Beloved comrade Rosa, you ask me what country I'm in,
and what's happening. Listen, I'm not sure.
Here are some pictures and sounds. The color is bad.
It's West German film processed in a Bulgarian lab.
What's in this country, you ask me.
TV girls wearing cashmere sweaters.
Three. Places where...
Three.
Places where people work, in this country they are...
Three.
Places where people work,
in this country they are terribly sad.
Probably they haven't yet had a revolution.
Very often tunes of American music, rearranged.
They manufacture machine tools, arms, uranium,
a lot of steel, trucks,
locomotives, streetcars.
This must be a country already thrust into the world of modern economy,
a Western country.
Yes, we are in the West:
in the fields, advertising for large American companies.
Seven.
That's a picture of a young working girl in a bikini,
but we didn't have the right to show it
because it was sold to Columbia Broadcasting Corporation.
The young workers like the Beatles a lot,
and the government lets them wear their hair long. It must be Yugoslavia.
No, that's Czechoslovakia.
Full of historic Western traditions.
Sundays, many workers would rather wash their cars
than fuck their wives.
Public transport for less fortunate workers.
For sleeping and making love, the government has built egalitarian housing.
In the factories, the formen have a hard time making the workers work.
Thirteen.
The hotels sell photos...
Thirteen.
The hotels sell reproductions of photos from Playboy.
There's still quite a few small shop- keepers, especially in the large cities.
Neon advertising for Russian trains.
There are journalists who do reports on the workers for television.
There are tanks, yes tanks, to watch over the peasants.
Unemployed young people
have the right to use children's playgrounds.
Nineteen. Even so, it must be a socialist country.
The cherry trees which are beside the road are really next to it,
not behind fences,
which means that this product is available to everyone.
The workers look angrily
at the way in which the production of cars has been divided in two,
large cars for leaders,
small cars for workers,
if they can afford them.
We're in a socialist country. Whoever says socialism, says red:
the red of the blood spilled by the workers for their emancipation.
That's a large factory in Prague,
with pictures of people's leaders.
There was fighting between the different kinds of red:
the red which comes from the left and the red which goes toward the right.
During the night,
pictures of the workers' leaders have been removed.
Twenty-five.
Production is fouled up.
We're in a very sick country.
Another picture we haven't the right to see
because Czech news has sold it
to a West German TV station.
Twenty-seven. The Americans are not the only ones,
there are also Japanese and Italian firms advertising nonstop.
Not only workers,
but a working class, a Czech and Slovak working class.
It'd be a mistake to think we're talking about a worker like other workers,
about just any worker.
This is a view of Prague taken from the window of a hotel
for tourists from Western European countries.
And this is a magazine mailed from Prague by the Cubans
for the militants of the Western European countries, where it is banned.
This is a nationalized food store.
Thirty-three. This is the same lying girl.
This is a working-class suburb.
This is a high-class whore hustling customers.
This proves that there are executives, because these are executive secretaries.
These are students.
In 1968, they danced throughout the spring.
Those are wire fences that the government puts around
everything which is the private property of the people.
That doesn't belong to anyone.
It's collectivized wheat.
These are the so-called children of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The newspaper of the unions
claims these locomotives belong to the railway workers and passengers.
The Czech and Slovak working class tries in vain to speak.
They'll never understand the party which gives their orders in Russian.
Forty-three. Here are the ghosts
of the Second International.
They swoop down like vampires on the Czechoslovak working class.
"As soon as a crow sees a rose, it thinks it's a nightingale,"
a Georgian proverb.
Forty-five.
These puppets and traitors have a name.
Yesterday, Bernstein and Kautsky. Today, Brezhnev and Kosygin.
They fire on the Czech and Slovak people
using James Bond's revolver, painted red in order to
hide their crimes from honest communists.
The same way the Khrushchev report, which purposely added
to the confusion surrounding Stalin,
has today become the staunchest ally of bourgeois imperialism
in its fierce fight against revolutionary movements everywhere.
Good. What we have just seen, Rosa,
is the concrete situation in Czechoslovakia,
but that's all,
just travelogues, souvenirs,
like Delacroix in Algeria, or Chris Marker on strike in Rhodiaceta.
The New York Times and Le Monde call it news.
And I agree with you, Rosa,
it isn't enough. Now we must make the effort
to rise above this perceptive knowledge.
We need to struggle to transform it into rational knowledge.
To make that effort, to struggle,
what does this mean then, concretely, for us?
This means: analyze concretely this concrete situation.
We are in a country of sick people. We see that right away.
Good. But what is their sickness?
This is what we have to find out.
This sickness is connected with treason,
with the revision of Marxism by pseudo-communists.
We can sense that immediately.
Good. But the treason didn't just happen like that, just by chance.
In order to struggle against these revisionist traitors,
we must first unmask them, first examine their history, first know.
And for you and me, Rosa,
to move from sensing to knowing, what does that mean?
That means beginning to put together the film.
Beginning to take apart the contradictions.
That's what we have to do now, Rosa.
We've got to do some editing.
We've got to organize the images and sounds differently,
to only accept them for what they really are.
What are they, Vladimir?
External manifestations of the communist reality,
of the communist irreality, in Czechoslovakia today.
External causes.
Yes, external causes.
Now let's organize the external causes along anti-revisionist lines.
Yes.
Editing these images and sounds along anti-revisionist lines
and establishing new contradictory relationships between them,
bringing to light internal causes
and therefore beginning to know the very substance of this thing called
the present situation in the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia.
Second part of the film.
Concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
Revisionism in practice. Revisionism in practice.
We rented this car at the airport in Prague.
We rented it from whom?
Just as in Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest,
we rented it from an American company,
Hertz or Avis,
two branches of American banking or chemical trusts.
This car is a Skoda.
It was manufactured by the Skoda factory, nationalized in 1945
by the Czechoslovak popular democratic forces
after their victory over fascism
and with the support of red troops under comrade Stalin's leadership.
Therefore this Skoda belongs today to the Skoda workers,
and as a result to the Czech people
who took possession of the means of producing it.
But Hertz and Avis, both firms belonging to the imperialist camp,
don't rent cars out of goodwill.
They do it to make a profit.
Therefore Hertz and Avis have appropriated, deviously,
and with the complicity of the Czechoslovak leaders,
the overtime exacted by these same bosses
of the Skoda workers. The appropriation of surplus value
theoretically no longer existent, reappears. And practically,
the more the socialist workers of Skoda work, the more the imperialist
shareholders of Hertz and Avis fill their pockets.
Revisionism has played its part. The theses of Ota Sik and Liberman
have become those of Galbraith and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber:
the free market needs slaves
and the slaves of revisionist countries are better-trained than others.
In August 1968, Russian tanks
wanted to smash the resistance of the Czech and Slovak people.
But they did an about-face in front of the kings of oil and Coca-Cola.
The new tsars surrendered to an old star:
advertising, number one star of the western economy.
Westernism in practice. The world belongs to the two of us!
OK, comrade? OK, boss!
Westernism in practice.
An example. A worker in the CKD factories
makes part of the anti-aircraft gun
which will serve his comrades, the artillerymen of North Vietnam,
to fight effectively against the planes of the Yankee invaders.
Two comments to make:
small models of these same planes are sold
in special stores where you have to pay for them in foreign currency.
Furthermore,
this worker is asked to produce more
without being taught to connect this production with the political struggle.
He is required to make a gun without being told where, why, and how it will be used.
In short,
the party asks him to grasp production with one hand
but not revolution with the other. Westernism in practice.
Nothing surprising about that. You remember, Rosa? Prague in 1948.
We had thrown Masaryk out of the window.
And Gottwald, what did comrade Gottwald say upon taking power?
"Today, the entire working class is united.
We are advancing together, with a mass of peasants,
the urban middle classes, the working class intelligentsia,
and a part of the Czech and Slovak bourgeoisie.
We are advancing now towards a national and democratic revolution,
and not towards a socialist revolution."
"Not towards a socialist revolution."
Remember, Rosa. We said to comrade Slansky:
"Let's throw off our illusions and prepare ourselves for the struggle."
And what did comrade Slansky reply?
"What will the rest of the world say if we let the workers into the street?"
Result: look, Rosa, Mr. Muscle,
union delegate installed by the Kennedy-Khrushchev class alliance.
And what is the job of this mother-fucking fighter?
To pretend to set up workers' councils in order to better stifle the people's voices
to make a travesty of the struggle for production, turn it into an opera.
Westernism in practice.
While the proletariat sacrifices itself,
the wives of the politicians of the bureaucratic state
go to beauty salons to the music of successful Parisian films.
Here are Josef Stakhanov and John Taylor. Where do they come from?
Stakhanov has arrived from Moscow on an Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-62.
Taylor from New York on a Pan Am Boeing 737.
What the hell are John Taylor and Josef Stakhanov doing in Prague today?
They've come to speed up the building of socialism,
and they're working together on a site on the Avenue Friedrich Engels.
Let's analyze how they organize their work.
John Taylor announces:
"It is necessary:
to break down all work into simple elements.
It is necessary:
to find out which movements are useless and eliminate them.
It is necessary:
to divide each job into elements corresponding to six functions:
transaction, transport and handling,
supervision, anticipation, stock-building."
Josef Stakhanov announces: "There's only one possible way,
contracts between industrial enterprises and the kolkhozy.
In order to ensure the labor supply of these enterprises,
workers have to be bound to production by salaries.
In order to apply and strengthen the principle of commercial return,
accumulation of capital must be intensified within industry.
That is the task," declares Josef Stakhanov.
What does this image mean? What does this sound mean?
This means that today, the holy alliance between Stakhanov's work force
and Taylor's work methods, that today this holy alliance,
this peaceful coexistence in the organization of work
on a small building site in the Avenue Friedrich Engels
is a result of the Cuban missile crisis,
a result of Camp David, a result of Yalta.
This means that the Narodny Bank in London
did not put politics first
when it used the golden ruble to Bolshevikly resist
the imperialist Bretton Woods agreement.
Result: at teller windows of the Paris branch of the Bank for Northern Europe,
the golden ruble had the idea of changing into Euro-dollars,
the highest form of financial imperialism,
and the ruble had this idea before the dollar.
Result:
Novotny or Dubcek, doesn't much matter. The worker, like the student,
is only a slot machine.
Result:
a beach,
the industrial suburb of Bratislava,
the apartment houses right next to the beach,
the role of that beach,
the necessity of not ruining the Slovak people's labor capital.
Leisure equals rest.
Work equals movement.
Leisure equals rest.
Work equals struggle.
Leisure, remaining a class-bound being.
Work, taking a class stand.
Contradiction: class being, class stand.
Contradiction resolved in socialist Czechoslovakia
as in capitalist France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil.
As a result of refusing the people the one right left out
of the bourgeois declaration of the rights of man,
the right to politically meaningful work,
the streets of Prague have become like those of London, Milan, Zurich,
only more sad, because this sadness is not a sign of struggle.
Here, all the demands of the French communist unions,
the English shop stewards,
or the militants of the Italian Communist Party, have been satisfied.
Here, no infernal cadences
or hovels, almost the same housing for everyone.
But every day, as in Paris, New York, Stockholm, Madrid,
every day...
But every day, as in Paris, New York, Stockholm, Madrid,
every day it's get up, go out, work. Get up, go out, work.
Class being. Class stand.
Being a revisionist is becoming a class being again.
And how do you become a class being again?
By refusing to fight everywhere from a class point of view.
By refusing to struggle, criticize, transform.
By refusing to combat right-wing red deviationism
in the name of left-wing red proletarianism.
Moreover, Rosa, here are some concrete proofs.
He says he works with a product for a certain machine...
Today, two faculties in Prague are on strike...
What time do you leave work?
At six.
- We're on strike. - Yes, that's what we're trying to do.
That is, to make, to hold rallies...
You're on strike for the...
for the livestock...
Do you live far from here?
That is, their loss of feeling useful,
as in their relation with the students and the workers
and the organization of people who do not...
He doesn't know exactly what machine he makes this product for.
The relationship between the students and the workers,
I believe that in our country it is better,
for example, than in the capitalist countries, where it's more difficult...
He wants to talk, because his cooperative is doing well,
it's a rich cooperative, and he's responsible...
It's for a sewing machine...
For them it's very dangerous for the workers to meet with us,
who agree with us.
I met a friend who...
Go to the movies, go to a cafe...
Tonight he'll watch television...
Yes, of course...
- We can't do it. - Why?
It's what I said before.
So we had this strike, at the beginning we put up posters...
A farmer who had a small property...
had bought a house...
and now...
They have to...
They have to make the school they had promised.
If we strike...
Leaving here, he goes with a girl to the movies or a cafe...
It was a house of his parents
which they had for more than forty years.
We agree for the most part, of course, but
with the Yugoslav communist party, you can go there,
how have they done...
Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria,
and France.
The communists are people like ourselves...
You see, Rosa? I was right. Revisionism in practice: Hertz and Avis.
Westernism in practice: advertising.
Taylor and Stakhanov: a show.
The two workers from the electrical plant in Bratislava,
the students from the faculty of philosophy in Prague,
peasants from the Alexander Dovzhenko cooperative,
they have furnished the proof.
What proof?
Westernism in theory. The proof that the rape
of a popular democracy by western ideology
is one of the principal aspects of modern revisionism.
The proof that the revisionists find
in the womb of western culture, support for their treasonous policies.
When the students occupy their university,
do they fearlessly fly the red flag?
No.
They timidly raise a black flag,
not even the black flag of Kronstadt or Catalonia,
but the black flag of bourgeois mourning.
What does that mean?
It means the student struggle is founded upon
suicidal humanism, not revolutionary determination.
Another concrete proof:
conversation with Vera Chytilova, asset of the Czech cinema.
She thinks it doesn't only depend
on the question of freedom or non-freedom,
she believes there are many more possibilities
in a state film.
She thinks that here there is no technology,
no equipment, no money,
but in terms of freedom, yes they have it.
Perhaps in the end it would be best to stop making films
and let others make them.
For example, today Forman is making a film with Paramount,
and Paramount, for me, is the same thing as Novotny.
Western culture: weapon of modern revisionism.
We are in a popular democracy. The Orlik cinema is showing
"Angelique, Marquise of the Angels".
Above the cinema is the Georgi Dimitrov school.
But what did Dimitrov say? He said: "The popular democratic state
represents the power of the workers, of the vast majority of the people
under the leadership of the working class."
Did the working class ask to have "Angelique" shown?
No, and...
What does this mean?
Simply that here, just as in Hollywood,
movies are made for the common man.
You go to the people, you don't come from them.
You criticize the people's shortcomings, without taking the people's point of view.
In short, you make the same kind of movies as the people's enemies.
Westernism in theory.
Vera Chytilova.
American films, French newspapers, English music.
What is the aim of the imperialist ideology?
To conceal the existence of the struggle,
to disguise the war between the old and the new,
to try to forget the class struggle.
Who makes use of Western ideology in Czechoslovakia?
Revisionism. Against whom?
Against this worker, whom it prevents from seeing the contradiction
between making an anti-aircraft gun for North Vietnam in the morning,
going to see "Angelique, Marquise of the Angels" in the evening.
Who profits from that?
Who splits his sides laughing
when someone says there is no art or science without a class base?
Those who betrayed Marxism, the revisionists.
To keep power,
in order to stay in power,
the revisionist boss makes use of a lackey: the intellectual.
This flunky broadcasts in profusion the bourgeois ideas
that are necessary and sufficient for his boss:
individualism, egoism, false sexuality, etc.
At all times, intellectuals have been
fertile ground for bourgeois degeneration.
That is why the revisionist boss
avoids as much as he can instilling them with
the ideology of the proletarian class, and on the contrary
tries his best to raise the working class to the level of the intellectual.
Westernism in theory.
Revisionism in theory.
In words, it's day and night.
In fact, every day, night falls over Czechoslovakia.
Sixty-eight.
Revisionism in theory.
1945: Czech and Slovak peoples liberate themselves from fascism.
1949: Novotny takes power.
1968: the Czech and Slovak peoples
resist the tanks of their false brothers, the invaders.
1968-69: Dubcek, Husak and company
remain proprietors of power.
Proprietors. Power. Private property.
Yes, revisionist power is born from the struggle of the people.
But whoever says revisionism means treason.
Once the people have put them into power,
the revisionists devote all their energy to keeping the people,
especially the working class, out of power.
Having refused the people the right to speak and act,
the revisionist princes suck their blood.
Here politics is the business of specialists:
the butchers of Prague.
Orders from high up are carried out by the police at the bottom.
The Communist Party has strayed far from the working class.
There's only a short distance from political prostitution to the whorehouse,
and it's quickly cleared by the directing clique.
The bureaucrats are looking to rendez- vous in large international hotels
to fornicate with the children of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The unions have become ordinary enterprises
for subcontracting labor, in the service of ambitious men
looking for promotion in the state apparatus.
The torture and death of proletarian internationalism.
The revisionist bureaucrats, like all reactionaries,
are afraid of the people, that is why they use police terror.
Just as in capitalist countries,
the Ministry of the Interior becomes the Ministry of Repression, the civil war
between the workers and the power of the revisionist feudal system.
The death of democratic centralism,
murdered by demagogy and the lies of opportunists.
Sixty-nine.
Revisionism is not the same as imperialism,
but its methods are identical.
USA equals imperialism. USSR, social-imperialism.
USA, Latin America. USSR, Eastern Europe.
The Soviet revisionists regard a number of coutries as their colonies.
Toward these countries, the new Soviet revisionist
counter-revolutionary tsars have adopted a policy of rape,
of economic pillage and political vassalage.
Thanks to their alleged economic aid
and self-styled military assistance,
Soviet revisionists have infiltrated like shameless foxes
into the countries' daily lives.
"To live among the people like a fish in water,"
say the Chinese comrades.
"To hide in vans in order to spy on the Czech and Slovak people,"
say the self-styled Soviet comrades.
Yesterday Czechoslovakia,
today Cuba, tomorrow Egypt.
Although revisionism is socialist in words, it is imperialist in practice.
By servilely bowing their heads,
by using Radio Moscow to drown out
the angry cries of their people, Czech and Slovak revisionists
have shown they are the truest allies of social-imperialism,
the truest allies of imperialism.
In a general way, we can say that
the revisionists cite in their support texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin
with the sole intention of lying to the people.
When the revisionists say socialism,
they mean social-imperialism.
When they say internationalism,
they mean social-colonialism.
When they say information,
they mean deformation.
When they say proletarian class stand
they mean bourgeois class being.
Therefore, third part:
to a picture of sickness, add a sound which is not sick.
Third part:
add the true sound to a false picture
in order first to find a true picture again.
That's what we're going to do now, Rosa.
Use the law of the unity of opposites,
discovered by Marxism-Leninism, in order to observe socialist society.
Managerial class.
Memorandum to administrators of the Party and State.
Our position in the life of the State and Party
means that if we are not careful
we risk falling into bad habits of bureaucracy
and granting ourselves special privileges.
Comrades, let's be careful, beware of being arrogant,
keep to our simple way of life,
banish flattery and egoism,
share the life of the people, refuse privileges.
Our practice ought to be guided
by the idea of whole-heartedly serving the people.
All we do should arise from the interests of the people,
and not a small privileged part of it.
This means several things.
Thinking of all problems in Marxist-Leninist terms.
Knowing the essential thing is not to understand the laws of the objective world
in order to explain it,
but to use knowledge of these laws to transform the world.
The knowledge of these laws is not gained solely from books,
but also from practice.
After we have acquired theoretical knowledge from practice,
we must verify the truth of these ideas through the actions of the masses.
To do that, we must apply democratic centralism.
We must solve the contradictions between centralism and democracy.
We must refuse to solve these problems by administrative fiat.
We must condemn unprincipled democracy.
Among the people, centralism and democracy
are two contradictory aspects of a single whole.
The search for this unity,
the unity of democracy and centralism,
the unity of liberty and discipline,
must be the main aspect of our leadership.
All controversies among the people
can only be solved through democratic methods:
discussion, criticism, self-criticism,
persuasion and education.
They cannot be solved by repression,
that is contrary to the people's interests.
Our other principle of practice is investigation.
We need to continually inquire within the masses
in order to modify our practices,
and bind ourselves every day more closely to the masses.
Not only are we unafraid of the people's criticism,
we must take it into account.
The people's criticism is the moving force behind our leadership.
If we don't want
revisionism to win,
we've got to master leadership based upon the principle:
"arise from the masses and return to the masses".
We cannot follow the example of Khrushchev:
undermining democratic centralism...
No longer think of subjectivity in terms of impression,
but in terms of class.
...attacking comrades by surprise.
We ought to be modest and prudent,
take care not to be presumptuous,
practice self-criticism and have the courage to correct our errors
and the shortcomings in our work.
We should never claim for ourselves all merit,
and blame others for our faults, as Khrushchev did.
If we follow these principles in our work,
bureaucratic revisionism will be beaten,
things will become clearer and the future will be less gloomy.
Re-education of the intellectuals.
In order to mold administrators who will really serve the people,
the proletariat must assume the historic task of re-educating the intellectuals.
The process of the peaceful evolution of the dictatorship of the proletariat
into a revisionist clique in the USSR
teaches us that domination of bourgeois ideology
on the cultural level leads inevitably
to restoration of capitalism on the political and economic level.
Consequently, after taking power...
THE COMMUNISTS ARE BOTH
THE MOTOR AND THE TARGET OF THE REVOLUTION
This proves that the re-education of the intellectuals is a major task.
Large numbers of workers must go into the university,
the theaters, the movie studios, in order to wage the...
...ideological fight along the lines of struggle, criticism and transformation.
This will not only lead to a new phase
in the struggle against bourgeois ideology,
but will also speed up the process by which the working class
remolds the lives of the intellectuals into its own image.
Why call this re-education?
Because the intellectuals received a bourgeois education in the past.
Because in the present, the revisionist line of Dubcek-Brezhnev-Husak
has not educated them in proletarian ideas, but in bourgeois ones.
The intellectuals need to be educated in the proletarian conception of the world
so that they reject the bourgeois ideas
instilled by revisionist education.
That's the content of this re-education.
The re-education of the intellectuals remains a major problem
throughout the period of revolution and the building of socialism.
After seizing power, the proletariat
undertakes to recast the intellectuals in its own image,
to form a contingent of proletarian intellectuals in its own service.
This is an imperative for the consolidation
and development of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
An imperative for the proletariat's establishment
of its own dominant position in the ideological and cultural domains.
To carry out this task,
it is indispensable to undertake a radical revolution in education.
DOWN WITH THE NEW TSARS
Analyzing the Spanish student movement,
which has been reaching ever greater proportions,
the Spanish Marxist-Leninist communist party
has set the way forward.
We must take the following important measures:
Send students and teachers to production for a time.
Condemn the bourgeois theory of science beyond class,
and of abstract knowledge.
Pose, in everything taught, the question: for whom, against whom?
Fully denounce the self-styled most influential academics
involved in revisionist pursuits.
Multiply the number of working class propaganda groups in the universities.
AGAINST THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS SLOGAN "I ENJOY APPEARANCES"
OPPOSE THE MARXIST-LENINIST SLOGAN
"LET'S MAKE OUR ENJOYMENT APPARENT"
Practice the method: struggle, criticism, transformation.
Not taking these measures means not acting in the proletariat's interests.
The proletariat will only free itself completely after having freed all mankind.
Proletarian policies must mark out a solution
to the masses and the intellectuals
and must strive to transform negative factors into positive ones.
We must undertake the re-education of the intellectuals from this point of view.
Adoption of this critical perspective should
permit those who have committed grave errors to admit and correct them.
As for the small minority of Party responsibles ultimately
following the road of capitalism,
we must concentrate our...
we must concentrate our hatred upon them,
for it is their revisionist line and education
which has poisoned our young intellectuals.
We must make a distinction between this handful of counter-revolutionaries
and the large majority of intellectuals fooled by this clique.
We must establish a clear distinction between two types of contradictions:
contradiction among the people, and contradiction between the enemy and us.
To resolve the contradiction between the intellectuals
and the dictatorship of the proletariat,
we must adopt the process: unity, criticism, self-criticism, unity.
The peasantry.
In the country of the Danube, many factions were fiercely fighting.
Lenin sided with the blacksmiths
because he believed only they could ensure the future of the country.
One could ask them to give their utmost
and their activities were highly useful to their fellow men.
Lenin said:
"If the peasants alone redouble their efforts,
the harvest will increase by a very small amount.
If, on the other hand, they are given a sufficient number of plows,
the result will be considerable."
At the time, there were two sorts of plows.
Some were made of wood in the old way,
others, which were newer, were made of iron
and were forged in large workshops belonging to powerful owners.
But there was only
a relatively small number of iron plows.
They cost a great deal, and could only be used profitably
over large tracts, and with the aid of horses.
The simple wooden plows, on the other hand,
could be built and drawn by the peasants themselves, but they only made
very shallow furrows in the soil.
These plows were used by poor peasants.
Moreover, these peasants had too little land to feed themselves.
They were often obliged to work elsewhere,
for wages on large estates.
Many peasant sons went to the towns to seek work in the
large metal factories, or in other workshops.
But only some of those whom the land could not feed
were fed by the towns.
The trade in plows was narrowly restricted.
Firstly, the large estates were few in number.
Secondly,
the iron masters had to keep the price of plows to a high level.
They increased their own profits
not by increasing the number of plows sold,
but primarily by making the workers work longer.
The continuing flights of poor young peasants from the countryside
meant one could always find new journeymen,
working for low wages.
Great poverty reigned among them.
Helped by Lenin,
the blacksmiths drove out the iron masters and seized power.
Before the expulsion of the iron masters,
the poor peasants supported the blacksmiths.
Afterwards, the blacksmiths aided them in driving out the large landowners.
The poor peasants at once divided the land they had won.
Before coming to power, Lenin had taught it was necessary
above all else to provide iron plows to the whole country,
and many had understood he intended to do away immediately
with the small holdings.
However,
when he seized power with the help of the blacksmiths, he did the opposite.
He left the land to the poor peasants,
as he had left the workshops to the journeyman blacksmiths,
allotting to each one
as much land as he could cultivate on his own.
In this way, he considerably increased the number of
plots of land too small for the use of the iron plow.
Only several large estates were taken over
and managed by himself and his pupils.
The philosopher Luxemburg violently reproached Lenin.
She said:
"Lenin is like all the others. Power weakens his memory."
And: "He who succeeds forgets much."
Lenin answered:
"I have taught, now they learn.
They have listened, now they experience."
Lenin laughed at those who believed one could, in one day, by decree,
put an end to a thousand years of misery, and went on his way.
Soon the situation was as follows.
The blacksmiths, after having driven out their oppressors,
produced as many iron plows as they could,
without worrying what price they could sell for.
The landowners had also been driven out
and their estates were now administered by the State,
or by the innumerable isolated small peasants.
Among the peasants, there were some who had almost enough land,
and horses to draw the plows.
Yet for them it wasn't obvious to buy iron plows
because their land was too small.
The peasants who were completely poor had no horses and went hungry.
Once again they had to find those who were better off
and work for them for wages or the lending of horses.
They soon again became very discontented.
Their hatred turned upon the well-to-do peasants.
Lenin did nothing to suppress this hatred, on the contrary, he fanned it.
The blacksmiths sent men
around the country to make propaganda for the iron plows.
They advised the poor peasants
to associate in the largest possible number,
and to combine as much land as they could,
so the use of iron plows could be profitable.
To those who followed their advice, they would send an iron plow on credit.
But to the isolated peasants who were better off,
they would not grant credit,
and would only send them iron plows after long delays.
"We are in the same position as the poor peasants," they said calmly.
"We blacksmiths no longer each have an anvil which belongs to us alone.
Without that, we cannot make plows."
Lenin replied:
"If you want the land to grow wheat,
give up the land now in order to get it."
Which means:
"If you give up the plots of land which belong to you, you will get more wheat."
It was true.
Soon gigantic tracts were created,
larger than the manorial estates of the old days.
After a time, the well-to-do peasants themselves
in turn had to join with these large tracts
because they were no longer able to find wage laborers,
and their fields produced little wheat
since the old wooden plows did not trace a deep enough furrow.
Thus Lenin realized his program by carrying out his task
and letting nature carry out its own.
Re-education of the intellectuals.
"Don't say 'nature', say 'dialectic of nature'."
Cf. Friedrich Engels.
The army.
The first decree of the Paris Commune was
the suppression of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people.
That demand now figures in the program
of all parties calling themselves communist.
In that way, the Commune seemed to have replaced the shattered state machinery
simply by instituting more complete democracy,
by the suppression of the standing army
and the election and recall of all officials without exception.
Now, in reality,
this "simply" represents a gigantic task:
the replacement of institutions by others which are fundamentally different.
The replacement of institutions by others which are fundamentally different.
Here it is definitely a case of transformation in quality.
Realized in this way,
as fully and methodically as possible,
bourgeois democracy becomes proletarian.
The State,
that official power designed to subdue a determinate class,
is transformed into something which is, properly speaking, no longer a State.
It is no less a necessity
to subdue the bourgeoisie and break its resistance,
but here the organ of repression is the majority of the population
and no longer the minority
as had always been the case in the time of servitude
and wage slavery.
Now, from the time when the majority of the people
subdue its oppressors,
there is no longer need of a special power of repression.
Seventy-five, part 2.
In this sense the State begins to disappear.
In the place of the special institutions of a privileged minority,
of the officials and leaders of the standing army,
the majority itself can directly take over these tasks.
And the more the functions of State power
are exercised by all the people, the less necessary this power becomes.
It is precisely here that we see the turning point
of bourgeois democracy into proletarian democracy,
of oppressors' democracy into democracy of the oppressed,
of the State, as a special power created to subdue
a determinate class, into the repression exercised
on the oppressor by the general power
of the majority of the people, the workers and the peasants.
Dictatorship of the proletariat.
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?
This question is extremely important for the revolution.
Without a large measure of democracy for the people,
the dictatorship of the proletariat will never be able to consolidate.
The proletariat must exercise, in every area,
its dictatorship over the bourgeoisie.
After the annihilation of its armed enemies,
there still remain unarmed enemies.
They have means to wage a struggle to the death against the proletariat.
Maintaining firmly the dictatorship of the proletariat
and creating the conditions for the passage to communism.
The revisionists obliterate the difference between socialism and capitalism,
between the dictatorship of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie.
We must fight against egoism and criticize revisionism.
Without destroying, we cannot build.
Destroying is criticizing, is making revolution.
Workers' propaganda teams
will remain in the schools for a long time,
participate in all the tasks of struggle, criticism, transformation,
and direct the school from that time on.
THE
DICTATORSHIP
OF THE
PROLETARIAT
IS
THE ENTRY
OF THE WORKING CLASS
INTO
THE SUPERSTRUCTURE
Quit the machines
Go out, proletarians
March and march
Form up for the attack
Flags arrayed and weapons loaded
In cadence step For the assault, advance!
OK?
Seize now the factory,
Dig the grave of capital.
Your life is more
Than being a machine.
All for all, Nothing for the exploiter.
The world must be won,
Arise proletarians!
Our brothers' blood
Calls for justice.
Nothing can stop
The wrath of the masses.
In London, in Paris, Budapest and Berlin,
Seize power, Worker battalions!
Take your revenge,
Worker battalions!
Our best...
The Third International.
Fiftieth anniversary of the creation
of the Third Communist International.
The great revisionist circus.
The clowns of Moscow and their Czech and Slovak accomplices
disguise themselves as Marxist-Leninists.
Editorial from Pravda: "Long live the Third Communist International,
however articles 4, 6, 7 and 11,
on the conditions of the admission of parties
to the Communist International, include erroneous aspects."
What do articles 4, 6, 7 and 11 say?
Article 4. In Brazil:
Refusing to undertake systematic agitation and propaganda
in the army would be treasonous
to the revolutionary movement.
Article 6. In Palestine:
Arab workers must be shown that staying out of imperialist wars
means not accepting the arbitration of the great powers,
but destroying capitalism
through revolutionary violence.
- Article 7. In Italy: - Strikes must be based
upon a complete break with reformism.
Article 11. In Czechoslovakia:
questionable right-wing elements in the party must not be replaced
by other questionable right-wing elements.
Listen, you're exaggerating, Rosa.
You cite true texts, but with what?
With images still half false.
You thought we could seize just like that, by chance,
the relations of production between images and sounds.
In fact, you've acted dogmatically.
What you've ultimately adopted is the style of posters and slogans.
You thought you'd taken a step forward.
Result: we've taken two steps backward.
Let's look backward now that we're there.
Czechoslovakia. We have seen in practice, practically,
first, the patient, the concrete situation.
We have seen in theory, theoretically,
second, the sickness, revisionism,
beginning with concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
We have shown, without being able to pass from theory to practice,
thirdly, Marxism-Leninism,
how to cure this sickness, how to fight against revisionism,
continuation and end, concrete analysis, concrete situation.
Fourth part. Czechoslovakia. New concrete situation.
Situation of class struggle. Fierce struggle between old and new,
between the red revisionism of the right and the red Marxism-Leninism of the left,
the red of the proletariat.
Good. Now to think.
That's difficult. Good.
Now, having right ideas.
Ideas. Philosophy.
We must make a new departure in the philosophy of images and sounds.
It is imprisoned.
By whom?
By the revisionists and bourgeois who imprison everything.
Why must we free it?
Mao Tse-tung, who liberated the Chinese people,
said that he used philosophy to do it.
But what philosophy are you talking about?
I told you it was imprisoned. The task of prisoners is to free themselves.
You're editing in circles and we're not moving forward.
We advance by going around in circles,
engaged in various struggles in the course of their history.
Not history, social practice.
Men acquire
a rich experience
drawn from both their successes and failures.
Not history, social practice.
Yes. Where do right ideas come from?
Do they fall from the sky? No.
They come from social practice.
From three kinds of social practice.
Social practice.
Struggle for production.
Social practice.
The class struggle.
Social practice.
Scientific experimentation.
The social existence of men determines their thought.
Throw off your illusions
and prepare yourselves for the struggle against revisionism!
Let's firmly resolve not to recoil before any sacrifice!
Let's overcome all difficulties
in order to win the victory against revisionism!
See you soon, Rosa, with all my love.
Love you. Good-bye, Vladimir.
Long live the resistance of the Czech people against Soviet social-imperialism!
Long live Mao Tse-tung's thought!