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COMMUNISM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE COMMUNISM!


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Communism is dead. Long live communism
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Communism is dead. Long live communism!

In light of the «confessions» made this August, we are forced, us «natural republicans» to paraphrase the hateful monarchist motto «The king is dead. Long live the king!» and plainly say: «Communism is dead. Long live Communism».

It won’t be easy for Russian opportunism to admit that the fiction of «building» communism (as though it were just another example of grim neo-classical Stalinist architecture) has been exploded; it is a pretence that has been kept up for almost 70 years with the collusion and active support of the capitalist «enemy» of the entire world.

The Moscow method has been able to immobilise the working class on a global scale and act as the perfect deterrent to any attempt at revolutionary revival. The strike of the English miners in 1926; the bloody struggles of the proletarians of Shanghai; the attempted revolt of Berlin workers in 1953; all the attempts at proletarian revolt in Eastern Europe, right up to the recent events in Poland which were bloodily repressed by the Russian bourgeoisie in power, all were perfectly justified by the relations of forces and the status quo between the powers that came about after the defeat of the world revolution (which wasn’t simply the Russian revolution) in the years between 1922 and 1926.

Not a word has been said by the Moscowites, or their faithless cronies elsewhere, about the fact that one of the «Lefts», and one in particular, fought a lone battle from the very first congresses of the International to defend the position that «Russian Communism» was a theoretical heresy destined to lead to defeat in practice.

We asserted in the past that when the Russian myth had collapsed, as was bound to happen, we shouldn’t expect an honest recognition of our foresight, but rather, if anything, oppression or silence. And such it is. But it isn’t that which rankles. We don’t keep going now, and we haven’t kept going in the past, through those post-mortem rehabilitations which are so much to the taste of opportunities swine. We anticipate, and know that an entire historical cycle must come to a close for communism to arise again as an urgent necessity. The mise en scène of its «downfall», and every corollary that can claim historical descent from a thesis so monstrous. Thus «the national roads to socialism» have degenerated into conflicts, which, though apparently ethnic and racist, are in fact nothing other than the expressions of struggles within the bourgeois class camouflaged in the most horrible and cannibalistic way. We need only see the Croatians, Slovenians and Serbians slaughtering each other; they who were once united together in the allegedly «most human of socialisms» that of the «Titoist» heresy.

But take note! We don’t believe that the Gorbachovites, they, their opponents and successors, will altogether dispense playing their three-cornered game. Like all those with a weakness for quotations, they are masters at digging around for passages to prove their latest argument, thus: «… we have radically changed our point of view on socialism to that of Lenin in 1921 at the time of the NEP». For Gorbachov the Lenin of the NEP was correct, that is, a free market, but there is not a single word … pardon us… to make it dialectical! In fact, Lenin’s policy was due to his awareness of the fact that in 1921 in Russia, after the revolution and «war communism» (practised also by the bourgeois governments…) the conditions weren’t there to «construct» socialism; exactly the opposite position to the one codified by the Marxist-Leninists à la Stalin.

But there it is, and without being master of linguistics, we all know that swine are used to quoting «out of context». That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but what is worse is that they go on to draw conclusions from their scrapbook of fragments, juggling words about as though they had a separate, nominalist, existence.

Their final word is this: «The crisis can be overcome and be followed by a new, revitalised idea of socialism».

Ever since 1921–24, the history of the PCUS has been far rockier than is commonly know in the West; and it can’t be easy trying to convince the Russian proletariat, after 70 years prostrated before fake socialism, that, unfortunately, it has all been a dreadful mistake… They are going to have to find a way to sugar the pill; otherwise as the powerful strikes of the Donbass and the Kuzbass show, even the «democrats» could be toppled.

Western capital, led by the U.S.A. is aware and worried about it. Testing the water with a loan here, a loan there, it proposes the following time-schedule: 1) First of all, Russia and its satellites to be opened up to commercial capital so that commodities and technology can be easily exported 2) next, all going well (meaning without the wars that are menacing the Balkanisation of the entire east) a heftier dose of financial capital will be forthcoming.

This operation, let’s come right out and say it, is certainly not going to be painless since the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself, as an economic, political and military system are only ever patched up by way of declarations of bankruptcy, and severe ones at that. And the official receivers, headed by the U.S.A. won’t be there just to help Gorby and Yeltsin save face, it is their own supremacy they are concerned about, both today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, as the saying goes, one thing leads to another. How will the Russian state, we ask, now openly capitalist, manage to compete with Western capital, bristling with weaponry, without recourse to arms? This is the question, this is the hurdle to be got over; and the bourgeoisie and opportunism in general, extremist or not, once they have got over their momentary intoxication at getting the proletariat and the propertyless in general into their cooking pot, are bound to be propelled once again into preparations for war.

Thus we say, if Communism is dead, Long live Communism!


Source: Translated from: «II Partito Comunista», No 194, August 1991 in «The Texts of the Communist Left», No.5, «Revolution and Counterrevolution in Russia» by «Editions of the 'International Communist Party'».

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