Lexicon of Contemporary Political Deception – Grandizo Munis

[We publish here our English translation of an important document from the Mexican-Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis, you can also find this text in Spanish on our comrades in Barbaria’s website.]

Fifty years of ideological and terminological falsification by Moscow, to which Peking is now adding other falsifications of its own, make it necessary to contrast the meaning of revolutionary terms with that which they have in the mouths of the Stalinist rulers.

Socialist Countries

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Those in which a nationalised capital exploits the proletariat to the hilt, without the latter even retaining the freedom to refuse the price offered by the former for its labour power, or any other freedom, whether it be the freedom to strike, to speak, to associate or to simply move about.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Those countries, which do not exist today, where the productive process is carried out without wage-labour and where commodities cease to be commodities, or purchasable products, in the absence of a universal equivalent (i.e., money). The sale of labour power alone presupposes the existence of a buying capital, while the capital-wage relation presupposes, and cannot but presuppose, the exploitation of the working class. The proof of the abolition of capitalism is the abolition of wage-labour.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Militaristic, bureaucratic despotism, exercised by a police state and directed against proletarian revolution at home and abroad. A supremely centralised party-state of capitalists in which power is wielded, unchecked and unaccountable, by a handful of all-powerful, all-terrorising leaders. Historically, its origin is the destruction of the 1917 revolution and the extermination of its protagonists. It is a dictatorship over the proletariat.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Government of the proletariat based on its own force of arms, after dismantling the repressive capitalist bodies; on workers’ management of the economy, and of the distribution of the social product of labour. It thus achieves the abolition of wage labour, and as a result the disappearance of classes and of the state. It is therefore the most complete democracy, not in law but in fact. With the dictatorship of the proletariat, the first and most important of the Rights of Man will come into being: the right of each person to live and fulfil themselves without having to sell their labour power and creations, without having to buy or sell the products of either. The second right to be guaranteed is the right of insurrection against any attempt to turn back. Through the proletariat, humanity comes into its own, and an entirely new civilisation is initiated.

Internationalism

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Subjugation to the economic and military interests of Russian capitalism, for its part, of those countries in which the United States ceded preponderance as its share of the spoils of war. And when they threaten to escape, the spoils are regained again by military invasion and police terror: see, East Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968. By extension, recruitment or paramilitary levy carried out by Moscow’s henchmen under the “anti-imperialist” banner in order to advance Russian interests in preparations for the third imperialist world war, as well as in local sub-imperialist wars of the Vietnam type. The same goes for China when it comes to Peking-obedient rogues. Moscow and Peking call internationalism the same actions and attitudes that they denounce as imperialism when it comes to the USA.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Solidarity of the world proletariat as a unity against international capitalism. Solidarity in ideas as well as in deeds, directed against the nation and patriotism in the first place, colonial countries included. There can be no higher interest than that of the world proletariat, not even that of a country where the revolution has triumphed. Internationalists fight both sides in local imperialist wars (Vietnam) just as fiercely as in wars of a global scale and point the finger at the respective partisans and propagandists as traffickers in human flesh. They propose and strive to organise the action of the exploited, at the front and in the rear, against their respective governments and military commanders. All national defence—even in its degree of resistance—conceals exploitation and oppression. The immediate enemy is, for each proletariat, in its own country; to sharpen the tensions between social classes to the utmost is a condition for unleashing the struggle of the proletariat in other countries and to undertake the destruction of capitalism throughout the world. Therefore, internationalists reject as reactionary the slogan: non-interference in the internal affairs of a country. It is designed to prevent the solidarity and collective action of the proletariat in the various countries, while it sponsors the constant economic interference of the big powers in the affairs of the small ones and often leads to their military intervention: local wars, invasion of Tibet, of Santo Domingo, of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Cuba, plus the gigantic arms trade. The proletariat of any country has, more than the right, the obligation to intervene in the struggles of the proletariat of any other country. The decisive internationalist action today, the one that we revolutionaries demand, is that of the proletariat of the United States, Russia and China against their respective exploiters. It would unleash revolt in the two military blocs and put into action the most vital immediate objective for humanity: the abolition of armies, of police, of war production, of borders and of wage labour.

Revisionism

DECEPTIVE MEANING OF CHINESE INTRODUCTION. The Russian party-state’s refusal or resistance to favour the Chinese party-state’s business, territorial expansion and strategy. In terms of war preparations, Russia’s unwillingness to engage with the United States in order for China to emerge as a leading power. By extension, party politics that prefer Moscow to Peking as an imperialist metropolis. Historically, the accusation of revisionism was brought forth by Mao Tse-Tung’s as he realised:

1. Russia refused to give him atomic weapons or even to protect his military ambitions in Formosa, India, Burma, etc. with them;
2. That the technical and economic “aid” was designed to keep China as an inferior and subordinate power to Russia;
3. That, of the enormous surplus value extracted from the Chinese workers, the conditions of Russian aid subtracted more from China than it would lose by trading and industrializing with the countries of the American bloc.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. The idea of various social democratic theorists concerning the evolution of capitalism (Bernstein, Hilferding, Bauer, etc.) and the establishment of socialist society. So called, because they  reconsidered or revised Marx’s views on the same subject. According to them, and in short, capitalism had before it a very broad economic and democratic development, which would allow the proletariat, without revolution, within the game of bourgeois democracy, to gain positions and to advance its economic condition, until socialism was realised. It is a question of evolution as opposed to revolution, of progressive reforms as opposed to the sharp measures following a revolution by leaps and bounds in development. Revisionism and reformism are synonymous, although the latter is the more appropriate term for the conception of the above-mentioned theoreticians. Reformism became the superior and almost unique concept of the Second International, whose parties, in the interval of the two great world wars, had in fact abandoned the pretension of achieving socialism to transform themselves into simple bourgeois democratic parties, “good managers of capitalist business”, as Leon Blum admitted before his death. Today, political reformism and the opportunism attached to it are non-existent, at least as an elaborated theory. Stalinism, whether pro-Moscow or pro-Peking, is neither reformist nor opportunist, for its goal is the establishment of state capitalism and the kind of police states already reigning in more than a third of the world. What appears today as reformism and opportunism, in practice, without any elaboration, is Trotskyism in its various shades and even anarchism. Indeed, when they do not seek to reform the Stalinist regimes, they deliberately or unwittingly place themselves under their sphere of influence in international politics and in questions of demands and trade unionism.

Dogmatism

DECEPTIVE MEANING. A term applied by Moscow to Peking’s policy as falsely as revisionism is applied by Peking to Moscow. It means only that in which China harms Russian national-imperialist interests. In their economic structure no less than in their political organisation, Russia and China are the original and its copy. What can truthfully be said about one of the two countries also applies to the other, although it may be necessary to change the patriotic symbol. Both regimes are perpetrators of a political fraud, always anxious to cover up their true nature and that of their dirty quarrels with terminology borrowed from the revolutionary movement. Not one of the positions defended by China, not one of the “thoughts of Mao Tse-Tung” is dogmatic in and of itself, unless this is understood to mean that his subjects are obliged to praise and revere him as a genius.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Dogmas are the statements which the church presents as revelations of God, that are therefore indisputable and unalterable. In a figurative sense, the revolutionary movement uses the term dogmatism to designate adherence to views and analyses that have been superseded by the evolution of society and the class struggle. For example, it would be dogmatism to adhere to everything ever said by any of the principal revolutionary theoreticians of our movement or to seek to slavishly emulate, to the letter, the path followed by the Russian revolution, which the Trotskyist, anarchist and Bordigist tendencies do today, despite their insistence to the contrary. Revolutionary thought is radically opposed to any dogmatism and therefore all orthodoxy is alien to it.

Peaceful Transition to Socialism

DECEPTIVE MEANING. A political parlor trick invented by Stalin after he had divided up the world with Roosevelt and Churchill, so that Western capitalism would accept the pseudo-communist parties as trusted auxiliaries. This is not the reformist conception mentioned above, but a simple assertion whose only justification is the existence of Russia as a great power. This also reveals the character of this term as forming part a long-term paramilitary manoeuvre, to take effect when Russia’s war potential surpasses that of the Americans. However, the transition itself would in no case be to socialism, but to state capitalism, as has happened in Eastern Europe. The proletariat would merely pass from exploitation by various monopolies to that of a single government monopoly, with its headquarters in Moscow. The Chinese party-state and its government have used this rhetorical bait of peaceful transition and its concomitant “peaceful coexistence” from the very beginning.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. That which can be achieved without armed struggle, but by putting into effect the same measures as a revolution: political power, arms and economy in firm control of the proletariat, for the absence of struggle does not mean that socialism is to be achieved evolutionarily from capitalist society. Marx spoke in his time of such a possibility for the English proletariat, but because of the absence of a strong army, police and bureaucracy. This is no longer the case even in Britain. And since the first measure of revolution is to get rid of the state apparatus which presides over exploitation, the only way to effect revolution without armed struggle would be such a sharp decomposition of the existing repressive bodies that the proletariat would meet no resistance in carrying out the seizure of power. Now that the Stalinist parties and the trade unions form a second line of defence against capital (they are in the first where the former rule), the possibility of peacefully overthrowing the society of exploitation seems less than plausible.

Economic Planning

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Totalitarian management of the relations between capital and labour, between production and distribution. This system not only preserves wage-labour, but also reduces its value to a greater degree than liberal capitalism, by means of a draconian arrangement consisting of piecework, bonuses, work incentives, hierarchies, fines and legal punishments for absenteeism, denunciations, police surveillance and other complementary procedures never before seen on this scale. All this in order to increase the surplus value or the share of the wealth created by labour which capital pockets, at the cost of a proportional reduction of the workers’ share, i.e., the wage. This surplus value is disposed of at the discretion of the top economic-political leadership, which transforms part of it into new investments, according to its interests of national and international exploitation, i.e., its present or planned imperialist demands, while another part, not less than that consumed by the privileged groups in any country, is distributed according to the hierarchy of the beneficiaries and servants of the party-state, who is the collective capitalist. The whole economy thus revolves around the interests of capital even more deliberately than in the case of the multiple initiatives of individual capitalists. The proletariat remains a dispossessed class with no other resource than the sale of its labour power, and no other capacity for consumption and culture than that resulting from the proceeds of that sale. It should be noted that Russian and Chinese planners come to learn in the schools of Western capitalism, as both plan the non-fulfilment of human needs.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. The complete functioning and management of production and distribution by society as a whole, represented at the beginning of the revolution by the working class, the cessation of whose exploitation leads in the short term to the disappearance of the working class itself, and ultimately of all classes. There can be no socialist planning without shattering from the first moment the law of value, the general economic basis and daily nourishment of the world capitalist edifice. This law starts from wage-labour and then has repercussions in a thousand ways and at all levels, not excluding the intellectual, scientific and artistic levels. Thus, production without wage-labour and the distribution of products without any relation to what is today the value of wage-labour is the first prerequisite of planning and the starting point of the future communist society. In its absence, a capitalist production plan can be imposed on the population, but there will be no planning. The former involves satisfying the needs of capital, the latter the needs of labour, the needs of each individual person. The former produces in order to sell, the latter to give, thus opening the field of unlimited economic and cultural development. Finally, planning must also do away with the universal representation of capitalist value: money. Such an economy requires the direct and entirely free participation of each and every man and woman, without imposition by anyone, by any organisation, under any pretext whatsoever. Society and the individual are not opposed to each other except where the majority of the latter are exploited and oppressed. Socialism starts from the satisfaction and freedom of each individual as the criterion of the general interest of society.

Popular Democracy

DECEPTIVE MEANING. A name given to the regimes imposed in Europe by the Russian army and capitalist bureaucracy or established in Yugoslavia and China in the heat of the victory of Yankee-Russian-British imperialism over Nazi imperialism, if not as a result of post-war inter-bloc haggling (North Vietnam, Cuba), but always under Moscow’s ideo-economic iron rule. From the beginning, and quite knowingly, the term democracy with the qualifier that it is ‘popular’, was assembled to make an anti-phrase, as if producing a commodity, as a useful extension of the Stalinist terminology of deception. In none of the countries so called can any hint of democracy be discovered, even in its squalid bourgeois form, while the working class, squeezed into the blurred designation of ‘the people’, suffers from an economic, political and cultural despotism even more totalitarian than that of the previous regimes. Neither their economic structure nor their political superstructure distinguishes these countries from what exists in Russia. Nor are they distinguished by their origins, contrary to what certain self-deformed definers claim, for the origin of what exists in Russia is not the 1917 revolution, but the Stalinist counter-revolution, and it is the overflow of the latter, not without Yankee help, that lends the aforementioned similarity. In none of these countries has there been a change of social system, but there has been a change of regime, from private capitalism to state capitalism, from bourgeois government to capitalist bureaucracy, into which the bourgeoisie was integrated. If the rank of socialist democracy was not conferred on them, it was because Russia reserved for itself this honorific title, in order to place itself as a hierarchical superior. The so-called people’s democracies are in fact first and foremost the Kremlin’s spoils of war, a military glacis and a preserve of imperialist exploitation at the same time. It is impossible for them to escape such a condition without seeking mercantile—and, if necessary, military—shelter in the American bloc; this is the case with Yugoslavia and recently with China. And they are in a position to do so without altering their economic-political organisation in the slightest, an incontrovertible demonstration, among other things, of the uniformity of the system of exploitation of humankind between them, the United States and Russia indistinctly.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It has none. Only in capitalist terminology can such a designation be found, applied to political and parliamentary regimes which recognise in law and respect in fact the freedoms of the individual, press, parties, demonstration etc., but on the social basis of the exploitation of wage-labour by capital. At best, ‘popular’ can only mean bourgeois left, in other words, the supposedly less brutal methods of domination of the proletariat by its rulers and exploiters. Now, the methods prevailing in the so-called popular democracies fall squarely into the category of the most brutal. Mobutu proclaimed the People’s Republic in the Congo, with a falsehood worthy—and copied— straight from the playbook of the Mao Tse-Tungs, Castros and other Kadars of the world.

Marxism-Leninism

DECEPTIVE MEANING, COMMON TO BOTH RUSSIAN AND CHINESE OFFSHOOTS. The real version of this mockery is: Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, and its unique content is given by the latter term, not silenced since the 20th Congress of the Russian dictatorial caste but less present in its sayings and deeds, international clientele included. But Stalinism is not a theory, nor is it an addition to a pre-existing theory, nor even a sociological or political empiricism in exploration of something. It is completely alien to any theory, thought or research. It appears historically as soon as the revolution of 1917 ceases its planned permanent march towards socialism and world revolution, even before the individual who would give it its name was born. From then on, it is the fait accompli or death of the revolution or, conversely, the life and constant affirmation of the bureaucratic-capitalist counter-revolution, the safeguarding of whose interests determines at every moment its domestic and foreign policy, as well as its arguments. Without realising it, Zinoviev was outlining an accurate definition of Stalinism when he said to Leon Trotsky:

“You fight Stalin with ideas, but what interests Stalin is not to refute your ideas, but to blow your brains out.”

Millions of people gunned down in all the Russian Lubiankas or sent to their deaths in Siberia, the slander poured upon them in torrents of publicity, the Russian revolution crushed, the world revolution deliberately led to defeat; all this, carried out in the name of this Marxism-Leninism, but in fact in defence of the new Stalinist exploiting caste, who, under the guise of propping up ‘socialism in one country’, prevented the victory of the Chinese proletariat in 1925-26, allowed Hitler to come to power, destroyed the Spanish revolution with its own henchmen, immediately allied itself with Hitler, supplying him with war materiale and raw materials, and receiving from him the Baltic States and half of Poland. It then allied itself with the strongest imperialism on the globe, with which it shares the exploitation and political domination of mankind, and with whose complicity it suppresses all insurrections and struggles in its sphere of influence. The Potsdam agreement already stipulates that the signatories, mainly Russia and the United States, are the guarantors of the preservation of order in the world. The path of Stalinism has been thus: from the hoax of socialism in one country to socialism in none. Such is its nature, nakedly counter-revolutionary practice, behind which there is nothing other than the expanded reproduction (or accumulation) of capital by a centralised, privileged and despotic caste such as the bourgeoisie never was. As well, in this neoreactionary and murderous practice are involved, without exception, all those who have acted for and defended Stalinism inside and outside Russia, no matter how much they have cloaked themselves in philosophical, existentialist, economist rhetoric, or how much they might attempt to justify themselves by seeking recourse in the writings of Marx and Lenin. There has never been any other counter-revolution guided by any other principle, whatever its rationale, but the Stalinist counter-revolution is a hundred times worse than the worst, not only because of its monstrous falsification, which invokes socialism in order to deny it, but above all because its continuity demands the prevention of the ‘revolution of revolutions’ for the human race, which is to say the communist revolution. Dead or alive, Stalinism is nothing other than that. All the lies, all the servility, all the cruelties, all the hypocrisies, in a word, all the alienations caused by millennia of exploitation, are used by it, conspire and develop within it to bar the way to revolution. Marxism-Leninism, hyphenated or not, represents in the complete formula, in arguments and deeds, precisely what the mummy of Lenin represents for the Russian regime: a mere processional banner of deceit, something akin to German ‘socialism’ and the invocation of Nietzsche by the Third Reich.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Leninism does not exist as a particular view of the world or of the class struggle. Lenin considered himself to be a disciple of Marx and never claimed to have made amends to him or to have contributed anything new to his theoretical developments. Right or wrong, the only thing that could be truthfully said of Lenin, like Trotsky, is that he was one of the greatest contemporary revolutionaries. The inventors of Leninism are the representatives of the counter-revolutionary tendency, and not without malicious intentions, directed at the time against the Left opposition headed by Trotsky, and over the years against the world proletariat. Stalinism has claimed on Lenin’s back, as a Marxist-Leninist originality, the idea of a one-party dictatorship, without fractions or internal ideological discussion; in a word, totalitarianism. This was one of its first falsifications. Indeed, the preamble to the law suppressing the other parties and the fractions within the Bolshevik party, written by Lenin himself, never published by his embalmers, states unequivocally that this was not a revolutionary principle, but a provisional expedient to which power was forced by the precariousness of its situation. It was a sign of weakness, not of strength. It is true that the measure served above all, in convergence with the new market economy (NEP), to arouse all conservative yearnings and to concentrate power in the hands of the future counter-revolutionaries, still lurking in the shadows. This does not mean that Lenin should bear the organic paternity of the counter-revolution. In whatever way his work is judged, he intended nothing more than to apply Marxism, whether he was right or wrong. It is therefore a question of clarifying what is to be understood by Marxism. First of all, it is necessary to deny the existence of a doctrine that can be called Marxist. Marx was horrified by any body of doctrine, however advanced it might claim to be, and his work is the incessant refutation of any system, philosophical or political. Indeed, a dialectical, i.e., revolutionary, interpretation of the external world and of history would be impossible if they were not both within and between themselves, subject to change, unity and contradiction at the same time, as well as stability and mutation. The so-called dialectical laws themselves cannot escape alteration and change, not even in the infinity of time, the entropy of the Universe, its energetic state, the most perennial thing known. Thus, only as a synonym for revolutionary and for terminological ease, can one speak of Marxism, by no means as a finished system to be paraphrased and used like Euclidean geometry. Philosophical, economic or political: Marx’s entire work and that of Engels tends to grasp the objective and subjective factors that act in history, modifying each other, without the driving hegemony between the two always being balanced, nor always tilting to the same side; hence one of the first statements: “revolutions are the motive forces of history”. Now, there would not have been a single revolution without a more or less clear consciousness of what was to be done, even if it was represented, not by the consciousness of Man, but by the consciousness of a class within it. This refined understanding of what is often called ‘Marxism’ proclaims the need for a communist revolution, not as a mere desideratum, as an ideal to be achieved, but as the result of the economic-cultural work of humanity itself, in its capitalist phase. Nor is it a compulsory or automatic result of that work; it is rather an outcome of the revolutionary action that the class that capital exploits can exercise on this work. The demand for the abolition of wage-labour, which sums up the whole of Marx’s work, is the engine of the communist revolution, the unique key to the disappearance of capitalism and the realisation of a new civilisation without classes and without a state. The counterfeiters in Moscow and Peking, who maintain wage labour even in draconian forms, are no less far removed from what is revolutionary, from what can be called authentic Marxism, than the bosses of the West. Their falsifications on the socialist mission of the state are directly paired to those of Hitler, who also relied on Hegel in this respect. For Marx, especially after the Paris Commune, for anyone who has unravelled the Russian revolution and understood the Stalinist counter-revolution, the state, especially while in its death throes as a “workers’ state”, has no economic mission to perform. The organisation of the post-revolutionary political power, improperly called the workers’ state, must cease and disappear as a direct consequence of the suppression of the capitalist law of value, or else it regains its traditional function as an oppressive state, exploiting the majority by a minority. That which is the result of millennia of slavery and crimes of every sort cannot be transformed into a pillar of salvation.

Self-Criticism

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Confession of guilt and false crimes, imposed by coercion and police terror on the critics and opponents of Stalinism. Human history records nothing so repulsive and abject as these political-terrorist proceedings, not even the proceedings of the Inquisition. Express or tacit opposition to the existing power (which was carrying out the counter-revolution) was not fought with ideas, let alone debated in public. The guilty were arrested, physically and morally tortured, they and their families, for months, for years, if necessary, until they were made to “confess” that they were in error, that their henchmen were right, and above all the first of them, “the great, the brilliant Stalin”. In minor cases, the “guilty one” managed, by prostituting himself in this way, to be reinstated in the ranks of the Party-State, even in a lower category. In the majority, which constitutes not tens or hundreds of thousands, but millions of cases, “confession”, so-called self-criticism, served, at most, to go to Siberia to die at hard labour. The pinnacle of this vast and bloody repression—indescribable either numerically, in its severity or in its reactionary scope—were the ‘show trials’ in Moscow from 1936 to 1938. Prestigious people of 1917, comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, were put in a position to admit that they were working for Hitler (or for the American government, according to the Kremlin’s alliances) for no other purpose than to bring down “the fatherland of socialism” and the very person of Stalin, “the father of the people”. These trials, in which a former ally of the White governments who fought against the revolution, Vichinsky, acted as prosecutor, were rehearsed like plays, until they achieved the effects intended by the ruling elite. The procedure is inseparable from Stalinism, which has exported it to every country it dominates. In China, it is applied, often with the addition of another odious feature. The victims must recite, before specially arranged assemblies, the faults and crimes attributed to them and praise the justice and foresight of their executioners and are then executed amidst ovations. This is the “enthusiastic” approval by the crowds, which the Russian government organises, through national political-police campaigns, calling for convictions and executions. It is always a synthesis of the lynching laws once practised in the United States as a popular justice (especially against blacks) and of the hangings in Hitler’s concentration camps, in the presence of the other detainees and to the music of Wagner. The Cuban and Albanian pocket dictators themselves have satisfied their instincts and comforted their power with such Stalinist ‘acts of faith’. In short, self-criticism and its extension, the confession of fabricated crimes, has served and continues to serve Stalinism to send revolutionaries to the cemetery, covering them with dirt. Later, the procedure was used against Stalinism’s own reluctant accomplices. All this terrorism, the falsification of ideas and the history of the revolution, plus the planned perversion of minds by the press, radio, television, literature, cinema, and even painting and music, not to mention the sui generis spiritual exercises that are so commonplace in the political and trade union assemblies, form the intellectual superstructure of the Stalinist counter-revolution, i.e., of state capitalism.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. Insofar as the term ‘self-criticism’ can be used, it can mean nothing other than a person’s reflection about his or her own actions and ideas; a reflection that is not imposed or made on demand, which would imply falsehood, but is rather spontaneous, arising from one’s free will and always without repressive consequences. Any revolutionary, any honest person makes this criticism throughout their life, according to their introspective capacity. It is contained in what is called experience, and cannot be negated by negative, reactionary or criminal experiences. A. London’s L’Aveu, both the book and its film, give us some insight into the essentially police techniques used to obtain “self-criticisms” and “confessions”, but nothing of its profoundly reactionary significance. London, who, moreover, played a part in the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and aided in the falsification of its history, did not open his mouth at all during the great trials in Moscow and in Czechoslovakia itself, until it fell to him, Stalin’s and Rokosky’s sideman, to play the role of “filthy vermin”, which cannot be dealt with here. Zinoviev made his own criticism when he declared in private: “The two great mistakes of my life are to have opposed the October insurrection and to have supported Stalin against Trotsky”. But he was lying, exhausted by torture, when, before Stalin’s favourite executioner, the White Vichinsky, he declared, in the faint voice of a man being buried alive, that he was a filthy vermin driven by Hitler against the brilliant Stalin, both of whom would soon after become allies.

De-Stalinisation

DECEPTIVE MEANING. A demagogic racket of the Russian high bureaucracy, aimed at offloading on Stalin’s corpse its own responsibility for the countless political and blood crimes perpetrated during his lifetime. Knowing that they were hated throughout their empire, the dictatorial caste wanted to take advantage of the death of the first dictator to make the population happy, or even to appease their hatred. This was explicitly recognised by Khrushchev when he declared that Stalin’s denunciation had become indispensable to bridge the huge gulf between the working class and the Party. The latter governs and imposes itself everywhere, yes, but surrounded by deaf hostility, by a general opposition which, even without organic articulation or defined political direction, undermines (if not destroys) the effectiveness of the government’s economic plans and projects. By putting the permanent police terror, the source of such opposition, on Stalin’s personal account, his accomplices and successors thought they could alleviate their serious difficulties. The denunciation of Stalin is of the characteristically crass Stalinist style, both in its gross fallacy and in the explanation of terrorism offered by the denouncers. And it could not be otherwise, because Stalinism is not reducible to the person of Stalin, nor the “violations of Soviet legality”, still less the “cult of personality”, which is as good as saying: the Devil. No, Stalinism is precisely, beyond violations and abuses, ‘Soviet’ legality itself. It was imposed at the same time as the counter-revolution was consolidating itself in the form of state capitalism and is the juridical expression of it. Hence, no act, no word spoken by any representative of that regime—or by those close to it in the world—can be anything other than a Stalinist act and word, no matter what mask is chosen. The very dishonourable servility with which all the high and low bureaucracy extolled the Chief, pled and wallowed at his feet, is also a requirement of the regime, its spiritual effluvium. It is a question of the human relations that flow from the economic-political structure and the legality of the counter-revolution. Not a single one of Stalin’s crimes would have existed if they had not corresponded to the present interests and future needs of the regime, of the set of individuals who implemented it, privileging themselves as much and more than the old nobility and bourgeoisie. These were the crimes of the Stalinist counter-revolution, not only of its leader. And the greatest of these crimes, as is stated in the relevant section in the previous issue of Alarma, is the destruction of all attempts at world revolution, beginning with that of Russia and ending with that of Spain. From this, all others follow, including the systematic falsification of history and ideas. There can be no other materialist explanation. Far from it, the continuing bureaucracy of the counter-revolution, its collective work, shows itself incapable of saying anything but rubbish about Stalin’s abuses, violations or personal mistakes. On the contrary, it always praises him for his social work, for the most criminal of all, for the very thing which is at the origin of the deportations of tens of millions to Siberia, of the murders by tens of thousands, of the abject Moscow and other trials, of the redoubled exploitation and the total shackling of the proletariat, in short, of the reactionary Russian legality. The same explains why Stalin’s methods have never disappeared, neither terror, nor false accusations against active or passive opponents, nor even violations of legality. The bureaucracy has not succeeded in establishing, even among itself, relations of security, as is typical among the privileged of other despotisms, for example Franco’s. It continues to be a despotism like that of Stalin. It remains an Asiatic despotism on the basis of big industrial capital. The fraud of de-Stalinisation has served to give rise to dissidents, whose voices are increasingly loud; moreover, and no less important, it has served to expose more than ever the despicable quality of the Stalinists. The same individuals who at the very name of Stalin went into a delirious trance, who swore personal allegiance to him and presented the most horrendous crimes of his reign as measures of health for mankind, have applauded his accusers, have themselves accused and cast upon his dead genius the filth of which they are co-authors and which they carry with them to the marrow. Tomorrow they will applaud any hypothetical restalinisation. The counter-revolution could not have produced more vile creatures. In short, if the general work of Stalinism is characterised by a prolonged retreat of the world revolution and the prostitution of class consciousness, particularly in Russia and its vassals, as far as China and Cuba, a gigantic revolutionary offensive is brewing in reaction to it. In history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It is very simple. It is summed up, making superfluous any addition, by Natalia Sedova-Trotsky’s last written statement:

“The police terror and Stalin’s slanders were only the political aspect of a fight to the death against revolution waged by the bureaucracy as a whole; one can only hope for the restoration of the whole truth by the annihilation of this bureaucracy by the working class which it has reduced to slavery. […] Any de-Stalinisation will prove to be a confidence trick, if it does not go as far as the seizure of power by the proletariat and the dissolution of the police, political, military and economic institutions, the basis of the counter-revolution which Stalinist state capitalism has established.”

Self-Management

DECEPTIVE MEANING. It was introduced by Tito, with the twofold intention of overcoming the stagnation of the Yugoslav economy and of making the world proletariat aware of its nature. It has since seen some vogue in countries such as Algeria and even Russia. It has also received, as a demand and a project, the approval of certain so-called leftist groups in Europe. The term refers to the self-management of each company in itself, with limitations that are silenced by its advocates, some of which will be indicated below. First of all, it is necessary to specify that self-management in the strict and unrestricted sense is like the prose that Monsieur Jourdain spoke without knowing it. In the same way, the messieurs Jourdain swarming today in politics are unaware that they have before their five senses as many examples of self-management as there are individually owned, bourgeois enterprises. The same applies to joint-stock companies as long as they are not financially dominated by banks or trusts. Until the emergence of big industrial capital, almost all enterprises were self-managed, they were of that kind which is now presented to us as new, almost as a discovery. Indeed, each one drew up its own production project (plan), coordinated its various aspects, supervised its execution in the work process, placed its products on the market, distributed the resulting surplus value as appropriate to the next production cycle. The enterprise, personified in the owner-capitalist, was the master of reinvesting, hoarding or squandering the profits. The self-management of today’s political crooks has quite a few restrictions imposed on it. It is enough to point out two of the main ones to shed light on it:

1. What a company has to produce—quantity and quality—is imperatively or indicatively designated to it by an economic direction (plan) placed far above it.
2. The profits of all the enterprises are concentrated and used at will by the same management, allocating a share to each enterprise according to its merits. The latter, in turn, is distributed by the management of the enterprise, always under the thumb of the one Party, according to the scale of goods and services.

So why talk about self-management when this is enough to make it impossible? Simply because the inventors of the procedure that the term conceals are political swindlers who present themselves as friends of the proletariat while in fact, and in law wherever they rule, they are its titled exploiters. What the supreme economic leadership actually does is to offload onto the workers of each enterprise the responsibility for the execution of its decisions, thus forcing the collaboration between capital and labour so dear to the old reactionaries, from Hitler and Mussolini to Franco and Papandreou. The very fact that there is talk of self-management of enterprises already proclaims their capitalist nature. Indeed, wherever it exists, in whatever country, the workers are forced to sell their labour power, including the instruments of labour, to the owners of capital. The price they receive for it is less than the value which their labour incorporates into the products produced. The difference, the surplus value, is the property of the exclusive use and abuse of the top economic management. If we bear in mind that such management is confused with dictatorial government, which concentrates police, judicial and legislative power in its hands, we will understand what the prefix ‘self’ adds to the capitalist functioning of enterprises. Just as Protestantism asked each Christian to become his own priest, the capitalism of the self-managementists asks each worker, with all the weight of its unlimited powers, to become their own foreman, their own timekeeper; it asks them to function as the representatives of capital in the face of their own nature and consciousness as an exploited class. The worker’s pay then becomes a function of the prosperity of the capital invested in the enterprise, and of their compliance or non-compliance with the rules of production and discipline dictated to them. For more than a century the capitalists have learned to give the workers a part of their wages in return for a share of the profits.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It does not exist; all self-management, whether true or false, is capitalist. The revolutionary position is identified with workers’ management of the economy (including distribution) on a national, international and world scale. The working class itself, through specially elected bodies, determines the production project or plan, in accordance with the urgent historical need to abolish wage labour, the necessary beginning of the disappearance of capitalism and classes. The products of the labour that today constitutes (in the United States, Russia, China and other countries alike) the surplus value or unpaid labour time of the workers, freely given to capital, would then go partly to immediate consumption, partly to the creation of new sources of production—but never to capital investment. Everything would always be decided and closely supervised by freely elected representatives, and in such a way that each individual or group of individuals is in a position to check how the social product destined for immediate consumption is distributed and what is done with the unconsumed product. There, we would stand a thousand leagues removed from the verbal fraud, organic deceptions, economic and police pressures of pretended self-management. Between capitalism, whatever form it takes, and the organisation of socialism immediately after the revolution, the mutations that distinguish them are greater than between ape and man. The chain which keeps the worker as a slave and alienates the whole of humanity is made of wage-labour. It is not a question of reinforcing it with bonuses, so-called profit-sharing and other expedients which force the worker to intensify his labour in order to earn more, without ever owning the products. No, the revolution puts the whole class in a position to consume more, without selling its labour power, and to increase production by reducing the time devoted to it. Technical applications can already go as far as the complete automation of all production processes not directly subject to the annual agricultural cycle. There is no revolution where humanity is not master of its labour and, consequently, of the products of its labour.

Anti-Imperialism

DECEPTIVE MEANING. It begins where all that is revolutionary ends. Its cloak of struggle against one imperialism, usually American, acts in favour of another, usually Russian, but it can also be Chinese or others. Historically, this designation appears as an immediate residue of the victory of Stalinism in Russia, which gave rise to it as a pseudo-revolutionary tendency, and paid for it, between one war and another. It officially inaugurates the policy of a capitalist power, in the midst of other, stronger ones, which in time, with the abundant help of the United States, would enable Russia to acquire the position of second imperialist power. It is not the first time, far from it, that a country already established as imperialist or with a tendency to become so, speaks, acts and contributes to the armed struggle against other countries whose economic or territorial domination it covets. At the dawn of capitalism, this was the struggle of France and England against Spain on the seas, in Europe and in America. England itself and the United States, then in a similar position as China today, supported with arms and propaganda rhetoric the independence of the whole of Latin America, within which British imperialism would soon become dominant. Against this, in turn, the United States stirred up the struggle, which at the end of the century declared war on Spain and, in the name of freedom and national sovereignty, raided the Philippines and Cuba. Hitler himself railed indignantly against the “plutocracies” that had carved up the world without leaving Germany a lot, which won him the sympathy of almost all nationalists, from Perón to Sukarno to Arab leaders. In recent years, we have still seen France, which had barely been militarily relieved in Indochina by the Yankee army, sing its anti-imperialist song. In short, ‘anti-imperialism’ is but one aspect of the inter-imperialist struggle. At the outbreak of the world war, it finds itself absorbed by one side or the other. What distinguishes the ‘anti-imperialists’ of today is their revolutionary charlatanism, together with a total enslavement to the interests, notions and methods of decadent capitalism, corrupted to the point of stench. They pretend to constitute sovereign and great nations, which was the work of ascendant capitalism, the urgent thing today being to do away with borders and to sink all national powers into the past; they take pride in their homeland like any obtuse bourgeois, patriotism being one of the worst poisons of the old reaction, to be dismembered from alienated consciences. They plan to industrialise by nationalising the economy—which they call socialism—and as soon as they come to power they establish even harsher methods of labour and exploitation than those of their predecessors. In short, they talk of revolution while they represent a new reaction. They fail even in that in which they are somewhat sincere, albeit more than a century late: the aspiration to build an independent nation-state. They cannot develop their capitalist industrialisation, or even bring it to life, except by bending their ears to Western or Eastern imperialist powers. Breaking free from those powers is a physical impossibility; unless the capital-wage labour contradiction is settled to the satisfaction of the latter, the only method to ensure revolutionary sovereignty and the sovereignty of every person in a world communist civilisation. But the anti-imperialist gentlemen belong to the capital pole of this contradiction. All they have the latitude to do is to channel into other imperialist coffers the surplus value taken from the workers of their countries, minus what they appropriate for themselves. Even so, the international economic power of the strongest capitalism, that of the United States, recovers part of the surplus value absorbed by others, even if it is Russia or China. The anti-imperialist overlords cannot go beyond the status of house servants to the greatest capitalist powers. But long before achieving these results, and even without achieving them, they have already rendered to dollar imperialism on the one hand, and to the Russian-Chinese counter-revolution on the other, the most precious of all services to them: that of rejecting the struggle of the international proletarian class by adopting the struggle between capitalisms. Whether friend or foe, this is a game of jackals.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It does not exist in the strict sense, since the workers of every country, including those most plundered by imperialism, have as their immediate class enemy their exploiting compatriots, through whom alone they can make a dent in imperialist capital and rouse the action of the proletariat in the countries whose capitalists exploit them. It is the struggle of the working world against national and international capital which, by overthrowing it, will put an end to imperialism. Revolutionaries must strip themselves of all national attributes, shake off the rags of patriotism like a piece of rubbish, in order to be in a position to organise the revolt of wage labourers wherever they are, and whatever the uniform that enlists them. Every national struggle is reactionary. Colonies or metropolises, Russia or the United States; the exploited must have as their immediate universal objective the struggle for the seizure of power, the expropriation of private or state capital, the international socialisation of production and consumption, declares the Second Communist Manifesto of the F.O.R. (Revolutionary Workers’ Ferment). Thus, posing the problem in its class terms (it has no other terms) the anti-imperialists appear full-bodied as swindlers, willing soldiers or mercenaries of another imperialism and pioneers of a third world war. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them are, in turn, dupes. In any case, one of the first duties is to expose them as class enemies of the proletariat. Those who do not fulfil this duty abandon, if not outright betray, the unshakeable principle: “Against imperialist war, for civil war”. Anything which can be rationalised away with texts of Lenin, Trotsky or the Third International is mere exegetical misrepresentation. Whatever mistakes these texts have made—not least in the realm of anti-imperialism—the data or coordinates which served as their orientation are no longer valid today; they have changed or disappeared. The coordinates from which revolutionary thought must start today are the following:

1. The capitalist system of production, with its distribution based on the sale of commodities, penetrates all borders and constantly tightens the bonds that hold the weak to the strong. But it makes the world a single economic entity, from which the revolutionary project must be developed.
2. The cycle of capitalist civilisation is closed, and its material results are amply sufficient to undertake social revolution anywhere and everywhere.
3. The industrial growth of the backward countries is always much lower than that of the advanced countries, and this does not in any case allow us to speak of the development of capitalist civilisation, nor of the emancipation of the former in relation to the latter. The formal granting of independence does not even result in a weakening of imperialist power, which was an important political outcome of the resolutions of the first three congresses of the Third International.
4. Revolutionaries in the backward countries must base their tactics and strategy on the present and possible economic development of the more industrialised countries. They must aim, not at national independence, a reactionary goal, but at the unity of a socialist economy to be established on all continents.
5. Revolutionaries must behave as if the whole world were one country.
6. Any national struggle is therefore alien to the demands of the world communist revolution; it is opposed to it.

Guerrilla Warfare

DECEPTIVE MEANING. Military prolongation of the policy for capitalist powers put into play by Moscow as anti-imperialist or anti-fascist, as defined in the title above. The introduction of this change or regressive mutation took place underhandedly, like the very transformation of the Russian revolution into counter-revolution. If the latter has proved to be the most important reactionary event of this century, guerrilla warfare has been one of its favourite tactical instruments, especially in places where the strategic instrument, i.e., the Russian war apparatus, did not or could not become active. The instrument is always in consonance with the historical objective. To the historical objective of the proletariat, the world revolution, the organisation of its own revolt corresponds as an instrument, starting from the main social centres: the cities. The objective of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the territorial or commercial domination of other countries, could only be served by military methods, since they are as antithetical to the struggle of the exploited as they are to that of their exploiters. Aware of this, the men of the Kremlin put Mao Tse-Tung into action for the first time after the Chinese proletarian revolution had been defeated thanks to them and their then close collaborator Chiang Kai-Chek. All subsequent practitioners and theorisers of these proceedings, from Mao Tse-Tung himself to Guevara to Tito and Giap, are cadets of the Russian General Staff. In the same way, the various labels that have been given to the proceedings since then are a function of interests and projects alien to the communist revolution: people’s or revolutionary war, siege of the cities by the countryside and of the rich countries by the poor countries, war of national liberation, urban guerrilla warfare. Already Mao Tse-Tung, and in Europe Tito, owed power to the last imperialist war; the latter thanks to Anglo-American supplies even more than Russian, the former to the abstention of the United States, which had previously recognised Stalin’s right to extend his influence in China. Anyone who takes the trouble to look in the newspaper archives will find in the newspapers of the time the report of an American ambassador-at-large advising his government to cut off all war and financial supplies to Chiang Kai-Chek, which it did. The Maoist army then embarked on the military parade which propaganda later inflated into a “long march”. Subsequent guerrilla and national movements are invariably, wherever they have occurred or are occurring, the consequence of imperialist war and preparations for another. Russia’s territorial and economic conquests are very important, to be sure, but far more important are the conquests of the United States, which dominates, without the strict necessity of military occupation, most of the world economy. Russia has reached the level of a major imperialist power, second only to the imperialist superpower represented by Wall Street, the Pentagon and the White House. However, the United States faces no other major rival than Russia. However much they may whine in Peking about the complicity of the two powers, the next world war, if it breaks out, will be mainly between them. However, the disproportionate military and economic potential so unfavourable to Russia—not to mention its internal political problems—impose on this state a long-term tactic aimed at undermining the United States by taking strategic and economic positions away from them. Hence the support for anti-imperialist, political or guerrilla movements, whoever provokes them, if not their artificial creation, and for anything that is detrimental or annoying to the rival. Within this tactical order fall such disparate facts as support for North Vietnam, Pakistan and the Arab world as a racial whole, agreement with the foreign policy of Gaullism, political and financial compromises with Federal Germany, Russian protectorate over Cuba, the sale of planes and weapons to the Greek military, the offer to Japan of economic participation in the exploitation of Siberia (this is aimed against China), the cordial and profitable relations with Suharto in Indonesia, etc. That Russia and its supporters have withdrawn their support for the guerrillas in Latin America (and Castro as well) only means that it is counting on profiting more from the anti-Americanism of the military and oligarchs, at least for the moment. That is what is becoming clear in Bolivia and Peru. In any case, nothing important can happen against dollar imperialism, whether it comes from rulers or from armed detachments transformed into armies, without it being absorbed into Russia’s sphere of influence. Even China itself, which is striving to do the same, will be thwarted. That is how North Korea escaped it, and in the much-vaunted “heroic” Hanoi, its voice is less heard than Russia’s. It is certain that China will only pick up the scraps from the inter-imperialist feast on the Indochinese peninsula unless the United States makes room for it to counter Russian penetration. The emergence and significance of guerrilla warfare and its transformation into limited wars can only be understood in the global context of imperialist struggle and as a means to another war. It is an invariable rule, if not a law of the historical movement itself, that such wars only happen in the absence of revolutionary activity of the masses, or immediately after the masses have been crushed. Mao Tse-Tung began his military activities after the Chinese revolution had been liquidated with his complicity. In Greece in 1944, the Stalinist Markos did the same after his party collaborated with the British troops and personally with Churchill to drown in blood an insurrection which demanded “all power to the proletariat”. Ho Chi-Minh liquidated the Hanoi commune with weapons in hand, assassinated its main leader Tha Thu-Tao, and then made a pact with French troops to liquidate in priority the Hanoi fugitives, who constituted armed groups. In Indonesia, Tan Malaka and his supporters, who advocated revolution, were surrounded and killed by a coalition of Stalinists and military led by Sukarno, a notorious pro-fascist. Nothing was happening in Algeria, except for the discovery of important oilfields whose final domination (West, East?) is now being decided. Finally, in Cuba, Castro and Guevara went into the Sierra Maestra with Yankee money and propaganda, in the complete absence of activity on the part of the exploited and proved incapable of ever stirring it up. It was Batista’s flight, imposed by the American ambassador, that triggered the general strike and allowed Castro to make a grand entrance into Havana. A few years later, the crowd’s joyous clamour had turned to tears. The case of Cuba is undoubtedly the one that best corroborates the above. Castro and Guevara were not men of Moscow, but ordinary patriots and as such bourgeois in training and intention. Their democratic projects did not exceed those of Batista at the beginning of his career, when as a sergeant he gave a hand to those in power. But they became Moscow’s prisoners as soon as they wanted to let go of dollar-imperialism’s scaffolding. For the Moscow General Staff, their establishment in Cuba has a strategic importance that far outweighs the economic one, and henceforth for the United States as well. The maximum distance the guerrilla can travel is from one centre of imperialist gravitation to another. It is worth specifying some aspects and conditions of the guerrilla that are never mentioned in the abundant literature on the political Far West. In the first place, there are no such guerrillas in the proper sense (see the revolutionary meaning) but armed platoons coming from outside the country or from abroad with equipment, even if they are not standing armies. Mao Tse-Tung formed an army from the first day, with his rear guard covered by the Russian border and supplied across it; so did Algeria, surrounded by Arab countries; so did Ho Chi Minh’s army, with the Chinese border as a back-up and the favourable terrain of the jungle. The contact of a complicit border is decisive for “anti-imperialist” guerrilla exploits. It allows the “liberation” army not only to be constantly supplied and safe from attack, but also to take refuge, when attacked, in neutral territory, to reappear when it pleases unfadingly. Without the border condition everything falls apart, as it did in Greece with Markos’ army, whose sanctuaries, as it is now said, were in Yugoslavia. When Tito broke with Moscow, the liberators vanished. Only in small countries, where a single battle can be decisive, do military detachments without a sanctuary-border have any chance of seizing power. In any case, their long-term existence requires receiving arms and ammunition from abroad and stealing supplies from the mouths of the population. That has been the untold story of so many guerrilla fighters. Within the armed detachments themselves and getting worse every day as they develop into an army, relations soon entail complete subordination to the self-appointed command, with all the consequences of discipline and repression that come with militarism, down to the right of life or death over each private soldier. The commander must be regarded by his soldiers as a kind of “Superman”. Fabricating this aura for him is one of the main subjective tricks of present-day guerrillaism, as anyone can verify in Debray’s vacuous little book Révolution dans la Révolution and even in the tone of Guevara’s letter released by his boss six months after his disappearance. Even if this letter was a forgery, which is likely, the way it was written reveals the mental architecture of its authors. When workers in revolution take up arms and fight, they establish relations among themselves from militant to militant, not from subordinate to boss. This was the case in the Spanish workers’ militias of 1936 and in every revolutionary troupe since the English skinheads. The recruitment of new soldiers is a particularly infamous chapter in this kind of war. With war imposed in reality, the commanders resort to violence and even terror to increase their numbers. Even where they have enjoyed a certain number of voluntary enlistments, such as in Algeria yesterday and Vietnam today, they are supplementing their demands for human flesh with rifle in hand. In Algeria and Vietnam, they have not backed down in the face of Nazi—or Stalinist—type atrocities that are being carried out there, including reprisals against recalcitrants and their families, against towns and villages as a whole. On French territory itself, the party of “liberation” tortured and murdered Algerians of other parties and even their own, who refused to enlist to fill their military quotas. The number of Algerians thus sent to the cemetery probably exceeds the number of victims of French repression. In Vietnam, the recruitment methods are the same. For its part, the so-called urban guerrilla is a gaudy contradiction deliberately invented to deceive. It is, quite simply, the well-known terrorism so often practised against Tsarism and other tyrannies, and in Spain itself, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The similarity, however, is in form, not in substance. The terrorism of yesteryear was practised by people of good faith, blameless, who struck blows at the most emperor-like leaders of tyranny; it did not seek to impose its rule, nor did it put on messianic airs like today’s urban terrorism. It is this, circumscribed in the whole scheme of “anti-imperialist” guerrilla warfare, etc., which contributes with full intention to exacerbate governmental repression and carries out devious designs, nationally as well as internationally. Its military coups, kidnappings, assaults, bomb attacks, which have nothing to do with problems of historical development, do not cause any political movement in the working class. On the other hand, it is in their milieus that the climbers make a political career. As an objective for the guerrillas, here is what the much extolled Guevara tells us: the possibility of the triumph of the popular masses in Latin America appears clearly in the form of a guerrilla war waged by an army of peasants, which totally destroys the structure of the old colonial world. Behind the absurd “guerrilla war waged by an army”, what the “encirclement of the cities by the countryside”, of the rich countries by the poor, offers us is the “thought of Mao Tse-Tung”, the religious babbling of Stalin. On the basis of such emptiness, the emancipation of the proletariat will no longer be the work of the proletariat itself, but of the peasants. In short, the wage slaves are redeemed by the capitalist smallholders. Such is the theoretical discovery of the anti-imperialist gentlemen. In reality, it is not a question of theory or principle, let us reiterate, but a military strategy aimed at transplanting the imperialist axis of the world from the West to the East. The guerrilla fighters do not promise the dismemberment of the large estates into smallholdings, but only to convert them into state capitalist property, as well as the industries, thus transforming all the inhabitants of agriculture into wage earners. The capitalist structures, far from being broken, are thus reorganised and invigorated to the extreme. If, by giving free rein to the imagination, after the four or five years of Vietnam that Guevara called for, we were to witness the collapse of American imperialism, we would also see the world surplus value which today flows towards it, change course towards Russia, or China if the vicissitudes between them should be to the advantage of the latter.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It does not exist in our time. When it did, in the past, it was bourgeois-revolutionary. Today, when the army of one country is overrun by the army of another country, and the latter is installed as an occupier, national defence can only take the form of guerrilla warfare or national resistance. These are therefore only an irregular and provisional aspect of the other. Now, the meaning of national defence has always been understood by revolutionaries as a betrayal, as a desertion to the class enemy, and not because “their” country has been defeated and occupied that they will accept it in its irregular form. By joining an armed group in the ‘anti-fascist’ resistance, in the jungle or in the mountains, one practises the same national defence as by volunteering for the national army. In the extreme of theoretical rigour, between the most incipient guerrilla warfare and classical or thermonuclear warfare, the difference, however enormous it may seem, is quantitative, not qualitative. And the quantitative aspect shrinks to nothing, bearing in mind that one can give rise to the other and that it has served as a forerunner in the past. Such were the Yugoslav, French, Italian, Polish, etc. national resistance and the new understanding of Mao Tse-Tung and Chiang Kai Chek to fight “against the Japanese invader” and at the same time against the revolution. Through this kind of irregular national defence came regular defence and the preservation of a capitalism that no longer had a right to life. This is where the proletariat is stuck in a quagmire. Guerrillas are a bourgeois method of struggle, compatible with the development of capitalism, national independence and bourgeois-democratic revolution. That has been their task in the past, whether they have succeeded or not, and without taking into consideration particular cases such as the Chouan serfs who fought against the French revolution. The most typical case is that of the Spanish guerrillas from 1808 onwards, which gave their name to the method. They were at first (see Marx in The Spanish Revolution) groups of men voluntarily united to undertake surprise actions against the French troops and disbanded after them, each man returning to his daily work. As soon as they became permanent and accepted subordination to the allied Anglo-Spanish armies, they renounced their revolutionary character. The so-called guerrillas of today bear no resemblance to the former, since there is nowhere in our epoch even a remote possibility of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, nor of national independence; the pseudo-guerrillas turned into armies, if they find the necessary logistical facilities, appear to the proletariat, simply and tragically, as a conquering war apparatus that is thrown upon it, and therefore as a police force. As such, and because of their national and international objectives, the tyrants who wage the “people’s war” have no other perspective than to serve as pawns in the reactionary contest between the imperialist blocs. Revolutionaries must on no account lend themselves to such crude manoeuvres. They know that via Moscow or Peking they are also playing into the hands of American imperialism, just as via Washington they are playing into the hands of Moscow and Peking. Because the first concern of both is to prevent the proletarian revolution from rearing its head, a key condition for them to be able to compete with each other for economic and military domination of the world. Anti-imperialist prattle thus becomes pro-imperialist action in general, and demagogy about revolutionary warfare becomes local imperialist war-making. Guerrillas such as those which formed in Spain after the victory of Franco’s army merit a different understanding. They were not the result of any malicious design, nor did they display any liberationist pretensions. They were simply the result of the instinct for self-preservation. Their members could not save their lives in any other way. And when, at the end of the massacre of 1939-45, Stalinism tried to use them for its own purposes, under the banner of the Resistance, which had already been repurposed into an army of national defence, it did all it could to artificially enlarge and maintain them, instead of worrying about needing to save them. It introduced into them the poison of its own falsehoods and aggravated the ferocity of Franco’s repression. This was one of the most abominable episodes of Spanish Stalinism, which is not lacking in these. Finally, and independently of all political considerations, guerrillas have no lasting application in the martial conditions of the world. All the more so when it comes to the pseudo-guerrillas manipulated by Moscow, Peking or their henchmen. Communist revolution is a process of militant and ideological apprenticeship of the exploited, which must necessarily take place in the workplaces and in direct relation to the abolition of the capitalist character of the instruments of production, without anything to do with their nationalisation, as we have seen in previous pages. One of the first lessons in this direction is that Moscow and Peking represent the eastern face of the class enemy, to be fought as fiercely as its western face. The measures that a communist revolution would take in Russia or China would be no different in any important way, and let us say it loudly, above all in economic terms, from those it would take in the United States or any other country. And in the face of this flaw, the prayers for a purely political revolution in Russia and its offshoots with which a nerveless and brainwashed Trotskyism yawns at us, are all so much hollow and reformist pipe dreams.

Socialism with a Human Face

DECEPTIVE MEANING. The latest jargon put into circulation by today’s political tricksters. It cannot be said with certainty whether it comes from a Stalinist brain or from one of those of its Western “progressive” associates. It makes no difference. It is important to note, however, that it is an explicit recognition that the regimes in question are beastly. It was in great vogue during Dubcek’s short time in power in Czechoslovakia, has supporters in all ruling Stalinism, even in Russia and China, and is almost unanimous within non-governing Stalinism. For the former, it is a political cudgel to be deployed in the face of an onslaught by the proletariat, for the latter, an excipient with which to make the workers who distrust it swallow its drug, and above all the bourgeois organisations which they intend to use as stepping stones before assimilating them, since they believe they can dominate the working class, no matter what they do or say, by the force of the unions and the police. Example: with his humane mask, Santiago Carrillo has reached the “height” of a “Pact for Freedom” with close collaborators and former ministers of the major murderer, among whom the devotee Ruiz Jiménez is not even the worst. With his real face he would have had to settle for a few plucked vultures. Stalinism cannot be judged by what it says, but by what it does while in power. In no country ruled by it is there the slightest freedom, not for the workers, not for anyone. Striking is much more difficult and has much more serious consequences than under Franco (recent case: Poland). In Dubcek’s own Czechoslovakia there was not a single day of freedom for the working class and the revolutionaries could not come out of hiding. The much celebrated “spring” did not give rise to anything contrary to the existing capitalism. The social democrats themselves, who only wanted to be able to serve the state without fear of future repressions, were restrained. And although workers and revolutionaries in general took certain liberties, these were not legal for a single day. The freedom that was allowed was to reinforce the shaky rule of the Party. Dubcek and his ilk repeated this almost daily. Far from it, what is at stake for the revolutionary freedom of the proletariat, of anyone who is not a Stalinist or classical reactionary, is to overthrow this party, its state, its capitalism. The Russian armoured divisions invaded Czechoslovakia in order to cut off a political development which could have gone as far as that.

REVOLUTIONARY MEANING. It does not exist. Not only is there a redundancy in saying socialism with a human face, or libertarian socialism, but the redundancy is a bait and switch in the mouths of those who claim that the property system in the countries of the East is socialist. If one of them should one day decree and respect the freedoms called human rights, it would be no more than a democratic capitalist system, based, like all the others, on the freedom to exploit wage-labour. Socialist property, on the contrary, begins with the suppression of the latter freedom, the existence of which confers on the instruments of production their capitalist nature, whatever the label of power. All the friends of Stalinism look forward to this day as the day of their own redemption, not certainly from the yoke of exploitation, which they do not suffer themselves, but from the outrages, betrayals, crimes which they have committed or covered up in service to its interests. Hence their ecstasy before so-called “socialism with a human face”. It is out of the question that such a case will not arise. The historical period in which we live, and the statified nature of Eastern capitalism preclude the stable existence of capitalist democracy there. It could appear, instead, as a moment of indecision between the revolutionary onslaught of the proletariat, which is undoubtedly in gestation, and the ruling counter-revolution. It would disappear to relapse into the latter or give way to communist revolution. The odious dictatorial caste is not unaware of this; it therefore allows those who portray themselves as ‘humane’ to remain in its midst, but it keeps them out of its way, because tomorrow, when it is besieged by the masses in revolt, they will be the last resort against them. Socialism does not have to justify itself by claiming to be humane or humanist. That remains for the hierarchs who are in a position to exercise over men, at work, in private and political life, a coercive power more or less limited in law or discretion. Socialism is much more than that; it is mankind freed from all social and mental constraints imposed by other humans; it is freedom from the first breath of existence through complete equality of possibilities, through the impossibility of having to sell one’s own labour and creative power in order to live; it is the flourishing of each individual through their participation in the work or labour of their choice, it is freedom and democracy made a functional requirement of civilization; it is humanity in full possession of its alienated faculties. Like the energy from a star, or the appearance of life on Earth, it has no need to justify itself, nor does it recognise any Creator. Everything else is bullshit.

Grandizo Munis

Alarma, 2nd series, issues 14, 15, 16 and 17 (June 1970-April 1971).