Category: socialism
What was the Cuban Revolution?
worker | April 5, 2021 | 8:28 pm | Cuba, socialism, struggle for socialism | Comments closed

The American Way to Bill of Rights Socialism
worker | October 30, 2020 | 8:12 pm | Gus Hall, socialism, struggle for socialism | Comments closed

The American way to Bill of Rights socialism

Xi: Marx’s theory still shines with truth
worker | May 4, 2018 | 8:08 pm | China, Communist Party of China, Karl Marx, socialism | Comments closed

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, is delivering a speech at a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx on Friday morning.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414e32556a4d77457a6333566d54/share.html

Xi: Marx’s theory still shines with truth

Politics
CGTN
1km to Beijing
2018-05-04 10:00 GMT+8

Updated 2018-05-04 14:28 GMT+8

Two centuries on, despite huge and profound changes in human society, the name of Karl Marx is still respected all over the world and his theory still shines with the brilliant light of truth, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Friday.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered a speech at a meeting to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx on Friday morning in Beijing.

“Today, we hold this grand gathering with great veneration to mark the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, to remember his great character and historic deeds and to review his noble spirit and brilliant thoughts,” Xi said at the event.

Marxism has profound impact on humans

Xi reviewed the great revolutionary and philosopher’s life in the speech and spoke highly of his contribution to human history.

CGTN Photo

“The most valuable and influential spiritual wealth left by Marx is the scientific theory of Marxism named after him,” Xi said.

The theory can be compared to a spectacular sunrise lighting the path for humans to explore the rules of history and pursue liberation, said Xi.

“Marxism is a scientific theory, creatively revealing the law of human social development,” he added. He also highlighted that Marxism is a constantly developing theory and always stands at the forefront of the times.

170 years have passed since the first formal version of the Communist Manifesto was published, and Marxism has been widely disseminated in the world, said Xi, adding that no ideological theory has had such a wide and profound impact on humans as Marxism has.

Xinhua Photo‍

“Marx is widely regarded as the thinker of the millennium,” Xi said.

Marxism has not only profoundly changed the world but also profoundly changed China, stressed Xi.

Only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China

‍The CPC combines the basic principles of Marxism with the realities of new China and has brought historical achievements, as well as deep and fundamental historical changes to the country, he added.

Such achievements have proven that only by adhering to and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics can we achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, he added.

The founding of the CPC was guided by Marxism, while the Party holds a great responsibility towards the rejuvenation of the nation and leading the Chinese people to create a miracle of human beings, Xi said.

As a faithful believer and steadfast practitioner of Marxism, the CPC is making persistent efforts to uphold and develop Marxism, said Xi.

Chinese Communists committed to constant development of Marxism

The general theory set forth by Marxism is still absolutely right despite tremendous changes of human society, said Xi.

Members of CPC shall always be the guardian and practicer of the Marxism, said Xi, calling the CPC members to transfer scientific thought and theory to strong substantial power to understand and remold world.

A conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx is held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 4, 2018. /Xinhua Photo

He stressed that the communists must make a habit of reading the Marxist classics and understanding the principles of Marxism. He urges communists to use the classics to guide their practice.

The vitality of theory lies in constant innovation, Xi said. And the constant development of Marxism is the sacred duty of Chinese Communists.

“We must persist in using Marxism to observe, interpret and lead the times, promote the development of Marxism with a fresh and rich contemporary Chinese practice,” Xi said.

Eugene Debs: A New Film Does Him Proud
worker | May 1, 2018 | 8:42 pm | Eugene V. Debs, socialism, struggle for socialism | Comments closed

Eugene Debs: A New Film Does Him Proud
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/eugene-debs-a-new-film-does-him-proud/

by Michael Hirsch

A charismatic and militant labor leader, five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, class-war prisoner jailed by the ostensibly liberal Woodrow Wilson administration for opposing U.S entry into World War 1 and a fiery, moral force in a corrupted era — Eugene Victor Debs was among the greatest orators this nation ever produced, yet no recording of his voice survives. And what a speaker he was! John Swinton, the late 19th century New York labor writer who as a young man heard Lincoln speak, likened Debs to Lincoln not just in intellect but in character. And unlike Lincoln, Debs could speak cogently to crowds for hours without notes.

Even foreign-language speakers were won over, with many testifying that Debs’ mannerisms alone were magnetic, his fist smacking his palm as he offered such injunctions as “Progress is born out of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.”

To know Debs and his impact on American working-class politics as it emerged to confront the mammon of industrial and finance capital, we are ably served by his voluminous writings and by a series of fine, highly readable biographies by such writers as Ray Ginger, Nick Salvatore and Ernest Freeberg, the latter author focusing on Debs’ later years as “democracy’s prisoner.” Add to those a plethora of histories of the old Socialist Party. Ira Kipnis’s “The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912”  is likely the best, though it ends prematurely with a massive vote for Debs in the presidential race and party membership peaking at 118,000 — all before the government’s full-bore assault on the left and Debs’ jailing.

Fortunately two strong movies are also available that help underscore  Debs’ impact, including a 1979 documentary by Bernie Sanders and a new feature: American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by filmmaker Yale Strom, currently artist-in-residence and professor in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University, and narrated by actor Amy Madigan. Debs’ legacy is especially well served by the new production, which takes advantage not only of scholarly accounts of Debs’ life and American socialist movement he rose out of but judiciously utilized the extensive Debs archives at Michigan State University-Lansing, the Debs Foundation collection in Terra Haute, Indiana and others.

So Who was Debs?

Born in 1855 and named by his immigrant parents after the French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo, Debs was slow to embrace radical politics in his hometown of Terra Haute, where the capitalists were still of the small, local variety and social mobility was not impossible for working people. The metastasizing of monopoly capital in the area through the intrusion and consolidation of finance and industry would come soon enough. The future socialist even married a rich man’s daughter and was a Democratic state office holder, if briefly.

The film makes clear that Debs, a strong railroad worker-unionist, didn’t start out as a socialist; that transposition came after the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland broke the American Railway Union strike under the mendacious claim that strikers were sabotaging mail delivery. Debs, it’s president, went into prison a militant trade unionist and, courtesy of the federal evisceration of his union and a prison reading of Marx’s Capital, came out six months later a committed revolutionary, though of a discernible American type. He would, for example, define socialism as “Christianity in action.” For Debs’ religiously inclined listeners, greed and the pursuit of personal wealth were presented as sin, the riches of capitalists balefully gained.

That appeal to traditional religion as a bulwark of cooperation — the essence of socialism — sparked interest in Debs’ “Red Special” whistle-stop electoral campaign in areas such as Oklahoma, where, the film argues, small-farmer militancy combined with ingrained Evangelical Christianity. The strategy was less successful in the South, where we can intuit that racial division was a prime factor mitigating unified class action.

But whether addressing farmers, workers or urban intellectuals at such venues as New York’s Cooper Union, Debs was in his element.

It was the Socialist Party’s opposition to World War I that led to its undoing and to a five-year prison sentence for Debs. His crime: violating a Sedition Act provision against urging young men to dodge the draft.

On July 16, 1918, a year after the act’s passage, Debs was in Canton, Ohio to address the Ohio Socialist Party’s state convention and visit comrades jailed for speaking out against the war. He knew he was at risk of arrest himself. “I must be exceedingly careful,” he told the convention delegates, “prudent as to what I say. I may not be able to say all I think, but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in prison than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. They may put those boys in jail — and some of the rest of us in jail — but they cannot put the Socialist movement in jail.”

True to form, government stenographers in the crowd noted his comments selectively. Prison followed, based on the alleged danger that his remarks, those of a known “agitator,” posed to troop recruitment — this just months before the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

A red scare followed the war. Foreign radicals were rounded up and deported. Native-born leftists of any stripe were imprisoned.

Running for president on the Socialist ticket in 1920 while incarcerated, Debs garnered just under 1 million votes. Even as late as 1921, on the eve of his leaving office, Wilson still refused to pardon Debs. It was the GOP’s Harding who granted Debs and 23 others a Christmas commutation.

The Irony of a Humble Man Lionized

It seems odd that a movement valorizing collective action and the social context of everyday life over invidious egotism and careerist grasping would also need to anoint leaders and elevate heroes. As Debs himself put it 1906 to an audience of workers in Detroit: “I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”

Even allowing for the early glint of its religious trappings, his was an American variant of Marx’s insistence on working-class self-activity, that the emancipation of working people was not the provenance of elites no matter how well-intentioned but a task largely of the workers alone. Debs’ often quoted statement to his trial judge at his conviction for violating the Sedition Act makes much the same point.

“Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal class I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.”

Debs’ heroes were not great men and women but ordinary people who showed uncommon bravery and solidarity with one another.

A story Debs told, though not included in the film, concerns a black-balled former railroad worker in desperate straits who proudly tells Debs that he never scabbed, knowing the principled stance meant exorcism from a decent-paying job. “If I’d have been like some of them, I’d had a passenger train years ago and been saved lots of grief,” he tells Debs. “But I’d rather be a broken-down old umbrella fixer without a friend than to be a scab and worth a million…. And when I cross the big divide, I can walk up to the bar of judgment and look God in the face without a flicker.”

Debs’ cited the man as the epitome of working-class solidarity.

“There was something peculiarly grand about the scarred old veteran of the industrial battlefield,” Debs wrote in 1913. “His shabbiness was all on the outside, and he seemed transfigured to me and clad in garments of glory. He loomed before me like a forest monarch the tempests had riven and denuded of its foliage but could not lay low. He had kept the faith and had never scabbed.”

Neither did Debs. See the film.

American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victory Debs opened at New York City’s Cinema Village (Manhattan) on April 27 for one week, and includes a Q and A with the film creator for several performances. Showings are also scheduled for Hudson, NY (April 26-May 13); Los Angeles and Pasadena, (May 4-10); San Diego (May 11-16), Washington, D.C., (May 22), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (June 12-15.)  

This post first appeared in the reader-supported Indypendent and is reposted her with the permission of the author.

____

Photo: Eugene Victor Debs speaking to a crowd in Canton, Ohio 1914. Courtesy of First Run Features.

“Eradicating the Bacillus”
worker | November 30, 2017 | 9:03 pm | Analysis, Imperialism, Jeremy Corbyn, socialism, USSR, V.I. Lenin | Comments closed

- by Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

“Eradicating the Bacillus”

Thursday, November 30, 2017

“Eradicating the Bacillus”
In the US, the last few months have seen a host of celebratory salutes to, tributes to, and commentaries on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Serious research and thought were reflected in many, reminding us of both the sacrifices and achievements made by the workers of many nationalities who established the first sustained workers’ state, the USSR. Authors and speakers touched on many aspects of the Revolution and its rich legacy of fighting for socialism and ending imperialism.
Needless to say, little (or none?) of the victories of twentieth century socialism spawned by the Russian Revolution found its way into the monopoly media; the fete for the Bolshevik Revolution was held on alternative websites, by small circulation journals, and in small meeting halls and venues. This would neither surprise nor disappoint Vladimir Lenin; rather, it would conjure memories of the difficult and stubborn work of the small, often disputatious Russian Social Democratic Party in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that the mainstream capitalist media had no commentary on the Russian Revolution. They did.
And it was relentlessly and uniformly negative. No warm words of any kind were spared for Russian workers of 1917 and their cause. In fact, in a year when the media and its wealthy and powerful collaborators decided to resurrect the spectre of Soviet Russia in a new, hysterical anti-Russia campaign, moguls mounted a lurid, anti-Communist campaign unseen since the Cold War.
The New York Times unleashed their rabid neo-McCarthyite commentator (Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses), Bret Stephens, to spew his venom and unsparingly and gratuitously denounce anyone that he could even remotely connect with the Revolution, from those wearing “Lenin or Mao T-shirts” to Lillian Hellman. Progressives, Jeremy Corbyn, and, predictably, Bernie Sanders are condemned, part of the “bacillus” yet to be “eradicated,” to reference his clumsy, vulgar paraphrase of Winston Churchill. They, like any of us who find any merit at all in the Soviet experience, are “fools, fanatics, or cynics.”
Then there was the nutty Masha Gessen– the favorite of NPR’s resident bootlicker to wealthy patrons, Scott Simon– who analyzes the Soviet experience in a strange brew of mysticism and psycho-babble. Even The Wall Street Journal reviewer of her new book (The Future is History) concedes that she “puts forth a[n]… argument full of psychospeak about ‘energies’ and an entire society succumbing to depression.” He goes on: “She begins with the dubious assertion that one of Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the society ‘had been forbidden to know itself.’”
“Dubious” assertion? Or whacky assertion?
But Gessen will always be remembered for embracing the term “Homo Sovieticus,” a term that will undoubtedly prove attractive to those mindlessly active in the twitter universe.
For reviewing Gessen’s book, reviewer Stephen Kotkin had the favor returned with a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal of his book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941. Joshua Rubenstein– himself the author of another catalogue of Stalin’s evil, The Last Days of Stalin— engages the usual verbal histrionics: “despotism,” “violent and catastrophic,” “ruthlessness and paranoia,” “draconian,” “remarkable cruelty,” “calamitous,” “crimes,” “ideological fanaticism.” These, and other shrill descriptions, pile up in a mere ten paragraphs. Rubenstein clearly reveals his anti-Soviet bias when he describes Soviet aid and assistance to the elected Spanish anti-fascist government in 1936 as an “intervention.” The interveners were the Italian and German fascists; the Soviets were, unlike the Western “democracies,” the only opponents of intervention.
Kotkin’s service to the WSJ and the anti-Soviet cause were rewarded with a long op-ed piece in the Journal in the weekend Review section (November 4-5, 2017). The Princeton and Stanford professor tackled the topic, The Communist Century, with great vigor. He sets the tone with the dramatic claim that …communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.”
The victims-of-Communism numbers game was elaborated and popularized by Robert Conquest, a writer whose career overlapped on numerous occasions with the Cold War propaganda efforts of the UK Information Research Department, the US CIA, and the CIA’s publishing fronts. Conquest owned the estimate of 20 million deaths from the Soviet purges of the late 1930s. At the height of the Cold War, this astounding figure met no resistance from “scholars” at elite universities. Indeed, every schoolgirl and schoolboy in the crazed, rabid 1950s “knew” of the tens of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges.
Unfortunately for Conquest (though he never acknowledged it) and the many lemming-like academic experts, the post-Soviet archives revealed that his numbers were vastly inflated. In fact, they had no relationship whatsoever to the actualities of that nonetheless tragic period.
Kotkin’s claimed 65 million victims of Communist misdeeds should, accordingly, be taken with less than a grain of salt, though it is curiously and mysteriously well below the endorsed estimate of his mentor, Martin Malia. Malia, the author of the preface to the infamous Black Book of Communism (1994), endorsed that sensationalized book’s claim that 94 million lives were lost to Communism. Some contributors to the Black Book retracted this claim, noting that it was arrived at by an obsession with approaching the magic number of 100 million victims. They subsequently “negotiated” (or manufactured) a tally between 65 and 93 million. Such is the “rigor” of Soviet scholarship at elite universities.
Kotkin, like most other anti-Communist crusaders, gives away the numbers endgame, the purpose behind blaming uncountable victims upon Communism. For the arch-enemies of Communism like Conquest and the participants in the Black Book, it is imperative that Communism be perceived as equally evil with or more evil than Nazism and fascism. This charge of moral equivalence is targeted at the liberals who might view Communism as a benign ally in the defense of liberal values or social reforms. No one has done more to promote this false equivalency than Yale professor Timothy Snyder with his shoddy, ideologically driven book, Bloodlands.
Of course, the Washington Post also has its resident guardians of anti-Soviet dogma in Marc Thiessen and the incomparable Anne Applebaum. Applebaum has enjoyed a meteoric career from graduate student to journalist covering Eastern European affairs to the widely acknowledged leader of anti-Soviet witch-hunters. Her marriage to an equally anti-Communist Polish journalist-turned-politician further strengthened her role as the hardest charging of the hard-charging professional anti-Communists. Her consistent work denouncing everything Soviet has earned her a place on the ruling class Council of Foreign Relations and the CIA’s “active measure,” the National Endowment for Democracy.
She “celebrated” the Bolshevik Revolution on November 6 with a several-thousand-word Washington Post essay raising the feverish alarm of a return of Bolshevism (100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.) Applebaum repeats a favorite theme of the new generation of virulent anti-Communists: the events of November 1917 were a coup d’etat and not a revolution. Of course, this claim is hard to square with another favorite theme– the Bolsheviks numbered only two to ten thousand followers. How do you reconcile such a tiny group “overthrowing” the government and the security forces of the fourth most populated empire in the world?
The Bolsheviks lied. Lenin was a liar. Trotsky was a liar. “So were his comrades. The Bolsheviks lied about the past… and they lied about the future, too. All through the spring and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises that would never be kept.” Further, Lenin’s henchmen used the “tactics of psychological warfare that would later become their trademark” to mesmerize the population. That same easily charmed population was to later fight for socialism against counter-revolutionary domestic reaction and foreign intervention in a bloody five-year war (1917-1922), the same supposedly easily tricked population that laid down their arms and refused to fight for the Czar or his “democratic” successors. This neat picture of perfidy surely exposes a belief in both superhuman, mystical powers possessed by Lenin and an utter contempt for the integrity and intelligence of the Russian masses.
But it is not really the historical Bolsheviks who are Applebaum’s target, but today’s “neo-Bolsheviks.”
And who are the “neo-Bolsheviks”?
For Ms. Applebaum, they are everyone politically outside of her comfortable, insular world of manners and upper-middle class conservatism. First and foremost, she elects to smear the social democrats in Spain and Greece, along with Jeremy Corbyn, who may consider “bringing back nationalization.” Similarly, their US counterparts “on the fringes of the Democratic Party” (Bernie Sanders!) are condemned because they embrace “a dark, negative version of American history” and “spurn basic patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East.” (Sadly, my social democratic friends will likely not allow these ravings to shake their confidence in Applebaum’s equally inane pronouncements on Communism.)
But the “neo-Bolsheviks” exist on the right as well! She identifies them as those rightists who “scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the church and sought to bring morality back to politics…” “If some of what these extremists [on the right] say is to be taken seriously, their endgame– the destruction of the existing political order, possibly including the U.S. Constitution– is one that the Bolsheviks would have understood.” In Applebaum’s bizarre world, there are Bolsheviks of both the left and right lurking under our beds! Safety is only found in the bosom of Christian democracy, that post-war artifact cobbled together by the Western powers to counter the parliamentary rise of Communism.
The anti-Communist graffiti artists, the professional defacers of the Soviet legacy, are legion. Books and commentaries by others, like Victor Sebestyen, Serhii Plokhy, Douglas Smith, Svetlana Alexievich, Amy Knight, and Catherine Merridale, join the authors reviewed here in churning out new grist for the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet mill.
With many Soviet sources now available, the practice of Cold War defamation has become a riskier business, an enterprise possibly bringing embarrassment to the most outrageous fabricators. Accordingly, the most sophisticated among the new generation of Cold Warriors have turned in a new direction: the 1930s famines in then Soviet Ukraine. With little risk of exposure and eager cooperation from the virulently anti-Communist, extreme nationalists now installed to govern Ukraine, they have started a new victim-numbers race to rally the cause of anti-Communism, a new narrative of Red wickedness.
Applebaum is right about one thing. There is evil in the air.
But it is the vicious slander of everything Red, especially the legacy of the Soviet Union.
Greg Godels (Zoltan Zigedy)
zzsblogml@gmail.com
Dimitris Koutsoumbas: “Socialism in the 20th century proved its superiority in comparison with capitalism”
worker | November 28, 2017 | 7:46 pm | Communist Party Greece (KKE), socialism | Comments closed

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Dimitris Koutsoumbas: “Socialism in the 20th century proved its superiority in comparison with capitalism”

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/11/dimitris-koutsoumbas-socialism-in-20th.html
The Secretary General of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, delivered the central speech during the KKE’s political and cultural event for the 100 years since the Great October Socialist Revolution that took place on Sunday 26th November in Athens / Source: inter.kke.gr. 
In his speech, the SG of the CC of KKE noted that “The October Revolution is neither an accident of history, nor a Bolshevik coup d’etat, as the capitalists declare and write, nor immature and early, as all kinds of apostates and oportunists-adventurists declare and write”  and added that “The October Revolution has been the climactic world-historic event of the 20th century that sounded the start of the era when the working class would become the protagonist of the developments and would push forward the wheel of history, taking over the power and organizing the new socialist-communist relations of production, reforming the whole society. (…) The October Revolution gave impulse to the international revolutionary movement and filled with optimism the struggle of the peoples around the world, accelerated the process for the founding of a series of communist parties. Our Party, is a product of the revolutionary flame of October. In a few days we will welcome year 2018, year of climax for the celebration of the 100 years of the honored and heroic Communist Party of Greece.”
D. Koutsoumbas underlined that “The Bolsheviks won because they worked with patience, with audacity, primarily because they worked with a plan of political, organizational and military preparation for the revolt in conditions of revolutionary situation” and added: “We hold up high the flag of revolutionary struggle. In our 20th Congress we placed the marker even higher, we put the urgent duty of consolidating the KKE. A strong KKE so that our party becomes able, as a party of social overthrow, to succeed in his historical vanguard role, utilizing and deepening the contradictions and antitheses of the capitalist system with the class struggle. A Party able to lead the struggle of the working class and of the whole people, for the regroupment of the trade-union movement, for the forward push of the social alliance in an antimonopoly – anticapitalist direction, against imperialist war, for the working class power.” 
The SG of the CC of KKE underlined that “The working class has proved that it can, it has the ability and possibility, as the only truly revolutionary class, to bring about its historical mission, to lead the cosmogonia of the building of socialism-communism. Our eyes, our mind and our way of thinking, are not blurred by the counter-revolution and the overthrows that took place. That is why, today, our priority is the regroupment of the working class movement from the situation of recession that is in today, that today more and more workers realize who is the real enemy and where their struggle should be directed to. (…) No struggle gains class orientation, stability and endurance, when the worker adopts the aims of the capital, of the national and international bourgeoisie for “bigger competitiveness” as his own. (…)
 
In order for the working class to assert the power, it must form its own social alliance with the poor peasants, the oppressed strata of the city. With the struggle of the Bolsheviks, it became possible, that the poor peasantry ally with the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. That alliance came up victorious, the alliance of all the oppressed with which the soldiers sided, the sons of the people that where serving in the war.
 
This experience confirms that the hope, the alternative are not to be found in the summit agreements but in the alliance of all the oppressed, in the movement, where all can meet together and walk towards the road of clash in order to really ascend to power.
 
The experience of October has confirmed that the working class due to its place in capitalist production is objectively the only revolutionary class, the builder of the socialist-communist society and consequently the leading force in relation to the rest of the popular forces.
 
Only the working class movement can assume complete revolutionary characteristics, can transform in a revolutionary movement.
 
Our proposal of the social alliance corresponds to the effort that the popular strata, through the struggle, as potential allies of the working class, and their respective movements, to be pulled more or less actively in the revolutionary struggle, or to become neutralized.
 
The Social Alliance that the KKE is proposing, in anticapitalist-antimonopoly direction, has to do with social forces, namely, the working class, the salaried employees of the public sector, the self-employed professionals, small craftsmen, small tradesmen, scientists, self-employed farmers.”
 
D.Koutsoumbas in his speech made reference to the imperialist interventions and wars that are breaking out today and maintained that: “October practically confirmed that the struggle for the exit of the imperialist war is inextricably connected with the struggle for worker’s power, and this strategy of the Bolsheviks was confirmed 100 years ago. That is the experience that we want to discuss, particularly today that the contradictions, the antagonisms, among powerful forces of the international capitalist establishment passes through our region: the Balkans, the Aegean Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In the focus of the antagonism there are the routes of transport of energy and commodities between monopoly groups of powerful imperialist states, regarding which will prevail in the share that is already developing in our country. We have already told that the Greek bourgeois class, through the SYRIZA-ANEL government, is claiming share, selling the new dangerous “great idea”, of the so-called “geostrategical upgrading of the country” in the context of NATO. We warn: It is only an upgrade of the geostrategical implication of the Greek ruling class in wars and interventions in the area, in missions of Greek troops out of the national borders, in upgrading the US death-dealing bases, including the ones that host nuclear weapons. And this is what the SYRIZA-ANEL government sold during the recent visit of Tsipras in the USA, apart from praises for Trump.”
 
The SG of the CC called “our people to not take position “under foreign banners”, to not shed its blood for foreign interests.” and added: “In the case of a more direct participation of Greece in an imperialist war, the working class should chart its own struggle along with the popular strata and their movement, in order to defend the territorial integrity of the country and in order for the people to win against the bourgeois power of exploitation and of wars or of the so-called peace with the peoples’ at gun-point.”
 
D. Koutsoumbas highlighted the achievements of socialism and made extensive reference to them undelining that “Socialism in the 20th century proved its superiority in comparison with capitalism, the immense advantages that provides for the work and the life of the workers. The Soviet Union and the international socialist system comprised the only true counter-weight to imperialist aggression.” Talking about the advantages of socialism he noted that “All the economic tools come under the service of the people. The mineral wealth, the infrastructure and machinery of industry, energy, telecommunications, transports, commerce, land, industrialized agricultural and livestock production become social property. The natural wealth producing resources become social property, the commerce becomes state-owned. With these tools the new power can plan centrally its economy, galvanize the development of the sectors of economy, of the peripheries. That is exactly why it can absorb all the unemployed, can guarantee the right to work. To abolish economic activity in health-care and prevention, to develop an exclusively free and public system of health-care-prevention, to develop people’s culture and sports. In can develop agricultural production next to the socialized sector of economy, organizing firstly a transitional form of productive cooperatives, provide the people with enough healthy food products and provide industry with raw materials. It can shape the conditions to expunge the causes of women’s inequality and support the relations between the two genders with complete infrastructures, their willingness to form a family, without any economic motive, protecting motherhood, the children, the elderly. The workers’ power, disentangling our country form the shackles of EU and NATO, will intend to develop interstate relations with mutual benefit, among Greece and other countries, particularly with countries that their level of development, the nature of their problems and of their immediate interests can guarantee such a beneficial cooperation. The working class of Greece is not alone. It has and will have the workers of the whole world at its side. Our slogan is “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”
 
The SG of the CC of the KKE, expressing the steadfast conviction of the Communists of Greece noted that “The era of socialist revolutions is ahead of us. The dashing entry of the working class and popular forces in the revolutionary struggle will sweep away sooner or later capitalist barbarism, imperialism aggressiveness. October illuminates the struggle of the peoples, socialism is a necessity of our times”.
KKE MEP Papadakis gives decisive response to EU Parliament’s vulgar anticommunism

Thursday, November 16, 2017

KKE MEP Papadakis gives decisive response to EU Parliament’s vulgar anticommunism

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/11/kke-mep-papadakis-gives-decisive.html
KKE MEP Kostas Papadakis (standing).
A decisive answer to the vulgar anticommunism of the capital’s political represnetatives at the EU Parliament was given by the MEP of the Communist Party of Greece Kostas Papadakis. Speaking at the Plenary of the European Parliament on Wednesday in Strasbourg, the KKE MEP said the following:
 
“We defend Socialism, which within a few years solved big problems that remain unsolved in Capitalism. Socialism abolished unemployment and exploitation. Socialism showed to the people what permanent stable labor with rights, free Health – Education for everyone, low cost housing, certainty for the future mean.
 
The exploitative system that you are defending means labour galleon, queues of unemployed people, permanent insecurity, auctions, people searching in the garbage.
 
In Socialism, the people lived peacefully for decades. Your system is dripping blood from the crimes of the imperialist wars, with Hiroshimas, dismembered states, refugees.
 
Socialism defeated the monster of fascism in the Second World War and fascism is capitalism’s child. The democracy that you are promoting is the dictatorship of the monopolies.
 
The mud, the anticommunism, the prohibitions invoked by the supporters and apologists of Capitalism show their fear. The learned people will find again their way. Your rotten system is the past. 
 
The future of the world is Socialism-Communism.”
 
Source: 902.gr / Translation: In Defense of Communism.