mercredi 29 septembre 2010

KOMINTERN: PART TWO

vol. 3, no. 8, October 1-15, 2010

Si vous voulez lire en français: http://www.laviereelle.blogspot.com/

You will find below the link to L'Humanité in English, a selection of articles from the daily communist paper published in Paris (France).
WE ALL CAN DO SOMETHING
Everybody should read Northstar Compass. It is the magazine of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People. Yes, Soviet people; and it is published, especially now in the years 2000. Recently, there was a striking document written by the Socialist Party of Bangladesh.

Their first stand: “the conduction of powerful political struggle who will be able to bring back the confidence of common people towards revolution, people and Marxism-Leninism, and will be able to fulfill the aspirations of mass emancipation of millions of martyrs”. This last word is too strong, mind you; let’s see how it is even more relevant today!
(Photo General Consulate of Cuba in Montréal: the future of their homeland and abroad, the young pioneers)

They deal with the need “to fight out individualism”; they stress too that “we are still in the era of imperialism described by Lenin”, providing examples: “in Britain, industry, health and service sector which developed on government’s initiatives were privatized, which means that British government commenced privatization. In the United States there is no such scope of privatization since even military sector in U.S. was also under corporate capital”. They point out that the “bourgeois” media want the workers to swallow all these setbacks, like gullible children and even... demand more. They don’t refer only to rich nations. For instance, they affirm that “the annual income of only one corporate organization like General Motors exceeds the total income level of a country like Bangladesh”.
These same rich countries contribute to the development of their agriculture. “The total amount of subsidy equalize more than the defence expenditure of many countries.” But they react promptly to any opposition. “They attempted to destroy Cuba, the source of anti-imperialist struggle of Latin America; there is ceaseless attempt from U.S. to assassinate Fidel even.”
As they say, “this has brought into light the acute depression prevailing in the society.”
Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, the masterpiece of Shakespeare, would be more than at ease with this statement: capitalism, “side by side increased the periphery of usury”; and “loan driven economy was created”.
We are living in a planned economy of unemployment, poverty and competition; the so-called “market economy”, or the “bubble economy”. But, “all these phenomena demonstrate the vulnerability of imperialist-capitalist economy”.
The plain truth? In USA alone, “70 million people are living below poverty level; 13, 7 million in the month of April of 2009” became unemployed.
(Photo: McDonald's, the fast-food empire of low-waged young workers)

The answer

Edward A. Drummond, a US communist writer, in a recent writing, confesses sadly that: “Prompt Press, a printing press that has traditionally printed the Party’s newspaper and pamphlets, is on its way out. The Party (Communist Party USA, Ed.) Archives were given away for free four years ago to a wealthy private university. There has been no Party candidacy for any public office in perhaps 15 years. There are no bookstores. There are few or no pamphlets.
There are no mass public meetings –even by today’s modest definition of “mass”- and no attempt to organize them. There is no mass distribution of the Party paper. There is no industrial concentration policy.” Drummond adds up that: “Moreover, in tailing Obama, the CPUSA is ignoring its own 2005 Program, which states: ‘U.S. capitalism is presently in the monopoly capitalist, imperialist stage of development, and in the transnational monopoly phase of that stage. Once the most reactionary ultra-right transnationals, who dominate political life today, receive a major defeat, it will be both necessary and possible to take on the transnationals as a whole; it will be possible to move on to the anti-monopoly stage of struggle.”
The Cuban Five
On the other hand, you have the courageous Cuban Five – jailed in USA- and actually serving heavy sentences on false charges, fighting with determination the indifference and silence surrounding them in North America. Antonio Guerrero, -one of them -, poet and close friend wrote to us saying: “Finally, on May 3rd, I was transferred from the penitentiary to a medium-security prison. The travel was short. [...] The change is great. [...] Another big impression has been the almost total absence of that tension that exists in penitentiary life. I can see that prisoners here are more quiet and polite, and the noise is low. Of course, it is still a prison, but everybody tries to avoid any incident and to maintain a good conduct.” The Five have been scattered in different prisons practically from Day One and ever since more than 11 years after.
Antonio’s poetry calls upon us: “So much encouragement, faithful friend! You give me your faith and your song to answer each enemy blow.”
They have friends all around the world, be it in Canada, in Lebanon, in Spain or in France to name just a few. President Obama must free them and restore their dignity; he has the power to do so.
In February 2010, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, The Guardian, published a letter to Obama which states: “ Each year the majority of UN member states has supported Cuba against the blockade and each year the vote has increased in Cuba’s favour, clearly indicating that public opinion is growing worldwide for an end to your genocidal policy. “ It was signed by the president of the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society, Joan Coxsedge.
Towards a new Komintern?
In April 2010, The New Worker, weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain, underlined in its editorial: “The real answer for workers is to fight back and to do this effectively we must join together, recognize that the ruling class is our enemy and fight in the short term to keep the Tories out. And then to force Labour to deliver better policies for the working class so that we can live decent, relaxed and enjoyable lives. But in the long-term we must fight together to get rid of the whole rotten capitalist system and replace it with socialism.”
This is not an impossible dream. Already in 1935, 18 years after the Russian revolution, the great American singer, Paul Roberson, went to Soviet Union. The Daily Worker, at that time, collected his impressions and words: “He has deliberately and for a long time been laying plans and preparing to move to the U.S.S.R. as the most suitable center for the important work of artistic innovation which he has in mind, and because he had decided on the basis of much evidence that it is a place where a man may do such work with greatest freedom and facility. He said in his interview that he is more than satisfied that the Soviet Union is just such a place.”
In the meanwhile, we may follow the people’s and workers struggles, for instance in Greece; we don’t know the outcome yet, we may conclude with the Socialist Party of Bangladesh: “Communist parties of different countries in the world, at sub-regional, regional and international level should conduct regular criticism-self criticism to eliminate the differences in opinion by ideological struggle and to develop monolithic communist international.” Komintern is the contraction of two words: Communist and International. The communists from the People’s Republic of Bangladesh share this viewpoint with many communists around the world. The Communist Party of Greece notes that we need “to speed up the processes of forming and shaping a communist pole, a distinct, in other words, presence of communist and workers parties, of communist forces that actively work in the direction of a united revolutionary strategy of the international communist movement”. It is now a must, many US and Canadian communists fight for it.
(Photo SolidNet: demonstration organized by the militant trade-union movement PAME in Greece, 2010)








dimanche 12 septembre 2010

JOSEPH STALIN

vol. 3, no. 7, September 16-30, 2010
Si vous voulez lire en français: http://www.laviereelle.blogspot.com/
You will find below the link to l'Humanité in English, a selection of the daily communist newspaper published in Paris.

BEHIND BLUE EYES
« And no one knows what it’s like to be hated, to be fated. » This is a line from the wonderful song of the famous British rock band The Who. When we think about Joseph Stalin, we can’t help but humming these lyrics.

Since many Canadians still have an almost uncontrollable fear of Stalin, we must dwell on his era and discuss the issue. Yet digging in my working years in the construction industry in Québec, I do not remember hearing real criticism of the Stalin period in the USSR, in the day–to-day speech of the construction workers. Most of the time, we just ignored what was going on in Soviet Union. It was in the 1970s.
(Photo Le Marxiste-Léniniste: Berlin, 1945 - The Red Army's Victory over the Nazi regime in Europe, along side with the Allied Forces).

Later on, at the university campus in Québec City, his name was mentioned regularly, especially during the endless disputes between Maoists and Trotskyists. The Communist Party of Canada, that I joined, said that it was true : Stalin was directly responsible for many crimes. Strange attitude but "credible"; was it not usually accepted, said everywhere, and obvious for all?! This denunciation was followed by the promise that no such a thing would ever exist with socialism in Canada. We then became advocates of anti-Stalinism in the progressive grassroots organizations, attracting many people keen on struggling with the Communists.
However, stays in the USSR brought questions. The main one was for the author of these lines: why Moscow does look like an abandoned construction site? We were still in the 1970s. The overall impression of the Soviet capital, casting sight to all the cranes and infrastructure without animation, was that they had taken a vacation ... in the 1950s and that they never came back to work after.
Moreover, the Young Communist League of Canada visitors have rubbed shoulders with some Soviet officials - rather petty bourgeois- who envied goods and clothing of travelers from the West without understanding the ins and outs of the class struggle at the international level; especially the policies of Big capital towards workers in capitalist countries, to avoid that they switch on the socialist camp (since the defeat of socialism in the USSR, capitalists rush to take them back -e.g. Greece). Also the ground was set up by opponents of Stalin to plunge the economy into the doldrums, putting aside plans for economic development in USSR to the benefit of some kind of socialist market economy, that never really worked. Recent researchs of communist parties economists, including the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), highlighted it.
Joseph Stalin scared many "intellectuals" in the West and in socialist countries (they have contributed to defame him after Khrushchev's famous report -the bible - to the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR). In fact, why have they hurried up to hide it after ... (?) Denunciation without trial, that's weird! What would you say, if the whole thing had been framed to stop the development of soviet socialism and its influence amidst toiling people around the world?
(Photo Internet: Moscow, a neighbourhood, that kept its look from the time of Joseph Stalin).
However, this socialist country had quickly joined the levels of development of capitalist countries, including the United States. The book "Socialism Betrayed" (from US Communists Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny), published in USA by International Publishers, confirms this success.

Stalin’s economic, political and social achievements were a testimony of its commitment to the Soviet people. By the way, Stalin vowed unconditional love for the Russian people, while he himself was "immigrant" in Moscow, was he not Georgian? A bit like the Communist leader Tim Buck, who - even though he was British- , has dedicated his life to improving the living conditions of the English Canadian and Québec workers, while mapping the road for the Communist Party of Canada, in its struggle for socialism.
Still today, many immigrants, including the Club of Friends of KKE in Montréal, have linked their fate to the emancipation of the working class in Canada and have every desire to see particularly the youth, to enjoy a great future in our society. But first thing first, let’s be optimistic. We can foresee the future with joy and happiness.
Finally, it is no wonder that everywhere - and now, at the international level, the Communists themselves study the history of their movement and write it honestly. The "historians"and other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois "ideologists" don't have as their main orientation to fight against poverty, unemployment and misery. They can not match the progress for workers with social and political truth. After all, they will not bite the hand that feeds them ... Their snack, they earn it while inventing cock-and-bull stories about: communism, Soviet Union and Stalin.
(Photo Internet: Joseph Stalin).

Further they are never happy about anything. So we don’t have time to lose with them.
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NOTA BENE: Daniel Paquet has first studied Law at Laval University in Québec City and at the Québec University in Montréal (UQAM). He was particularly interested in criminal law. Later, he turned to Communications, where he graduated "with honours" in 1996 in journalism, always at UQAM. In 1979, he studied at the Higher School of communist parties cadres, under the direction of the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Interested in the case of Joseph Stalin, he wanted to throw a new light on this great historical figure in order to understand the real legacy of the Bolshevik leader. He took contact with the Friends of USSR in the United States; and Michael Lucas and Dr. Adélard Paquin, publishers of Northstar Compass, specialized magazine on USSR (available in English in Toronto and in French in Montréal).
He is a member of the Communist Party of Canada and contributes to the establishment of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Canada.



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