Communists have a proud history of fighting on the front lines of the resistance to fascism, from the International Brigades in Spain, to the Antifascist Resistance in occupied Europe, to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to defend the USSR and defeat Nazi Germany. The Soviets liberated the survivors of the death camps and led the assault on Berlin. From that practice, theory has been developed to analyze what fascism is, how it develops, and how it should be fought.
Our enemy is monopoly capitalism, the capitalist and imperialist system that exploits the working class here in the United States and oppresses whole nations of people, here and around the world. The monopoly capitalist class, the imperialists, are well organized, and control both the legal and political institutions of the government as well as the military and police. It will take the masses of the people in their millions to overthrow them. We can’t do it alone. The working class must be organized, and it must organize together broadly with its allies. This “united front” against monopoly capitalism is the revolutionary strategy that will carry us forward toward being able to overthrow the imperialists.
Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution. The purpose of revolutionary theory is to guide revolutionary practice. Nevertheless, since Marxism was young, there have always been opportunists and revisionists who tried to distort its revolutionary essence. The leading edge of this attack on Marxism – from the misleaders of the Second International, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky in the early 1900s, to Khrushchev’s modern revisionism, beginning with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 – has been the advocacy of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.
To obtain a copy of the new FRSO Program book, reach out to your local FRSO organizers. If you are not in an area where FRSO has an organized district, you can order a copy at tinyurl.com/buyfrsoprogram
The central point of the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state is that it is always and everywhere the product of antagonistic class contradictions. It arose from such contradictions, and as long as classes exist, so too will the state. Marx and Engels were the first to understand the state in this way, and it was Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, who did the most to develop the materialist understanding of how and why and the state arises in human history.
In order to have a successful revolution that can overthrow the capitalist ruling class, put the working class into power, and build socialism, we need to be organized in the way that is best suited to that task. The great leader of the Bolshevik revolution, V.I. Lenin, took up this question of Marxist revolutionary organization in 1902 in his book, What is to be Done? In this book, Lenin for the first time gives us the theory of the “Party of a new type.”
In the previous two articles in this series, we’ve discussed imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, which Lenin called “the last stage of capitalism.” We explained how imperialism and monopoly capitalism are synonymous, the laws of motion inherent in capitalism that lead to imperialism, how imperialism means war, and how imperialism has affected the national question. In our last article, we talked about how and why the contradiction between imperialism and the national liberation movements is the principal contradiction on a world scale.
Imperialism means monopoly capitalism, but it brings along with it war and national oppression. Because of the peculiar dynamics of imperialism in the era of proletarian revolution, the national question takes on a particular importance, and, concretely, must be understood and dealt with practically in ways that differ from the pre-imperialist period of competitive capitalism.
Now that we’ve spent some time looking at the basic concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy, let’s move on to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. Toward the end of the 1800s, the internal laws of motion of capitalism caused it to enter a new and final stage in its development – monopoly capitalism. In the essay “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin defines it like this:
Gelsenkirchen, Germany – The Marxist Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a weekend of celebration from August 25-28. Among the 1500 who attended were party members from across Germany, their families, residents of the local community, and international guests representing revolutionary parties and organizations from 31 countries across five continents. Andy Koch, the National Organizer of Freedom Road Socialist Organization attended the celebration.
