Guest Editorial
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| Ray O Light |
The October-November 2008 issue of Northstar Compass (NSC) carried much of the news of the Conference of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People held in Toronto from October 10-12, 2008. In his first page editorial introducing the Conference and its highlights, Council Chairman and NSC Editor Michael Lucas devoted the entire second half of the editorial to the final resolution considered by the Conference, the unanimously passed resolution on the need for a new Communist International. As the person who had drafted the resolution upon the request of Chairman Lucas and the one who guided its passage at the Conference (with just a few amendments), I want to share some thoughts about this important issue as well as about its connection to the International Friendship Council and the Council's biggest supporter over the years, the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians.
First of all, today the prevailing world outlook throughout the movement is bourgeois nationalism at the expense of and in opposition to proletarian internationalism. In his 2008 International Council Report to the Conference, Chairman Michael Lucas shared a quote, which he said was "issued in the U.S. about forty years ago by the 'Youth for Stalin' movement which [according to Lucas] expresses exactly what the present situation is now." The Youth for Stalin quote is as follows: "Since the death of Stalin, the two main characteristics of the international situation have been (1) the intensification of the contradiction between the oppressed nations and U.S. imperialism; and (2) the development of a policy in most socialist countries of betrayal of the oppressed nations based on the ascendancy of the national bourgeois class in the socialist countries." ("The Role of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the International Marxist-Leninist Movement – The October Revolution vs. the 'Cultural Revolution", Youth for Stalin, April 1968, cited on p. 13, Northstar Compass, September-October 2008) Chairman Lucas then observed: "These were prophetic words since the socialist camp is no more, and in its place was the birth of exploitative raw capitalism and growing cooperation with U.S. imperialism at the expense of the oppressed peoples of the world". (ibid)*
*Perhaps it was, at least in part, because I was the author of those words and that document on behalf of Youth for Stalin some forty years ago that Chairman Lucas asked me to draft the International Council/NSC Conference resolution this past fall, raising the need for a new Communist International.
In 1925, Stalin had warned that, "... the danger of nationalism must be regarded as springing from the growth of bourgeois influence on the Party in the sphere of foreign policy, in the sphere of the struggle that the capitalist states are waging against the state of the proletarian dictatorship. There can scarcely be any doubt that the pressure of the capitalist states on our state is enormous, that the people who are handling our foreign policy do not always succeed in resisting this pressure, that the danger of complications often gives rise to the temptation to take the path of least resistance, the path of nationalism....and that the path of least resistance and of nationalism in foreign policy is the path of isolation and decay of the first country to be victorious." (Stalin, Selected Works, Volume 7, p. 170-171)
In 1968, almost every communist party or organization in the world was affiliated with and/or heavily influenced by either the Soviet revisionists in state power or the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" leadership in state power or both. The revolutionary internationalist cry of Che Guevara, calling for "two, three, many Vietnams" went unheeded. Instead, within the next few years, the Chinese revisionists, following the Soviet revisionist example, used the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against U.S. imperialism as a lever with which to develop its own rapprochement with U.S. imperialism. Bourgeois nationalism was now rampant in the international communist movement. Of course, bourgeois bureaucracy, in place of proletarian revolutionary initiative, flourished in such a situation, especially within the parties in state power. Bourgeois bureaucratism and revisionist renegacy and renunciation of the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power were fully "appropriate" for rapprochement with U.S. imperialism, the main bulwark of world capitalism; and they were convenient for opportunist-dominated parties and organizations in oppressor, dependent and oppressed countries and nations that wanted to continue to have good relations with these parties in power.
This bourgeois nationalist and bureaucratic legacy of the last forty years lives on in the communist movement today in the widespread "conventional wisdom", "worldly sophistication" and outright hostility toward the accomplishments of the communist movement worldwide during the period of the Communist International. This opportunist legacy lives on despite the decay, disintegration and disappearance of the Socialist Camp in the post Comintern period!
The lengthy quote from Comrade Stalin cited in our Conference
Resolution on the need for a new Communist International is taken from Foundations of Leninism, written
in 1924, over eighty-four years ago. Stalin observed: "Formerly, the
analysis of the conditions for the proletarian revolution was usually
approached from the point of view of the economic state of individual
countries. Now, this approach is no longer adequate. Now the matter
must be approached from the point of view of the state of the world
economy; for individual countries and individual national economies
have ceased to be self-sufficient units, have become links in a single
chain called world economy; for the old 'cultured' capitalism has
evolved into imperialism, and imperialism is a world system of
financial enslavement and *[neo-]colonial oppression of the vast
majority of the population of the earth by a handful of 'advanced'
countries....
*The Conference's one-word amendment "updating" the Stalin quote is in brackets.
The validity of Stalin's observation has been born out more dramatically this year than ever before. For the world capitalist crisis that began as a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the USA just a few short months ago, spread within weeks, days even, throughout every corner of the globe. Despite this fact, there are hardly any current communist parties or organizations in the world of any size and significance, which proceed as comrade Stalin has indicated. Instead, on the eve of 2009, most communist parties and organizations in the world, no matter how serious, positive and even courageous their day to day work may be, are crippled by an analysis that proceeds from the economic state (as well as the political situation) of their own individual countries, described by comrade Stalin as "no longer adequate" over eighty-four years ago!
(For example, had the world communist movement been armed with a proletarian internationalist world outlook over the past two years, "the Obama phenomenon", providing a new and exciting facade for bourgeois democratic illusions about the U.S. imperialist state, and thus representing a new U.S. imperialist ideological and political counter-offensive, would have been thoroughly exposed. With a clear internationalist view that the liberation movements of the Afghani and Iraqi peoples are on the frontlines of our struggle, President-elect Obama's decision to retain George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would have been the "last straw" rather than the first hint about Obama's key role in defense of the U.S. Empire.)
The "left" and right opportunism with which bourgeois nationalism permeates the world wide communist movement today is manifested in widespread resistance to a proletarian Leninist policy of consistent internationalism. This, no doubt, will continue to include resistance to its organizational manifestation, resistance to taking any serious step, even the most preliminary, needed to begin building a new Communist International.
Secondly, the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People is not a vanguard organization at all.
Indeed, the Conference Resolution specifically states that "we function as an united front organization." (Emphasis in Resolution) In my view, the political strength of the modest organization and work of the International Council and Northstar Compass lies precisely in its recognition of both its limitations as a mass pro-socialist and non-vanguard organization and its limitless aspirations for resurrection of socialism in the former USSR and proletarian socialist revolution on a world scale.
In resistance to the positive work of NSC/International Council and, specifically, in opposition to NSC/IC's promotion of the need for a new Communist International, two incorrect propositions are put forward with regard to its non-communist and mass character, coming from opposite directions. One is that NSC/International Council is or should be a communist organization. The other is that, as a non-communist organization, NSC/International Council has no business taking a stand on such a vanguard issue as the need for a Communist International.
On the one hand, some individuals and groups with pro socialist and pro communist sympathies advocate turning NSC/International Council, a Friendship society, into a vanguard organization. Among their ranks are some who have made a positive contribution to NSC/IC work but have illusions about their own capacity and that of NSC/International Council to function as revolutionary communists in the current situation. They seriously underestimate the immense tasks involved in the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power against the brutal imperialist enemy. They confuse mass, class and vanguard levels of organization and discipline. They are unwilling and/or unable to help build communist vanguard organization and to submit to the collective life and discipline required to mobilize millions of toilers through their own experience to make the revolution; they believe that merely espousing a belief in something is sufficient to make it happen.
On the other hand, some self-proclaimed communist individuals, parties and organizations protest that this united front organization has no business sticking its nose into communist business. To these petty bourgeois opportunists, the vanguard organization is not dialectically interconnected to the working class and the toiling masses, but is separate from and over and above the class and the masses. This is precisely the opposite of Lenin's teachings! He and the other great teachers of scientific socialism – Marx, Engels, Stalin and Mao, among them (and to one extent or another, the revolutionary parties and organizations they led) – have practiced the mass line, from the masses to the masses. As Mao so simply and profoundly expressed it to the Chinese Communists in the crucible of the Chinese national democratic revolution, "we must be their [the masses'] pupil, before we can be their teacher." (It is worth noting, in this connection, the current work of progressive U.S. professor Grover Furr based on now accessible Soviet archives. Professor Furr has exposed the great struggle led by Stalin around the 1936 Soviet Constitution in which Stalin, through changes in the election law, etc., tried to open up the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to criticisms by the non-Party masses, to make the Party answerable to the class and the masses.)International Council/Northstar Compass, while having tiny numbers relative to the immense tasks the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples face, is at one with the millions of revolutionary-minded masses of toilers throughout the world who are consciously or unconsciously striving for a world of peace and plenty, striving for a world of socialism, to be born out of the current world of increasing starvation, want, violence and injustice. In this way, the International Council/Northstar Compass' demand on the international communist movement to undertake once again the construction of a new Communist International, capable of providing general guidance and some organizational strength for the world proletarian revolution in our time, is a mass demand.
We must work diligently to make this mass demand, this call for a new communist international, grow in intensity and strength. For it will meet with great resistance not only from the imperialist powers, led by U.S. imperialism, but from the dominant opportunist forces in the current so-called World Marxist Movement.
Given this political climate, how has NSC/International Council been able to emerge and survive and now call on vanguard organizations to build a new Communist International?
Thirdly, International Council/ NSC came by its proletarian internationalism honestly. The Toronto-based Northstar Compass and the Canadian branch of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People, led by Michael and Helen Lucas, have been and remain the backbone of this modest internationalist enterprise. They draw on the strength of two historical mass movements that developed in Canada (as well as in many other countries) under the leadership of the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Communist International on a proletarian internationalist basis.
"Hands Off Russia!" Committees were formed in Canada as well as in the USA and elsewhere in 1918 to defend the new workers' government born out of the victorious Russian Proletarian Revolution of 1917. The blatant intervention in Russia of a dozen imperialist armies in alliance with the former Tsarist armed forces in the attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik regime led by Lenin prompted workers all over the world to come to the defense of the new workers power. Later on, Michael Lucas spent decades as a key Canadian Communist Party leader assigned to work in the area of Canadian-Soviet Friendship, the later incarnation of the Hands Off Russia Committees. Lucas' position in the Canadian CP and specifically in the Soviet Friendship work helped him to see clearly the catastrophic conditions that developed rapidly in the former USSR after the Gorbachev-Yeltsin forces led the return to open capitalism.
In 1992, Lucas began the Northstar Compass journal exposing the new capitalist regime in Russia. He rallied to NSC's banner the members of the Canadian Friends of Soviet People who (in the face of the now revisionist Canadian CP's hostility) had remained loyal to its pro socialist aims. While the International Council was launched in 2001, the Canadian Friends has remained the cornerstone of the organization and the journal. Particularly exemplary has been the upholding of the historical accomplishments of Socialism, especially in the USSR. A massive, well-turned, imperialist ideological offensive, following the dissolution of the Socialist Camp, has claimed that socialism was a failure and is finished once and for all. It has been ably exposed by NSC which has documented the need for the Soviet peoples to go "Back to the Future", i.e., the socialist future.
Probably even more important to the survival and modest but significant success of NSC/IC has been its organic connection to the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians (SCRC). Michael Lucas is himself a son of the Carpathian Mountains. He came to Canada (along with his mother) to join his father, William Lukac, already functioning there as a communist miner and union organizer. Father, mother and son all were long time Canadian communists. And all became active in the SCRC ("the Carps") as did Michael's wife, Helen Lucas.
Like most immigrant nationality groups in the capitalist world, the Carpatho-Russians organized themselves to defend their rights in Canada and the rights of their people back home. Beginning in Winnipeg in 1929, the organization spread quickly to a number of cities throughout Canada. The "Carps" were very active in protest demonstrations and labor picket lines. The political activism and the mass character of the SCRC are both reflected in the fact that at one point, out of 247 members of the Toronto branch of the SCRC, 94 were members of the Party Club of the Communist Party.
During World War II, a large number joined the Canadian military to fight against fascism and for Canadian democracy and Soviet socialism. Many then returned to the Carpathian Mountains to help build socialism in their native land. Meanwhile, post World War II immigrants to Canada from the region included a much larger percentage of pro-imperialists, fascists, and other reactionaries. In the resulting struggles among the nationality groupings in Canada, and with the beginnings of the Cold War and the real possibility of the organization being banned, the SCRC decided that it needed to buy its own building in Toronto. It purchased what is now the Friendship House in 1946 using its membership fees from around the country for this purpose. This valuable property was paid off in 1960 and was celebrated with a burning of the mortgage.
As Chairman Lucas pointed out in his recently published book, "From the Carpathian Mountains to Canada", "The SCRC always cooperated with the Hands Off Russia Committee, Friends of Soviet People, Aid to Russia Fund, helping ... the Canada-USSR Association... From 1972, the Canada-USSR Association-Canadian Friends of Soviet People were welcomed to use the offices and the Carpathian Ballroom for all their meetings and receptions, without any rental costs at all." (p. 97) Lucas explained the consistent internationalism of this nationality-based immigrant organization as follows: "Our Carpatho-Russian Society was NEVER nationalistically orientated and always believed and believes in Internationalism and Socialism. Nationalism is just as dangerous in the long run as its collective partner and supporter – capitalism, imperialism and fascism ... But when you are subjected by enemies... to unwarranted criticism, we are then guided by J.V. Stalin's work on the Nationality Question... and we must stand up and defend ourselves." (p. 91)
The language of the official non-profit status, finally conferred on the SCRC in 1982 by the Canadian government of Ontario Province, makes clear the consistent internationalism of this immigrant nationality organization: "no member or director of this Corporation can sell any part of this corporation's assets, or to invest or to profit from any principal assets of this Corporation." Noteworthy, also, is the provision that prohibited memberships from being passed on to the members' children.
Thus, the Society of Carpatho-Russian, Canadians envisioned to contribute to the cause of democracy and socialism after its own progeny had become assimilated into Canadian society. Today, in his early 80's, Michael Lucas continues to keep the faith. As he expresses it, " Our Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians was from the very beginning and is now and will be as long as it will exist, dedicated to Socialism, to the USSR and to its future resurrection, to Marx, Engels, Lenin and" Stalin, to internationalism, and we shall always be against Imperialism under whatever label or flag it is hiding. We shall always be together with all of the progressive movements of the world." (p. 90)
Born and raised in the crucible of the struggle to defend proletarian socialism in the USSR and under the guidance of the Communist International, both the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians as well as the Hands Off Russia Committee and its Canada-Soviet Friendship Society offspring have demonstrated the strength of non-party mass organizations when they are trained in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. It is largely on this basis that the International Council for Friendship with Soviet People has earned the right to call on proletarian vanguard organizations around the world to take an active part in the construction of a new communist international, in the course of their efforts to unite the oppressed masses and the international working class against imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism. For Michael Lucas and many of the Canadian Friends of Soviet People have the experience that this task can be accomplished only by a Communist International.
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