Contribution to ICOR’s internet Seminar discussion for the 100 years of the October Revolution. By N. Papavasileiou, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (m-l).
The historical new in class struggle for over 150 years now is the entry of a new class, the working class. With this in mind, Karl Marx saw the necessity and the propability for humanity to pass from its prehistory – the exploratory class societies – to its history, socialism and communism. So Marx formed his theory starting at the Manifesto and going through to Das Kapital. The Russian Revolution and the victorious October had at their base the existence and and the struggle of the working class. October is epic because it confirmed Marx, confirmed the capability of the world damned to win in their struggle for a society without exploitation and oppression. October saw also the further development of Marxism with Lenin’s works and the victorious revolution. It confirmred the relation action – theory – action. Lenin and the Bolshevics gave the answers needed for the October to be victorious. Since 1902 (“What is to be done”), through the years of imperialist war and the buncruptcy of the Second International (“Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”), and up to the days before the revolution (“State and Revolution”).
A hundred years later, with given the capitalist restoration and the defeat of the communist movement, in conditions of crisis and unrelenting capitalist – imperialist barbarity, with the toiling and popular masses being bombarded by the systemic domination, which tends to solidify disappointment and inertia, we think that we must reconfirm that the working class is the foundation and the backbone of the new assault to the sky. The most basic part of the theory that is being ignored or distorted even by forces that refer to revolution and socialism-communism is that “without a working class organized as a class for itself there is no revolutionary struggle or revolutionary perspective”. Because this is the only class, the only social force, that with its position in production can overthrow the bourgeoisie and build in a revolutionary way socialism-communism. In other words it is the only class that can lead the struggle fot the liberation of the whole society from capitalist slavery. This is valid not only before and during the revolution but also after the seize of political – social power by creating those revolutionary transformations that are necessary in the long road to communism.
This position is not common for all today even in its first half, that is the necessity of the organization of the working class in capitalism. The deviation and the distortion is not done in a straight way but in many oblique ways – ways that are liquidating to the cause. There is a deluge of republishings of the Gotha program, full of frauds and illusions that have at their central core the so-called possibility of a petit-bourgeois leadership of the movement. There are rivers of proposals and programs which will overthrow capitalism building cooperatives and social economies inside capitalism, “demanding” a more “just distribution” of the produced wealth leaving aside the capitalist productive relations and the capitalist power. In reality all these express the grudge created by the shrinkage and sinking of petit-bourgeois strata. All these circulate among forces that contain the classic “left” socialdemocracy and reach anarchist ideas, even forces that refer to the Left and communism! Labor programs circulate in the name of the working class!
This is here the crucial point of the matter. The forces that in this way and with this content speak in the name of the working class have taken care to distort who is this working class! The equation “working class equals the whole of the wage earners” has prevailed. But this denies the essence of the marxist thesis that the working class is the class that cannot appropriate the work of any other class. It also denies the thesis that the worker creates not only use values but surplus value. With this false definition the produced political result is that the middle and petit bourgeois strata put thenselves at the leadership of the working class and through them the capital and the bourgeoisie. At the same time the targets emerging through this false definition lead to just a more just and milder capitalism.
The correct recognition of the working class is not just byzantinology and scholasticism but a crucial political issue. Besides the distortions concerning which is the working class (even if it exists) are not products of a wrong reading and understanding of marxism. These are expressions of a political adaptation to the current negative balance of power, products of the retreat and defeat of the communist movement. The political domination of these distortions and thoughts inside the movement becomes, objectively and independent from intentions, a helper of the capitalist and systemic assault against the working class. This assault is of a strategic character and does not only aims to the intensification of exploitation and the extraction of more surplus value. It also aims – because capital and capitalism in general know their adversary – at the disintegration of the working class, the strike at the conditions that the proletariat organizes and fights at first for its own interests.Here lies the fundamental task for all forces that aim to a new assault at the sky. They must all fight together and with all their might for the reorganization of the working class where it can only be done: Inside the class struggle, against the capitalist assault, for the right to steady and stable work. This is the basic and real test field of the praxis that is today demanded. This reorganization is indisputable in order to open the road of revolutionary struggle and everything it will contain: Alliances of the working class with the popular masses, tactical choices, and, of course, the foundation of the political vanguard of the working class, the revolutionary communist party. All these have not an ordered sequense, the class struggle is unpredictable, History is not copied! But they have a dialectic relation and the demands on the field of struggle and the creation of the social subject cannot be skipped and be answered without this!
