior mode of production and democracy during the formation of the socialist society during the resolution of the old contradictions and social inequalities through the control of the administration of the productive units, of the social and administration services of all the organs of power from the bottom up.

The exercise of workers’ and social control will be institutionalised and safeguarded in practice, as will the unhindered criticism of decisions and practices which obstruct socialist construction, the unhindered denunciation of subjective arbitrariness and bureaucratic behaviour of officials, and other negative phenomena and deviations from socialist-communist principles.

The foundation of working class power is the production unit, social services, the units of administration, the production cooperatives where the working people exercise their right to elect and recall the representatives.

The communist party, as an ideological-political organised vanguard of the working class, constitutes the leading force of the revolutionary working class power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It vindicates its revolutionary leading role as long as it expresses the general interests of the working class and the scientific laws of socialist-communist construction in practice.

Dear comrades,

At the end of this brief contribution, allow me to say that the communists in Greece keep alive in our hearts the mass heroism of the proletarians who stormed the Winter Palace, of the communists and Komsomols who crushed the counterrevolution in unprecedented historical conditions and laid the foundations of the socialist construction, of the Red Army soldiers who crushed the Nazi hordes! Their sacrifices and their struggles were not in vain. They sustain and encourage the communists all over the world, the forces that struggle for the revolutionary regroupment of the international communist movement.