Getting Involved

[Tiparith]

With a few new found comrades I helped make an organization in Victoria, BC, Canada. We are a Marxist-Leninist group that has both followers of Trotsky and Stalin working together for communism and we are functioning well. In fact it was an outsiders observation that we are probably the most functioning commie group on the island, and all told we have only ten members and haven't held our own events yet. THAT IS BLOODY SAD!

I'm looking for people in the region and internationally to enter dialogue with us so that we can have our outside observer proven wrong. We hold weekly meetings and want to start joint actions with other groups and talk about the possibility of merging groups. We work under the democratic centralist line that if everyone has a vote what the group does and doesn't do, and everyone can offer ideas of what we should do for vote. In that way I hope that no group would feel their individuality threatened. We have a website which I warn you now is a crappy web-wizard build that tells a bit more about us, and we call ourselves Commie Club - Victoria. The webbie is www.vicml.com and remember its not appealing to the eyes.

If you want to contact us the admin email is this one, which if not displayed is [email protected] and I really want to here from people.

The problem with the left is that we all have our own little takes on history, well it is very important to consider we shouldn't let that divide us. While we sit divided the capitalists are conquering. I assure any readers that emailing me is not a commitment but could only propel you, your group, and our group forward.

[Prairie Fire]

I'm also a member/organizer of Commie Club.

hopefully ti wil update some parts of the website soon.

[Prairie Fire]

Here is the url for the Commie club homepage.

We changed the name by general consensus to Victoria Marxist Leninist Organization.

[Sir_No_Sir]

Thank god for the name change=P
Good luck with it though, its extremely intimidating to get involved at first.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Alas, while I have no intention of joining any communist organization while in my finance studies, my heart is leaning toward the International Communist Current (http://en.internationalism.org/introduction).



Anyhow, it's nice to see "Bolshevik-Leninists" and "Marxist-Leninists" working together for a change (http://english.communist.ru/2006/04/05/there-is-no-stalinism-or-trotskyism-any-more-there-is-revolutionary-marxism-and-reformism.htm). :)


Marx wrote once: ‘The traditions of all dead generations hang as a nightmare over the minds of the quick. It is then, when people seem only to be busy with transforming themselves and their surroundings and creating something absolutely unprecedented, in such periods of revolutionary crises that they resort in fear to spells, calling spirits of the past for help, borrow their names, battle-slogans, costumes in order to perform a new scene of the world history in this attire consecrated by antiquity’ [1].

And it is true even for great revolutions. The English revolution of the 17th century wore the costume of early Christianity and used the language of the Old Testament, the Great French revolution revived the Roman antiquities, the revolutions of the 19th century including the Commune of Paris tried to copy the experience of the years of 1789-95. The October revolution saw itself as the repetition of the Commune of Paris and partially of the Russian 1905 revolution, and all following socialist revolutions traced the Russian October.

But the French, operating with the Roman phrases and names, solved the problems of their time. The live people creating their own history were going in the clothes of the raised from the dead ghosts.

Nowadays only clothes of ghosts are roaming the open spaces of the former Soviet Union. These are the empty shapes of the past years. Heaps of Stalinist, Trotskyite etc groups are discussing the ‘most important’ and ‘most urgent’ questions: if there was socialism in the Soviet Union, if the policy of the Comintern was correct at this or that moment, if Stalin betrayed the Spanish revolution, if the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was necessary or unprincipled and so on and so forth.

The sectarian mentality rotates in the vicious circle of the stock phrases of the past epoch. When you read works of such sectarians, you get an impression that they just ‘programmed’ their stock phrases in hot-keys of their keyboard – you press control + «I» and ‘the betrayal of the Spanish revolution’ appears on the screen, you press control + «B» and ‘the benefits of the bureaucracy’ appears on the screen, you press control + «G» and ‘the pact with Hitler’ appears on the screen, and control + «K»: ‘the dismissal of the Comintern’. Probably the process of writing the sectarian articles can be automated in general but it is already the matter of programmers but not that of theorists.

(The Trotskyite stock phrases are given here as an example, but there are even funnier ‘Stalinist’ stock phrases).

Each of the sectarian directions is supported by a number of prophets and saints requiring sacrifice, a whole series of doctrines protected with the same jealousy as the dogmas of the Saint Church and which are as vital as the latter. There are still 60 year-old arguments, and one can hear mutual accusations worthy of A.Y.Vyshinsky.

The questions of history are of course important and they are worth studying, discussions are necessary [2]. But the fact that it is in the questions of the past but not the present that the self-determination and organizational delimitation of the left are being realized is becoming the huge brake on the way of forming the modern left ideology and the left movement.

The division into Stalinists, Trotskyites, Maoists, and a number of other smaller movements, which was made up in the 20th century, was not a sectarian whim at all. In the world, where beside the capitalist system there appeared an alternative social system on the basis of the revolutionary break with capitalism, which became a factor of the struggle including the capitalist countries, the left could not help defining their attitude to it. And their views on the other questions were being formed in many respects depending on this self-determination. The society was split by the global class struggle, which was also the struggle of the states of the capitalist and socialist camps against each other. ‘The communist is defined by his attitude to the USSR’, Georgiy Dimitrov used to say. And it was true because one attitude to the USSR referred communists to the category of Stalinists, another one – to Trotskyites, etc.

Each of the trends grew up from the real contradictions of the real revolution, even the whole wave of the socialist revolutions of the 20th century. The revolutionary movement that grew from the Soviet October, having turned out to be isolated within one country, was divided into two trends – one of them (Stalinists) were ready to sacrifice some of their principles for the sake of keeping the achievements of the revolution, the other one (Trotskyites) abided by all the maxims of the classics and fixed methodically each deviation from the program of Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’ in the practice of the Soviet socialism. Then when after the Second World War the situation changed, some of ‘Stalinists’ became Maoists, and some – Khrushchevtsy- Brezhnevtsy. And the former started to reproach the latter with the elementary truths of Marxism-Leninism, which were forgotten by the leaders of the CPSU partly from the conditions existing earlier partly because of the new opportunism. The question if all concessions and compromises made by Stalin were necessary, how correctly Trotsky interpreted Leninism, and if Maoists were right in all points during their polemics with the CPSU in the 60s, should be left for the historians of the revolutionary movement, because for today they are only of some importance as some illustrations of the struggle of the revolutionary Marxism and reformism. It is at the most.

And there is such a struggle – between reformists and revolutionaries – in each of the above-mentioned trends. There are revolutionary ‘Stalinist’ parties, and there are ones that slipped into reformism. The majority of the mass communist parties became reformist, especially European ones. The French Communist party is the most glaring example here. On the other hand there is the Greek Communist Party, which has been getting left during the 90s and 2000s; there is the radical ‘Stalinist’ Labor Party in Belgium [...]. Trotskyites, though existing in most cases as small revolutionary sects, also have their reformists. For example, the pride of Trotskyism – one of the few mass Trotskyite parties - the Sri Lankian party – slipped to reformism and even managed to sit in the bourgeois government. Maoists can also be reformists and revolutionaries. Even within the small country – Nepal – there are two Maoist parties: the CPN (Maoist), which conducts armed struggle against the bourgeois and feudal state, and the CPN (united Marxist-Leninist), which admits the monarchy, was part of the government and acts according to reformist patterns. In India, where Maoism is prevailing in the Communist movement, there are also Maoists-reformists and Maoist conducting armed struggle or getting ready for it. The obsoleteness of the old contradictions is gradually being stated by the left themselves, but there is no conscious approach to this issue. It is hard to get rid of old costumes, to refuse from the habitual patterns. Nevertheless there is already positive experience – in Denmark and Norway Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyites formed a united election list, and then also a united movement, almost a party. We are not going to evaluate it now: time will show if these associations are reformist or revolutionary, another thing is important: there is direct evidence of the fact that today the division of the left is made in other lines and not according to their attitude towards the Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, the personalities of Stalin, Mao and Trotsky.

The old contradictions are worth getting rid of not because they are ‘outdated’ at all. The far older division into reformists and revolutionaries, and according to the Russian tradition – into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, is not out of date. Just the conditions in which the left movement exists in the late1980s – early 90s have radically changed. With the collapse of the socialist camp, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, Eastern Europe and in a somewhat different form in China it was the end of the whole epoch of the development of both capitalism and the world revolution, which started with the victory of the socialism in Russia and with its defeat in Germany. Ground Zero of the world history came, partly even the ‘old’ imperialism returned. The polarization of the poverty and wealth, which was smoothed away in the 20th century in the leading capitalist countries for fear of ‘the repetition of the USSR’, has reached again the level of 1914.

History came full circle and came back to the same point again but at a new level of development. The national monopolies gave place to the transnational ones, liberalism to neoliberalism, colonialism – to neocolonialism; the advanced productive forces are not already an internal-combustion engine and electrical generator, but telecommunications industry and genetic engineering and so on. Accordingly the revolutionary theory must draw a kind of circle along the spiral of its own development and, getting rid of the contradictions of the other phase of the turn, come to the crotch of neobolshevism and neomenshevism.

The masses understand it better than the revolutionaries; they are hardly interested in the fact who was right - Stalin, Trotsky or Mao. They are interested in technologies of resisting to corporations, in defense of labor and social rights, one can get them interested in the idea of radical breaking of social relations, relations of property and authority, in the idea of revolution.

The main ingredients of the new left ideology and practice are also formed within various Marxist trends simultaneously, that is why the unification on new grounds is about to happen.

By forming the integral Marxist ideology we will have to overcome not just the words: ‘Stalinism’, ‘Trotskyism’, etc. but the corresponding style of thinking. The sectarians will say: Okay, there are no longer conditions for dividing into Stalinists, Trotskyites, there is only revolutionary and reformist Marxism. But they will agree to admit revolutionary only the trend, that will agree to admit all doctrines of this sect. For the sect in general it is important what makes it different, unique but not what unites it with the mass movement. Here the tiniest shades of the meaning in the interpretation of this or that ‘saint’ text are important but not real problems facing the real movement.

As a matter of fact, one will have to overcome the sectarian approach itself. Here one can also find a lot of examples from the history of the revolutionary movement. For instance, even deep disagreements and mutual dislike did not prevent Lenin and Trotsky from working within one party in 1917 if their political line coincided at that moment.

Victor Shapinov



[1] К.Marx. 18 Brumer of Lois Bonaparte. // К.Marx, F.Engels. Complete Works. vol. 8, p. 119.
[2] You can read about my opinion of the disputable issues of the past of our movement here: http://communist.ru/root/archive/discussio...pinov.on.stalin (http://communist.ru/root/archive/discussion/shapinov.on.stalin)



P.S. - I edited out the opportunistic FARC in Colombia. <_<