Étiquette : documents in english

Dialectical materialism considers that one thing can turn into its opposite. However, it is essential not to consider this to be some sort of displacement. Thus, the following diagram is wrong.

This diagram is wrong, because it implies that a thing is different from its opposite and that thus, turning into its opposite, there would be a transformation, a modification, a displacement.

According to dialectical materialism, what happens is that the opposite of a thing is, at the same time, that thing. Thus, there is no “transformation” when one thing becomes its opposite.

This is obviously tricky to grasp. It was not until Mao Zedong that dialectical materialism understood this process sufficiently. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the fruit of this understanding: given that there is no “barrier” between a socialist China and a revisionist China, one should not imagine that revisionism would be based on a transformation, a modification, a displacement. The struggle was actually internal to Chinese society.

Hence the multiple aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Stalin, in the USSR, considered that revisionism would pass through points of fixation, which would initiate a displacement, a modification, a transformation. This was not the case and his mistake was his insufficient understanding, due to historical reasons, of the process of causing one thing to turn into its opposite.

In the diagram showing the flawed approach, the arrows symbolize the problem. If we say, when something turns into its opposite, that there is a modification, then we say that a thing is absolutely separate from its opposite. To become its opposite, a phenomenon would have to know a whole operation, a whole movement.

We are so led to value the place of “passage”, we are obliged to consider that, for something to be able to change, there would need a “place”, an airlock, a point of connection.

And this is foreign to dialectical materialism. It is even quite precisely, from a historical point of view, the theoretical justification of God.

Before dialectical materialism, the hypothesis of God was unavoidable for mankind. Incapable of grasping the movement of matter, of grasping the contradiction (especially between quantity and quality), of grasping unequal development… mankind idealistically founded its reflection on the principle of creation, action and reaction.

For something to exist, for something to happen, in this conception, there needs to be an “ideal” moment, a pure situation, a momentum (and indeed an outcome).

Hence the notion of the “divine” inspiration of the artistic or scientific “genius”, proceeding by “creation”, from nothing. This notion of creation implies that there is a “beginning” and an “end” to things that would be logically separated, isolated, different, unique, since “created.

Everything being what it is, and nothing else, for it to be able to change into its opposite (even admitting that it is possible), there needs to be a ground for it, an action. The conditions must be created.

In reality, one thing is also its opposite. This is true of socialism, which will be the same, even if reversed, of capitalism for a while, then of communism afterwards.

Socialism is indeed an overtaking of capitalism, that is to say its prolongation and its negation; at the same time, socialism is contrary to communism as it represents a more developed stage, towards which it naturally tends.

Communism itself will undergo transformations, becoming ever more complex with a series of internal oppositions. This is quite clear if we see the relationship with Nature, humanity having experienced an unequal development, leading it to be the opposite of Nature, and being at the same time this opposite, and becoming it again entirely again, in a more developed way.

Everything is always the opposite of something, being this opposite as well. The child has the adolescent he becomes as an opposite, the adolescent obtaining the fact of being an adult as the opposite, and so on. The adolescent is not the adult but at the same time he is it too, despite being his opposite.

We can see here that a multitude of derailments in human behavior stem from a misunderstanding of these qualitative differences and from a confusion aabout reality. Desires are directed towards a thing which is the opposite of a thing, with an assimilation of both, when in reality it is and is not this thing.

The adult man who turns to an adolescent derails because he confuses the adolescent with the woman, being in complete confusion about the thing and its opposite; the contradiction between man and woman can also be misunderstood and lead to disorientation where the thing is confused with its opposite.

There is of course also, even above all, a fetishistic attention to the notion of center, point of reference, reference frame. There is an inordinate value to the consideration that any phenomenon would have a “peak” corresponding to the transition from a one-sided rise to a unilateral descent.

There is an obsession with the search for a center, as in the Cartesian representation of a function (with values 0 and 0 on both axes). This is reproduced socially with the fascination for the one-sided leader, in the negation of the dialectical movement between the center and the base, but above all in the rejection of the universality of each thought which, ultimatelyreflects matter in motion.

This whole approach in terms of center, point of reference, frame of reference… is in fact used to reduce the complexity of phenomena, not to study their substance, to skirt the fact that any process, in its internal movement, obeys its own particular features, in a universal process of contradiction.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, with its multiple aspects, was precisely in China an operation to understand the modalities of the process of the transformation of red China into black China, in order to launch a counter-restoration to capitalist restoration. Its failure at the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 is a reminder that a counter-restoration can itself turn into its opposite, a counter-counter-restoration.

That this happened when Mao Zedong died may indicate that the error consisted in making him a center, a point of reference, a reference frame in the revolutionary apparatus, by failing to consider that it is a question of grasping all aspects of the transformation.

This question of changing from one thing to its opposite, of the absence of a place where to “move”, will require great attention in the future; it will make it possible to grasp essential aspects that are still not understood, such as viruses which are at the “crossroads” of living and dead by virtue of their qualities, forming a sort of nexus between life and death, without being able to be a center, a point of reference, a reference frame.

We have here the expression of a contradiction between the particular and the universal, but also the question of a deeper understanding of the fundamental interrelation of all the things which form, concretely, one and the same reality, an infinite and eternal universe composed of multiple layers like an onion, with movements like echoing waves.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The formidable capitalist expansion of 1989-2020

Capitalism has experienced a tremendous development during the period 1989-2020; the standard of living of the masses has greatly increased, and this at the global level. There are of course pockets, sometimes very large, which have relatively avoided this. Nevertheless, both imperialist capitalism and bureaucratic capitalism gained such momentum that they succeeded in stifling the revolution.

Many data clearly show how there was a capitalist expansion, each time very specific, with new or enlarged markets. The development of meat consumption is quite emblematic here. The consumption of meat in the world was 145.3 million tonnes in 1983, 323 million tonnes in 2017 (we are talking about more than sixty billion animals per year). It involves planetary transformation. 30% of the land surface is used for intensive cattle breeding. Dairy animals linked to milk and meat represent 20% of all animal biomass. Would capitalism have been capable of such a transformation at the level of the Biosphere, if it had not grown? Obviously not.

Concrete is in this respect emblematic, since concretisation is an essential phenomenon of capitalist expansion. 6 billion m³ of concrete are produced each year; in three years (from 2011 to 2013), China consumed as much concrete as the United States during the whole of the twentieth century.

We can put this in relation to sand, which goes into the composition of the concrete. The extraction of sand from the seabed, mines and lakes amounts to forty billion tons per year. The same goes for cement, another element of concrete. In the early 1990s, non-Western countries consumed 65% of the world’s cement, now it is 90%. The main producers of the world’s 4.6 billion tonnes of cement are China (57.5%), India, the United States, Iran, Brazil, Turkey.

We note the presence of India and Brazil, which we find also for steel. Humanity produces each year as much steel as during the decade 1945-1955. The main producers of the 1.8 billion tonnes of steel are China (almost 50%), India, Japan, the United States, South Korea, Russia, Turkey and Brazil. Similarly, if we take the world production of sugar cane, which was 448 million tonnes in 1961 and 1,907 million tonnes in 2018, we have Brazil in first place, having taken the place of India, now second.

Even if it is in a distorted or incomplete way in bureaucratic capitalist countries, capitalist expansion is general, systematic and aggressive, as evidenced by urban sprawl, which implies as a “model” the Western way of life.

Of course, it is absolutely impossible to generalize such a way of life, totally destructive for the planet: it would take several planets, serving only as resources, for this capitalist “utopia” to exist for the now 7.7 billion human beings (2.5 billion in 1950), who also now live mainly in an urban environment.

Anyway, without wanting to look too far, we just need to see that people in western countries use computers, smartphones and the internet, things that did not exist before the development of 1989-2020. Even in non-western countries there is a trend in this direction and black metal is listened to in Indonesia as in Bolivia, Instagram is used in Lagos as in Tehran.

The phenomenon of global migration, which has grown to immense proportions, illustrates this. There is a real wave of brain drain and of young men seeking to live in the capitalist El Dorado. Such a phenomenon would not exist if there was a real class struggle at the national level counterbalancing misery, if capitalism was dying. Migration is a direct expression of capitalist growth all over the world, but with a far too low growth locally “in comparison” to the Western countries.

Trotsky’s insane conception of the productive forces

The ultra-left has the following conception: the world has been frozen since the Russian revolution, which is part of the world revolution; it failed but the process is still ongoing. So the only thing possible is that everything is frozen while waiting for the final success of the world revolution.

This conception stems from a totally erroneous reading of the first general crisis of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. The Communist International has never spoken of a “final” crisis of capitalism, but of a “general” crisis, with therefore relative counter-tendencies.

And if indeed the productive forces have remained similar in Europe, it has always been stressed that this was not the case neither in Japan nor in the United States, and that capitalist restructuring was aimed at relaunching capitalism in Europe itself (especially in Germany). The Communist International has been perfectly dialectical and certainly not one-sided.

Leon Trotsky was totally one-sided and in no way dialectical. In April 1939, in “Marxism in Our Time”, he asserts completely erroneously that the productive forces have ceased to grow. Here’s how he presents this wacky design:

“The Decay of Capitalism

However expensive the control of the market has been to society, mankind up to a certain stage, approximately until the World War, grew, developed and enriched itself through partial and general crises.

The private ownership of the means of production continued to be in that epoch a comparatively progressive factor.

But now the blind control by the law of value refuses to render further service. Human progress is stuck in a blind alley.

Notwithstanding the latest triumphs of technical thought, the material productive forces are no longer growing.

The clearest and most faultless symptom of the decline is the world stagnation of the building industry, in consequence of the stoppage of new investments in the basic branches of economy.

Capitalists are simply no longer able to believe in the future of their own system.

Construction stimulated by the government means a rise in taxation and the contraction of the “untrammelled” national income, especially since the main part of the new government construction is directly designed for war purposes.

The marasmus has acquired a particularly malignant and degrading character in the most ancient sphere of human activity, the one most closely connected with the basic vital needs of man – in agriculture.

No longer satisfied with the obstacles which private ownership in its most reactionary form, that of small land holdings, places before the development of agriculture, capitalist governments see themselves not infrequently called upon to limit production artificially with the aid of statutory and administrative measures which would have frightened artisans in the guilds at the time of their decline.

It will be recorded in history that the government of the most powerful capitalist country granted premiums to farmers for cutting down on their planting, i.e., for artificially diminishing the already falling national income.

The results are self-evident: despite grandiose productive possibilities, secured by experience and science, agrarian economy does not emerge from a putrescent crisis, while the number of the hungry, the preponderant majority of mankind, continues to increase faster than the population of our planet.

Conservatives consider it sensible politics to defend a social order which has descended to such destructive madness and they condemn the socialist fight against such madness as destructive Utopianism.”

Leon Trotsky had nothing understood of restructuration and imperialist war as a “way out” of the capitalist crisis.

The question of the situation between 1945-1975: the two Maoisms

This essential truth must be said and repeated. In the 1960s, when opposition to revisionism arose in Western countries, there was a complete split between two Maoisms. The first, who defines himself as Maoist, has a critique of everyday life, it notes that capitalism is expanding in the 1950s and 1960s, that there is a new way of life. It is thus sometimes linked to or stemming from the hippie movement, like the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Army Fraction in Germany, or it is in any case extremely attentive to the same questions as the hippies, like the Red Brigades in Italy. Likewise, the French UJCML and the Gauche Prolétarienne raised the question of culture.

In any case, there has been a great deal of attention to the unions, as they were integrated into expanding capitalism; there was a fundamental reflection on the growing weight of subjectivity in the imperialist metropolises.

There was none of this in the second “Maoism”, the false Maoism, carried by people calling themselves “Marxist-Leninists” and imagining themselves living in the 1930s.

The horizon of these false anti-rebels revisionists never went beyond revolutionary syndicalism, they understood nothing of the social transformations underway, due to a cosmopolitan reading.

The “Maoist Communist Party” currently existing in Italy comes directly from a small “ML” group of the 1960s and 1970s: it maintained the “revolutionary trade unionist” course through an era marked by dozens of armed organizations and thousands of political prisoners …

The first Maoism, the only truly authentic one, failed in its assertion, yet it represents the historical heritage of the Communists in the imperialist metropolises.

The “MLs”, even disguised as “Maoists”, continued to exist, more or less painfully, imagining that the world had not changed since 1930, and by anyway understand it like in a caricature…

2020 and the second general crisis of capitalism

The opening of the second general crisis of capitalism, through the intermediary of COVID-19, complicates matters even more, since it is necessary not only to understand the meaning of the capitalist expansion of 1945-1975, but also that of 1989-2020.

In fact, the second one was directly enabled by the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism and the integration of capitalist China into the world market. The crisis of the 1970s was thus postponed. Capitalism then experienced a new expansion, a new impetus, which runs up against the wall of reality.

If the first general crisis of capitalism was powerfully marked by the contradiction between manual labor and intellectual labor, the second crisis of capitalism has as its main aspect the contradiction between town and country.

There are basically only two points of view: the erroneous one imagining that capitalism has become imperialist at the beginning of the 21st century and that it has been “frozen”.

Since it has “maintained itself”, one must then fall into the ideology of imagining that capitalism is “organized”. This was what the Social Democrats said in the 1920s-1930s, this is what the revisionists said in the 1960s-1980s with the theory of “state monopoly capitalism”.

And there is the authentic communist point of view, which seeks to understand the tendencies and counter-tendencies of capitalism, in its historical dialectic.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) has made public a series of documents on different questions. These documents have the Central Committee as redaction and were published in January 2021, sometimes after a correction from a previous document. We speak here of the documents called:

(1) Changes in Relations of Production in India — Our Political Program (272 pages)

(2) Caste Question in India—Our Perspective (97 pages, first edition in May 2017)

(3) Nationality Question in India — The Stand of Our Party (97 pages, first edition in May 2019)

(4) China – a new Social-Imperialist power! It is integral to the World Capitalist-Imperialist system! (84 pages, first edition in July 2017)

What is of special interest is the question of the definition of capitalism, imperialism and crisis. We find here indeed a real problem, as the CPI(M) is developing a non-dialectical analysis of it. Because of the special importance of India in the world revolution, it is necessary to see what this weakness historically means.

In fact, the reason behind the problem is that India is a major spot of the contradiction between town and country. The development of the urban areas is particularly distorted there, in an area where the animal question was raised a long time ago already.

And it is an area where lives an significant part of the world masses, it is a country totally split through religious comunalism and castes.

The CPI(M) just doesn’t confront itself to all of these questions. It takes a road opposed to the question of universality as historical necessity, as communism affirming the unity of the masses, of the world, of the Biosphere, of the universe, all of this being the key of the Indian Revolution.

The conception of the CPI(M)

The conception of the CPI(M) is the following. Capitalism would be in crisis since the 1970’s, but as it is solely “imperialist” and furthermore “organized”, it would have answered through neo-liberal policies at all levels in the 1980’s.

The direct consequence would have been poverty all over the world and also the final domination of financial capitalism through “globalization”.

This conception is not new; it is the one of the Indian Maoists since the 1990’s, in a common point of view of all the different organizations (the Maoist Communist Center, the Maoist Communist Center of India, the CPI(ML) People’s War, etc.). At the beginning of the 1990’s, such an understanding of capitalism was for example deeply explained by the CPI(ML) People’s War at conferences in Brussels organized by the Workers Party of Belgium, a post-Maoist revisionist structure.

This should be no surprise: the Indian Maoists have a trend to use the revisionist concepts of neo-liberalism, depending countries, globalization. This is the key to the problem of the Indian Maoists.

The documents of 2021 are an attempt to justify this approach and, in fact, it is also the first time they openly preach such an “alterglobalization” vision of the world, as usually, it is quite masked, even if readable for who takes attention.

One of the main point here is that the wrong conception of the CPI(M) leads to miserabilism: capitalism would be paralyzed since the 1990’s, the world masses would have been always poorer since the 1990’s, and so on.

This is a fairy tale, which totally misses the incredible development of the productive forces by capitalism in the 1989-2020 period, the impact on the Biosphere, the aggravation of the contradiction between town and country.

And, therefore, it comes to a non-understanding of the second general crisis of capitalism appearing in 2020 through the pandemic.

This justifies the criticism of the conception of the CPI(M), one of the most important revolutionary organization of the world, which is prisoner of its own Indian experience and missing the general transformation.

1. The definition of imperialism

a) what the CPI(M) says

The CPI(M) defines imperialism as follows :

“As the great Marxist teacher Lenin said, emergence of monopoly organisations and export of capital are the characters of imperialism.” “A century passed since the world capitalist system transformed into imperialism.”

“With the beginning of the imperialist era the phase of ‘peaceful’ development of capitalism ended. The series of imperialist wars began for colonies and for re-division of the world.”

“According to the report published by the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology of Zurich a few monopoly organisations are controlling the economy of the whole world. Six super rich persons of the world own property equal to half of the population, i.e., to that of 360 crore people.”

“In the overall imperialist era, especially in the neo-colonial period and especially during the period of globalisation, several considerable changes took place at a fast pace in various sectors in the international and domestic level. These changes led to transformations and polarizations in class relations all over the world in varied levels.

Since the global economic/financial order is more centralized in the hands of a few imperialist institutions/countries and wealth and political power is centralized in the hands of their big compradors, the number of oppressed nationalities, classes and sections rose very high.”

b) an unilateral understanding of imperialism

The CPI(M) has an unilateral understanding of imperialism, which is reduced to financial capital, which would be centralized and organized.

Moreover, imperialism would be a new system of production : there would be a capitalist industrial production which would produce capital, this capital would come to an overproduction and imperialism consists in the overproduction of capital.

This is wrong. Imperialism is not a base, it is a superstructure of capitalism. Even when capitalism comes to imperialism, its base is merely capitalist, with concurrency and competition among capitalists, in the shadow of the big monopolies.

The bank apparatus doesn’t make disappear the basis, but emerges as a parasitic form it. So, the capitalist basis is not modified in itself an if there is an overproduction of capital, it can’t be separated from the overproduction of commodities.

Lenin, when defining imperialism in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, is very clear about both double aspects : base/superstructure on one side, industrial/financial on the other (here the important parts are underlined).

“We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;

(2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy;

(3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;

(4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and

(5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

The dominance of monopolies and finance capital doesn’t mean there are only monopolies and finance capital. This is the error of the CPI(M), which leads to another one: the conception of a “pure” organized capitalism i.e. imperialism.

2. The conception of organized imperialism

a) what the CPI(M) says

The CPI(M) defines a kind of organized imperialism as follows :

“Imperialists and revisionists create tales and put the people in illusion about the changing conditions in order to protect the imperialist system and to deceive the people of the world.”

“When the public sector of China was being restructured, the crisis in East Asia in the end of 1990s was destroying Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. With their class interests the imperialist forces of the US, Europe and Japan experimentally introduced capitalism in early 1990s to put up a wall against ‘Communism’ in the countries came to be known as East Asian Tigers.”

“Neo-colonialism gave new opportunities for every imperialist force to exploit. Moreover, it made possible collective colonialism to ‘collectively exploit’ the backward countries that is expressed through WB, IMF, WTO and other such imperialist organisations. This is a distinct character of neo-colonialism.”

“1991 – Second stage of Globalisation begins While the Keynesian theory was formulated to solve the imperialist crisis of the 1930s the Monetarist theory came forth to solve the crisis that broke in 1970.

The Monetarists suggested decrease in expenditure and cut in subsidies but not to print currency in order to reduce budget deficit. They sermonized the ‘invisible hand’ principle of Adam Smith that states that market forces itself regularize economy.

This was what Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US brought forth. The policies of ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ said to be introduced by them in fact reflect the monopoly of trade and the control of monopolies over the market.

The jargon of free trade and free market is merely a mask of the monopoly of International Monetary organisations and Multi-National Companies.

To say that they apply the Adam Smith principle of the capitalist stage of free competition is only to delude the people all over the world.” “Firstly imperialists re-structuralized capitalism in their countries through implementing Reaganomics and Thatcherism.

They created an unprecedented surge of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) to establish giant Conglomerates.

They turned finance capital into a decisive force and a major specter dictating the economies of the countries all over the world. They brought all the forms of social production in the world into their control and made all the countries of the world surrender to the policies of imperialist globalization.

They thus intensified the onslaught on the working class of their own countries and increased the rate of surplus value (profits) being extracted from them.

Secondly, with a new offensive on the backward countries they could further expand their markets and seize cheap raw materials of those countries. They intensified exploitation of the toilers manifold. Both of these are closely related and mutually dependent.

The objective of globalization strategy is to re-structuralize the economies of the entire countries of the world as per the exploitive interests of the international monopoly finance enterprises and Multi-National enterprises, lift all the sanctions and all the tariff obstacles for imports-exports and for shifting profits to their native country, in a way to create a ‘borderless’ world where goods, technology, capital and labor can ‘move around freely’, to facilitate the exploitation of any country as per its wish according to their international monopoly.”

b) an erroneous conception of an “organized” capitalism

It is simply amazing that the CPI(M) really says that the Keynesian and Monetarist theories are the expression of a capitalism that understands its own crisis and try to overcome it, or that imperialism “experimentally introduced capitalism” in South Asia.

This is absolutely not conform to the communist ideology; this corresponds to the social-democratic (in the 1920’s) and revisionist (in the 1960’s) understanding of an “organized capitalism”, of a state monopoly capitalism.

The conception of the CPI(M) is clearly is that “international monopoly finance enterprises and Multi-National enterprises” leads the world, choosing the developments in an objective manner in accordance to their interests.

And the immediate consequence of this is the negation of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. There would be a total domination of the financial capital over the world, with governments as mere puppets.

There would be no bureaucratic capitalism in India, which would be a kind of neo-colony.

3. The comprador and the bureaucratic bourgeoisies

a) what the CPI(M) says

“With the transfer of power in 1947 (nominal independence) colonial, semi-feudal India turned to semi-colonial, semi-feudal country.

The comprador big bourgeois class of our country that served the British imperialists from the beginning became comprador ‘bureaucratic’ big bourgeois class with the transfer of power.

The comprador bureaucratic big bourgeois class and the big feudal class together became the main hurdle of the development of various nationalities. In semi-colonial India the comprador bureaucratic big bourgeois class is playing the main role on one hand in serving the interests of several imperialist countries and on the other in preserving the caste based feudal society of the country.”

“To put it briefly, the planned onslaught of international finance capital all over the world through globalization reached a severe level in the backward countries in the past three decades.

Since the Indian comprador bureaucratic bourgeois, feudal classes are dependent on imperialist finance capital and its interests entwined with their interests, the collaboration reached unprecedented level.”

“Today, the comprador bureaucratic bourgeois class is working as an instrument to slave imperialism in our country. It makes use of the broad semi-feudal social basis to keep the people in bondage and unleashes its hegemony. They are traitors, disrupters and cruel enemies of the people.

They are deceivers, liars and corrupt. They massacre the people, they are rapists and are absolutely useless. But they have the power and the instruments of production. They are ruling the country.”

“The TATAs is the biggest industrial comprador big bourgeois enterprise. Their turnover had the 2 nd place by 2001 with 37,197 crore rupees. At the time, the TATAs had 84 companies out of which 34 companies were joint ventures with TNCs.

They own the most ancient and biggest private sector power company in the country. They own mining, oil fields, steel factories, car and truck manufacturing companies, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks.

They own Taj hotels, Jaguar, Land Rover, Dewan, Tetley tea, a publication house, a chain of book shops, the biggest brand of iodised salt, the Lakme empire of cosmetics and the TATA-Honeywell factory of Poona.”

b) the non-understanding of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie

When we read this, it is logical that the CPI(M) considers the islamist movements as “anti-imperialist” and can’t understand the nature of people like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey or even Narendra Modi in India.

Normally, Maoism considers that there is four forms of bourgeoisie in the non-imperialist countries: the petty-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie (both oppressed), the comprador bourgeoisie which exists only as intermediate with imperialist structures, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie which develops itself in the distorted capitalism existing in the oppressed country.

The CPI(M) negates the existence of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. There would be only a comprador (bureaucratic) bourgeoisie totally submitted to imperialism. But then, how can the CPI(M) explains that a simple lackey like TATA is able to possess Jaguar and Tetley, two main symbols of British imperialism ?

The only explanation for TATA and all the big Indian capitalists is that they are bureaucratic capitalists. They have been comprador and they turn over a rather independent bureaucratic capitalism, with Indian features.

So, the CPI(M) tells here something incorrect.

And it practices a headlong flight in saying that its is globalization itself which is solely responsible for all the evolution in India.

4. a change by above only?

a) what the CPI(M) says

“It means, in the specificities of India we have to study the feudal society, the later colonial (colonial, semi-feudal) and neo-colonial (semi-colonial, semi-feudal) societies, the attack of imperialist globalization (finance capital), the changes that it caused in the entire country and in the respective areas and the role of class struggle that contributed to the change in relations of production in the respective areas.”

“On the whole imperialism is unleashing control on social, economic, political, cultural and all the sectors on the semi-feudal base in the country historically and in the present phase of globalization. The main intention of imperialism is to develop the country industrially but not to change it into another capitalist contender.

It wants to sustain it as the supplier of raw material and as a market for imperialist products. The comprador rulers brought forth several laws, rules, regulations, directives and other policy measures to bring changes in rural India favorable to the imperialist MNCs, comprador bureaucratic bourgeois and feudal classes.”

“During the globalization period, the old and the new feudal forces of the dominant castes in the rural areas were the social prop in every step that the state took up in the interests of imperialism and comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

Along with the foreign corporate companies and domestic comprador companies, the new feudal forces, parliamentary party leaders and several kinds of mafias benefited through the agrarian, rural exploitive policies.

The collaboration of global finance capital enterprises, the several networks of government and non-government networks, parliamentary political parties and several kinds of mafias increased much more and semi-feudal relations led by the old and new feudal forces continued in new forms.”

“National bourgeois class This class invests in wholesale business, transport of goods, public transport, education, health sector, hotels, tendu leaf business and other such business and service sectors along with small and medium scale industries.

This is oppressed by imperialism and comprador bureaucratic capitalist policies and is tied by feudalism. Due to this reason, its market is constantly suffering from their offensive. Growth of their industries is limited. Lakhs of industries are becoming bankrupt.”

b) a wrong understanding of changing by above and not internal

The CPI(M) is very clear. As the country would be totally dependent (and the national bourgeoisie and local capitalism would die each day more), as the ruling class would be a comprador bourgeoisie totally dependent from imperialism, when the semi-feudal aspect of the country knows a change, it is by above only.

This is clearly unacceptable, as the CPI(M) presents the nationalist movement in India as a foreign abstraction, in negation the bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

5. The nature of the BJP

a) what the CPI(M) says

“The hunt of global finance capital for super profits is destroying the lives of the entire proletariat, peasant, middle class and national bourgeoisie and other oppressed classes, sections and nationalities and is making a cruel attack on them.

For this purpose it is bringing fascist parties to power in the backward countries. In this background the Narendra Modi government under the leadership of the fascist BJP with Brahmanic Hindutwa ideology took up power in the centre in our country and is unleashing severe fascist offensive on the people for the past six years.”

“Brahmanic Hindutwa communalism spread in a big way in the country in the past seven decades. Starting from the massacre of lakhs of Muslim people during partition in 1947, it unleashed several massacres, atrocities, putting in flames, destruction of properties and loot (…).

The Hindutwa forces went much ahead with the objective to transform the country into a Hindutwa state. We have to remember that all this is dictated by the global finance capital.

The aim of finance capital is to facilitate the way to its exploitation by strengthening fascism in the country and by establishing fascist ideology and its hegemony in all the sectors of the country.

10. The hierarchical caste system based on the Brahmanic Hindutwa ideology is integral to the semi-feudal relations in India.”

b) the question of the BJP

The CPI(M) tells us here something inconsistent. Why would imperialism promotes Hinduism and Indian expansionsim through the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian’s people party)?

Why would or should imperialism need an Indian intercontinental missile with atomic weapon called Agni, from the Hinduistic god of fire ?

The Hindutva anticapitalist romanticism is absolutely no conform to the values of imperialist consumerism. The policy of nationalist unification of the country by the BJP is not conform to the line of divide and conquer of imperialism.

In fact, it is easy to understand that it represents the Indian bureaucratic bourgeoisie, trying to play its own card, in a relative manner only of course. It is the same all over the world, semi-feudal semi-colonial countries becoming expansionist, like Turkey.

In negating the bureaucratic bourgeoisie character of the BJP, the CPI(M) negates (in a theoretical manner) the expansionist character of India, and this is an error on the ideological level and of course collides with the internationalist practice of the CPI(M) itself.

The problem is that the CPI(M), with its conception of a systemic imperialism, doesn’t see the amazing growth of the productive forces since the 1990’s.

6. The crisis since 1973?

a) what the CPI(M) says

“In fact globalisation is the offensive of finance capital on the backward countries of the world. It is entwined with the restructuring of capital in monopolies. Since capital fell into permanent crisis since 1973, this is part of its strategy to overcome the crisis. At present it fell into further crisis since 2008.”

“Since the beginning of the 1970s, imperialism fell in general crisis all over the world, in 1980s more intense globalization policies were taken up and it put the burden of its crisis on semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries like India.”

“The economies of those countries very speedily spread for nearly two decades and led to partial stability of capitalism. But it could not sustain permanently. With the crisis falling into prolonged depression from 1973, the illusion of constant spread of world economy was shattered.”

“Worldwide financial crisis since 1973 led to a decline in the demand for capital goods in the imperialist countries. As a part of internationalization of production imperialism adopted Globalisation policies since the 1980s and 1990s. This is part of the neo-colonial policy of imperialism since post-World War II.

However, there is a difference in the policies that imperialism adopted as a part of neo-colonialism in 1946-80 and the globalisation policies since the 1980s, especially since the beginning of 1990s when Russia declined as a superpower. The imperialists that adopted Keynesian economic policies until then introduced free trade market policies since the beginning of the 1990s.”

b) the question of the productive forces

The CPI(M), in its documents, give a lot of data about poverty. The problem is that this is made with the same statistic approach like Eugen Varga at the beginning of the Third International. The dialectics of economy is not understood.

Saying that capitalism is in crisis since 1973 is simply amazing. From the 1989 to 2020, capitalist growth was huge, using China as the factory of the world.

The quality of life of the people in the imperialist countries never stopped to improve, be it in the fields of medicine, education, sport, leisure, food, etc.

Of course, these fields were defined by imperialism. But if we take the quantitative level, life became much easier in the imperialist countries. This also explains why there was no revolt, why the revolutionary sector nearly died, etc.

But this is not only true for the imperialist country. Also the countries oppressed by imperialism knew an elevation of the quality of life during the same period.

Not all, of course, and India in particular is a weak point, making it one of the center of the World Revolution.

Nevertheless, a look at Mumbai, Kolkata or Delhi shows how India changed, with an urbanization corresponding to the development of the productive forces. And the BJP is the expression of such a trend, with a bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

And the CPI(M) knows it, in fact – because it understood the changes that knew China. How could have China become social-imperialist if not by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie?

7. Social-imperialist China

a) what the CPI(M) says

“China – a new Social-Imperialist power! It is integral to the World Capitalist-Imperialist system!”

“Unlike the opinion of a few Maoists, China is neither dependent on the imperialist countries nor is it a country exploited by those imperialist countries. On the contrary, it undoubtedly became a new Social-Imperialist country by 2014. It emerged as an imperialist power only because it is super-exploiting the working class of the country. It is beyond doubt that the speedy industrialization led to this change.

The emergence of China as a global factory is strengthening the economic restructuring of the world and is changing the dynamics of the supply demand chain of the world economic system.”

“To summarise, Chinese monopoly organisations are the most powerful in the world. ‘Monopoly is the strong economic basis for imperialism,’ said Lenin. This is an index to say that China has developed into a Social-Imperialist country.”

b) China and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie

If there was in China only a comprador bourgeoisie, then this country would still be dependent. The CPI(M) understands well that it is not dependent, that it is even social-imperialist, noting that the monopolies are very well organized, at a high level.

But from where can it come, if not from the bureaucratic bourgeoisie? The bureaucratic bourgeoisie grows normally in the shadow of the comprador bourgeoisie, from which it is also a part of it, dialectically. But as capitalism, in a distorted manner, develops itself, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie grows and absorb the state.

The Peruvian communists describe as follows this process.

“Following Chairman Mao’s thesis, he [i.e. Gonzalo] specifies five characteristics:

– that bureaucratic capitalism is the capitalism that imperialism develops in the backward countries, which is comprised of the capital of large landowners, the big bankers, and the magnates of the big bourgeoisie;

– it exploits the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie and places constraints upon the middle bourgeoisie;

– it is passing through a process by which bureaucratic capitalism is combined with the power of the State and evolves into state monopoly capitalism, comprador and feudal, from which can be derived that in a first moment it unfolds as a non-state big monopoly capitalism and in a second moment, when is combined with the power of the state, it unfolds as state monopoly capitalism;

– it ripens the conditions for the democratic revolution as it reaches the apex of its development;

– and, confiscating bureaucratic capital is key to reach the pinnacle of the democratic revolution and it is decisive to pass over to the socialist revolution.

In applying the above, he conceives that bureaucratic capitalism is the capitalism that imperialism generates in the backward countries, which is linked to a decrepit feudalism and in submission to imperialism which is the last phase of capitalism.

This system does not serve the majority of the people but rather the imperialists, the big bourgeoisie, and the landowners.

All of this merely proves the political aspect of bureaucratic capitalism that is rarely emphasized, but which President Gonzalo considers as a key issue: bureaucratic capitalism ripens the conditions for revolution, and today as it enters into its final phase, it ripens the conditions for the development and victory of the revolution.

It is also very important to see how bureaucratic capitalism is shaped by non-state monopoly capitalism and by state monopoly capitalism, that is the reason why he differentiates between the two factions of the big bourgeoisie, the bureaucratic one and the comprador, so as to avoid tailing one or the other, a problem that led our Party to 30 years of wrong tactics. It is important to conceive it this way, since the confiscation of bureaucratic capitalism by the New Power will facilitate the completion of the democratic revolution and to advance into the socialist revolution.

If only the state monopoly capitalism is targeted, the other part would remain free, the non-state monopoly capital, and the big comprador bourgeoisie would remain economically able to lift its head to snatch away the leadership of the revolution and to prevent its passage to the socialist revolution.” (Communist Party of Peru, The Democratic Revolution)

7. The national liberation

a) what the CPI(M) says

“A self-reliable economy must be developed. But imperialism, comprador bureaucratic bourgeois and feudal classes are obstructing this path. Four ally classes – workers, peasants, middle class and national bourgeois classes, oppressed social sections – Dalits, tribals, women and religious minorities must integrate in the leadership of the proletariat and eliminate them and New Democratic Revolution must be accomplished with the ultimate objective of establishing Socialism-Communism.

Only thus it is possible to establish New Democratic and self-reliant economy. Only thus genuine development is possible.”

b)a movement of national liberation

It is very clear that the CPI(M) has a line corresponding to a movement of national liberation. This is positive. But this is not conform to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The CPI(M) is not interested in the internal questions of India, it considers that the confrontation with imperialism is the sole key.

From there comes the fascination for the Tribals at the margins of development and a disdain for all the Indian cultural questions, like the nature of Islam in India or the relationship to animals. What is fascinating the world about India is out of sight for the CPI(M).

From there comes also the non-understanding of the crisis appearing in 2020. Not seeing the development of the period 1989-2020, the CPI(M) imagines that capitalism, now imperialism as a world system, would be in crisis since 1973…

This is a huge error and it shows that the CPI(M) must choose: or being the armed branch of “another development” against globalization, or assume Indian history.

The crisis will require a quick and decisive choice.

[Published in Communism #14, July 2021.]

The irruption of the COVID-19 pandemics in 2020 was a crash test for all the revolutionaries in the world. Would they be able to face a global crisis, to understand it and give the keys to face it adequately? Or was it only possible for them to accompany the events?

It depended of course of what has been done in the period before the crisis. If the revolutionaries understood how the productive forces grew since 1989, how nature was under attack, how the animals were enslaved at industrial levels all over the world… then they were able to understand how it came to the crisis and which sense it carries.

If the revolutionaries were in the fiction that capitalism was in crisis since ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years… then they would be not able to understand that something new happened, something with a qualitative leap.

A good example for it is expressed by the Brazilian review A Nova Democracia. It is even absolutely typical, in the sense that such a point of view was the one of most of the movements defining themselves as marxist-leninists or even maoists. They just failed to understand what happened.

A Nova Democracia’s article “World Economy towards Recession: CORONAVIRUS CONCEALS THE IMPERIALISM CRISIS”, published in March 2020, expresses quite purely this deep misunderstanding. Here is what it says:

“The industrial production and the stock exchange of the financial market have collapsed at the beginning of March in the whole world. The trigger, according to the worldwide press monopoly, is the coronavirus expansion.

However, it is actually the crisis of relative overproduction of capital.

The coronavirus itself could not cause such an impact in the world economy. The reason of stoppage of the capital reproduction is the capital itself.

The portal Crítica da Economia, quoting a newspaper of the reaction, has observed that the coronavirus nowadays is less lethal than the flu: “Internal data of the World Health Organization (WHO) show that, in 2020, the simple seasonal flu has already caused more casualties (76.537 deaths) than the new coronavirus (2.812 deaths); that is, our well-known and familiar flu has already killed 2.720% more people than the misterious new coronavirus”.”

In July 2021, such a discourse is of course easily appearing as pathetic. Nevertheless, it was quite common at the time or even a rule for ultra-leftists. The pandemics would be overestimated by the states to put strict laws, it would be nearly a hoax of counter-revolutionary nature.

It is not even a misjudgment of the crisis, it is a negation of it, even at the sanitary level. And the reason for that is a belief considering that the world economy is organized by some monopolies and world finance, that capitalism “thinks”, is able to “act” in a calculated manner, etc.

A Nova Democracia expresses perfectly this conception, where the crisis consists in the overproduction of capital, which would choke the economy and the world. The article says :

“The occurrence of the coronavirus is just a fact that aggravates the economy. However, behind this fact there is already a relative overproduction of the latent capital.

The crisis of overproduction of relative capital occurs when the capital production extrapolates the consumption capacity of the society defined, ultimately, by the contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist appropriation of the product.

To get an idea of it, the unemployment rate in the USA reached, on October, 2019, a low record of 3,5%. It amounts practically to “full employment”. It was the lowest rate for the last 50 years, resulting  of the interest rate that propels the credit for the production.

However, in October, the creation of new workstations in the industry has decreased for the first time in six months, although the production has increased 1,1% in November. It is a huge increase of the global production that grows disproportionately to the addition of the capacity of worldwide consumption.

The overproduction crisis is the inevitable consequence. Proof of this is that all Yankee economists foresee that the economy will slow down in the short run, i. e., it will not find markets to continue the expansion.”

It is of course totally wrong to understand capitalism in terms of bookkeeping, with inputs and outputs. If what says A Nova Democracia is true, than capitalism would never grow or even never exist, because there is always a discrepancy between production and consumption… Especially at the beginning of capitalism, with primitive accumulation, a key topic.

Of course, concerning the sanitary aspect, A Nova Democracia totally changed its point of view afterwards, saying for example in April 2020 in the article “THE 21st CENTURY AND THE MEDIOEVO [middle age]: The historical and political failure of the imperialist system”:

“It is a sinister revival of almost ancient times of the Humankind history as, in the middle of the 15th century, the “Black Death” occurred, sweeping across Europe and Asia, killing 200 million people; or even with the Spanish flu epidemic and the deaths of tens of millions persons.”

But the same article explains also, in a rather shocking manner:

“As a result either of a natural biological evolution or a machination of the Yankee imperialism ( a hypothesis that one cannot ignore at all since it fits the criminal Pentagon “war games”, a fervent believer of Malthusianism *), the coronavirus acts as an invisible small atomic bombs in another form of a world war.

One cannot forget the atomic artifacts that the imperialist States and some of their lackeys possess, in large scale and great quantity in their arsenals, aiming at intimidating permanently the Earth peoples.

The issue is, with the pandemic the governments negligence they will eliminate populations considered by them  as surplus populations, especially the aging and sick people.

On the whole, it means to destroy productive forces to justify new and miraculous “Marshall plans” to recover the economy for a new expansion.

The negligence is intentional, resulting of the imperialism nature but twisted with adjustable doses of dramatization by the press monopolies – Globo Network, a leader in Brasil – to mitigate the masses uprising.

It is the imperialism law: the crisis in the system is only partially eradicated with the destruction of the productive forces, killing of workers and “surplus” populations, concentration/ centralization of capital and the conquering of new markets ( war with weapons arsenal).”

We have a double problem, which is typical. The first one is to consider that capitalism has an overview on itself. The second one is to affirm that capitalism can “choose” to destroy the “surplus” of commodities and workers. Nothing about it is true, of course.

And to understand that, only a small aspect has to be see: the question of the aging and the sick people. If we take the imperialist countries, it is a long time now that these aging and sick people a integrated in capitalism. Since 1945, and now in a very important way, they are an element of capitalism, as consumers of products directly aimed at them.

To take two examples pretty clear, we can see that Germany import proletarians from the Eastern countries in order to use them as cheap particular help for old people, and that Portugal has made low taxes for the French pensioners.

Of course, A Nova Democracia can’t see that. In its vision, world capitalism consists in finance, and finance only. There is no capitalist mode of production any more, but world masses against a small bunch of super rich people. A Nova Democracia so just can’t see the evolution of everyday of life, the progress of capitalism, its systematization at all levels of life.

And this is the key. Either there is the understanding that capitalism developed itself since 1989, bringing the world to a new step, with a new general crisis. Or there is the following of events, in the belief that there was no evolution of the productive forces since the 1930’s.

If we take the 500 most important global companies, we find, for Turkey, on the 420th place the Koç Holding, which brings together 113 companies including credit institutions, an oil refinery, tractor factories, bus bodies, tourist companies, the production of household appliances in particular with Beko, etc. Important though less powerfully, there are also Sabancı Holding (notably with one of the textile leaders Kordsa Teknik Tekstil), OYAK Holding, and three state monopolies: Turkish Airlines, Halkbank and Vakıfbank. In any case, we are very far from an imperialist-type export of capital, in a country where a quarter of women marry before the age of 18. Moreover, for a significant part of their activities, all these main Turkish companies are in close partnership with companies from imperialist countries (Toyota, Citibank, Philip Morris, Carrefour, DuPont, etc.).

Turkey is in fact a very active dependent country. This can be read in the following figures. Its foreign direct investment was $ 27 million in 1991, $ 1 billion in 2005, $ 4.7 billion in 2015. On the surface, it is very impressive. However, in reality, in 2015, this represented only 0.32% of foreign direct investment in the world, against 0.01% in 1991. This remains deeply marginal. Turkey took advantage of the capitalist momentum after 1989, but has not changed its base. Moreover, in 2015, Turkey experienced a penetration of foreign capital of 16.5 billion dollars, much more than its own capitalist interventions outside its territory.

The expansionist aggressiveness of Turkish militarism

However, despite this very clear weakness from an economic point of view, Turkey is particularly aggressive. It is active with Azerbaijan against Armenia, it occupied part of Cyprus in 1974, it makes Iraqi Kurdistan a satellite, it intervenes in Libya, it actively supported the Islamic State in order to take advantage of its military penetration into Syria and it decided, in the name of offshore oil drilling, to assume a frontal position with France and Greece.

A sign of this trend, Turkey produces 70% of its weapons and the goal, by 2023, is to achieve this at 100%. It is difficult to see how this is technologically possible, as evidenced by the purchase from Russia, to the chagrin of US imperialism, of the highly advanced S 400 anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense system.

The question of where such aggression stems from is of great importance. There are really many revolutionary organizations in Turkey since the 1970s and they are frantic on precisely this issue. Some see Turkey expressing an aggressiveness peculiar to capitalism, others see it as the activity of an American satellite, of a neo-colony. Some speak of semi-capitalism, others of capitalism with feudal remnants in the superstructure, or of bureaucratic capitalism.

Turkey’s matrix: the general crisis of capitalism

It is by no means a coincidence that Turkey becomes particularly aggressive in the context of the second general crisis of capitalism. This country was born from the first general crisis of capitalism. It is even a component of it.

Since the founding of the Republic of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal in 1923, this country has experienced countless political, economic, military and ideological upheavals, to the point that in fact it has been in permanent crisis for no less than a century. Half of its existence, at least parts of the territory have been under a state of emergency!

It must be understood that the country was born on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which generated the expulsion of more than a million Greeks from its territory, to which must be added the Armenian genocide in the background from 1915 to 1923. Turkey succeeded at its foundation in expelling from its territory the foreign armies aiming at a permanent occupation, but came under German control, then under British control, finally under American control. There has been permanent instability, with military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980. There is also a significant Kurdish national minority, which has been tirelessly suppressed militarily for a century, while the country has also important other minorities, such as Lazs, Circassians, Arabs, Zazas, many Caucasian peoples, etc.

The Turkish regime, crossed by violence

Turkey is thus a country of immense culture, but also of immense complexity. There are a lot of minorities, the country was formed from above; it is at the same time a mixture of peoples and nations and at the same time it forms a real unified block. The central state has been, since its birth, ultra-paranoid. During the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist countries indeed wanted to carve up the Turkish part of it and sent occupying troops. One part was to come under British rule, another under French rule, Greek and Armenian areas to be established and Istanbul to form a small state.

This nightmare scenario from the Turkish point of view is a key to this ultra-militarist Turkish device, benefiting from a huge popular echo in the name of the “defense” of national interests, but in reality in the service of large landowners allied to a upper bourgeoisie linked to imperialist countries and serving as intermediaries. Within such a framework, the army plays an omnipresent role, and its clandestine interventions – through “disappearances”, murders, counter-guerrillas – have been innumerable.

This makes this country one of the main weak links in the chain of dependent countries. The country was born on the job, in the framework of the first general crisis of capitalism. It has been relatively “frozen” with the clash of the American and Soviet superpowers. But once the general framework has been called into question by the second general crisis of capitalism, it sets off again.

Kemalism

Kemalism is born as a national bourgeois response to the attempt at imperialist partition of the country. This explains its ultra nationalism, its insistence on the absolute primacy of the central state and on the need to modernize the country. The first military successes of Mustafa Kemal and the development of the first general crisis of capitalism resulted in a compromise and Kemalism established a regime with the recognition of the imperialists, in exchange for their significant penetration into the country.

Turkey is then a country as if blocked. The bourgeoisie began its war of independence but sold itself from the start, in alliance with the big landowners in order to establish the new regime. The authentic national bourgeoisie, which arrived too late historically (and partly non-Turkish and notably Armenian), has withdrawn in front of a “turkified” bourgeoisie sold to imperialism.

Throughout the 1920s, Turkey then experienced a terrible trade deficit, while the capital of the imperialist countries appropriated railway companies, mines, industries, businesses, banks. In 1924, Germany already had 2,352 of the 4,086 km of railways; in 1937, 42% of exports and 36.5% of imports were with Germany. Turkey will also indirectly support Nazi Germany, maintaining its massive economic exchanges until the very end of the war.

This was a continuation of ever greater pressure on the masses. Many strikes had been bloodily suppressed by the regime, while in January 1921 the leadership of the Communist Party of Turkey had already been physically liquidated. From 1931 the police had full latitude for arrests; in 1934 the parliament gave Mustafa Kemal the name Ataturk, “the father of the Turks”. In 1936 public holidays and the ban on child labor were abolished, with even a labor law taken over from fascist Italy; in 1931 the press was controlled and in 1939 any organization headed by the state; in 1943 agrarian products were taxed at 12%, hitting hard small peasants, etc.

The change of supervision after 1945

The CHP, the Republican People’s Party, which had been pro-Nazi Germany, lost control after World War II to the DP, the Democratic Party, which was pro-American. Turkey “benefited” from the Marshall Plan and a massive military support, the companies of the capitalist countries invested in Turkey in a deep way, this country switching over to NATO in 1952 and in 1955 in what will be called the CENTO, making this country a pro-imperialist fortress on the borders with the USSR. It was then the army that took control, starting to build a military-industrial complex.

It was thus the army who overthrew the DP government in 1960, which had been unable to stabilize the regime despite its pro-religious and nationalist demagoguery, leading in particular to the Istanbul riot of 1955 against the last Greek community, with numerous deaths and very significant damage to buildings linked to the Greeks (4,348 stores, a thousand houses, 110 hotels, 27 pharmacies, 23 schools, 21 factories, 73 churches, 2 monasteries, a synagogue…). This caused the exodus of more than 100,000 Greeks.

The DP, which became the AP (Justice Party), resumed power a few years later, accompanying the transformation of Turkey into a productive base for the imperialist countries, the trade deficit from 1960 to 1972 being between 113 and 677 million dollars according to the years. Turkey then depended very largely on the United States and West Germany, then on France, Japan, Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium. Soviet social-imperialism was also ever more present, providing between 1966 and 1979 $ 2.7 billion in credit, more than the United States between 1930 and 1974. However, instability continued to the point that the army intervened to intervene again, for a second coup, in 1971.

The 1970s and the systematization of ultra-violence

In 1970, the Turkish regime was in agony. A quarter of the country’s budget went to the military, compared to only 4.7% for agricultural development where 65% of the population lived in 1970, and 3.8% for health. In 1970, more than a third of the inhabitants of the cities lived in shanty towns (the “gecekondus”, a building built overnight); more than half of the population was illiterate. 55% of children die before they turn 18. Emigration became massive to West Germany, but also to Austria, Switzerland.

In this miserable context, marked by revolts whereas imperialism became increasingly oresebtn as the large landowners crushed the peasants, the army then fell into crushing. The 1971 coup set off a sequence that would extend into the late 1990s, with a systematization of ultra-violence. Faced with the uninterrupted crisis, the army took the lead as such and generalized arrests, murders, torture, violent interventions, legal and clandestine, direct or through nationalist mafia networks. These notably acted in a terrible way with their massacre, in December 1978, in the city of Kahramanmaraş, of a thousand left activists, including their families.

May 1, 1977 had already been marked by shootings against the crowd, killing dozens and dozens of people, while 600,000 people demonstrated. The secret services, MIT, were developing strategies directly with US imperialism, to counter the multitude of revolutionary organizations resulting from the first three initiatives of the early 1970s, the THKO, the THKP / C, the TKP / M-TIKKO, who were developing the armed struggle. The clashes spread, with around ten deaths per day, more than 5,000 in total, including more than 2,000 militants of revolutionary organizations.

With the economy on the brink of collapse, the army then took the initiative of carrying out a new coup in December 1980, arresting 650,000 people, placing 1.6 million people on black lists, etc.

From the 1980s to open expansionist assertion

The army directly managed the country from 1980 to 1983 and the revolutionary organizations were not able to reorganize themselves until 1987, then reaching a high level of combativeness during the 1990s. The revolutionary organizations which then had the most success were the DHKP ​​/ C (Guevarist), the MLKP (Hoxhaist), as well as relatively the TKP (ML) and TKP / ML (both Maoists). They got bogged down, however, while conversely the PKK enjoyed ever greater success among the Kurdish masses, reaching great scale and clearly succeeding in subduing the revolutionary organizations to its own agenda, except for the DHKP / C.

The failure of the revolutionary organizations to turn things around in the 1990s was similar to the success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, prime minister from 2003 to 2014, when he became President of the Republic. Its political domination corresponds to quite a change in Turkish reality. Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan advocated a reactivation of the Islamic-Ottoman ideology, and no longer simply a “Turkish” republicanism. He was in tune with an upper bourgeoisie seeking expansion.

The mistake of the revolutionary organizations in Turkey was thus very simple. They all considered Turkey to be fully subjugated to US imperialism through the military. However, the arrival of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to power corresponds to the arrival of a new faction in power. We have proof of this with the trial of hundreds of people at the end of the 2000s, accused of being part of the Ergenekon network made up of soldiers and members of the secret service. This was the beheading of the Kemalist state apparatus. The American response included the attempted coup in 2016 through the Islamic congregation Gülen, which failed.

But the new regime managed to take hold. It goes beyond the Kemalist nationalism born of the first general crisis of capitalism to add to the neo-Ottoman aims and placed it as its main aspect.

The question of the PKK and Rojava

Turkey’s expansionist assertion could not concretely be followed by the Kurds, which explains why the PKK was the only movement able to hold out against the nationalist-Islamic wave, since the revolutionary organizations had made the mistake of believing that there would be a status quo in the following of the United States.

The PKK, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is historically a very incoherent movement; born on a communist basis, it nonetheless immediately sought military confrontation in the late 1970s with the revolutionary organizations in Turkey, and has often been a follower of the coup against them until today. The PKK does not tolerate competition.

Conversely, it can at times express a real internationalism and a great sympathy for them, by a natural convergence, in particular of its base. Moreover, the PKK expresses a democratic battle of the Kurdish masses and this produces self-denial at times, a democratic struggle of great depth. It is also all the more difficult to apprehend the PKK by the fact that the Kurds are historically divided territorially in several countries (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria).

In any case, in order to subsist politically and especially militarily in the case of the existence of armed branches, all revolutionary organizations in Turkey, with the exception of the DHKP / C, then literally followed the PKK. This is true from June 1998 with the Platform of United Revolutionary Forces (BDGP), bringing together the PKK, TKP (ML), MLKP, TKP / ML, TDP, DHP, TKP-Kıvılcım. And this will take on an even greater scale when in the Syrian civil war, the Kurdish forces establishing an independent zone, Rojava, bringing in Turkey and Rojava the establishment of the United Peoples Revolutionary Movement (HBDH), with the PKK, TKEP / L, TKP / ML, MKP, TIKB, DKP, MLKP, THKP-C / MLSPB, DK.

Is this an adequate choice against expansionist Turkey? In fact, in the background, there is the question of knowing if Turkey really exists and if the revolution is defined in its framework, or if it should disappear in favor of a regional framework of near-eastern dimension. It goes without saying that the PKK is pushing in the latter direction, due to its national agenda being defined over several countries, while conversely there is a reading considering that a national framework is always specific, like for the DHKP / C and TKP / ML (the latter having withdrawn from HBDH precisely on this issue).

Turkey’s pan-Turkish headlong rush

The revolutionary organizations were thus overtaken by this emergence of an openly aggressive Turkey; in their eyes, it was inconceivable. Why did the revolutionary organizations in Turkey make this mistake? In fact, they didn’t see that Turkey was coasting. By 1974, Turkey had already occupied part of Cyprus, affirming its expansionism which then, with the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism, was all the more expressed. There are indeed many peoples in the world who are part of Turkish history, with its language and culture: the Uzbeks, the Uighurs in China, the Azeris, the Kazaks, the Kyrgyz, many peoples of Russia such as the Yakuts or Tatars, Turkmens, etc.

Many of these peoples lived in the USSR, and US imperialism overwhelmingly supported pan-Turkism in order to help destabilize its competitor. Today’s Turkey is in fact, sustaining this approach, which is culturalo-racialist fanaticism, frewheeling. Thus, a significant portion of people of Turkish origin in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland… refuse any assimilation, defining themselves as “Turks”, only marrying between Turks, etc. Pan-Turkism aims at the union of the Turks and this as far as China and Siberia.

There was space there for the Turkish upper bourgeoisie, with its massive Cold War army, ultra-aggressive on the basis of “modern” Turkey, to rush into an expansionist orientation.

These inordinate ambitions literally carried a new political wave in Turkey, of which

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the direct expression. The Muslim dimension is, however, also extremely important here, as pan-Turkism, already widely present in Kemalism, has merged with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qatar and Turkey are the strongholds.

Turkey’s Ottoman headlong flight from and Qatar

There is no (Sunni) Islam without a Caliph and it is the Ottoman Empire which for several centuries has played the role of the Caliphate. Its collapse in 1918 sparked the birth of Islamism as a movement to reconstitute a caliphate. Launched into its expansionist ambitions, Turkey has reactivated the ideology of the Ottoman Empire, proposing itself as “protector” of Islam. This leads it to have a very important influence in Albania and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This neo-Ottoman Islamic line is obviously in conflict with Saudi Arabia’s claims to offer itself as the model and guardian of Mecca. The Saudi “Wahabis” are thus in open conflict with Turkey, which is based on the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stronghold is Qatar. The “Arab Spring”, in which the Qatari channel Al-Jazeerah played a big role, was in fact a series of pro-Muslim brotherhood revolts, notably in Egypt.

Qatar has very little investment in Turkey, but very targeted, supporting it when its debts are too important, making in 2008 the acquisition for more than a billion dollars of the second group of media (led between 2007 and 2013 by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law), buying Turkey’s largest television satellite for $ 1.4 billion, earning 49% in military vehicle production with even a Qatari military representative on the board.

Turkey and the double dynamic of its headlong rush

Turkey is in a double ideological system: on the one hand, as an “extension” of the Ottoman Empire, it claims to be the heart of Islam, which justifies its hegemony; on the other, there is a non-religious racialist discourse. This tinkering is based on expansionist inclinations, but at the same time it can only hold up through expansionist inclinations.

It can be said that, from the start, Turkey has been the weak link in the chain of dependent countries, because it was born in a tinkering resulting from the first general crisis of capitalism, that it maintained itself artificially in the framework of the cold war and that with the second general crisis of capitalism its headlong flight literally turns into a detonator.

The national bourgeoisie which immediately played the role of bureaucratic bourgeoisie at independence, in alliance with the large landowners, took advantage of its importance during the Cold War to establish its bases and prolong its flight forward by means of a neo-Ottoman perspective corresponding to its redoubled aggressiveness while the second general crisis of capitalism asserts itself.

Turkey has thus always been in crisis since 1923 and it tilts, depending on the nature of the general crisis at the world level, in such and such aggressiveness. It is losing itself, as reflected in religious fanaticism and irrationalism.

The turmoil of Turkish history will thus be at the heart of the second general crisis of capitalism. Large-scale upheavals are inevitable. Turkey will experience an intense period of crisis during the 2020s and will be one of the countries at the heart of the revolutionary question at the global level.

The Covid-19 crisis opens a new era, because it carries with it a whole bundle of historical contradictions. Humanity can no longer live as before, it faces a challenge which consists in finding its place in the Biosphere. It can no longer simply continue to carry the capitalist mode of production, which very clearly leads to destruction in all areas. There is the need for a break.

We can imagine that this is not simple. It involves a great determination in the face of capitalist corruption, an ability to look to the future, a sense of involvement to make things turning in the right direction. Without a sufficient ideological level, without an adequate cultural reading, we cannot turn off, carry this rupture, we are caught up by the old era and its values.

With the Covid-19 crisis, a double phenomenon has unfolded. On the one hand, there was an effect of surprise, of fear, of anguish, in the face of an event that seemed incomprehensible given the capitalist claim to propose a stable world. What is unfolding then seems therefore incomprehensible, calamitous, a catastrophe and there is a headlong rush in social-Darwinist reasoning, that the weak must perish.

However, on the other hand, there was and there is a sense of understanding that a whole period has ended. With the confinement, the closing of the borders, the partial shutdown of activities, the cessation of capitalist triumphalism … all of this has dialectical been a breath of fresh air as well. It was finally the proof that capitalism could not perpetuate itself without knowing blockages, that it is not able to swallow up private life and the whole of society, and even the planet, without being stopped by something. Capitalism appears to be outdated.

What arises as an alternative is Socialism or barbarism. Either there is an awareness, a going beyond old values and the affirmation of Communism – whether at the level of society or in relation to nature. Either there is an identitarian, national withdrawal, an escape in the spirit of concurrence, competition, with an acceptance of the disaster and the attempt to take advantage of it to dominate others.

Either popular democracy, with the working masses deciding the orientations of society on a basis of sharing, cooperation, compassion, refusal of hierarchies, unification of social and productive forces, or militarism and the quest for a national savior, leading to fascism and imperialist war.

Either the bourgeoisie is politically put aside, its state dismantled, its state apparatus liquidated, with popular power around the working class, or the upper bourgeoisie takes control of the state and pushes capitalism to participate in the imperialist battle for the redistribution of the world, mobilizing in a nationalist and militarist manner.

This alternative does not arise formally. It will take time before it arises at all levels of society. On the side of popular democracy, we do not get out of capitalism easily, whether in terms of mentalities or the establishment of new forms of production. There are many obstacles, such as the workers’ aristocracy, a social layer bought by the capitalists, or even the nefarious influences of a petty bourgeoisie seeking to abuse the masses to negotiate with the bourgeoisie.

On the Reaction side, it is difficult to get the country from political liberalism, ideological relativism, generalized individualism… to the same values, but nested in an aggressive “collective” project requiring participation in “the national effort”. Capitalism in its liberal form and capitalism in its fascist form are both the same and not the same; the transition from one to the other is not smooth.

It goes without saying that what is decisive here will be the general crisis of capitalism and more precisely the forms it will take. We can already see that the economic dimension of the crisis is terribly deep, that it surprises by its expression, that it strikes almost by surprise this or that sector. Unemployment, precariousness, brutality in everyday life, anxiety for maintaining its social existence… all of this can be the breeding ground for fascism, while the bourgeoisie necessarily seeks an exit through capitalist rationalization and imperialist war.

Conversely, the prolonged nature of the situation contributes to reflection, to awareness. And we can even see, in a relative way, that people who had turned their backs on the values of the dominant way of life, who did not trust the capitalist pretensions, who sought an alternative way of life … suddenly found themselves having a certain value, instead of appearing as mere freaks as before.

Obviously, it is most often elementary steps, of withdrawal, while it is not only a question of realizing that the pace imposed by capitalism is unbearable. If we stop at that, we do not see that capitalism has had its day and that it is not a question of slowing down history, human activity in general, but quite the contrary of accelerating it. It is not about making a hippie approach triumph in order to « calm », « frame » or « roll back » capitalism, but rather to have an active humanity, protagonist of new choices, allowing a new development. You have to live up to the times.

Nevertheless, we can thus already read behaviors, attitudes, positions that pass into the universal, the planetary dimension, in opposition to the cynical, individualist, nihilist values of capitalism. The common denominator of all is that it is considered that we “can’t do the same anymore”. The refusal of nuclear power or of hunting, the requirement of a high standard in health, the detestation of waste or religious divisions, the affirmation of the sharing of cultural goods, whether for music , films or images in general… Such phenomena, whether they are aware of it or not, come tendencially into conflict with the 24 hour a day demands of capitalism.

This does not mean that people have grasped the full scale of the disaster, nor that the process is not recuperable in itself with a modernization of capitalism. What there is here is a deep contradiction between, on the one hand the battle for existence, with the need to work in order to have a salary to live, to integrate socially, with also alienation making us appreciate what capitalism offers… and on the other, in a way not necessarily understood, a cultural, material, psychological need to breathe, to temporize, to stop incessantly running by following the desiderata of capitalism, to flourish by doing things differently, in a better way. To what extent this contradiction will be positive, in what form, that is the real basic question.

In any case, it is possible to say that the people who have grasped with satisfaction this break, this moment of pause in the capitalist machinery, represent the point of the emerging consciousness that we must put an end to all this, that we must change everything, that nothing is right anymore. Of course, we are still a long way from coming to the affirmation that we must destroy what destroys us, nevertheless a process has started.

Concretely, we can say that the great capitalist impetus founded on the collapse of Soviet social-imperialism and the integration of social-fascist China into the international division of labor is now over. What shatters is the capitalist consensus that was maintained between 1989 and 2020, based on a relative rise in the standard of living on a global scale, the absence of major wars across the world, technological modernization and better access to health.

This period between 1989 and 2020 was a crossing of the desert from the point of view of the communist strategic proposal, it was extremely difficult for the revolutionary vanguards around the world to experience. The thesis that capitalism goes to war seemed out of date; capitalism was expanding mass consumption and seemed to overturn the claim that exploitation leads to impoverishment. The way of life of the masses was changing, whether with computers, internet, cell phones, the reinforcement of cinema and television in everyday life. A vast petty-bourgeoisie was getting stronger in the imperialist countries, developing cultural activities that seemed fulfilling or at least entertaining.

The ground conquered with so much difficulty in the years 1960-1970, place of the engagements in the years 1980, literally evaporated in 1989. The collapse of Soviet social-imperialism allowed the Western imperialist countries to appropriate new markets, and through the integration of social-fascist China, capitalist production and consumption have been greatly enlarged.

In such a context, the reconstitution of the avant-gardes was a difficult struggle, requiring patience and tenacity. In France, the CPF (MLM) is based on a process born in the 1990s, with the affirmation of Maoism at the very beginning of the 2000s, for a major operation of ideological reconstruction of fundamental principles. In Belgium, a country with a similarly great revolutionary tradition, the process of aggregation of forces assuming the break with capitalism led in 2010 to the formation of the MLM Center.

But it is not just about reclaiming the Communist heritage. It is also about deepening, to be up to the challenges of the time. The animal question, in particular, arises with all its acuteness. In the background there is the contradiction between city and country, with humanity’s place in the biosphere as the backdrop to a battle for the future direction to be taken.

We do not understand people who say they want revolution, but who have no concrete, practical point of view on all the burning issues of our time and whose speech could be in 1980, in 1960, in 1930, or even in 1900. To imagine that one can lead a revolutionary policy while being completely out of date culturally is simply an aberration strictly equivalent to the petty-bourgeois fascinations for anything that appears as a new cultural or social phenomenon.

You have to be anchored in your time, in your society. Revolution is not a cosmopolitan process. What is called people’s war is not a technical concept, but a popular reality, with the people made up of concrete people, existing with their sensibility in a well-defined material reality. It is necessary both to be in phase with the people and to be a vanguard turned towards overtaking reality, there is the productive contradiction defining the communists.

This is all the more true at a time of crisis and when one says crisis it means revolution. What is ending is a time when revolutionaries were marginalized or corrupted by capitalist momentum. It was a time of relative neutralization of antagonisms. We can even say that, since the 1950s, the capitalist countries have experienced such a neutralization, the revolutionary wave being expressed mainly in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The people of the capitalist countries were crushed by capitalism and its values, they were integrated into its process, adopting the way of life that it demanded. We are now at the breaking point.

An authentic life is only possible in the fight for liberation and before that, it is in a socially isolated way that such an approach emerged, whether in the French “leftists” around May 1968, in violent workers’ initiatives. Italians of the 1970s, in the Berlin squats of the 1980s. There was a complete break between avant-gardes prisoners of their alternative style and the broad masses entirely cut off from their approach and even inaccessible by their disdain for what was not the traditional capitalist way of life. The situation changed with the onset of the crisis; the antagonistic stall with the 24 hours a day of capitalism takes on its meaning!

The project of recomposing the proletarian fabric by the democratic movement of the masses violently tearing up capitalist hegemony at all levels can resume its natural course. The need for Communism can be expressed again, sector by sector in the popular masses, posing as a strategic hypothesis addressed as broadly as possible.

This is a process in which we are only at the beginning. But our pride is to have prepared, to be on the front line in this start. And we have confidence in the victory of this process of overcoming the general crisis of capitalism, by the victory of the popular masses country by country in a prolonged process and the establishment, as final achievement, of the world socialist republic.

Marxist Leninist Maoist Center [Belgium]
Communist Party of France (marxist leninist maoist)

Where does the sensation come from ? Such a question is a typical
error, the produce of the feudal and the bourgeois approaches, which separate the brain and the body.

The feudal conception separates them totally, whereas the bourgeois way links them in a tormented way.

Both consider that the question of the sensation is connected to the body, to the interpretation of the body by the brain. A feeling, a sensation, can not exist in itself; it has an existence only in the case of an interpretation by an individual.

The reason for this anthropocentrism resides in Metaphysics. For the feudal
conception, the mind must leave the body and join the origin of the world, God, which is immaterial.

For the bourgeois conception, we can not explain the origin of the world, so we should restrain us in elaborating theory about the relationships we make with reality.

Life is seen through individuals, through their relationships. There is no world, no nature, only a world, a nature existing insofar we have a relationship to them.

This conception was necessary to the bourgeois to justify the existence of the capitalist, which is an individual acting through his own understanding of its surrounding reality.

Protestantism is here the main ideological construction of this approach.

Nowadays, existentialism and all the post-modernist variants that exist support a terrorist version of this self-centeredness, this vision of the world based merely on the individuals.

Therefore, in the history of science dominated by the bourgeoisie, it was always considered that animals know no pain. They are considered as mere mechanisms, by Descartes and Malebranche notably, without a “conscience”.

Of course, this wrong conception proved more and more wrong, through the affirmation of democratic and socialist thought.

One major historical event here is when, on 10 December 1907, in a turmoil following an dissection of a living brown dog in London, 1,000 medical students marched through central London waving effigies of a brown dog on sticks, justifying and promoting vivisection, attacking for this reason suffragettes and trade unionists fighting against vivisection.

Two conceptions of the world struggled. Nowadays, the sensation of pets are recognized, but they are still mistreated; the sensation of vertebrates is also recognized but they are considered as of minor interest.

Moreover, the sensation of fishes and invertebrates are openly negated, in the name of the nervous system and the brain, in an anthropocentric conception.

On the contrary, dialectical materialism connects living matter to sensation.
In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin deals with this question among others, and remembers us this important question :

“There still remains to be investigated and reinvestigated how matter, apparently entirely devoid of sensation, is related to matter which, though composed of the same atoms (or electrons), is yet endowed with a well-defined faculty of sensation.

Materialism clearly formulates the as yet unsolved problem and thereby
stimulates the attempt to solve it, to undertake further experimental investigation.”

Lenin says also that we have certainly to go in the direction of considering that, in the foundation of the structure of matter, we can surmise the existence of a faculty akin to sensation, like Denis Diderot did it.

And indeed, compassion and empathy are a proof of it. What is the dialectical materialist conception of reflect? That thebrain reflects reality; what we think is an echo.

But, if René Descartes and Emmanuel Kant are right, if each individual is like surrounded by a Chinese wall, how is it possible to feel what somebody else feels? How are compassion and empathy possible ?

This is only possible because living matter knows sensations; sensations are linked to the principle of echo, of movement of matter.

That is why a revolution can occur: the masses have synthesized, at different levels, the same vision of the world, corresponding to reality.

Revolution occurs at the general level, compassion and empathy at the individual levels, but their foundation is the fact that matter and sensation can not be separated.

Living matter is therefore at the heart of dialectical materialism, as it is a developed form of matter, a direction which corresponds to the auto-movement of matter itself to more complexity.

This is the reason why we have to recognize, cherish and defend the dignity of reality of nature, of the animals, of each living being, which correspond to the auto-development of matter, and participate in the global system of life on our planet as a Biosphere.

The universe consists of the infinite and eternal process of the reflection of matter by the matter and for the matter.

Matter is indeed sensitive and knows in itself an impression shaping it to different degrees.

This difference in the marking of the reflection has as its source in the fact that the universe is in motion and that it is through it that the reflections and impressions are carried.

This movement and the many aspects of reality make that reflections and
impressions know different rhythms, different magnitudes.

We can say that the universe is the reflection of itself in an uninterrupted
process of transformations.

Its nature is the equivalent of an infinite ocean where everything is reflected in an uninterrupted movement of waves at all levels, at all scales.

This process of reflections and impressions within a moving universe, with all its different aspects of matter, is thus characterized by unequal development.

The inequality of the markings of the reflection, of the impression, causes
situations of imbalances.

There is movement because unequal development, and uneven development because movement.

The main aspect depends on the stage of the process.

On the one hand, the impression of reflection in matter results in making it
more complex on the internal plane.

On the other hand, the uneven nature of this impression provokes breaks. The break is precisely what characterizes a process leading to a transformation as a qualitative leap.

There is concretely neither cause nor consequence, but only an internal transformation resulting in a greater complexity of matter, an enlargement of its impressions, an increase in the power of its reflections, one or more moments of rupture, a qualitative leap.

It is this movement of internal transformation reflected from matter in matter which itself inscribes impressions and produces changes. And what takes place internally is the contradiction brought to its conclusion.

The law of contradiction, with two poles opposed in a relative manner or not, expressing uninterrupted antagonistic relations, belongs to the general and universal movement of matter.

There is neither beginning nor end, because no process is isolated.

The reflection and the impression are generalized and uninterrupted; every phenomenon is related, in different ways and to different degrees, to all the other phenomena.

In the universe, everything is constantly transformed, with transformations whose reflection causes impressions, which themselves produce reflections, which provoke impressions, and this to infinity.

There is consequently neither cause nor consequence.

The process of transformation is dialectical, it unites the particular and the
universal, the relative and the absolute, all being bound together and at the same time unbound in an infinite and eternal process.

Any transformation is added to other transformations and is reflected in them, producing interaction, liaison, mediation.

Nothing is so isolated and independent.

Everything is mutually connected and interdependent, constantly transformed and transforming, by the reflection, by the impression.

Absolutely everything is reflection and reflection of reflection, and this to infinity.

Matter is inexhaustible and ever more complex, ever richer.

No turning back is possible, never, because the movement produces a series
of qualitative leaps that has resulted in a more developed form, more intertwined with the rest of the material.

What is called time is the description of transformation and what is called space is the description of matter, because the universe is only matter, always richer, ever more complex, ever more intertwined to an infinity of aspects of itself.

Any process obeys this mirror system. The most developed phenomena of nature and life correspond to major qualitative leaps in the complexification of matter on a large scale.

The two poles of electricity, molecular asymmetry in the domain of life in relation to the domain of non-living matter, action and reaction in mechanics, mirror neurons in brains, union and dissociation of atoms in chemistry, childhood and parenthood, the masculine and feminine, the class struggle in the modes of production… are examples of complex expression of the movement of matter and of a very high degree of
interplay with itself.

This process has no beginning or ending.

There is no starting point to the universe, nor any point of arrival.

There is no « God », no Big Bang, no source, no beginning.

There is only a ever deeper movement of reflections and impressions, in a spiral movement, proceeding by jumps, characterized by unequal development at all levels, affirming the dynamic nature of the internal relations taking a contradictory dimension until the break.

In fact, not only are the developments unequal between them, but each development is itself unequal in itself, because of the different density of
impressions.

The law of contradiction applies to the expression of the contradiction itself.
Nothing is therefore indivisible, nor eternal. One becomes two and that forever and everywhere.

As it is formulated in the article « The universe is the unity of the finite and the infinite », published in the Journal of the Dialectic of Nature in People’s China in the first half of the 1970s:

« The end of all concrete things, the sun, the Earth and humanity is not the end of the universe.

The end of the Earth will bring a new and more sophisticated cosmic body.

At that time, people will hold meetings and celebrate the victory of the dialectic and welcome the birth of new planets.

The end of humanity will also result in new species that will inherit all our achievements. In this sense… the death of the old is the condition of the birth of the new. »

Communism is the product of the movement of the synthesis of matter through leaps, that is to say that matter ceases to use itself in a partially
unproductive way to find a way to form an active whole.

By partially unproductive, we must understand that matter can only use
matter to develop itself, which implies that one aspect develops at the expense of another, within the framework of an uneven development.

The imbalance caused is resolved by a dialectical leap.

Mao Zedong tells us here that:

“Imbalance is a general and objective law. The cycle, which is endless, goes from imbalance to equilibrium and, again, from this one to the other.

Each cycle, however, corresponds to a higher level of development. The
imbalance is absolute, while the balance is temporary and relative.
The rupture of the balance is a leap forward.”

The capitalist mode of production thus permits the development of the productive forces, but this at the expense of the proletarians; socialism is the negation of it and the communism which prolongs it is then humanity
applying the principle of each according to his means, to each according to his needs.

There is however no negation of negation and socialism organized by humanity does not mean that it is alone to march to communism.

In reality, for dialectical materialism, the whole universe goes to Communism. Dialectically, this means that the entire universe has also gone to communism.

Matter is eternal and infinite; it is inexhaustible.

Consequently, it has already undergone a dialectical evolution, by means of transformations, since this is its very nature. It therefore implies that it has already known and that in every great step, every leap forward, it knows
a communist leap.

This communism consists in the universalization of the means of production of a material form, its synthetic combination. Any rise in the complexity of matter on a certain level corresponds to a communist assertion.

Mountains, galaxies, plants and animals are examples of synthetic leaps corresponding to a communist stage. We have an affirmation of a complex and organized system, a pooling of multiple contradictory aspects of the matter.

These complex systems themselves have a past made up of steps that established the elements that were going to synthesize.

The separate elements combine; they form a harmonious whole and at the same time obey an internal contradiction involving them in a development.

This development is itself uneven and this explains the different galaxies, the different mountains, the different plants, the different animals. The systematization of the production of a complex system is itself uneven.

These are not nature tests or nature errors; it is a reality of any development to be unequal.

Any process takes advantage of a process which has by definition been
unequal in itself to produce a more complex form, through an equally
unequal development.

This past is infinite, as much as the future. The process is endless, its
aspects infinite.

Matter, based on the inequalities of development of its different aspects, knows an infinite development by the affirmation of contradictions leading to a communist leap, producing new forms which themselves bring more
complexity in the general development.

Any jump does not correspond to a communist stage.

But each leap contains, in germ, the tendency to the leap forward towards
the communist nature of the system.

The communist stage is distinguished from the others by a unification where the contradiction ceases to be antagonistic between different aspects to allow a harmonious development – which corresponds to the development of new contradictions, which are different from the previous ones, which have shifted.

This displacement is done by placing the new form in new relationships with the rest of the material.

Each mountain, each galaxy … is the fruit of an internal contradiction, and its realization as a complex form produces a new contradiction with other aspects of matter, for example the galaxy with another galaxy, the
mountain with a river, etc.

The initial internal contradiction, allowing the advent of a new one, of a more complex form, then moves towards the dialectical relationship between the new thing and another thing, forming a new internal contradiction.

The article « The Universe is the unity of the finite and the infinite », published in the Journal of the dialectic of Nature at the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, presents the new relationship which established itself as follows:

« The end of all concrete things, the sun, the Earth and humanity is not the end of the Universe. The end of the Earth will bring a new and more sophisticated cosmic body.

At that time, people will hold meetings and celebrate the victory of the dialectic and welcome the birth of new planets.

The end of humanity will also signify that species will inherit all of our achievements. In this sense… the death of the old is the condition for the birth of the new. « 

Communism therefore generalizes on ever more complex levels, because matter transforms itself and its interaction at a complex level deepens, becomes systematized. In this sense, there is no negation of negation, no end of history, nor indeed beginning. There is communism for communism, matter for matter.

The universe is an infinite system where complexity develops in leaps and
bounds. The Japanese physicist Shoichi Sakata, in Theoretical Physics and
Dialectics of Nature, in June 1947, defines his conception of the Universe
as an onion, greeted by Mao Zedong:

“Current science has found that in nature there exist qualitatively different “levels »-the form of motion — , for example, a series of the levels such as elementary particles — nuclei — atoms — molecules — masses — heavenly bodies — nebulae.

These levels form various nodal points which restrict the various qualitative modes of existence of matter in general. And thus they are not merely related in a straightforward manner as described above.

The “levels” are also connected in a direction such as molecules — colloids — cells — organs — individuals — societies. Even in the same masses, there exist “levels” of states corresponding to solids-liquids-gases.

Metaphorically speaking, these circumstances may he described as having a sort of multi-dimensional structure of the fish net type, or it may be better to say that they have the onion-like structure of successive phases.

These levels are by no means mutually isolated and independent, but they are mutually connected, dependent and constantly “transformed” into each other. For example, an atom is constructed from elementary particles and a molecule is constructed from atoms, and conversely the decompositions of a molecule into atoms, an atom into elementary particles can be made.

These kinds of transformations occur constantly, with the creation of new quality and the destruction of others in ceaseless changes.”

The universe is an infinite ocean of contradictions raising matter to a more complex level, bringing richer contradictions, allowing an ever richer combination of matter, more sensitive, more complex, and this in all
directions.

It’s the meaning of communism.

The MLPD, Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, is the only Marxist-Leninist structure to have maintained itself since the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany. It was one of the main initiators of the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organizations (ICOR), regrouping since 2010 some fifty structures claiming to be Marxist-Leninist and, most of the time, in one way or another, uphelding Mao Zedong.

The line of the MLPD and of the ICOR is classically neo-revisionist: revisionism is denounced, but in reality it is revisionism itself which is assumed. We can see this very simply with the thesis of “state monopoly capitalism”. This thesis is revisionist. State monopoly capitalism would be a new stage of imperialism.

The state would have acquired a great level of independence from the classes, it would be “rational” and by relying on it, capitalism would reach an “organized” stage. The state, through the socialization of losses, would prevent monopoly capitalism from sinking.

Developed by Eugen Varga, this thesis was strictly rejected in the immediate post-war period in the USSR, as part of a great ideological battle. Then, Nikita Khrushchev made it an official device of the revisionist ideology. And, unfortunately, most Marxist-Leninist organizations defining themselves as anti-revisionists in Western Europe have maintained this thesis of “state monopoly capitalism”.

This is the case with the MLPD.

The MLPD does not say that the state is neutral and that it could be wrested from monopoly capital. This distinguishes it from those practicing open revisionism. However, it maintains the thesis of “state monopoly capitalism” theorized by Eugen Varga as a new stage of imperialism. Willi Dickhut, the main theorist of the MLPD since its founding in 1982 and until his death in 1992, fully assumed it in 1973 and this position is documented
by the MLPD itself in 2019.

The MLPD says exactly the same thing as Eugen Varga and this thesis was strictly rejected by the USSR at the time of Stalin, in a vast controversy. Here is how the MLPD presents it:

“In connection with the Second World War, there was a qualitative leap: in all imperialist countries the transition from monopoly capitalist imperialism to monopoly state imperialism has matured.”

This thesis is totally revisionist, historically indefensible from the communist point of view, since it was proposed by Eugen Varga, denounced by Stalin’s USSR, assumed by revisionism in the USSR and systematized in all revisionist parties in the world. The idea of a “qualitative leap” in the history of imperialism was rejected by Stalin. There has never been any talk of a new stage of imperialism.
The consequences must be understood.

Indeed, Eugen Varga’s thesis of “state monopoly capitalism” implies that the state systematically comes to the rescue of monopolies, being even only an appendage to them. The activity is therefore the same as that of the Western European revisionists of the 1960s: the regime should be “unmasked”.

The MLPD says in 2017:

“Bourgeois democracy masks that we live in Germany in a state monopoly capitalism, a dictatorship of monopolies.”

And since we are already living in a dictatorship of monopolies according to the MLPD, then the communist analysis of fascism disappears. There can no longer be any attempt by the monopolies to take control of the state by means of fascism, since the monopolies already have the power. The monopolies therefore wrest the necessary profit thanks to the “organizing” State making society pay. No more need for fascism, no more need for
imperialist war.

The thesis defended by Stalin in 1952 on the inevitability of wars for capitalism, specifically targeting Eugen Varga, is rejected.

Instead, we have the 1920s socialist thesis of so-called organized capitalism.
The MLPD fully accepts this conception and, to satisfy its formulation, has put in place several concepts: the “surmonopoly”, the “sole domination of international financial capital”, the formation of new imperialist countries, the “proletarian way of thinking”.

The MLPD says:

“The international financial capital alone dominant is a small disappearing layer of the bourgeoisie, which is formed by groupings of the international surmonopolies with different national-state bases and links.”

By “surmonopolies”, the MLPD means the 500 most powerful companies in the world. They would form an “international financial capitalism” dominating capitalism on a world scale and supported by states subject to them. Not only non-monopoly capital, but even monopoly capitalist is subject to these “surmonopolies”. And these surmonopolies have not
only merged their own organs with those of the state apparatus, they have pushed for the dismantling of the states themselves.

This is the thesis of organized capitalism theorized by social democracy in the 1920s, with ultra-imperialism forming alongside the possibility of world socialism, and modernized in the 1940s with the thesis of “State monopoly capitalism”.

To unmask this organized capitalism, it would be necessary, according to the MLPD, to have a “proletarian way of thinking”, which would make it possible to discover the real situation. But, quite logically, the only possible revolution is against these “surmonopolies” and we then arrive at the Trotskyist thesis of the unitary world revolution. The program of the MLPD is explicit:

“Under the conditions of internationalized production, the socialist revolution will take an international character. The international collaboration of the imperialists in the organization of the counter-revolution and the interaction with the international class struggle make that today it is practically impossible that an isolated revolutionary process in a country can be carried out victoriously (…).

In this world revolutionary process, there will be in indissoluble interaction mass strikes, mass demonstrations, anti-imperialist, democratic and revolutionary struggles and uprisings.

This is why the proletarian strategy and tactics in each country must essentially be understood and carried out as preparation for the international socialist revolution.”

This is Trotskyism.

And then remains a fundamental problem to explain for the MLPD: why is there still a very clear tendency to war which emerges?

An explanation was to be found. The MLPD then says the following thing: yes, war is inevitable in capitalism, because the states compete for their interests. This is not Lenin’s teaching at all.

Leninism explains that imperialism is the superstructure of national capitalism. The imperialist war is therefore carried by capitalism itself, because once developed, the monopoly fraction prevails.

It was therefore necessary for the MLPD to break this definition and broaden the concept of an imperialist country. Stefan Engel, leader of the MLPD, publicly expressed this “broader” concept in 2011.

Would be henceforth imperialist countries Saudi Arabia, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, India, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran. Added to this must be China and Russia, as well as Israel, which the MLPD already considered as imperialist.

We immediately see the paradox, since the MLPD itself explains that these 14 countries bring together 3.7 billion people, more than half of the world’s
population. If we therefore add the population of the remaining imperialist countries (United States, Western European countries, Japan), then not living in an imperialist country would only affect 35% of the world population!

Here is completely reversed the principle of uneven development and the parasitic nature of imperialism. Besides that, the MLPD does not recognize the concept of a semi-feudal semi-colonial country, speaking of “neo-colonialism”. The MLPD needs all this fiction to pretend that it has not left communist teachings. The MLPD thus denounces the war, saying that it is the result of competition between imperialists.

What the MLPD does not directly confess, however, is that according to this conception, this competition takes place in what is called the “world imperialist system”. For the MLPD, this is a kind of by-product of the world domination of the “surmonopolies”.

It is therefore the fruit of state militarism in search of territories to be controlled – we come back here to Rosa Luxembourg’s erroneous thesis that an imperialist war is based only on the principle of conquering territories to widen the accumulation of capital.

For the MLPD, there is a global, unified imperialism, and within it competition between states. This is why countries without industrial production apart from oil and gas, such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, can be defined as “imperialist”. As they take a part of
the global « piece of the cake », they compete with others.

All this has nothing to do with the teachings of communism and the just understanding of the uneven development of semi-feudal semi-colonial countries, recognizing that there are indeed differences between Gabon and South Korea, Chile and India. Nevertheless, a semifeudal semi-colonial country can only be transformed into expansionism and not into
imperialism, because it is itself linked to one or more imperialist countries.

Iran practices expansionism, as does Israel, but neither the one nor the other is an imperialism. This responds to the specific needs of bureaucratic capitalism in crisis, which needs to get out of it by war. But their semi-feudal and semi-colonial dimension is obvious.

The weight of religions in institutions alone shows the undemocratic dimension present, the maintenance of backward social structures, incompatible with liberated capitalism and going as far as imperialism. There is indeed a tendency towards war, but it is not imperialism in substance or else one distorts the notion of imperialism by reducing it to a bourgeois definition of « geopolitics ».

This is why, beyond a few rhetorical remarks, the MLPD does not make imperialist war one of its favorite themes. The imperialist wars is for it only a secondary aspect, specific to the internal competition of states for in a “world imperialist system”. This is an entirely revisionist analysis.

Movement has by definition a non-linear nature. If this were not the case, it would necessarily tend inversely to linearity and therefore to the abolition of movement as such. As movement does not imply the abolition of movement as a universal principle specific to matter, but the abolition of the matter which carries movement, that is to say its transformation since its abolition is impossible.

There is always movement, because there is always matter. But so that the movement does not stop, without which there would be no more matter expressing it, it must be the matter itself which stops, and as it cannot stop, it is transformed. Matter carries movement, is abolished by movement, is constituted by movement.

But nothing can constitute matter. Therefore is matter movement and movement matter.

What is at stake here is the question of quality. A line, even an ascending one, does not evolve, it carries a uniform direction. And who says uniform direction says absence of rupture. Even a movement uniformly experiencing breaks would, by definition, have no breaks due to its continuous dimension. It can therefore not exist.

Therefore, the break is not sufficient in itself to go beyond the principle of a linear movement.

If we take a uniform line, we have no breaks.

∕

If you accept the breaking principle and integrate it into the movement, then you have a leap, but only in terms of form. This jump only adjusts the direction, corrects it, it is a qualitative correction of the quantitative. The break applies to development, to its expression – but it is not development itself.

A break, a qualitative leap, is not enough to formulate quality.

A qualitative leap knows quality, it is not quality. A jump is not quality in itself.

__ ∕

Concretely, we can see in the development of the phenomena that there is advance, retreat, revolution, restoration, counter-restoration. The final transition to a higher stage is never unilateral. It is never linear.

It is never linear either with a single « jump », since there are backslides, a push forward, a counter-push, etc.

So there is not simply a « break » in the course of development. There is not a trend, then suddenly a qualitative acceleration breaking with this trend while continuing it. This can only be a summary description, losing the substance of quality.

What is at stake here is the contradiction between the new and the old. If we stop at it, we have the principle of rupture, in a way however formal.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

This contradiction in fact also implies the contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. There is no abstract struggle between the new and the old, only a concrete struggle.

The development being internal, the crisis does not occur from the outside, bringing about a transformation, but inside and it is carried by the inside itself; in fact it is the interior itself.

Any development of a phenomenon is a crisis carried by an internal tear. It is not the « form » of the phenomenon that is affected by the crisis, but the contradictory substance of the phenomenon that carries it.

There is therefore no linear movement, because the movement itself undergoes a change in nature by the change in the substance of what carries it.

The changing movement is the changing matter, the changing matter is the changing movement. Movement is transformation of matter and transformation of matter is transformation of movement.

Thus, there is a contradiction between the change in the nature of the movement and the change in the substance that carries it. The old wears the old movement, the new the new movement. But the old and the new are one and the same phenomenon, thus carrying so contradictory both the old and the new movements.

There are thus:

– contradiction within the phenomenon (or more adequately contradiction of the phenomenon), producing the movement;

– contradiction within the phenomenon, between the old and the new;

– contradiction between the new movement and the old, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the old movement and the new, within the phenomenon;

– contradiction between the movement and the phenomenon.

There is no negation of negation, because each stage constitutes a qualitatively new terrain. There is no linear movement, nothing is linear, everything comes under the non-linear character – including the non-linear character.

This is because the contradiction is always concrete – there is no movement in itself – it is the dignity of the real that prevails.

Viruses, the most common organisms on Earth, can only be understood in their relationship to living things; they are in fact not able to carry out metabolic processes, because they do not have any of the physiological mechanisms necessary for the implementation of these processes. They cannot reproduce or feed on their own.

A virus simply consists of a protein capsule protecting a DNA or RNA. It can only reproduce by means of a host, from which it diverts part of the operation for its own benefit. In doing so, it can also cause its own genetic code to intrude into that of its host.

Viruses, by their massive spread on the planet, are a key in biochemical exchanges; at least 8% of homo sapiens DNA is viral from its origin. The placenta owes its function to viral DNA.

This fact alone completely ruins bourgeois conceptions of heredity as « fixed », frozen, separated from reality, etc.

Viruses form, concretely, a pivot in the more complex development of matter.

This material always comes from the universal unity of the processes as well as from the qualitative character of the movement, while being carried out in a particular way and through quantity.

It must be understood that there is nothing existing in a separated way and that nothing is regressing in its development. What is called “disease” is therefore improperly defined, because the negative effects are completely secondary to the main aspect of the general process of complexification of matter which involves dialectical relationship.

Only a small minority of viruses are thus pathogenic to humans, even though they form a material aspect of the utmost importance. It is an expression of uneven development.

The types of viral populations in the ocean are at least 200,000 and it is predicted that they would be a billion. In the ocean, the number of viruses per milliliter of water is estimated to be between 10 exponent 6 and 10 exponent 8 (between one and one hundred million).

These viruses play an essential role in the ocean in their relationship to bacteria and living things; their role is still unknown, but it appears that they regulate the bacterial population, that of micro-algae and even living beings.

In other words, the decomposition resulting from the activity of viruses has a biogeochemical activity, playing on food in the oceans, the equilibria of the beings therein, neutralizing the development of bacteria, having an essential function in the presence of CO2 on Earth through activity in the carbon cycle (by capturing carbon to transform it as sediment in the seabed).

Many chemical elements are still involved here in the activity of viruses in the ocean (phosphorus, sulfur …) and research is new, dating from the very end of the 20th century and the very beginning of the 21st century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that we were able to see viruses, using electron microscopes; it was not until the beginning of the 21st century that viruses, like the bacteria, appeared as an essential scientific field.

If this statement is true on the level of practical studies, dialectical materialism had already noted the nature of viruses in the early 1950s, within the framework of the socialist USSR led by Stalin, and had asked the question of their role in biogeochemical processes.

In a summary on dialectical materialism of 1953, Peter Belov, in his article On the primacy of matter and the secondary character of consciousness, says that:

“The data of advanced modern science as to the essence and origin of life can be briefly summarized as follows.

Living is not something random on earth. The totality of all living things on earth – the biosphere – is a natural product of the geochemical development of the planet’s surface.

The biosphere continues to play an essential and extremely important role in all the other geochemical processes of the earth’s crust, determining the nature of the rock formation, the formation of the soil, the composition of the atmosphere and in general the distribution of the chemical elements in the upper layers of the earth’s crust, hydrosphere, atmosphere.

“Living organisms, from a geochemical point of view, are not an accidental fact in the chemical mechanism of the earth’s crust; they constitute its most essential and inseparable part. They are inextricably linked to the inert matter of the earth’s crust, minerals and rocks … The great biologists have long been aware of the inextricable link that connects the body to its surrounding nature.” (V.I. Vernadsky, Essays on geochemistry, State Publishing House, 1927)

Living things are made up of the same chemical elements that make up the rest, the mineral part of nature.

The composition of a living body includes almost all of the chemical elements (including radioactive) in the periodic table, some largely, some in smaller proportions. But whatever the quantitative proportion of certain chemical elements in the composition of the protoplasm (their presence in organisms is only detected by spectral analysis), they however also play an important role in the life of the protein, their absence leads to death of the body.

Modern advanced natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology) have fully exposed the idealist theories of “eternity of life”, “panspermia”, etc. Life on earth is of terrestrial origin, the result of an extremely long natural synthesis of increasingly complex organic substances (…). The Living is inseparable from the conditions of its existence and can only be conceived as a product of the development of these conditions themselves.”

The question that inevitably arises here is that of placing the virus: is it an organism falling under living matter or is it inert matter?

Virologist Konstantin Sukhov rightly noted in 1950 in the journal Questions of philosophy that:

“The self-reproduction of viral particles marks their capacity to assimilate and is a quality that fundamentally distinguishes them from bodies of inanimate nature.

At the same time, due to the simplicity of their organization, viruses retain a number of properties which make them extremely close to molecular substances.

This includes their ability to crystallize and their chemical reactivity.

At this stage of the development of living matter, life turns out to be reversible, it can completely stop and resume depending on environmental conditions.”

This point of view is essential, because it poses the viruses “in the middle” of inert matter and living matter.

There are two opposing points of view here, indeed, in the socialist USSR at the time of Stalin, implying themselves a whole conception which, if it is wrong, shakes up the scientific perspective itself.

If we say that viruses come from inert matter or living matter, there is indeed a compulsory validation from a parallel point of view.

The question arises in the following way: either it is said that viruses are not alive, but by-products of life, that they are basic living forms but having degenerated and having lost everything except their DNA. This places them in a subordinate role, consequent to the development of living matter and bringing them back to inert matter.

Or, on the contrary, it is said that viruses are part of the process of life itself, that they are there from the start in this process.

The Soviet biochemist Alexandre Oparin (1894-1980) considered for example that this second conception was wrong, because it would bring to consider that viruses would be a “brick” of life, which would lead to a metaphysical conception of a “creator” at the origin of such a brick.

Oparin was head on against Vernadsky here. Oparin reasoned in terms of “primordial soup” where living matter is inert matter experiencing a leap, while conversely Vernadsky considered that the universe had always known an opposition between living matter and inert.

However, Vernadsky had still not resolved the question of viruses in 1938; he then formulated the problem as follows in Inert matter, living bodies and biosphere:

“We have never observed a spontaneous generation of a living organism from inert bodies: the principle of F. Redi (all life comes from life) is never violated.

The concept of inert (dead) and living natural bodies as distinct natural objects is an ancient concept, taught over the millennia – a concept of common sense. It cannot be doubted and is clearly intelligible to all.

After centuries of scientific work, there have been very few doubtful cases where one wonders whether a specific natural body should be considered as a living or inert body, or whether a given natural phenomenon is a manifestation of living or non-living processes.

The issue of viruses is one of those rare cases, and it is probably the most profound illustration of this.”

Here is the problem. Oparin is right to say that there cannot be an absolute border between living matter and inert matter: this would be an absolutist idealism. However, it follows from his reasoning that viruses would be a regression, but a regressive process is not possible, since it is opposed to the principle of the dialectical movement.

Vernadsky is thus right to see in viruses a theoretical problem, but he sees himself blocked by his positioning opposing unilaterally inert matter and living matter.

In fact, the answer is in the question and Mao Zedong’s teachings on dialectical materialism, his insights into movement and its nature, make it clear.

There are two aspects, which has been well seen. First, it is clear that living matter requires an internal process and that viruses do not have it.

Friedrich Engels tells us about living matter, in the Anti-Dühring, in 1878, that:

“Life is the mode of existence of albuminous bodies, and this mode of existence essentially consists in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these bodies.

The term albuminous body is used here in the sense in which it is employed in modern chemistry, which includes under this name all bodies constituted similarly to ordinary white of egg, otherwise also known as protein substances (…).

Wherever we find life we find it associated with an albuminous body, and wherever we find an albuminous body not in process of dissolution, there also without exception we find phenomena of life.”

There are no vital phenomena relating to viruses. So it seems that viruses do not come from life, from living matter.

However, at the same time, viruses have DNA or RNA, which inert matter does not have. Viruses are capable of having a direct relationship with living matter, while inert matter has an indirect relationship.

This is where the key lies. Vernadsky is wrong to oppose living matter to inert matter, but Oparin is wrong to assimilate them by saying that one comes from the other. Indeed, by doing so, he himself opposes one to the other and returns to Vernadsky’s unilateral idealism.

The latter is moreover more materialist despite his idealism, because he recognizes the dignity of the real: in opposing in the past living matter to inert matter, he is wrong, but in opposing them today he is right because it allows us to understand their combination, their dialectical relationship in a whole which is the Biosphere.

By opposing one to the other, Oparin is materialist because he says that matter comes from matter, but he loses the dialectic because he separates living matter and inert manner unilaterally and therefore misses the leap made by matter.

His point of view is thus regressive compared to that of Vernadsky, because it breaks the unity of matter and arrives at an abstract schematism where inert matter would have remained after all “behind”.

Viruses are, in such a framework, the proof of the leap in matter and at the heart of the contradiction that this leap implies.

Viruses are not either inert matter or living matter, they represent the expression of uneven development in the leap of matter bringing about the existence of living matter.

Viruses are the nexus of the inert and the living, of the spread of the complexification of life (by the transmission of DNA) and of death (by diseases and bacteriophage activities, massive in the ocean).

Viruses are fixed, they do not change in size, and yet they can transform, recombine. They have genetic material but cannot reproduce on their own.

They have a form depending of mineralogy but are turned towards the living.

Viruses are the nexus of the relationship between life and death, and as such a key to understanding the development of living matter as we know it.

The “primordial soup” of which Oparin speaks cannot exist in the past only, such a reading is anti-dialectic.

In reality, there is no negation of the negation, a break rejecting the legacy of the past, and the soup still exists, having experienced qualitative leaps. Viruses are at the heart of the contradiction of this soup where living matter and “inert” matter both attract and repel each other, as opposites.

The emergence of a particular strain of coronavirus, never identified in humans, is no coincidence. It is a product – entirely new, a qualitative leap from the virus – of the collision between cities and countryside caused by the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

These cities and countryside are, moreover, themselves largely shaped by the CMP, which is true of the way of life of humanity in general. And all of this is happening on a planetary scale.

We should not therefore think that the health crisis comes from outside of humanity, from outside the CMP, on the contrary. It was born from within the CMP and from the world it formed in its image.

A world which is by no means finished, firm, stable, permanent … and which is collapsing under the blows of what is new, exponential, in rupture.

Capitalism is a mode of production now planetary

Capitalism is not only an economy, i.e. a particular distribution of property and a particular distribution of wealth. It is, more concretely, the way in which humanity socially finds the material means to exist and to develop.

It is a mode of production.

And having reached an immense development of the productive forces at the beginning of the 21st century, and being by nature universal, the CMP subjugates all planetary activities. Its consequences concern all aspects of life on Earth, all the time.

It was this historic situation that brought about the emergence of a new strain of coronavirus and gave it a global dimension.

It is this same historical situation that has brought global warming and the same goes for deforestation, the massive annihilation of wild animals, the massive use of animals in industry, the uncontrolled development of areas constantly expanding urban areas, etc.

The concrete origin of coronavirus disease 2019

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a direct result of the development of the CMP in China, a monopolist and bureaucratic development, with metropolises established in a short time and engulfing everything around them.

The city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, illustrates this. It had just under 1.5 million inhabitants in 1953, 2.2 million in the early 1970s. Then the restoration of capitalism in China brought about a complete change, transforming it into the megalopolis of central China.

The agglomeration had more than 4 million inhabitants in 1982, more than 8 million in 2000, practically 11 million in 2015. Wuhan integrates eight cities of significant importance in this agglomeration (Huangshi, Erzhou, Huanggang, Xiaogan, Xianning, Xiantao, Tianmen, Qianjiang).

This former French Factory is now even the Chinese model for urban development and is undergoing a massive operation to build road infrastructure (one metro line per year, 400 km high-speed commuter train, etc.).

This urban dimension is, however, only one aspect of the question. A third of the population still lives in the countryside, in an agglomeration where we find Carrefour, Auchan, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, KFC, etc.

Here we have an intermingling of cities, countryside, within the framework of an unbridled capitalist expansion.

The origin of the virus in the strict sense, it’s thus the massive urbanization of the area of Wuhan, with a use, for food, of animals both wild and from breeding, in a kind of general confusion where we no longer know what is cities, what is countryside.

This was the terrain, unnatural, favorable to the mutation of the virus, which passed from one species to another, then finally to the human species.

It is not an encounter with a disease not discovered so far – it is the confrontation of humanity with a disease resulting from a mutation, caused by the action of humanity itself.

The metropolis as the basis of the CMP

There is a Franco-Chinese « sustainable city » of 39 km² in Wuhan, a project set up during the presidency of François Hollande. 2018 was even « the Franco-Chinese year of the environment » and going to China on this occasion, Emmanuel Macron said the following:

« Urbanization is already a challenge for China and will be even more so tomorrow. France wishes to strengthen its partnerships in this area by developing the integrated offer that we have built for the sustainable city. »

This shows the convergence, on a world scale, of all the capitalist forces towards the strengthening of the metropolis. Today, the majority of humanity indeed lives in cities.

We should however more being talking of urban areas, as since the passage of the bourgeoisie in the reaction following its victory over feudalism, it is no longer able to create cities in the historical sense of the term, hence the great cultural interest for real cities in the strict sense (Paris, London, New York, Venice, Bruges, Amsterdam, Prague…), themselves also deeply disfigured by the CMP.

The metropolis with innumerable ramifications, despotic in its anonymity and entirely denatured, becomes the norm. It is the form most suited to the satisfaction of capitalist production and consumption, to the 24 hours a day of capitalism.

For our country, France, we can say that its symbol is the roundabout that dots the roads. We are there in the dynamics of the just-in-time, zero stock massively involving industrial zones in the countryside, in order to have an accelerated circulation and a better rotation of capital.

This leads to the destruction of nature and to the moral, cultural and psychological crushing of the workers. Karl Marx rightly speaks of :

“an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

The historical city, that of the bourgeoisie, involved culture, exchanges, meetings. This is incompatible with the CMP, which is tyrannical and requires everything to be an ever deeper, broader, more perfected, faster trading relationship.

The modern city is now a place to live in isolation, seeking to make the most of its accommodation, if possible by buying a home. Everything is far, farther and farther away, whether it’s leisure, the possibilities of playing sports, shopping, people you can meet.

Everything is subject to a commercial relationship, everything must go through the CMP.

The limited nature of CMP in the face of coronavirus disease 2019

The CMP has only one logic: its own development. It does not proceed by choice, but by necessity, since its very existence depends on an uninterrupted and enlarged development of capital. Its only horizon is himself.

The CMP is the first to “regret” the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19), but at the same time if the same thing had to be done again, it would do it again. The CMP does not allow itself any retreat, any background analysis; it lives in the immediacy of its self-realization. It has no regard for itelf, being a system which is its own end in itself.

We can clearly see its limited character throughout the health crisis due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is new in its scale, and above all which is shocking because of its qualitative dimension. Researchers are overwhelmed, because the natural relationships between living things are upset and this causes health crises expressing a qualitative leap that exceeds them.

There has already been the emergence of the SARS-CoV virus through the masked palm civet and MERS-CoV through the dromedary. These jumps between species of virus, which are not found in a natural situation, become recurrent due to the situation imposed by the CMP.

For this reason, everyone has heard of HIV, Ebola, avian flu, swine flu. The so-called Spanish flu, which killed between 20 and 100 million people in 1918, is also of this type; cominh from an animal farm in the United States, it reflects the beginning of the generalization of the distorted relationship to life.

The CMP produces, by its action (and its inaction), destructive phenomena, born from the contradiction between it and life on Earth.

None of this, however, can be grasped by the CMP, which only identifies reality by means of statistics, « big data », quantitative data evaluation. The principle of qualitative development is foreign to the CMP.

Capitalism being not simply an « economy », but an unilateral mode of production, it responds to its own logic of accumulation and nothing else. It can only notice things, passively, remaining himself.

The CMP thus has an interest in having what it sees as potential natural resources, and therefore in preserving them – but on the other hand, it is obliged to integrate them, to quickly valorize them, to meet the needs of capital-based production and consumption.

The CMP also has every interest in ensuring that global warming does not cause massive unrest. However, at the same time, the CMP has its own priorities and considers that its own development takes precedence over any other consideration.

This is the reason why supporters of the CMP can indifferently say either that global warming does not count, or that capitalism must develop new markets to adapt. These are two pieces of the same coin consisting of the narrow character of the CMP.

The CMP collides with reality

The CMP has upset the whole natural relationship between life and its surroundings. Human labor had already caused upheavals, from agriculture and animal husbandry. With the development of the productive forces, however, the planet has changed entirely with the CMP.

Life concerned by the CMP was initially restricted, since there were only a handful of capitalist countries originally, along with the Netherlands and England, with underdeveloped productive forces.

Then followed a whole series of countries, like Belgium, France, Germany … and mainly the United States, with a material accumulation starting to be significant, while colonization upset the primitive economies all over the world.

There are economies which are not yet perfectly capitalist in the strict sense, but the CMP has fundamentally modified them in order to subordinate them. The situations of modern feudalism that exist in most countries of the world themselves fall within the framework of the CMP.

It is this modern feudalism that achieves deforestation in the Amazon, the massive use of fossil fuels in the Middle East, the cocoa monoculture in West Africa, that of palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia, etc.

The human way of life within the CMP has not changed qualitatively over the decades. It is quantitatively that it has deepened and generalized.

And the quantitative is transformed, at a moment, into qualitative.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) reflects that the CMP is starting to reach its limit: it is starting to undermine the whole reality, at all levels. It is no longer a realizing force, but a force of destabilization, of disturbances, of destruction.

The CMP is reaching its limit

The more the CMP develops itself, the more it confronts its limit, its inability to bring about the enlarged reproduction of life without entering into an antagonistic contradiction with life itself.

As long as capital is in the hands of particular people, it will irrationally seek its enlarged reproduction and produce a forced systematization of the valuation of capital – that is to say, the use of what exists, as much as possible, to bring about capitalist production, capitalist consumption.

The destruction of all that is natural is inevitable for a mode of production whose function is the dispersed, disorderly, systematic accumulation and by ever more powerful cycles, by an ever more unified and violent capital.

The 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) shows that the transformation of reality by the CMP has reached a global dimension and that the threshold of rupture has been reached.

There were already many telltale signs. The CMP seeks to force the course of things, to ensure that everything fits perfectly into it, even if it means being violently distorted, crushed, reshaped.

The CMP already literally dynamites the natural functioning of things. It distorts everything that exists to insert it into the capitalist market. This is true for animals used in industry, which are genetically modified for food and the pet industry.

This is true for vegetation and wild life in general, whose richness, multiplicity, abundance… are considered hostile by the CMP, because they are carriers of quality, irreducible to a simple quantitative reading.

This is true for the human way of life; there is just the need to think of the consumption of meat, the massive use of sugar and stimulating products (caffeine, theine), the generalization of processed products, the proliferation of specific markets (halal, kosher, gluten-free, meat-like products, etc.).

And even if working conditions have improved, they involve a far greater human tension, as well as a profound deformation of the personality. Night work alone has expanded considerably, affecting more than 15% of workers in France, with dire consequences for health.

The CMP concretely tries to modify its own material base, in order to avoid reaching its own historical limit, and by doing so it reaches it.

Because the CMP thus comes into contradiction with its own material base to force its own development – reality becomes antagonistic to the CMP.

World health crisis and communist affirmation

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global crisis that does not come from outside of the CMP, but from it, and at the same time it expresses itself in it. Capitalist accumulation takes place in a concrete way and it is this process of accumulation which itself brings the crisis, produces the crisis, is the crisis itself.

The CMP sees reality here lurching under its feet. It is forced to back off.

And the CMP backing off is humanity backing off – placing itself at the heart of historical contradiction, as source and resolution.

It is indeed humanity that carries the CMP. What the CMP is going through, humanity is going through, just like what humanity is going through, the CMP is going through.

Humanity, prisoner of the CMP, of its mechanisms, of the ideology which ensues from it, is confronted with a brutal awareness: reality rebels against it.

The onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a crisis shaking the very foundations of human participation in the activities of the CMP.

Humanity, which is a part from nature, is forced to drop out of the CMP which becomes an obstacle to life itself.

It’s the end of a whole movement. Humanity has come out of nature to assert itself as a species, but it must return to it by bringing the achievements of its own journey. This corresponds to the principle of uneven development.

What is called History is human history in its separate course from the Biosphere, that is, from all of life on Earth as a unified system.

The end of History, the passage to Communism, is his return to the History of the Biosphere, bringing to it what was acquired during its uneven development.

Communist transformation affects the human being at its very bottom. It brings it back to nature, as a complex social being.

It is both a tearing, but also a reintegration into the general process of the Biosphere.

Communist objectives

Produced by the CMP, the health crisis will have repercussions in it, causing disorganization, slowdowns, inevitable bankruptcies. This reveals all this fragility of the CMP construction, which comes to its term.

The CMP will obviously desperately seek to get out of there, at the expense of the masses, who will be further exploited and alienated. It will also mean stepping up the march to war for the distribution of the world, with at its heart the confrontation between the hegemonic American imperialist superpower and China wishing to divide the world in its favor.

However, this will not be enough, the limit being reached, the tilting threshold being reached.

What matters substantially is that the limit of the CMP is capital itself, always more incapable of valuing itself in reality, all the more if it rebels openly.

The CMP finds itself in the impossible situation to perpetually seek to circumvent the downward trend of the rate of profit. It tries to escape an overproduction of goods by the lack of continuity in the consumption cycle, to avoid the overproduction of capital, in the absence of field to develop itself.

The health crisis precipitates it all the more in the failure of its self-enlargement.

The CMP is effectively disappearing in front of the historic qualitative leap: the transition to world unification of humanity under the aegis of the working class, the adoption of the communist position in relation to nature.

It clearly follows from this revolutionary reading of the 2019 coronavirus disease crisis (COVID-19) that the following tasks are on the agenda, falling under the general communist program for our entire era:

1. Replacement of state apparatus by the democratic power of the people;

2. Dismantling of metropolises;

3. Cessation as far as possible of any destructive relationship with life on Earth;

4. Socialization without compensation of all monopolies;

5. Establishment of a world socialist republic;

6. Conquest of space in order to spread there life, from the Biosphere.

We are entering the decisive era, that of the second wave of the world revolution. We will be on the front line to make our country the example to follow to meet the challenges of our time!

This task is inevitable historically, the communist victory is assured by definition.

Long live Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong!

Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

People’s War for Communism!

Communist Party of France (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

March 2020

Since some years, Ajith is put forward as an intellectual by the Indian Maoists and the Maoist Communist Party of Italy. It is therefore very interesting to see what he has to say about the Covid-19 crisis, as its postmodern conception of the world can only appear in a more frankly manner. What we can see in its article Covid-19, its social roots are as important as the virus itself is indeed the expression of the negation of Dialectical Materialism.

Ajith doesn’t understand nothing about the principle of mode of production. So, he criticizes Capitalism under only one aspect, the one of health. Understanding that it’s not enough to appear as a Communist, he then salutes the article COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital published by Monthly Review.

This review is edited by a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and was co-founded b Paul M. Sweezy by Paul M. Sweezy, a professor of economics at Harvard acquiring a certain fame for Monopoly Capital (1966) written with Paul A. Baran. We are in the intellectual bourgeois environement of the universities.

Ajith belongs exactly to this approach and this is why he hails the article of Monthly review, which would “ scientifically” analyze the imperialist relations giving birth to the Corona pandemic. Ajith shows that he’s a total failure.

The article of Monthly review is typically petty bourgeois. We would need rules and regulations in the world, good rules and regulations, which capitalism is not able to obey. Ajith agrees. Both Monthly Review and Ajith are, because of this approach, unable to understand both the mutation of the virus and the animal question.

Monthly Review says the following, which is completely wrong:

“We need to retain the shock we received when we learned another SARS virus emerged out of its wildlife refugia and in a matter of eight weeks splattered itself across humanity (…).

Ecosystems in which such “wild” viruses were in part controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest are being drastically streamlined by capital-led deforestation and, at the other end of periurban development, by deficits in public health and environmental sanitation (…).

What were once local spillovers are now epidemics trawling their way through global webs of travel and trade. By this parallax effect—by a change in the environmental background alone—old standards such as Ebola, Zika, malaria, and yellow fever, evolving comparatively little, have all made sharp turns into regional threats. They have suddenly moved from spilling over into remote villagers now and again to infecting thousands in capital cities.”

Ajith agrees totally and says:

“The crux of this essay may be summarised thus: Viruses that had been largely contained through the complexities of the tropical forests have entered the mainstream through the deforestation caused by capital, and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.

In short, the changes in livelihood conditions and environmental conditions of the vast majority, caused by globalisation and neo-liberal policies, lie at the root of the present tragedy. Its primary solution is the destruction of the imperialist system and the success of the Communist project.”

Let’s put aside the fact that for Ajith Communism is a “project” and that evil consists in “globalisation and neo-liberal policies”. This is even too petty-bourgeois to be mentioned and it shows a clear problem about the level of political economy in some part of the world.

Let’s see here a new thing, very important: the fact that the Covid-19 virus is not seen as a mutation. There would be a reservoir of pathogen viruses and the deforestation would bring them in contact to us. The industrial farms are the intermediary for the spread.

This is totally wrong. The virus didn’t come from the wildlife. It knew a mutation. It was in the wildlife but then it changed. And it changed through the animal farms. This is why Dialectical Materialism can only have the conclusion that we need a leap in agriculture and this means the dismissal of the animal farms.

Monthly Review has a “logical” conclusion and not a “dialectical”: we must go back in the past. It doesn’t see the leap of the virus, sop it can not see the leap necessary in agriculture. We read in the article of Monthly Review a typical peasant-populist argumentation:

“If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population center (…).

We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time.”

This means only going backward in capitalism: as capitalism, when developed, comes to interference with nature, then we should go in the past, when production didn’t not have this level of development at a planetary scale. This is totally reactionary.

What we see here is typically petty-bourgeois. Neither Monthly Review nor Ajith understand that it is the animal question which has been raised. Living at the expense of living beings is not only morally wrong, but practically a suicide. In the past, using meat has a sense as a local source of protein. But with an agriculture at the planetary scale, it is nonsense.

So,we don’t need to look at the past and try to make again a “local” production, an autonomous consumption, which is a reactionary dream, an anti-capitalist Romanticism. We need to look at the future and accept the leap which consists in the planetary agriculture, abolishing animal farms.

I The particular situation of North America in its relation to England

a) North America posed an historical problem to England, who had at first under-estimated the importance of the modernisations required to maintain its colonial and imperial domination on qualitatively more advanced economies than, for example, India’s. England’s failure led to the thirteen colonies’ independence and the formation of the United States. 61 years later, democratic-patriot rebellions almost costed England a second independence, on its Canadian territory this time.

b) England could relatively maintain its historical domination on Canada with an historical compromise due to the particular configuration of the property right, literally cutting the country in half. Canada didn’t exist in a unified way during the colonization process and the historical conditions of the part colonized by France were backward in comparison to England’s part. Thus, it is an unequal development that will shape Canada.

II The particular situation of French Canada

a) The french part of Canada, colonised under the aegis of the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France (also named Compagnie des Cent-Associés) has known the establishment of a feudal type regime. The lords had immediately put in place their parasite type domination, sitting down their monopolistic-bureaucratic position, with the help of the profits extracted from fur trade which the king of France gave them the monopoly of.

b) Serfdom and the seigniorial system were abolished in 1854, in words only because peasants had to buy back their liberty at a high price, which the majority couldn’t afford to, instead they started paying a regular rent. This situation lasted until 1935 and the Syndicat National du Rachat des Rentes Seigneuriales (National Syndicat for the Buying Back of Seignorial Rents).

III The dual development of English Canada

a) The English part of Canada has seen a large settlement colonization, on the basis of a qualified immigrated peasantry establishing farms. English capitalism, already strongly running, made Upper Canada its trade hub. What will become Ontario formed the starting point for the general development of the capitalist mode of production in Canada, formed by the reunion of Upper and Lower Canada with the other British colonies in North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

b) Capitalism which developed itself in the English part under English imperialism contained an essential contradiction: a contradiction between a free peasantry by definition producing a free capitalism and a bureaucratically formed bourgeoisie with the role of intermediate for English imperialism exporting its capital.

IV The establishment of Canada under the aegis of English Canada itself integrated in the device of English imperialism

a) Upper Canada’s preponderance rests uppon the fact that it forms the English stronghold, as opposed to a french Lower Canada, France having lost this zone after the seven years war (1756-1763). After that, there’s the fact that it forms the fallback base of the British loyalists fleeing the United-States who conquered its independence. Finally, its the material base of the victory over the American invasion of 1812.

b) The Canadian regime developed itself in multiple constitutions. The Act of Union (1840) served as a basis for the development of the Canadian ideology, because it seeks to “unite” “both” Canada in a Province of Canada, both having to equally share an unequal debt and a parliamentarian representation. It’s in 1867 that the Dominion of Canada came into existence as a confederation, with the British North America Act, which will little by little result in today’s Canada, with its actual sharing of provincial-federal powers, new provinces coming into existence overtime. It’s only in 1982, with the repatriation of the constitution, that the judicial sovereignty of Canada is fully recognized in its relation to the England and that its English-Canada national bourgeoisie has sort of “acquired” its political independence to the United Kingdom, however accompanying an ever increasing capital influx from the United-States.

V French Canada’s dialectical relation to English Canada

a) The national English Canadian bourgeoisie didn’t revolt against England’s comprador bourgeoisie. There has been a double development, principal aspect being the domination of the comprador bourgeoisie, in alliance with the national bourgeoisie placed in a subordinated role.

b) Canada isn’t born out of a bourgeois democratic regime. It is born out of the domination of an oligarchy itslef born out of the top-bottom capitalist contributions from English imperialism. However, this aspect is somewhat balanced by a strong bottom-up capitalism produced by the historically free English peasantry. This historical compromise was only possible due to the looting of Québec.

VI French Canada’s own contradictions

a) The feudal class in Lower Canada (Québec) was integrated, not toppled. Therefore there was no immediate democratic outcome in its countryside, only a gradual transfer of land monopoly from feudal lords to the big bureaucratic-capitalist land owners.

b) Lower Canada’s feudal class became totally useless because capitalism was impulse by the Anglo-Saxons and could detach from it. Therefore, the feudal class diluted itself inside Québec’s bourgeois factions, mainly real estate developers, a new monopolistic layer.

VII The origins of French Canada’s own contradictions

a) English Canada’s capitalism didn’t systematize itself because it came by the top for a large part, hence some monopolistic aspects. Has it not happened, if capitalism really developed itself freely in Canada, then Québec, having backward productive forces and being held back by its feudal forms, would have been completely integrated, loosing all its characteristics.

b) The preservation of a feudal French Canadian infrastructure finds itself in the monopolistic character of English-Canadian capitalism. The consequence is the incapacity to get to a republican form and the preservation of the dominant classes by the means of four provincial framing, allowing an alliance between the English elite directly linked to English capitalism as well as the local capitalists and the French elite forming an aristocracy edifying top-bottom capitalism.

VIII Québec as a nation in formation

a) Québec’s existence despite English Canadian capitalism’s development only reflects its weaknesses. It inevitably leads, because of capitalist penetration into the feudal countryside, to the emergence of the national sentiment. Forming Québec national identity, there is its language, an established market, a particular economic life and a psychic situation born out of the French origins and Catholicism.

b) Because of the external capitalist penetration, Québec’s national affirmation only could emerge as deformed by religion and the peasantry, producing an idealistic romanticism. The feudal class was able to make profit out of it by using demagoguery, thus maintaining its position while accompanying capitalist development.

IX Positions in front of Québec as a nation in formation

a) English Canada tried to solve the French Canadian question from above, with the help of measures such as the interdiction for French people to buy land in the west of the country, the massive immigration used to recolonize Québec as an English-speaking territory, the integration of French-speaking « house negroes », an extreme provincialization, etc.

b) Because of the historically stuck up situation of French Canada, an uncommunist view of things could only lead to two things:

– a romantic dreaming of the past, wanting to go back or;

– a liberal dream of a cosmopolitan-stateless escape in the Canadian ideology and even American.

X The modernist crisis of Canada at the beginning second half of the 20th

a) The elevation of the productive forces broke the feudal domination. Quebec’s society was cut in half during the administrative period of Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis (1944-1959), an epoch known as “The Great Darkness”. The liberal-democratic faction rose to power and lead Québec to a “Quiet Revolution” (1960-1966). National sentiment rose, although romantic it nonetheless abandoned its feudal clothing. As a consequence there was massive excitation in the years 1960-1970, primarily worn by the petite-

b)  The total reconsideration of the balance of power between the United States and England since 1918 brought the generalisation of American imperialism in Canada. The pro-American faction of the Canadian oligarchy defeated the one aligned on England, as the nation bourgeoisie was weakened.

XI Québec in front of the historical challenge

a) French Canada is probably the most developed example of a bureaucratic capitalism, allowing exceptionally good standards of living and a powerful petite-bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. Because of the high level of its productive forces, Québec also knows the same typical problems of advanced capitalist countries (24/7 capitalist corruption, strong petite-bourgeoisie in the cultural realm, labour aristocracy linked to trade-unions, etc.). It also suffers from a situation that puts it on a secondary and provincial level in the Canadian system.

b) The historical problem of Québec is that it’s always been lagging behind Canada’s modifications because of its historically backward situation. This situation is now however only there as a background to an advanced capitalism. Québec appears as the weak link not only in the Canadian device but also practically for the United States.

XII Québec’s national-democratic tasks: a historical significance

a) The only basis allowing equality between peoples of North America is socialism, itself coming from the popular-democratic effort. Because it is marginalised from Canada, itself being an annex of American imperialism, Québec represents the detonator for a Canadian and even American Popular Republican Union.

b) In Québec’s specific framework, the historical contradiction arises from the national-democratic affirmation, then generalises itself to the rest of Canada (even possibly the rest of North America and its other specific frameworks). Thus, the first task of democrats and revolutionaries from Québec is to display and pass on the national-democratic legacy, to keep it alive, study and defend its historical, social and cultural actors and to begging a historical-materialist study of the North-American situation, as to give birth to the popular and democratic movement able to strike a blow to North American imperialism. This leads either to a Democratic Union or to Québec’s independence.