Communists discuss U.S. path to socialism

[People's World]

NEW YORK - The Communist Party USA has opened a national conference here this weekend. The logical assumption is that the 140 delegates present today from all over the country will focus on what they can do to defeat the right wing in this year's elections. And while this is, in fact, very true, the delegates note that they intend to go much, much further.
"This conference will not ignore the elections, to be sure," Sam Webb, the party's chair, declared in his opening remarks. "But it has, at the same time, a grander design. It will connect the dots between our immediate and longer-range political tasks.
"Or to put it differently, we hope to connect the struggle at the ballot box today with the struggle for socialism tomorrow."
There were many new faces present at the conference, as Webb noted: "Many of the new delegates are young people, who are as committed now to a socialist future as were the older generations of Communists in the past."
One of the things driving their commitment is concern about the growing threat to humanity's future coming from environmental degradation. "Almost daily," he said, "we hear of species extinction, global warming, deforestation, resource depletion, and on and on to the point where we are nearly accustomed to the gathering catastrophe.
"Our planet cannot indefinitely absorb the impact of profit-driven, growth-without-limits capitalism; the earth is sending distress signals to its inhabitants. And they will become louder, still, as long as the reproduction of capital dominates the reproduction of nature."
The Communists gathered here today say that capitalism - which once generated jobs and rising income - has devolved into a generator of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity. And with that understanding, they don't believe that the future offers a restoration of growth and rising income - that can only come, they feel, with a turn in the balance of class and social forces.
Socialism - more than a good idea, is "imperative," as Webb put it, "to preserve peace and our planet, expand democracy, eliminate gross racial, gender, and other forms of inequality, and to provide a secure life for the billions living on this earth."
Given their commitment to this goal, the delegates are preparing to discuss the various stages through which they see the struggle for socialism progressing.
Defeating right-wing extremism is seen as simply the first stage of the fight. Webb warned of that stage's critical nature. "If you don't believe me," he added, "take a look at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, where Republicans took control of the levers of power in 2010 and then ruthlessly rolled back rights, eliminated social programs, and attacked the labor movement.
Assuming an eventual victory over the right wing, the Communists see workers and allies then being able to enter an "anti-corporate" stage of the struggle, where they expect the fight for a peoples' agenda will bring the labor movement at odds with corporate/economic political power.
"This stage of struggle doesn't supplant capitalism," Webb remarked. Instead, it "brings the socialist stage closer as tens of millions become convinced in the course of the struggle that capitalism doesn't work for them."
In the next stage (the socialist stage), Communists see a substantial shift to the left among the "core forces" of social change, a deepening of anti-racist consciousness and practice, the consolidation of the anti-corporate alliance, and the growth of the Communist Party and other left organizations.
"This stage will culminate in the election of a peoples' government," Webb stated.
Important parts of this stage, he noted, are "steps to control the movement of capital, to institute a tax policy that weighs heavily on the wealthy, and to place under democratic control sectors of the economy, such as finance, that are a threat to the peoples' government and a socialist revolution."
Some of this is still a way off, and so another focus on the part of the Communists is turning their party into a far bigger one than it currently is.
"We are still too small," Webb acknowledged, "but the good news is that we're growing. A good measure of this is the thousands of people who 'like' us on Facebook. As of last week, 20,000 people liked us on the People's World and 18,000 liked us on the Communist Party page. And in both instances, the number grows week by week."
Photo: Sam Webb speaking at the CPUSA's 2010 National Convention. PW Photo.
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[Nikos]

"We are still too small," Webb acknowledged, "but the good news is that we're growing. A good measure of this is the thousands of people who 'like' us on Facebook. As of last week, 20,000 people liked us on the People's World and 18,000 liked us on the Communist Party page. And in both instances, the number grows week by week."

:congrats:

[Kid of the Black Hole]

:congrats:

I think that elicits one of those hearty laughs that turns into a choke that eventually leaves you gasping for air and gagging. I can't believe he didn't mention how many twitter followers they have

[Nikos]

I think that elicits one of those hearty laughs that turns into a choke that eventually leaves you gasping for air and gagging. I can't believe he didn't mention how many twitter followers they have

I cant believe he said that, Kid.

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/3128/webb2.jpg

One click forward, two clicks back.

[blindpig]

I cant believe he said that, Kid.

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/3128/webb2.jpg

One click forward, two clicks back.

Let's try to give this thread an upbeat twist as we've flayed this dead horse to the bone and it's too fucking depressing.

Nikos, as a Party member what are you doing in preparation for the upcoming election?

[Nikos]

Let's try to give this thread an upbeat twist as we've flayed this dead horse to the bone and it's too fucking depressing.

Nikos, as a Party member what are you doing in preparation for the upcoming election?

Blindpig, a Party member during the elections doesnt do anything outside the frame of his everyday political duties . To be a party member means that you act like a Party communist in working places and every aspect of yous social life. This means that you are implementing the Party line regarding the duties of a member. You are a model of behavior among your colleagues, you are honest, you organize the workers in unions, you are exposing the class enemy, you are the link between the working class and the Party local organizations. The main activity of a communist (a Party communist or a communist outside the Party) is to work with his co-workers politically and to persuade the people for the necessity of the overthrow of rulling class. You distribute the newspaper and the other party leaflets. Your political activity is to become a leader in your workplace, to elevate the class conscience of your fellow worker, to make them participate in Party's activities, you are obliged to keep yourself informed and educate so you can defend Party policies and to defeat the bourgeois propaganda. A Party member can be a pioneer agitator and political personality in his workplace because he isnt alone against the bosses (he has a Party behind him) and because he acts according a specific strategy which has been decided by the Congress. During the period of elections ofcourse all efforts are intensified. The electoral programm of the Party much reach every citizen everywhere. This isnt possible if you dont have an extended net of Party friends and supporters throughout the country. They are doing a great part of work. You have to work hard so you can present to the people a viable political alternative and to make them capable of drawing conclusions based on their political experience. Elections are only one of the indicators which show the level of political maturity of the working class. A CP exist because it is flesh from the flesh of the people. If it looses that bond, it will cease to exist. Elections are only a moment of class warfare, and in fact not the most important part of it.

[Nikos]

And you certainly dont measure the growth of the CP by the "likes" on FB but by the numbers of people every communist manage to mobilize for the interest of the working class. You want to change the consciousness of the people which many times here and elsewhere means a considerable cost in personal and business life of the person who decide to change his views on the world. You dont need clapping and thumbs up in webpages, you need people who decide to throw themselves into the machine and stop it. What is the point of having supporters on the internet but not reserves in workplaces. You have to build a disciplined devoted organization of communists who are strong enough to win the working masses. All these arent a secret of KKE. All these were the usual duties and goals of all CP in the world just 30 years ago.

[blindpig]

Well that's what I was getting at, " all efforts are intensified", more leaflets, more agitation, more propaganda. Be assured I know the futility of bourgeois democracy and it's pageants. It seems to me that the party uses these, particularly this election, as a plebiscite, both to rally the people and as a show of strength. As such the party has a lot riding on this one. But I understand, if not this time then the next, however long the road.

[blindpig]

And you certainly dont measure the growth of the CP by the "likes" on FB but by the numbers of people every communist manage to mobilize for the interest of the working class. You want to change the consciousness of the people which many times here and elsewhere means a considerable cost in personal and business life of the person who decide to change his views on the world. You dont need clapping and thumbs up in webpages, you need people who decide to throw themselves into the machine and stop it. What is the point of having supporters on the internet but not reserves in workplaces. You have to build a disciplined devoted organization of communists who are strong enough to win the working masses. All these arent a secret of KKE. All these were the usual duties and goals of all CP in the world just 30 years ago.

What! You mean those 'likes' are meaningless? Say it ain't so...You should have 18,000 likes on your facebook page, I can tell you're just jealous......

Funny, the more 'connected' people are the more disconnected they really are.

[Nikos]

Well that's what I was getting at, " all efforts are intensified", more leaflets, more agitation, more propaganda. Be assured I know the futility of bourgeois democracy and it's pageants. It seems to me that the party uses these, particularly this election, as a plebiscite, both to rally the people and as a show of strength. As such the party has a lot riding on this one. But I understand, if not this time then the next, however long the road.

Unfortunately, all these arent taken for granted anymore. Elections have become the A and Z of political struggle. Because the idea of overthrowing the bourgeois democracy its not a realistic goal for many people. They like to be kidding themselves that it takes only a victory in the elections and the capitalists will surrender the keys of the the city to the victors. A bad result in the elections and they are willing to abandon anything in order to regain few votes. These last weeks there is a huge pressure from the petty bourgeoisie and middle classes towards KKE in order to persuade the Party to collaborate with EU supporters of the Left and Socialdemocracy. Many people have developed an anti-KKE stance because they want a "progressive" government that will solve their problems without their efforts. This is the result of bourgeois propaganda 30 years now. I dont know of the Party gain many votes or not in the upcoming election. I know for a fact that there are many "communists" and leftists in Europe that they will be glad to see us having bad results. Many people abroad, traitors of the working class, will say "Look at these stalinists, they have failed, they have done so much and failed at the end. There is no other alternative than the peaceful political activism, than the collaboration with the bourgeoisie against the neoliberals". They have done their part in defaming the Party all these years. The important thing for us is to keep a dynamic part of the working movement prepared for the fights we have ahead of us. It is going to be ugly. Probably an official default in few months or in the next year, fights with neo nazi and provocation etc. No one knows how things will end. Yeah, i sound bitter tonight. I had some frustrating discussions today with morons and "modern intellectuals" of the upper class. I hate this type of people, I really do.

Edit:
Funny, the more 'connected' people are the more disconnected they really are.

I am going to steal this.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Yeah, i sound bitter tonight. I had some frustrating discussions today with morons and "modern intellectuals" of the upper class. I hate this type of people, I really do.

Have you ever had a discussion with modern intellectuals that WASN'T frustrating and embittering? Because I haven't. Hate, hate, hate 'em.

[anaxarchos]

Unfortunately, all these arent taken for granted anymore. Elections have become the A and Z of political struggle. Because the idea of overthrowing the bourgeois democracy its not a realistic goal for many people. They like to be kidding themselves that it takes only a victory in the elections and the capitalists will surrender the keys of the the city to the victors. A bad result in the elections and they are willing to abandon anything in order to regain few votes. These last weeks there is a huge pressure from the petty bourgeoisie and middle classes towards KKE in order to persuade the Party to collaborate with EU supporters of the Left and Socialdemocracy. Many people have developed an anti-KKE stance because they want a "progressive" government that will solve their problems without their efforts. This is the result of bourgeois propaganda 30 years now. I dont know of the Party gain many votes or not in the upcoming election. I know for a fact that there are many "communists" and leftists in Europe that they will be glad to see us having bad results. Many people abroad, traitors of the working class, will say "Look at these stalinists, they have failed, they have done so much and failed at the end. There is no other alternative than the peaceful political activism, than the collaboration with the bourgeoisie against the neoliberals". They have done their part in defaming the Party all these years. The important thing for us is to keep a dynamic part of the working movement prepared for the fights we have ahead of us. It is going to be ugly. Probably an official default in few months or in the next year, fights with neo nazi and provocation etc. No one knows how things will end. Yeah, i sound bitter tonight. I had some frustrating discussions today with morons and "modern intellectuals" of the upper class. I hate this type of people, I really do.

Their hegemony is absolutely complete. Their narrative is the only narrative, with variations on capitalism being the only possible social evolution going forward and with bourgeois democracy as the highest possible expression of human political organization. Even their "socialists" and "radicals" accept it all without protest. Even their "communists" shape themselves around their slogans.

"Democracy is the worst possible form of government... except for all the others.", etc, etc

The irony, of course, is that all this occurs as their system fails completely: in place of prosperity, crisis; in place of democracy, corruption and oligarchy; in place of worldwide development, the creation of the deepest class divides; in place of enlightenment, virtue, and science, the recreation of the darkest ignorance, superstition, decay...

They control everything and have lost control of it all. It is reminiscent of the completeness of feudal reaction at the end of the Peasant Wars even as those same wars simultaneously made the continuation of feudalism impossible. All they could do was create (temporarily) a pro-feudalist bourgeoisie and achieve general agreement that the sun would not come up the next day... because they said so.

Lenin was exactly right as was Marx before him and even Hegel before that. There is a very real disconnect between politics and the actual social fabric, with the former only a lagging form - an outdated expression - of the latter.

Nikos is exactly right about elections but it goes even further. Elections are at their best a decision over who will run the "democracy" - the dictatorship. Communists do not qualify. We are against the dictatorship. Therefore, elections are merely an opportunity for other kinds of political activity for us. They cannot be otherwise.

Don't let the philistines get you down... they are completely bankrupt and their heads are fit for nothing but the inevitable implosion.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Hey Anax and Nikos, I was just reading this speech from a KKE PB member posted on ML Today.

http://mltoday.com/subject-areas/marxist-theory/the-character-of-the-contemporary-era-1368-2.html

This snippet caught my attention


The communists believe in historical materialism and study the course of social development, the replacement of social-economic systems on the basis of the indisputable principle of the conflict between the relations of production and the forces of production which is expressed through the class struggle. When the relations of production impede the development of the forces of production, the necessity of a social revolution emerges irrespective of whether the subjective factor has matured.

I think this is an interesting statement because of where it locates the class struggle (within the antagonism of relations/forces of production) and also its take on the place of the subjective element.

[PinkoCommie]

The communists believe in historical materialism and study the course of social development, the replacement of social-economic systems on the basis of the indisputable principle of the conflict between the relations of production and the forces of production which is expressed through the class struggle. When the relations of production impede the development of the forces of production, the necessity of a social revolution emerges irrespective of whether the subjective factor has matured.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

[Nikos]

Yeah, it is a huge waste of time talking to such people. They are professional wankers. Fuck them.

Marinos' speech is very interesting indeed.