Patelis Dimitrios | Collective of Struggle for the Revolutionary Unification of Humanity, Greece
The parasitic character of imperialism is linked to the systemic corruption, to the degeneration of the revolutionary movement by capital. Using institutional and extra-institutional forms, the revolutionary movement is integrated into the national and transnational monopoly regime. Out of this stem the historical forms and contemporary manifestations of opportunism.
As V.I. Lenin taught us, opportunism is a basic form of undermining and dismantling the movement, which is constituted by the de facto propagation of the interests of capital, of the financial oligarchy, within the workers’ movement. This is happening primarily in the imperialist countries of the front line, but also in their vassal countries, those with an average and/or lower level of development.
The opportunists, in order to veil and ideologically mask their integration into the capitalist regime, their practical and organisational drift into disruptive positions of subordination of the movement to the interests and strategic choices of the financial oligarchy, make successive revisions of Marxism-Leninism, sometimes with revolutionary-like and even “left-wing” rhetoric and terminology. These revisions are necessary for the corrosive manipulation they practice, serving as a theory-resembling cover for their descent into bottomless right-wing, pro-regime opportunism.
The deeper the opportunists’ pro regime’s downward spiral, the more out of touch with reality, unbalanced, unscientific, and irrational are the ideological constructs they concoct and invoke.
The most dangerous “modern” unprecedented revision of the Leninist political economy of imperialism of our times is systematically launched by the ideological apparatus of the present leadership of the KKE, through the crude irrational ideological construct/dogma, the infamous “imperialist pyramid” nonsense, which they have the impudence to try to impose through every legitimate and illegitimate way on the international communist movement.
This ideological construct, in all its absurdity, constitutes a “coherent” scheme for deceiving and manipulating people lacking a Marxist-Leninist dialectical education. Any “coherence” of this highly metaphysical hodgepodge has nothing to do with its internal composition (factual, theoretical, logical and methodological). On the contrary, it is highly external and deeply linked to the extremely valuable concrete service it provides to the bourgeoisie as a systemic/ regime project of deception, manipulation, misdirection, division, undermining and dismantling of the movement.
What do the modern “communists” who have contractually undertaken the destruction of the anti- imperialist and communist movement acknowledge and reject, what do they embrace and what do they resign from?
Here we will provide a brief outline of some of the basic unacceptable theses of this vulgar toxic revision attempted by the most dangerous opportunists during the escalation of World War III.
1. Within the foundation of the infamous “imperialist pyramid” nonsense, lies an unprecedented deception: the deliberate confounding of the scientific categories “imperialist stage” and “imperialist state”. Thus, not only any possibility of reference to the historical stages are relinquished, but also any scientific approach towards imperialism and each stage of the structure and history of the development of society.
In this way, imperialism cannot be the “highest stage of capitalism” since:
a. “there are no stages” and
b. “anyone who dares to speak of stages is an opportunist”! (We will come back to the matter of stages).
It goes without saying that in order to support their nonsense, the pharaonic revisionists are forced to censor and ban the classics of our revolutionary theory. In order to disguise their opportunism, they are quick to declare—implicitly but clearly—that “the first opportunists are Marx, Engels and Lenin”, i.e., those who proposed and established the dialectic of the laws governing the stages of historical development!
What is therefore left for the revisionists to say about imperialism, if it is not a qualitatively and essentially historically specific stage? Imperialism becomes, in their pharaonic hodgepodge, an ahistorical condition, an abstract structure (in the spirit of the bourgeois structuralist Althusserian ideotypes), with the how and whence it emerged, as part of a law governed process, remaining unclear and irrelevant (from which stage/ stages) and even more unknown if, why and how it can be overcome historically by the next stage (stages of revolutionary transformations towards communism).
In their fixation, ALL states are equally abstract building blocks, structuralistically self-sufficient, self- contained and introverted “formations”, qualitatively and essentially undifferentiated and homogenized (any state where monopolies exist or operate in is automatically declared an “imperialist state”). Among these unequivocally “imperialist states” there may even be some “inequality”, i.e., ONLY QUANTITATIVE differences, inequality in terms of order of magnitude, (of metaphysically understood measure). Thus, they may statically occupy some place in the pyramid (any scientific examination of inter-state relations, imperialist integrations, global relations and processes of production, capital flows and monopoly super-profits, etc. is rejected here by default). Thus, all states are automatically labelled “imperialist”!
To the extent that the architects giving shape to this nonsense sense that their pharaonic edifice is unstable, they are quick to “alter” it with 2 flimsy admissions:
1) of all these “imperialisms”, those who – unknown how—were once near the top, are starting to compete for a position at the top of the pyramid and
2) in all these “imperialisms” small or larger, we need not search in vain for scientific substantiation of their imperialist nature … For the unabashed and despicable revisionists, as an overwhelming confirmation of their “collective pharaonic wisdom” serves this killer “argument”: “the capitalists of every country at the stage of imperialism, are engaged in or wish to engage in imperialist policy”!!!
And here, science has reached its apogee …
There could not be a more blatant confession of mindless subjective idealism that wants to advertise itself as a “revolutionary class consistency” … By this logic, every small shopkeeper, every petit bourgeois individual can self-evidently be considered a capitalist, an imperialist, a great tycoon of the financial oligarchy, but only if he wants to be, because “he would like it that way”! The same goes for the wage-earning proletarian!
Imperialism is finally reduced to the “wants” of some subjects, while metaphysical voluntarism does away with every trace of Marxist science and rationality! …
2. They reject the Leninist discovery of the essential and decisive for the monopoly stage, manifestation of the basic contradiction of capital: the contradiction between capital and labour, between dead labour of the past and living labour of the present (Marx). That is to say, they reject the contradiction between imperialist countries (a handful of parasites/rentiers according to Lenin) and independent, semi-independent, dependent countries, through multiple mechanisms of extracting surplus value on a regional and global scale, through the siphoning of monopoly super-profits. Without this contradiction, which is fundamental to imperialist exploitation, it is impossible to diagnose the current times and conjuncture, it is impossible to formulate a historically specific strategy and tactics that will lead to victory. It is an unprecedented apologetic, which absolves the domination of the world financial oligarchy and disarms the revolutionary movement.
3. They reject a Leninist category of irreplaceable theoretical and practical importance, the “weak link”: the country and/or group of countries, of the periphery, where the internal and global contradictions of the imperialist system are concentrated, forming an explosive node that makes the outbreak of revolutionary situations possible and necessary. Without the precise identification of the organic dialectical relationship between the “weak link”, a revolutionary situation and the escalation of the latter into a victorious revolution, there can be no conscious intervention of the revolutionary subject there where beats the heart of the global revolutionary process: especially in countries with an average or even below-average level of development (but not totally impoverished, as the very existence of the collective subject is practically nullified in these countries, as is also the case in the countries of the imperialist frontline).
4. They de facto reject communist strategy, they practically renounce it through the metaphysical detachment of strategy from tactics and the reduction of the latter to an abstract “anti-capitalism”. They go so far as to reject and even ban the word “tactics” from their official texts and rhetoric, while they strive to convince the world that this word alone denotes “opportunism”!
An elementary knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory makes it clear that the categories ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ constitute a dialectical dipole. Detachment of one pole from the other, from its opposite, every metaphysical absolutisation of one of them, leads practically to the opposite of the absolutised pole: the abstract absolutisation of the strategic end, its detachment from the means, the ways and the actual gradual escalation of the concrete historical process, from the development of the totality of the objective and subjective conditions of its achievement, leads to the confinement of the movement to blind and meaningless activism, to tailing the capitalist class, hounding behind the agenda set by its regime, that is, to a crawling tacticism.
We have seen it in previous forms of apostasy, e.g. in the Kautskyism of the Second International: in the name of the “orthodoxy” of adherence to “pure strategy”, to “pure socialism”, the then opportunist apostates denounced the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution as a “dirty Asian sect” against their own “pure strategic orthodoxy”! They thundered and excoriated the “heretical” Bolsheviks and Lenin precisely because they rejected the Leninist contribution to the political economy of imperialism, the theoretical and practical importance of the “weak link”, the Leninist conception of the national question and the need for an organic link between anti-imperialism and the socialist revolution, the need for an anti- colonial struggle and the revolutionary removal of pre- capitalist residues, etc. Thus, expecting the automatic and spontaneous “maturation of conditions” in the developed capitalist-imperialist countries, those ten a penny “revolutionaries”, also openly moved to positions of integration and capitalist reform, to becoming advocates of their own imperialist coalition during the war …
Today’s opportunist apostates are resurrecting and continuing in an even more crude and vulgar way the most rotten of traditions that led to the bankruptcy of the Second International which Lenin mercilessly criticised. Additionally, traditions of the Trotskyist sects, neo- Marxist, Eurocommunist, structuralist, post-structuralist and post-modernist sects, with clumsy new gimmicks. They even have the audacity to disguise this apostacy/ resignation with the grandstanding of their alleged commitment to the “revolutionary strategy” which they reduce to “pure anti-capitalism” = “pure people’s power- socialism” …
5. They metaphysically detach theory from praxis while reducing scientific theory to propagandistic ideological constructs to cover up their opportunist pro-regime drift. “Theory” and “praxis” also constitute a dialectical dipole, the metaphysical treatment of which leads to blindness, to the nullification and undermining of the revolutionary movement. In this way they de facto reject and disavow both revolutionary theory and revolutionary praxis, since, as Lenin proved, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement […] the role of the pioneer militant can only be fulfilled by a party guided by a pioneering theory” ( V. I. Lenin: “What is to be done?”)
6. The dialectic of the historical process consists of the development in law governed stages, with a specific historical escalation of qualitative, quantitative and essential transformations, objective and subjective conditions, with a corresponding upgrade of means, ends, modes and subjects. Only on the basis of this scientific approach is the law governed character of the revolution substantiated. Without it, revolution and socialism-communism are empty words, meaningless chatter. However, our revisionists also reject the revolutionary theory of historical law governed process discovered by the classics of Marxism-Leninism. They have gone so far as to deny the very existence of law governed stages of historical development, which is a gross rejection of the dialectic of revolutionary development.
They justify this obscurantist irrational revision by invoking an imaginary “theory of stages” which is supposedly a property of … opportunism! By denying the existence of a gradual, law governed development in society, they deny the very possibility of scientific research, scientific description and explanation of the structure and history of the development of society, and thus reject any possibility of scientific prediction, on the basis of which alone is the formulation of a victorious strategy and tactics of the revolutionary movement possible.
Shadowboxing with some arbitrary ideological construction, referred to in neo-Marxism as the “theory of stages”, they have moved to overtly counter- revolutionary positions: metaphysical evolutionism, i.e. the de facto view of capitalism as an eternal and insurmountable system …
7. They reject the necessity and the very possibility of any real socialist revolution, any historical project of early socialist revolutions. According to their dogma, “all countries are imperialist within the pyramid”, therefore there are no “weak links”, tactical transitional goals, and escalation of the struggle, from the revolutionary situation, the uprising with frontal anti-imperialist (national liberation, anti-neocolonial, democratic, etc.) movements in dependent countries with an average and below-average level of development, to the socialist revolution. Therefore, they also reject the tasks of escalating the struggle towards the transitional stage, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction.
8. The opportunists reject the concrete historical process of revolutionary transformations in the existing victorious early socialist revolutions of various peoples, addressing them in a “didactic contemptuous tone”, bordering on racist colonialist conceit. So they preach in an arrogant tone: “What you have isn’t socialism” and “We will tell you how you should have carried out your revolution” or “How you should do it”!
However, exactly what kind of revolution can be taught by the apostates who, as we have seen above, have rejected and renounced every fundamental concept and principle of revolutionary theory and practice? Their “preaching” is done by invoking a metaphysically idealized “model of pure socialism”, without contradictions, problems and conflicts with the counter-revolution, a model in absolute metaphysical opposition to capitalism, in the spirit of abstract “anti-capitalism”, the imaginary absolute negation of capitalism in the metaphysical beyond of the “maturation of conditions”, which practically means being trapped in the insurmountability of capitalism …
9. They categorically reject the essential and decisive component of the world revolutionary movement since the 20th century: the camp of the countries of the early socialist revolutions. The current opportunism/ revisionism, takes and projects the prevalence of bourgeois revolutions and the restoration of capitalist relations in the USSR and the early socialist countries that emerged after WWII (with the decisive presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe) AS WELL AS THE BOURGEOIS-REACTIONARY PROPAGANDA: A supposedly FINAL AND INDEFINITE “FAILURE- DEFEAT” of the very idea and prospect of socialism!
This attitude tends to be applied retroactively in history: even the socialist character of the USSR, and even the role of Stalin himself, begins to be explicitly and unequivocally called into question! The Second World War is gradually described as “imperialist from the start and to the end”, etc. Apparently, it is only a matter of time (and a gradual demographic-age change in the composition of members, cadres and followers who have a lived experience of the revolutionary history of the movement) for the drift into regime positions of overt anti-Sovietism/anti-communism. This position leads to a potential rejection of all existing socialism, even in the countries that continue to build socialism (PRC, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, etc.), based on bourgeois ahistorical ideologies, which identify commodity- monetary relations with capitalism, thus failing to recognize the legitimate necessity of the existence and development of various forms of historically necessary socialist commodity and monetary relations enlisted by various forms and levels of central planning, which CANNOT be abolished IMMEDIATELY, but are sublated at the stage of maturity of socialism, towards the achievement of a mature communist society.
10. They reject another essential and decisive component of the global revolutionary movement: anti-imperialism and the countries that emerged as a result of victorious national liberation, anti-colonialist, etc. movements, under the influence and with the internationalist help of the victorious early socialist revolutions of the 20th century. The opportunists label the whole of the anti-imperialist, national liberation, anti-colonialist, etc. movements, every frontal struggle “opportunist”, “reformist”, “imperialist”, operating “under foreign flags”, etc.
The entirety of the unacceptable positions and doctrines of this historically unprecedented for the audacity and primitive irrationality of the opportunist- revisionist web cannot stand up to elementary scientific Marxist criticism. It is no coincidence that in order to circulate, submit and finally impose its despicable ideological constructs on the people it controls, the current leadership of the KKE resorts to torrential propaganda through repetition (which ends up as brainwashing), to the effective prohibition of any critical thinking, any differentiation from its doctrines ( in terms of taboos), without hesitating to resort to the practices of the deep state, such as mass ideological lynching and the smearing of dissidents.
Does their provocative arrogance and their prevarication function as a desperate attempt to overcompensate for their bottomless theoretical and practical degeneration, or is it a necessary element of extreme zeal in their mission to undermine and dismantle the revolutionary movement? It remains unknown … The only certainty is that this increasingly insolent conceit of theirs offends, provokes the indignation of the communists of various countries, those who refuse to comply with their suggestions and accept their “gifts”.
However, it is appropriate to ground our questioning in the field of practical testing, complementary to the strict scientific Marxist critique.
Let us therefore pose the following question: What exactly is the practical perspective that any adoption of this package of crude revisions holds for the revolutionary movement?
Under this pharaonic and disastrous “theory”, communists are required to find their place and role within a bleak system:
All 237 countries on the planet (all states and microstates) are universally imperialist, qualitatively and essentially undifferentiated, homogeneous and embedded as static and self-contained building blocks in the “imperialist pyramid”.
All that the working class and its parties could do is “pure class struggle”, “class war” for “people’s power”.
The latter is conceived as “socialism” without intermediate transitional stages towards and within it, as “pure anti-capitalism without a trace of commodity and money relations (CMR)” (in this bourgeois ideological construct CMR is synonymous with capitalism) = directly to “communism”.
When will this happen? “When conditions are mature!”
When, where, how and why are these conditions likely to mature somewhere? For the reasons stated above, this scheme does not foresee the slightest possibility of scientific prediction on the basis of Marxist science, which they have collectively revised and abandoned. The whole process is mystified to a degree corresponding to the expectation of believers of “the fullness of time”, the “second coming of God”, etc.
Will conditions mature simultaneously in the entire pharaonic structure or first somewhere, in some structural element of this pyramid? It is unknown and impossible to give a rational answer based on the figure, since there is no room in it for gradual qualitative and substantial differentiation of the thickened structural elements.
Let us try to examine the two basic versions on the basis of the infamous figure:
a. Let us examine the possibility of a simultaneous spontaneous and automatic maturation of conditions in all 237 countries (for reasons unknown). How would the balance of power change all at once, so that the next day the communists (without allies, fronts, escalation and coordination of the struggle on a global basis, etc.) would perform the miracle? What socio- political subject is preparing on a global scale for this miracle? Which global financial oligarchy will allow this to happen? The questions are of course rhetorical in nature … Practically: never! It is absolutely unfeasible to simultaneously change the balance of power (due to inequality, parasitism of the imperialist states, etc.), just as it is unfeasible to simultaneously prepare an equally organised, militant and effective revolutionary socio- political subject in every part of the planet. Moreover, the preparation of such a subject is unattainable without the leading role of the communists. How will the communists be able to perform this role if—saturated by the toxic solvent of the “pyramid” —they are condemned to being self-referential and self-absorbed, isolationist, harmless to the regime of the world financial oligarchy?
b. In violation of all the tenets of the Pharaonic pyramid, let us suppose that conditions mature (unknown how) in 1 country, or group of countries. Does the global financial oligarchy, together with the oligarchies of all (236 now?) countries, have any reason to allow this to happen without suppressing at birth any movement to challenge its sovereignty? What then can the poor revolutionary movement of a single country do, even if it has the majority of the working class and people on its side? Alliances on a frontal basis for tactical purposes, at home and abroad, are “forbidden” (since tactics, alliances, fronts, anti-imperialism, stages, etc. = opportunism, etc.).
Any intermediate hypothetical version of the above would have unambiguously similar results. This plan goes beyond the most morbid insanity.
In practice, therefore, the revolutionary movement in these twisted terms can never do anything revolutionary, at any time or any place!
So, what does this “programme” propose? Practically nothing communist: it proposes the practical DEATH OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT AND EVERY PROGRESSIVE PARTY ON THE PLANET! Simply, until the spontaneous and automatic “maturation of conditions”, i.e. eternally, people ought to support electorally etc. and reproduce the remaining organizational and institutional formation as a diminishing framework of existential reference …
By this one-sided conclusion alone it becomes clear that the luminaries of this party ideological apparatus, de facto (regardless of their intentions) give no damn about the real movement, about the revolution and socialism-communism. All they could care about is the maintenance and reproduction of the conditions of parasitism of their small bureaucratic machine, their entrenched positions and roles as an organic component of the 5 decades of peaceful adaptation to the bourgeois parliamentary system of the national and transnational superstructure (EU, NATO, etc.).
The stewardship over the glorious revolutionary history of a once revolutionary party and movement must be conducted in terms of ritualistic references to symbols, which to the extent that the degeneration of the apparatus and its integration into the regime are promoted—are increasingly transformed into formalistic signifiers of the identity of a manipulable public, of a special reference “target group” in the spectrum of political marketing of the regime.
Political parties, like any element of culture, are not immutable throughout history. The gradual pro-regime degeneration of once revolutionary parties is a law of history that the classics, and Lenin in particular, pointed out during their time.
These de facto residual functions of the bureaucratic ideological apparatus of a rapidly degenerating party can be organically combined with an ideological-political manipulation of international aspirations, especially in view of the escalating World War III.
The revolutionary movement of our time is being called upon to respond to the challenges of World War III. In war and in revolution—which war brings urgently back on the agenda—the main enemy of the movement is the imperialist axis under the US aggressor. An axis that instrumentalises and uses as its strike force its subordinate fascist and Nazi regimes of various hues.
In order for the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement to emerge victorious in this life-or-death confrontation with a still powerful enemy (despite the rapid loss of its forces, positions and roles in the global balance of power), it must achieve the maximum consolidation, unification and coordination of its forces, its formation into a strong and effective front at the national and international level.
This is impossible as long as most dangerous dipole in history, opportunism-revisionism, continues to undermine and divide the movement, sowing division and defeatism, disorienting and distracting forces. As long as it contributes actively and from within to the manipulative work of the mechanisms of the superstructure of the deep bourgeois state, in de facto (consciously and/or unconsciously) complicity with the tentacles of the non-state and transnational organs of imperialism. All as it contributes destructively to the undermining and annulment of the formation of the revolutionary subject of the time, through the buying- off, deception, the denigration of militants and parties/ organisations, splits (with the principle of “divide and rule”), with deadly machinations and consequences for the movement.
What is required, therefore, is an unrelenting struggle for the revelation of its true role, for the unmasking, for the theoretical, ideological, moral-political and organisational crushing of this toxic and disruptive apostasy.
This struggle is indispensable for the realisation of the development of the world anti-imperialist front, with the catalytic role of a theoretically and practically reorganised and united world communist movement.
