From: "Verlag Neue Einheit" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 02:50:38 +0100
To: "..Mailverteiler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Neue Einheit: Problems of the International Communist Movement -
Klaus Sender Message to the Year 2001
Message of Greetings at the Beginning of the New Year
Problems of the International Communist Movement
For the new year we send our warmest greetings to all communist
organizations and to all revolutionaries around the globe.
For more than 10 years, after having succeeded in infiltrating and
subverting large parts of the former communist movement in decades of
struggle, a capitalism has been developing around the world which is
unprecedented in history. Great revolutionary changes are coming
along with this capitalism, as well as simultaneously social
devastation on a large scale which inevitably must again give rise to
the protest against this capitalism in mankind. The revolutionaries
and communists around the globe, therefore, have quite different
tasks but just to abandon themselves to resigned reflections on the
past. One has to face the tasks and realize the shortcomings, the
apparent as well as the more concealed mistakes of the movement of
the former epochs. The total denial of the movement as it occurred
with quite a lot of representatives as the result of their former
political activity is inappropriate. It cannot be seen but as a
breakdown of thinking.
In the middle of the fifties the communist movement experienced a
setback when fundamental revolutionary principles were abandoned in
the party which so far had been the most important one, the CPSU.
Instead of a critical reappraisal of mistakes committed up to then,
and of shortcomings of the movement which had become apparent during
the past century, neo-bourgeois forces went over to denying the
substance of the movement, in order to go after the breaking up of
this movement in a protracted process and to finally restore
capitalism in such parts of the world where one had already been
considering it a thing of the past.
The last 10 to 12 years of capitalism, or already the last 20 to 25
years, if you look at the whole new epoch since the political change
in China in the end of the seventies, only prove that this capitalism
is unable to offer a solution for mankind, and that it inevitably is
steering towards a new grave dead end.
This capitalism attacks everything which produces cohesion among the
masses, which makes possible positions of resistance, it undermines
revolutionary classes, undermines nations, and would like to
undermine the whole of culture for the only purpose of rendering
everybody a slavish underling. The most different forms of resistance
are thus provoked in the whole of mankind which we have to support
and from which we have to learn ourselves. The picture of the world
today is characterized from there by great disorder, the most
different phenomena standing side by side.
The communist movement does not need to conceal its achievements.
During the 130 years from appr. 1840 to the seventies of the 20th
century its achievements were colossal, and not only in the regions
where it was able to realize its own rule but also in the remaining
parts of the world it everywhere aroused the resistance by the
revolutionary pressure and simultaneously pushed through social
improvements with basic rights. Without it, capitalism from the
outset would have got stuck in those forms which are connected to the
term Manchester which today, after the overthrow of communism, it
dares to re-erect in an all the more unconcealed and blunt manner.
For the most brutal forms of capitalism, which we are experiencing
today, were also those which predominated in the beginning of the
capitalist industrial phase, limited, though, to a few countries
then, whereas today they include the whole world.
We have to concern ourselves, of course, in particular with the large
communist states, above all the former Soviet Union and the
revolutionary China of Mao Zedong. The line of modern revisionism,
connected to names like Browder, the American "communist" who wanted
to declare from the outset the US the model for the modern world,
Khruschev and other leaders of the SU, must be a central chainlink
for the criticism. The assumption that one had to conduct a
predominantly common policy together with the biggest power of the
capitalist world, that one must raise the forefinger against the
peoples willing to make revolution and to forbid their rebelliousness
- this line must be fundamentally condemned. Rightly it was at that
time castigated and rejected by the CPChina.
Several matters pertaining to the policy of the CPChina, too, have to
be reappraised. It is in fact correct that the Chinese revolution,
the majority of this population just being peasants, was as for its
bulk predominantly a peasants' revolution, with a proletarian
leadership, however, as embodied first of all in the Soviet Union
and furthermore in a communist party which by an integrative concept
included the broadest possible strata into the new democratic
revolution. The CPChina under Mao Zedong made use of the immense
historical and philosophical abilities residing in this largest
nation on earth which, though, has also its negative aspects.
The communist revolution in Germany could not stand the pressure, so
the revolution here and in some other European countries failed for
the time being. The Komintern's policy did not know how to arrive at
sufficiently concrete assessments, it bears an important share of the
responsibility, it was a "phraseological" policy not representing a
true materialism. Mao Zedong's policy also meant that that policy was
not able to prevail in China, but with the development of Mao's
teachings an essential new deepening of Marxism-Leninism was achieved
which not least took up again Lenin's dialectics as well as some
basic principles by Stalin. "Determine the forces with which a
revolution really can be made", "Correctly grasp the pair of
contradiction", "Deeply join together with the masses" - in this way
it may be titled.
The revolutionary focus wandered to the East for some time. For the
durable victory, however, it is necessary that the modern proletariat
is welded together. In today's situation it is obvious that the
immense new proletariat which was formed under the conditions of the
so-called globalisation meets difficulties to develop new unifying
forms of organization. There are immense movements of migration in
the whole world effecting an exchange, but capital also keeps on
exhausting new strata and instigates splits, tries to prevent the
continuity, and the single proletarians, the workforces in many large
nations of the former colonial and semicolonial world have a hard
time creating a unified front and uniting. Although they are hundreds
of thousands or millions in number in the single countries, they
nevertheless constitute a minority of the total population. In most
of the states there is a complete lack of rights, an autocratic
dictatorship furthered and exploited by the international capital,
whichever may be its guise. To support the unification which is
absolutely not easy must be the task of the modern revolutionary
communists. This can be the result only of an extremely sober and
consultative work. Any presumption, any celebration of oneself must
disappear. We also think that the countries which have already
experienced communist revolutions and their complete or partial
decline, among them Russia resp. the Soviet Union, China, but also
Germany with the formerly largest revolutionary movement (its
suppression belonging as a cornerstone to the understanding of the
modern communist movement) - that these countries must also play an
important role in the struggle for the elementary social rights and
the struggle for retaking the communist movement, in spite of all the
difficulties created by the social warps of this modern capitalism.
Although we have to criticize revisionism, in these parties there
are still people who want the same as we do and with whom we seek
cooperation.
In Germany we have experienced a degree of decay during the last
decades which is unprecedented in the history of our country. If
fascism extorted the proletariat by brute force, corrupted it by
racism and the unconcealed imperialist racist war, then what we are
experiencing since the 70ies is a decomposition of the proletariat,
corruption by imperialist social lifting, simultaneously release,
pushing the proletariat into the social scrapheap, and a purposeful
playing off of several nationalities against each other. It is
typical for the modern capitalist currents and their lackeys that
what they'd like most would be declaring the significance of the
nation in history nil or even negative on the whole. An
internationalist proletarian revolutionary force must decidedly take
action against that. The Group Neue Einheit is not only to be found
among the propagators of a decided internationalism but also among
the decided defenders of the rights of a nation, and of our own
nation in particular at which certain forces of capital are hurling
mud, as if the reactionary side was the only one and the
revolutionary components of our history were not existing. One has,
however, to acknowledge the fact that Germany was the country to give
birth to modern communism, and that it always has been a country in
which decisive battles around social questions were fought to the
end. This has been the case since more than 150 years. The Nazi
counter-revolution, and in general already the counter-revolution
after the revolution of 1918, always was the most concentrated
expression of all reactionary movements, and it could not have been
generated only by the domestic reaction, but only by the cooperation
of the most decisive forces in the world, with US imperialism as the
centre of gravitation and the wire-puller in the background.
Each communist party has to have a critical look at the positive as
the negative sides of the own nation, of the own culture, and has to
differentiate these. Here for each of the communist parties a wide
field of tasks will still offer itself, as these questions have so
far been dealt with in a completely insufficient fashion.
Not only in Germany but in general around the globe the mistake was
committed to attach too little importance to the cultural questions
dominating in a country. But they are an important key in coming near
to the people of the respective country.
The essence and the main thing for us is and remains the social
struggle in our country. The high concentration of the proletariat in
Germany during the first decades of the 20th century, the
revolutionary attempts in this country as well as in some
neighbouring countries extremely alarmed the bourgeoisie. Fascism was
the reaction. Later in the sixties and seventies Marxist
revolutionary parties arose again in spite of all attempts to declare
this movement dead, and capitalism all of a sudden could not escape a
revolutionary youth. The response which was given has simultaneously
to be seen in the context with the international structural changes:
drastically reducing the proletariat in these modern developed
countries, to transfer the decisive manual labor to other countries,
the so-called low-wage countries, to let also a decisive part of the
brain-work follow, to make capital act internationally, and to reduce
as far as possible the social endeavors of the proletariat in every
single of these countries and in particular also in ours so far as to
prevent their enforcement.
Important is also the basic principle of Marxism that an
internationalist proletarian movement never is able to develop in a
country which itself is basically humiliated and is denied autonomy.
For a historically evolved nation, the development towards autonomy
is the precondition for its unfolding, also for the unfolding of the
working class. Capital's efforts to declare national independence a
minor matter or even a matter of reaction, therefore, in reality come
down to suppress the workers' cause in all countries.
>From the part of communists it cannot be tolerated what, for example,
is frequently said in our country, that it didn't matter where a
country's offspring is coming from, that as well it might be
"imported" from abroad as there were enough people in the world.
These are views of Neo-Malthusianists who in general advocate the
reverse and who basically also advocate the fight against the
domestic social movement.
In order to make clear which demands are to be heard here, it is
possible, for instance, to quote a capitalist representative who
frequently appears in the media and also politically acts as the
deputy chairman of the central council of the Jews in Germany. Michel
Friedman was quoted by the daily "Der Tagesspiegel" of Aug. 10, 2000,
in saying that the call for a population policy in Germany was
showing 'that it still hasn't been understood that Germany's future
does not depend on German parents getting German children.'
What an absurdity. Imagine somebody saying about Israel that Israel's
future did not depend on Israeli parents getting Israeli children, or
declaring in the USA that the US' future did not depend on American
parents getting American children etc. No country would accept that,
and in this country that must not be accepted either. It goes without
saying that each country's future depends on this country's people
getting children. An opposite supposition is racism.
Statements of this tendency are to be found also from other
representatives of capitalism, but the aggressiveness of Friedman's
is top. In this context it is in fact interesting that he is the
deputy chairman of the central council of the Jews. Our organization
has always condemned any form of racism and naturally also of anti-
Semitism. This however cannot mean that other ultra reactionary or
racist statements can go unpunished in the public and even are
declared taboo in society as it is attempted by some. Also an
opposite racism is not something which can be tolerated by us, by
revolutionaries and by the revolutionary working class under any
circumstances.
The favoring of laws with an offending pornographic character, which
hurl mud at the most elementary endeavors of the human being, at his
sexuality which is also an expression of his cultural identity, and
want abnormalities to be declared normality, from the part of
governments of today must also be mentioned. We know from the
experiences of the socialist states, also of the SU and the People's
Republic of China, that something like that is incompatible with
socialist construction. It was not by chance that our group was able
to prove that the infamous renegade Eduard Bernstein simultaneously
with his revisionist attempts made an attempt in this direction, the
direction of spitting at human sexuality and propagating sodomy.
Again cultural questions prove to be of prime importance.
Connecting internationalism with the national question - the
revolutionary with the democratic program - nowadays, therefore,
plays a fundamental role for our organization, and also for the
international communist movement, as we are thinking.
All this mentioned above naturally does not mean that the necessity
to struggle against German imperialism is not of prime importance. On
the contrary, the same forces representing this positions of decay in
the own country are reinforcing German imperialism in the world,
especially in eastern Europe, under the covering hand of the USA. The
same phrases of "ecologism", fear of "overpopulation", of opposing
the civil use of nuclear energy, of "human rights" and control of the
masses are today also the main appearance of German imperialism.
Furthermore we have to stress the government's endeavors to use
Neonazi provocations for the deflection from its own evil politics.
Still today in some countries parties are the ruling ones who claim
to pursue communist aims, as for example in China. But it cannot be
doubted that in China capitalism has more and more been gaining
ground since in the end of the seventies it was declared the
fundamental content of the epoch by Deng Xiaoping. The US, of course,
are calculating that these elementary economic forces will become so
big as to blast away the remaining Communist Party, in order to once
more pursue a direct imperialist agenda towards China.
If in the future such developments are to be prevented, it will be
necessary that also in China itself an unvarnished discussion is
conducted, at the same time once again thinking through the
revolutionary traditions of the Communist Party of China. Nobody can
forget that the CPChina successfully and in a historically far-
sighted fashion, criticized modern revisionism since 1956, and that
this criticism finally lead to the Cultural Revolution.
A different although not equally probable variant would consist in
China itself becoming a capitalist and imperialist hegemonic power,
and thus a danger itself.
The Cultural Revolution certainly had different sides, and there are
people in China who think that it would have brought ultra leftists
to power and in a way offered China on the salver to the US, if it
had been successful. There have in fact been trends of that kind but
they are not the core element. The objective, above all to develop
the human being and to make him master of his fate, to make the
producer the master of the factories, and for this purpose above all
to develop the class consciousness within the country, to continue
the class struggle under the socialist period, was without doubt
correct. The latter is a principle basically initiated already by
Lenin and carried on by Mao Zedong.
The Cultural Revolution also tore up the very roots of many
reactionary phenomena in China, notwithstanding the chaos, and in
doing so it took part in favoring the more modern development of
today on certain sectors. Like it was in many other countries, it
were the very revolutionary aggravations, sometimes even
exaggerations, which paved the way for the following modern times.
France, for example, had likewise become, after some exaggerations of
the French revolution, a forerunner of a modern nation, the epoch of
Napoleon and the restoration not being able to change this. The
Cultural Revolution is and remains an attempt under socialist
conditions to prevent the revisionist restoration and to realize the
objective of strengthening the revolutionary class consciousness, in
particular among youth.
One may debate these questions, one should debate them in the
communist movement, and we don't close our ears against the
shortcomings of the Chinese revolution which by its magnitude and
extent without doubt enabled also forces of capitalism and of the old
Chinese order to carry on their existence in many corners of society,
the US certainly having hopes of this even a long time before the
Cultural Revolution. This has to do with the broadness of this
revolution. But the main matter must never be forgot, thus we
decidedly defend the fight against revisionism and the Cultural
Revolution as well.
China is a very large country and like every country, big or small,
it has its different sides. China had and has immense revolutionary
abilities but at the same time it has negative reactionary sides
correlating with certain aspects of its culture. This is the same in
Germany as in China, in the USA as in Russia, in South Africa or
Brazil. And the whole of experience so far has demonstrated that
communism is not protected against reactionary conditions reproducing
themselves for quite a while in communist forms, because of the way
of thinking of the human beings, because of the cultural habits of
thousands of years of age. Thus czarism can reproduce itself in the
form of neo-czarism, thus Asian or Chinese reaction can reproduce
themselves in certain forms even under the continuation of certain
communist politics - they just have to be fought. It is not only the
class struggle in the modern meaning but also the fight against the
reproduction of ancient forms of society which resurge. It will
always be the task of class struggle during the socialist period to
fight also this reproduction of reactionary phenomena, and all the
experiences show that this cannot have full success overnight.
With the year 2001, the new centenary and the new millennium,
according to the modern calendar, finally start in an exact
calendrical fashion. The past millennium has produced a tremendous
thrust of productive forces, and in particular in Europe "la classe
emancipative" which came into being shortly before the year 1000 has
come so far as to be able to make the first steps for abolishing the
society based on exploitation.
The decades to come will again bring these questions up, the problems
of genetic engineering, of the international information society, all
of these will again transform our ideas, and we have to take up the
challenges.
I think that in the communist movement today the most different
components will grow together. Those who must fight for their basic
rights and supply will unite with those who defend science and the
fundaments of modern technology, and on the whole communism will
become the expression of all revolutionary endeavors round the world.
We must not forget that globalization, Internet society and also the
necessities of a modern dealing with genetic engineering and the
modern biological sciences have political consequences, they
necessitate further socialization. In this we can in fact retake the
experiences of former socialist states, also the negative ones, as we
have to avoid also them. In this respect the whole struggle led by
the communist movement over the various stages, up to the Communist
Manifesto of 1848, over the development of the legal movement during
the second half of the 19th century, the Commune of Paris, the
struggle against Russian czarism, the struggle against imperialism,
revisionism and the First World War, the October Revolution of 1917,
the revolutionary struggles in Europe between 1918 and 1933, up to
the successful revolutionary struggles of revolutionary China from
1921 to 1949 and moreover in the People's Republic of China, the
socialist construction in the Soviet Union, the victory against the
old fascism, and many other things were absolutely not worthless. All
of this was of extreme importance, without experience it is
impossible to come along.
The communists must learn the integrative element of the various
components in the world, and without doubt will regain their strong
power.
In the first half of January 2001
Klaus Sender
Ch. of Group Neue Einheit
e-mail to the author: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(The author here signed his pen-name longtime used in
the communist movement. In other instances he signed
his civil name Hartmut Dicke.)
-Translation-
Internet-Statement 2001/1
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Internet: http://www.neue-einheit.com
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