ALEA JACTA EST

THE WORKING CLASS IS CONDEMNED TO LIBERTY, SAYS HISTORY


vol. 3, no. 11, November 16-30, 2010

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

You will find at the end the link to L'Humanité in English, a selection of articles from the daily communist newspaper published in Paris (France).

« For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night… (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Penguin Books, Toronto, 1969, p. 37).

Workers in general are seduced by Nature, People and Beauty. They stand for world peace and progress. It’s probably why Québec Colleges students are so fond of the french poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), a prolific one in its early youth. He lived through the Commune de Paris, in 1871. He had opinions : here is Le dormeur du val, The Valley Sleeper,

« Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l’herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.
[…]
Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit. »

A young soldier, mouth opened, head naked,
Nape bathing in the fresh blue watercress,
Sleeps ; he is lying in the grass, under the skies,
Pale in this green bed where Light rains.
[…]
Perfumes do not move his nostril ;
He sleeps within the sun, the hand over his chest, Quiet. He has two red holes on his right side.
(Image Internet: La Commune de Paris, le premier état des ouvriers au monde, en 1871).

Wars are a source of « big money » for multinationals, such as former US vice-president Dick Cheneys’ Haliburton Corp. Those international mnopolies are always looking for new sources of profits. Now, they channel their efforts through « friendly » governments against the working people « in order to make those attacks on workers’rights in public administration (Education, Social Security and Health, Ed.). European governments are trying to convince the public that civil servants are a privileged stratum and the main culprit for the state’s deficit.

[…] So, they increase job insecurity, they increase the minimum age for retirement, they devaluate pensions, they reduce the purchasing power of workers, they lower or freeze salaries ; they destroy career oppportunities, they cut paid holiday and Christmas bonuses… » (Reflects, World Federation of Trade Unions, Athens, October 2010, #2, p. 7).
(World Federation of Trade Unions Logo. The 16th Congress will take place in Athens, April 6-9, 2011).

But, as states character Galileo in one of Brecht’s play : « As a young man in Siena I watched a group of building workers argue for five minutes, then abandon a thousand-year old method of shifting granite blocks in favour of a new and more efficient arrangement of ropes. [Further, he affirms that] everyone declares : right, that’s what it says in the books, but let’s have a look for ourselves. That most solemn truths are being familiarly nudged ; what was never doubted before is doubted now. » (idem, p. 7), Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, Methuen Student Edition, Toronto, 1988, p. 7).

« A human race which shambles around in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws, too ignorant to develop its own powers, will never be able to develop these powers of nature which you people are revealing to it. To what end are you working ? Presumably for the principle that sciences sole aim must be to lighten te burden of human existence… » (p. 108).

Petty bourgeoisie and society


But we cannot take the human race as one entity set in the stone. We live in a class-divided society. In Québec, the most important class in number and influence is the petty bourgeoisie. Here is what Marx’s comrade, Engels, wrote in 1849 : « It is not unlikely that the petty bourgeoisie, if left to its own devices, would have gone outside the legal framework of lawful, peaceful and virtuous struggle and taken up the musket and the paving-stone in place of the so-called weapons of the spirit. The history of all political movements since 1830 in Germany, as in France and England, shows that this class is invariably full of bluster and loud protestations, at times even extreme as far as talking goes, as long as it perceives no danger ; faint-hearted, continues and calculating as soon as the slightest danger approaches ; aghast, alarmed and wavering as soon as the movement it provoked is seized upon and taken up seriously by other classes, treacherous to the whole movement for the sake of its petty bourgeois existence as soon as there is any questions of a struggle with weapons in hand – and in the end, as a result of its indecisiveness, more often than not cheated and ill-treated as soon as the reactionary side has achieved victory. » (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Volume 10. International Publishers, New York, 1978, p. 150).

When they wrote The Communist Manifesto the year before (1848), they included a chapter on the Petty Bourgeois socialism : « In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and even renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. » (Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Washington Square Press, New York, 1977, pp. 99-100).
(Photo Internet: Karl Marx)

Consequently, they developed their own school of socialism. « This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor, the concentration of capital and land in a few hands, over-production and crisis, it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty-bourgeois and farmer, the misery of proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In its positive aims however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionay and Utopian. » (ibidem, pp. 100-101).

The October Revolution and the petty bourgeoisie

(Photo Internet: Lénine haranguant les révolutionnaires en Russie).
Once the Communists took the power in Russia, during the 1917 October Revolution, they had, in the words of Lenin, to face the sitution where : « It was not the State Capitalism which was opposed to socialism but petty bourgeoisie and private capitalism that were struggling, side by side, against State Capitalism and socialism. Petty bourgeoisie opposed itself to State intervention, inventory and control, either from State capitalism or State socialism . » (Lénine, Œuvres, tome 27, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1980. P. 351).

Soviet leaders soon concluded that this experience had to be shared with comrades and friends abroad. The US marxist, James Connolly, underlined in one of his essay, Stalin on Socialist Construction : « Internationalist responsibility also included educating comrades abroad in the basics of Marxism-Leninism and elevating their level of understanding : Stalin remarks on the inadequate level of Marxist development of the majority of the Communist parties abroad’. Compared with the ‘inadequate’ level of Marxist development during Stalin’s time, the level of development at the present time, when revisionism predominates in many Communist parties, appears positively abysmal, » (pp. 8-9).

But, as said the famous french communist poet, Paul Éluard (1895-1952), in support of the Stalin government and the Resistance against Hitler and Nazi Germany :
« Et par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommer

Liberté. »

« And with the power of one word
I start my life all over again
I was born to know you
To name you

Liberty. »

(Photo Internet: la Résistance française, des femmes et des hommes).

danieleugpaquet@yahoo.ca

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L'Humanité in English: http://www.humaniteinenglish.com