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BROWDER AND COMPANY AVOW THEIR RENEGACY
In carrying out the Kremlin’s order to dissolve the American Communist Party and turn it openly into an appendage of the two capitalist parties, Browder and Co. found themselves compelled to depart from their customary device of duping their followers by some brazenly distorted quotation from Marx or Lenin. For the first time the American Stalinists have publicly acknowledged that they are unable to extract from the Marxist classics so much as a single phrase that could be palmed off as a justification for their current policy.
In his speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City, announcing the liquidation of the C.P.U.S.A., Browder admitted that he had “no formulas from the classics which give us an answer,” and then added: “We are departing from orthodoxy … ” (Daily Worker, January13.)
On January16, the editor of the Daily Worker likewise confessed that Browder’s “proposals” were “accompanied by well-defined changes in traditional approach on a number of basic questions.”
Here we have the undisguised and unabashed voice of renegacy. The Stalinists are repeating today the traditional words of their real historical predecessors, the opportunists of the Second International. It was Bernstein and his colleagues, including the Russian Mensheviks, who originally proclaimed that Marxism had been “outdated;” that the time had come to make a few “departures from orthodoxy;” that it was necessary to introduce changes “in a number of basic questions” and so on and so forth.
Lenin, on the other hand, fought mercilessly every attempt to revise Marxism. The proudest boast of Bolshevism was that it remained orthodox, that is, true to the teachings of the founders of scientific socialism. The distinguishing trait of Lenin and the genuine Bolsheviks was their unfaltering adherence to principles.
It is not for nothing that Browder hastens to admonish his faithful flock not to seek guidance in any of “our textbooks.” He means, above all, Lenin. For literally everything that Lenin wrote constitutes a scathing indictment of these latter-day revisionists and traitors. One of the chief assignments of the Stalinists today is to embellish bourgeois “democracy.” During the last war one had to look in the Social Democratic press for the most optimistic estimates of the future of capitalism; nowadays one finds the rosiest perspectives for this utterly decayed system in the speeches and writings of the Stalinists.
LENIN’S TEACHINGS ON BOURGEOISDEMOCRACY
During the last imperialist slaughter Lenin warned incessantly that the decay of the capitalist system could lead only to the ascendancy of blackest reaction unless the workers intervened with their socialist solution. Thus, in 1916 he wrote:
“The difference between the republican-democratic and the monarchist-reactionary imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because both are rotting alive.” (Collected Works , English Edition, vol. XIX, p.338.)
Lenin taught the workers:
“Not a single fundamental democratic demand can be achieved to any considerable extent, or any degree of permanency, in the advanced imperialist states, except by revolutionary battles under the banner of socialism.” (Idem, p.67.)
In this same period he wrote:
“Capitalism in general, imperialism in particular, transforms democracy into an illusion — and at the same time capitalism generates democratic tendencies among the masses, creates democratic institutions, accentuates the antagonism between imperialism, which repudiates democracy, and the masses which strive toward democracy. Capitalism and imperialism cannot be overthrown through any reforms — not even the most ‘ideal’ democratic reforms — but through an economic overthrow.” (The Hoover Library: The Bolsheviks and the World War, p.226.)
Any number of similar quotations can be adduced. These basic ideas of Lenin on the class nature and bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy were later incorporated in the theses and resolutions of the first four World Congresses of the Communist International. The entire course of events has borne out their correctness.
Twenty years had to pass since Lenin’s death before even the Stalinists dared to proclaim that the socialist solution for which Lenin fought all his life and which he brought to realization in Czarist Russia in October 1917 is nothing but “a puerile dream-world” (Browder, Sunday Worker, January16); “a form of escapism” (Allen, Daily Worker, January 17), etc. etc.
With a contempt for the masses that typifies all the hirelings of the Kremlin, Browder tries to cover up his abject renunciation of socialism by the “realistic” plea that the Communist Party is much too small, and besides the American people are “so ill-prepared subjectively for any deep-going changes in the direction of socialism.” (Sunday Worker, January 16.)
In this field too Browder follows a beaten track. Every misleader of the working class has employed this argument. Every supporter of capitalism is convinced, like Browder, that a real revolution is beyond the realms of possibility.
EARL BROWDER AND PROFESSOR STRUVE
Suffice it to cite one example from Russian history, namely the case of Professor Peter Struve. Like Browder, this individual began his political career by passing himself off as a Marxist. He was even the author of the first Manifesto issued by the illegal socialist party in Czarist Russia to which Lenin belonged. Struve quickly found it expedient to disavow Marxist orthodoxy; in fact, he disavowed Marxism altogether. On the very eve of the 1905 revolution this Russian Professor declared: “There is not yet a revolutionary people in Russia.” Struve could have cited — and did cite — far weightier arguments in support of his “realistic” estimate than are at Browder’s disposal when he advances as his “considered judgment” that — alas! — there is not yet a revolutionary people in the United States. For Russia of Struve’s day was an illiterate peasant country without any traditions of revolutionary struggle; the Russian proletariat formed a tiny minority of the population; the Russian party was pathetically small.
“Prior to January 22, 1905,” wrote Lenin, “the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small handful of people — and the reformists of those days (like the reformists of today) derisively called us a ‘sect’ …. This circumstance gave the narrow-minded and overbearing reformists formal justification for asserting that there was not yet a revolutionary people in Russia.” (Collected Works, vol. XIX, p.389.)
In 1944 Browder repeats almost verbatim Struve’s “formal justification” of 1905. It has hardly improved with age, but Browder labels it “Marxism.”
THE ARGUMENT FROM TEHERAN
In order to peddle this ancient garbage of reformism, the Stalinists produce their trump argument: The Teheran conference alters everything and, therefore, we too must alter with it. In particular, Teheran, according to Browder, has finally established that “capitalism and socialism have begun to find the way to peaceful co-existence and collaboration in the same world.” (Sunday Worker, January16.)
There is nothing especially original about this thesis either. Stalin propounded it back in 1924 when he advanced his theory of “socialism in one country.” At the basis of this “theory” is the contention that the socialist and capitalist systems could co-exist peacefully. However, the real originator of this theory is not Stalin at all but a right wing German socialist by the name of Vollmar who in 1878 wrote an article to prove that:
“…. The final victory of socialism is not only historically more likely primarily in a single state, but that nothing stands in the road of the existence and prosperity of the isolated Socialist state.” (The Isolated Socialist State, by von G. Vollmar, Jahrbuch fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozial Politic, Zurich, 1879. Page 55.)
Since 1924 the Kremlin and all its lackeys have reiterated on numerous occasions that socialism had “irrevocably triumphed” in the Soviet Union and that it could co-exist peacefully alongside capitalism.
After the signing of the Stalin-Laval pact (May 1935), Stalin proclaimed in an interview with Roy Howard that not only could the USSR abide in peace with capitalism, but that the capitalists themselves — the peace loving variety, of course — could band together to do away with war forever.
Stalin’s entry into the League of Nations was trumpeted at the time as inaugurating a new era of peace on earth. The Stalinists betrayed the Spanish revolution and committed innumerable crimes for the sake of preserving this “peaceful collaboration” which ended up in — Munich (September 1938).
Stalin then preceded to cohabit with Hitler (Stalin-Hitler pact, August 1939). At the end of June 1941 Stalin’s new found ally invaded the Soviet Union.
Such is the record of the peaceful co-existence between capitalism and the first workers’ state in its degenerate form under Stalin.
BROWDER BLURTS OUT TRUTH ABOUT TEHERAN
Whether by accident or design, Browder did tell some truth about Teheran. In point of fact he substantiated that in order to arrive at an agreement with Churchill and Roosevelt Stalin pledged himself to try to drown the German revolution in blood. Said Browder:
“British and American ruling circles had to be convinced that their joint war together with the Soviet Union against Hitlerism would not result in the Soviet socialist system being extended to Western Europe under the stimulus of the victorious Red Armies.” (8unday Worker, January16.)
There can be no doubt as to the meaning of these words. Western Europe includes, above all, Germany. If Browder is correct that the British and American capitalists are now finally “convinced,” then it can only be because Stalin supplied them with sufficiently “convincing” guarantees along with his seal and signature.
Moreover, it must be conceded that there is a grain of truth in Browder’s insistence that the explanation for the dissolution of the American Communist Party is actually to be found in Teheran. For many years Stalin has used the world labor movement as so much small change in his diplomatic deals with both the “democratic” and fascist capitalists. The belated burial of the Communist International in May 1943 and now the liquidation of the C.P.U.S.A. are apparently part of the price the Kremlin has agreed to pay for its deal with Washington and London. And the Stalinist movement has so degenerated its followers that they unquestioningly accept anything and everything the moment the order is issued in Moscow.
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