– Hardial Bains, 1997 –
Excerpt from Modern Communism
…Following the victory of the Great October Revolution in 1917, an expeditionary force of 14 imperialist countries, including Canada, united in an unholy alliance to invade Soviet Russia in an attempt to crush it, but to no avail. Prior to the Second World War, all of Old Europe, with the United States and Canada watching in the wings, appeased the devil himself, Adolf Hitler, egging him on to rid the world of the “Red Menace,” the Soviet Union, but to no avail. Following the victory of the anti-fascist forces during World War Two, with the Soviet Union and the communists of all lands at the head of the Resistance Movement, the forces of darkest reaction united in the most unholy alliance to unleash the Cold War, led this time by the U.S. imperialists.
As soon as Hitler was crushed in Berlin, and before the people could breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the heroic success of what they had accomplished in the anti-fascist war, the “Western” imperialists led by the United States began their Cold War to “contain communism”. They dropped the atomic bomb twice on the people of Japan to terrorize the world. They arbitrarily divided Europe into zones of influence, restored former Nazis to power in Germany, militarily crushed the popular uprising in Greece against the monarcho-fascist regime and through the Marshall plan laid the groundwork to undermine progressive change in all of Europe and bribe and subvert wavering elements.
In 1949 the U.S. and fifteen of its allies formed the aggressive NATO military alliance which sanctified the continuing occupation of Europe by U.S. forces, drew a line right across the continent, positioning huge forces and nuclear weapons to threaten and frighten the newly founded People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union, and to stop the peoples of France and Italy from opting for communism.
In 1950 the U.S. imperialists and their allies, including Canada, invaded Korea with modern weapons of mass destruction, and during three years caused untold suffering and devastation to the Korean nation. A cease-fire was signed in 1953 but the U.S. occupied the south, turned it into a colonial possession and militarized the Korean Peninsula. They have refused to leave to this date.
Utilizing the CIA and reactionary military forces within countries around the world, the U.S. imperialists began a terrible history of assassinations, coups d’etat, and direct military intervention to stop any progressive change or challenge to imperialist exploitation and plunder. Even a brief list is horribly damning: the democratic movement in Iran, led by Mossadegh, was overthrown by U.S. forces which installed the brutal Shah of Iran in 1953; throughout Africa and Latin America military regimes were armed to the teeth by the U.S. and their allies, and wherever the people attempted to take power they were overthrown and killed such as Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, and Allende of Chile in 1973. To this day, any country that attempts an independent foreign policy or democratic reforms becomes a target of attack such as the Congo, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, etc., and of course Cuba, which has been singled out for punishment and isolation.
U.S. imperialist Chieftain Kennedy, taking over the war against the people of Vietnam from the French imperialists, escalated it into a full-scale slaughter that continued for over ten years. In a clumsy attempt to rationalize their military intervention in Asia, the U.S. extended the reactionary theory of the “containment of communism” to the “domino theory” stating that the U.S. military had the right to go into a country and crush the communist forces, because if the communists were not stopped, one country after another would “fall to communism in a domino effect.”
In 1965 they armed and financed the Suharto fascists in Indonesia to unleash a bloodbath upon the Indonesian Communists and other progressive people that resulted in the deaths of one million people and continues to this time. The U.S. imperialists tried to hold back the independence of the Chinese people, hoping to enslave them and keep them on the world market as cheap “coolies.” They armed the fascist regime of Chiang Kai-shek and when it was defeated in 1949, installed it on Taiwan, and encircled the island with the U.S. Seventh Fleet which is still around there.
In the U.S. and elsewhere they began an anti-communist crusade under the name of McCarthyism that attacked and marginalized progressive people in all walks of life, especially in the trade unions, education and the arts. This assault on the democratic rights of the people has continued unabated with anti-communism at its core. It has been a continuous life and death struggle between progress and retrogression throughout the world; between the forces of enlightenment and the forces of darkness; between the exploited of the world, with the proletariat at the head, and the exploiters, with the bourgeoisie at the head. Since the time of U.S. imperialist Chieftain Jimmy Carter, even the word democracy, used in the most general way, has been the cover for intervention and subversion of all those people who are attempting to open the road to progress for their societies.
The period since the Second World War has been an unending struggle of the people for progress, against the darkest reaction. It has been the most violent period of counter-revolution the world has ever witnessed.
As the Cold War got underway and world imperialism headed by U.S. imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie turned the spectre of communism into the most terrifying apparition, the challenge facing communists everywhere to answer this spectre with a manifesto of their own also came under increasing pressure. Not a few communist parties, starting with those such as Browder in the U.S. who had capitulated even before the Cold War was officially launched and followed by the Yugoslav party led by Tito, the Italian party of Togliatti and others, succumbed to the pressure of imperialism and the reactionary world bourgeoisie, and responded with a phantasm of their own. Following the death of J.V. Stalin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev changed the general line of the Communist Party altogether, declaring “peaceful competition” between socialism and imperialism. The CPSU under Khrushchev initiated a kind of competition to see who could issue the filthiest slanders against the name and work of Stalin, against socialism and the progress of the society. In the name of exorcising the ghost of Stalin, or presenting communism “with a human face,” these revisionist parties too espoused dogmatism based on anti-communist Cold War presuppositions, declaring the edifice of socialism, the theory of scientific socialism and the principles of Marxism-Leninism to be null and void. They reinstated all the traitors from the past, including the likes of Nikolai Bukharin who had been condemned to death for treason against the Soviet state. In this way they established common cause with all the enemies of socialism and revolution.
This phantasm of communism created by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union finally reached its pinnacle in the open rejection of socialism and communism by Mikhail Gorbachev and others. Their stands exposed the fact that behind all their self-righteous claims to be the most pure communists and the greatest defenders of what is best in humanity, lurked the most dangerous enemies of the working class and the progress of society. Following the counter-revolutions in the eastern European countries and the collapse of the former Soviet Union, not a few parties changed their names and dropped their symbols. Experience shows that their aim in doing so was to better serve imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie in their counter-revolutionary crusade to extinguish the demand of the peoples of these countries to come to power themselves and create a society which satisfies their claims upon it. However, this merely shows that they were not communist in the first place, but social democratic parties whose main aim was, and continues to be, to reconcile the class struggle in the service of imperialism and world reaction. Today, the new bourgeoisie in power in these countries, and world imperialism and reaction are having great difficulty stabilizing their rule. The bourgeois rule of law is outmoded, not acceptable to the peoples whose societies have already been established on a more advanced system.
As pointed out by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 148 years ago, “Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power,” synonymous with change, progress and their own demise. This is why, in spite of their “victory” in the former Soviet Union, the more desperate the bourgeoisie becomes to preserve the capitalist status quo and forestall its inevitable downfall at the hands of their grave-diggers, the international proletariat, the more they conjure up the spectre of communism to scare the gullible, justify reaction, and promote reactionary reforms in the name of change. This so-called change is mixed up by them with every sort of political tendency, while the official opposition disclaims all change and demands a return to the past. In this way, together, they throw dust in the eyes of the masses to obscure the way forward.
Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the regimes in the former people’s democracies, the same struggle is raging under current conditions. In spite of their victory, imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie have not been able to exorcise themselves of the “terrifying apparition” which gripped Old Europe during the last century. The prospect of their downfall so terrifies them that they have united together as never before to rid and purify themselves and the entire world of this figment of their own thought.
The spectre which today haunts imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie of the entire world remains the spectre of communism, but today the battle against communism has been transformed from what it was at the time of Karl Marx into a broad campaign against change, against the New. Even the most harmless struggle for change, as long as its thrust is for real change, towards the New, becomes the target of the vilest propaganda and brutal attacks. The ghost of J.V. Stalin and the socialist Soviet Union under his leadership, haunts even the most innocent and the gullible. History has been turned on its head, with the worst crimes of the Hitlerite fascists attributed to the communists in general, and J.V. Stalin in particular. This disinformation is intended to disorient the workers, women and youth and provides them with no prospects whatsoever. This is also done with the aim of diverting the attention of the world’s people from the Hitlerite nature of the crimes being committed today by the imperialists and world reaction in the name of democracy and the standards set by the Paris Charter. Signed in 1991 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, comprised of the states of Old Europe along with Canada and the United States, the Paris Charter is a declaration that all countries the world over must adhere to a “free market economy,” a “multiparty system,” and human rights based on their own anti-communist Cold War notions of the sanctity of private property and civil rights based on it. The Paris Charter is held up as the standard that determines whether a country is on the “right” path or not.
Hoping in vain that people will believe that their only choice is to make the best of the capitalist status quo, the ghost of Stalin is invoked as the modern-day spectre of communism, making the people believe that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Within this framework, all the political parties of the bourgeoisie, their governments, big business, the labour aristocracy, organized religion and academia are terrorizing the people in an effort to force them to renounce their desire for revolutionary change. The reactionary bourgeoisie’s pretensions, according to which it seeks reform, combined with its mortal fear of change, development and motion — its fear of everything truly new, modern, and consistent with the requirements of the times — find their expression in the official adoption of pragmatism and neo-pragmatism by many states in the world. Pragmatism worships the absence of principles. If something works in the interests of the status quo, it must be applauded and applied; it is the unholy marriage of religion and science, which takes the vow that “the end justifies the means.”
Imperialist countries even forge blocs and create pretexts in order to invade their enemies as in Iraq, or interfere in the affairs of their “friends” as in Haiti, Bosnia, and in the Middle East against the Palestinian and other Arab people. They gang up and accuse others such as the People’s Republic of China of “violations” of “human rights,” while they themselves do not even recognize a livelihood as a human right and in their own countries poverty, and the abuse and humiliation of women, children and minorities are escalating. Fascism, militarism and state terrorism are used on a scale broader than anything that has been seen during the decades since the Second World War. All of this is directed with a vengeance against the forces fighting to open society’s door to progress, against those who stand for real change, for everything which is new, and against everything which is decadent, moribund and old. Communism is still banned in many countries, such as Albania, south Korea and elsewhere, and Marxist-Leninists are still hounded and killed throughout the world. The fear of even discussing communism characterizes not only imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie and their secret police, monopoly-controlled media, academia and think-tanks throughout the world, it also is a feature of some who call themselves communists, socialists, social-democrats, labour activists and progressives. Instead of dealing with the theory and practice of Modern Communism, they play the most reactionary role as a block to social change. Throughout the twentieth century they have elevated anti-communism to the status of a key element of the official ideology of the most powerful states, which includes not only the ruling bodies but the official opposition in both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forms. This official anti-communist ideology has provided every pretext to commit the most terrible crimes against humanity.