Communist Perspective

Repudiate the debt

2012-01-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

On Saturday 28th January during the Temple Bar Tradfest in Dublin activists from
the Repudiate the Debt Campaign set up an information stall to highlight the ongoing
rip off of the Irish people.      

Thousands of citizens thronged the streets and it provided a good opportunity to
meet face to face with people and discuss this odious debt imposed on the people
by the EU/ECB and the main political parties.

A lot of leaflets and information in relation to both the debt and the Repudiate
Campaign where distributed and signatures collected demanding a referendum to allow
the people the opportunity to vote on this crippling debt.     

Also a number of people joined up to actively take part in the campaign.

The campaign will continue to raise its public profile and to engage people in an
open, face to face way about the importance of and the necessity for the repudiation
of this debt.

General Strike in Norway

2012-01-25T07:17:00.000-08:00

Norwegian trade unions launched a general strike on Wednesday against the government's planned implementation of the EU Temporary and Agency Workers Directive into national law and the social dumping that it would spark.

The fact that nationwide strike action is taking place against a directive that allegedly makes up a large part of the "social Europe" agenda tells us a lot about what this agenda actually delivers.

Norwegians have twice rejected European Union membership in referendums, but the country joined the European Economic Area (EEA) in 1994 and is a member of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) along with Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Oslo's EEA membership means it must effectively follow EU rules on the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour in return for access to the EU's single market.
However a recent opinion poll suggested that 76 per cent of Norwegians wanted their country to remain outside the EU.

Mass trade union rallies took place in around 40 cities including Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand, Stavanger, Haugesund, Tromsø, Gjøvik, Raufoss, Fredrikstad, Arendal, Porsgrunn and Sarpsborg.

Unions argue that the implementation of the EU Temporary and Agency Workers Directive will undermine Norwegian labour laws and introduce the large-scale use of temporary and agency workers, forcing out permanent workers and weakening workers' rights and collective agreements.

The directive also gives final authority over Norwegian employment legislation to the EFTA Court, a supranational judicial body responsible for the three EFTA/EEA members Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

This court is very similar to the EU's European Court of Justice (ECJ) which has already made some draconian judgements striking down trade union collective bargaining rights in nearby Sweden and Finland in the Laval and Viking cases.

The EU court ruled that under the EU treaties business rights to "establishment" overrule basic trade union rights, rulings that have not gone unnoticed in Norway.
The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) is demanding that the government reject the directive and introduce laws to ensure that wages and working conditions for those who are hired are the same as the permanent employees.

The Working Environment Act, brought in in 1994, currently lays down that permanent employment is the main rule in Norway, with strict exemptions for the use of contract labour and temporary employment.

Backing the action, International Transport Workers Federation general secretary David Cockroft said Norway's legislation on contract labour and temporary employment was some of the best there is.

"The directive doesn't just risk taking a good law and making it mediocre - it could also strip the rights currently enjoyed by workers and open the floodgates to their replacement by precariously employed temporary and agency staff who will themselves get inferior employment protection," he said.

ITF president Paddy Crumlin said Norwegian unions and workers were stepping up to defend legislation that "does the job it's meant to."

Norway has low unemployment compared with many other European countries and much less use of temporary labour. The growth of temporary and agency workers is uneven across Europe but is inextricably linked to how deregulated the economy is in line with neoliberal EU rules covering the single market.

According to figures released in 2007 the number of temporary and agency workers in Germany was just 8,172. In the UK it was nearly 1.2 million. That number has probably expanded across the EU since then and pressure is being applied to ensure the number of temps grows in Norway.

A recent government-commissioned report by Professor Fredrik Sejersted of the University of Oslo found that Norway has embraced 75 per cent of the EU's regulations over the years and more than 6,000 EU laws have been included in Norwegian law. "We are almost as deeply integrated as the UK," he says.

His report Outside and Inside finds deep implications for Norway's society, economy and democracy and expresses concern at the political consequences of adopting EU policies "without voting rights."

Sejersted calls this a "great democratic deficit," suggesting that as Norway's integration with the EU has intensified, media, public and political understanding has shrunk massively.
"There are few areas of Norwegian democracy today where so many know so little about so much as is the case with Norwegian European policy," he says.

Europhiles of all political hues will no doubt attack Norwegian workers for resisting this silent neoliberal drift as being "selfish," "protectionist" or even "racist" for not allowing the wholesale deregulation of the legal framework covering work practices.

But this strike reveals the deep rift between the democratic demands of Norwegian voters and the machinations of the Norwegian political class and its collusion with the EU to implement a neoliberal economic and social agenda without a mandate to do so.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/114393

No bondholder left behind is murder

2012-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

REPUDIATE THE DEBT CAMPAIGN

25 January 2012

Once again the Irish Government is handing over public money, this time €1.25 billion, to pay off the bond-holders of Anglo-Irish Bank. This callous, odious and unjust debt is taking a heavy toll on the Irish people. This odious debt imposed on our people by the EU and ECB is simply costing the lives of the sick and of children.

There is no other solution than the complete repudiation of this debt. No tinkering with promissory notes or the like will address the simple fact that this is not the people’s debt, and it is not their responsibility to pay it through massive transfers of wealth from our country and our people, with a callous “austerity” programme and cuts in health, education, and social welfare, all just to save the German and French banks.

Repudiation of this debt is they only way to stop the savage attacks and the heavy price tags forced on our people. The governments strategy of no bondholder left behind is killing our people.

Paul Doran
Co-ordinator
087 6837650

Browne v The Troika

2012-01-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

Troika (EU, ECB & IMF) representatives, and Barbara Nolan, head of the European Commission representation in Ireland, held a press conference on the latest bailout review this afternoon.

Participants:
Klaus Masuch, head of EU Countries Division at the European Central Bank
Istvan Szekely, director of economic and financial affairs at the European Commission
Craig Beaumont, mission chief for Ireland at the IMF.
Barbara Nolan, head of the European Commission representation in Ireland.

Early in the conference, Istvan Szekely said: “I’m impressed by the depth of the discussion in Ireland and the understanding of complex, economic financial-sector issues, which is revealed by looking into the Irish place, looking into the discussion. But also when I come from the airport with the taxi driver they are often very very informed I must say, very very informed.”

[LATER]

Vincent Browne: “Klaus Masuch, did your taxi driver tell you how the Irish people are bewildered that we are required to pay unguaranteed bondholders billions of euros for debts that the Irish people have no relation to or no bearing with, primarily to bail out or to ensure the solvency of European banks? And if the taxi driver had asked you that question,hat would have been your response? That’s my first question.”

Barbara Nolan: “Well, well, well, can we take a couple together? Can you ask the second question?”

VB: “Well, my second question is a completely different issue and it may have a follow-through if Mr Masuch doesn’t answer the question in a way that would illuminate the taxi driver’s understanding of all this, I would have a follow-through question.”

Nolan: “Right, can I ask you then to pass the mic, and we’ll come back to you for the second question?”

Browne: “Well, if you don’t mind, that’s a way of breaking up the exchange, and I would prefer if it went this way: We’ve a tradition in Irish journalism that we pursue issues and that when somebody doesn’t ask [answer] a question we follow through on it and I hope that tradition will be respected on this occasion. So could you answer the question?”

Masuch: “I have answered a very similar question of you – I think it was two reviews ago – and can…”

Browne: “[inaudible] the question”

Masuch: “… and I answered it. I can understand that this is a difficult decision to be made by the government and there’s no doubt about it but there are different aspects of the problem to be, to be balanced against each other and I can understand that the government came to, came to the view that, all in all, the costs for the, for Irish people, for the, for the stability of the banking system, for the confidence in the banking system of taking a certain action in this respect which you are mentioning could likely have been much bigger than the benefits for the taxpayer which of course would have been there. So the financial sector would have been affected; the confidence of the financial sector would have been negatively affected, and I can understand that there were, that there was a difficult decision but that the decision was taken in this direction.”

Browne: “That, that… Well, that doesn’t address the issue. We are required to pay, in respect of a defunct bank – that has no bearing on the welfare of the Irish people at all – we are required to pay in respect of this defunct bank, billions on unguaranteed bonds in order to ensure the health of European banks. Now how would you explain that situation to the taxi driver that you talked about earlier?”

Masuch: “I think I have addressed [looking to Barbara Nolan] the question.”

Browne: “No you haven’t addressed the question because you referred to the viability of the Irish financial institutions. This financial institution I’m talking about is defunct. It’s over. It’s finished. Now, why are the Irish people required, under threat from the ECB, why are the Irish people required to pay billions to unguaranteed bondholders under threat from the ECB?”

Masuch: [silence]

Browne: “You didn’t answer the question the last time so maybe you’ll answer it this time.”

Masuch: [mutters to Barbara Nolan]

Nolan: “Well, I think he doesn’t have anything to add to what he’s already said. Can I.. [pointing at another questioner]”

Browne: “Well, just a minute now. This isn’t, this isn’t good enough… You people are intervening in this society causing huge damage by requiring us to make payments not for the benefit of anybody in Ireland but for the benefit of European financial institutions. Now, could you explain why the Irish people are inflicted with this burden?”

Manusch: “Well, I think I have addressed the question.”

Browne: “You’ve nothing to say. There’s no answer, is that right? Is that it? No answer?”

Manusch: “I have given an answer”

Browne: “You have given an answer that didn’t address the question.”

Nolan: “That’s your view.”

Browne: “That is my view and I think it would be the view of the taxi driver and a few of our viewers tonight.”

Nolan: “Right. Can we please move on?”

Causes of the crisis

2012-01-19T21:23:00.001-08:00

Carchedi, Foster and the causes of crisis

The annual Marxism 2011 festival took place in London this weekend. One of the sessions was on Marxist theory and the economic crisis. The speakers were John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the American Monthly Review, Guglielmo Carchedi, the Italian Marxist economist and Joseph Choonara from the British Socialist Workers Party.

With three speakers and only a short amount of time, no speaker was able to do justice to their arguments. But let me summarise. I won’t comment on Choonara’s contribution, not because he did not say some excellent things, but because I have more to say about the other two speakers.

Those who have read John Bellamy Foster’s book, The Great Financial Crash: causes and consequences (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Financial-Crisis-Causes-Consequences/dp/1583671846) , will know that he represents that tradition of Marxist economics developed by Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran and Harry Magdoff that argues the cause of capitalist economic crisis can be found in the development of competitive, small firm capitalism of the 19th century into the monopoly, large firm capitalism of the 20th century, which has further developed structurally into a monopoly finance capitalism of the 21st century. This monopoly capitalism breeds stagnation because competition is weak or suppressed. Workers’ wages are held back by monopoly pricing and there is shift of profits from small firms to large ones. But because workers cannot spend as much, monopoly surpluses build up. They have to be realised through arms spending or a credit boom, the latest of which has seen the development of ‘financialisation’ (see my post, Financialisation: the cause of crisis?, 19 July 2010). Eventually the credit bubble bursts and the stagnatory nature of capitalism is revealed. The crisis occurs not because profitability is too low but because the surplus is too high to be bought or realised. Capitalist crises are not cyclical (boom and slump), but structural (stagnation).

The Monthly Review analysis is close to the views of those who have ‘neo-liberalism’ and underconsumptionist explanation of capitalist crisis, namely that there is not enough ‘effective demand’ from workers as their wages have been restricted and inequalities of income have grown so large that capitalists can no longer sell their goods and services to the masses in sufficiently profitable amounts. So there is overaccumulation or overproduction and that causes the crisis. The crisis is caused by inequality and underconsumption, delayed by a credit bubble, which when it bursts, causes profits to collapse. Low profits are the result of crisis and the lack of realisation, not vice versa (see my posts, The crisis of neoliberalism and Gerard Dumenil, 3 march 2011 and Views of the Great Recession, David Harvey and Anwar Shaikh, 3 September 2010).

In my book, The Great Recession (http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-recession/6079458), I show how this explanation of capitalist crisis is both wrong and also not Marx’s view. Suffice it to say that Foster in his brief speech presented two key facts to support his thesis: that capitalist crisis one of structural stagnation because in every decade since the 1960s, economic growth in the major capitalist countries has been slower than the previous one. This is true. But you can often make the stats fit any argument. Instead of measuring growth decade by decade, if you measure it against the rise and fall in profitability in the US, you find that economic growth was faster from 1982-97, when profitability was rising, than it had been between 1965-82, when it was falling. In other words, economic growth is faster when profitability is rising and vice versa.

His second fact was that real wages in the US have been stagnant since the 1970s and inequality has increased sharply, so workers became bereft of the incomes to buy the goods and services of monopoly capitalism without credit. It is true that real wages have stagnated. But it is not true that the costs of variable capital for the capitalists have stagnated and that is what matters to capitalist production. Employee costs include not just wages but also benefits (holidays, sick pay, pensions, medical care, social security), which must be paid at least in part by employers. When these are added in, employee costs have risen in real terms. In the period 1982-97, employee costs rose, but profits rose faster, so the rate of exploitation (surplus value) rose in the US (and elsewhere). The increase was so strong and when combined with a fall in the costs of production (a falling organic composition of capital), profitability rose and capitalist production grew faster and did not stagnate. It was only when profitability peaked and began to fall that growth slowed.

Guglielmo Carchedi has been a major contributor the development of Marxist economics over the last 30 years. He was among the first to provide a refutation of the Okishio theorem that purported to show that Marx’s law of profitability was theoretically false or flawed and could not be used to explain crisis. Carchedi has also shown up the fallacies of the underconsumptionist explanation of crisis that still dominates many parts of the Marxist economic spectrum (see his recent book http://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/finance-crisis/on-the-origins-of-the-crisis-beyond-finance/carchedireturnfromthegrave ).

At the meeting, Carchedi outlined the main arguments in his latest book, Behind the crisis (http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Crisis-Historical-Materialism-Book/dp/9004189947) and paper (see his excellent two files on his thesis at www.marx2010.weebly.com). He shows that if you look at the productive sector of the capitalist economy (namely, the US) over the last 50 years, then you can see a secular fall in the rate of profit. This secular fall has been driven by Marx’s law of profitability, namely a rise in the organic composition of capital. ie the growth of machinery and plant etc has outstripped and displaced the growth in the employment of labour power. As Carchedi explains, labour is the only source of value, so the rising organic composition of capital may deliver faster productivity, BUT because goods get produced in less labour time, there is a slower growth in value and profitability falls.

Carchedi also shows that within the secular decline in profitability, there are shorter cycles when profitability can rise, in particular a rise from 1986 to date. This rise is due to the counteracting influences on profitability that are also part of Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. From 1986, capitalists drove up the rate of exploitation or surplus value by vicious attacks on working conditions etc to counteract the effect of the rising organic composition of capital. But eventually, the law of profitability will overcome the counteracting influences and the crisis will ensue.

This is a powerful argument. But where I have some doubts about Carchedi’s approach is in his measure of profitability. Carchedi’s data show that US profitability has risen from 1986 to 2009. So how can the Great Recession be a result of falling profitability? Carchedi measures only the profitability of the productive sectors of the capitalism, indeed just the goods producing sector. He excludes services and the finance sector. This may be justifiable if you want to see the working out of Marx’s law of profitability over a secular period. But I think it then confuses and obscures what is going on cyclically and thus does not help to explain booms and slumps. Marx did not exclude from his general rate of profit the financial sector or the unproductive sectors of capitalism. These sectors do not create surplus value, but they appropriate it from the productive sector (by interest, rent and other charges) and so must be included in the overall rate of profit and considered in the cyclical explanation of crisis.

If you look at the profitability of the whole capitalist economy, as I did in my book and others have done as well (see my upcoming paper!), then we can see that US profitability peaked in 1997 not 2009 and has still not returned to that level (see my recent post, Returning to the long view and others on this). Indeed, I have argued that after the slump of 2001, US profitability again peaked in 2005-6 (below the level fo 1997) and began to fall well before the credit crunch of 2007 and the recession of 2008-9. This falling profitability(in the context of the general downphase of profitability from 1997) eventually triggered the credit crunch of 2007 when credit could no longer support profits. This restores Marx’s law as the underlying (but not proximate) cause of the crisis.

Michael Roberts

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/carchedi-foster-and-the-causes-of-crisis/

Peoples News Issue 62

2012-01-19T13:45:00.000-08:00

The latest draft of an international treaty to toughen the enforcement of EU budget rules—the third in less than a month—dilutes the requirement to adopt a rule on a constitutional basis, binding governments not to exceed EU deficit and debt limits. Instead it says that the rule could be applied through “provisions of binding force and permanent character, preferably constitutional, that are guaranteed to be respected throughout the national budgetary processes."

It is possible that, if it survives further drafts, such language might strengthen the Government’s case in avoiding having to insert the rule in the Constitution and hence having a
referendum. Instead the Government might attempt to enact the Fiscal Compact Treaty through secondary legislation—a move that could be challenged only through the courts. The dilemma for the Government is that if the legislation were struck down in those circumstances it would go into the resulting referendum on the back foot.

Read more...

http://www.people.ie/news/PN-62.pdf

Check it out

January Socialist Voice

2012-01-17T12:40:00.000-08:00

Jan 2011 edition out now:

http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/sv/index.html

CPI Statement: Collective Resistance is the only way forward

2012-01-17T12:06:00.000-08:00

Collective resistance is the only way forward in 2012

Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland

16 January 2012

As we enter 2012 its is clear that this will be a year of further austerity measures, which will be imposed upon the people of Ireland north and south.
Working people will experience deeper cuts in government spending. Three will be more job losses throughout the economy, on both sides of the border, and in particular within the financial sector. We express our solidarity with the workers in Ulster Bank, Vita Cortex, Lagan Brick, La Senza, and all workers involved in disputes or being made redundant as the crisis of the system deepens.
This year billions of euros of the people’s money will be handed over to foreign banks and bond-holders. On 25 January alone the government will hand over €1½ billion to Anglo-Irish Bank bond-holders.
On the wider economic front, the forecast for Irish GDP is a growth of only 0.7 per cent in 2012—down from previous forecasts of 1.2 per cent. The establishment, and even some on the left, who based their analysis on a fiscal stimulus and increased exports, allowing the Republic to meet its debt repayments, are being proved wrong.
In the North, last year saw output shrink by 17 per cent, from a peak four years ago, to a level not seen since 2003, meaning that the private sector in Northern Ireland has effectually lost eight years of growth. What is increasingly clear is that the global capitalist economy is slowing down sharply.
The response from the government will be to make the people pay, through further cuts in public services. The external troika of the EU, ECB and IMF is demanding the sale of state assets to raise €5 billion. A large number of salaried workers who are paid monthly will have new deductions in their first wage packet of 2012 and the imposition of the so-called household tax, flowing from last December’s budget.
The attacks in this budget against single parents, the unemployed and pensioners will continue, and more and more of workers’ salaries will be taken from them to pay an odious and anti-people debt.
The weakness of the private sector in the North, combined with continuing cuts in the public sector, means that the present unemployment total of more than 60,000 is likely to continue to rise in the months ahead.
The debate now emerging between the Scottish and British governments may well lead to a political and structural crisis in the United Kingdom. The question of Scottish independence will have reverberations within the unionist community in Northern Ireland and may have an impact on the whole of Ireland.
Working people are now feeling the full propaganda campaign in relation to the “Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union” as the combined arms of the establishment, the state and the mass media attempt to manufacture consent by bullying and blackmailing, to get people to support a further attack on democracy and the sovereignty of the member-states.
Sabre-rattling of the type seen by Cameron to keep the little-Englanders of the Tory right happy is no response. Throughout Ireland, trade unionists, community activists, socialists, republicans and democrats are fighting back. From that resistance there must be developed an alternative economic and social programme, based on repudiating the odious debt, revitalised strategic planning, public-sector investment, and democratic control.
The greatest political weakness of the coalitions in Dublin, Belfast and London is that the people know we are not “all in this together”: their solutions are short-term and in the interests of banks, big business, and the EU establishment. Our solutions will be long-term and in the interests of the Irish people, North and South.

Crisis in Hungary

2012-01-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

The crisis of capitalism and the revolutionary perspective in Hungary

by Dr Thürmer Gyula, president, Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party

The forces of capitalism both in Europe and Hungary make enormous efforts to hide the fact that contemporary capitalism is in a deep crisis. They cannot deny the existence of serious problems of capitalism, but they try to demonstrate that all problems can be solved within the framework of capitalism by capitalist reforms.
But the truth is that the serious internal crisis of capitalism cannot be solved by traditional capitalist reforms. The revolutionary perspective of solving the problems of capitalism is becoming more and more real.
Hungary is one the weakest elements of contemporary European capitalism. Hungarian capitalism is in a deep crisis, independently of the worldwide crisis; but it is being made even deeper by the general crisis of capitalism. The crisis is far from being solved, and nobody can foresee its consequences.
Under these circumstances we should not only criticise the capitalist system but we should also demonstrate to the people the real possibility of establishing a new world. We should demonstrate socialism as a real alternative to existing capitalism.
It means that the communist movement in Hungary is entering a new situation, which means new possibilities and new tasks.

The crisis of Hungarian capitalism

Hungarian capitalism is in crisis, and the general crisis of international capitalism makes it even deeper. The crisis of contemporary Hungarian capitalism can be explained by the following factors:
1. The overwhelming majority of the Hungarian economy, industry, financial system, trade and services have been sold to foreign capital.
Hungary was the first ECE country to open its economy to foreign investors, in 1989. According to the statistics of the UN organisation UNCTAD, also dealing with foreign investments, at the end of 1990 foreign direct investment in Hungary accounted for 1.7 per cent of GDP. Today this ratio is over 70 per cent. In the EU this ratio is just 40.9 per cent, in Romania 36.7 per cent.
Almost 100 per cent of banks belong to international capital. 80 per cent of industrial production comes from transnational companies. The Hungarian economy depends much more on foreign capital than any other of the countries of Europe. After 2011 there is a real danger that Hungarian agricultural land could also be bought by foreign capital.
The decisive role of foreign capital is one of the characteristic features of Hungarian capitalism. Twenty years ago the capitalist counter-revolution was the result of the activity of international capitalism, the internal betrayal by the revisionist forces of the ruling communist party, and the activity of the bourgeois opposition.
There had not been a strong Hungarian capitalist class. The new capitalist class was created partly from elements of the former ruling elite of the socialist system, which used their political position to take an active part in the privatisation of state property, partly from intellectuals and entrepreneurs of the socialist period, partly from new generations that appeared on the scene during the last two decades.
The extraordinary large role of transnational capital is the result of different processes. Firstly, the capitalist forces were aware of the fact that the period of socialism was a successful period in Hungarian history, and the social forces of socialist society, the working class and the co-operative agricultural farmers, were quite strong.
The capitalist forces were interested in liquidating these social classes and groups. They saw only one way: to involve transnational capital. Secondly, the liberally minded intellectuals were always oriented to the United States, Israel, and the transnational capitalist forces, and they have always considered the large role of foreign capital as something absolutely normal.
All Hungarian governments have supported foreign investments by giving cash subsidies, determined by individual government decision, development tax allowances, training subsidies, job-creation subsidies, etc.
The Hungarian capitalist class consists of different groups. Firstly, a small but influential group of big capitalists has positions in the financial area, trade, and services. It is closely connected with transnational capital. Secondly, hundreds of thousands of micro, small and middle-sized entrepreneurs are engaged in industry and trade. Their position is very weak. They are under a double pressure from EU capital and Chinese capital. Without strong support from the state, they are sentenced to death.
These developments have serious consequences, now that the capitalist system is in crisis. Firstly, foreign capital controls the basic areas of the Hungarian economy. They have absolute power in the financial area and they control the most sensitive area: internal trade. Inasmuch as there is not any strong national production, there are very limited possibilities for defending Hungary by its own means. It can be clearly seen that transnational companies are trying to solve their own problems by reducing production and by closing plants in Hungary, which contributes to the rise of unemployment.
2. The gap between the wealthy and the poor groups of society has widened enormously. This is one more reason for the crisis of Hungarian capitalism. The original accumulation of capital meant that people have been deprived of their resources. It is the result of the inflation policy, tax policy and credit policy of capitalist governments of the last twenty years.
Hungary has a population of 10 million. Of these, 9 million can be considered as people living at a very limited standard of living or even under poor circumstances, and only 1 million can consider themselves as winners from the social changes, EU membership, etc.
As the following figures show, the number of the desperately poor—those living under the poverty line—has drastically increased over the past years. The poverty line is the sum of incomes of a household that allows those in the household to feed and clothe themselves and pay for heating and electricity. In 1993, according to reliable statistics, 27 per cent of Hungary’s population lived below the poverty line.
There were about 1 million poor people in Hungary in 1980. Today their number exceeds 2½ million. The richest tenth of society makes 7.3 times more money than the lowest tenth.
Perhaps children are in the most severe situation. Almost half the people under eighteen live in a family below the poverty line. In the past years, in 53 per cent of households real wages have decreased. This means that in those families the growth in incomes was slower than the growth in prices.
The number of so-called long-term poor is rising. The long-term poor in Hungary comprise several distinct social groups: the homeless, the rural population, particularly those living in micro-communities, the unemployed or those withdrawn from the labour market, households with more than three children, single-parent families, single elderly females, and the Roma (the so-called “gypsies”). A third of the long-term poor are Roma, even though this group is only approximately 5 per cent of the Hungarian population.
In the first months of 2009 the average monthly income in Hungary was €402. Manual workers receive €295, white-collar workers €511. The minimum wage is €250. One should take into consideration that consumer prices are practically on the EU level.
During the last twenty years the working class have lost their savings, which they built up during the socialist times. Now working people use their last reserves, and many of them have no more reserves at all. The same can be said about the intellectuals, teachers, and medical workers.
Most of the working class and the intellectuals have recently taken on large debts to buy an apartment, car or television or just to cover the costs of everyday living. These social groups cannot mobilise new resources in order to face the consequences of the present crisis.
3. The third reason and characteristic feature of the crisis of Hungarian capitalism is the extraordinarily high level of corruption.
Hungary ranks 39th out of 179 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2007. Despite anti-corruption laws, non-transparency leads to persistent rumours of corruption in government procurement.
The reasons for these phenomena are connected with Hungarian capitalism itself. Firstly, the privatisation of state property meant practically free robbery. Now the different political and economic circles fight for a greater share of EU money, state orders, and central investments.
Secondly, the system of laws is very confusing, which is beneficial for those in the black economy. Today about 30 per cent of GDP is produced in the black economy.
Thirdly, the present political and juridical system is a result of compromises concluded twenty years ago between different groups of the capitalist class. Many of its elements have already lost their vitality. As a result of this situation the capitalist state cannot fulfil some of its basic functions, including the work of the police, local administration, etc.

Possible ways of development

The future development of Hungarian capitalism depends on the development of international capitalism and the processes going on in the different social groups of Hungary.
1. The international capitalist forces do not want to lose Hungary.
Hungary was one of the first countries changing from socialism to capitalism, and it served as a demonstration of the correctness of US and German policy of peaceful counter-revolutions.
This is one reason. The second is that international capital has invested large amounts of money in Hungary. Now the debts of Hungary are equal to 97 per cent of Hungarian GDP. The international capitalist forces would like to get their money back. That is why they are ready to help. In 2009 Hungary received €20 billion as standby credit.
The IMF and the international capitalist forces want a more or less stable political situation in Hungary, the oppression of all possible anti-capitalist movements, but with “EU-conformant means.” The Obama government seems to understand better than the EU countries that the collapse of Hungarian capitalism could lead to a series of collapses in the region. They could not convince their EU partners yet to invest much more money in consolidating Hungarian capitalism.
The United States is quiet indifferent about which group of the capitalist class rules Hungary politically. It demands from any Hungarian government absolute fidelity to the United States and NATO and participation in NATO military missions. In internal policy the US government expects a consequent and demonstrative fight against anti-Semitism and communist forces.
The leading EU countries do not express special worry about the situation of Hungarian capitalism. According to their experience they are convinced that in a Hungary that is member of the EU and NATO there cannot be social revolutions, not even social uprisings of great measure.
The different political groups of the EU express their sympathy for different political parties in Hungary. It seems that now both Germany and France are not satisfied with the performance of the Hungarian Socialist Party and would not oppose a change of government.
2. The Hungarian capitalist class consists of different groups.
The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) and the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) represents big capital closely connected with transnational capital. They are traditionally oriented economically and politically on the United States and Israel.
The coalition of the socialists and liberals has been an optimal solution for international capitalist forces for a long time. Hungary takes an active part in all US and NATO-inspired military actions, from Kosovo to Afghanistan. The majority of the Hungarian economy was privatised, first of all sold to foreign capital, during the governments of these parties between 1994 and 98 and since 2002. The government headed by the Hungarian Socialist Party has been able to split the trade unions fighting against the government and to guarantee “social peace.” The socialists were able to subordinate to the MSzP all left political and civil organisations, with the exception of the Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party.
The coalition of the socialists and the liberals has declared a fight against anti-Semitism and guaranteed excellent possibilities of development for those who belong to the Jewish community in Hungary. According to the statistics of different Jewish organisations, today between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews live in Hungary. The inter-marriage rate for Jews is about 60 per cent. The MSzP-SzDSz government makes great efforts, among others, to change the constitution and to declare that “Holocaust denial and public incitement of racial hatred” is a criminal offence. The government, which asserts that Hungary is the place in Europe where some of the worst neo-Nazi incidents took place in recent months, planned the reform in response to public outrage at recent provocations.
In spite of all these developments, the international capitalist forces are not satisfied with the actual performance of the socialist-liberal coalition. The neo-liberal economic policy led to a serious worsening of the people’s standard of living. Millions are unsatisfied and begin to express their anti-government and even anti-capitalist attitude in different forms. The worsening of living conditions has strengthened two tendencies in Hungary, anti-Semitism and anti-Roma actions.
Fidesz (the Hungarian Civic Union) represents much more the small and middle capitalists, although it does not deny big capital. It is more oriented on Germany and the EU generally. Fidesz, which had been originally a liberal party, is now a party that tries to unify all conservative, nationalist forces. It co-operates closely with the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP).
Fidesz, during its rule in 1998–2002, basically fulfilled the expectations of international capital. Hungary took an active part in the war against Yugoslavia and the “process of democratisation” in Eastern Europe. The policy of the Fidesz government of supporting the desires of Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia and other countries for national autonomy led to criticism from some EU countries. US political circles criticised Fidesz because, according to their estimation, its government did not fight enough against anti-Semitism. Fidesz, while supporting transnational capital, realised a lot of measures in order to support Hungarian capital, first of all middle capitalists.
Since 2002 Fidesz has demonstrated that it is the largest oppositional party and is able to influence the political processes in Hungary. It was the organiser of large anti-government demonstrations in 2005–06 and initiated a referendum on basic issues of the educational and health policy of the MSzP-SzDSz government. The congress of Fidesz declared that it is necessary to create a “new majority,” including not only the traditional allies of Fidesz but other political forces, trade unions and civil organisations, too.
At the same time Fidesz demonstrated that it does not want to exceed the frameworks of parliamentary democracy or violate the general rules of political behaviour in the EU. It did not support the large demonstrations of trade unions in 2007–09, although it meant great possibilities.
The idea of a new majority has not been realised, and Fidesz has not opened demonstratively towards other political parties.
The two groups of the capitalist class of Hungary represented by the basic political parties have common and different interests. All of them are interested in maintaining the capitalist system. They do not want to change the existing political system. That is why the 5 per cent limit for entering the parliament will be not changed. All groups of the capitalist class fight for a better position in privatisation, in getting EU money and large state investments. At the same time all of them know that their internal fight cannot threaten the common interest of the capitalist class. The Hungarian Socialist Party would like to keep power, and Fidesz would like to get it. Both of them understand that the EU allows using only parliamentary methods.
The MSzP uses different methods to keep power. Firstly, it is interested in the activity of the Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik). Jobbik are the storm-troopers of the capitalist class. They play a role similar to that played earlier by the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP).
Jobbik fulfils different functions, using national feelings and radical anti-capitalist slogans they can manipulate the people. They are able to take votes from Fidesz. At the same time they use other “weapons” that are not used by other capitalist forces. These are anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism and anti-Roma slogans. They can take votes also from the communist forces. Jobbik registered the Magyar Gárda, the extremist paramilitary “Hungarian Guard Movement,” in June 2007 as a “cultural organisation” to “prepare the youth spiritually and physically for extraordinary situations when it might be necessary to mobilise the people.” According to a recent report by the Progressive Institute, today in Hungary there is a greater openness towards extremist movements, because of poverty and job losses resulting from the current economic crisis.
Secondly, the socialists try to get all left votes. They could not subordinate the Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party to the MSzP, but in 2006 they were able to create the “Hungarian Workers’ Party of 2006,” which is a revisionist party, in words criticising capitalism but supporting the socialist-liberal government.
Thirdly, they helped the birth of new organisations, such as the party called “There Can Be Another Policy,” which, together with the Humanist Party, can create an alternative to the liberals.
3. Under these circumstances there are two basic ways in which Hungarian society can go on: the way of capitalism and the way of socialist revolution.
From the point of view of the capitalist alternative, of decisive importance is the fact that the field of action of Hungarian capitalism is principally determined by the enormous influence of transnational capital in the Hungarian economy, by the political, military and ideological dependence of Hungary on the United States, NATO, and the EU.
Within capitalist development—we emphasise, inside capitalism and not as an alternative to it—different courses are possible. One of these is a further subordinating of Hungary to the IMF, EU, and other capitalist centres.
The Hungarian governments will serve the interests of transnational capital by liberalising fully all areas of the Hungarian market, liquidating the remainder of Hungarian enterprises, suppressing all forms of protest by the working classes. It is the way of giving up fully the national sovereignty of Hungary, the way of limitation and oppressing democratic rights.
This policy will continue if the socialists remain in power. They declare it clearly and demonstrate it in actual policy.
We have no illusions, and we cannot have any: this policy can be revived in some form even if Fidesz comes to power. Fidesz is also the party of big capital, just like the MSzP; the only difference between them is that in the social base of Fidesz are many more representatives of the small and middle bourgeoisie.
The Hungarian Communists should not and will not support this way. The Communists should know that the neo-liberal, pro-IMF way will worsen the conditions of the people, and can lead to a further radicalisation of the masses. The Communists should prepare for this situation. We should fight against such development which would lead to a radical right turn in policy. There is not a real danger that fascist or even radical right forces would come to power. The actual extremist right forces are not strong enough, and such a development would lead to an immediate intervention by the EU, as we could see in Austria some years ago.
But there is a real threat that the capitalist forces would use the crisis in Hungary and the strengthening of extremist right forces for establishing a “democratic dictatorship” in order to “save democracy.”
Within the capitalist way of development we can also imagine such a course, which provides more opportunities for national capital, for Hungarian small and middle enterprises. Nor can we rule out the possibility that, in order to avoid mass resentment and the outbreak of large-scale social conflicts, capital will make some concessions to the masses, will try to mitigate the social and economic problems of people.
In foreign policy also it can happen that Hungary will pursue a more balanced course while keeping its main commitment to the EU and NATO. For example, it will develop closer relations with Arab and Latin American countries. We can observe the development of similar alternatives within the capitalist system in a number of Latin American countries.
This way is possible under the circumstances of capitalism. The present government and the Hungarian Socialist Party are against it. The main opposition party, Fidesz, representing the interests of the Hungarian middle capitalists, expresses its readiness to limit transnational capital, to support Hungarian enterprisers, to limit the incomes of big capital, and to give more to the broad masses. It is a question whether Fidesz—on coming to power—would really do it or would look for a compromise with international capital.
This way does not meet completely the interests of the working class and means only provisional improvements. But this way means some improvements for the working masses. It allows the HCWP to co-operate with the small and middle bourgeoisie on the basis a of common fight against transnational capital, supermarkets, and foreign exploitation.
This course will be successful if we are able to turn popular resentment into an organised force and thus force capitalist governments to restrict capital. The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party takes part in trade union fights, in the movement of “home defenders” (against evictions), in civil actions in order to increase the influence of Communists and to build the forces of mass resistance.
Lenin wrote in The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution: “The proletariat must carry to completion the democratic revolution, by allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush by force the resistance of the autocracy and to paralyse the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution by allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population in order to crush by force the resistance of the bourgeoisie and to paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.”
Another way is the way of socialist revolution. It is clear that the basic problems of the working class can be solved only in the way of the socialist revolution by overcoming capitalism. The Hungarian Communists have always been in this position, but since the capitalist counter-revolution in 1989–90 we did not speak about the possibility of socialist revolution. Now we should do it!
“The current crisis is an expression of a deeper crisis intrinsic to the capitalist system, which demonstrates capitalism’s historical limits and the need for its revolutionary overthrow,” we can read in the common declaration of communist and workers’ parties in São Paolo.
Our parties have also declared: “Emphasising that neo-liberalism’s bankruptcy represents not only the failure of a policy of management of capitalism but the failure of capitalism itself, and confident of the superiority of the communist ideals and project, we affirm that the answer to the emancipatory aspirations of workers and peoples can only be found in the rupture with the power of big capital, with the imperialist blocs and alliances, and through deep transformations of a liberating and anti-monopolist character . . . Certain of the possibility of another world, a world that is free from class exploitation and the oppression of capital, we declare our commitment to continue the historical path to building a new society, socialism, free from class exploitation and oppression.”
The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party will take the way of socialist revolution. Now we consider our basic and most important task to be demonstrating to the Hungarian people that capitalism is not the only way of living. We should demonstrate that capitalists will never give to us a better life, never will give us any place in the parliament. We should win these things by serious struggle. But this way is a realistic way, and we can create a new world: socialism.
Naturally, we remember the words of Lenin: “Every revolution means a sharp turn in the lives of a vast number of people. Unless the time is ripe for such a turn, no real revolution can take place.”
Now we cannot speak about a revolutionary situation in Hungary. But we can speak about the possibility that the general development of the crisis of international capitalism and its consequences in Hungary can lead to the birth of revolutionary situation.
We consider our main task to be preparing the Communist Party for such a situation. The historical experiments show that real revolutionary situations remain unused if the subjective circumstances do not exist at the due time.
We strengthen our Marxist-Leninist education. The members and activists of the party should understand the present situation and the real meaning of the revolutionary way.
We study the historical experience of socialist revolutions in Hungary with the aim of using those experiences that can be applied today.
We study the experience of the communist parties of Greece, Portugal, Brasil, Venezuela and other countries and how to organise and stir to greater activity the masses.
The party organises its leading bodies on a new basis. We are creating “local revolutionary centres, ” with the necessary mobile informational equipment.
We create mobile “combat groups,” which can participate in different demonstrations, street actions, and solidarity events.
We are building a new youth organisation, with young people deeply devoted to idea of revolution.
We began to go directly to the factories to meet the workers. The experiences are very positive.
We are opened to all anti-capitalist, anti-monopoly initiatives and participate in all social actions that fight against supermarkets, against neo-liberal housing policy, against ejections of those who cannot pay for gas and electricity.
We create a more effective system of alternative media, using the weekly paper A Szabadság [Freedom], the internet, and other means.
We are building up a broad system of the web pages of local organisations, using Youtube technology and other modern internet technologies.
We fight for the more effective co-operation of communist forces in the international arena.
The HCWP has left the Party of the European Left, because we do not agree with the revisionist and opportunist policy of the party.
We are convinced that we need not a “new European political culture” but a very consequent fight against capitalism, for the rights of the working masses. We should not only criticise capitalism but should organise the everyday fight of the workers. We want to liquidate capitalism; the Party of the European Left wants to make it better.
We are standing on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, the theory and practice of class struggle, the principles of proletarian internationalism. The European Left, unfortunately, is standing on the basis of reformism. The European Left fights against capitalism only in phrases, but in practice it helps to strengthen the “democratic” image of the European Union, the European Parliament, and the capitalist system generally.
Lenin said: “It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes it moves irresistibly.” We should be prepared for it.

A “Euro-Germanic” chauvinism

2012-01-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

A “Euro-Germanic” chauvinism by Rui Paz

Avante! (Lisbon), 2 December 2011

Portugal has borne the full brunt of the EU austerity machine.

Workers fought back in 2011 with a series of general and sectoral mass strikes.

Referring to the ease with which the German government imposes more and more its own interests on other countries in the European Union, Volker Kauder, secretary-general of Angela Merkel’s party, stated during its congress in Leipzig: “Europe is now speaking German.”

A wave of Euro-Germanic chauvinism is being instigated by the leader of the political class in Germany.

Countries indebted and ruined by speculators are being stigmatised by Christian Democratic governmental circles as “deficit sinners.”

Not even the most faithful friends tolerate opinions not previously authorised by Berlin, as recently occurred when the German chancellor classified the proposal of the president of the European Commission (José Manuel Durão Barroso, a Portuguese bourgeois politician) as “fortuitous and unsuitable,” and ZDF, the German television network, reported during its prime-time news that Durão Barroso “was screwy.”

The truth is that the European Union has changed into a permanent martial law zone, in which economic power rules democracy, imposing non-elected and illegitimate governments directly controlled by Berlin, as in Greece and Italy. The EU adjusts matters by means of anti-national leaders who do other than what has been promised during election campaigns, thereby deceiving the peoples and the voters. Finally, the EU prepares changes to the treaties now in force, which definitely withdraw sovereign rights from the states that do not submit.

But this whole state of affairs was predictable. It would have been enough to follow attentively both the geo-strategic documents and statements of the most relevant political figures in the last twenty years.

Germany’s ambition to dominate Europe did not arise today. In 1990, just after the so-called “unification,” Klaus Kinkel, the minister for foreign affairs, stated that “now we must achieve what we failed to do twice” (i.e. with the two world wars). Since the beginning of the nineties, Berlin has understood the EU project as an indispensable instrument for relaunching another attempt to dominate the whole continent.

Hans-Peter Schwarz, counsellor to the Christian-Democrat chancellor Helmut Kohl, on approaching the issue of “the European central power,” said in 1994 that “only one state exists that, owing to its geographical position, economic capacity, and cultural influence, has the capacity to presume to be a European central power—that is, Germany.”

In 2000, Joschka Fischer (Green Party), former minister for foreign affairs, stated during a conference in Berlin where he presented his ideas on the EU’s goals that, “considering its area, economic strength and geographical situation, Germany has the right to practise a soft hegemony over Europe, that is, without the use of strategic military force.”

The idea that Germany must dominate Europe, owing to its geographical position, economic strength, population, etc., is permanent in German leaders' political speeches. The Eurofederalist-dominated elites within the dependent countries have permanently concealed this.

The principles contained in the EU’s treaties—from the Treaty of Maastricht and the Treaty of Nice to the Lisbon Treaty—are all in that same direction. Even now, as one can see, the cry for “more Europe,” the deepening of federalism or even the revision of the treaties, means more power for the great powers’ directorate, more German hegemony, more anti-democratic power for big capital, more challenges to social, labour and cultural rights, and an ever more forceful strangulation of the people’s sovereign will.

The situation in Hungary

2012-01-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

What is really going on in Hungary?

Information for the communist and workers’ parties of the world

On the 1st of January 2012 a new constitution came into force in Hungary. In connection with it the Western press has published many materials saying that what is happening now in Hungary, “leads to impoverishment of people” and ”threatens democracy and tightens the government’s grip on the media and the judiciary despite criticism from Europe and the United States”.

On the 2nd of January a large demonstration took place at the Opera house in Budapest. The official organiser of the demonstration, the newly formed Solidarity movement, has a couple of dozen members. Its leader is the former president of the trade union of army and police servicemen, he himself is a former army officer trained among others in one of the US military institutes.

Behind the demonstration one can find the Hungarian Socialist Party and liberal forces and also the „civil” organisations, formed by them. In this demonstration did not take part any civil organisation which really struggle against poverty, to protect families, against eviction, etc., or for example traditional student organisations? Neither the movements of agricultural workers, nor trade-unions were present. Among the slogans of that demonstration you can find nothing about a new labour code, no protest against the IMF pressure and intervention.

The reaction of western media to these events results from the same sources which earlier have supported the former social-liberal government and their austerity policy.

But what is really going on in Hungary?

1. In April 2010 the conservative Fidesz - Hungarian Civic Union won the parliamentary elections and replaced the former government of socialist-liberal forces led by the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP).

The parliamentary parties consider the elections of 2010 as a turning point in Hungarian history. The Fidesz declares that it was the „beginning of a new revolution”. The socialists and its allies consider it as the „beginning of autocracy and dictatorship”.

2. The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party has the opinion that the real historic change took place not in 2010 but in 1989-1990 when socialism was destroyed in Hungary. It was a capitalist counterrevolution. The power of the working class was replaced by the power of capitalist forces. State owned industrial factories and banks, agricultural collective farms were privatized. Hungary joined the NATO in 1999 and entered the EU in 2004. The capitalist system based on private economy and bourgeois democracy was stabilized.

It was the change from socialism to capitalism that lead to the general impoverishment of the Hungarian people. Hungary has a population of 10 million. 1, 5 million Hungarians live under the poverty line which means that they live of an income less than 200 euros a month.

Almost 4 million live of an income of 250 euros per month. The official number of unemployed is 0, 5, in reality there are about 1 million people without any chance to get a job.

The limitation of democracy began not in 2010 but in 1989-1990. Political forces fighting against capitalist system, first of all the Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party do not have access to public media. Red star, hammer and sickle - ”as symbols of tyranny” - were banned in 1993. In 2007 the whole leadership of the HCWP was accused of “libel made in public”. Anti-communist campaigns have taken place regardless of which bourgeois party is at the power.

3. The Hungarian capitalist class has different parties to express their interests. On one hand it is the Fidesz - Hungarian Civic Union which expresses the interests of conservative, nationally minded part of the capitalist class. It is traditionally orientated on Germany. On the other hand there are the Hungarian Socialist Party and the Party „Politics Can Be Different” which represent the liberal and social democratic part of capitalist class. They are closer to the United States and Israel.

The fight between the two parts of Hungarian capitalist class has deep historical roots. Before 1989 there were two main streams of the anti-socialist oppositional movement, the nationally minded conservative line and the liberal tendency. In 1990 the first capitalist government was formed by the conservatives. At the same time the liberals agreed about a long-term cooperation with the Hungarian Socialist Party, a rightwing social democratic party. Many of the leaders of this party are coming from the former socialist period but they fully changed their position and many of them became rich capitalists.

After destroying the socialist system the capitalist forces created a new political structure which existed untill 2010. It was based on the following principles:

· The nationally minded conservative forces and the liberals together with the socialists will rotate in the power.

· None of them can have absolute power.

· They prevent any anti-capitalist forces from entering the parliament.

· All of them will respect obligations in connection with NATO and EU and there will be no discussions on foreign political issues.

All the parliamentary elections between 1990 and 2006 demonstrated a clear equilibrium between the two groups of parties. The situation changed dramatically after 2006. It became clear that the Hungarian capitalism is in deep crisis. It had three main reasons.

First, the Hungarian economy fully depends on foreign capital. Second, the Hungarian people are poor, they have exhausted their reserves. Third, corruption became a serious problem, paralyzing the normal functioning of state.

By 2010 the capitalist forces realised that the socialist-liberal forces cannot guarantee the internal stability of capitalism, are not able to prevent social explosions. That’s why they decided to change the socialist-liberal coalition and to open the way before the Fidesz.

The main task of the conservative Fidesz, and its government headed by Viktor Orban was to prevent any developments similar to the events in Greece. The Fidesz won the elections with social slogans (full employment, social security etc.). The majority of the people were deeply unsatisfied with the socialist-liberal government. The Fidesz could easily manipulate them and to get a two-third majority in the new parliament.

4. The conservative government has been realising changes in different directions: They strengthened their own class-basis. The Fidesz put its people on all positions in the political life, media, and culture. They declared their idea to create a new middle-class. They satisfied the nationalist forces in Hungary by introducing double-citizenship for people of Hungarian nationality living abroad, introducing new memorial events connected with the Trianon peace-treaty of 1920.

They took a clear turn to conservative and nationalist tradition in politics, culture, and education. They decided to prevent a social explosion by different means. First, they introduced a new Labour Code which gives very wide rights to the capitalist owners and turns workers practically into slaves. Second, they divided the working masses by giving serious money to railway-workers and raising the minimal salary. Third, they concluded an agreement with the leading confederations of trade unions. They could save their privileges and at the same time gave up real class-struggle.

The new government launched a general anti-communist campaign. In 2010 the Penal Code was changed. They declared that communism and fascism are the same and those who reject the „crimes of communism and fascism” can be sentenced up to 3 years of imprisonment. (Until now there have not been any legal sentences.)

In the last days of 2011 a new law was accepted regulating the process of transition to the new constitution. Among other it declares that the period of socialism (1948-1990) was illegitimate, full of crimes. Leading personalities of the socialist period can be accused and sentenced. Their pensions can be reduced. The law contains a general statement: the contemporary Hungarian Socialist Party as legal successor of the ruling party of the socialist period has responsibility for all what had happened at that time. It is not clear yet what consequences it can lead to.

5. The socialist-liberal forces have launched recently serious counterattack against the government. The Socialist Party took over many social slogans and demands of the Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party. They began to use red colour which the traditional colour of communists.

The socialists and the liberals began to create new civil organizations and movements. In October 2011 the Solidarity movement was created with clear pro-socialist orientation. They introduced a new demand: down with the Orban-government! Their program is to create a new socialist-liberal government.

6. The United States of America has openly interfered into the internal affairs of Hungary. The US ambassador in Budapest criticises openly the official government and supports the position of the socialist-liberal forces. Secretary of State Clinton made the same in her letter on 23 December 2011. The letter was published by the liberal press.

The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party considers:

Hungarian capitalism is in crisis. The general crisis of capitalism in Europe makes the Hungarian situation even worse and unpredictable. The Hungarian capitalist class understands that if the euro system or the EU itself collapses, it will lead to social explosions even more dramatic than in Greece. They understand that people are unsatisfied and many of them consider that socialism was better that the actual capitalism.

Both the conservative and the socialist-liberal groups of capitalist class want to prevent any social explosion. They are different not in their main efforts but in the methods they want to use.

What is now going on in Hungary, it is on one hand a common fight of the capitalist class against the working masses, on the other hand, a struggle between two groups of the capitalist class. Even more it is a struggle between the leading capitalist powers, the US and Germany for European dominancy.

The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party does not support any of the Bourgeois parties. We declare that the main problems of working people are unemployment, low salaries, high prices, exploitation, and uncertain future. These problems are the consequences of capitalism. The capitalist governments cannot and do not want to solve them.

The only solution of the problems of working people is consequent struggle against capitalism and fight for socialist perspective.

The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party does not support the mass-demonstrations of the socialist and liberal forces. Their aim is not to change capitalism. Their aim is to change the conservative capitalist government with a socialist-liberal capitalist government.

The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party does not support the Fidesz either. Their aim is not to create socialist society but to reform and strengthen capitalism.

The Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party considers its obligation to explain people that there is only one way to solve their problem. We should fight against capitalism.

We want to be present everywhere there are working people. We want to help them in small things in order to get their confidence in great things.

We will unveil all efforts of revisionist and opportunist forces which want to manipulate working people and to win them for the social democracy.

There is not any revolutionary situation in Hungary. But things can turn worse in Europe and in Hungary. That’s why we prepare the party, our members and units for more radical class struggle which can happen at any time.

Presidium

Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party

We lived better under socialism

2012-01-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

We lived better under socialism, by Stephen Gowans

Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, Soviet socialism managed to create one of the great achievements of human history: a mass industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of wealth, income, education and opportunity that plagued what preceded it, what came after it, and what competed with it; a society in which health care and education through university were free (and university students received living stipends); where rent, utilities and public transportation were subsidized, along with books, periodicals and cultural events; where inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous, and child care was subsidized.

By 1933, with the capitalist world deeply mired in a devastating economic crisis, unemployment was declared abolished, and remained so for the next five and a half decades, until socialism, itself was abolished. Excluding the war years, from 1928, when socialism was introduced, until Mikhail Gorbachev began to take it apart in the late 1980s, the Soviet system of central planning and public ownership produced unfailing economic growth, without the recessions and downturns that plagued the capitalist economies of North America, Japan and Western Europe. And in most of those years, the Soviet and Eastern European economies grew faster.

The Communists produced economic security as robust (and often more so) than that of the richest countries, but with fewer resources and a lower level of development and in spite of the unflagging efforts of the capitalist world to sabotage socialism. Soviet socialism was, and remains, a model for humanity — of what can be achieved outside the confines and contradictions of capitalism. But by the end of the 1980s, counterrevolution was sweeping Eastern Europe and Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the pillars of Soviet socialism.

Naively, blindly, stupidly, some expected Gorbachev’s demolition project to lead the way to a prosperous consumer society, in which Soviet citizens, their bank accounts bulging with incomes earned from new jobs landed in a robust market economy, would file into colorful, luxurious shopping malls, to pick clean store shelves bursting with consumer goods. Others imagined a new era of a flowering multiparty democracy and expanded civil liberties, coexisting with public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, a model that seemed to owe more to utopian blueprints than hard-headed reality.

Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed as a great victory for humanity, not least by leftist intellectuals in the United States, two decades later there’s little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well.

Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them — and from humanity as a whole: “We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security.” And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better — once.

But that’s only part of the story. For others, for investors and corporations, who’ve found new markets and opportunities for profitable investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has, indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by the landowning and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose estates and industrial concerns have been recovered and privatized. But they’re a minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?

Prior to the dismantling of socialism, most people in the world were protected from the vicissitudes of the global capitalist market by central planning and high tariff barriers. But once socialism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with China having marched resolutely down the capitalist road, the pool of unprotected labor available to transnational corporations expanded many times over. Today, a world labor force many times larger than the domestic pool of US workers — and willing to work dirt cheap — awaits the world’s corporations. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the implications are for North American workers and their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan: an intense competition of all against all for jobs and industry. Inevitably, incomes fall, benefits are eroded, and working hours extended. Predictably, with labor costs tumbling, profits grow fat, capital surpluses accumulate and create bubbles, financial crises erupt and predatory wars to secure investment opportunities break out.

Growing competition for jobs and industry has forced workers in Western Europe to accept less. They work longer hours, and in some cases, for less pay and without increases in benefits, to keep jobs from moving to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other former socialist countries — which, under the rule of the Reds, once provided jobs for all. More work for less money is a pleasing outcome for the corporate class, and turns out to be exactly the outcome fascists engineered for their countries’ capitalists in the 1930s. The methods, to be sure, were different, but the anti-Communism of Mussolini and Hitler, in other hands, has proved just as useful in securing the same retrograde ends. Nobody who is subject to the vagaries of the labor market – almost all of us — should be glad Communism was abolished.

Maybe some us don’t know we’ve been mugged. And maybe some of us haven’t been. Take the radical US historian Howard Zinn, for example, who, along with most other prominent Left intellectuals, greeted the overthrow of Communism with glee [1]. I, no less than others, admired Zinn’s books, articles and activism, though I came to expect his ardent anti-Communism as typical of left US intellectuals. To be sure, in a milieu hostile to Communism, it should come as no surprise that conspicuous displays of anti-Communism become a survival strategy for those seeking to establish a rapport, and safeguard their reputations, with a larger (and vehemently anti-Communist) audience.

But there may be another reason for the anti-Communism of those whose political views leave them open to charges of being soft on Communism, and therefore of having horns. As dissidents in their own society, there was always a natural tendency for them to identify with dissidents elsewhere – and the pro-capitalist, anti-socialist propaganda of the West quite naturally elevated dissidents in socialist countries to the status of heroes, especially those who were jailed, muzzled and otherwise repressed by the state. For these people, the abridgement of civil liberties anywhere looms large, for the abridgement of their own civil liberties would be an event of great personal significance. By comparison, the Reds’ achievements in providing a comfortable frugality and economic security to all, while recognized intellectually as an achievement of some note, is less apt to stir the imagination of one who has a comfortable income, the respect of his peers, and plenty of people to read his books and attend his lectures. He doesn’t have to scavenge discarded coal in garbage dumps to eke out a bare, bleak, and unrewarding existence. Some do.

Karol, 14, and his sister Alina, 12, everyday trudge to a dump, where mixed industrial waste is deposited, just outside Swietochlowice, in formerly socialist Poland. There, along with their father, they look for scrap metal and second grade coal, anything to fetch a few dollars to buy a meager supply of groceries. “There was better life in Communism,” says Karol’s father, 49, repeating a refrain heard over and over again, not only in Poland, but also throughout the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. “I was working 25 years for the same company and now I cannot find a job – any job. They only want young and skilled workers.” [2] According to Gustav Molnar, a political analyst with the Laszlo Teleki Institute, “the reality is that when foreign firms come here, they’re only interested in hiring people under 30. It means half the population is out of the game.” [3]

That may suit the bottom lines of foreign corporations – and the overthrow of socialism may have been a pleasing intellectual outcome for well-fed, comfortable intellectuals from Boston – but it hardly suits that part of the Polish population that must scramble over mountains of industrial waste – or perish. Maciej Gdula, 34, a founding member of the group, Krytyka Polityczna, or Political Critique, complains that many Poles “are disillusioned with the unfulfilled promises of capitalism. They promised us a world of consumption, stability and freedom. Instead, we got an entire generation of Poles who emigrated to go wash dishes.” [4] Under socialism “there was always work for everybody” [5] – at home. And always a place to live, free schools to go to, and doctors to see, without charge. So why was Howard Zinn glad that Communism was overthrown? And where are the celebrants of Solidarity today?

That the overthrow of socialism has failed to deliver anything of benefit to the majority is plain to see. One decade after counterrevolution skittered across Eastern Europe, 17 former socialist countries were immeasurably poorer. In Russia, poverty had tripled. One child in 10 – three million Russian children – lived like animals, ill-fed, dressed in rags, and living, if they were lucky, in dirty, squalid flats. In Moscow alone, 30,000 to 50,000 children slept in the streets. Life expectancy, education, adult-literacy and income declined.

A report by the European Children’s Trust, written in 2000, revealed that 40 percent of the population of the former socialist countries – a number equal to one of every two US citizens – lived in poverty. Infant mortality and tuberculosis were on the rise, approaching Third World levels. The situation, according to the UN, was catastrophic. And everywhere the story was the same. [6, 7, 8, 9]

Paul Cockshott points out that:

The restoration of the market mechanism in Russia was a vast controlled experiment. Nation, national character and culture, natural resources and productive potential remained the same, only the economic mechanism changed. If Western economists were right, then we should have expected economic growth and living standards to have leapt forward after the Yeltsin shock therapy. Instead the country became an economic basket-case. Industrial production collapsed, technically advanced industries atrophied, and living standards fell so much that the death rate shot up by over a third leading to some 7.7 million extra deaths.

For many Russians, life became immeasurably worse.

If you were old, if you were farmer, if you were a manual worker, the market was a great deal worse than even the relatively stagnant Soviet economy of Brezhnev. The recovery under Putin, such as it was, came almost entirely as a side effect of rising world oil prices, the very process that had operated under Brezhnev. [10]

While the return of capitalism made life harsher for some, it proved lethal for others. From 1991 to 1994, life expectancy in Russia tumbled by five years. By 2008, the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, a full seven years lower than in 1985, when Gorbachev came to power, and began to dismantle Soviet socialism. Today “only a little over half of the ex-Communist countries have regained their pretransition life-expectancy levels,” according to a study published in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. [11]

“Life was better under the Communists,” concludes Aleksandr. “The stores are full of things, but they’re very expensive.” Victor pines for the “stability of an earlier era of affordable health care, free higher education and housing, and the promise of a comfortable retirement – things now beyond his reach.” [12] A 2008 report in the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, noted that “many Russians interviewed said they still grieve for their long, lost country.” Among the grievers is Zhanna Sribnaya, 37, a Moscow writer. Sribnaya remembers “Pioneer camps when everyone could go to the Black Sea for summer vacations. Now, only people with money can take those vacations.” [13] That Aleksandr, Victor and Zhanna are now free to denounce the new government in the strongest terms, if they wish, hardly seems to be a consolation.

Ion Vancea, a Romanian who struggles to get by on a picayune $40 per month pension says, “It’s true there was not much to buy back then, but now prices are so high we can’t afford to buy food as well as pay for electricity.” Echoing the words of many Romanians, Vancea adds, “Life was 10 times better under (Romanian Communist Party leader Nicolae) Ceausescu.” [14] An opinion poll carried out last year found that Vancea isn’t in the minority. Conducted by the Romanian polling organisation CSOP, the survey found that almost one-half of Romanians thought life was better under Ceauşescu, compared to less than one-quarter who thought life is better today. And while Ceauşescu is remembered in the West as a Red devil with horns, only seven percent said they suffered under Communism. Why do half of Romanians think life was better under the Reds? They point to full employment, decent living conditions for all, and guaranteed housing – advantages that disappeared with the fall of Communism. [15]

Next door, in Bulgaria, 80 percent say they are worse off now that the country has transitioned to a market economy. Only five percent say their standard of living has improved. [16] Mimi Vitkova, briefly Bulgaria’s health minister for two years in the mid-90s, sums up life after the overthrow of socialism: “We were never a rich country, but when we had socialism our children were healthy and well-fed. They all got immunized. Retired people and the disabled were provided for and got free medicine. Our hospitals were free.”

But things have changed, she says. “Today, if a person has no money, they have no right to be cured. And most people have no money. Our economy was ruined.” [17] A 2009 poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that a paltry one in nine Bulgarians believe ordinary people are better off as a result of the transition to capitalism. And few regard the state as representing their interests. Only 16 percent say it is run for the benefit of all people. [18]

In East Germany a new phenomenon has arisen: Ostalgie, a nostalgia based on the old regime’s full employment, free health care, free education through university (with living expenses covered by the state), cheap rents, subsidized books and periodicals and dirt cheap public transportation. During the Cold War era, East Germany’s relative poverty was attributed to public ownership and central planning – sawdust in the gears of the economic engine, according to anti-socialist mythology. But the propaganda conveniently ignored the fact that the eastern part of Germany had always been less developed than the west, that it had been plundered of its key human assets at the end of World War II by US occupation forces, that the Soviet Union had carted off everything of value to indemnify itself for its war losses, and that East Germany bore the brunt of war reparations to Moscow. [19]

On top of that, those who fled East Germany were said to be escaping the repression of a brutal regime, and while some may indeed have been ardent anti-Communists fleeing repression by the state, most were economic refugees, seeking the embrace of a more prosperous West, whose riches depended in large measure on a history of slavery, colonialism, and ongoing imperialism—processes of capital accumulation the Communist countries eschewed and spent precious resources fighting against.

Today, nobody of an unprejudiced mind would say that the riches promised East Germans have been realized. Unemployment, once unheard of, runs in the double digits, rents have skyrocketed, and nobody goes to the doctor unless they can pay. The region’s industrial infrastructure – weaker than West Germany’s during the Cold War, but expanding — has now all but disappeared. And the population is dwindling, as economic refugees, following in the footsteps of Cold War refugees before them, make their way westward in search of jobs and opportunity. [20] “We were taught that capitalism was cruel,” recalls Ralf Caemmerer, who works for Otis Elevator. “You know, it didn’t turn out to be nonsense.” [21] As to the claim that East Germans have “freedom” Heinz Kessler, a former East German defense minister replies tartly, “Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security.” [22] Still, Howard Zinn was glad communism collapsed. But then, he didn’t live in East Germany.

So, who’s doing better? Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright turned president, came from a prominent, vehemently anti-socialist Prague family, which had extensive holdings, “including construction companies, real estate and the Praque Barrandov film studios”. [23] The jewel in the crown of the Havel family holdings was the Lucerna Palace, “a pleasure palace…of arcades, theatres, cinemas, night-clubs, restaurants, and ballrooms,” according to Frommer’s. It became “a popular spot for the city’s nouveau riches to congregate,” including a young Havel, who, raised in the lap of luxury by a governess, doted on by servants, and chauffeured around town in expensive automobiles, “spent his earliest years on the Lucerna’s polished marble floors.” Then, tragedy struck – at least, from Havel’s point of view. The Reds expropriated Lucerna and the family’s other holdings, and put them to use for the common good, rather than for the purpose of providing the young Havel with more servants. Havel was sent to work in a brewery.

“I was different from my schoolmates whose families did not have domestics, nurses or chauffeurs,” Havel once wrote. “But I experienced these differences as disadvantage. I felt excluded from the company of my peers.” [24] Yet the company of his peers proved not to be to Havel’s tastes, for as president, he was quick to reclaim the silver spoon the Reds had taken from his mouth. Celebrated throughout the West as a hero of intellectual freedom, he was instead a hero of capitalist restoration, presiding over a mass return of nationalized property, including Lucerna and his family’s other holdings. Havel was indeed a champion—of his own material interests and those of the class of privileged exploiters to which he belonged.

The Roman Catholic Church is another winner. The pro-capitalist Hungarian government has returned to the Roman Catholic Church much of the property nationalized by the Reds, who placed the property under common ownership for the public good. With recovery of many of the Eastern and Central European properties it once owned, the Church is able to reclaim its pre-socialist role of parasite — raking in vast amounts of unearned wealth in rent, a privilege bestowed for no other reason than it owns title to the land. Hungary also pays the Vatican a US$9.2 million annuity for property it has been unable to return. [25] (Note that a 2008 survey of 1,000 Hungarians by the Hungarian polling firm Gif Piackutato found that 60 percent described the era of Communist rule under Red leader Janos Kadar as Hungary’s happiest while only 14 percent said the same about the post-Communist era. [26])

The Church, former landowners, and CEOs aside, most people of the former socialist bloc aren’t pleased that the gains of the socialist revolutions have been reversed. Three-quarters of Russians, according to a 1999 poll [27] regret the demise of the Soviet Union. And their assessment of the status quo is refreshingly clear-sighted. Almost 80 percent recognize liberal democracy as a front for a government controlled by the rich. A majority (correctly) identifies the cause of its impoverishment as an unjust economic system (capitalism), which, according to 80 percent, produces “excessive and illegitimate inequalities.” [28]

The solution, in the view of the majority, is to return to the status quo ante (socialism), even if it means one-party rule. Russians, laments the anti-Communist historian Richard Pipes, haven’t Americans’ taste for multiparty democracy, and seem incapable of being cured of their fondness for Soviet leaders. In one poll, Russians were asked to list the 10 greatest people of all time, of all nations. Lenin came in second, Stalin fourth (Peter the Great came first.) Pipes seems genuinely distressed they didn’t pick his old boss, Ronald Reagan, and is fed up that after years of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda, Russians remain committed to the idea that private economic activity should be restricted, and “the government [needs] to be more involved in the country’s economic life.” [29]

An opinion poll which asked Russians which socio-economic system they favor, produced these results.

• State planning and distribution, 58%;

• Based on private property and distribution, 28%;

• Hard to say, 14%. [30]

So, if the impoverished peoples of the formerly socialist countries pine for the former attractions of socialism, why don’t they vote the Reds back in? Socialism can’t be turned on with the flick of a switch. The former socialist economies have been privatized and placed under the control of the market. Those who accept the goals and values of capitalism have been recruited to occupy pivotal offices of the state. And economic, legal and political structures have been altered to accommodate private production for profit. True, there are openings for Communist parties to operate within the new multiparty liberal democracies, but Communists now compete with far more generously funded parties in societies in which their enemies have restored their wealth and privileges and use them to tilt the playing field strongly in their favor.

They own the media, and therefore are in a position to shape public opinion and give parties of private property critical backing during elections. They spend a king’s ransom on lobbying the state and politicians and running think-tanks which churn out policy recommendations and furnish the media with capitalist-friendly “expert” commentary. They set the agenda in universities through endowments, grants and the funding of special chairs to study questions of interest to their profits. They bring politicians under their sway by doling out generous campaign contributions and promises of lucrative post-political career employment opportunities. Is it any wonder the Reds aren’t simply voted back into power? Capitalist democracy means democracy for the few—the capitalists—not a level-playing field where wealth, private-property and privilege don’t matter.

And anyone who thinks Reds can be elected to office should reacquaint themselves with US foreign policy vis-a-vis Chile circa 1973. The United States engineered a coup to overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende, on the grounds that Chileans couldn’t be allowed to make the ”irresponsible” choice of electing a Communist. More recently, the United States, European Union and Israel, refused to accept the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, all the while hypocritically presenting themselves as champions and guardians of democracy.

Of course, no forward step will be taken, can be taken, until a decisive part of the population becomes disgusted with and rejects what exists today, and is convinced something better is possible and is willing to tolerate the upheavals of transition. Something better than unceasing economic insecurity, private (and for many, unaffordable) health care and education, and vast inequality, is achievable. The Reds proved that. It was the reality in the Soviet Union, in China (for a time), in Eastern Europe, and today, hangs on in Cuba and North Korea, despite the incessant and far-ranging efforts of the United States to crush it.

It should be no surprise that Vaclav Havel, as others whose economic and political supremacy was, for a time, ended by the Reds, was a tireless fighter against socialism, and that he, and others, who sought to reverse the gains of the revolution, were cracked down on, and sometimes muzzled and jailed by the new regimes. To expect otherwise is to turn a blind eye to the determined struggle that is carried on by the enemies of socialism, even after socialist forces have seized power. The forces of reaction retain their money, their movable property, the advantages of education, and above all, their international connections.

To grant them complete freedom is to grant them a free hand to organize the downfall of socialism, to receive material assistance from abroad to reverse the revolution, and to elevate the market and private ownership once again to the regulating principles of the economy. Few champions of civil liberties argue that in the interests of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, that Germans ought to be allowed to hold pro-Nazi rallies, establish a pro-Nazi press, and organize fascist political parties, to return to the days of the Third Reich.

To survive, any socialist government, must, of necessity, be repressive toward its enemies, who, like Havel, will seek their overthrow and the return of their privileged positions. This is demonized as totalitarianism by those who have an interest in seeing anti-socialist forces prevail, regard civil and political liberties (as against a world of plenty for all) as the pinnacle of human achievement, or have an unrealistically sanguine view of the possibilities for the survival of socialist islands in a sea of predatory capitalist states.

Where Reds have prevailed, the outcome has been far-reaching material gains for the bulk of the population: full employment, free health care, free education through university, free and subsidized child care, cheap living accommodations and inexpensive public transportation. Life expectancy has soared, illiteracy has been wiped out, and homelessness, unemployment and economic insecurity have been abolished. Racial strife and ethnic tensions have been reduced to almost the vanishing point. And inequalities in wealth, income, opportunity, and education have been greatly reduced.

Where Reds have been overthrown, mass unemployment, underdevelopment, hunger, disease, illiteracy, homelessness, and racial conflict have recrudesced, as the estates, holdings and privileges of former fat cats have been restored. Communists produced gains in the interest of all humanity, achieved in the face of very trying conditions, including the unceasing hostility of the West and the unremitting efforts of the former exploiters to restore the status quo ante.

What the Reds achieved surpassed anything achieved by social democratic struggle in the West, where the advantages of being more advanced industrially, made the promises of socialism all the more readily achievable – and to a far greater degree than could be achieved elsewhere in the world. Hidden, or at best, acknowledged but quickly brushed aside as matters of little significance, these are achievements that have been too long ignored in the West – and greatly missed in the countries where they were reversed in the interests of restoring the wealth and privileges of a minority.

Endnotes

1. Howard Zinn, “Beyond the Soviet Union,” Znet Commentary, September 2, 1999.

2. “Left behind by the luxury train,” The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2000.

3. “Support dwindling in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,” The Chicago Tribune, May 27, 2001.

4. Dan Bilefsky, “Polish left gets transfusion of young blood,” The New York Times, March 12, 2010.

5. “Support dwindling in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,” The Chicago Tribune, May 27, 2001.

6. “An epidemic of street kids overwhelms Russian cities,” The Globe and Mail, April 16, 2002.

7. “UN report says one billion suffer extreme poverty,” World Socialist Web Site, July 28, 2003.

8. Associated Press, October 11, 2000.

9. “UN report….

10. Paul Cockshott, “Book review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford”, Marxism-Leninism Today, http://mltoday.com/en/subject-areas/books-arts-and-literature/book-review-red-plenty-986-2.html

11. David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee, “Mass Privatization and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: A Cross-National Analysis,” Judy Dempsey, “Study looks at mortality in post-Soviet era,” The New York Times, January 16, 2009.

12. “In Post-U.S.S.R. Russia, Any Job Is a Good Job,” New York Times, January 11, 2004.

13. Globe and Mail (Canada), June 9, 2008.

14. “Disdain for Ceausescu passing as economy worsens,” The Globe and Mail, December 23, 1999.

15. James Cross, “Romanians say communism was better than capitalism”, 21st Century Socialism, October 18, 2010. http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/romanians_say_communism_was_better_than_capitalism_02030.html “Opinion poll: 61% of Romanians consider communism a good idea”, ActMedia Romanian News Agency, September 27, 2010. http://www.actmedia.eu/top+story/opinion+poll%3A+61%25+of+romanians+consider+communism+a+good+idea/29726

16. “Bulgarians feel swindled after 13 years of capitalism,” AFP, December 19, 2002.

17. “Bulgaria tribunal examines NATO war crimes,” Workers World, November 9, 2000.

18. Matthew Brunwasser, “Bulgaria still stuck in trauma of transition,” The New York Times, November 11, 2009.

19. Jacques R. Pauwels, “The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War,” James Lorimer & Company, Toronto, 2002. p. 232-235.

20. “Warm, Fuzzy Feeling for East Germany’s Grey Old Days,” New York Times, January 13, 2004.

21. “Hard lessons in capitalism for Europe’s unions,” The Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2003.

22. New York Times, July 20, 1996, cited in Michael Parenti, “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism,” City Light Books, San Francisco, 1997, p. 118.

23. Leos Rousek, “Czech playwright, dissident rose to become president”, The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2011.

24. Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez, “Czechs’ dissident conscience, turned president”, The New York Times, December 18, 2011.

25. U.S. Department of State, “Summary of Property Restitution in Central and Eastern Europe,” September 10, 2003. www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/or/2003/31415.htm

26. “Poll shows majority of Hungarians feel life was better under communism,” May 21, 2008, www.politics.hu

27. Cited in Richard Pipes, “Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. “Russia Nw”, in The Washington Post, March 25, 2009.

Joint Young Communists Statement 20 years after counter revolution

2012-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

The 18th Assembly of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, to which the Connolly Youth Movement is affiliated, was held in Lisbon on 8–12 November 2011. The political declaration of the assembly can be read at:

http://cym.ie/documents/WFDY-2011.pdf

V. Browne on Referendum chances

2012-01-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

Vincent Browne - Irish Times

Wednesday 4th January

People could get opportunity to vent their anger at EU

THERE IS the prospect for the Irish people of a welcome opportunity this year to express their rage at the EU, which has inflicted €100 billion of debt on this country to safeguard financial institutions in Germany, France, Belgium and elsewhere, writes VINCENT BROWNE

And to rage against this Government which has conspired with this iniquity and, in the process, dishonoured the promises it made to the electorate last February. The opportunity will come about in a referendum likely to take place in the first half of this year.

The referendum will happen either because of the intergovernmental agreement, which requires the disciplines of the proposed fiscal union to be incorporated into member state constitutions, or by way of an amendment to the existing EU treaties which would achieve the same outcome. The reason for the latter arrangement – ie a treaty change rather than this new intergovernmental agreement – is because the proposed agreement is suspect legally.

Whichever it is will afford the Irish people a chance to put a spoke in the wheels of a rampant faction of the EU led by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, and also a spoke in the wheels of the Fine Gael-Labour Government that has offered almost precisely the same austerity and socially regressive prescriptions of its predecessor, which was ignominiously defeated in the election last February.

The thrust of the European project since the outset in 1957 was to create a single market. This, inexorably, was going to favour those most able to compete in markets, primarily because of their financial clout, over those whose aptitudes and resources were not market-oriented.

Along the way it absorbed the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation, “reforms” of labour markets (wage-cutting), tax “reforms” (broadening of the tax base to capture revenue from those previously deemed too poor to pay more tax) and “reforms” of social protections (the prioritising of agendas, ahead of the promotion of equality).

And now this neoliberal agenda is to be institutionalised either by way of this cumbersome and questionable intergovernmental agreement or by way of EU treaty changes.

It was precisely this neoliberal mindset that insisted that the welfare of bankers, financiers and bondholders be prioritised over the welfare of ordinary Irish people which led to the catastrophic bank guarantee of September 2008. This guarantee was influenced in the first instance (in September 2008) by the ECB’s insistence that no bank be allowed to fail in the EU – the scale of the guarantee was Ireland’s own doing, an act of special deference to the financial powers.

The continued support for the banks, including two institutions that are now effectively defunct (the former Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society), plus the payment of unguaranteed bondholders, is being done at the insistence of the ECB again. The weight of this debt burden forced Ireland into the humiliating EU-IMF “rescue” deal and that, in turn, has forced the austerity programme we are now enduring.

What is now planned is that we sign up, indefinitely, to what will amount to an austerity programme for a great many people here, way beyond the time when Ireland will emerge from its present travails. This will be enforced through fiscal parameters that will always prioritise fiscal rectitude over social need. But, more than that, there will be a requirement to comply with economic and budgetary policy guidelines that will prioritise markets, especially labour markets, which means wage and job “flexibility” (wage and job insecurity).

This fiscal union, however contrived, will include penal sanctions for member states that fail to meet its strictures and will come into effect (via the intergovernmental agreement) once nine states sign up to it. I assume there will be a rethinking on this one, for why would any state sign up to a penal arrangement, when not doing so makes no difference. There is no question of any state being removed, against its will, either from the euro zone or from the EU itself.

Voting against this intergovernmental agreement would make no difference to anyone, although we will be told and retold the lie that doing so would mean we leave the euro. It won’t and can’t.

But it would annoy the Government, and especially those who have been most deferential and subservient to our euro masters, which is something to be welcomed in itself. More than that it would represent a defeat of considerable significance to the Government, it would destabilise a few more Labour backbenchers, although not enough, and would be a signal to Europe that we, the Irish people, have had enough.

If, however, this comes to us as an amendment to the EU treaties, Ireland voting against it would stop it in its tracks completely, which would be a service to all the people of Europe. There would be the usual threats and maybe even a few carrots, but surely we have been through that before not to be deflected.

This is predicated on Europe getting to June without meltdown.

KNE Greetings - Greece

2011-12-31T09:56:00.001-08:00

CPI New Years Message

2011-12-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

New Years Message of solidarity

Comrades and fellow-citizens,

As we begin a new year we send greetings and extend our solidarity to the working men and women and the oppressed mass of humanity around the world struggling against imperialism and its allies, both secular and religious. We also extend our solidarity to those countries and peoples building socialism, and especially to the Cuban people, who, under very difficult and complex conditions as well as against great odds, continue to transform their society in a more socially just and humane, people-centred course of development.

To the working class in Europe: let us make 2012 the year of resistance to the policies and diktat of ruling-class forces and the corporate-state institutions of the European Union. We reiterate our solidarity with the Greek working class, who are in the front line of resistance and who have shown great tenacity throughout 2011.

Here in Ireland we witnessed small but nevertheless important expressions of opposition and resistance organised by the trade union movement to the austerity measures being imposed by both the Irish and British governments. The biggest and best organised were carried out by the Northern Ireland Committee of the ICTU throughout the North as well as the demonstration against the budget organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions. We also had community-based resistance and opposition, while debt activists kept up their campaigns against the odious debt and continue to publicise weekly its anti-democratic and anti-people nature.

We stand at a moment when the forces of monopoly capitalism have unleashed unprecedented attacks throughout the capitalist world on the rights and conditions of workers. They are attempting to make workers, the poor, the sick, the unemployed, pensioners and children, small business owners and family farmers pay for the growing and deepening crisis of their system.

It is clear that 2012 will be an important if not a decisive year in the life of the Irish people, for working people in particular. The deepening crisis, centred on the odious and anti-people debt, permanent and growing mass unemployment, mass emigration, growing poverty and a collapsing health service are the outcome both of the crisis within the system itself and of the policies being pursued by the Irish ruling class and its international allies, in particular the European Union, to make the people pay for that crisis.

2012 will be a pivotal point for the European Union as it attempts to grapple with the growing crisis of an insolvent banking system, spiralling “sovereign” debt, and a currency that is collapsing. The ruling classes of the member-states have no answers to this crisis except deeper and deeper austerity. Workers will face further attacks.

Working people need to build their organisations of resistance, in particular to rebuild a trade union movement still unable to break free from the mind-numbing demobilising and de-organising effect of decades of “social partnership.” There are no solutions the system can offer workers that will not undermine and destroy all that workers and their families have struggled for over many generations.

Our people showed great resistance to colonialism and exploitation over the centuries. The Irish people need to draw deeply from this well of experience to gain the courage and the strength for the struggles ahead.

The struggle of today will shape our future. The empowering of the people is central. We need to establish people’s democratic control

• over capital and its social use and priorities,

• over the natural resources of the country and their planned, sustainable use, and

• over a planned industrial strategy to give a future to our youth and bring our people home.

The ruling forces are marginalising and weakening themselves with the anti-people policies they are pursuing. We need a stronger militant party of the working class—a stronger Communist Party. We need to make 2012 the year of fight-back and resistance. The odious debt must be dumped off the people’s back to save our country from a future of debt-slavery.

Communist Party of Ireland

New Years Greetings from the Revolutionary 5!

2011-12-30T10:02:00.000-08:00

Dear sisters and brothers,

This year 2011 is reaching an end, and we want to take this special time to send you all our love, with warmness and the gratitude of the Five, for all that you give every day for the cause of Cuba; that is our cause.

You are our greatest virtue, our strength and the main reason we can maintain our optimism that someday the big miracle of our freedom will happen and we will all celebrate together in victory.

With those of you who have always been there along our side for these 13 years of unjust imprisonment, we are fulfilling the prophecy that all work of love overcomes the adversity and in the end that will prove to be the case.

We wish you happy holidays, a 2012 with peace, love, health and victories.

The love of the Five is with you every second of the year and of life!

On behalf of our five families, of the Cuban people, and from each one of us, we wish you

!!!!!!!HAPPY 2012!!!!!!!

Ramón Labañino

Comrade Raul Castro Speech

2011-12-30T09:55:00.000-08:00

Comrades:

The 8th ordinary session of the National Assembly of People's Power which ends today has approved the economic plan and the Budget Law for the year 2012. At the same time, deputies received abundant information on the progress made in the implementation of the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the [Communist] Party and the Revolution approved by the 6th Congress. The President of the Supreme People’s Court and the Attorney General of the Republic also reported to Parliament.

This session was preceded by the expanded meeting of the Council of Ministers on December 16 and that of the 3rd Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party on Wednesday 21st, as well as the work of the 12 permanent parliamentary commissions since last Tuesday. Given all of this, I will not go into the issues discussed at length and will only refer to certain basic questions.

In the midst of the ups and downs of the global financial crisis, the Cuban economy has shown an acceptable and sustained performance; the gross domestic product grew 2.7%, less than the 3% planned, basically due to the non-execution of investments and the shortfall of certain agricultural and food industry products and construction materials.

At the same time, the gradual recovery of sugar production was initiated in 2011, the record number of foreign visitors was exceeded, internal monetary balances and a favorable dynamic in the productivity-average wage relationship have been preserved. Structurally, the economy is improving on the basis of better adjusted proportions in relation to investment, prioritizing those of a productive and infrastructure nature.

We are continuing to move forward in reestablishing the international credibility of our economy, strictly meeting financial obligations resulting from debts to principal creditors, a policy which we shall continue to strengthen in the future.

Addressing this Parliament on December 18 of last year, I stated that before the end of 2011 we would end limitations on transfers from Cuban banks to other countries, to the benefit of foreign suppliers.

Today we are in a position to confirm that we have met this commitment and, moreover, procedures directed at avoiding new retentions in the future – except in exceptional circumstances – have been put into effect.

The economic plan for next year was drawn up in line with the guidelines approved by the 6th Party Congress and is qualitatively better in terms of the reconciliation of demands between producers and clients. However, financial tensions will be maintained, obliging us to continue reducing expenditures of all kinds, as these potential savings are still one of the primary sources of income at our disposal. The gross domestic product should grow by 3.4%.

Despite a planned increase in national production of foodstuffs, including rice and beans and thus a reduction in quantities imported, as a result of high prices in relation to food imports these will rise to more than $1.7 billion. This reality eloquently demonstrates the need to make significant advances in plans to cultivate all land remaining idle or insufficiently exploited.

The state budget deficit will remain at the same level as in 2011; in other words, 3.8% of the gross domestic product, rationally assuring free services to the population in the areas of health, education, culture and sports, as well as social security, subsidized basic items for families and individuals with insufficient means for the acquisition of construction materials, among others.

I AM CONVINCED THAT CORRUPTION IS CURRENTLY ONE OF THE PRINCIPAL ENEMIES OF THE REVOLUTION.

Moving on to another issue, very closely linked to the economic functioning of the nation. Despite the fact that this issue has been mentioned on various occasions, including in the central report to the 6th Congress, the guidelines themselves, concretely, No. 10, speeches to Parliament and in many Council of Ministers’ meetings, there has been no appreciable progress toward what is required. This is the primordial role of contracts in the interrelations of enterprises, budgeted entities and non-state forms of management, reflected in the deficient situation of receipts and payments with the consequent disruption in internal finances and propensity for criminal acts and corruption.

To cite just one example, the former was demonstrated by the fraudulent supply of agricultural produce to markets in the capital, produce which did not exist nor was cultivated, generating an embezzlement of more than 12 million pesos due to the criminal acts of directors, officials and other workers in state marketing enterprises, as well as small farmers who lent themselves as straw men, all of whom are to stand trial for administrative and criminal acts, given the gravity of the crime.

I have brought up this issue to illustrate the imperious need for all of us in leadership roles at different levels, from the grass roots to the highest positions in the country, to take a firm line in the face of indiscipline and lack of control in relation to receipts and payments, which constitute one of the principal causes and requisite conditions for crime. I am convinced that corruption is currently one of the principal enemies of the Revolution, far more damaging than the subversive and interventionist activities of the United States government and its allies within and outside of the country.

The Comptroller General of the Republic, the Attorney General and the specialized units of the Ministry of the Interior have instructions to combat this scourge with all the severity that our laws permit, as, in its moment, incipient drug trafficking was successfully confronted beginning in January of 2003.

In this strategic battle the levels of coordination, cohesion and rigor in confronting crime have been intensified, and certain results have been seen, both in relation to so-called white collar crime, committed by national directors and officials and outside elements linked to foreign trade and foreign investment, and crimes committed by ordinary criminals in conspiracy with administrative directors and employees in state

owned enterprises, in production processes, transportation and distribution units within the food industry, trade, gastronomy, the housing system and the ministries of Basic Industry and Agriculture.

Precisely in the agricultural sector, since August 1 of this year, there has been increased action against the theft and slaughter of cattle and the subsequent selling of beef on the illegal market, a phenomenon which has flourished with a certain impunity over the years, provoking serious affectations to state and private producers, not only from the economic point of view, but also in moral and social terms.

The Revolutionary National Police, in coordination with other Ministry of the Interior agents, and in close cooperation with the political and mass organizations have professionally and systematically taken on the task of definitively eradicating cattle rustling in the Cuban countryside, a crime involving the complicity of slaughterers, directors and specialists in the state sector, persons in the Basic Units of Cooperative Production, small farmers, veterinarians and municipal directors and other officials in the institution supposedly responsible for ensuring the growth of the cattle industry in the country – I am referring to the Agricultural Control Center, known as CENCOP.

I believe this is an opportune moment to clarify that this is not yet another campaign, as has certainly been the case in the past when, with the passing of time, actions to reestablish order were discontinued and routine and superficiality once again took over, allowing those who were waiting for everything to settle down, and return to normal, to continue prospering at the expense of our people’s heritage.

I can assure you that this time it is going to be all over for the country’s rustlers, as it was all over for the drug traffickers, and they will not reemerge because we are determined to ensure that instructions set out by the government and agreements of the Party Congress are fulfilled. I will say the same in relation to those corrupt bureaucrats, with posts obtained through simulation and opportunism, who are utilizing the positions that they still occupy to accumulate fortunes, betting on the possible defeat of the Revolution.

This Wednesday, in the Central Committee Plenum, we discussed these factors fully and showed a series of documentaries and interrogations of white collar criminals. These will be screened for all of you, comrade deputies, in due time, in the respective provinces, and also to other leaders.

We have very clearly in our minds Fidel’s warning of November 2005 in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, a little more than six years ago, when he stated that this country could autodestruct; that today, while the enemy cannot destroy us, we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our own fault, the leader of the Revolution concluded on that occasion. For that reason, two days ago, we recalled in the 3rd Plenum of the Central Committee what I have just mentioned, that we are going to do away with that parasitical plague.

In the name of the people and the Revolution we are warning that, within the legal framework, we shall be implacable.

MIGRATION POLICY: I REAFFIRM THE UNCHANGED WILL TO GRADUALLY INTRODUCE CHANGES REQUIRED IN THIS COMPLEX ISSUE

Closely linked to this firm decision to restore social discipline in our homeland is the process of implementing the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Revolution, which was discussed in the current session of the National Assembly, given the panorama I have been presenting to you, it is obvious that it would be very difficult to update our socialism.

The Implementation and Development Permanent Commission has given a full picture of the progress of its work and the adoption of a series of decisions to fulfill the Party Congress agreements. I will not take time to list them; they are only the first steps. The fundamental issues are pending, which does not mean that we are not advancing at the projected rate.

We shall continue making a reality of everything agreed upon, without haste, but without pause, with the comprehensiveness and gradual pacing required, without pressure or improvisation, by contributing to overcoming the old dogmatic mentality and opportunely correcting any errors that we might make. We shall not neglect – not for one second – the unity of the majority of Cubans around the Party and the Revolution, the unity which has served us to reach this point and to continue advancing in the construction of our socialism.

As was to be expected, well- or ill-intended exhortations to hasten our pace have not failed to materialize, as well as attempts to impose the sequence and reach of measures to be adopted as if this was something insignificant and not about the destiny of the Revolution and the homeland.

After the authorization of buying and selling of private motor vehicles and homes, more than a few people are pressing for the urgent implementation of a new migration policy, forgetting the exceptional circumstances in which we live in Cuba under a siege embodied by the interventionist and subversive policy of the United States government, always on the hunt for any opportunity to obtain its well known objectives.

On August 1 in this Parliament, I publicly addressed the issue and stated that we were working toward implementing an updated migration policy and advancing in reformulating and drafting the regulations, in line with present and foreseeable future conditions. Today, I guarantee each and every one of the proposals made on that occasion, while reaffirming our unchanged will to gradually introduce the changes required in relation to this complex issue, while continuing to comprehensively assess the positive and negative effects of each step we take.

I will now devote a few minutes to foreign policy.

This 2011 has been a year of upheaval for the world, constantly more dangerous and reactionary tendencies are currently revealing themselves, on a par with increasing expressions of resistance and popular protest against neoliberal capitalism. The United Nations mechanisms, created to preserve peace and security, have been manipulated in order to impose on the planet the dictatorship of the United States and NATO, which are assuming “regime change” as a model, violating principles of international law, and using financial-media emporiums to stir up hatred and violence.

Meanwhile, in dozens of U.S. and European cities, there is increasing support for the message of the “indignados”, directed at bringing to an end growing inequality in the developed countries.

We call on those governments, which preach so much about democracy, human rights, press freedom etc, etc, to listen to their legitimate demands, to consult with their peoples in the context of economic policies, adjustment measures and to take into account public opinion, without the brutal repression to which they frequently subject demonstrations by students, professionals, workers, immigrants and other minorities.

At the same time, Our America is advancing toward integration and regional sovereignty, one sign of which was the constitution in Caracas, on December 2, of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which represents the institutional event of greatest significance in the hemisphere during the last two centuries of independence.

Cuba received the honor of being unanimously elected to preside over CELAC in 2013 and host its third summit at the end of that year. This will vindicate all of Latin America and the Caribbean, whose peoples have invariably encouraged the heroic struggle of Cubans.

A few days later, at the CARICOM-Cuba Summit in Trinidad and Tobago, our country thanked the Caribbean sister nations for their solidarity.

IN A HUMANITARIAN AND SOVEREIGN GESTURE, THE COUNCIL OF STATE HAS AGREED TO PARDON 2,900-PLUS PRISONERS

Before Holy Week, we will be receiving the apostolic visit of His Holiness Benedict XVI, Head of State of the Vatican City and Pope of the Catholic Church.

Our people and government will have the honor of welcoming His Holiness with affection and respect.

We Cubans have not forgotten the sentiments of friendship and respect left in 1998 by the presence on our soil of Pope John Paul II.

At the same time, while our international reputation is growing and there is majority recognition of the Cuban Revolution, there has never been such a degree of discredit of the United States policy toward our region and condemnation throughout the world, within U.S. society itself and in the Cuban émigré community, of the genocidal economic, political and media blockade of Cuba.

At the same time that we are updating our socialism, changing everything that must be changed, the United States government is still anchored to the past.

Barack Obama, the eleventh U.S. President since 1959, seems not to understand that Cuba made enormous and prolonged sacrifices to win its independence in the 19th century and to defend its freedom at Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs] in 1961, in the October 1962 Missile Crisis, in the beginning of the Special Period in the last decade of the 20th century and in all these years of the 21st century. At times, he gives the impression of not even being informed of the fact that, faced with this reality, his government has had to renounce its most reiterated pretexts to justify the blockade and invent others which are constantly more unsustainable.

With equanimity and patience, we shall dedicate ourselves to fulfilling the Congress agreements while the U.S. elections are taking place. We know that the blockade will continue and that the financing of and attempts to convert a handful of mercenaries into a destabilizing opposition will increase, but that does not produce sleepless nights for a revolutionary people like ours, educated, armed and free, who will never renounce their defense. (Applause)

Although the immobility of the U.S. government and its lack of political will to improve relations are encouraging the most reactionary sectors to promote new provocations and acts of aggression, Cuba maintains its objective of advancing toward the normalization of relations with the United States and to develop cooperation in all spheres which could be to the benefit of both peoples.

Family ties and the limited interchange which exists between the two countries demonstrate how positive their expansion would be for the well-being of everyone, without the obstacles and conditions imposed by the United States government, which subordinates any progress to its policy of hostility and intervention aimed at reestablishing its dominion over Cuba.

Before concluding, I must inform this Assembly that, in a humanitarian and sovereign gesture, the Council of State has agreed to pardon more than 2,900 prisoners.

These include women, sick individuals, those over 60 years of age and also young people who have raised their educational levels and possibilities of social reintegration.

Not included in this pardon, with very few exceptions, are individuals convicted of crimes of espionage, terrorism, murder, homicide, drug trafficking, pederasty with violence, rape and corruption of minors and robbery with violence in inhabited homes. However, certain individuals convicted of crimes against the security of the state, who have completed a large portion of their prison terms with good behavior, will be released.

In a systematic way and in annual figures higher than those included in this pardon, in accordance with existing legal regulations, the People’s Supreme Court, the Attorney General of the Republic and the specialized units of the Ministry of the Interior will be evaluating and arranging the early release of prisoners, taking into account conduct, characteristics of acts committed and family and health situation, in addition to many requests from family members and a number of religious institutions, among them the Council of Churches of Cuba and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba, through its president.

The announced visit to Cuba by Pope Benedict XVI and the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the image of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, have also been taken into account.

The pardon will become effective in the next few days, as another demonstration of the generosity and strength of the Revolution.

At the same time, we have stated our willingness to grant the early release of 86 foreign citizens from 25 countries, including 13 women convicted in the courts for crimes committed in Cuba, on the prior condition that the governments of their countries of origin accept their repatriation.

Through diplomatic channels, the required information will soon be reaching those governments via appropriate authorities.

Finally, a few days before ending this year of intense work, I send all our people, in the first place our courageous five heroes and their brave families, warm greetings for the New Year and one more anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution.

The 1st National Party Conference is already awaiting us in January, so there will not be much time to rest.

That’s all.

Thank you very much.

Bondholders pay day!

2011-12-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

Despite their investments going south these investors will be paid as if their investments performance had nothing to do with it.

The Irish Government continues to hand over billions in corporate welfare while cutting social welfare to fund these cheques to big business.

25th January, 2012, Anglo Irish Bank will pay out a single unguaranteed, unsecured bond to the value of €1.2 billion;

28th June, 2012, Anglo Irish Bank will pay out a single unguaranteed, unsecured bond to the value of €454 million; and

and twenty four additional unguaranteed, unsecured senior bonds with a combined value of €800 million will be paid out from January 2012 through to April 2018

With thanks to SF TD Pearce Doherty for this information.

Our strength will lie in sovereignty, development and equity

2011-12-20T13:02:00.000-08:00

Speech by Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Councils of State and Ministers at the Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Caracas, Venezuela, December 2, 2011

COMPAÑERO Hugo Chávez Frías, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela;

Dear Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Heads of delegations:

In the first place, we greet the Venezuelan sister people and the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela has received us today with hospitality and pride, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of its independence and is offering us this opportunity for the governments of all of Latin America and the Caribbean to meet together.

We have the privilege to be present at a founding event of great significance. With the decisions we are adopting here and the joint work of the last three years, we are vindicating more than two centuries of struggles and hopes. Coming thus far has cost effort, but also blood and sacrifice.

The colonial metropolises of the past and the imperial powers of today have been the enemies of this undertaking. They have attempted to defy the body of ideas of Simón Bolívar who, with farsightedness, affirmed, "The unity of our peoples is not a simple illusion of men, but the inexorable decree of fate."

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States is our most precious work. Symbolically, it consolidates the concept of a united and sovereign region, committed to a shared destiny.

In strategic terms, it gives us the political instrument required for combining our resolve, respecting diversity, solving differences, cooperating for the wellbeing of our peoples and acting in solidarity with one another. Its success will depend on the nature and wisdom of its members, the 33 independent nations situated between the Río Bravo and Patagonia.

Our strength will lie in sovereignty, development and equity and the prosperity with justice of the citizens of this vast and rich region will depend on that. We do not have a fully homogenous body of ideas, nor do we agree on all political positions. This is part of the reality and we must work with that in a climate of respect and cooperation.

We live in an area free of nuclear weapons, a privilege enjoyed by very few regions of the world. It is a fundamental contribution to the cause of humanity for the total elimination of this threat, which is endangering human survival.

We must aspire to also declare ourselves, one day in the not too distant future, a territory free of foreign military bases, as an additional contribution to regional identity.

The common heritage of our lands and seas emcompasses exceptional natural riches which, utilized in a sustainable way, with responsibility and solidarity, offer future generations the basis for a future of prosperity and justice. We have a diverse and interrelated culture, with indigenous ancestral values. There also exists an insufficiently utilized technical and scientific potential.

Despite all of this and not insignificant economic growth figures, Latin America and the Caribbean, with more than 20 million square kilometers of area and more than 580 million inhabitants, is advancing slowly and has not managed to overcome the deformations blocking its development.

We inhabit the region of the world considered to have the greatest inequality in terms of distribution of wealth. Together with the recognition that we have borne the effects of the global economic crisis in better conditions, there also exists the great breach signified by the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands in the face of the immense poverty of the majority.

The prosperity of our region is dependent on a solution to this problem.

Currently, there are 180 million poor Latin American and Caribbean people, 72 million of them living in extreme poverty. This is a tragedy which will not be solved even if we meet all the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations.

Today, poverty is affecting 81 million of our children and 13 million of them do not even have access to adequate nutrition, in a region which produces more food than it requires. These children are the creditors of this region’s future. We are their debtors.

The recent economic development of Latin America and the Caribbean shows that, despite the profound crisis, revenue from exports has grown, principally of basic products; that the burden of the foreign debt, although unjust and crushing, has been lighter; and that the accumulation of reserves has increased.

This panorama gives us an opportunity if we act with responsibility and a genuine spirit of solidarity.

And it is in this spirit that we must face the situation in Haiti, which represents a test for all of us. Latin America and the Caribbean have a historic and ethical responsibility to this sister republic, the first to attain its independence from the colonial yoke in our region where, led by slaves, the first revolution in the history of humanity took place. Haiti requires and deserves our efforts to contribute, with more substantial contributions, to its reconstruction and development, with strict adherence to the will of its government and the needs of its people.

In our case, as we stated at the last Cancun Summit in February 2010, and confirm today, "Cuban collaboration and its modest effort will remain in Haiti for as many years as necessary, if the government of this nation wishes it. Our country, heavily blockaded, has no excess of resources, rather it lacks everything, but it is disposed to share its poverty with those who have less, in first place with those who currently most need it on the continent."

I recall that on one occasion when I visited Ecuador, during one of the many international meetings which we have convened, I took advantage and visited the Chapel of Humankind, founded by that magnificent painter of the continent, Osvaldo Guayasamín, and was very impressed by a sign expressing a thought which wasn’t his – according to his older son – and which was on one of the walls of this extremely important cultural and historical center. The sign read, "When I was a child, I cried because I had no shoes, until one day I saw a child who had no feet." I wish to say that, however difficult a country’s situation is, however complex and great our poverty is, there is always someone poorer than us, there is always a child without feet who doesn’t need shoes.

Dear colleagues:

We have assumed the commitment to firmly oppose any attempt at the destabilization of the constitutional order in our countries.

This is not a fortuitous statement, but one of genuine response to the coup d’état against Venezuela in 2002, and then the oil coup, the Santa Cruz sedition in Bolivia, the military coup perpetrated in Honduras, the attempted coup in Ecuador and constant acts of destabilization against legitimately constituted governments, firmly committed to their people’s demands for social justice, defenders of the sovereignty of their countries and expressions of the purest and most effective democracy.

The nature and motivations of those who promote those attacks on sovereign institutionalism and against the constitutional rights of the peoples are known to us. It is also known that they receive the support of the United States and certain European governments, as well as the complicity of powerful private organizations in the information and advertising industry.

I recall that during a meeting we had in Nicaragua, in the capital, Managua, related to similar recent events in Central America, I realized when I spoke, what a coincidence that all these attempts have been against ALBA countries! And I turned to President Correa, who was on my left, and said, "You’ll be the next one." He looked at me in surprise, as if to say, "But, why?" he himself and you know why.

It is the fight between materialistic oligarchical interests, supported by transnational capital, and the legitimate rights of the peoples. It would be a serious error to ignore the fact that Latin America and the Caribbean have changed, that they cannot treat us as in the past. It has cost us hard work to confront the burden of colonialism and neocolonialism and a strong regional determination to defend our hard won independence must be expected. The Bicentenary Charter which we adopted today must be assumed as an expression of this reality.

Beyond our regional environment, we share a complex world in upheaval, in which the peoples are rebelling against injustices – what we are seeing in Europe and in other parts of the world and in the United States itself demonstrates that – imperialist policies of plunder, the concentration of wealth, corruption and the abuse of power. It is a phenomenon particularly expressed in the North of Africa, the Middle East, almost all of Europe and North America. It is an expression of the collapse of merciless neoliberal economic models already experienced and repudiated in our region.

It is also a world in which the major powers are violating international law, exercising their domination through the use of force and attacking sovereign nations hiding behind pretexts and manipulation.

In Libya, NATO has committed an international crime which is now threatening to become a model. (Firework explosions are heard)

That’s the war Chávez is waging on mosquitoes or I don’t know what! (Chávez tells him that it is a firework display in Caracas in honor of CELAC)

To the shame of the United Nations, defenseless cities have been bombed for eight consecutive months, massacring civilians, destroying social services, mutilating the infrastructure and making hundreds of thousands of people homeless or refugees.

For Cuba, the attitude of the United States is nothing new. It is the same as always. We have spent more than 50 years standing up to hostility and aggression. We are enduring the most all-encompassing and lasting economic, commercial and financial blockade ever imposed on any country. Our region knows that and has resolutely and consistently spoken out against it, for which we Cubans express our gratitude to all of you.

I am going to end by reading a paragraph I included, then took it out, but after what Chávez has said, I shall read it.

I wish to thank yesterday’s meeting of foreign ministers for their generous statements about Cuba and the recommendation of a future Cuban presidency of CELAC in 2013. I was going to leave it until tomorrow or after you, presidents, prime ministers and heads of delegation had spoken; but Chávez, the president of Venezuela, the host country, pulled out agreements here, made me vote, I agreed, I voted and now I interpret… I already asked Correa if he is in agreement with this kind of vote, on granting Cuba the celebration of the next CELAC [Summit], after Chile.

In this case, I give thanks not only to the foreign ministers, but to all the presidents, prime ministers and heads of delegation present.

Finally, how were things left, Correa? You are in agreement, as Chávez would say, right?

Are you all in agreement or shall I withdraw this paragraph? I do not want to express my thanks and after that have someone put up their hand and say, No, I am not in agreement.

(Chávez confirms that they will be in Cuba in 2013).

Well, then we will keep it in. Many thanks to all of you. (Applause)

We acknowledge the tremendous effort displayed by Venezuela in creating the bases for and organizing this Summit, as well as the leadership of President Hugo Chávez Frías in bringing us to this point, toward such promising results for the future of the region, and his contribution to the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Within the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, Cuba will work with dedication, altruism and commitment for the unity of our peoples, for a future of peace and social justice, and for the irrevocable undertaking of consolidating the full independence of what José Martí defined for the future as "Our America."

Thank you very much (Applause)

Translated by Granma International

Latest news on the EU

2011-12-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

People's News Issue 61

http://www.people.ie/news/PN-61.pdf

Must we adore Vaclav Havel? M.Parenti

2011-12-20T11:28:00.000-08:00

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? US writer Michael Parenti


Havel just died and the mainstream press is filled with adulatory obits.
Here is what I wrote about him about 15 years ago which might give readers a more substantive picture:

From Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds (USA, 1997) pp. 97-99:

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel?

No figure among the capitalist restorationists in the East has won more adulation from U.S. officials, media pundits, and academics than Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became the first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic.

The many left-leaning people who also admire Havel seem to have overlooked some things about him: his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and unrestrained free-market capitalism.

Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy and fervently anti-communist family, Havel denounced democracy's "cult of objectivity and statistical average" and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis. He called for a new breed of political leader who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of the Being," and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world."

Apparently, this new breed of leader would be a superior elitist cogitator, not unlike Plato's philosopher, endowed with a "sense of transcendental responsibility" and "archetypal wisdom." Havel never explained how this transcendent archetypal wisdom would translate into actual policy decisions, and for whose benefit at whose expense.

Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian nation. Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in Czechoslovakia - with no audible objections from Havel.

Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush's Gulf War, an enterprise that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other Eeast European pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of rights violations in El Salvador, Columbia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client state.

In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market "reforms." That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.

The propagation of anti-communism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led "a frantic international campaign" to keep in operation two U.S.-financed cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anti-communist propaganda.

Under Havel's government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel's government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.

In 1995, Havel announced that the 'revolution' against communism would not be complete until everything was privatized. Havel's government liquidated the properties of the Socialist Union of Youth - which included camp sites, recreation halls, and cultural and scientific facilities for children - putting the properties under the management of five joint stock companies, at the expense of the youth who were left to roam the streets.

Under Czech privatization and "restitution" programs, factories, shops, estates, homes, and much of the public land was sold at bargain prices to foreign and domestic capitalists. In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution. Havel himself took personal ownership of public properties that had belonged to his family forty years before. While presenting himself as a man dedicated to doing good for others, he did well for himself. For these reasons some of us do not have warm fuzzy feelings toward Vaclav Havel.

--- Michael Parenti

Socialism is the future!

2011-12-19T05:50:00.000-08:00

Final statement of the 13th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties,Athens, 9–11 December 2011

The international situation and the experience of the communists twenty years after the counter-revolution in the USSR. The tasks for the development of the class struggle in conditions of capitalist crisis, imperialist wars, of the current popular struggles and uprisings, for working-class and popular rights, the strengthening of proletarian internationalism and the anti-imperialist front, for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism.

The meeting was attended by representatives of seventy-eight parties from fifty-nine countries. A number of parties that did not manage to take part for reasons beyond their control sent written messages. We salute from Athens the growing popular struggles releasing huge emancipatory potential against imperialism, against capitalist exploitation and oppression, and for the social, labour and social-security rights of workers all over the world.The meeting was held in critical conditions in which the deep and prolonged capitalist crisis continues to prevail in the international situation, accompanied by the escalation of the aggressiveness of imperialism, which is expressed in the decisions of the Lisbon Summit for the new NATO strategy. This reality confirms the analyses outlined in the statements of the 10th, 11th and 12th International Meetings, which took place in Brasil (São Paulo) in 2008, India (New Delhi) in 2009, and South Africa (Tshwane) in 2010.

It becomes increasingly obvious for millions of working people that the crisis is a crisis of the system. It is not faults within the system but the system itself that is faulty, generating regular and periodic crises. It results from the sharpening of the main contradiction of capitalism, between the social character of production and the private capitalist appropriation, and not from any version of the management policy of the system or from any aberration based on the greed of some bankers or other capitalists, or from the lack of effective regulatory mechanisms. It highlights the historical boundaries of capitalism and the need to strengthen the struggles for anti-monopoly anti-capitalist ruptures, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

In the USA, Japan, the EU and other capitalist economies the impasses of the various versions of the bourgeois management are being demonstrated. On the one hand the restrictive political line leads to a prolonged and deep recession; on the other, the expansionist political management, with large state support packages to the monopoly groups, finance capital, and the banks, intensifies inflation and leads to the swelling of the public debt. Capitalism converts corporate insolvencies into sovereign insolvencies. Capitalism has no other response to the crisis beyond the mass destruction of productive forces, resources, mass dismissals, factory closures, and the comprehensive attack on workers and trade union rights, on wages, pensions, social security, the reduction in people’s income, the huge increase in unemployment and poverty.

The anti-people offensive is strengthening, which is manifested with particular intensity in certain regions. The concentration and centralisation of monopoly capital is intensifying the reactionary character of economic and political power. Capitalist restructuring and privatisations are being promoted, aiming at competitiveness and maximisation of the profit of capital, at ensuring a cheaper labour force and the regression of decades in terms of social and labour rights.

The intensity of the crisis, its global synchronisation, the prospect of the slow, weak recovery intensify the difficulties of the bourgeois forces in managing the crisis, leading to the sharpening of the inter-imperialist contradictions and rivalries, while the danger of imperialist wars is being strengthened.

The attacks on democratic rights and sovereignty are intensifying in many countries. Political systems become more reactionary. Anti-communism is being reinforced. There are generalised measures against the activity of the communist and workers’ parties, against trade union, political and democratic freedoms The ruling classes develop a multi-faceted attempt to trap the people’s discontent through changes in the political systems, through the utilisation of a series of pro-imperialist NGOs and other organisations, through attempts to channel the people’s discontent into movements with allegedly non-political or even with reactionary characteristics.

We salute the people’s and workers’ extensive struggles and uprisings for democratic, social and political rights against the anti-people regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, namely in Tunisia and Egypt. Despite the contradictions which the current situation manifests, it constitutes a significant experience that the communist movement should study and utilise. Simultaneously we strongly condemn the imperialist war of NATO and the EU against the Libyan people and the threats and interference in the internal affairs of Syria and Iran, as well as of any other country. We consider that every foreign intervention against Iran, under whatever pretext, attacks the interests of the Iranian workers and their struggles for democratic freedoms, social justice, and social rights.

These developments confirm the necessity of strengthening the communist and workers’ parties in order to play their historical role, to further strengthen the workers’ and people’s struggle in defence of their rights and aspirations, to utilise the contradictions of the system and the inter-imperialist contradictions for an overthrow at the level of power and economy, for the satisfaction of people’s needs. Without the leading role of the communist and workers’ parties and the vanguard class, the working class, the peoples will be vulnerable to confusion, assimilation and manipulation by the political forces that represent the monopolies, finance capital, and imperialism.

Significant realignments in the international correlation of forces are under way. There is the ongoing relative weakening of the position of the USA, the general productive stagnation in the most advanced capitalist economies, and the emergence of new global economic powers, notably China. The tendency for the increase of contradictions is strengthening, between the imperialist centres, and of these with the so-called emerging economies.

Imperialist aggressiveness intensifies. There are already several regional points of tension and wars, and they are multiplying: in Asia and Africa, in the Middle East with the increasing aggressiveness of Israel, particularly against the Palestinian people. At the same time we note the rising of neo-Nazi and xenophobic forces in Europe, the multi-faceted interventions and threats and the offensive against the people’s movements and the progressive political forces in Latin America. Militarisation is being reinforced. The risk of a general conflagration at a regional level becomes even greater. In this sense the expansion and strengthening of the anti-imperialist social and political front and the struggles for peace in the direction of eradicating the causes of imperialist wars are fundamental.

There are two paths of development:

• the capitalist path, the path of the exploitation of the peoples, which creates great dangers of imperialist wars, for workers’ and people’s democratic rights, and

• the path of liberation, with immense possibilities for the promotion of the interests of the workers and the peoples, for the achievement of social justice, people’s sovereignty, peace, and progress, the path of the workers’ and people’s struggles, the path of socialism and communism, which is historically necessary.

Thanks to the decisive contribution of the communists and the class-oriented trade union movement, the workers’ struggles in Europe and all over the world were further strengthened. Imperialist aggressiveness continues to meet resolute popular resistance in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This fact, along with experience accumulated so far especially in Latin America, the struggles and the processes that take place, demonstrate the possibilities of resistance, of class struggle, in order for the peoples to make steps forward, to gain ground, inflicting blows to imperialism when they have as their goal the overthrow of imperialist barbarity.

We salute the workers’ and people’s struggles and note the need to further strengthen them. The conditions demand the intensification of the class struggle, of the ideological, political mass struggle in order to impede the anti-people measures and promote goals of struggle that meet the contemporary people’s needs, demand an organised workers’ counter-attack for anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist ruptures, for the overthrow of capitalism, putting an end to the exploitation of man by man.

Today the conditions are ripe for the construction of wide social anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist alliances, capable of defeating the multi-faceted imperialist offensive and aggression and of fighting for power and promoting deep, radical, revolutionary changes. Working-class unity, the organisation and the class orientation of the labour movement are fundamental factors in ensuring the construction of effective social alliances with the peasantry, the urban middle-class strata, the women’s movement, and youth movement.

In this struggle the role of the communist and workers’ parties at the national, regional and international level and the strengthening of their co-operation are indispensable. The joint co-ordinated activity of the communist and workers’ parties, of the communist youth organisations and the anti-imperialist organisations in which the communists have an important contribution constitutes one of the most reliable elements for the expansion of the anti-imperialist struggle and the strengthening of the anti-imperialist front.

The ideological struggle of the communist movement is of vital importance in order to defend and develop scientific socialism, to repulse contemporary anti-communism, to confront bourgeois ideology, anti-scientific theories and opportunist currents which reject the class struggle; combat the role of social democratic forces that defend and implement anti-people and pro-imperialist policies by supporting the strategy of capital and imperialism. The understanding of the unified character of the duties of the struggle for social, national and class emancipation, for the distinct promotion of the socialist alternative, requires the ideological counter-offensive of the communist movement.

The overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism constitute an imperative need for the peoples. In view of the capitalist crisis and its consequences, the international experiences and practice of socialist construction prove the superiority of socialism. We underline our solidarity with the peoples who struggle for socialism and are involved in the construction of socialism.Only socialism can create the conditions for the eradication of wars, unemployment, hunger, misery, and illiteracy, the uncertainty of hundreds of millions of people, the destruction of the environment.

Only socialism creates the conditions for development according to the contemporary needs of the workers.Working people, farmers, urban and rural workers, women, young people, we call on you to struggle together to put an end to this capitalist barbarity. There is hope, there is a prospect.

The future belongs to socialism!

Hans Heinz Holz, RIP

2011-12-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

Comrades and Friends,

We received sad news from Germany earlier today. Hans Heinz Holz, life long Communist, Anti-fascist and Marxist thinker passed away. He became a communist while in Jail during Nazi rule having being locked up for his anti-fascist activism. In prison he came into contact young communist and anti-fascist workers.

He was best known for his work as a Marxist philospher, his work published in various publications and translated into various languages. He worked as a University lecturer at both Marburg and the University of Groningen.

Irish communists were privileged to have Comrade Holz speak at the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution in both Dublin and Belfast in 2007.

He is a loss to the communist movement.

Out of the dark and into the light

2011-12-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

How the October Revolution brought the countries of the USSR into modernity in a historically short period through heroic advances in industry - Socialist Voice, November 2011

There is a reason why I am covering historical ground in this article—not that we don’t have enough economic and social problems to contend with in Ireland today, but it is my opinion that the socialist construction that took place in the USSR in the twentieth century needs not only to be defended but advanced in the labour and left movements.

In this era that we live in, when labour is on its knees and the international communist movement has been weakened, at such a critical juncture we need to respond and challenge not only the ideologues of the imperialist and capitalist forces but also those who label themselves as socialist, the revisionists and the opportunists who don’t recognise the achievements of the first attempts at socialist construction in history.

My goal in this article is simply to relay some basic facts about Soviet industry in the fields of power (electrification), metallurgy, fuel, and engineering, which had a profound positive effect on the livelihood of the citizens of the socialist systems. These types of industries are the classical “hard” industries. I am focusing on them because (a) they formed the basis for socialist construction, (b) without the revenue and the products of these industries the advancement and expansion of “light” industries would never have materialised on a mass scale, and (c) space does not allow me to go beyond this field.

For those who still question the intent, nature and advancement of socialist construction in the USSR, let me bend your ear on this fact. Remembering that the newly formed state was blacklisted by the industrialised countries in regard to investment finance, “the Soviet people had to build the country’s heavy industry entirely with their own resources . . . All the profits of state-owned factories and mills, transport, banks, state internal trade and foreign trade remained in the hands of the state and could be used for the development of socialist industry.”

In other words, the means of production were now publicly owned, and it was in the people’s interest to continually and heavily invest, build and expand in all industrial areas, which is what they did. The table below illustrates this fact, and the figures also show that industries were becoming much more efficient and less labour-intensive and therefore needed a more technically skilled labour force.

Data comparison from 1922 to 1974

	1922	1940	1950	1960	1970	1974
Electric power output (billion kWh)	0.8	48.6	91.2	292.3	850	975.8
Output of steel (million tons)	0.3	18.3	27.3	65.3	116	136
Output of pig iron (million tons)	n.a.	14.9	19.2	46.8	85.9	99.9
Output of iron ore (million tons)	n.a.	29.9	39.7	106	195.5	225
Oil extraction (million tons)	4.7	31.1	37.9	148	353	459
Gas output (billion cu.m)	0.03	3.2	5.8	45.3	198	261
Coal production (million tons)	11.3	166	261	510	624	685
Production of metal-cutting lathes	300	58,400	70,600	156,000	202,200	224,000
Forging and pressing machines	n.a.	4,700	7,700	29,900	41,300	48,900
Production of motor cars	840 [1928]	145,400	362,900	523,600	916,100	1,846,000

We can also look at the fact that “the proportion of individual peasants and non-co-operated handicraftsmen, who amounted to 75.4% of the population in 1924, had dropped to 0.3% by the end of the 1950s . . . Since 1970, they have ceased to be statistically significant” (Golikov).

One cannot over-emphasise the qualitative difference this would have made for those who previously lived as peasants and in constant poverty. Electricity, lighting, running water, hot water, solid housing, social care, free health care, free education, guaranteed jobs—all these were made universal. These and many more progressive schemes were the result of the construction of heavy industries, continuing into light industries, that characterised socialist economic planning.

It is important that in all the anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda from those on the right and the left, we must take account of these empirical statistics, which demonstrate just how effectively a planned economy functions, and without doubt it greatly enhanced the lives of the greatest number of people living in the Soviet Union.

The idea of electrification contained in Lenin’s GOELRO (1920) was the beginning of what became the Soviets’ five-year plans for economic development, the first one being that of 1928–1933, which brought electricity and light to every corner of the Soviet Union.

Electrification was the basis of all industry; and, as we can see from the figures, power capacity went up in unison with the expanding productivity levels. In terms of economic growth it is observed that “in 1940 the GNP of the Soviet Union was 410% higher than in 1913, the national income 430%, industrial output 670% and gross agricultural output 40% . . . In 1974, the Soviet GNP was more than 10 times that of 1940, the national income 10.9, industrial output 15.8 and gross agricultural output 2.4 times higher.”

The figures I have included here go up to the ninth five-year plan, because of the source I am citing. But, contrary to the idea of stagnation in the Soviet economy, industrial growth in the Soviet Union after this period continued, but at lower levels. It wasn’t until Gorbachev’s reign that the wheels of this historical juggernaut were stripped. In Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny’s book Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, one of their main conclusions was that it wasn’t the socialist system of a planned economy that failed: on the contrary, we have noted how successful it had been. It was in those final years of Gorbachev, with the seeds planted in Khrushchev’s tenure, that the planned economic structures of the Soviet Union, its publicly owned industries and the political structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were dismantled piecemeal, dismembered, and ultimately helped lead to the collapse of the first attempt at building a socialist state.

I have defended the achievements of Soviet industry here because the ideas and implementation of Marxist-Leninist theory can withstand the assaults and falsifications conjured up by right and left-wing theorists and their stooges. Conversely, this is not to endorse an idealist impression of the USSR. Mistakes were made aplenty, and these, just as importantly, need to be examined and learnt from. What is important, though, is that we here in Ireland can have faith in another way to organise our industrial forces, one that seeks to strip the monopolists of their hegemony and price-setting power, so that the greatest number of citizens can reap the benefits of a planned economic system.

In these most turbulent times it is imperative that we defend and advance the title of socialism and the attempts made to create a more equal and just society. Failure to do so most certainly will bring us from the light into the darkness.
[EON]

Peoples News - issue 60

2011-12-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.people.ie/news/PN-60.pdf

December issue of Socialist Voice

2011-12-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/sv/index.html

Germany in the driving seat

2011-12-10T08:48:00.000-08:00

Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland

9 December 2011

The agreement reached at the EU summit meeting is a clear victory for Germany. The decision to hand over more powers in relation to budgetary priorities and on greater supervision will further undermine the sovereignty of this state and the ability of the Irish people to effect change or to reverse the policies being imposed by the external EU-ECB-IMF troika in alliance with the internal troika of Fine Gael, the Labour Party, and Fianna Fáil.

The proposal to impose stricter rules and controls on budgetary deficits is a clear victory for German monopoly capitalism. It will produce little of real substance and certainly no relief in the massive debt and austerity measures being imposed on the Irish people. The main objective of the summit was to protect the interests of banks, financial speculators and bond-holders over those of the people.

The Irish Government asked for little and got nothing.

The further transfer of powers to such unelected bodies as the EU Commission and the notoriously anti-worker European Court of Justice—whose primary function is to protect the interests of big business and to prevent any “distortion of the market”—is a grave step towards unelected corporate control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people and a major assault on democracy and national sovereignty.

The decisions flowing from this meeting can only lead to permanent austerity measures upon the Irish people. It is the people who are being asked to pay the price, and any new treaty must be put to the Irish people in a referendum.

9th Meeting of the European Communist Youth Organizations

2011-12-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

There have passed 20 years since the flag with the hammer and sickle, the red flag of the October revolution and of socialism was taken off the Kremlin. There have passed 20 years since the counter revolution and the overthrow of socialism in USSR and the other socialist countries of Europe. This fact meant a social backward movement, not only for the peoples of the socialist countries, but also for peoples of entire world. The peoples of socialist countries saw the drop of their level of living, they faced new phenomena such as unemployment, insecurity and immigration. The peoples of capitalist countries lost support for their struggle against the capitalist barbarity.

During all those years there has been proved that capitalism not only can't solve any social problem, not only can't satisfy the needs of the workers and the youth, on the contrary, tries to get over their irremediable contradictions, by augmenting the exploitation of peoples, condemning them to poverty, unemployment and to wars.

Today, we are witnesses of new manifestations and deepening of the capitalist crisis of overaccumulation and overproduction.

As a result, all predatory aspects of capitalist mode of production in its final stage, i.e. imperialism, are sharpened. Accumulation of monopoly capital is accelerated by means of its centralization and concentration. On the other side, population which is relatively surplus with regard to the needs of capitalist accumulation, the evidence of ineffectiveness of capitalism, is growing and manifests itself in massive unemployment, proletarization of masses and poverty, especially among young people. At the same time, part of the workers is overloaded by longer working hours for lower wages. With growing productive forces, large part of them is unused. Unequal effects of crisis in capitalist centers (Germany, France) and so-called periphery (Greece, Italy, Portugal...) are results of uneven regional and national development inside imperialist structures.

The crisis is taken also as a pretext for attack on every advance of working class, which was gained by history of hard working class struggles, of which most significant is establishing of workers power in part of Europe. At the same time, the implementation of anti-peoples measures that have been decided by both social democratic and neoliberal governments is accelerating and aims at making the price of labor power in Europe decrease. Labor rights, such as limitations of working day, collective agreements, protection in work, and against the vagary of employers, are now in danger. Precarious work has become one of the main means of exploitation among young workers, being also used to bring limitations to the workers capacity of organizing themselves and participating in the working class organizations, like trade unions, and as consequence a tool to weaken the working class struggle. The free health care and education is being destroyed and the price of them grows. The retirement age is rising. Social security system and other responsibilities of state toward working class are canceled. All these changes move in direction of privatization, i.e. new spheres of profit for capital, and larger stratification of society: high quality of health care, education, social security for bourgeoisie and no for working and other popular classes.

The capitalist rulers implement and enforce the dominance mechanisms over peoples. The mass-media propaganda, no matter whether it is financed by states or capital, promotes anti-communism, blames the whole parts of population and peoples of the crisis, and supports racism, chauvinism and xenophobia. Any illusion of democratic character of EU institutions is being thrown away. This development shows the imperialist character of EU and disproves any illusion of change to "more social" EU that due to its class nature isn't possible to reform. Rivalries between capitalist countries for the share of the capital loss, which is the inevitable result of the crisis, are sharpening. Rivalries within the EU and Eurozone are reflecting precisely this fact. At the same time, they are united in their attack against the workers, they ask them to make sacrifices in the name of the salvation of Eurozone, EU and their profitability. Peoples should not make any sacrifice. Their future and their prosperity cannot be found in the imperialist institutions.

The falsification of history and anti-communism is financed and promoted by EU institutions and bourgeois states both in former socialist and other countries. The peoples' victory over fascism, the historical significance of the Soviet army in this victory, and the progressive development in socialist countries are disparaged. Communism is being equalized with Nazism. The reactionary forces of the past are propagated, even the openly terrorist and fascist ones. Even the trade-union movement is slandered and state mechanisms - such as bans and organization of strike-breaking - are used against strikes. The criminalization against the Communist Parties and Communist Youths is being promoted.

NATO confirmed its aggressive stance in its summit in Lisbon. The new imperialist attack in Libya under a pretext of civilians' protection, employing of UN in its plans to occupy the country and exploit its oil reserves, and planned attacks on Syria and Iran clearly show the dangerous imperialist offensive which can be resisted only with the gathering of the anti-imperialist forces. The inter-imperialist contradictions are growing between the old as well as the new imperialist powers.

The effects of the crisis create new movements of youth and workers in European countries. We salute the brave struggles of workers and youth, among which the recent struggles of workers in Greece, Portugal, Spain and other countries, where young communists stand in front of defense and counter-attack against the capital.

We highlight the necessity of reinforcing the intervention of the Communist Youths within the youth and the youth movement, of reinforcing the contribution of young communists to the empowerment of the class worker movement. Only in that way, accumulated anger of young people, who face the enlargement of the dead ends, will find a way out. Only in that way such anger will not get trapped within the framework of the "new movements", promoted by the system, which, using slogans such as "down with the parties, down with the trade unions", are trying to calumniate the organized class revolutionary struggle.

The attempts to intimidate the working class movement are caused by the capitalists' fear of comparison between the current capitalist development and successes of socialist construction. The socialist system proved its superiority over capitalism. It guaranteed to the citizens right to work in planned socialist economy which develops capabilities of a country proportionally, social security, free health care and education. It canceled exploitation and inequalities between peoples, regions, races, nations, and genders. Socialism promoted social ownership of means of production, both in country and in towns. On the international scale, the world socialist system was decisive for peoples' defeat of fascism and Nazism, and for destruction of colonialism. It constituted the only effective counterweight to imperialism. It supported progressive and anti-imperialist forces in the world.

The Communist Youths compromise to enforce their struggle, especially today that the capitalist crisis sharpens and this may cause unforeseeable consequences for the peoples. The Communist Youth Organizations bare the great task of organizing the struggle of the youth to secure the satisfaction of its contemporary needs. Today, the produced wealth, the productivity of labor and the development of science and technology can meet all the contemporary popular needs, can reduce the working time, can eliminate unemployment, can raise the cultural and educative level of workers. In order to achieve this, the means of production can no longer be private property, used to exploit workers. It is necessary to transform them into social property and developed them into favor of the working people. We highlight that the people must not recognize the capitalist debt. The real debt was created to the working people, by their exploitation and dispossession by the monopoly capital. There is no unity with exploiters facing the crisis, no sacrificing of people, which should bring even more surplus value to the big capital and strengthen its rule.

The Communist Youth Organizations have great responsibility for future of the peoples. Their ideological work will tell the truth about the glorious history of socialist construction in 20^th century. Their strengthening and coordinate actions will bring the consciousness of possibility and necessity of building superior society - socialism and communism - the idea the capital wants to erase from youth's minds. Their organization of militant youth will reinforce the working class and people in their struggles against imperialism.

The prospect of socialist construction and future of communism is the only real alternative to current system of exploitation.

20 years after it is clear that the defeat of socialism was temporary. Social evolution cannot stop.

The youth's future is Socialism!

Communist Youth of Austria (KJÖ)
COMAC, Belgium
United Democratic Youth Organization (EDON)
Communist Youth Union of the Czech Republic (KSM)
Socialist German Workers' Youth (SDAJ)
Communist Youth of Greece (KNE)
Communist Youth of Poland (KMP)
Portuguese Communist Youth (JCP)
Revolutionary Communist Youth Union of Bolsheviks (RKSMb)
Union of Young Communists of Spain (UJCE)
Collectives of Young Communist (CJC)
Youth of Turkish Communist Party (YTKP)

Overthrowing capitalism in the twenty-first century

2011-12-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

CPI General Secretary, Eugene McCarten, at the Communist University, London

Comrades,

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak at this year’s Communist University here in London. The title of this rally, “Overthrowing capitalism in the twenty-first century,” is certainly a challenging one but a most important one.

If there was one simple answer we would long since have found it. But, as we know, life does not always offer simple or easy solutions; it does not offer pain-free solutions. It is the question of who the pain is inflected upon, and for what outcome.

We are certainly gathering at an extremely important point in history, particularly as events are now unfolding in Europe. What appeared unstoppable and solid three decades ago, two decades ago or even five years ago, and was perceived by millions as the natural order of things, is now very fluid. People are beginning to question things that they once solidly believed in. Not alone is monopoly capitalism in deep crisis but we are also on the possible edge of a global environmental catastrophe.

The European Union is now in a “state of chassis,” as Seán O’Casey’s character called it. There is a clear division and a redivision of power and influence now under way within the EU. The old order of France and Germany deciding and the rest following is now being changed, with Germany deciding and the rest awaiting word from the Chancellery in Berlin. The ECB disagrees with the Commission, while the EU Parliament continues to play at being a parliament and maintaining that façade and still attempting to fool the gullible.

The crisis is deepening and is exposing deep fractures in the system as well as inter-imperialist tensions and rivalries. The recent G20 summit came and went and delivered nothing. The EU heads of government appear to be in permanent crisis session. Like constipated bull-frogs, they croak without any relief from the trapped wind from all the hot air generated, as each meeting is presented as the most important since the last most important one. The continuing and deepening crisis within the EU, centred on the euro and debt, and the imposition of socialised corporate debt on working people, appears to be their only answer. After each EU, euro-zone, G8 or G20 summit the politicians, media and “experts” all tell us we will have to wait to see how the markets respond. Clearly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

The growing crisis of the euro and what they call the “sovereign” debt crisis has all the hallmarks of being beyond them. They have now constructed a structured debt relationship between the core states and the heavily indebted peripheral countries, which will result in massive transfers of wealth from the periphery to the centre. Germany is attempting to extract maximum political advantage from the situation, demanding further rigid controls of the fiscal and budgetary governance of member-states by EU institutions, including the EU Commission and the European Central Bank. Clearly they are attempting to close off any potential alternative economic and social strategy by the people.

The austerity measures being imposed by the external EU-ECB-IMF “troika,” in co-operation with the internal troika of Fine Gael, the Labour Party, and Fianna Fáil, is imposing massive cuts in public spending: $3.5 billion this year, €3.7 billion next year. There are cuts in children’s allowance and unemployment benefit, hospital closures, levies, and an increase in value-added tax, which always affects poor people and workers most. In Ireland and all the peripheral countries there is a massive fire-sale of public companies, and public services will be privatised, narrowing the space and role of public capital so as to create areas into which private, corporate capital can expand, and control and exploit. Yet the rich and powerful remain aloof from the crisis; their life-styles, their villas remain untouched.

The French elite want the peripheral countries to pay back their debts to French banks at whatever cost to the people of those countries while demanding that the Germans bail out the rest of the French banking system in the form of euro debt bonds. German monopoly capital does not want the noose of debt hung around its neck, which would be the case if the euro debt bonds were created. This is the nature of the present divisions within the EU.

The European banking system is in deep trouble, which began in the periphery and has now moved into the core countries. Each solution gives temporary relief, to be followed by further crisis and a further turning of the screw on the people. The crisis of the system is being used by national governments and monopoly capitalism to drive back the rights of workers and their families, to take back much of what we gained in the last half of the twentieth century in our wages and our terms and conditions.

In Ireland we await the budget—it hasn’t been sent from Germany yet—from a coalition government not yet a year in office and already bankrupt of ideas. They will carry on the same policies as the previous government, stamped with the seal of the EU and marked “non-negotiable.” Because that is what they have been told to do, and it is also in their own class interests.

But we know that this is not necessarily the case—that things can be changed. The Greek government also said things were non-negotiable, but, through great resistance and against great odds, the Greek working class have resisted and forced the social democrats to scurry back to Brussels, looking for concessions and a cut in interest rates etc. Their resistance created conflict and tension at the heart of the EU.

When Papandreou ran out of road, in a vain hope of placating enough of the people and stabilising the situation, he decided in a last throw of the dice that he would consult the people in a referendum on the austerity pact. This was the final straw that broke the patience of his political masters in Berlin and Paris and the ruling class in Greece. Papandreou had to go, and he went, in the first of two virtual coups d’état, to be replaced by what is euphemistically called “technocratic” government.

This was quickly followed by a coup against Italian democracy and the replacement of the Italian government with a new one with not a single elected member. The assaults on the democratic will of the Greek and Italian people are among the first public manifestations and a real expression of the EU corporatist state now under construction. The reality that bourgeois democracy will be truncated to meet the needs of capital when in crisis is becoming more open and visible.

European monopoly capitalism is using the crisis to further tighten its grip. If they succeed in further eroding the ability of peoples and member-states to take independent decisions in relation to economic and social policies, and that budgets must first be cleared through Brussels, this will in effect turn elected governments into mere lobbyists, looking for concessions here and there, one set of lobbyists among more powerful lobby groups.

Since the bourgeoisie took power and established their state institutions and governance, they have carefully constructed a consciousness and belief among people that democracy and capitalism are inseparable, indeed synonymous: that no other social and economic organisation of society was or could be democratic. Yet we have two governments removed in as many weeks, replaced by quisling governments. They loudly proclaim that the crisis in each country is different and that we must prevent “contagion,” yet they impose similar cures for what they claim are different illnesses.

We believe capitalism is incompatible with democracy: capitalism insists that social control is undesirable, bad, and impossible.

Comrades,

We are living in a period when many myths are exploding and are ceasing to have an influence on how the people see the world around them.

Myth 1: That the independent state is redundant in the era of globalisation. False! The first port of call when the situation moved into crisis was the resources of the state to bail it out, in Ireland to the tune of €140 billion—that is, nearly €40,000 per person.

Myth 2: That the EU is a union of equals. Since the crisis it has been a case of the weakest having to go to the wall.

Myth 3: That monopoly capitalism has overcome its contradictions of boom and slump.

Myth 4: That democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. Clearly not true. What we have in the EU is a form of corporate state, one becoming more reactionary as the crisis deepens.

Myth 5: That there is no alternative either to capitalism or to the solutions being imposed to get it out of this crisis.

We clearly need a strategy for building and strengthening working-class solidarity throughout Europe, to find unity on shared goals and demands.

Decades of revisionism and opportunist influences, a non-class approach, a non-anti-imperialist approach to central economic and political questions among sections of the communist movement in Europe have left a deep legacy of confusion and division within the ranks of working-class forces. It has left the working class in some countries leaderless. It has left the working class confused and lacking in clarity about the nature of the crisis, about the class character and the role of the EU, thereby hindering the building of resistance and presenting clear anti-monopoly demands and strategies for a way out of the crisis on working-class terms.

But we see around us the small shoots of resistance beginning to develop, in the form of the Occupy movements around the world. Yes, they display anti-communist, anti-left, anti-trade-union features; but nothing will emerge from the swamp of the capitalist system fully developed or without the scars of the system affecting how they see the world. The working class is beginning to resist, as we witness in the growing number of strikes by workers throughout Europe, including here in Britain and back home in Ireland.

The gravediggers of the system are slowly awakening from the decades of Cold War propaganda freezer. The leaders of imperialism wish that the spring that gives birth to new life to the people’s struggles will be confined to places far from their own doorsteps, a spring that will give them new opportunities to exploit and dominate, while at home they hope they can keep the people under control with a daily diet of manufactured fear about the ATM machines running out of money, or people losing their homes, so as to manufacture their consent to having what generations struggled for taken away, because that is what is needed to get “us” out of the crisis.

The question facing us all is, How do we turn the economic crisis of the system into a political crisis of the system?

Our struggle is both national and international. It is is a struggle against imperialist domination and control.

On the European level it is clear that we need greater co-operation. We have many shared demands: No to privatisation, No to the debt burden, No to the imposed austerity schemes of the EU, ECB, and IMF, and actions of solidarity with workers when they are on strike.

At the national level we need to harness the people’s anger at not having any control or influence over events affecting and shaping their lives.

In many ways it is the crisis of the system that is exposing the nature and the limitations of the system itself. We have to take advantage of this and try to create greater ideological space for us to present a people’s alternative way forward.

Their lack of democracy and their efforts to corral and to narrow the people’s options are their Achilles heel. This means leading people from the straitjacket of bourgeois democracy, where workers and citizens have no real democratic control, to real democracy, where there is full social control over politics, society, and the economy.

We communists want to empower working people to democratise all areas of life.

Democracy, which is centred on working people, is the fertile ground that we have to cultivate and develop. It is about the democratic control of capital, about democratic control over the means of production.

Once again the hammer and sickle can be seen in their thousands on the streets of cities around Europe. They thought they had exorcised the spectre, but they have not.

This is not a time for pessimism or defeatism but rather for optimism and resistance. The twenty-first century belongs to the forces of democracy and socialism.

Socialism is the future! 13th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, Athens, December 2011

2011-12-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

Speech of Eugene McCartan, general secretary, Communist Party of Ireland

The crisis of capitalism, of imperialism, has thrown up serious questions for the workers’ movement around the world. The old questions of revolution versus reform have once again become a sharp issue within the workers’ movement. The crisis of the system, the deep contradictions, financialisation and stagnation have shut the door on a social-democratic solution at this time. The imperialist powers are resorting to wars and the heightening of aggression.

The crisis of European monopoly capitalism

The austerity measures being imposed by the external EU-ECB-IMF “troika,” in co-operation with the internal troika of Fine Gael, the Labour Party, and Fianna Fáil, are imposing massive cuts in public spending: €3.5 billion this year, €3.7 billion next year, a total of €20 billion between 2011 and 2015. There is a massive socialised corporate debt of €140 billion.
Mass unemployment has become a permanent feature of Irish society, reaching 14 per cent. If we add in those emigrating, unemployment would reach 20 per cent. Emigration is again being used as a major social safety value. Corporate profits are up, with wages, social welfare and pensions all on a downward spiral.
There have been cuts in children’s allowance and unemployment benefit; there are hospital closures, levies, and an increase in value-added tax. In Ireland and all the peripheral countries there is a massive fire-sale of public companies, and public services will be privatised, narrowing the space and role of public capital so as to create new investment opportunities, with guaranteed profits, for private, corporate capital.

Structural debt crisis and debt servicing as a means of extracting wealth from peripheral countries

The European banking system is in deep trouble, which began in the periphery and has now moved into the core countries. Each solution gives temporary relief, to be followed by a further deepening of the crisis and a further turning of the screw on the people. The crisis of the system is being used by national governments and monopoly capitalism to drive back the rights of workers and their families, to take back much of what we gained in the last half of the twentieth century in our wages and our terms and conditions.
The growing crisis of the euro and what they call the “sovereign” debt crisis has all the signs of being beyond their capacity to solve. They have now constructed a structured debt relationship between the core states and the heavily indebted peripheral countries, which will result in massive transfers of wealth from the periphery to the centre, an approach similar to the terms dictated to their former colonies.
German monopoly capitalism is attempting to extract maximum political advantage from the situation, demanding further rigid controls of the fiscal and budgetary governance of member-states by the EU institutions, including the EU Commission and the European Central Bank. Clearly they are attempting to close off any potential alternative economic and social strategy by the people.
European monopoly capitalism is using the crisis to further tighten its grip. If it succeeds in further eroding the ability of peoples and member-states to take independent decisions in relation to economic and social policies, with national budgets first having to be cleared through Brussels, this will in effect reduce elected governments to mere lobbyists, looking for concessions here and there, one set of lobbyists among more powerful lobby groups.
Three days ago the Irish Government delivered its budget; it had arrived back from Germany stamped with the seal of the EU and marked “non-negotiable.” Because that is what they have been told to do, and it is also in their own class interests. They loudly proclaim that the crisis in each country is different and that we must prevent “contagion,” yet they impose identical cures for what they claim to be different illnesses.
We have witnessed two virtual coups d’état, in Italy and Greece, with two governments being replaced by what is euphemistically called “technocratic” government. These assaults on the democratic will of the Greek and Italian people, in collusion with the ruling forces in both countries, are among the first public manifestations and a real expression of the EU corporatist state now under construction. The reality that bourgeois democracy will be truncated to meet the needs of capital when it is in crisis is becoming more open and visible. This is an important ideological strategic weakness of theirs.
In many ways it is the crisis of the system that is exposing the nature and the limitations of the system itself. In effect we build our strategies on the contradictions and mistakes of the system.
We are living in a period when many myths are weakening and are ceasing to have an influence on how the people see the world around them.
Myth 1: That the independent state is redundant in the era of globalisation. False! The first port of call when the situation moved into crisis was the resources of the state to bail it out, in Ireland to the tune of €140 billion—that is, nearly €40,000 per person.
Myth 2: That the EU is a union of equals. Since the crisis it has been a case of the weakest having to go to the wall.
Myth 3: That monopoly capitalism has overcome its contradictions of boom and slump.
Myth 4: That democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. Clearly not true. What we have in the EU is a form of corporate state, one becoming more reactionary as the crisis deepens.
Myth 5: That there is no alternative to capitalism or to the solutions being imposed to get it out of this crisis.
We clearly need a strategy for building and strengthening working-class solidarity throughout Europe, for finding unity on shared goals and demands.

The working class needs allies

Policies for developing struggle and resistance are clearly the pressing issue facing the communist and workers’ movement at this crucial moment in history. We have to take advantage of this and try to create greater ideological space in which we can present a people’s alternative way forward.
Capitalism’s lack of democracy and its efforts to corral and to narrow the people’s options is its Achilles heel. This challenges us to lead people from the straitjacket of bourgeois democracy, where workers and citizens have no real democratic control, to real democracy, where there is full social control over politics, society, and the economy.
We communists want to empower working people, to democratise all areas of life.
Democracy, which is centred on working people, is the fertile ground that we have to cultivate and develop. It is about the democratic control of capital, about democratic control over the means of production. From our viewpoint we see democracy and national sovereignty as central struggles. Others may see different priorities.

Democracy

We believe that the question of democracy and the defence of democracy can open up new avenues of struggle and alliances with new forces and potential allies. This is not about defending bourgeois democracy but exposing its limitations and its class nature.
National sovereignty is also a central question, one that has the potential to open up fissures in the enemy positions, to undermine and expose the fact that ruling-class forces have always put and will always put their class interests and their relationship with imperialism before the interests of the people, most importantly those of working people.
Certainly, experience in Ireland shows that social forces that were once secure allies of the establishment, such as the professional classes, small businesses, and family farmers, are now finding their political influence closed off, their economic interests sacrificed.
The trade union leadership also believed it had a stake in the system, flattered by the policies of “social partnership.” Now that social partnership has been abandoned by the state and the employers it is left high and dry and incapable of defending the working class. The labour movement has to relearn class struggle.
This is a struggle that may well be a long one. We are moving into a possible long phase of stagnation, of mass unemployment and growing mass poverty. It will require us to bring to bear the great experience of the communist movement of more than a century.

Deepening ideological struggle

How we exploit the divisions of our enemies and unite working people and anti-imperialist forces is the central question. What demands contain the potential for moving forward and countering the attacks under way?
Through our campaigning on the debt we have been attempting to expose the class nature of the European Union. The Irish ruling class puts the interests of the European monopoly banks and finance houses before those of the people. We want to expose this abject dependence and subservient relationship.

Areas of co-operation and unity in struggle in Europe

Opposition to the imposition of corporate debt on the peoples of the European Union gives us the possibility of uniting workers throughout the EU, which would present a significant challenge to finance capital.
Opposition to the privatisation of public enterprises and the commercialisation of public services is another area where co-operation and unity can be achieved.
Solidarity actions with workers engaged in resistance can also provide an opportunity to break the isolation or cordon sanitaire that ruling-class forces have succeeded in building, leaving each national working class with the belief that it is on its own. We need to develop a strategy for spreading “contagion.” This is a struggle for the whole of the class throughout the EU, to bring working-class internationalism back into the consciousness of workers.

Turning the economic crisis of the system into a political crisis of the system

Capitalism creates and functions on uneven development. That truism is no more clearly revealed than it is in relation to the present crisis, centred on the euro. The uneven economic and social development of the different member-states is clear, and the economic crisis manifests itself differently.
Just as monopoly capitalism attempts to impose similar solutions and policies, they affect the people in different ways. Resistance likewise is shaped by the traditions and the concrete conditions of each country: the relative economic and social development, the extent and size of the working class and its consciousness, the scale and the social and economic role of other social classes and their place in the productive process, the extent of penetration and domination of transnational capital over national economic development.
To quote Lenin, writing about the 1916 Rising in Ireland in reply to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek, Trotsky, and other leftists, “envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon . . .
“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is . . .
“The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible.” (Lenin, “The Irish Rebellion of 1916.”)

Taking into account the concrete material conditions of each country

If we accept that “social revolution is a living phenomenon,” what are the material conditions and social forces that we have to understand, try to work with and win over?
Certainly in Ireland, the centuries of colonial domination, the continued partition of the country and the deep division within the working class require us to reflect on and understand that reality.
In Ireland, national consciousness is more developed than class consciousness; and neither is strong enough to resist or to explain what is happening or provide a way forward on its own. It is combining the social and national questions, showing that they are inseparable, that provides the framework for possible forward movement, showing that domination and control by the European Union can be broken only by the working class, as the Irish ruling class is itself a junior partner and subservient to the interests of imperialism, in the first instance to the EU.
We cannot copy history, we can only learn from it and apply the lessons.
Clearly, socialism is the only alternative to capitalism, but the question of how we turn the economic crisis of the system into a political crisis of the system is the challenge that faces revolutionary forces.

Strategies for reflecting the history of each people

Irish communists have called for the repudiation of the debt; it is not the people’s debt, and should not be paid. We have called for social control of capital, for democratic control over natural resources, for an alternative all-Ireland economic, political and social strategy. These are policies and demands that are diametrically opposed by monopoly capitalism and bring us into conflict with the Irish ruling class and the EU.
We believe that capitalism is incompatible with democracy: capitalism insists that social control is undesirable, bad, and impossible.

Opening up the road to socialism

Clearly there are many lessons to be learnt from the building of socialism in the twentieth century and current efforts at building socialism in difficult conditions, where imperialism is the dominant military, economic, political and cultural influence and power globally, as it was in the twentieth century.
Our history has to be assessed and faced up to, honestly and critically, as a necessary element in the fight against anti-communism.
Now more than ever we must guard against left-sectarianism and dogmatism as much as against reformism, opportunism, and defeatism.
Socialism and the struggle for socialism in the twenty-first century will be shaped by the experience of the twentieth century but most importantly by the class and anti-imperialist struggles of the twenty-first century and the balance of power and the strength of imperialism.

New Repudiate the Debt leaflet

2011-12-10T05:29:00.000-08:00

Crisis deepens...Demand to repudiate growing

2011-12-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

As the crisis deepens the demand to repudiate the illegitimate and odious debt that this state socialised on behalf of its class of bankers and developers grows. Sadly the political and economic assessment of the Repudiate the Debt campaign is being proven to be true as this crisis deepens, the euro totters on the bring of collapse and working people are made transfer their wealth to the super-rich on a daily basis.

Check out http://www.nodebt.ie/campaigndocuments/ for campaign documents and economic briefings to help you in demand repudiation.

Not our debt!

New CYM poster designs

2011-11-30T14:03:00.000-08:00

Excellent historian, Keeran, revisits Soviet history

2011-11-30T13:57:00.000-08:00

Sorry if you cannot read the below article then check it out at its original source at

http://mltoday.com/subject-areas/books-arts-and-literature/khrushchev-lied-but-what-is-the-truth-1246.html

Excellent writer, Keeran, revisits Soviet history

2011-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

Written by Roger Keeran writing at the US site  Marxism Leninism Today 

Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every ‘Revelation’ of Stalin’s (and
Beria’s) ‘Crimes’ in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous ‘Secret Speech’ to the
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25,
1956 is Provably False by Grover Furr. Kettering, Ohio: Erythros Press and
Media, 2011. $25.00. Pp. 425.

In 1987 William Morrow and Company published a biography of a leading
Soviet Communist, L. M. Kaganovich, written by Stuart Kahan, an American
journalist and allegedly Kaganovich’s nephew, who claimed to have
interviewed Kaganovich in Yiddish in Moscow and who portrayed Kaganovich as
the “architect” of Soviet terror.[1] In a blurb a Yale historian praised
the book as “an important contribution.”

A few years later, Kaganovich’s daughter and five other close relatives of
Kaganovich issued a statement that they never heard of this so-called
nephew, that Kaganovich did not understand or speak Yiddish, and that no
interview with Kahan ever occurred. They detailed lies that riddled the
book from beginning to end.[2]

This episode was emblematic of the difficulty of knowing Soviet history. No
modern history is more lacking in reliable official sources or more
shrouded in ideology, propaganda and disinformation than the history of the
Soviet Union. Even though the Soviet archives were briefly and partially
opened to researchers in the 1990s, the lack of official archival material
remains a problem, and the end of the Cold War only slightly diminished the
anti-Soviet vitriol of most writing.

On the whole, writing on the Soviet Union represented what a mainstream
historian has called the “totalitarian thesis.”[3] According to this
thesis, the Soviet Union could only be understood as a top-down
dictatorship driven by power hunger and paranoia that sustained itself by
arbitrary authority and violence. Leon Trotsky’s writing on the Soviet
Union supplied the original inspiration for the totalitarian thesis [4],
and Hanna Arendt gave it an academic imprimatur in 1951.[5]

After Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech to the 20th Congress of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 supplied the thesis with
seemingly unimpeachable verification from the inside, the totalitarian
thesis became the dominant academic paradigm as found in the works of its
most prolific and influential expostulators, Robert Conquest and Roy
Medvedev.

Starting in the 1990s, Soviet scholarship experienced a change. Researchers
for a time gained access to the Soviet archives, and studies emerged that
historians J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning called “anomalous” to the
totalitarian paradigm.[6] Historian after historian found that the
repression was not nearly as widespread as Conquest and others had
proposed, that previous estimates of the number of victims of Soviet,
figures of 20 million or 12 million or 10 million or 7 to 8 million
victims, were simply phantasmagorical.[7]

According to historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, a careful
examination of archival records revealed that the number of persons shot
during the repression of 1937-38 at 681,692, and adding those who died in
prison and exile “we reach a figure of nearly 1.5 million deaths due to
repression in the 1930s.”[8] These are large numbers to be sure but nowhere
near the previous exaggerations. Other studies, from those of telephone
directories in Leningrad to census data confirmed that previous estimates
vastly overstated the size of the repression.

Still other studies discovered that the repression did not simply emanate
from the top but developed a life of its own in factories, local party and
government organizations and the army, where the accused were most often
officials and where the repression, as ironic as it sounds, was accompanied
by growing democracy at the grassroots level.[9]

Also, the repression occurred in the context of economic problems,
industrial sabotage, and plots against the regime. According to Getty and
Naumov, three opposition groups actively conspired against the Stalin
regime in the early 1930s: “The Riutin group, a reactivated Trotskyist
organization, and the Eismont-Tolmachev-Smirnov group.”[10]

Other studies provided a more nuanced view of Stalin, who emerged as less
powerful, more competent, more hands-on, and more seriously theoretical
than the brutal tyrant drawn by the totalitarian paradigm.[11]

Though the new revisionist Soviet history contradicted or modified parts of
the totalitarian paradigm, it did not overthrow it, but then in 2011 Grover
Furr’s book, Khrushchev Lied appeared.[12]

Furr aimed further than any previous revisionist account. Indeed, he aimed
at a central pillar of the totalitarian paradigm, Khrushchev’s secret
speech, in which Khrushchev made a broad indictment of Stalin’s leadership,
including the “revelations” that that Stalin had created a “cult of the
individual,” that in his “last testament” Lenin had warned of Stalin’s
propensity to abuse power, that Stalin had been a fearful and incompetent
wartime leader, and that he had engineered the trials of the 1930s that had
devastated the leadership of the CPSU and resulted in phony trials,
imprisonment and executions of countless numbers of good Communists and
other innocents. Furr promised to provide evidence that “every ‘revelation’
of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) ‘crimes’ … is provably false.”

Given the importance Khrushchev’s speech played in all subsequent
scholarship as well as in the thinking of most Communist parties,[13]
Furr’s book promised to be a tour de force of momentous historical and
political implications. This turned out to be not quite the case.

The book begins with nine chapters in which Furr, a Montclair State
University professor who is fluent in Russian, tries to rebut the sixty-one
revelations that Khrushchev made in his speech. Then, follows a chapter in
which Furr categorizes Khrushchev’s lies, a chapter on the “falsified
rehabilitations” that followed the speech, and a chapter on the reasons,
implications and legacies of the speech. Nearly half the book is taken up
by an appendix, in which Furr supplies quotations from primary and
secondary source material to support his argument.

Before taking up some of the problems with Furr’s book, I would like to
give him credit for a number of contributions. First , Furr underscores the
importance of Khrushchev’s speech, “the most influential speech of the 20th
century,” in shaping all subsequent views of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

On this point, Furr reinforces the observation of the Italian Marxist
Domenico Losurdo, who says, “Without a doubt there were two turning points
that have determined the contemporary view of Stalin: the outbreak of the
Cold War in 1947 and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU.”[14]

The impact of the speech is what gives such gravity to Furr’s contribution
in shining a spotlight on the fundamental mendacity of Khrushchev’s speech.
Furr is certainly right that much in Khrushchev’s speech was false, even
knowingly and maliciously false.

The disingenuousness marked even its publication, in which editors added
such audience reactions as “commotion in the hall” and “indignation in the
hall” and “applause,” even though those who actually heard the speech
recalled “total silence reigned in the hall.”[15]

The allegation in the secret speech that more or less tied all the other
allegations together was that Stalin had built up a “cult of the
individual” in order to enhance his dictatorial powers. Furr shows how
misleading this accusation was. First, the existence of a cult of
personality was no revelation since Party leaders had discussed it for
years. Secondly, Stalin not only did not foster the cult but expressed
distaste with it, or at least with some of its excesses. Third, all Party
leaders bore responsibility for the glorification of Stalin. Indeed, no one
surpassed Khrushchev when it came to sycophancy.

In his memoirs, Party functionary, Dmitri Shepilov, recalled the 18th Party
Congress in 1939, where Khrushchev lauded Stalin twenty-six times as “our
genius of a leader,” “our great Stalin,” “our beloved leader,” and so
on.[16] Furr gives examples of Stalin resisting its excesses, as when he
prevented the renaming of Moscow after himself. (Furr’s most amusing story
concerns Stalin’s attitude toward idolatry. Once in chastising his sons’
arrogance, Stalin reportedly said, “Do you think you are, STALIN? Do you
think I am STALIN? HE is Stalin—there!” he said pointing to a pompous
portrait.)

Yet, by trying to absolve Stalin entirely for the cult around him, Furr
strains credibility. Stalin may have opposed renaming Moscow, but he
apparently did not object when scores of other cities, towns, streets,
squares, parks, factories and so on were named after him and when his
pictures and statues became ubiquitous.[17] Unlike Fidel Castro, Stalin did
not do as much as he might have to discourage the cult that developed.

Another Khrushchev lie that Furr exposes concerns the so-called Lenin
testament. Toward the end of his life Lenin wrote a letter in which he said
Stalin had “unlimited authority,” and Lenin was “not sure whether he
[Stalin] will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient
caution.” Lenin also said Stalin was “too rude.”

Furr maintains that Lenin never viewed or labeled what he wrote as a
“testament” and that Khrushchev most likely lifted this characterization
from Trotsky. Moreover, Furr points out that Lenin never used the words,
“abuses his power.” More significantly, Furr disputes Khrushchev’s
implication of a rift between Lenin and Stalin. At the time of the letter,
not only was Stalin in charge of safeguarding Lenin’s health, but also
Lenin entrusted Stalin with his very life by making Stalin the caretaker of
a cyanide capsule Lenin wished to take if his suffering became unbearable.
Furr might also have pointed out that, however critical Lenin was of
Stalin, he was even more critical of Trotsky and other top leaders.[18]

Furr convincingly rebuts many other Khrushchev statements. Some of the
falsehoods are trivial. Many are not. Several of the widely believed
revelations concerned Stalin’s conduct during the war—that he was
demoralized and inactive at the start of the German invasion and that he
was an incompetent commander. Furr points out that this view is completely
at variance with those who worked most closely with Stalin, including
Marshall Georgii K. Zhukov, who (even after Stalin had demoted him) praised
his wartime leadership.[19]

The most extensive part of Furr’s book and of Khrushchev’s speech concerns
the Moscow Trials and related repression of 1936-38. Here, Furr makes his
most important contribution, though, it is a contribution beset with
problems of its own. Throughout the secret speech, Khrushchev attempted to
place the entire blame for the repression on Stalin and Beria.

For example, Khrushchev maintained that Stalin demanded “absolute
submission” and those who opposed him were doomed to removal from leading
bodies and “moral and physical annihilation”; that Stalin and Andrei
Zhdanov’s telegram to the Politburo on September 25, 1936 was responsible
for the appointment of Nikolai Ezhov as head of the NKVD and for pushing
the NKVD “on the path of mass arrests and executions”; that Stalin
justified “a mass terror policy” by the idea that “as we march forward
toward socialism class war must allegedly sharpen”; that the repression
involved the preparation of lists, 383 lists, of thousands of persons
“whose sentences were prepared in advance” that were sent to “Stalin
personally for his approval.”[20]

Furr convincingly argues that putting exclusive blame on Stalin and Beria
is entirely misleading. For example, far from repressing dissent, Stalin
showed great tolerance for disagreement. More importantly, no one had
greater or more direct responsibility for the repression than the heads of
the NKVD, first Genrikh Yagoda and subsequently Nicolai Ezhov (sometimes
spelled Yezhov), and Party first secretaries like Khrushchev.

The memoirs of Party leader, Dmitrii Shepilov, completely supported Furr on
this point. Shepilov said, “During the devastating purges of 1937-38, and
later in Moscow and Ukraine, no individual cases were decided without
Khrushchev’s personal knowledge and approval….Perhaps the most glaring and
revolting aspect of Khrushchev’s activity was that many of the persons whom
he sent to the gallows, he later, with a hypocrisy unsurpassed in history,
mourned the demise of from the highest party and government rostrums. In
these lamentations there was the added twist that the men held responsible
for the deaths of our glorious communists were, of course, Stalin, and his
colleagues, but never Khrushchev himself.”[21]

Moreover, Furr points out that though Khrushchev blamed Stalin for the
repression, he completely ignored that Stalin deserved credit for ending
the repression in 1938 and for the punishment of Yagoda and Ezhov for their
excesses. Historian Boris A. Starkov recounted that in 1938 A. A. Zhdanov,
A. A. Andreev, K. E. Voroshilov, L. M. Kaganovich, A. I. Mikoyan and V. M.
Molotov turned against Ezhov and convinced Stalin and the Central Committee
that Ezhov’s excesses were undermining the morale, the economy and the
defense of the country, and Stalin removed Ezhov.[22] Shepilov said simply,
“Stalin stopped Ezhov’s churning meat grinder.” [23] In short, Furr has
come up with a valid and momentous insight that one of the most influential
speeches in history was riddled with lies, distortions and fabrications.

This discovery, however, has made Furr (to use one of Stalin’s memorable
phrases) “dizzy with success.” In his exuberance, Furr allows all sorts of
problems to bedevil and enervate his account. First, there is a conceptual
problem. The point of studying history is to understand what happened.
Disputing Khrushchev’s views does not provide an alternative account of
what happened. Furr admits this and says his study cannot satisfy the
curiosity about “what really happened.”[24] In spite of this disclaimer,
Furr does suggest an alternative to Khrushchev’s view, and his alternative
view is not credible.

Moreover, some of Furr’s specific refutations lack either the facts or
arguments to be convincing. Instead, he often resorts to a tendentious and
one-sided reading of the evidence, to innuendos and speculation, to
overblown and hyperbolic language, and to unsupported allegations of his
own.

The book’s problems start with its title and argument. To call every
Khrushchev revelation a lie has dramatic appeal and a figurative truth, but
no one in their right mind could buy this as literal truth, because no one
in their right mind could imagine Khrushchev or anyone else speaking for
hours before a congress of the Communist Party about revelations that
contained nothing but falsehoods. Even Furr himself does not believe this.

A reader, however, has to wait until page 142 to hear the author
acknowledge that “it would, of course, be absurd to say that every one of
Khrushchev’s statements is false.” Yet, by not admitting that Khrushchev’s
“revelations” artfully mixed truths and lies, this absurdity is precisely
what Furr is guilty of. Having staked this extreme claim, Furr makes no
effort to sort out the truth and falsehood of Khrushchev’s speech, but
proceeds to focus only on what in Khrushchev’s statements were dubious,
even if it means lumping together the trivial, disputable and half lies
with the significant, provable and total lies. Moreover, when the evidence
to make his case is unavailable, Furr slips into the role of a dubious
defense attorney who nitpicks the evidence, badgers witnesses and kicks up
sand.

Take Furr’s treatment of one of the most important episodes in Soviet
history, the Kirov assassination. On December 1, 1934 in the Party
headquarters in Smolny, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party of
Leningrad, was shot in the head and killed by a Party member, Leonid
Nikolaev.

Kirov was a supporter and friend of Stalin’s, (the two had vacationed
together the previous summer), and Kirov had been sent to Leningrad at
least in part to counteract the opposition elements in the party there. The
day after the assassination, Stalin went to Leningrad and took personal
charge of the investigation, which ended up implicating the opposition
leaders, G. Zinoviev and L. Kamenev, and set off the Moscow Trials and
associated repression. In the secret speech, Khrushchev implied that Stalin
was behind Kirov’s murder.

Furr argues that Khrushchev’s insinuation was baseless and that the
opposition leaders convicted were in fact part of a murder conspiracy. Furr
is right on the first count but fails to prove the second. Moreover, his
refutation is superficial and tendentious. Furr’s refutation takes up less
than two pages and involves quotations from three historians, all of whom
dispute Stalin’s involvement in Kirov’s murder.

One would never know from Furr’s account that Khrushchev’s implication
became the conventional wisdom among such Cold War Sovietologists as Robert
Conquest, The Great Terror,[25] and Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The
Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery.[26] In other words, a serious rebuttal of what
Khrushchev implied would involve acknowledging what the Cold Warriors have
written in support Khrushchev’s view and then refuting or at least
disputing it. Furr does not do this. He does not even identify two of the
historians he quotes, Pavel Sudaplatov and Alla Kirilina. Furr neither
provides their credentials (though strong), nor gives any reason that they
are more credible (though they are) than Amy Knight or Robert Conquest. In
other words, sometimes Furr has a stronger case than he bothers to make.

Moreover, Furr is highly selective about what he chooses to use from his
sources. He fails to acknowledge, for example, that though the three
historians he quotes disputed Khrushchev ‘s view, none of them supported
Furr’s view. That is, none of them believe that the oppositionists
convicted in the Moscow trials were guilty of Kirov’s murder. For example,
Kirilina dismissed Stalin’s culpability for the murder but argued that
Nikolaev was a lone assassin.[27]

A recent examination of the case by historian Matthew Lenoe (The Kirov
Murder and Soviet History [2010]) relied heavily on the recollections of
Genrikh Samoilevich Liushdov, one of the lead investigators in the Kirov
case, who subsequently defected to Japan, and whose papers were examined by
Lenoe in the Hokkaido University Library in Japan. Lenoe provided evidence
that Stalin had nothing to do with Kirov’s murder, hence proof that
Khrushchev lied, but he also supported the lone assassin theory, hence not
supporting Furr’s view either.[28]

If Furr is right about the Kirov murder, he does not prove it here, and at
best one will have to await his forthcoming study of the case. In spite of
Furr’s claim about “every” Khrushchev revelation being a lie, Furr actually
does not dispute much that Khrushchev said about the repression. He does
not question that mass repression occurred, that it was directed not just
against Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and Bukharinites, but against “many
honest Communists”; that the repression involved “the fabrication of cases
against Communists,” “false accusations,” “glaring abuses of socialist
legality,” “barbaric tortures,” and “the death of innocent people”; that 70
percent of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress were
“arrested and shot” and a majority of the delegates to the 17th Party
Congress were arrested; that on January 10, 1939 Stalin sent a telegram to
various bodies declaring that “methods of physical pressure” were
permissible “in exceptional cases”; and so on.[29]

Thus, while Furr accepts the major facts of the repression, he often
quibbles over minor points, and without sufficient evidence, disputes the
idea that everyone punished was innocent, and objects to laying the blame
for the repression on Stalin (and Beria). Granted that many people besides
Stalin carried out the repression and granted that Stalin played a role in
ending the 1936-38 repression, the question remains how involved, aware and
responsible was Stalin for the repression? If Khrushchev tried to shift
total responsibility to Stalin, Furr seems bent on trying to deny Stalin
any responsibility. In any case, Furr’s reasoning and evidence on this
point are dubious.

For example, Khrushchev said that “mass repressions grew tremendously”
after Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov sent a telegram to members of the Political
Bureau on September 25, 1936 calling for N. I. Ezhov to replace Yagoda as
head of the NKVD.[30] In the telegram, Stalin said the NKVD was “four years
behind” in “unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc.” [31] Furr says that
Khrushchev lied about this. Furr narrowly focuses, however, on what Stalin
meant by saying that the NKVD was four years behind. Furr says that what
Stalin really meant was the NKVD was four years behind in unmasking the
opposition bloc not four years behind in applying repression.

Furr is right about the meaning of those particular words, but Furr ignores
the other truth in Khrushchev’s statement, namely that Stalin bore direct
responsibility for increasing the repression by picking Ezhov, who
broadened the scale of repression. In a similar vein, Furr asserts that
Khrushchev “seriously distorted” Stalin’s words when he said that Stalin
tried to justify mass repression by saying “as we march forward toward
socialism class war must allegedly sharpen.”[32] Furr asserts that Stalin
actually said, “the further we advance…the greater will be the fury of the
remnants of the broken exploiting classes, the sooner they resort to
sharper forms of struggle.”[33]

Does Furr really believe that the slight variation in words makes any
difference in the meaning? Stalin’s words differ from Khrushchev’s
paraphrase, but the meaning does not.

Molotov’s testimony made this clear. When Chuev asked Molotov whether
Stalin was correct about the class struggle intensifying under socialism,
Molotov did not equivocate: “It was correct in view of the periods analyzed
then.”[34] Furr contends, “Stalin went on to call for an individual
approach and for political education, not for anything like repression or
‘terror.’”[35] In reality, according to Furr, “it was the Party First
Secretaries and others around the country…who turned to ‘mass
repression.’”[36]

Though Furr is correct about Stalin’s statements and the First Secretaries’
actions, this hardly proves that Stalin opposed mass repression. If anyone
knew Stalin’s views on repression, it was Molotov, and Molotov said, “It
was mainly Stalin who took upon himself this difficult task [of
repression]“[37] and that Ezhov “overdid it because Stalin demanded greater
repression.” [38]

Furthermore, Furr’s notion that Stalin opposed mass repression is
contradicted by the historians Getty and Naumov, who found in the Soviet
archives “Stalin’s signature on documents authorizing mass executions.”[39]
Granted that authorizing mass executions of persons duly convicted by the
courts was not the same as ordering them, still Stalin’s signature showed
that he was fully aware and supportive of the most extreme punishment for
those convicted of serious crimes against the state. Furr seems loathe to
acknowledge this.

As for the so-called torture telegram, Furr may be right in questioning the
provenance of this wire and whether it was ever sent. Moreover, Furr is
certainly right that in quoting the telegram Khrushchev omitted sentences
so as to put Stalin in the worst possible light, that is, omitting
sentences where Stalin stressed that physical pressure was permissible only
“as an exception” and those sentences where Stalin condemned those who had
abused these methods.

Khrushchev’s skullduggery notwithstanding, the telegram clearly showed
Stalin’s willingness to condone torture in exceptional cases such as where
a convict refused to divulge the existence or whereabouts of
co-conspirators still at large. Had Furr acknowledged this and thus sift ed
and winnowed the truth from the falsehoods in this matter, his account
would have been forthright and useful rather than a strained effort to
argue that every Khrushchev allegation was simply a lie.[40]

A similar one-sidedness adheres to Furr’s treatment of Khrushchev’s and
Stalin’s views of Trotskyism. Furr points out that Khrushchev suggested
that Stalin favored annihilating Trotskyists even those who had long ago
broken with Trotsky’s ideas and returned to Leninism. Furr correctly points
out that Stalin never called for the persecution of such erstwhile
Trotskyists, but instead called for “an individual, differentiated
approach.”[41]

Furr goes further, however. Furr says that Stalin opposed persecuting
Trotskyists altogether. Here are Furr’s exact words: “Stalin did refer to
Trotskyites in very hostile terms. But he did not advocate persecuting them
[i.e. Trotskyites]. While stressing the need for renewed vigilance Stalin
also proposed the establishment of special ideological courses for all
leading party workers. That is, Stalin saw the problem of Trotskyism as a
result of a low level of political understanding among Bolsheviks.”

One has only to read the complete texts of Stalin provided by Furr in the
appendix to appreciate nor only that Khrushchev lied but also that Furr
misleads. Stalin made clear that two categories existed, those who had once
been Trotskyists, and those who not only remained Trotskyists but who had
become “a gang of wreckers, diversionists, spies, assassins, without
principles and ideas, working for the foreign intelligence services.” The
former should not be persecuted. For the latter, however, Stalin thought
that “not the old methods, the methods of discussion, must be used, but new
methods, methods for smashing and uprooting it.”[42]

Of course, Furr knows that such recent historians as Getty and Naumov
confirm the oppositional activity of Trotskyists in the 1930s and knows
that Stalin thought these forces had to be smashed and uprooted. Yet, his
narrow preoccupation with Khrushchev’s lies leads him into careless
formulations that play fast and loose with the truth. Though Furr expends
many words parsing Khrushchev’s statements in detail and indeed spends a
whole chapter categorizing the various kinds of deceptions engaged in by
Khrushchev, he makes little effort to sort the truth from the lies. In the
end, one is left with two competing versions of the repression. Since Furr
is content to act as a defense attorney and merely attack Khrushchev’s
credibility without venturing his own interpretations of events, one never
knows exactly what he thinks happened.

Still, Furr seems to hold a version of the repression something like this:
A massive repression occurred in the Soviet Union in the years 1936-38.
This repression took the lives and liberties of large numbers of Communist
leaders, including members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th
Party Congress. This repression involved torture and forced confession and
the framing and punishment of many innocent people. The blame for this
repression rested primarily with the regional party secretaries, like
Khrushchev, and the leaders of the NKVD, notably Ezhov. Furthermore, many
of those who suffered from the repression were guilty. Others were
knowingly framed by Ezhov and his cohorts who were in league with the
opposition and who used excessive repression to discredit the leadership.
This version of the repression is thus the diametrical opposite of
Khrushchev’s, which was more or less that no legitimate reason for the
repression existed, that virtually all those punished were innocent, and
that the only reason for the repression was to ensure Stalin’s unchallenged
and absolute authority.

The problem with these competing narratives is that neither have much
evidence to support them. To support his view that the vast majority of
victims were innocent, Khrushchev relied on a review of cases prepared
before the 20th Congress known as the Pospelov Report, which was cursory at
best. To support his view, Furr repeatedly makes sweeping references to
evidence about the guilt of those punished: “the evidence we know exists,”
“all the evidence we presently have,” “all the evidence at our disposal,”
“a great deal of documentary evidence,” “a great deal of evidence,” “the
vast preponderance of evidence,” etc., but he never actually explains what
evidence he is referring to.[44]

Apparently, he is simply referring to the well-known confessions and
interrogations of the condemned, because he takes pains to argue that just
because someone confessed does not mean he/she was innocent. Furr never
acknowledges that confessions, particularly when given under duress, are
pretty useless as historical evidence.

An example of the warring narratives occurs over the most sensational of
Khrushchev’s allegations, namely that the ninety-eight members and
candidates (70 percent) of the Party’s Central Committee elected at the
17th Congress and the majority of the delegates to the 17th Party Congress
who were “arrested and shot” were in fact innocent. Furr claims that “a
great deal of evidence” suggests that “a significant number” of these high
ranking Communists “appear to have been guilty after all.” A little later,
Furr strengthens his claim by asserting that “the vast preponderance of
evidence” points to their guilt. [45] Strong words, however, are no
substitute for proof. What is Furr’s evidence? Does he just mean the
confessions and interrogation reports? He refers to nothing else.

One is left with warring assertions: Khrushchev’s baseless claims of
innocence and Furr’s baseless claims of guilt. No doubt serious anti-Soviet
activity and plots existed. No doubt the repression took the lives of
countless innocents. But how great was the anti-Soviet activity and who was
guilty and who was innocent remain unresolved questions.

Still, these are extremely serious questions. The construction of the first
socialist society, the lifting of an illiterate, impoverished, oppressed
and backward people into an era of literacy, culture, material well-being
and atomic energy; the Soviet defeat of fascism, the Soviet role in the
Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions and in the liberation struggles
of the third world arguably make the Russian Revolution the most important
event of the twentieth century. Understanding that history, its failures
and its accomplishments, consequently has the utmost interest not only to
professional historians but to socialists and revolutionaries worldwide.

For this reason, some persistent writing and editing anomalies in Furr’s
book are particularly annoying. While the second edition has corrected the
most egregious errors of the first, the book still contains some
inconsistent spelling of Russian names, a lack of identification of
persons, and an uncommon amount of speculation, insinuation and
overstatement. The seriousness of the problems under discussion deserve
more care in the writing.

However glaring, the manifest weaknesses of Furr’s book should not obscure
the conclusion that Furr and other revisionist historians have driven a
stake into the reliability Khrushchev and historians like Conquest who
relied on Khrushchev.

If Khrushchev’s portrait of Stalin as an all-powerful, megalomaniacal,
paranoid and bloodthirsty tyrant was wrong, still what is one to make of
the Stalin in Furr’s dodgy portrait? One can hardly avoid concluding that
Furr views Stalin as a leader who was removed from, or even opposed to, the
mass repression occurring around him, a leader who sought individual and
educational remedies to those who sought to undermine or overthrow him, and
who was unfairly blamed for repression committed by others? This Stalin is
no more believable than Khrushchev’s.

Both portraits ignore a simple idea—that first and foremost, Stalin was a
revolutionary, and the repression of the 1930s must be understood in the
context of revolutionary violence.

The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the difficulty
that most Americans have in accepting revolutionary violence. In Listen,
Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, Mills wrote as if a Cuban revolutionary
were speaking to an American. In response to American outrage over the
pictures of the revolutionaries summarily executing five or six hundred
supporters of the dictator Batista without “a fair trial,” the Cuban says:

This was war. During the Batista regime, thousands of our people were
murdered….So what would you expect? Maybe in easy moral terms, no killing
is excusable….But however immoral the purposes and the results of killing
are quite different in different places and at different times. Because you
see it does matter who is getting killed and why. But whether you think so
or not, you certainly have no grounds for talking about injustice: Who gave
any trial to the people of Hiroshima? Well, this, too, was a war. Remember,
too, Yankee, that morals are easy to come by sitting in your quiet suburbs
away from it all protected from it all. Morals are easy to say out [sic]
when you’re rich and strong and all the unpleasantnesses of the world are
hidden from you—by distance, by amusements, by your own indifference, by
your own private way of life.[46]

Not much has changed. If anything, it requires an even greater stretch for
Americans today to imagine the strain on Soviet revolutionaries, who were
surrounded by hostile imperialist powers that actively plotted their
overthrow, faced with ambitious and unscrupulous internal foes that were
masters of political intrigue and convinced that they knew better than
Stalin how to lead the country. The Soviet leaders were confronted with the
daunting tasks of constructing a socialist society, collectivizing a
recalcitrant peasantry, industrializing at breakneck speed, all while
bracing for an inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany.

To empathize with these revolutionaries and to understand the repression of
the 1930s, one must do what Mills did, seek the voice of the Russian
revolutionaries of the 1930s. The two revolutionaries who provide the best
insight into Stalin and the repression were Lazar Kaganovitch and
Viacheslav Molotov. Both were veteran Bolsheviks, who played a variety of
crucial roles in building socialism and defeating German fascism. Both were
extremely close to Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. Both were demoted by
Stalin in the 1950s (Molotov’s wife was even imprisoned), but neither
turned against Stalin or the revolution. Both opposed Khrushchev, were
defeated by him and expelled from the Communist Party. Both lived long
lives. Molotov died in 1986 and Kaganovich died in 1991, and both left
behind memoirs that present remarkably similar views of Stalin and the
repression.

Before turning to what they had to say, it is important to remember that
just as the Cuban revolutionaries were shaped by the violence they had
experienced at the hands of Batista and his men, so Stalin and his
colleagues were shaped by the repression they had endured at the hands of
the tsar and the tsar’s secret police. In Stalin & Co.: The Politburo — The
Men Who Run Russia, Walter Duranty, a correspondent for the New York Times
in Moscow, put a fine edge on this point.

Duranty noted that the conflict in the Soviet Party after Lenin’s death
involved two camps, the “Western Exiles,” those like Trotsky, Kamenev and
Zinoviev, who had spent a considerable amount of time before the revolution
abroad, and the “Home Guard,” those like Stalin and his close associates
who had stayed a struggled at home. The latter had to endure spies,
provocateurs, arrests, imprisonment, torture, threats to family and
friends, conditions unknown to those in exile. The experience of struggle
under dire conditions made Stalin’s suspicious and hard as well as
contemptuous of those whose circumstances had been easier.[47] To
understand the ruthlessness displayed by Stalin and his associates in the
1930s, one must never forget the ruthlessness they had endured.

Kaganovich[48] and Molotov viewed Stalin and the repression, differently
than Furr does. I would paraphrase their views like this: The period from
1930 through the start of World War II constituted an extremely perilous
time for Soviet socialism. The danger was represented by a combination of
circumstances. The Soviet Union was surrounded by hostile imperialist
states and the inevitability of war increased with every passing year. To
survive the Soviet Union had to industrialize quickly and to obtain the
resources and manpower to do this, it had to quickly collectivize
agriculture. Industrialization and collectivization involved wrenching
social transformations that directly threatened the interests of some of
the people and demanded great sacrifice.

Those whose interests were threatened and whose conditions worsened
provided a base of opposition to these policies. These circumstances put
immense strains on the unity of the Communist Party and the Soviet
government. Some in the Party leadership and government opposed the
policies of industrialization and collectivization, and in some cases this
opposition developed into a determination to end these policies and
overthrow of the Soviet government even if that meant resorting to
assassination, industrial sabotage, inciting insurrection, and cooperating
with foreign governments. Even where opposition stopped short of such
extremes, it nevertheless meant an insupportable violation of unity and
democratic centralism.

Stalin showed patience with opposition for years, but after the
dissemination of the openly oppositional Riutin Platform, the assassination
of Party leader Kirov, and signs of industrial sabotage impeding growth,
Stalin reacted. He supported the appointment of Ezhov as head of the NKVD
and endorsed the repression under Ezhov, including the arrest and
punishment of Party leaders in the three Moscow Trials. Many excesses
occurred that in retrospect were regrettable: torture, forced confessions,
the railroading of innocent people.

Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and others viewed these measures not simply as
“terror” or “political repression,” but as a Party “purge,” that is
measures necessary to rid the Party not just of demonstrably treasonous,
criminal, and opposition elements but of all elements that were divisive
and unreliable because under the circumstances weakness, divisiveness, and
unreliability were tantamount to treason.

In this sense, even with their excesses, the purges were necessary to give
the Party and hence the nation a unified and resolute leadership with which
to prepare itself to wage a life-and-death war with fascism. If Stalin had
not had the foresight, the courage, and toughness to preside over these
purges (and to end them when they became became counterproductive), the
revolution and the country may not have survived the German invasion and
millions of more people would have suffered and died than actually did.

Both Kaganovich and Molotov regarded Stalin’s ruthlessness or hardness not
as a personal defect but as a quality that the times forged and demanded.
It was a steeliness for which Stalin was named. It was a quality necessary
and admired by true Bolsheviks. It had nothing at all to do with vainglory,
or power hunger, or paranoia. It did, however, become more and more
pronounced as Stalin experienced the betrayal of former colleagues in the
Party leadership.

Yet, his ruthlessness did not reflect a desire for personal power or for
the wealth or luxury or flattery or deference and the other trappings of
power. Rather, Stalin’s toughness, like his intellectual prowess, his hard
work, long hours, and modesty were traits totally in service of the Party
and the revolution. This more or less was the view of Kaganovich and
Molotov, two of Stalin’s closest associates, who lived through the hardest
times with him, and lived long enough to write memoirs.

Furr ends his account with some speculation on the reasons Khrushchev
engaged in his meretricious attacks on Stalin and Beria. He suggests four
possible explanations: that Khrushchev wanted to shift blame from “his own
role in the unjustified mass repressions of the 1930s,” that Khrushchev
wanted to take the USSR on a “sharply different” political course, that
Khrushchev wanted to gain an edge on his rivals in the leadership who had
been close to Stalin, and that Khrushchev wanted to stop the “democratic
reforms with which Stalin was associated.”[49]

All of these are plausible explanations, and they are not mutually
exclusive. Yet, the second of these is the most consequential. In the book,
Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Thomas Kenny
and I argue Khrushchev did take the Soviet Union on a new course
domestically in many ways that sowed the seeds of the collapse under
Gorbachev.[50] So, we hold no brief for Khrushchev.

Nonetheless, I would suggest that Furr neglects yet another reason for
Khrushchev’s behavior, namely, a desire to close the door decisively on the
period and practice of harsh and widespread political repression. And he
did. For all his limitations as a leader, when he expelled Malenkov,
Molotov and Kaganovich from the leadership and from the party, Khrushchev
understood that neither the times nor circumstances required their
imprisonment or execution.

Furr concludes his account on an utterly false note, namely by proposing
that Khrushchev’s ignominious lying can be traced to Lenin, Marx and
Engels. Thus, Furr goes from ignoring an obvious reason for Khrushchev’s
behavior to entertaining an incomprehensible reason. He ignores
Khrushchev’s undeniable contribution in ending the practice of mass
repression, but then suggests a trail of blame worthy of the most
hard-bitten Cold War ideologues. Just as they would fancifully trace the
repression and all other problems of the Soviet Union to Marx and Lenin, so
Furr would do the same with Khrushchev.

This is a troubling but fitting coda for a book that provides a much needed
but deeply flawed re-assessment of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the
totalitarian paradigm the speech did so much to foster.

November 23, 2011

 Endnotes 1. Stuart Kahan, The World of the Kremlin: The First
Biography of L. M. Kaganovich, The Soviet Union’s Architect of Fear (New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1987). 2. “Statement of the
Kaganovich Family,” http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org and
http://.oocities.org/capitolhill/embassy/7213/kagan.html (accessed July
2011). 3. Christopher Read, “Main Currents of Interpretation of
Stalin and the Stalin Years,” in Christopher Read, ed., The Stalin Years a
Reader (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire, England: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2002), 9. 4. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What
is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1937). 5. Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951). 6. J. Arch Getty and
Roberta T. Manning, “Introduction,” Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives
(Cambridge, England and New York, New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 4. 7. Getty and Manning, 10-13. 8. J. Arch Getty and
Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the
Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999),
591. 9. See essays by Hoffman, Manning, Fitzpatrick, Nove, and
Weathcroft in Getty and Manning, and Wendy Goldman, Terror and Democracy in
the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. Getty and Naumov,
52-68. 11. See for example essays by Davies and Harris in Sarah
Davies and James Harris, eds., Stalin: A New History (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12. Grover Furr, Khrushchev
Lied: The Evidence that Every “Revelation: of Stalin’s (and Beria’s)
“Crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956 is
Provably False (Kettering, Ohio: Erythros Press and Media, 2011). 13.
For an example of the immediate impact of the speech on western Communist
Parties, see The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A
Selection of Documents Edited by the Russian Institute of Columbia
University (New York: Columbia University, 1956). 14. Domenico
Losurdo, “History of the Communist Movement: Failure, Betrayal or Learning
Process,” Nature, Society and Thought vol. 16, no. 1 (2003), 41. 15.
Furr, 141. 16. Dmitrii Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar: A Memoir of
Soviet Politics under Stalin and Khrushchev (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), 72. 17. See for example, “List of places
named after Joseph Stalin,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wike/List_of_places_after_Joseph_Stalin (accessed
July 2001). 18. Furr, 11-20. 19. Furr, 95. 20. Khrushchev
quoted by Furr, 22, 41-42, 43-44, 73 21. Shepilov, 71. 22.
Boris A. Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov,” in Getty and Manning, 36-38. 23.
Shepilov, 41. 24. Furr, 143. 25. Robert Conquest, The Great
Terror: A Reassessment (New York and Oxford: Oxford Universuty Press,
1990), 479. 26. Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest
Mystery (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999). 27. Matthew Lenoe, “Key to the
Kirov Murder on the Shelves of Hokkaido University Library,” Slavic
Research Center News No. 3 (February, 2006),
http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/eng/news/no13/enews13-essay3.html (accessed
July 2011). 28. Matthew E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 29. Khrushchev quoted by
Furr, 35 and 79. 30. Khrushchev quoted by Furr, 42. 31. Furr,
42. 32. Furr, 43. 33. Furr, 43-44. 34. Albert Resis, ed.
Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics Conversations with Felix Chuev
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 259. 35. Furr, 44. 36. Furr,
45. 37. Resis, 258. 38. Resis, 263. 39. Getty and Naumov,
25. 40. Furr, 330-331. 41. Furr, 30. 42. Stalin in Furr,
262. 43. Getty and Naumov, 62-64. 44. Furr, 26, 29, 30, 37,
39. 45. Furr, 37, 39. 46. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The
Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 51. 47.
William Duranty, Stalin & Co.: The Politburo—The Men Who Run Russia (New
York: William Sloane Associates, 1949), 18-19. 48. See for example:
“Thus Spake Kaganovich,”
http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/embassy/7213/kaganovich.html (accessed
July 2011). 49. Furr, 197-199. 50. Roger Keeran and Thomas
Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New
York: International Publishers, 2004). .

reminder - DCTU Demo

2011-11-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

IMF endorses Stiglitz!

2011-11-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

Long-term IMF-watchers may be interested in this fascinating IMF web-post, on a conference on management of the financial crisis in Iceland. In it, the Fund implicitly endorses former IFI arch-nemesis Joe Stiglitz, as well as capital controls (for now), and a government refusal to allow tax payers to bail out private banks. It lists the three lessons from Iceland as being: real country ownership makes for stronger recovery; a heterodox policy approach helps; and it’s important to protect the welfare state during crisis.

More: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2011/CAR110311A.htm

check it out

Latest IPSC events

2011-11-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Dear all,

This is going to be a busy time for Palestine solidarity work in the Dublin area - please see below for a list of events coming up in the next month or so. We would appreciate it if you could forward or otherwise publicise these events to those who may be interested. In addition, there are two important events taking place during the coming week - a series of protests outside the Israeli Embassy sponsored "Israeli Film Days" in Filmbase (Thur 24 - Sun 27), and a report back from the Irish Ship To Gaza crew (Thur 24). We will also be marking ten years of the IPSC on Tuesday 29th November, and our ever popular Fundraising Christmas Dinner will take place on Saturday 10th December. Full details for all events are at the links below.

Upcoming IPSC and related events

1. [Dublin] Nov 24-27: Protest the Israeli Embassy "Film Days” at Filmbase
Thu, 24 November 2011, 5:30PM - Sun, 27 November 2011
(FilmBase, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2)

2. [Dublin] Public Meeting: The Hijacking of the MV Saoirse and the Siege of Gaza
Thu, 24 November 2011, 8:00PM
(Wynn's Hotel, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin 1)

3. [Dublin] Boycott Israeli Blood Diamonds stall
Sat, 26 November, 11:00AM
(Grafton Street, Dublin 2)

*

4. [Dublin] On International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People, the IPSC marks its 10th Anniversary
Tue, 29 November 2011, 7:30PM
(The Pearse Centre (aka Ireland Institute), 27 Pearse Street, Dublin 2)

5. [Dublin] IPSC Dublin Branch Meeting
Thu, 1 December 2011, 7:30PM
(The Central Hotel, Exchequer St, Dublin 2)

6. [Dublin] Film Premiere: How we can solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem by Sami Moukaddem
Tue, 6 December 2011, 7:15PM
(The Pearse Centre (aka Ireland Institute), 27 Pearse Street, Dublin 2)

7. [Dublin] IPSC Annual Christmas Fundraising Dinner 2011
Sat, 10 December 2011, 2:00PM
(The Silk Road Cafe, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle, Dublin 2)

65 Years of anti-imperialist struggle!

2011-11-19T00:57:00.000-08:00

WFDY Exhibition

2011-11-19T00:46:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Budapest!

In the link below you can find the exhibition of the 65 years of WFDY. We ask you to share it and promote it within the framework of the efforts to inform all the youth of the world about what is WFDY.

http://www.wfdy.org/2011/11/18/exhibition-on-the-65-years-of-life-and-struggle-of-wfdy/

WORLD FEDERATION OF DEMOCRATIC YOUTH
1389 Budapest P.O.B. 147, XIII Frangepan u. 16, Hungary
Tel./Fax: + 361 3502202 / 3501204
E-mail: wfdy@wfdy.org
Web: www.wfdy.org
WFDY is an International NGO.
It has consultative status with the United Nations (ECOSOC) and operational
relation with UNESCO.
Presented a Peace Messenger award by UN Secretary General in 1987

Who runs Ireland?

2011-11-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRELAND

Press Release: Who runs Ireland?

17 November

The revelation that documents relating to the forthcoming budget were found today (17
November) in the German Bundestag, with German politicians poring over their contents,
while neither Dáil Éireann nor, most importantly, the Irish people have seen or read
what is in store for them, is almost beyond belief.

The opinions of the Irish people count for little, for it is now clear that what
Germany wants, Merkel gets, and the Irish people will pay the price. It seems clear
that Enda Kenny delivered these documents by hand on his recent visit to Berlin.

Working people and their families are being made to pay for a debt that is not
theirs, but they are also now paying with democracy being shredded to keep German
and French banks afloat.

Democracy is now in grave danger, with events in Greece, Italy and now Ireland
exposing the real power at the heart of the European Union. We have seen two virtual
coups d’état, in Greece and Italy, and the removal of two complete governments, to
be replaced in Italy by a government made up of “technocrats,” representatives only
of business, and in Greece by a government not elected by the people.

Democracy is being set aside in the interests and for the needs of European monopoly
big-business interests. The will and opinions of the peoples within the European
Union are now being pushed aside, and great dangers now face all democrats.

Anti communism in Spain

2011-11-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

Dear comrades:

Once again, from CJC (Collectives of Young Communists) Spain we write you with the occasion of our anti-repressive campaing, looking for international solidarity with the three comrades from our organisation and our party (Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain) who are in a trial for false proves of the police.

We send the report where the case is explained. The trial will be the 1 of December. Until that day, in Spain, all the comrades will struggle to denounce this case of represion and to make pressure against the goverment to let free our comrades.

This case is the most obvious expresion in Spain of the worldwide anti-communist campaing, that the capitalism needs to criminalize our ideas, and put in prision our militants, we ask you to send your solidarity with our comrades, and to publish the case in your countries.

Send the information of your acts or statements of solidarity to those mails before the first of december:

internacional@cjc.es

cjc@cjc.es

(please the both e-mails)

Comrades the international solidarity is our best weapon against the represion of the capitalist state in any country.

Together we will have succes and our comrades will be free!

No pasaran!

Revolutionary greetings from Spain!

Trade Union Left Forum

2011-11-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

Comrades

The Trade Union Left Forum now has an e-mail address:

tuleftforum@gmail.com

JCP Speech from WFDY Assembly, Lisbon

2011-11-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Comrades and friends,

Speech by Diogo D’Ávila, member of Secretariat and the Political Bureau of the National Leadership of JCP

On behalf of the National Leadership of JCP, I salute everyone present in this rally! It is proof that even with the arrival of Autumn, with rain and naked trees, with cold and gray days, the youth is present! To all who have come from all parts of the country, to all friends and guests who were willing to participate in this initiative we say: No cold, no rain and no gray days can make us stop the struggle for Spring!

We salute the international delegates in the 18^th Assembly of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, coming from Angola, Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bhutan, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Cuba, Czech Republic, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Great-Britain, Greece, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mauritania, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Palestine, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Syria, Sweden, Tanzania, Turkey, United States of America, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Western Sahara, and Zimbabwe. All of them have contributed to make this Assembly in a great success, coming out of it with more strength and tools to combat imperialism and transform the world in each of their countries. We salute the elected organization for WFDYs leadership, particularly the comrades of UJC Cuba that assume the General-Secretary and the comrades of EDON Cyprus that assume the Presidency. We wish all the continuation of good work, and we are certain that the Assembly has given a great step to, as it is stated on the Assembly's motto: Reinforce WFDY, Intensify the anti-imperialist struggle, for a world of peace, solidarity and revolutionary social transformation!"

The 18th WFDY Assembly is the final moment of eight years of presidency, which we assumed with great honor. By hosting this Assembly in Portugal, we are also willing to reaffirm our total commitment to the continuity of WFDY's work and with Anti-Imperialist struggle. We believe that the best contribute we can give to the development of WFDY's work and progress is: the mobilization of portuguese youth for the struggle against right-winged policies and for the materialization of their rights here in Portugal; the solidarity with all the struggling youth as well as the participation and development of WFDY activities.

In a moment when the danger of new imperialist aggressions rises, when all around the world war, hunger and right withdrawal is spread, but also in a moment when resistance and struggle increases, we find in WFDY the greatest most important space to exchange experiences and to articulate and stimulate youth resistance and struggle in each country.

Comrades,

Last Thursday we celebrated the 32 years of Portuguese Communist Youth. Since the unification between the Communist Students Union and the Communist Youth Union, JCP assumes itself as The Revolutionary Organization of the Portuguese Youth. We are Revolutionary because we are deeply aware and we acknowledge youth problems today, because we are the only ones who are truly willing to do anything to solve these problems, because the basis of our intervention is Marxism-Leninism, which allows us to define the struggle aims according to the historical moment that we are living. We are Revolutionary because we are proud that every day we stimulate, mobilize, and encourage struggle, bringing more and more friends, organizing them and showing the way. But above all we are Revolutionary because we know we are not alone, because we put all our trust in the Portuguese Youth, sure that it will assume the struggle against right-winged policies and the imposition of a patriotic and and left-winged policy as its own.

From here, we call upon the portuguese youth to organize and intensify struggle! A struggle that is increasingly difficult as increasingly strong the attacks from the government are: by PSD / CDS – PP, with support from PS and the President of the Republic.

From education to work, from housing to health and culture, we witness an unprecedented attack to our rights, that in many ways reminds us of times past. It happens in José Afonso High School in Seixal, where students cannot take food inside the school. It happens in the University of Minho, where, while having fees of thousands of euros, students are forbidden to demonstrate. It happens in the ZON call center in Porto, where over 90% of workers have a precarious labour link even though they perform a permanent job. This is an attack that brings us the darkest days the most part of us here present have ever witnessed and that in any way has a solution for the problems of our country: it takes it from the frying pan into the fryer. An attack that has in workers and youth its major enemies, while great company holders and great bank owners are getting richer, while the successive governments (PSD, CDS – PP e PS) are totally submitted to the interests of imperialism. They opened the doors of our economy to the IMF and the European Union, they happily host NATO summits (our country being a founding member during fascist times) and they actively participate in their military aggressions to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

From here we state our solidarity with the General Strike next 24th November, called by CGTP-IN, as well as the National Superior and High school students' struggles, on 22 and 29 November, respectively. We also value the hundreds of struggle initiatives that took place in the let week of October, as well as the great demonstration of the Public Administration workers that took place here in Lisbon today and where 180,000 workers, many of which young workers, participated.

This is the only way to defeat the aggression pact designed by the portuguese and the foreign Troika, and this will be the only way to defeat imperialism.

It is possible to defeat these policies, it is possible to build an alternative, it is possible and necessary to hold back this path! Let us end with strength, determination and the trust in portuguese youth, to take in our hands the destiny of our lives!

Long live the World Federation of Democratic Youth!

Long live the Portuguese Communist Youth!

Long live the Portuguese Communist Party!

On the death in action of Alfonso Cano

2011-11-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

On the death in action of Alfonso Cano

Sobre la muerte en acción de Alfonso Cano

Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland

12 November 2011

The death in action of Alfonso Cano is a severe blow to the aspirations of the Colombian people for social justice and peaceful development, which have long been frustrated by the Colombian state and its backer, US imperialism.

For over sixty years Colombia has suffered the violent repression of state and paramilitary forces. Many times a peaceful way forward was sought, only to find that the Colombian oligarchy and the US imperialists fear peace and profit from war.

The threat of a peaceful settlement always brings a military response. Civilian politicians and other public figures involved in the search for peace also face state repression and threats from paramilitary death squads.

The massive military operation with the aim of killing Alfonso Cano, mounted with the aid of the latest technology from the United States, exposes the brutality of the Santos government and the hollowness of his fine words.

At the same time the state and paramilitary forces continue with their murderous repression of the peaceful struggle of the indigenous peoples, of the peasants whom they are driving from their land, of the workers organised in trade unions, of the students.

The Communist Party of Ireland pledges its continuing solidarity with the Colombian people in their struggle for a peaceful way forward, for social justice, for national liberation, and for socialism.

November SV Out Now!

2011-11-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

November Issue of Socialist Voice

OUT NOW

http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/sv/SV-83.pdf

Check it out

Political Statement CPI

2011-11-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRELAND

James Connolly House, 43 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

12 November 2011

At an extended meeting of the National Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland, on Saturday 12th November, communists from around the country gathered to discuss the deepening crisis of the system and its impact on the people, north and south.
The meeting reaffirmed the party’s view that the present crisis is part of the systemic crisis of the monopoly capitalist system, a system with a built-in cycle of boom and slump. The crisis has been made deeper and more contradictory by the dominance of finance capital, throwing forth new features in this crisis that are making it deeper and more complex, and more difficult for ruling-class forces to solve.

The continuing and growing pre-eminence of finance capital, coupled with the stagnation in manufacturing industry, has created deeper contradictions at the very heart of the system, as each attempted solution creates new problems and exposes further weaknesses.

The complete lack of any coherent strategy on the part of the political leaders of monopoly capitalism at the recent G20 summit meeting in relation to the global systemic crisis shows that they have few, if any, answers. The continuing and deepening crisis within the European Union, centred on the euro and debt, and the imposition of socialised corporate debt on working people, appears to be their only answer.

The virtual coup d’état by German monopoly capital has secured the ousting of two already compliant governments, replacing them with even more compliant governments headed by technocrats: the former vice-president of the European Central Bank, Lukas Papademos, in Greece and the former EU commissioner Mario Monti in Italy. These individuals’ loyalties are to the ECB and European monopoly capital rather than to the citizens of their countries.
This development has exposed one of the many falsehoods that have been constructed, that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The setting aside of their democratic processes has opened up a new field in the struggle against the European Union and reaffirms the long-held view of Irish communists regarding the anti-democratic nature, values and strategy at the core of the EU integration process.

The assaults on the democratic will of the Greek and Italian people are among the first public manifestations and a real expression of the EU corporatist state now under construction. The reality that bourgeois democracy will be truncated to meet the needs of capital when in crisis is becoming more open and visible.

The solutions presented by the EU and by the Irish and British governments are for rescuing capitalism as a system, attacking the trade union movement and rolling back the advances made by the working class during the twentieth century. The ruling class want their austerity measures to be permanent and irreversible.

The drive for privatisation is to narrow the influence and role of public capital and to open up new investment opportunities for a stagnant global economy in the interest of private corporate capital.

This is a struggle that is both national and international, linking up with the growing struggles of workers throughout the European Union and globally. The defeat of this strategy requires a resolute response from all workers’ organisations and democratic forces. Workers must not only struggle to defend the economic and social gains made in the twentieth century but must now also be the defenders of democracy and national independence.

The CPI restates its view that there is no fairer or better capitalism to be resurrected or built from this crisis but rather that it is in resisting the assault of capital that new forces can be drawn into the resistance and into the struggle for a new, socialist Ireland.

The anarchy, avarice, exploitation, individualism, selfishness, consumer-fetishism and destruction of the global environment can be overcome only by working-class forces leading the struggle for socially planned economic, social and cultural development, nationally and globally. We need a greater role for working people in all aspects of life—economic, political, social, and cultural.

We call for support for the strike called for Northern Ireland on 30 November and express our solidarity with British workers, who will also be on strike on the same day. Workers in the Republic should come out and support the pre-budget demonstration called by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions on 26 November as well as the protest called by community organisations for 3 December.

The policies being imposed by the Irish Government, in alliance with the “troika,” have to be resisted. We need to bring real and meaningful power into the hands of the people. This will come about only from a radical realignment of Irish politics and the sweeping away of the moribund economic and political structures that are now incapable of meeting the needs of our people.

We call on left and progressive forces to demand:

(1) a referendum on the socialised corporate debt;
(2) resistance to the privatisation of public companies and services; and
(3) the building of an alternative economic and social strategy that includes
—a break with the euro,
—the establishment of controls on capital,
—an all-Ireland economic and social strategy,
—greater regulation and control of essential areas of the economy,
—democratic planning and accountability, and
—the nationalisation of all natural resources.

New report RMF

2011-11-13T01:36:00.000-08:00

New report out from Research on Money and Finance

Breaking Up? A route out of the eurozone crisis

Check it out...

http://issuu.com/bits_n_bytes/docs/final_rmf3/1

Pre Budget Demo - DCTU

2011-11-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

The Dublin Council of Trades Unions is calling a pre-budget
demonstration in Dublin on Saturday 26th November 2011. We are anxious
that it be an inclusive effort which unites the trade unions,
community organisations and campaigns against cutbacks.

The demonstration will promote three simple demands

Stop the policy of austerity – reverse the cuts.
 
Tax the wealthy not the needy.
 
For a public investment programme to create jobs.

Already a broad range of organisations, including the Irish Congress
of Trade Unions and individual unions and community groups, have
supported the march. We invite you and your organisation to
assemble with your banners and placards at 12 noon on Saturday 26th
November at the Garden Of Remembrance, Parnell Square, Dublin.

Please find a leaflet/flyer attached for more information. WE WOULD BE
OBLIGED IF YOU CIRCULATED IT THROUGH YOUR INTERNAL EMAIL LISTS to your
Branches and members. Some hard copies will also be available.

If you would like more information or to help organise for Saturday
26th please contact:

087 2101370 or dctuforum@gmail.com or the address below.

Regards,

Phil McFadden, President
Mick O'Reilly, Vice President
Sam Nolan, Secretary

Dublin Council of Trade Unions
Mandela House
44, Lower Gardiner Street,
Dublin, 1

Latest People's News

2011-11-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

Latest from the People's Movement

http://www.people.ie/news/PN-58.pdf

Following the finalisation of the euro “rescue deal” announced by EU leaders, the People’s Movement calls on the Government to demand that Ireland be treated on an equal basis to Greece, and demands that the EU open immediate negotiations with representatives of the banking sector—the Institute of International Finance—in order to achieve this objective.

Global Research On Greece

2011-11-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

Greek Prime Minister Forced Out in Euro Crisis Deal

by Patrick Martin

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou agreed to resign Sunday and be replaced by a coalition government of national unity that will have a mandate from the bankers and European heads of state to impose even more drastic austerity measures on the working people of Greece.

Papandreou held what a spokesman said was his last cabinet meeting as leader of the social democratic PASOK party before entering a protracted meeting with President Karolos Papoulias and Antonis Samaras, leader of the opposition right-wing New Democracy party.

The talks faced a double deadline Monday—the opening of the financial markets in Europe, hit by huge sell-offs last week over the Greek crisis, and a meeting of European Union finance ministers in Brussels. The Greek delegate to that meeting, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos, was expected to confirm the formation of a new government committed to carrying out the terms of the EU agreement reached October 26 on a restructuring of Greece’s debt.

Press reports from Athens indicated that beyond the ouster of Papandreou, demanded by Samaras as the price of his party’s support, there was no agreement on the composition of the new government or who would lead it. Talks will continue Monday, again chaired by the elderly Papoulias.

PASOK retains a narrow majority in parliament, demonstrated in the 153-145 vote of confidence won by Papandreou in the early hours of Saturday morning. The next prime minister could thus be another PASOK leader, most likely Venizelos, or a “nonparty” caretaker, such as Loukas Papademos, the former vice president of the European Central Bank, Greece’s largest single creditor.

New Democracy has abandoned its posture of opposition to the austerity policies of PASOK, which was aimed solely at undermining and ultimately bringing down the Papandreou government. The conservative party has close ties with co-thinkers like the Christian Democrats of Angela Merkel in Germany and the French UMP of Nicolas Sarkozy, the two leaders most active in the imposition of savage budget cuts on Greece.

As part of the deal with PASOK, New Democracy has now agreed to ratification of the terms of the austerity deal with the European Union, once the final technical details are ironed out, by a deadline of December 15, the date when the Greek government will run out of money to pay obligations like state employee salaries and pensions and interest on government bonds.

Papandreou is the third government leader this year to become a casualty of the euro crisis, but unlikely to be the last.

In February, the Fianna Fail-Green coalition in Ireland was wiped out in a general election, replaced by a coalition of the right-wing Fine Gael and the Labour Party.

In June, the ruling Socialist Party in Portugal was routed in general elections by the right-wing Social Democrats.

The ruling social democratic PSOE in Spain is expected to lose heavily in the general election set for November 20, and Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero stepped down as PSOE leader long before the vote, announcing he would not seek reelection.

In Italy, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faces another vote of confidence in parliament Tuesday, on a budget bill, which he is widely expected to lose.

If the Berlusconi government falls, which would precipitate early elections, it would complete a sweep of all five governments of the so-called PIIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain—that were viewed at the beginning of this year as the most likely candidates for financial crisis and bankruptcy.

Berlusconi was compelled to accept supervision of the Italian economy by the International Monetary Fund in intensive discussions at the G-20 summit in Cannes November 3-4. This effort to forestall an immediate collapse of confidence in European financial markets may instead precipitate it, since any serious outside review of Italy’s books is likely to find the financial crisis is much worse than currently admitted.

In Greece, the political crisis takes the form of a de facto takeover of the government by the EU and its emissaries. EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told Reuters that the European powers backed the change in government in Athens. “We have called for a national unity government and remain persuaded that it is the convincing way of restoring confidence and meeting the commitments,” he said.

He added that the proposal announced last Monday by Papandreou for a popular referendum in Greece on the austerity measures dictated by the EU and the IMF amounted to “a breach of confidence by Greece” that would “lead it outside the euro zone.” Rehn continued, “We do not want that, but we must be prepared for every scenario, including that one, for the sake of safeguarding financial stability and saving the euro.”

Papandreou sprang the referendum proposal in order to call the bluff of New Democracy on the one hand and the Greek trade unions and their pseudo-left allies on the other and to force them to drop their professed opposition to the austerity measures, which are fiercely opposed by the broad mass of the Greek people. After being summoned to France by Sarkozy and Merkel on the eve of the G20 summit and threatened with expulsion from the euro zone and a cutoff of funds, Papandreou dropped the referendum proposal, but not before New Democracy agreed to back the EU-IMF austerity plan.

According to some European press reports, Venizelos has the backing of the major EU powers, particularly Germany, because of his role in scuttling Papandreou’s call for a referendum. After Papandreou’s meeting with Merkel and Sarkozy, Venizelos came out publicly against the referendum and was widely lauded in the European media as a result.

Venizelos is a long-time political rival of Papandreou, dating back to their contest for the PASOK leadership in 2007, while the party was in opposition. He served as defense minister before Papandreou named him finance minister this summer, seeking to ensure support of all factions of PASOK for acceding to the austerity demands of the EU.

This connection to the military raises many questions in the wake of Papandreou’s firing of the entire top general staff last week, at the same time as he advanced the proposal for a referendum. Papandreou replaced the heads of the army, navy, air force and joint chiefs of staff, who were all appointed by the previous New Democracy government, but had worked with Venizelos as defense minister.

The purge of the top generals in the midst of a full-scale government crisis had the appearance of a preemptive effort to forestall military intervention. It was widely reported as such in the European media, but the American press has been virtually silent about it. This alone indicates that the US government is playing a critical but largely behind-the-scenes role in the Greek events, which the US corporate-controlled media loyally covers up.

Whatever the outcome of the political maneuvers in Athens, the Greek working class has already paid an enormous price. According to a report by Inter Press Service (IPS), the measures already implemented have given birth to a “new poor” in Athens, with wide layers of the population, once accustomed to regular employment and adequate living standards, now plunged into destitution.

The report published November 1 cited the emergence of homelessness on a mass scale in the Greek capital, as well as a proliferation of aid clinics and feeding stations familiar in third-world war zones, but not seen in the European Union in many decades.

This includes a medical facility for the homeless, run by Doctors of the World, and a volunteer clinic in Perama, a working class district of Athens once home to longshoremen and shipbuilding workers, most of whom are now laid off.

Nikitas Kanakis, with Doctors of the World, told IPS, “Out of the 40 kids our pediatrician examined two weeks ago, 23 were malnourished. Some years ago we thought that this country had moved past the point where a lack of food was a prominent social issue. Now we are making public appeals for supplies so that we can provide those in need with dry rations and clothing along with our medicines.”

The Athens Center for the Homeless reports a 30 percent increase in people seeking food since the beginning of 2011. Together with church facilities and other agencies, charities distribute 12,000 meals a day to the hungry in Athens alone.

There are also reports of a significant increase in drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases and other social problems that are the direct consequence of poverty and mass unemployment. Suicides have increased by as much as 40 percent, according to the Greek minister for health.

Patrick Martin is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Wealth Distribution Pyramid

2011-11-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

While 0.5% of the worlds population have over 1 million dollars 68.4% have less than 10,000 dollars.

Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook

Freedom Waves

2011-11-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

Emergency Demonstration
Support the Freedom Waves ships to Gaza
End the Siege of Gaza

Friday 4th November
6pm, The Spire
O'Connell Street
Dublin 1

At 7.30pm tonight (Thursday) the Irish Ship To Gaza shore team were informed that Israeli warships were seen 6 miles from the Irish (MV Saoirse) and Canadian (Tahrir) ships attempting to break the siege of Gaza. The ships are currently in international waters around 200 miles from Gaza. Israeli spotter planes were also observed flying overhead according to Fintan Lane, who is on board the Irish ship Saoirse. Crew and passengers on the boats fear being boarded tonight.

The Irish Ship To Gaza campaign calls on people to mobilise to call for an end to the illegal Israeli siege of Gaza and to support the #FreedomWaves ships by attending this demo tomorrow at 6pm at the Spire in O'Connell Street Dublin 1.

Organised by the Irish Ship To Gaza campaign - http://www.irishshiptogaza.org/

Please also send a message to TDs calling for support for the #FreedomWaves - Email Campaign to Protect Irish and International Citizens Sailing to Gaza

Web: http://www.ipsc.ie/event/dublin-emergency-demo-in-support-of-freedomwaves-end-the-siege-of-gaza
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=286858534667867&context=create
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ipsc48/status/132192757455400961

KKE: Elections Now!!!

2011-11-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

No to the blackmail of the people with the referendum

Down with the government

Elections now

The government yesterday carried out the most naked and open blackmail and ideological intimidation against the people, in relation to the agreement for the management of the state debt, by announcing a referendum. At the same time the government of PASOK requested a vote of confidence from the Parliament.

The Press Office of the CC of the KKE made the following statement:

“Down with the government. Elections now. No to the naked blackmail and ideological intimidation against the people. The blackmail will not succeed. The announcement of the Prime Minister concerning the referendum means that a vast mechanism to coerce the people is being set up, through which the government and the EU will use every means, threats, provocations in order to subdue the working class and the popular strata, to snatch a yes for the new agreement.

The referendum is going to be carried out with a new reactionary law, lumping together the positions of the KKE with that of ND and the other parties, despite the fact that they are diametrically opposed, while the strategy of the government is identified with the strategy of ND, LAOS and their other stooges. Elections now. The working class and the popular strata must impose them and welcome them with mass mobilizations all over the country. With their activity and vote they must strike hard against the bourgeois political system, to pave the way for the overthrow of the anti-people political line, the power of the monopolies.”

latest from MR

2011-11-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

The below is the editorial from this months edition of Monthly Review.

It is a sign of the seriousness of the current economic malaise that more and more establishment commentators today are turning to Marx for answers. Thus a September 14, 2011, article in Bloomberg Businessweek, entitled “Marx to Market,” acknowledged:

The Bearded One has rarely looked better. The current global financial crisis has given rise to a new contingent of unlikely admirers. In 2009 the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an article praising Marx’s diagnosis of income inequality…. In Shanghai, the turbo-capitalist hub of Communist-in-name-alone China, audiences flocked to a 2010 musical based on Capital, Marx’s most famous work. In Japan, Capital is now out in a manga version…. As misguided as Marx was about many things…there are pieces of his (voluminous) writings that are shockingly perceptive. …. Marx has gotten an attentive reading recently from the likes of New York University economist Nouriel Roubini and George Magnus, the London-based senior economic adviser to UBS Investment Bank…. In an Aug. 28 essay for Bloomberg View, Magnus wrote that “today’s global economy bears some uncanny resemblances” to what Marx foresaw….

Consider the particulars. As Magnus notes, Marx predicted that companies would need fewer workers as they improved productivity, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed whose existence would keep downward pressure on wages for the employed…. It’s hard to argue with that these days…. The condition of blue collar workers in the U.S. is still a far cry from the subsistence wage and ‘accumulation of misery’ that Marx conjured. But it’s not morning in America, either. (http://businessweek.com)

Bloomberg Businessweek seems unaware that Marx viewed the reserve army of labor as applicable not just to developed countries like the United States, but also to labor throughout the globe. It is this question of the global reserve army that is addressed in the Review of the Month in this issue. Not only do we find that a majority of the world’s workforce today is living at close to subsistence level, due to the enormous downward pressure exerted by the massive global reserve army of labor, holding down wages, but it also remains true, as Marx wrote in Capital, that “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

During the weekend of September 9–11, Fred Magdoff was in Ireland to participate in the Desmond Greaves School, an annual event. In addition to a talk on the economic crisis in the United States, Fred also participated in a Sunday panel discussion about where capitalism is headed. He met with people in the labor movement, a variety of socialists, and members of the Communist Party of Ireland. One of the organizers of the event, in thanking Fred, wrote the following: “We regard [Monthly Review] as one of the most important sources of Marxist theory and analysis about contemporary capitalism. The concepts of imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and financialisation are not in wide use here, so Monthly Review is vital to our efforts to understand what is happening in the economy and society. Without these concepts and this analysis, it is impossible to understand the crisis or think about where we are going and what we should be doing.” We hope at MR that this new connection with Irish socialists is only just a start, in what will be a continuing relationship.

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/11/01/november-2011-volume-63-number-6

Unsecured bondholders paid!

2011-11-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Stop bankrupting the Irish people!

2011-11-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

1 November 2011

Stop bankrupting the Irish people!

The decision of the present Government to continue to pay all the debts incurred by the Irish banks that the previous Government socialised is a scandal beyond belief.

While in opposition the then opposition parties, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, rightly criticised the Government for paying unsecured bond-holders, as it was hurting the old, the sick, children, and those depending on social welfare.

Yet over the next day or so they will hand over $1 billion to unsecured bond-holders. These secondary bond-holders—“ground feeders”—have purchased these bonds at a small fraction of their value and will now receive in payment the full amount outstanding.

This is a sum that could build and fit out the new children’s hospital. It would also go a long way towards developing our natural resources under public ownership and control.

This transfer of wealth from the people to banking corporations and individuals must end now.

The people must be given the same right as the people of Greece. We demand a referendum on the bank bail-out!

Repudiate the debt campaign

We demand referendum on bank bailout

2011-11-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

31st October 2011

We demand referendum on bank bailout

Let the people have their say

It is now time for the Irish Government to follow the example of the Government of Greece and call a referendum on the bank bailout. A decision that has plunged our country into decades of debt. This odious debt is not the responsibility of the people and is simply unpayable and is causing extreme hardship among our people and will inflict great suffering for decades to come.

The decisions of the EU over the last number of years have lead to a permanent debt structured relationship between the peripheral member states and the centre, and a permanent transfer of wealth from the peoples to financial corporations.

We have to end this transfer of this wealth from the people to private banks and parasitic bond holders. The Irish people must be allowed to have a vote, as they are the ones being forced to pay a debt not of their making.

Repudiate the debt campaign

www.nodebt.ie

Repudiate the debt protest

2011-10-30T02:24:00.000-07:00

The Repudiate the Debt Campaign will be holding a lunchtime protest, 12:45 to 2 p.m., on Tuesday 1 November outside the Department of Finance in Upper Merrion Street to protest against the handing over of €700,000,000 of the Irish people’s money to unguaranteed and unsecured bond-holders.

We consider this a transfer of wealth from the pockets and wage packets of Irish working people, the sick, unemployed, pensioners, and children.

This demonstration will be part of a national day of protest around the country to highlight this robbery of the people’s wealth. Organise your own event: mount your own protest in the main street of your village,town, or city. Contact your local radio stations to draw attention to

this affront to democracy.

Don't leave it up to others, or just sit back and complain. Every voice counts; every placard raised is an act of saying No to this robbery of our people.

No party-political banners or flags.

Tuesday 1 November

Department of Finance (Merrion Street, Upper)

12:45 to 2 p.m.

THE BILLION-DOLLAR HEIST – FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

2011-10-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

THE BILLION-DOLLAR HEIST – FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

On November 2^nd 2011, next Wednesday, a $1,000,000,000 bond comes due at Anglo Irish Bank. This bond is unsecured, unguaranteed, a bond we have absolutely no obligation to pay, from a bank described by Minister Michael Noonan in an RTE interview only last June in the following terms: “Look, it's no longer a bank. Anglo is now merged with Irish Nationwide. It's a warehouse for impaired assets. Its deposit base has been moved out into the pillar banks. And it doesn't work as a bank anymore. You can't put your money on deposit in Anglo Irish. You can't get a loan from Anglo Irish. So the only thing that gives it the name of a bank is because it has a banking license. It needs the banking license to access the monies from the Central Bank. So I said that as far as I am concerned, this is not a real bank. This is a warehouse, and we need your assistance in dealing with the senior bond holders because we don't think the Irish taxpayer should have to redeem what has become speculative investment.” (Thanks to the Namawinelake blog - the most reliable source of otherwise hidden information - for this quote).

On November 1^st, 2011, next Tuesday, at 12 noon, I am asking for a nationwide protest against the payment of this bond. 34 weeks we’ve been marching in Ballyhea and now in Charleville against the payment of these bonds, bonds that come due on an almost weekly basis, 34 weeks in which we’ve been almost on our own in protest against this massive injustice being visited on the Irish people. This one time, at noon on this one day and for just half an hour of your time, can you join us? Wherever you are, at work or at play, can you just stop, down tools, get together with your workmates, your family, your friends, your fellow parishioners, and protest this new order, where bondholders are bailed out while people are burned?

It used to be that at noon the bells tolled throughout this land and called people to prayer, to reflection; those days are gone, long gone. This once, however, can we again come together at that hour, and reflect; reflect on what’s being done in our name, reflect on whether or not it’s right that the institutions whose billions fuelled the fire that engulfed our economy should themselves escape even being scorched; reflect on whether or not it was right that we should have been saddled with this debt without even a hint of consultation, a debt that will be passed on to our children, and perhaps to their children; reflect on whether we belong in a community where, far from everyone looking out for each other, the strongest – the Germans and the French – are forcing billions from us, among the smallest and the weakest, to bail out the German and French banks who recklessly lent those billions to our banks.

Most of all, we should reflect on this: already we’ve poured billions into the various Irish banks, but next year (2012) another €20 falls due in bank bonds, in 2013 it’s €17bn, in 2014 it’s €25bn – where do you think that money will come from? From the banks themselves? No, my friends; over the next three years our six banks will be back to us again cap-in-hand, the ECB at their shoulder guns-to-our-heads, and this government will pour yet more billions in to those banks, billions our ‘friends’ in the ECB will willingly lend to us, so all those major financial institutions get their money – ‘Every last cent’, according to our own government.

Next Tuesday, stand with us, a nation united, a united nation, and let Europe know, let Leinster House know – we’ve had enough of this outrage, we’ve had enough of this national humiliation, we’ve had enough of being told first, what bad people we were to squander all that money when the reality was that it was our banks and the banks from which they borrowed who were the reckless ones, and now, what good people we are to ‘honour’ all those bank bonds.

November 1^st, Tuesday, noon, let the bells again toll and let us again commune, but this time let them toll time on those bank bondholders. Gather, protest, take a stand. All this is happening to us ONLY because we’re allowing it to happen. Enough.

Yours sincerely,

Diarmuid O'Flynn.

Ballyhea

Charleville

Co. Cork

Mobile: 086 2752664

BLOG: http://bondwatchireland.blogspot.com

http://thechatteringmagpie14.blogspot.com/

ONLINE PETITION: http://www.petitiononline.com/isntbb11

TWITTER: @ballyhea14

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