Above: a rally by the participants in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution.
One of the most famous critiques by Michael Parenti is from Blackshirts and Reds, where he pointed out how the rejection of existing socialist projects objectively harms the working-class cause:
The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The KKE, Greece’s communist party, absolutely embodies this problem. It’s called socialist China an imperialist power, basing this narrative off of the “imperialist pyramid” theory where every country supposedly has imperialist tendencies. Even more consequently, it’s participated in the smear campaign against Maduro by Venezuela’s Trotskyists, promoting their lies about how Maduro has sold out the country’s workers. This betrayal has been so impactful because the KKE, through its efforts to fund numerous global communist formations, exercises influence over many of the world’s class-conscious workers.
It’s because of the platform the KKE and its beneficiaries provided to the Trotskyist wreckers that their deceptions could be so effective; the anti-Maduro smears created a splinter within the global workers movement over the question of Venezuela, and crippled the Venezuelan communist party’s popularity. (Though the authentic militants within it have retaken control, and are building it back up.) So we know that by advancing the agenda of the “pure socialists,” the KKE has done very serious, material harm to the proletarian cause.
Yet at the same time that the KKE has launched these attacks against the socialist and anti-imperialist movements, it’s articulated the exact arguments which discredit the “pure socialist” view of class struggle. In its resource Theoretical Issues regarding the Programme of the Communist Party of Greece, the KKE said that
Any attempt to determine the character of revolution with criteria other than the ones that arise from the character of the era and the maturity of the material preconditions is not an objective one. In the Essay on the History of the KKE, volume 2, 1949-1968, there is the following reference:
“The character of the revolution, as the basic element of the strategy of a communist party that acts under the conditions of capitalist power, cannot be determined by the existing correlation of forces, but by the maturation of the material preconditions for socialism. The latter determines its necessity and timeliness. The minimum necessary degree of the maturation of the material preconditions exists even if the working class is a minority of the Working Age Population, from the moment that it becomes aware of its historic mission through the establishment of its Party. The social alliance of the working class with the popular strata and every form of its political expression ought to serve the strategic goal of working class power that expresses the interests of the majority of the people”[10]
It is important to stress that Lenin wrote “Under a false flag” in order to highlight the issue that if the proletariat in a specific historic period assumes duties that do not correspond to this specific historical era and mechanically transfers the experience from previous periods, then it cannot fulfil its contemporary duties, and will always be dragged behind the bourgeois class, placing itself under a false-for its own class interests- flag.
If the KKE understands this reality about how workers movements must not remain stagnant, and adapt to the conditions as they change, then why do the KKE and its connected groups attack the Bolivarian revolution? Why have they sided with the Trotskyist wrecker faction in Venezuela’s communist party, who base their entire argument off of applying an unfair standard to the revolutionary government? We know that these left-wing anti-Maduro actors have employed lies in order to make their case; a major tactic of theirs has been to omit the impacts that Washington’s sanctions are having, and foist the blame for the country’s crises on to Maduro. To spin this narrative, the KKE’s camp has needed to pretend as if Venezuela’s workers have different duties than the ones they do during the present era; that they aren’t facing the conditions which exist today.
It’s a weaponization of dogma for opportunistic purposes, where these ultra-left wreckers have cloaked the infantile nature of their analysis behind orthodox Marxist rhetoric. One aspect of the KKE’s argument against Bolivarianism is that Venezuela’s revolutionary leadership isn’t a Marxist-Leninist one; which actually reveals how the KKE’s camp isn’t truly Marxist-Leninist, because MLs do not care about people’s ideology. The thing we foremost care about is whether an individual or leader has been proving themselves as a positive contributor towards the class struggle, which is certainly true for Maduro; he is responsible for continuing to lead the people into mobilizing for armed defense against the hegemon, and no Trotskyist rhetoric can dispute this.
Moreover, to attack Maduro is to attack the revolutionary masses of Venezuela; who, as the Venezuelan communist party’s president Henry Parra has said, are the ones behind the sacrifices that got Venezuela this far:
The difference that I may have with Comrade Maduro or with his government can never be put above the revolution, of us surrendering ourselves to imperialism, to the very same discourse of imperialism. We cannot hand this process to the right wing. We are forbidden to turn back, because what is at stake here is not only Venezuela, but Venezuela, Latin America and the world. Venezuela, like Cuba, is the hope of the insurgent people. This is an insurgent people, who have rebelled against the biggest and most powerful empire that humanity has ever known, US imperialism. A communist party cannot betray the actions of a people who have sacrificed themselves for such a cause. If anyone has sacrificed themselves in defending this revolution, it is not the leaders of the revolution, it is the people. They are the ones who have sacrificed and resisted.
On this basis alone, the KKE’s camp is in the wrong. To propagate the lies of the wrecker faction, and thereby create new fissures within the working-class movement for the sake of purity politics, is inherently a treacherous act. But the problem goes deeper than the anti-Maduro camp being purists; it’s not that they focus too much on secondary problems, it’s that they’ve fabricated a problem by depicting Maduro as “neoliberal.” In 2023, when the Trotskyist wreckers were starting to get majorly exposed, Thierry Deronne helped refute their core deceptions. Deronne pointed out how much Washington had continued waging war against the alleged neoliberal sellout government, which in reality was resisting neoliberalism harder as the aggressions mounted:
According to Venezuelan analyst William Serafino (2), if Maduro were a neoliberal, not only the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), but also the many state-owned enterprises such as the Caracas subway, electricity, telecommunications and water supply companies, to name a few, would already be in private hands. The current policies against corruption in the strategic spheres of the economy, the slow recovery of the productive apparatus–which is leading to better financing of the state through taxes on large companies, the reconstruction of public services deteriorated under the blockade, the transfer of non-US technology to circumvent the blockade, policies reinforced by the rebound in the price of oil and multipolar alliances, show the absurdity of the claim…If Nicolas Maduro had become a neoliberal, how can it be understood that the imperial harassment continues against him? The main characteristic of the Maduro government’s policy in the face of such economic warfare is that it has, on the contrary, resisted and rejected the formulas of privatization and abandonment of the population.
When the wreckers call the Bolivarian revolution neoliberal, they’re seeking to discredit the very idea of working-class politics in the modern era—and this applies not just to Venezuela, but to everywhere else where the workers are carrying out organic and effective struggles. The mentality of these dogmatic opportunists is to look at a country’s proletariat doing what it absolutely must do in order to survive imperialism’s attacks, and see this as betrayal because the proletariat isn’t acting as it would under past conditions (or the past conditions that the dogmatists imagine). Supporting the Soviet Union is an essential part of the KKE’s tradition, so it used to not play the role that it does today; yet because of the antagonistic turn that the party has taken, it can now only claim to uphold the USSR while distorting what existing socialism means.
No revolutionary project would be able to succeed while following the criteria that the KKE has set, where even when a revolution resists capital harder, this is seen as capitulation. It’s a nonsensical position to take, and it would seem like a very strange thing for a historic ML party to do. But the KKE’s deterioration exposes a reality about how parties can fall into opportunism: when their ranks haven’t been given a consistently rigorous education, and aren’t encouraged to keep constantly investigating the conditions, they will be susceptible to opportunistic nonsense. All who seek to advance the workers movement must internalize this lesson.
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