The Start of the Current Century:

By Dr. Ivan Ivanov – Bulgaria

It is so good that NSC has dedicated an issue to Lenin and his birthday and to have also started a page in NSC dedicated to the names and work of other prominent leaders of the working class in the world, socialist and communist movements. This gives the readers of NSC an opportunity not only to remember and pay homage to those remarkable personalities and their accomplishments, but also to give opinions and exchanges of thoughts on the current validity of their ideas and political experiences.

Just a fortnight after Lenin’s birthday, April 22, 1970 is the birthday of Karl Marx, May 5, 1818. In May it is the Victory Day over Fascism, an event that by no means can be separated from the name of Stalin and the heroic people and army of the USSR. On June 19, as it was duly noted by NSC, is Georgi Dimitrov’s 125^th Anniversary.

Recovering once again through my mind all these dates and events, I couldn’t help thinking g over and over again what an extraordinary phenomenon in the life history of mankind that Karl Marx was. Obviously, Engels, his closest associate had all the good reasons t underline that "Marx was a Genius and all of us around him were in the best case just talents."

This is just not another attempt at an eulogy. What Marx and Engels have done for mankind is so great and indisputable, that neither it nor they need any special effort of this kind. Karl Marx is the only one in the History of Science to offer a successful thorough analysis of the fundamental and system-forming economic, social and political processes of Society as a whole.

There are, no doubt, a number of other, some very talented and brilliant scholars after him. Each of them however was taking up, studying and analyzing mostly one or separate features and characteristics of the life and development of Society. None were or taking it up as SYSTYMATIC ENTITY. That is why this makes Marx irreplaceable and vitally necessary to all who really aim at gaining true knowledge of human society and at doing everything to make it better.

For these reasons Marx and his teaching do not have to be either "revised" or "negated" as so many various kind of opportunists, renegades and revisionists are continually suggesting. They all have of course, their bad "good reasons" for doing so. On the other hand, such efforts of theirs are usually backed also with a striking scarcity of knowledge and equally "impressive" inability to learn.

There are scholars now, like the book written and published by Keeran and Kenny "Socialism Betrayed" that analyze this tragedy and much more has to be done.

Anybody who had read Lenin "Imperialism", the inter-imperialist contradictions, the necessity of raising the slogan of International Labour Unity – all of the present problems in the world were predicted by these Marxists and scientifically analyzed.

Stalin learned from his teachers and was influenced by Marx and Lenin. At the same time Stalin and his associates had to do however something that none of the previous leaders had the chance to do.

The fundamentals of another, new in principle, human civilization was basically laid by the Soviet people, and later by the people of other socialist countries. Much can be learned from Stalin and his work "The Economic Problems of Socialism" –1952.

Also, at least three basic ideas of Georgi Dimitrov will prove inevitably necessary to the current and future efforts to bring about a better world for the billions of people on this planet.

First – United People’s Front of the democratic and progressive forces to limit the powers of the reactionary, monopolistic capital, militarism and the danger of advancing fascism.

Second – Collective Farming which gives ownership to the whole people and thus produces an abundance for all of the people.

Third –The dictatorship of the proletariat and establishing peoples democracy.

All of the above were abolished after 1989 in the Soviet Union and we see the disaster that this has caused in former USSR and in other former socialist countries.