Now What?

The Way I See It!

November 24, 2010

Lenin and Catastrophe!

For left progressives who wish only to bring honour to the name revolutionary, now would be a good time to re-read V.I. Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”, Volume 25 of Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers 1964.

Written in the period September 14-20th 1917 following the overthrow of the Czarist regime, during the period of the Kerensky bourgeois government and as Russia hurtled towards the October Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin in his exemplary style, kept pace with events, unfailingly guiding the proletarian revolutionary forces towards the victorious socialist revolution.

The work is full of illuminating insights for today’s revolutionaries who consider tailing events to be unworthy and the worst of all opportunist mistakes during a period of economic crisis and war.

Tailism is a Marxist term for after the fact brilliance of insight into events posing as leadership.

The internet is full of such insight usually from a gaggle of academia playing their favorite game of “gotcha” polemics, competing with each other as to who can shout the loudest and with clever panache calling upon the capitalists to reform themselves. Or Else!

Or Else What?

After the fact brilliance of insight has many geniuses today none of which help the working class to advance its cause that much as class conscious workers shrug their shoulders and say: “Yah! I know that…NOW WHAT?”

NOW WHAT INDEED!

NOW WHAT must be answered even if the answer is not provided as fully today as Lenin, in his day answered that question.

The worst failing of tailism is its impotence. Tailism obviates the hard work of organization reducing the working class to accept denunciation in place of organized struggle. Finance capital shrugs off denunciation as detritus. The only exposure it fears is that which leads to overwhelming public censure and mass action culminating in its loss of freedom.

Unlike Russia in 1917 Canada in 2010 is not yet in a revolutionary situation. Nor is it in a period of rest and calm. The Canadian economy and political system is in the midst of developing crisis phenomena that will not mechanistically self-correct. The public is urged by media hype and silver tongued capitalist shills to passively accept that the economic and political pendulum will swing from neo-con right to liberal- reformist “ left” if only we wait for it to happen.

The class struggle underway in Canada is no different in essence from France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Iceland or any number of G20 states where mass labour actions are underway. The process everywhere is dialectical not mechanistic and it will not self-correct in the interests of the working people without mass public and organized intervention led by organized labour.

The struggles of today are not about going back to where we were, which was never so hot in any case, but to go forward to something new not as yet fully clear that improves the conditions of life for working people.

WHERE TO START?

If one reads Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe” and lays down the work and leaves it with only one thought, that thought should be Lenin’s statement that monopoly capitalism is imperialism and that state monopoly capitalism is imperialism in the 20th Century.

The Canadian organized labour movement is late in completely accepting that truth. It is late because its social reformist leadership doesn’t believe that Lenin’s definition is true. The socialist reformist leadership clings to the illusion that capitalism in the 21st Century is still capable of progressive development.

Social reformism is wrong. Being wrong in the past on this matter could mask labour’s exploited status and for a privileged section relative full employment and rising wages was possible because the capitalist system was expanding and labour got the crumbs. That is not the situation today. Today the capitalist economy cannot expand universally but only in selected areas where finance capital seeks maximum profit, summed up as the energy sector, speculative rentier capital and militarism and war.

So investment decisions can continue in preferred sectors of the economy it chooses, and without accountability to the nation for the consequences, finance capital rejects the very idea of restrictions on any of its freedoms. While insisting on unrestricted rights to invest where it pleases, at the same time finance capital insists the state imposes restrictions on labour to give up wage gains, accept worsened working conditions, give up pension benefits, agree to privatization of universal social programs, and surrender hard won democratic rights to organize, bargain and defend the industries and communities they have built.

To paraphrase Lenin, when he called upon the workers to continue the revolutionary process and advance to socialism, he warned that to stop at the period of the bourgeois democratic revolution meant – to accept controls and labour for the working class, freedom and idleness for the rich. Lenin counseled that the rich do not allow themselves to be controlled and consider freedom to be their unlimited right to impose controls on others.

It is not only OK to fight to reverse the equation and for workers to put controls on finance capital. It has become the burning question of our time.

When the Lenin’s definition that state monopoly capitalism is imperialism and the form of capitalism in the 21st Century is grasped fully, all possibilities will be open to the people to put monopoly under control in the only way that really counts – to restrict finance capital freedom of action and subordinate it to the interests of the nation and the vast majority who create the wealth of this place we call Canada.

What could be more democratic than that?

To Be Continued…

Next…
The Banks – Not a Public Industry – The Private Back Room of State Monopoly Capital.

Left Turn Canada!