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Venezuela: Socialism without the use of any reformist fig-leaves

franz, Monday, November 14, 2005 - 21:46

Franz J. T. Lee

In which way do revolutionary international relations exist between the recent political upheavals in France and elsewhere in Europe, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and in Latin America, and growing fascism in the USA and abroad?

In other words, as taught by socialism, by Marxism, can a scientific and philosophic study of the concrete dialectics of global processes in the era of "globalization" reveal the true dynamics of the current, inexorable, apocalyptic life and death struggle between North and South, between savage earthly barbarism and human galactic emancipation?

The answer is affirmative, of course, these realities co-determine each other, they form part and parcel of the current global "new wars," of the information wars, of Donald Rumsfeld's "full spectrum dominance," especially of the "axis of evil," in which Venezuela because of her abundant energetic resources figures as a "rogue state" programmed for future military invasion, in tune with the past genocidal attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and according to the future ones planned for Iran and North Korea.

All this is subordinated to the real, true, gigantic, international, occult battle, that already annihilated the Soviet Union.

It is the relentless Pyrric economic war between the USA and its imperialist, corporate competitors, expressed in political terms, between the USA, Europe, China, Russia and India. Unless stopped immediately, this will be the greatest world war that man has ever experienced, it could cost hundreds of millions of lives, when not billions, it is inherent in the very fascist, belligerent quintessence of world imperialism, it could be the final battle of globalization itself, the global war between the Orwellian USA and the Machiavellian Eurasia, for a dumping place, for an eternal planetary grave in the imperialist radio-active setting sun.

Here in Venezuela ... to understand, to study and to grasp the transhistoric revolutionary meaning, the emancipatory urgency of the above, of its immediate daily "praxical" and theoretical needs, deeds and thoughts, presuppose stringent, radical changes within our educational programs and missions, in our dissemination of real in-formation and true "ex-formation," the development of emancipatory news media, radio programs and TV documentaries and commentaries, an investment of hundred millions of dollars, that would be worth the human, humane and humanitarian investment and the resulting powerful, creating and creative intelligence surplus.

This would really be Marxist "new socialism," and the starving, pauperized millions of Venezuela and Latin America, the "time bomb America" would immediately identify its proletarian odor and flavor, would hungrily pluck its innovative, liberating, anti-reformist, delicious fruits, would elevate the Bolivarian Revolution on a continental integrated plane, would topple the ALCA henchmen of United States imperialism and militarization.

Let us now briefly comment some of the fundamental issues at stake.

The international mass media, owned and financed by the huge multinational corporations, defending global capitalist class interests, including paying the fat salaries of their respective "think tanks" that formulate such death sentences of millions like the "Project for a New American Century," permanently produce and reproduce the reigning ideological big lies and hoaxes, known as "international news," at the academic level, known as "international relations," a discipline, like "el desarrollismo," that was especially introduced to bedevil Marxism, to refute its imperialist theories.

Currently, this is precisely what the "neo-Kautskians," the modern revisionists and reformists are trying to do on a world scale, especially to sow theoretical confusion within the Bolivarian revolutionary movement itself.

* Our modern "Seven Wise Men" of the erudite Left should urgently give special "praxical" and theoretical attention to this revolutionary problem.

Those, who, in reality, are the loyal mouthpieces of world, imperialist, bourgeois, democratic class rule are currently describing the French workers, youth and immigrant wage-slaves protesting against police brutality as "rioters" and "criminals." They are the very same ones who describe the Bolivarians as violent, "terrorist hordes."

All over, current world events, whether in France, the USA or Venezuela, are being interpreted by the mass media as anything else, except as world class struggles.

In fact, with the help of modern reformists, social class rebellions and class struggles are being christianized, pacified and computerized.

These are the very same media that daily describe President Hugo Chavez Frias and President Fidel Castro as tyrants and dictators or "communists." What they fail to explain is what Lenin revealed in his work concerning "The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky," especially with reference to dictatorship and democracy.

Lenin explained that bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of a minority, of a social ruling class, that privately owns the major means of production and communication, that rules the majority, that only have their labor force to sell on the national and international economic market of unequal exchange , that is a downright parasitic robbery.

With reference to the hundreds of national and international conferences, forums and debates, that currently treat such subjects as socialism, reformism, revisionism, revolution, democracy. dictatorship and class struggle, it is pertinent to comment on some important aspects that are often neglected or simply have been forgotten.

Few scholars underline or understand that Lenin was not a friend of democracy of any political caliber.

Lenin negated bourgeois democratic dictatorship with proletarian democratic dictatorship, only to get rid of both; class dictatorship and class democracy.

According to his revolutionary praxis and theory, as temporal, transitional measure, the world proletarian revolution, guided by a Marxist vanguard party, by means of global class struggle, has to topple this minority bourgeois democratic dictatorship and to replace it with a proletarian democratic dictatorship of the majority of workers, peasants and other oppressed social classes, that eventually has to abolish the bourgeois State, all forms of ruling class bourgeois democracy, the private ownership of the means of production, and finally, by eliminating both capitalist minority classes and working majority classes, to banish dictatorial democracy forever from the face of the earth, and to establish socialism on a world scale, the prerequisite for world communism.

This is Socialism, but it is not a revolutionary recipe for Venezuela, but some urgent emancipatory food for thought, for theory, a delicacy to chew very carefully.

Of course, Lenin was not expecting that this would happen within a decade or two. He studied Marx and Engels, especially their Communist Manifesto, and "Capital," in which the whole bourgeois democratic revolution, the transhistoric, capitalist, dictatorial, democratic process is explained right to its very zenith, towards its self-annihilation, towards contemporary, destructive globalization.

This is the current crisis, recession and depression, the global conflagration of mortal world wars.

Lenin, together with Leon Trotsky, knew that socialism could only be established as permanent revolution on a world scale, as a mode ... not a "post-capitalist" mode of production, not of labor, not of labor goods, where their use-values have to be computerized, to be calculated in equal, exchange-value prices, a mode not of master-slave relations ... but a mode of plenty, of creative, creating, human emancipation.

In the epoch of the Second Internationalism, as can be witnessed by the fundamental debates between Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, it was (and still is) reformism and revisionism that have invented the idea of a "post-capitalist" democracy. For scientific and philosophic Marxists, democracy is the dictatorship of the parasitic few, of the bourgeois, capitalist, ruling class, over the majority, over the rest of society.

After more than 200 years of French revolutionary democratic dictatorial experience, of bourgeois, capitalist democracy, we should know by now, at the very latest, what democracy really is all about. Our too human and christian chimeras of non-existent democracy, also our sincere humanist endeavors, are praiseworthy, but they are not necessarily democratic, at best, they are emancipatory, anti-dictatorial.

If we do not study "real democracy" scientifically, very soon we would never know its inhuman, inhumane quintessence.

Hence, in this analytic sense, modern democracy, invented by the European bourgeoisie, in its own class interest, is the political appearance form of capitalist oppression and repression; when it is threatened, like in 1929 or today, then it shows its true, real grimace: World Fascism. This is why the democratic bourgeois State suppresses any political rebellion in France, England, Spain or elsewhere, so brutally, also why Bush so easily could introduce torture chambers and patriot laws, so criminally could invade Iraq.

In such severe times, reformism and revisionism, aimed against socialism and Marxism, are being resuscitated and set loose. All over in Europe the books of Kautsky and Bernstein are being re-published or discussed again. Very carefully, the lair of reformist vipers, clad in red, are being launched on a world scale.

Hence, currently there is a renaissance of reformism and revisionism that is flooding even the Bolivarian Revolution; hence, comrades, beware!

Commenting on a pamphlet of Karl Kautsky, "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," Lenin explained that he had no true or real democracy in mind, he never considered democracy as being a future mode of production, as being an alternative to capitalism. He simply abhorred such minority ruling class dictatorships that currently exist everywhere, except in Cuba and Venezuela. This is the reason why in past centuries all praxico-theoretical revolutionary Marxists, except the staunch followers of Kautsky and Bernstein, eventually changed their original identification as "social democrats" who were fighting for "social democracy," and henceforth called themselves, without the use of any fig-leaf adjective who and what they really were and are: Marxists, socialists and communists.

(See: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/oct/10.htm)

* At least, Mussolini identified himself as a fascist, and Hitler called himself a Nazi, a national socialist, a "Fuehrer."

Bush identifies himself as a "messiah," well, who and what are many of us really?

Concerning the fathers of revisionism and reformism, Lenin wrote:

"And at a time like this, Mr. Kautsky, leader of the Second International, comes out with a book on the dictatorship of the proletariat - in other words, on the proletarian revolution - that is a hundred times more disgraceful, outrageous and renegade than Bernstein’s notorious Premises of Socialism. Nearly twenty years have elapsed since the appearance of that renegade book, and now Kautaky repeats this renegacy in an even grosser form!"

In essence, revisionism and reformism came into being as counter-revolutionary, pro-capitalist and imperialist tendencies within the international labor movement, disfiguring and eliminating the "praxical" and theoretical basics of scientific and philosophic socialism, of Marxism: inter alia, negating the class struggle, the dialectical method, the materialist scientific and philosophic world outlook and the Marxist connotation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of democracy. They "revised," disfigured, ideologized Marxism.

Within the context of a this brief commentary, we cannot explain the complex debates that followed, however, apart from Lenin's work mentioned before, in detail, Tony Clif has explained to us what was running through Rosa Luxembourg's entire work, especially what is explained in her famous pamphlet, Social Reform or Social Revolution, in which she fiercely attacked Eduard Bernstein, and refuted his revisionist anti-Marxist views with special incisiveness, "was the struggle against reformism, which narrowed down the aims of the labor movement to tinkering with capitalism instead of overthrowing it by revolutionary means."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1969/rosalux/2-
reforrev.htm

In how far all these things are affecting the USA itself, the domestic revolutionary resistance and rebellion, forty years ago, Malcolm X, assassinated by racist, capitalist reaction, has explained its mortal, lethal essence, that is, its immense mind and thought control mechanisms and machinations:

"They use the press to set up this police state, and they use the press to make the white public accept whatever they do to the dark-skinned public. They have all kinds of negative characteristics that they project to make the white public draw back, or to make the white public be apathetic when police-state-like methods are used in these areas to suppress the people's honest and just struggle against discrimination and other forms of segregation."

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6945/694563.html

How the USA like a "noble vulture" sucks the blood of its national and international capitalist wage-slaves, how it creates the modern mental holocaust, Malcolm X poignantly formulated as follows:

"And being in a position to suck the economic blood of our community, they control the radio programs that cater to us, they control the newspapers, the advertising, that cater to us. They control our minds. They end up controlling our civic organizations. They end up controlling us economically, politically, socially, mentally, and every other kind of way. They suck our blood like vultures." (ibid.)

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=46911

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