By PROLETARIAN UNION OF SPAIN
The bourgeois mass and cultural media never stop attacking communism and socialist countries. They repeat again and again their lies about millions of deaths by the "totalitarian regimes" of the USSR, China, Cuba, ... in order to make workers believe them and to make it more difficult for communists to talk to them, organize them and mobilize them to put an end to the exploitation of human beings by others, Thus, they try to prevent the socialist rising, the only alternative to capitalism which is scientifically proved. This last thing is what precisely gives such an enormous powerful attraction to socialism: since 1917 in Russia, it had gone from theory to facts. The importance of this success is understood above all because workers -who are the only force able to achieve socialism- are eminently practical people who are convinced and act much more through realities than through brilliant reasoning. That is why capitalists are keeping going at socialist countries much more than at communism’s theoretical and political program; therefore, they "forgive" Marx and, in a certain way, Lenin, but not Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim Il Sung or other representatives of socialist edification.
What would happen to capitalism if right now, workers knew that socialism means that they rule and that for this reason they can put an end to unemployment and crisis, increase wages and guarantee a prosperous life from birth until death? Above all when bourgeois governments are destroying the best conquests won in past times by the working class, taking advantage of the present economic crisis.
Many people believe anti-communist lies because they still trust capitalists and their sayings. They believe that capitalism without exploitation and without the oppression of the majority by a minority is possible. Or they believe that socialism without a working class dictatorship is possible, without having the proletariat to defend itself from capitalists' counter-revolutionary attempts; they see communists as oppressors looking for their own profit. Something that reinforces this wrong opinion is the propaganda of those who, presenting themselves as defenders of workers' interests or even as Marxists, attack socialist countries, accusing them of not being the true socialism, of being capitalist countries dressed up as socialists. Proletarian Union has given the readers of its newspaper, and anyone interested in this matter, an article called "Solidarity with socialist countries!", where we refute those who, from a so-called Marxist-Leninist point of view, deny that socialist states are indeed so. These comrades are making a double mistake:
1) they don't take advantage of the practical achievements of these states in order to spread socialism among the people; 2) they don't give to the proletariat ruling those countries the solidarity that it needs.
Proletarian Union is convinced that the countries that define themselves as socialists – Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China – are still effectively socialists. And we Marxist-Leninists not only have the obligation of supporting them, not only as nations harassed by imperialist powers, but also as brother states in which the proletariat has political power, and making use of it, is building socialism towards communism.
Socialism means connecting production relations with the social nature of the productive forces developed by capitalist regime. Before achieving this, socialism is nothing more than the theoretical reflection of the social movement of the working class for its own emancipation, which has as its basis the successful socialization of production. By taking the power, under the direction of its vanguard -the Communist Party – the working class cannot make communism come true in just one step (the complete socialization of the means of production and the transformation of the super-structure). The proletariat destroys in a violent way the bourgeois state machinery – dictatorship of the bourgeoisie – in order to substitute it by its own state – dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words, its own organization as ruling class for the transformation of society, through class struggle, until achieving the abolition of classes. Gradually, it expropriates the social means of production from the capitalist class and centralizes them into the hands of the state; meanwhile it transforms small production into socialized production through cooperation under the direction of the socialist state.
Socialism must not be conceived as social stage or a homogeneous way of production that is qualitatively different from capitalism, but as a process of quantitative differentiation from capitalism. The fundamental qualitative leaps are the conquest of power by the working class and the culmination of socialist edification into communism. Socialism cannot be something "pure": it consists in shoots of communism and shoots of capitalism.
The militants of Proletarian Union recognize that the USSR went much further than any other country in the transition from capitalism to communism, but we do not condemn the other socialist countries because of this. In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks took advantage of a greater economical development previous to the revolution, a juncture with a rising of the revolutionary international working class movement, with the hegemony of Marxism, aggravated inter-imperialist contradictions, incomparable natural resources and territorial depth, etc.
To sum up, we consider as socialist any country in which the proletariat has political power and has set out the way towards communism, whatever may be the degree of development of this process, whatever may be the achievements and withdrawals of the same process, as long as the re-establishment of capitalism is not completed. Even when the direction of the USSR became revisionist, the state was still socialist, because revisionism is nothing but the tendency of making the interests of the bourgeoisie prevail, but this still occurs in a proletarian environment. Confronted with these kinds of situations, we communists must fight against revisionism and, at the same time, we have to support the workers' state, helping the proletariat of this country in keeping the socialist achievements in its fight against the counter-revolution that the incipient new bourgeoisie is making.
With this attitude, we must analyze rigorously and carefully how the political direction of socialist states are revisionists and if they apply correctly the general principles of Marxism-Leninism to their specific conditions.
The contradictory nature of proletarian revolution in present socialist states – in comparison with their offensive supported during the first decades of the USSR – is the reflection of working class' weakness in these same countries and in the rest of the world. The present socialist countries are not in good conditions for achieving in an epic way their role of support bases of world revolution. These conditions could not be foreseen by the founders of Marxism-Leninism;
Ending with this situation and renewing the revolutionary offensive of the proletariat is above all the responsibility of the communists from other countries, particularly the ones who live in imperialist states. It is our own responsibility.
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