By V. I. Ulyanov | Progreso Weekly Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Lenin: The greatest tactician the working class has ever had.
But first, I want to acknowledge that I was incorrect about my prognostication as to when a social revolution was to begin in North America. Certainly a revolution of peasants started south of the U.S. border in 1910, but not within the borders of the home of American capitalists. I was off by 94 years.
In 1917, I wrote that the United States had sunk “into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything.” Those words were fairly accurate at the time, but they are even more so today. Yet there was no revolutionary situation THEN. [1]
I never imagined in my wildest dreams that you will have to deal in the 21st century with the equivalent of the “know nothings” of the 19th century. Those who died before and after me, including Mr. Bismarck and Mr. Keynes, have known how deficit financing made it possible for capitalism to survive and flourish when confronted with so many financial cycles [as Marx and our own Russian economists, Kondriateff and Minsky, predicted].
But here you are now. In a political landscape that every anticapitalist and antiimperialist could not have dreamed. Revolution is not too far off, it seems, and yet your capitalist and political leaders do not speak clearly about the crisis and the rural hinterland, the small towns, and even a portion of the unorganized working class thinks that what you need is a balanced budget amendment. Imagine, the very social base that produced a
Mussolini and a Hitler, it is now attempting to fix your cyclical capitalist economy by doing away with the only thing that keeps you afloat – well, besides the financial transfers from China and Japan. Granted, in my wildest dreams I never envisioned the financial oligarchy that presently dominates the entire world although I was one of the first to show its origins.
I am envious of those who are radical and alive in North America today! I have some words of advice:
– Do not oppose the Tea Party and the opportunist rightwing capitalist financiers dominating the Republican Party!
– Allow the contemporary version of the Know Nothing Party [the tea partiers] exacerbate the socioeconomic conditions of the American people.
Uncle Joe Stalin who has been conversing with me for many years now, informs me that he recalls when the Koch brothers’ dad became a millionaire building heavy industry in mother Russia. Stalin thinks that the Koch kids are closet socialists that want to foster havoc to capitalism. [2]
And Mao, who also joins our discussions, thinks that the USA today is a wonderful example of what his essay “On Contradiction” really meant. He predicts that a Balanced Budget Amendment will lead to systemic instability hastening the preconditions for revolution because:
First, American military forces no longer will be able to project its awesome military might abroad. New wars will be impossible to execute if the monies had not been allocated beforehand.
Second, public employment will diminish so there will be an ever-growing unemployed population, with the added element that in our own days consumption expectations were low. The clever capitalist escaped the falling rate of profit through a financialization of the world economy but everything comes to an end – the credit system has been maxed out and cannot continue to operate. As the Industrial Workers of the World proclaimed, “This worn-out and corrupt system offers no promise of improvement and adaptation. There is no silver lining to the clouds of darkness and despair settling upon the world of labor.” [3]
BUT one note of advice: Beware that the unfolding class war does not deteriorate into racial, ethnic and geography bounded conflicts. And be careful that the fascists do not end imposing, what my friend Jack London called, “the Iron Heel.” He wrote, “Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.” [4]
[1] http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/StateRev.html
[2] http://www.alternet.org/story/146504/
[3]Manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905 and 1908.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/iwwpreamblemanifesto.html
[4] Jack London, The Iron Heel,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1164/1164-h/1164-h.htm
V.I. Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founded the U.S.S.R. and was leader of the 1917 October Revolution.
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