Finnish Stalinists collaborating with Fascists

[Unicorn]

In the 2004 municipal elections, the Turku and Raisio sections of the Finnish anti-revisionist Communist party "Kommunistinen työväenpuolue" entered to an alliance with the racist SKS party which wants to deport all non-white immigrants from Finland.

The alliance meant that the votes of the parties were counted together and candidates representing these parties had a better chance to be elected. The result of the election was that the racist chairman of the SKS party, Olavi Mäenpää, got more votes than any other candidate in the election and was elected. The votes given to various communist candidates helped him just as much as the votes given to him. "Vote a Communist, Elect a Fascist"

Esko Luukkonen, the leader of the Turku section, was then expelled from the party. He and the Turku section joined to the "Communist League" which consists of former members of the KTP who were expelled in 2002 on the grounds that they were founding an anti-EU party coalition party with Finnish nationalists. (The expelled members included the general secretary and the editor-in-chief of the party newspaper) One member of the Communist League, Pekka Tiainen, PhD, is a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Labour and one of the most influential advocates of immigration restrictions in Finland.

I hope that this offers a glimpse to the sad state of the Finnish communist movement. In the 1960s and 1970s communists got 18-22% of votes in elections and anti-revisionist communists dominated student politics.

[BIG BROTHER]

What?! I wanna just throw up after reading this.

[thejambo1]

how can any communist side with a fascist!! this is a well weird pact. they should be ashamed of themselves/

[Unicorn]

how can any communist side with a fascist!! this is a well weird pact. they should be ashamed of themselves
The fascists are anti-EU and have a populist economic policy similar to the social democrats. Many Finnish communists are also against immigration.

The electoral system is also very biased against small parties and allying helps. But the alliance with fascists was incredibly opportunistic idiocy.

[Wanted Man]

I read about this before. Do you know anything more about the movement in Finland? I did speak on msn to someone from KomNL once, but I didn't quite figure out how the movement is made up.

[Unicorn]

I read about this before. Do you know anything more about the movement in Finland?
What do you want to know about it specifically?

[Wanted Man]

The parties, movements, the differences, etc. Just curious. And where does the KomNL fit in?

[Unicorn]

The parties, movements, the differences, etc. Just curious. And where does the KomNL fit in?
The Finnish Communist Party (SKP) was active in politics through SKDL which had left-wing social democrat members in the beginning but was practically dominated by communists.

Electoral success was comparably good (18-25% of the vote). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_People's_Democratic_League

SKP split to two factions in 1969: the majority faction (Eurocommunists critical of CPUSA) and the minority faction (="Taistoists") which was Marxist-Leninist and upheld Brezhnev. Student politics in Finland were controlled for a short time by this anti-revisionist minority faction of SKP. Maoists/Trotskyists were not welcomed in the party. The Marxist-Leninist opposition was expelled 1985-1986. SKP and SKDL went defunct in 1990. Both the Eurocommunists and the opposition founded a new party, Vasemmistoliitto then. Ironically, the majority of Finnish MPs representing Vasemmistoliitto are former anti-revisionists though the party is basically Social Democrat today. Former Eurocommunists and former Taistoists still hate each other although they both support capitalism today.

Today there are two registered communist parties: SKP (different from the old SKP) and KTP. SKP was founded by Gorbachev supporters and it is highly revisionist. KTP is the party of traditional Marxist-Leninists and upholds Stalin and Brezhnev though it is critical of the 1970s and 1980s period in the USSR .

KomNL (Communist Youth League) is an independent organization founded in 2000. The background was that the youth organization of SKDL joined Vasemmistoliitto and the successor "Communist Youth" founded in 1995 went Trotskyist. It is Marxist-Leninist (the party program mentions scientific socialism as defined by Marx, Engels and Lenin as the basis). It opposes Trotskyism, Khruschevism and Eurocommunism.

[AGITprop]

how can any communist side with a fascist!! this is a well weird pact. they should be ashamed of themselves/

Hitler-Stalin peace pact?

It is inherent to Stalinism...

Nah I'm kidding

I appologize for my trolling, but it jus had to b said...no one else had done it yet. :)

[S. Zetor]

Some time ago I wrote a brief overview of the Finnish communist scene, I'll paste it here as De Baron asked for information.

In the beginning - say, in 1944 - there was the newly-legalised Communist Party (SKP), a pro-Moscow party which was the only game in town until around 1966, when the party split internally into pro-Moscow and Eurocom-type "national communism". The party was kept formally together until the early 80s, when the pro-Moscow minority was expelled. The expelled minority kept appealing for unity, but a group within them decided that they had finally had it with Gorbachev, and founded their own party, The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) in 1988.

In 1990 the SKP majority dissolved SKP and formed Vasemmistoliitto, a leftist soc.dem party. The old minorityists took hold of the old name SKP in 1994, and has followed a kind of eurocommunist line (or something) ever since.

The CWP split in 2002 over principles on cooperation. The people who were in favour of a more wider interpretation of cooperation were expelled, and founded The League of Communists. They have now oriented towards building a popular front against monopolies from scratch with and have founded a front party for the purpose, Finland's Workers Party. Everybody apart from the monopoly bourgeoisie is welcome!

What remained of the CWP is 70-80 years old on average, and has taken to publishing historical articles on Stalin, the Soviet Union and the Finnish Civil war, among the angry readers' letters quality anonymoys pieces that make up the whole of their paper. It comes out 15 times a year or something.

At present SKP has around 3.000 members (and decreasing), around 10% of whom are active; the League of Communists has probably 100 members, like the CWP. SKP has a weekly paper which is relatively good, much better than any of the other left-wing papers around.

And then the youth.

In the 90s when the old democratic youth league was founded again as the youth section of Vasemmistoliitto, communists formed their own Communist Youth. After a few years the latter was taken over by people influenced by SWP-UK style trotskyism, something quite new in Finland. The name was changed into Socialist League, and they're a member of the IST. They function in Helsinki, and how many members they have is anybody's guess. I would say it's around 100 or probably less. They split around 2000 or so, and a few people formed The Marxist Workers' League that is now a member of the CRFI.

After the Communist Youth changed their name into Socialist League and joined the IST, the ones who disapproved of this founded the Communist Youth League (CYL) in 2000. Some people who had their background in the CYL, founded The Marxist-Leninist Society in 2005 after being disillusioned with SKP. In the seminar the society organised last year, they presented their plans for business activities and other stuff to raise money for revolutionary activity on a professional basis (instead relying on 100% voluntary work and time). There was 40-50 people present, mostly from other groups already mentioned.

I have been actively mostly in the KomNL (=CYL), and a few years in SKP but I have left the latter. Soon I'll be over-aged for KomNL, and I'll orientate myself towards working within the Marxist-Leninist Society and their project, which seems like the only communist act going forward at the moment. Most of the leading comrades are young, under 30, so even though they've upheld stuff that I consider useless ideological baggage, I'm hopeful that it's not going to be a simon-pure sectarian group; after all, the seminar I mentioned above dealt with things to be done, not programmatic questions. There was comrades present from both the "stalinist" CWP as well as the trotskyist Marxist Workers League.

--

As to Unicorns statement that KomNL "opposes Trotskyism, Khruschevism and Eurocommunism", could you provide a source, or reasoning behind this? I think it is comrade Unicorn's own, quite far-reaching conclusion, one which I believe cannot be supported by evidence in its essentials.

--

And as to the original topic: The CWP Turku branch elections deal with the racist Mäenpää was totally disgraceful, but I would be careful in characterising every openly racist outfit as "fascist". I don't think fascism needs to involve any more racism that imperialism normally does, any more than it needs to involve the kind of paganistic religion that the Nazis had in their variety of fascism.

In my understanding, the essence of fascism is that it the unparliamentary, openly violent weapon wielded by a significant sector of monopoly capital, in order to crush the revolutionary workers, after parliamentary and bourgeois-democratic means have failed.

From this angle, any party with a bourgeois viewpoint can become a fascist party. It doesn't even need a conscious program of fascism - a normal bourgeois-capitalist party will do, or even social-democrats. Because soc-dems believe that in order to fund the "welfare state" you need to take care of the capital welfare first, they can very well go over to capital's side to crush the unruly workers by force.

[Unicorn]

As to Unicorns statement that KomNL "opposes Trotskyism, Khruschevism and Eurocommunism", could you provide a source, or reasoning behind this? I think it is comrade Unicorn's own, quite far-reaching conclusion, one which I believe cannot be supported by evidence in its essentials.
I visited the website of the organization and found "Marxisti-Leninistin Perusvihko" released by KomNL. The booklet denounces right opportunism (which apparently means Eurocommunism/Khruschevism) and left opportunism, naming specifically Trotskyism as the model of left-opportunism. I am not a member of KomNL. .
http://komnl.fi/opintomateriaali/m-l_perusvihko.pdf

[Colonello Buendia]

this is fucking shocking, It's bad enough that the Italian Rifondazione Communista was collaborating with a center left party and supporting the capitalist system but Fascism and Anti-revisionism combining is fucked up. This is why the left should stay out of Bourgeois elections and actually prepare a REVOLUTION not side with a radical reactionary nationalist party so they can play "kingmakers"

[S. Zetor]

I take some of my words back, as I now believe comrade Unicorn did have a legitimate reason to think that as the study booklet has been passed by the CYL board, it represent the organisation's views. I apologise.

However, in practice I wouldn't put too much stress on the ideological line of a youth organisation, so that they'd be absolutely logical in all that they do and put out. The fact is, there's only so many comrades around who have read enough so that they can write study booklets like this for others, and there's not enough self-enlightened comrades around for real discussion to take place of what gets passed and what doesn't.

In my estimate, this means that "lines" change as often as the people on the board change, the new line depending on what the comrades in question are interested in, what they have read etc. What's left is really a "general communist" line, in my opinion, and not some "professional" sketching out of a conscious political line.

I think a fair assessment of this booklet and CYL line is that even though it has been passed by the CYL board (back in the days), in practice the chapter on party theory (where the issue mentioned by Unicorn appears) does not really represent "the line" of the CYL, as far as representing a line would mean conscious ideological commitment to a line. I'm sure that if one asked the average CYL board member whether CYL "opposes Krushchevism, Eurocommunism and Trotskyism", they would give different answers, or didn't know - precisely because they DON'T have a line on the issue.