Introduction
On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the capitalist and imperialist system reigns supremely in the world. However, this century may still be the century where we will see the fall of imperialism. The capitalist and imperialist system has reached the limit of its historical evolution. It is unable to secure peace and progress for mankind. Never has there been such a gap between rich and poor. The system is ripe for revolutionary change.
Therefore, the twenty-first century might become the century of socialism. The century where the struggle of the working class for creating a socialist society is materialized successfully.
The Danish society faces major historical change.
It has come a long way, from the young bourgeois society, which threw off the yoke of feudalism, nobility and absolute monarchy, to the aged capitalist society of today. A small rich imperialist country, which is unable to secure the workers and the great majority real welfare and progress, and where the ruling class, in its pursuit of profits, has sold the sovereignty of the country and its possibility of a future independent development and even made the country a participant in imperialist looting wars.
A infinitesimal minority of the population, the capitalist class, with the monopoly capital as the leading stratum of this class, has organized society and all activities in society so it serves the pursuit of bigger and bigger profits and the growth of capital. It is this, and not the interests and needs of society, of the humans, of the workers or the great majority that is the key priority and controlling factor of today’s society.
The ruling class has brought the development of Danish society into a dead end.
In this aged capitalist society, the working class is the only social force that has the key to a different and better future and is capable of realizing its objectives and the programme for a socialist Denmark.
Capitalist Society
The present capitalist society, too, is a class society, based on the exploitation and oppression of man by man. In all developed capitalist societies, the working class is by far the largest class. It grows continuously, worldwide too.
The struggle between workers and capitalists, between these two main classes in the world and in all countries in the world of today, highly developed as well as underdeveloped countries, constitutes the main motive force behind the development of society.
The commodity dominates everything in capitalist society. Everything is about the production and sale of commodities for bringing profit to the capitalists, the class which owns or controls the means of production. Everything is a commodity. Human labour power is a commodity. Not just material products, but culture and science are commodities, too. Human intellect is a commodity, an object of trade on an international scale. And humans themselves, and all human qualities and functions, have become commodities; they have become big business. The human sex has become a commodity. Human generations have become commodities. Private life, home and leisure time are commodities. Nature is business. The best brains get traded, the human body is sold in the sex industry, and even human organs have become the object of purchase and sale. Children have become an industry and export article. Youth and old age are profitable. Fortunes are made from both sickness and health. The dream of happiness is transformed into a lottery. Life itself, the genes of humans, animals and plants, is patented. And death is lucrative. Human life is cheap. Wars produce a formidable yield.
Everything, even relationships between humans, all human relations, is permeated and saturated by the commodity, by the purchase and sale, by the fight for profit.
And nothing, nothing at all, is sacred to the capital, nothing human, no human values.
Everything is the object of an ever-increasing intensification of global capitalist competition, and the capitalist does not recoil from any crime when he sees the possibility of making maximum profits.
This is due to the fact that the objective of capitalist production is not to satisfy the continuously increasing needs of humans, of the whole society, but solely to secure ever-increasing accumulation of capital, ever-increasing profits.
The capitalist of today is part of an international jet set, which is living a life in incomprehensible luxury and considers the whole world as its property, as its living room and arena.
Still, day after day, the contemporary worker is forced to sell his labour power at the current price on the labour market where the competition for jobs is getting tougher and tougher. He must constantly fear unemployment, a disabling accident or to end up as a “loser of society” among the redundant, the “outcasts”. If he or she is in possession of a bit of “personal property” due to loans, the creation of indebtedness or by instalment, this does not last long. There may be a very short interval between managing and being without roof over one’s head.
Throughout the entire life, as long as the worker has the ability, he or she must be at the disposal of the capital, within industry, transport, trade, sale, or service, within the closely tangled capitalist sectors, the private or public sector. He and she must constantly adapt and improve their skills in order to sell their labour power over and over again. Throughout life he or she normally works in many different jobs, and in the end they are discarded useless while the wealthy can cheat, steal and defraud openly with only a few or no consequences for them personally.
Under capitalism, work is a plague. It is damned, and at the same time indispensable because it is a misfortune to lose it, to join the ranks of the army of unemployed. It is damned because it is deprived of meaning, because the factory worker simply is an appendage to his machine, the office worker to his computer, the checkout assistant to the till, the bus driver to his wheel, and the fast food worker to the burger and the smile. It is tough, it wears down and stresses the worker, and constantly he has to run faster and faster. To the capitalist, the ideal worker has a body of a 20-year-old and 40 years of experience.
The vicious circle of capitalist society, its fast turnover and consumption of humans, crushes millions of people. But still, it is from the working class that the hope for a humane society arises. The working class bears the solidarity and human values on which the new society has to be built.
More than ever, the workers have nothing to lose but their chainsand, literally speaking, a world to win in a socialist revolution.
The World of Capitalism and Imperialism Today
As the United Nations on the threshold of this century officially stated: “Power and wealth is being concentrated in the hands of an exclusive group of people, nations and companies, while the rest is becoming marginalized.”
A very small superrich bourgeoisie of dollar millionaires and billionaires, a few hundred multinational companies and a few handfuls of rich imperialist countries possess the majority of the total assets in each country and in the world as a whole.
The three richest individuals in the world own as much as the world’s 35 poorest countries and their 600 million inhabitants altogether. Hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, in different countries are toiling for the same multinational company and its shareholders. A few imperialist Great Powers, headed by the US, are dictating international law and order, ruling the rest of the world’s peoples and nations and are in absolute command of war and peace.
The gap between rich and poor people and the gap between rich and poor countries are constantly growing and at a fast rate. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, when both humans and countries are concerned. The social polarization and the polarization of incomes and wealth are increasing. The class distinctions are more profound and have never been more distinct than now. The global exploitation has reached unprecedented proportions.
Never has the wealth of the world been bigger and neither ever has poverty and misery. Mass unemployment is permanent and is becoming ever more extensive worldwide. Hundreds of millions of people cannot get a job. Under the ever-recurrent economic crises, huge masses of people are outcast only to become part of the new surplus population who lives at the subsistence level.
The incredible technological development in all fields, the development of the technical-scientific revolution, which is a precondition of capitalist production, leads to an increase in unemployment and in exploitation. The new conquests are not, or only to a limited extent, placed at the disposal of the majority of people.
Hunger and chronic undernourishment are the conditions of hundreds of millions of people, while there at the same time is enough food. The world’s total food production has long ago been able to feed everyone, and enough good houses and cities can be built. However, a large part of the world’s population lacks the most basic necessities and has to live at or under the subsistence level, crammed into constantly growing cities with millions of inhabitants, into bad and unhealthy homes owned by speculators while the rural areas are being emptied and farm production is being intensified with one-tracked production exterminating the rain forests and transforming gardens and lakes into destroyed puddles of poison.
Commonplace diseases, easily curable, are yearly claiming millions of human lifes. Infectious epidemics, environmental poison and accidents at work are claiming millions more despite the fact that modern medical science never before has been able to cure almost everything and modern technology has never had a greater ability to prevent accidents and catastrophes than now.
Crime has taken on enormous proportions. Prostitution and sex trafficking, organized drug trafficking and drug-related deaths are international business and one side of the global misery.
These are all sacrifices of poverty and misery, just a few of the sacrifices of imperialism.
Modern trafficking of humans, legal and illegal export of labour power and human material for the sex industry, has assumed gigantic proportions.
Also two world wars, that is for the time being, and countless minor wars which constantly are breaking out, are attributed to imperialism’s mass murdering. And the world is still seeing new genocides, new oustings of people and new floods of refugees. Military expenses amounts to more than the total income of half the world’s population. For just a fraction of these expenses, one could secure all people access to basic healthcare, including the vaccination of all children, malnourishment and undernourishment could be eradicated, and clean drinking water secured for all. For another fraction the widespread illiteracy among adults could be eliminated, basic school education for all children could be secured, and one could secure the same level of education for women as for men.
Poverty, suffering, and social and human misery could be abolished. Wars could be brought to an end. Worldwide environmental catastrophes such as global heating could be avoided. The more limited local environmental catastrophes, which occur still more often, could be prevented. Destroyed equilibriums could be restored, and the ruthless exploitation could be stopped.
All the scientific, technological and civilizing preconditions for a viable and durable development for the whole planet and for a just distribution of all its goods and riches already exist.
However, this is not happening and will never happen under the present method of production, that is, under capitalism in the age of imperialism. No matter how many promises are being made by heads of state, no matter how many reports are being made and how many international conferences are being held, a just distribution of goods will neither occur nor will a new and viable development be put into action. The poor will continue to be poor, the rich will get richer, and the global disorder with crises of all types and new wars will permanently be repeated.
This is due to the fact that it is the method of production itself, the order itself, the foundation of today’s world that is the problem, the root of the suffering, misery and all the catastrophes.
The large-scale production of capitalism, which constantly replaces and renews its technological foundation, constantly develops new products and new branches, is only able to do so by simultaneously disturbing the balance between humans and nature and by destroying the ever-lasting terms of nature for a durable fertility and viable development. It is only able to continue its way of function by undermining those two sources whereof all wealth stems: the earth and the worker. Its function is destroying nature and destroying society’s most important productive force, the labour power.
Every attempt of the capitalist politicians to reduce the evils and disasters of the current system only results in trifles, which cannot prevent a continuous negative development, nor hinder a repetition and deepening of the evils or the emergence of new threats against the planet and the humans.
Capitalism and capitalist method of production has reached its limits. Imperialism has become a threat against the survival of the planet and humans themselves. It is capitalism, which has to be abolished; it is imperialism, which has to be destroyed.
It is only the introduction of a new method of production, the socialist method of production, the establishment of socialist society, which can save the planet and bring human society onward. It is the world historic role of the working class, in alliance with all exploited and oppressed peoples, classes and strata of society, to secure that the human race is freed from the disastrous ravage of capitalism. It is the task of the working class to head the construction of socialism. The workers of the world are in possession of the key to the future of the human race.
The Present Historical Epoch – the Epoch of Imperialism and the Revolution
The transition from one social method of production in the world to another has never in history taken place overnight, but is a process which has proceeded over centuries, never following a straight line, but with progressions and retrogressions, with revolutions and counter-revolutions.
The history of capitalism until today covers more than half a millennium.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism worldwide meant an enormous progress for the development of society. Capitalism tore the countries and nations out of the stagnation of the Middle Ages, established modern nation states and a cohesive world market and paved the way for an unseen development of the productive forces, of the modern large-scale industry and of science and technology.
Capitalism has to a distinct extent developed the social character of production. However, there is no social management and planning, which corresponds to this. The means of production and the products of the social labour remain the property of a few handfuls of capitalists. The more capitalism develops, the more the social character of production contrasts sharply and incompatibly with the capitalist private property and private appropriation. This contradiction is the sharpest and most fundamental contradiction of capitalist society.
At the close of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century capitalism reached its final stage of development, its highest and last phase, its historical terminus in terms of method of production and social system. The so-called free competition capitalism, which had played a dynamic and progressive role for the development of the productive forces, turned into imperialism.
With imperialism and the outbreak of the first war between the imperialist powers about the repartition of the world, and with the first successful socialist revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world stepped into a new historical era, which until now has lasted close to a hundred years – the epoch of imperialism and the revolution. The fundamental content of the present historical epoch is the transition from capitalism to socialism on a worldwide scale; its main contradiction is the fight between these to opposite social systems.
It is the epoch of socialist revolutions and national liberation revolutions, the epoch with the collapse of imperialism, the end of the colonial empires and the overcoming of its successor, neo-colonialism.
It is the epoch where capitalism is in a general crisis; it is characterized by the intensification of all contradictions of society and of the class struggle on an international scale. Capitalism entered its first stage of this general crisis at the time of the triumph of the October Revolution; a new stage began around and after the Second World War.
The general crisis of capitalism is marked by the fierce battle between the two social systems, socialism and capitalism, by the fact that there is a steadily increasing instability and decay of the entire capitalist system and, in addition, by the chronic underutilization of production capacity and the chronic mass unemployment worldwide. The inevitable and recurrent capitalist crises of overproduction are becoming more frequent, more intense and profound. They come together with the financial, currency and stock market crises, and turn into economic world crises.
The rapid technical and scientific development, the so-called technical-scientific revolution under capitalism, is imperative to the survival of capitalism. However, this development is, first and foremost, connected with the militarization of the imperialist Great Powers. It contributes to increasing unemployment and deepens the economic crises, and it means new dangers to humans – such as the possibility of nuclear war, genetic manipulation of life, etc. Its results only benefit the most countries and the majority of the world’s population to a limited extent. Under imperialism, the tendency of developing the productive forces exists along with the tendency of impeding them. The latter is the main tendency.
The general crisis of capitalism is expressed by the eternal crisis of the imperialist colonial system as well, also after a new one, the neo-colonial system, has replaced the old colonial system. It is expressed by the ever-ongoing wars, the wars between the imperialist Great Powers for world hegemony, by the continuous aggressions and looting wars in order to subjugate other countries and attain control over raw materials, by counter-revolutionary wars in order to preserve the hegemony or regain it when the peoples revolt in anti-imperialist wars for their liberation.
The global environmental crisis is another expression of the general crisis of capitalism.
The general crisis of capitalism affects all aspects of bourgeois society, its basis and superstructure, and its ideology, politics, and culture. It affects all aspects of capitalism as a world system and as a social system. It is worldwide, many-sided and includes all countries without exception.
Despite the fact that the first waves of socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, as the result of the battle of world imperialism against them and due to revisionist and overt bourgeois counter-revolution, were pushed backwards and capitalism was restored in the first socialist countries of the world, the present historical era is the epoch where socialism triumphs over capitalism on a world scale.
The most important contradictions characterizing this epoch are the following: the contradiction between labour and capital in the capitalist countries, the contradiction between the oppressed peoples and nations and imperialism, the contradiction between the imperialist powers themselves, and the fight between the two opposite systems in the world, between capitalism and socialism.
Imperialism
Imperialism does not abolish any of the laws of capitalism; it does not overcome any of its evils, but only intensifies and enlarges them.
Imperialism is monopoly capitalism; it is parasitic and decaying capitalism; it is moribund capitalism.
Under imperialism the industrial and banking capital have grown together and become finance capital. The monopolies are the basis of the economy of the bourgeois imperialist society and at the same time also the basis of all the economic and social diseases of imperialism.
State monopoly capitalism is fully developed in the imperialist countries. This means the subordination of the state apparatus under the monopolies and the establishment of their complete hegemony over the political, economic, spiritual and social life of the entire society.
The monopolies divide the world economically among themselves. They know no frontiers and demand free and unimpeded access to all markets and the disregard of the sovereign rights of the nation states.
Within the intensified international competition, international monopolies and monopoly cartels are made; they make agreements on the economic division of the world among themselves. Through continuous mergers, giant concerns and gigantic multinational companies are created. These companies are operating all over the world, but they keep their main base in one of the imperialist Great Powers. They control the greater part of production in the world as well as the greater part of the world trade.
A new type of international monopoly cartel is being created; international financial organisms such as the World Bank and the IMF support and ease the global offensive of the monopolies.
Imperialism means constant militarization of the economy, constant rearmament, constant preparedness for war, constant warfare and constant fear of war. Imperialism cannot exist without political and economic expansion.
Imperialism’s subjugation of the world first occurred in the form of colonies. Today, after the former colonies have gained formal political independence, it occurs in the form of neo-colonialism, that is, the economic as well as the direct and indirect political control of the imperialist powers and the multinational companies over these countries. Colonialism and neo-colonialism means double or triple exploitation of the workers and the working masses in these countries. To imperialism and the monopolies these countries are fruitful areas as regards export of capital and lucrative outlets for their commodities, which often are of a lesser quality and maybe even more poisonous than those they are selling in their own countries. They dump their surplus commodities, their outdated and banned commodities, and large amounts of garbage there. The oppressed countries provide cheap labour power, soil and raw material while the imperialist plunder prevents them from moving forward and obtaining a cohesive economic and social development.
Today, the imperialist Great Powers, the multinational concerns and the chorus of capitalist ideologists and politicians claim that “the time of the nation state is passé”. The nation states must give up their rights as sovereign states and permit the concerns to operate freely, without restrictions and without regard to the interests of the populations. Everything and everyone has to subjugate to the “New World Order” of imperialism. This is the main content of the so-called globalisation.
Neither state monopoly capitalism the technical-scientific revolution, the “globalisation” nor other phenomena and features of imperialism today, account for new phases in its development. They do not change its characteristics and cannot overcome or abolish the contradictions of capitalism, but only enlarge them and make them even more profound.
All this does not change the content of the current epoch, but intensifies the three fundamental characteristics of imperialism.
It underlines and strengthens imperialism as monopoly capitalism. The concentration and centralization of capital, which formed the basis of the monopolies, is continued and intensified at the same time as the capitalist competition is becoming even more vehement. The big ones continue to eat the small ones at all levels, worldwide too. Monopolies become multinational, they become giant monopolies. Big national monopolies are bought by even bigger monopolies, which perpetually unite and merge.
The parasitism and decay of imperialism is more and more underlined, the parasitic character of the ruling class becomes even more distinct, while the possibility of the world’s progress is being repressed. Rockets and weapons of mass destruction rather than health, food, housing and education are being produced. Political reaction is everywhere. Wherever bourgeois democracy exists, it is crackling; it is becoming a thinner and thinner varnish of the dictatorship of the monopolies.
Imperialism is dying capitalism, the portal to socialism, because it intensifies all the deep contradictions in the world. The economic and political development of the capitalist countries is becoming more and more uneven; the social development is filled with leaps, catastrophes and big clashes. The barometer is always at storm.
Imperialism strives for hegemony, for obtaining power over everything and everyone, and not for freedom and progress, although it presents itself as being the defender of human rights and even of workers’ rights and praises “freedom” and “pluralist democracy”. Its songs of freedom are hymns to the freedom of exploitation, to power as the law. Its defence of human rights is completely hypocritical.
Even the right to life, the most fundamental human right, is not guaranteed under imperialism, which daily tramples this right under foot on a massive scale. Millions of people are constantly dying due to lack of food, from diseases, as cannon fodder as victims in the wars of imperialism or in disasters and catastrophes, which are brought about by the pursuit for profit. Even in the richest imperialist countries, the right to work, to an education, a home and other fundamental rights, social and political, are not genuine and assured. At best they are incomplete, semi-formal. The priority of the ruling class, the right above all human rights, the right to private ownership of all values produced by society limit them.
All kinds of reactionary currents mark the imperialist societies, which are subjugated to the dictatorship of monopolies. “Pluralism” and the never-ending stream of new fashionable philosophies and new patent solutions to the problems of the world simply cover the fact that the only ideology of these societies is barren anti-communism. Their political life is a major electoral fraud, the parliaments are chatting forums of hot air, their mass media is a market for half-truths and complete lies, and the public debate is controlled and manipulated. Social life is dominated by advertisements and emptiness. Art, culture and sports are controlled and sponsored by concerns and serve the sale of their commodities and to keep the masses calm.
Racism and xenophobia, the conception of the imperialist countries being superior and with superior rights, imperialist chauvinism, is widespread everywhere. And fascist movements are allowed to thrive and develop.
Alcoholism and drug addiction are widespread diseases, bestial crimes such as mass murder and fascist terror are prevalent, organized crime and prostitution on a large scale are common phenomena.
Capitalist propaganda claims that it is the progressive character of free market economy, which is making its appearance when the general population get their share of the technological progress. But the new technology is placed at their disposal for the sake of the producers and their profits, and because the development of capitalist production and the maintenance of capitalist society demand it. Otherwise so many workers would not be driving around in cars, television would have remained a military secret, and the computer would not have been introduced into private homes.
It is not the bourgeois, reformist and revisionist parties, the parliamentary discussions nor the lobbyist deals and the horse-trading, which has given the workers and the general population improvements or new rights. All essential reforms have been brought about as a by-product of the revolutionary struggle. All political and social improvements have been forced through by socialism, by the struggle of the working class and the peoples. Decades of working class struggle, the fear of revolution of the ruling class, combined with capitalism’s own needs for development, have brought about the “Danish Welfare Model”.
And no reforms are lasting or durable under capitalism. The so-called welfare goods, the social security arrangements and the political and democratic rights can be pulled back or undermined. If the relative strength is adequate, the ruling class will abolish those rights again. Therefore, the workers must conduct a continuous defensive struggle for all hard-won rights and social goods in the same way they are waging an unequal battle for the defence of the real wages and for countering the increased speed of work, the stress and attrition of workers with the demand for shorter working hours.
In times of crisis, when the power of the ruling class is threatened by revolution, also “pluralism” and bourgeois democracy are put aside. The open terrorist dictatorship of the finance capital in its fascist form is then established. The communist parties are forbidden and workers’ organizations are dissolved. The workers and the general population feel the black iron fist, which accompanies the formal democracy as its shadow.
Socialism and Communism
In the twentieth century we experienced the first attempts to abolish capitalism and begin a social development towards classless society, that is, communism.
Between capitalist class society and classless communist society is socialism where the former is transformed revolutionarily to the latter. Socialism is itself a transitional society, the lower stage of the communist society, which gradually shakes off the remnants and traces of the former society of exploitation and finally defeats capitalism.
It abolishes the exploitation of man by man; it starts its construction by getting rid of the superfluous capitalist class, it turns the working class of capitalist society into a free working class, a class which is in power and no longer is a commodity, and which together with and leading the rest of the working people of the towns and in the countryside and with the new intellectuals of socialism build a new society. These classes and strata of socialism develop into being in the same position in production as the working people of socialism, ready for the challenges of communist society.
Socialism lays the foundations for the new society of humans, the communist society, where man and nature are living in harmony, in a fruitful interaction which makes a viable development possible as long as humans are able to exist on our planet.
Under communism all classes, every class division, every class distinction, is gone. The state and state power, which expresses class power, is gone. The political parties, which are instruments of different classes, will be gone. All the antagonistic contradictions of the old class societies will cease to exist. The communist society will develop fast, freely and unimpeded. All humans have the same relation to the means of production; they are equal to society and their personalities can develop and unfold fully, and society develops through the free and voluntary contribution of everyone.
The productive forces can unfold freely and develop for the benefit of the whole society. Every hierarchy, every boundary in the division of labour, contradictions between the manual and mental labour, between town and country, between the sexes will have been overcome.
Labour will no longer be a compulsion, but a vital necessity expressing the creative force of humans. Under communism, the mode of distribution is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
The socialist society progresses towards communism on end.
Two fundamental aspects first and foremost characterize the socialist society. First of all the fact that working class rule (the dictatorship of the proletariat) has been established, that is, the working class organized as the ruling class without sharing state power with other classes or strata. And secondly by the fact that all private ownership of the means of production has been abolished, and all soil, raw materials, buildings and factories are social property.
If one or both of these fundamental characteristics is missing, one cannot speak of a genuine socialist society, even though a country may call itself or is being called socialist.
All states and state types that history has known have been class states, instruments of class rule.
However, in all social formations before socialism, the state is a tool of a minority who uses it to rule the majority. The bourgeois state, the capitalist state power, is a tool for the class rule of the capitalist class over the working class and the rest of the population. The socialist state is a tool of working class rule. It belongs to the great majority, and for the first time it is used in the interests of the great majority, building socialism towards communism. At the same time, the socialist state defends socialism as a social system against aggression and subversion, against capitalist restoration.
The socialist revolution and the class rule of the workers take away the ownership of the means of production from the bourgeoisie and the big landowners and turn these into collective socialist property. Socialism abolishes the exploitation of the labour power, which ceases to be a commodity thereby ending capitalist wage slavery. Everyone is paid according to his or her contribution.
Under socialism the working population enjoys genuine influence on the development of society, on the relation to nature, and on their existence. The society and the economy develop according to a deliberate plan, which all adults and fit citizens take part in carrying out. The objective of production is no longer profit, but to cover the constantly growing material and cultural needs of the society and the humans. The socialist economy makes possible and requires a full and versatile development of the technical-scientific revolution in the interests of the entire society. It aims at developing on the basis of the most advanced technology and science.
If the construction of socialism is to succeed, it does not just require the constant material, social and cultural progress of the entire population, the abolition of unemployment, housing for everyone, everyone’s possibility of getting an education, etc. It also requires a many-sided extension of the political democracy, of the freedom and human rights and of a flourishing cultural and social life.
Democracy is a decisive driving force in the construction of socialism. Socialism opens the possibility of democracy being a genuine fact rather than a formality and its constant extension in accordance with the concrete conditions. It does not just include the traditional bourgeois-democratic rights; the democracy is extended to include production and all sides of society. The individual, social and political human rights will be reality, from the right to life and food, the right to work and a home, the right to a private life, personal security and one’s own property. On the other hand, socialism, just like the bourgeoisie abolished the birth privileges of the aristocracy, abolishes the capitalist law of private property as an outdated privilege for only a few. With socialism, it will be possible, for the first time in history, to genuinely do away with the double oppression, the class and gender oppression, of the workingwomen.
Socialism puts an end to militarism and aggressions, racial hatred, nation prejudice and conflicts, waste of humans and destruction of nature.
Socialism establishes a real welfare society, which values the consideration for humans most, where humans for real are the centres of interest.
Socialism is built on the basis of the firm alliance between the working class, as the ruling and leading class, and the remaining working population in the cities and in the countryside, including the ordinary farmers, functionaries and intellectuals.
The construction of socialism implies the initiative and creative force of the broad masses. It is the conscious action of the population, which builds the new society. It can never be built through bureaucratic and administrative methods, but is the work of the workers and the whole population.
Socialism abolishes the antagonistic contradictions in production and society of which capitalism is saturated, but it cannot overcome all antagonistic contradictions. Because there exist remnants from the former society, because all classes and all class divisions are not abolished, because socialism can be established while there still exists a capitalist and imperialist surrounding world, non-antagonistic and antagonistic contradictions will still exist under socialism.
The existence of antagonistic contradictions means that the class struggle continues through the whole period of socialism.
The overthrown exploiting classes and the international reaction will never put up with their defeat and will always attempt to re-establish the system of exploitation. Under socialism, there likewise exists the danger of the development of a revisionist bureaucracy usurping power as a new ruling bourgeois class and carrying through a capitalist restoration. Both these sources, working for the undermining of socialism, are active over a long period and return again and again.
From the workers’ side, the class struggle is fought as a struggle for defending their state against imperialist aggression, against careerism, bureaucracy and revisionist degeneration. It is fought as a struggle against the old exploiting classes whose political and economic power will be broken down, but which will still exist physically and will attempt to return, and against new bourgeois and revisionist elements, which all will be supported by the international reaction. It is fought as a struggle against all relics from capitalism and aims at blocking all possibilities of capitalist restoration and continuing the progress of the socialist development of the society.
Capitalist restoration is not an objective law; it is not unavoidable, despite the fact that capitalism has returned to those countries, first built socialist societies, and the fact that there does not exist any socialist country today. It is the result of revisionist and bourgeois counter-revolution, which can be prevented, provided the socialist society is built on the foundation of Marxism-Leninism and the working class strengthens its class rule.
It can be avoided, provided the communist party of the workers remains revolutionary and does not turn revisionist, and provided state power does not get the chance of removing itself from the working class, that is, of rising itself above the working class, riding on the back of the working population, but on the contrary remains a strong instrument in the hands of the workers.
The construction of socialism proceeds by stages towards a fully developed socialist society where the transition to communism will take place. This period covers several decades and can last several generations, dependent on the stage of development of the individual society and the international circumstances as a whole.
The socialist revolution is not a magical formula, which with one blow abolishes all the misery of capitalism and solves all problems with which humans are faced.
The building of socialism constitutes a long period of struggle and work for overcoming the marks of the old society and creating a humane and decent society.
The Historical Experiences of Socialism
The socialist society is not constructed according to a model or a scheme, but under concrete historical conditions, in concrete countries, in concrete situations. And the experience of this, from the Paris Commune to the concrete construction of socialism during a part of the twentieth century, are all included as a part of the revolutionary experiences of the international working class, as part of the revolutionary theory. Therefore, they are of vital importance to the revolutionary struggle of the working class, also today.
So far, socialist societies have only been constructed in developmentally backward countries. In such countries, where all contradictions of capitalism and imperialism are being concentrated, and where all the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and anti-colonialist revolution are not solved, it is easier to approach the socialist revolution than in developed, capitalist and imperialist countries. On the other hand, the construction of socialism itself will take place at a faster speed in the developed countries.
Two times in the twentieth century capitalism and imperialism was shaken to its foundations.
The first time was with the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia, marking the beginning of the era of socialist revolutions. For the first time in the history of mankind, a society that was not based on the exploitation and oppression of a majority by a minority was established. For the first time the capitalist bourgeoisie was expropriated and the working class, at the head of the great majority, began the construction of a socialist society. This was the world historic achievement of Lenin and his communist party, of the Bolsheviks and the Russian working class. The Soviet Union was the living proof that a real modern society could develop and prosper without capitalists, without exploiters and parasites, and that working class rule and social ownership of the means of production was not just a dream, an utopia, but was established as a living historical reality.
The tremendous dynamic of socialism, its superiority to capitalism, its ability of creating a hitherto unseen economic and social development, was irrefutably proved through 35 years of socialism in the Soviet Union headed by Lenin and Stalin, from 1917 until immediately after the death of Stalin in 1953, where a group of revisionists in the leadership of the communist party by a coup seized power over the party and the working class state.
In a few decades, the October Revolution was able to transform a backward peasant country, torn up by big landowners and tsarism, a prison for workers and peasants of all nationalities, into a modern industrial nation, which almost could compare with the most advanced countries in the world. Something unseen in the history of the world was taking place: Workers were transforming a devastated tsarist bankrupt estate into an economically, socially, technologically and culturally flourishing socialist Great Power. Hunger, famine and illiteracy were abolished, and all workers, urban as well as rural, experienced an unseen progress in their standard of living and their cultural level.
The life expectancy was almost doubled; public health was improved radically and in short time. New factories, production plants and even whole new cities were constructed by the new society.
The October Revolution and the successful construction of socialism in the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin was the greatest shock to the capitalist-imperialist system, as it was watching the communist ghost of which Marx and Engels had spoken in 1848 materialize as a vigorous social order, an aspiration for all workers, for all the oppressed people of the world.
For that reason, the Western imperialists and reactionary bourgeoisie set all their political, economic and military instruments in motion against the first workers’ state of the world and together with the Nazis and the Italian and Japanese fascists they initiated the Second World War.
But once more, the superior strength of socialism was demonstrated as the Soviet Union, being the main force in the global struggle against Nazism and fascism, smashed the biggest and most efficient military machine ever and drove out the barbarian hordes of Hitler’s Germany from its territory. And it happened once again when the country, devastated of war, was rebuilt in a short time.
Socialism made the Soviet Union a Great Power in the forefront.
A few years later, it was able to send out the first man ever in space, demonstrating its enormous development of technology and productive forces.
Around the first socialist state was grouped a series of countries, which through anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and peoples’ democratic revolutions had liberated themselves from the yoke of Nazism, imperialism and colonialism and from the old reactionary ruling classes. They broke away from the domination of imperialism and from the capitalist global system and created a revolutionary, peoples’ democratic and socialist camp.
The victory against Nazism and fascism and the revolutionary progress, as a result of that victory, was the second historical defeat of capitalism and imperialism in the twentieth century.
By the middle of the century, the capitalist-imperialist system faced its biggest crisis ever. The capitalist “equilibrium” had been destroyed. Germany, Japan and Italy left the Second World War defeated. England and France were severely impaired. The old colonial system had gone disintegrated. A number of new national states emerged, while anti-imperialist national liberation movements developed in those countries still being under the yoke of imperialism. Many capitalist countries were on the brink of revolution.
In this situation, US imperialism took over the role as the undisputed leader of the capitalist world, as the only imperialist Great Power that was not impaired, but strengthened through the Second World War. It mobilized all reactionary forces in the world in order to save the capitalist order. Its strategy was to destroy the socialist camp, to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, to crush all anti-imperialist national liberation movements, and to establish global US hegemony. The US and world capitalism controlled large resources, enormous political, economic, technical, and military force and a worldwide propaganda apparatus, which all together was activated during the Cold War, with the nuclear arms race as the ultimate triumph. Through the Marshall Plan, among other things, the US assisted the recovery of Western European and Japanese imperialism and created a set of military, political and economic mechanisms, as NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, with the purpose of ensuring the regression and fall of socialism. It was making use of its political domination in making the UN a tool for its interests or a stop to the progress of the international community.
The US strategy had two main lines: The first was a line of aggression and armed intervention everywhere in the world, resulting in US bases and military forces in many countries and on all continents, in the US Navy patrolling the oceans, and in atomically armed aircrafts, missiles and satellites controlling space. The other line was the undermining of and ideological aggression against the socialist countries and the communist and workers’ parties in order to cause their degeneration and deviation from scientific socialism. Modern revisionism became the main weapon for combating Marxism-Leninism and the revolution, for forcing “peaceful” counter-revolution. Socialism had proven capable of crushing all attempts to destroy it with armed power, because it enjoyed the support of the working class and the masses, due to its indisputable progress and conquests. The enemies of socialism had to present themselves as Marxist-Leninists striving for “more socialism” and “better socialism”; the agents of capitalist counter-revolution had to pose as “communists”.
Revisionism is ideology and policy disguised as Marxism-Leninism, as scientific socialism, as a policy benefiting the working class and the entire people, but its content is anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist and counter-revolutionary.
Yugoslavia was the first revisionist country in the world. The world historic tragedy to all workers in the world and to socialism happened after the death of Stalin, when a revisionist group in the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) seized power of the communist party and the state of the working class. They changed the Marxist-Leninist line of the CPSU and the Soviet Union and assumed a revisionist platform with theses like “peaceful (parliamentary) transition to socialism”, the transformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the “state of the entire people” and “peaceful co-existence” as the general outline of the foreign policy of the socialist countries. This anti-Marxist platform was canonized at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and was developed further by the subsequent party leaders. The revisionist CPSU was at the head of the capitalist restoration. The Soviet Union was transformed into an imperialist Great Power like the US. With only one exception, all the countries of Eastern Europe took the path of revisionism. Also China and the other countries outside Europe, which through peoples’ revolutions had overthrown the old ruling classes and embarked on a revolutionary path along which the establishment of working class rule and socialism should have been installed, followed a revisionist path.
The only exception from this was the socialist Albania of Enver Hoxha, which brought new evidence of the historical dynamic of socialism. Enver Hoxha, this great Marxist-Leninist, and the Party of Labour of Albania, fought revisionism of all kinds and exposed the revisionist counter-revolution, which took place in the former socialist and peoples’ democracies. A long step had been taken in the transformation of Europe’s most backward country into a contemporary socialist country, when a combination of revisionist and open bourgeois counter-revolution of an aggressive fascist type in 1989-91 changed Albania into a capitalist gambling house, a miserable poorhouse, totally dependent on the “goodwill” of imperialism.
Socialist Albania demonstrated that even a small country is able to build socialism successfully under capitalist-revisionist encirclement and blockade.
Socialism existed unbrokenly as a social system from the October Revolution to the fall of Albania.
Historical experience shows that only Marxism-Leninism, scientific socialism, can lead the working class, the revolution and socialism to victory. If revisionism seizes power, this means the defeat of the revolution and socialism, and the revolutionary struggle of the working class and the peoples, their sacrifices and efforts, does not lead to the construction of a socialist society, but is being blocked and goes in the opposite direction.
In the first phase of this counter-revolutionary process, such revisionist societies are transformed into state capitalist societies, which maintain some socialist forms; in the final phase, an openly bourgeois-capitalist system is established and the socialist façade is being brushed away.
Revisionism in power means the bourgeoisie in power, the creation or recreation of a new ruling bourgeois class. The private capitalist society of exploitation, where the law of the jungle prevails, will inevitably return, unless the working class prevents this, that is, re-seizes state power by making a new socialist revolution.
A distinct feature of revisionist countries is the contradiction between the socialist ideals that are being praised and the capitalist reality, the all-pervading official hypocrisy.
In the name of a false socialism, social-fascist dictatorships, waging social-imperialist wars of aggression, restoring national oppression etc., were established in the revisionist Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries. If a big revolutionary power turn revisionist, this means imperialist as well. This is the case with China, too.
In order to reach its objectives, modern revisionism discredits socialism in the eyes of the working class and the peoples. And the bourgeois propaganda uses the crimes of revisionism, as military interventions (e.g. Czechoslovakia in 1968), aggressions (e.g. Afghanistan in 1979), espionage against the population, oppression of the socialist democracy, careerist opportunism and luxury lifestyle of the revisionist elite, national oppression, social stagnation and decay etc. for smearing socialism so that the working class loses its confidence in socialism.
The same bourgeois propaganda claims that socialism failed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But what fell in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe in 1989-91 were not socialist societies, but revisionist societies that only had their socialist signboard left. Their fall was not the proof of the failure of socialism, but of the failure of modern revisionism.
The bitter experience of the workers and the working population in those countries where private capitalism has made its entry shows that undisguised capitalism, instead of bringing the promised progress, only brings more recession, poverty and misery to the masses, while a new capitalist class, arisen through crime, swindle and corruption, is living in total luxury.
The historical experience shows that capitalism and imperialism, with all possible means, even the most barbarian ones, will turn back the march of history.
The socialist countries are being described as bloody dictatorships by the bourgeois propaganda, and life under socialism is presented as drab and gloomy. But no matter how often these lies are being repeated, they remain propaganda lies. This being said, real lacks, errors and specific negative features of the former socialist countries can be pointed out. Anything else would be inevitable in the construction of a whole new social system for the first time in world history.
Some negative features are historically determined and general of that period or they are concrete manifestations of the historical backwardness, which the first socialist countries had as their legacies.
The general civilizing underdevelopment had to put its mark on the new society. Other errors and shortcomings emanated from the extraordinarily complicated situation under which socialism was constructed right from the start, thereby forcing socialism into a continuous struggle for survival, or imperialist and revisionist undermining activities caused them.
However, these errors are not errors of socialism as such, or features of its nature or “errors” of Marxism-Leninism. In the next attempts of building socialism, it will already develop more easily, in developed as well as in underdeveloped countries.
In the twentieth century, socialism demonstrated that it is a strong, viable and dynamic social system, which develops even backward countries into modern societies and that it means a new and decisively better life for the working class and the broad masses. As a social system socialism surpasses capitalism in all fields.
The Road to Socialism and the Revolution Today
The fundamental question of all revolutions is the question of state power. In order to build socialism, the workers, led by their political party, the communist party, must conquer state power. The working class must rally round itself all other forces in society that suffers from capitalism and imperialism and play the leading role in the socialist revolution.
Conquering state power does not simply mean taking over the capitalist state apparatus, trying to build a socialist society by this state. That will never be possible. The revolution must destroy the old capitalist state; it must crush the capitalist state apparatus that is organized for ensuring capitalist class rule and suppressing the majority of the population. The revolution must thoroughly build a new state power, an instrument of working class rule, a socialist state expressing and defending the interests of the great majority of the population and serving as a tool for building socialism.
Necessarily, the concrete forms of socialist state power vary according to different countries because it is based on the situation, the traditions and culture of the countries and of the peoples. The socialist revolution proceeds and develops nationally, in concrete international circumstances and given historical conditions. It is the result of the inner contradictions in each country, of their intensification to the bursting point. It is driven forward by society’s own development demands and defends the nation and its future. Therefore, the socialist revolution cannot be neither imported nor exported and cannot be forced militarily from the outside.
In every single country, the working class, the country’s own population, makes the revolution, although it will enjoy the support of the working class and the peoples all over the world, as well as of genuine socialist countries. The Danish workers must carry through the revolution in Denmark themselves and cannot depend solemnly on the international developments; socialist Denmark must be constructed and developed according to the demands of Danish society, that is, on a national basis.
A revolution sends reactionary class rule packing by force. The socialist revolution brings the most powerful ruling class ever, the capitalist class, its state, its hegemony to an early grave. It is a naive dream thinking that the transition to socialism can be peaceful, that the capitalists will give up power voluntarily, that they will renounce their enormous wealth, accumulated through the swot of the workers, and leave the historical arena by themselves, and that all capitalists and their pillars will work for the construction of socialism on equal terms with all other citizens. It is dangerous to believe that they will accept the will of the majority and the revolutionary socialist democracy.
There is no historical evidence of a peaceful transition to socialism and the conditions for such a transition are not present anywhere in the capitalist world today.
Socialism does not establish itself with one stroke and not at all only by parliamentary means. The transition period between socialism and capitalism is characterized by fierce class struggles. It is a period that passes while the capitalist class, backed by the international counter-revolution, is resisting furiously.
For the revolution to break out, there must exist a crisis in society with the open exposure of the antagonistic class contradictions and their sharpening to the busting point, with big mass protests, strikes and social unrest, which leads to a revolutionary situation, to a point, where the ruling class is unable to rule as before and where the workers and the people will not tolerate the ruling regime any longer.
Whether such a revolutionary crisis, a revolutionary situation, leads to a socialist revolution depends on the consciousness and determination of the working class, on its organisation and its ability to rally round itself the majority of the population and to understand the manoeuvres of the capitalists and their pillars. It depends on the line of the communist party; whether it follows a correct Marxist-Leninist line, whether it has the strength, experience and influence to win the support of the majority of the working class for the revolution and to isolate the reformist and revisionist parties, the reactionary trade union leaders and their trade union apparatus, that is, to eliminate their mass basis.
The tasks of the revolution vary in different countries, depending on their development and position in the world imperialist system. In all developed capitalist and imperialist countries, socialism is an immediate goal.
In the underdeveloped former colonies, the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist revolution are combined with the tasks of the socialist revolution, and the revolution will proceed through more stages. The social basis of the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist revolution also comprises a part of the capitalist class, the so-called national bourgeoisie.
In these societies where a very big part of the population is farm workers and small peasants, the question of land reforms is still very actual and urgent because the big landowners own the bulk of the land.
In the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist revolutions of the twentieth century, which often were dressed up as socialist revolutions, this national bourgeoisie and not the working class got into power. In many of these countries, the national bourgeoisie has joined imperialism very closely, sold out the conquests of the revolution and has become an upper class rolling in money, whose luxury is contrasting sharply with the widespread mass poverty.
Imperialism has again strengthened its positions and interferes openly in the internal affairs of these countries. It arranges coups and installs or overthrows regimes, the cliques in power, according to its interests. The worn-out servants of US imperialism are kicked out when it is considered necessary and replaced by new ones in order to avoid the development of a popular revolution. Progressive and anti-imperialist governments are undermined and replaced by new ones obeying the dictates of imperialism.
The national question, the question of national sovereignty and independence, is also a most important question to a series of countries in today’s world, including many developed countries. Principally, Marxism-Leninism recognizes the right of national self-determination, including the right of a nation to break away from an oppressor nation. Whether a distinct national secession and the formation of a new state should enjoy the support of the workers in the world depends on a concrete analysis, whether it weakens or strengthens imperialism which manipulates the national question for its own purposes.
The working class is the largest class in today’s world and the only consequently revolutionary class.
The modern (industrial) worker is found everywhere, and his party, the Marxist-Leninist communist party is found wherever he is, or it is being built in the struggle against reformist and revisionist currents being maintained by imperialism. Around the worker, we find a huge amount of unemployed, of people forced to live on or under the poverty line, of people living from relief measures, charity or social security benefit. The poor urban population in the underdeveloped countries constitutes a special unorganised labour market of small self-employed, street vendors, shoeblacks, rag pickers, criminals and prostitutes (in some countries, the economy of this sector amounts to nearly 60 percent of the GNP). A big part of them are living in prefabs or huts, or are simply without roof over their heads. They are homeless in the rapidly growing megapolises all over the world, which are absorbing the giant immigration from the countryside, its surplus population. In the impoverished land districts, hundreds of millions of people are only just surviving as present-day day labourers and farm workers working for landowners, on the farms or in the plantations of the multinational companies, or as small peasants owning a bit of land, which can barely support a family.
When the world-wide collaboration and struggle for world hegemony between the two imperialist superpowers, US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, stopped due to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and US imperialism proclaimed the “New World Order” with itself as the leader, a new period of the world-wide revolutionary struggle of the working class and the peoples was initiated. It is the period of struggle against US imperialism, the world’s only political, military and economic superpower, against all imperialism, against the global offensive of the multinational monopolies and against the whole imperialist world order.
US imperialism and its positions as a world power have been strengthened. It is the main centre of world reaction, the main enemy of the world’s peoples.
But it is not their only enemy. Other imperialist powers, seeking more power over countries and peoples in the world, are acting in the struggle for world hegemony and redistribution of the world. The US and the big imperialist powers collaborate and join forces against the world’s countries and peoples and against the international working class. This leads to joint imperialist wars when it is in their interest. But the contradictions of imperialist rivalry for getting the place in the sun is constantly sharpening and may become acute. The US faces challengers that will take up the fight. Especially, the European Union (EU), the “United Europe of the Monopolies”, the union of the old European colonial powers which since the German reunification has moved very quickly towards a true big supranational state, “the United States of Europe” with many peoples, nations and former nation states that are being reduced to regional administrations. The EU is an enormous imperialist power with an enormous potential, economically, politically and militarily, and with the dream of becoming a sparkling superpower. It is about to absorb Central and Eastern Europe, it is making its way into the Middle East, and it has its own plans regarding the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and even Latin America, the US backyard. The EU is a giant enemy of the working class and all peoples in the world.
Capitalist Russia, the Russian Federation, is another hotbed of reaction and counter-revolution. As tsarist Russia, it is a nations’ prison. Russia is a weakened power on the world scale, but it is still the second largest military power in the world, a dangerous, aggressive, militarist and revanchist atomic power. Even deep in debt, Russia is an economic Great Power, an imperialist power with rich resources.
On the Asian continent, the revisionist, social-capitalist and social-imperialist China has very rapidly carried out a capitalist modernisation and construction. Only by virtue of its enormous population, area and economic weight in the world, China is a giant, a modern and formidable military power. And the imperialist and revanchist Japan, with huge interests in Asia and the rest of the world, is a heavyweight in the world economy.
Other big, but underdeveloped capitalist countries, are becoming regional Great Powers.
Today’s rivalry and competition between the imperialist powers is very hard, and the contradictions among them are constantly growing. Economic and trade wars between them are breaking out all the time. They are mutually making still new alliances; old alliances are breaking up and new ones are being made or remade.
The danger of war between the imperialist powers, including another world war between the atomic powers, is real.
At the time when the US and the Soviet Union were rivalling and distributing world hegemony, Chinese revisionism was propagating the theory of the “Three Worlds” in order to become the leader of the peoples in the world, of the “third world”. Today, similar revisionist ideas about the socialist revolution not being on the world agenda and countries having carried out an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist revolution as the principal force of revolutionary development are being propagated. These countries are considered the leaders of a so-called “front against neo-liberalism”. According to this theory, it is not imperialism that should be combated. The imperialist EU and other imperialist powers may, according to this revisionist theory, even play a partly progressive role in the world.
But no imperialist powers can ever play a progressive role. They are completely reactionary and bloody enemies of the working class and the oppressed countries and peoples of the world. And there does not exist any country, on any continent, which holds anti-imperialist positions consequently. The overwhelming majority of the third world countries are governed by pro-imperialist, reactionary and capitalist regimes, irrespective of their anti-imperialist postures because of demagogic reasons. The so-called “non-aligned” countries were and are connected with hundreds of threads to Western imperialism, which has strengthened its positions, and the countries which were allies of Soviet social-imperialism, countries on the so-called “non-capitalist road of development”, have found new powers to protect them.
Capitalist propaganda maintains that the “free market economy” brings economic wealth on a global scale, that imperialism is not an aggressive and doomed system, but brings freedom and democracy to the entire world. It asserts that socialism is dead and all class struggle has been replaced by friendly class cooperation.
But the struggle between the two principal classes in capitalist society is permanent and due to their opposite relation to the means of production, to their fundamentally opposite class interests, social view and perspectives for the future. The working class and socialism are, and continue to be, the centre of the revolutionary process in the world.
In many countries, and on all continents, revolutionary crises exist. Bourgeois propaganda is suppressing this fact and is concealing the extensive struggle against imperialism and capitalism being conducted everywhere in the world, the strikes of the working class and the big popular struggles and movements comprising millions of people.
Opposite to the order of capitalism and imperialism, against the “globalisation” of the monopolies, against revisionism and all reaction, are the international working class and its allies, the peoples struggling for national and social liberation, all the giant forces of progress, of revolution and socialism.
The international working class and the peoples, headed by the new Marxist-Leninist communist parties, are preparing for the new wave of anti-imperialist and socialist revolutions, the third wave in the epoch of imperialism and the revolution.
The Class-divided Denmark
Present-day capitalist Denmark is said to have brought welfare to the entire population. It is said to be a society in which few people have too much and even fewer too little, a society where the different classes and social strata are living together in harmony.
This is a false idealisation of the reality in our country. The struggle between the antagonistic classes and class interests pervades Danish life completely.
Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.
Denmark is a class society where the capitalist class, the ruling class, appropriates the labour of the workers. Denmark is a society, built on exploitation, no matter how it is being presented.
The Capitalist Denmark
There is one single class, which has ensured a superabundance of welfare for itself: the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class.
Its absolute top stratum, the small stratum of monopoly capitalists consisting of a few hundred families, enjoy a golden mode of life, built on exploitation, and are surrounded by obeying servants. Some of these monopoly capitalists rank in the international premier league of multinationalcompanies, the class brotherhood of the international monopoly capital. This stratum is the real ruler of the society and the state, the owners of the greater part of all the values produced by society.
In addition, the top stratum of the bourgeoisie consists of big company owners and shareholders, who very rarely have anything to do with the companies, and of the hired corporate managers working in the big companies. It consists of the upper stratum of the public administration, the armed forces and the police, as well as the big landowners and the upper stratum of intellectuals working in the private and public sector. And it comprises career politicians of the state and municipalities, the upper trade union stratum administering enormous trust fortunes, and others.
The capitalist Denmark is also made up of the rest of the bourgeoisie, too; big farmers, self-employed intellectuals, functionaries working in the state power apparatus, some sections of the petty-bourgeoisie and the upper section of the petty-bourgeois strata among the private and public employees. In addition, it includes the labour aristocracy, the privileged and bribed upper stratum of the working class, consisting of foremen and trade union bureaucrats.
The ruling class, its leading agents and bribed pillars, makes up merely a very modest percentage of the total population.
The Working Class
The steadily growing working class, which produces or realizes surplus value to the capital or ensures the reproduction of the labour power, and which constitutes around 60 percent of the population engaged in active employment, is by far the largest class in society. Today’s worker toils in factories and companies, in offices, trade, transport and services, jumps around ensuring that the public and private employers always have fresh labour power at their disposal, or is scantily taking care of that part of the population which cannot be used in the present or future production – the growing number of pensioners, early pensioners and chronic sick. The worker slaves constantly, if not he or she is forced to idleness as unemployed getting unemployment pay or cash benefit. It is a long time ago that the skilled worker was able to support his family solely with his salary. Because of the decline of the real wages, it is imperative that both men and women work. Also most young people work; while they are still in school, they are working as short-time employees in some of the lousiest jobs. All this expresses that the total exploitation is growing.
Today, the working class is made up of more strata than before because capitalist production is still expanding. A considerable amount of women and foreign workers have been added. A series of skilled professions has disappeared and the number of non-skilled or semi-skilled jobs has increased, especially in the expanding service industry. The core of the working class is the industrial worker, the workers working in the centres of large-scale production. The broadest, largest and most militant stratum of the working class is the stratum of unskilled or semi-skilled workers in all branches of the private and public sector.
The working class is the only consequently revolutionary class in capitalist society. Its historical role is to bury capitalism and to be the principal force in the construction of socialism.
The Intellectuals
In every class society, the intellectuals constitute a special stratum, which serves this society and its dominant class.
They are being educated for developing capitalist production, for preserving and developing capitalist society, and for ensuring the ideological oppression of the working class and the broad masses. They are comprised of academics, scientists and specialists, priests, journalists, artists, “advisers” of all kinds, entertainers, teachers of many kinds, students of higher education etc. They do not sell their labour power, but their knowledge and know-how, their skills and spiritual products. Some carry on a self-dependent business with or without employees; others are part of the petty-bourgeois stratum in both the private and public sector. A small portion of the intellectuals becomes part of the bourgeoisie.
The Petty-bourgeoisie and the Petty-bourgeois Strata
Between the two main classes of society are the urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois strata. In total, they constitute a very large group in society, making up approximately one third of the population engaged in employment. They are squeezed by the monopolies and the big and middle-sized capitalists or by the public employer that represents the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.
The urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie includes self-dependent artisans, small farmers and fishermen, small shopkeepers and service companies of different kinds.
The petty bourgeois owns the means of production himself and struggles very hard to survive capitalist competition. Some petty-bourgeois businesses consist of only one person working, or they are family businesses without any employees. Others have a few, a handful or a little more, of employees, whose labour they exploit.
Contrary to the capitalist, the petty bourgeois works in the production himself. The petty-bourgeois labour and the petty-bourgeois businesses are exploited by the banks, which often have them in their pocket, by their suppliers, and by the businesses to which they are sub-suppliers and dependent on. They constantly face ruin because of the bigger companies. A few have success and become capitalists, but the vast majority of them are no success. There is a constant renewal of the petty-bourgeois businesses and their owners; some go bankrupt and are closed down completely or are being bought up by larger companies. The former petty bourgeois is left with a huge debt, is forced to move to poorer housing and is unemployed.
But always a new “entrepreneur” appears, who wants to try his luck.
This traditional petty-bourgeoisie shows a tendency of decreasing in size and is being absorbed in the working class.
The petty-bourgeois strata are a very large and mixed group of wage earners working in the private and public sector. They do not own the means of production themselves, they do not create or realize surplus value, but they carry out leading functions in the capitalist production and trade or functions preserving the continuance and survival of the capitalist system; control and oppression of the population, ideological functions etc. The petty-bourgeois strata are comprised of administrators, many kinds of specialists and functionaries, teachers, educators, nurses, welfare officers, policemen, employees in the public administration and many others.
The petty bourgeois has a double character, a reactionary side and a side uniting him with the working class and the future socialist society.
A great part of the petty bourgeoisie lives partly by exploitation of the working class or by getting a share of the profits. On the other hand, they work themselves. They dream of becoming a capitalist or making a career for themselves by advancing in the company or in the public sector. They are being threatened with standing without anything, as unemployed, with going bankrupt or with getting sacked. They must continuously work harder and harder and are constantly being pushed to satisfy bigger demands.
The upper part of the petty-bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois strata is very near to the bourgeoisie, whereas the lower part is very close to the skilled workers of the working class.
Those parts of the petty-bourgeoisie, who do not live from exploitation, do not participate in the exploitation, are not bribed by special privileges, and who are clashing with the monopoly capital and its state, are the more or less solid allies of the workers in the daily struggle and in the struggle for the new society. Among the public employees, this part is a very big. A socialist revolution will improve their situation. The progressive part of the intellectuals and the students are the allies of the working class.
On the contrary, those living extensively from exploitation, whose way of life is very close to the life of the bourgeois, and who are working in leading positions of the capitalist production, the social organization or of the repression and power apparatus of the bourgeoisie, as well as the reactionary intellectuals, are the stable allies of the capital. They have something to lose in a revolution.
Between these two petty-bourgeois extremes, there is a fairly considerable group that will tend towards supporting the existing system. This group has to be neutralized politically so that it does not become a force acting on the side of the counter-revolution.
The petty-bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois strata as a whole vacillate between the bourgeoisie and the working class. They constitute the social basis of the most reactionary political and ideological currents.
Also the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and the labour aristocracy constitute the social basis of opportunism in the workers’ movement, that is, reformism and revisionism.
At the bottom of society we find a small stratum, which stems from the working class, the so-called lumpenproletariat, which lives from swindling, prostitution and crime and is completely reactionary.
The Social Basis of the Revolution
The social basis of the socialist revolution extends continuously. Because of this, the divisive efforts of the capital increase too; its efforts to fan and deepen all contradictions in the working class and in the population are increasing. For that, the capital uses all its political parties, its giant media apparatus, the reactionary trade union leaders and the labour aristocracy, and now and then even elements from the lumpenproletariat, too.
Also in Denmark, the social basis of the revolution broadens, and therefore the dominant class and its lackeys of both sexes use still more sophisticated and crude measures to control and to split the population in order to prevent the unification of forces against the capital. The social polarization is growing, the big class distinctions are getting more obvious, the desperation, the hatred and the fury is increasing, as does the indifference, apathy and egoism. The social unrest is smouldering; the time where Denmark was an “oasis of class cooperation in the midst of the dessert of the fierce class struggle” is gone forever.
The women, who have gained equal rights and equal pay constitutionally, do not enjoy these rights in today’s reality; they are still second-class on the labour market and in society, and they are still the principal responsible of children and family. The female worker is still being oppressed in two ways. The situation of single mothers is very difficult.
The women’s struggle for equal rights and liberation, which is supported by the working class as a whole, is not over at all.
The constant cheap labour demands of the capital have lead to mass import of foreign workers and refugees. In addition, the best-educated people of the poor countries, their doctors, engineers, computer technicians etc., are being imported. In this way these countries are being drained of their know-how and specialists.
As these workers and intellectuals are being uprooted from their native countries, they are being exposed to the discrimination of the employers and the state, to racist smear campaigns from the right-wing and the political reaction, to fascist and racist terror, but the Danish and foreign workers are uniting in the struggle against the common enemy: the capital and the reaction.
The purpose of racism and xenophobia is to fan the contradictions in the working class and among the broad masses; it is to weaken the militancy of the working class and to split the population.
The reaction demands assimilation, that is, the forced Danicization of the foreign workers, or it demands their isolation or expulsion from the country. The state policy has resulted in ghettos, in special immigrant quarters in the big cities.
The workers and the Danish population demand a ban on Nazism and reject xenophobia, discrimination and ghettoization. The working class stands for the voluntary integration of the new citizens on a non-religious basis, respecting their national and cultural identity.
Capitalist Denmark has lost every perspective of an independent development. The special “Danish Welfare Model” has been liquidated. Large assets belonging to society, the national inheritance, have been privatised. The ruling class has liquidated the national state, making Denmark a province of the European Union. It has sold out the national sovereignty and self-determination.
Internationally, the behaviour of capitalist Denmark, as a solid pillar of imperialism’s “New World Order” and a new participant in the aggressionsand predatory wars of imperialism and NATO, is becoming more and more reactionary.
The ruling class and its changing governments, its political parties, has nothing more than declining living conditions, less welfare and less democracy to offer the working class and the great majority.
Only socialism can bring progress to the working class and the great majority, giving Denmark a future.
A Socialist Denmark
The development of a revolutionary crisis in Denmark, and with this the outbreak of the revolution and the transition to socialism, will depend on and is closely coupled with the international developments, especially on the European continent.
Denmark is a small country neighbouring a giant imperialist power, the reunited Germany, which is the leading force in the construction of a new imperialist superpower, the European Union (EU). Denmark is opposite neighbour of another Great Power, Great Britain, which dreams of winning back its position as the centre of the world, as the ruler of a huge colonial empire. And Denmark is close to another centre of reaction on the continent, capitalist Russia.
With a thousand of threads, Denmark is tied together with the structures of imperialism, in the EU and in NATO. Due to the super profits from imperialist exploitation, the ruling capitalist class has been able to make concessions to the working class. The revolution in Denmark will be influenced by all the above-mentioned facts and by the battles of the working class on the continent, too, especially in the countries that are member states of the EU. It will quite probably develop in connection with the existence of revolutionary crises in a number of those countries.
However, the revolution will take place and proceed on a national basis, and so will the construction of socialism. The first task of the revolution, as regards the seizure of power by the working class, is to expropriate the monopolies, including the properties of the multinational companies in Denmark, as it breaks the resistance of the ruling class against the revolutionary will of the people. It will also confiscate the rest of the capitalist property and fortunes, which stems from the exploitation of labour. Socialist Denmark will free itself from all imperialist alliances. It will break all ties with imperialism.
In the beginning, socialism must overcome the damages, which the ruling class and imperialism inflict on society in connection with the transition to genuine peoples’ power. Socialism has to be constructed without the super profits of the global imperialist exploitation, that is, alone by virtue of the resources of the working class and the people. The Danish working class and population are among the best educated and the hardest working people in the world. And even though Denmark is relatively poor on raw materials and always will need a large international trade and development, it has many resources at its disposal and is capable of generating more and use them in accordance with the principles of restoration of the balance of nature, such as production of wind power, solar power etc.
Politically and economically, socialist Denmark will regain its sovereignty, and it will develop society on the basis of sovereignty and reorganizeits production so that it, first and foremost, aims at satisfying the needs of the Danish population. It will be able to get rid of all the unnecessary expenses associated with capitalist production and trade, all the expenses for advertisements etc., and for the maintenance of the enormous capitalist state apparatus with its overgrown bureaucracy. The expropriation of capitalist property and capitalist profits will raise the wealth of the whole society enormously. Denmark will be a prosperous, well-developed country, capable of rapidly building a flourishing socialist society with welfare for all people.
Socialism will make use of all the human resources that capitalism destroys. There will be work for everyone; the right to work will be a guaranteed right.
And with all the resources that will be released, it will soon be possible to lower the normal working hours considerably, that is, to 30 hours, and gradually, to even less. The amount of leisure time increases so that the family lifes of the workers and the population are freed from the hurry and stress and they can start functioning and get time for the personal development of every individual, for further education and for a still more active participation in the political, social and cultural life of society, for a rich personal life.
Socialism will ensure good, plentiful and healthy food for all citizens. Denmark is an agricultural country, which at the moment is able to satisfy not only the needs of its population, but also of 15 million people more. Agricultural production will continue growing, producing more than the Danes consume. There will also be enough for export and perhaps for satisfying millions of starving people all over the world.
The ruthless exploitation, the intensive one-sided production, which wears down nature, animals and people working in agriculture, will cease; the production will be reorganized on an ecological basis. Producers’ dependence on banks and suppliers, their debt slavery, will cease. The estates and the big capitalist farms will be nationalized and become state farms. The small producers will be stimulated to join together on a voluntary basis for a rational and environmentally compatible production.
Socialism enables life in the countryside to develop, enables the local communities to get a new future and enables that more people will be able to live outside the big cities.
A socialist Denmark will ensure good and cheap housing for everyone. Housing shortage will be abolished; nobody will be without a roof over his head. The costs of housing will be limited to their running, maintenance and improvement, because profits and speculation will be banned when the land and the buildings become social property. The social housing corporations are already social property, although they also are an object of profit for banks and financing companies; the real estates of the housing speculators and banks will also become social property. Also, Denmark has many house owners and many owner-occupied flats. Almost all of the people living in these kinds of housing belong to that great majority who will only benefit from socialism. Of course, socialism will not take away the houses from these people. They will go on living in their houses that for the most part are virtually owned by the capital, which forces the “owners” to slave year after year in order to afford to live there. Society will release them from their debt. On the whole, socialism will not confiscate the personal belongings, what people need or their savings. It will ensure that the great majority will get more personal goods and more quality of life.
Socialist Denmark will ensure the functioning of all socially useful institutions, of schools and education centres, of hospitals, old peoples’ homes etc.; it will ensure that all have a high standard and that they are at everyone’s disposal. The healthcare system will be improved with more preventive and guiding offers that will benefit the great majority of the population. The whole healthcare system will be free of charge.
Research for the development and progress of society will take a prominent role at the universities and the institutions of higher education.
Public cultural offers will be increased; there will be no user fee, their use will be free of charge for all. Public transport will be improved so that it really covers the needs in connection with production, work and leisure time. Private transport will be reduced, simply because there will be less need for it. The roads become safer for all road-users, and the city centres will be free of parking lots. Cities belonging to the people will contribute to a better life for them.
The situation of the pensioners will become better. In a socialist society they are not just considered a troublesome surplus population. As long as they are capable and willing of doing something, there will be useful functions for them to fulfil in the socialist construction. Without further hesitations the normal retirement age will be lowered to 60 years or less.
The youth will get the possibility of educating. Whether one gets a higher education will not depend on one’s class background, which is the case today where the son or daughter of an unskilled worker continues to be a rarity at the universities and institutions of higher education. Primary and lower secondary school will give all the children of the country a common basic education. It will no longer aim at producing good labour power to the capital, but at educating skilful members of the socialist society; free, strong, courageous and solidary personalities. Through the combination of theoretical and practical work the school will ensure all children a versatile education. The basic education should be ended at a level corresponding to the level of high school and technical schools.
All small children must be ensured good day-care centres that are not just places for child storage. At the same time, they will get more time with their families, simply because the family gets more time together, when their father and mother do not have to work more than 40 hours a week.
These benefits, and more, are realisable because the socialist economy does not produce for profits, but for satisfying human needs. These needs will keep on growing and will be satisfied still more as the socialist economy gets strengthened. It will not be able to cover all needs immediately, but from the very beginning it will be able to ensure the great majority a welfare and general prosperity that substantially exceeds the best of times of the Danish capitalist welfare society, which today has been liquidated and replaced by a discount model within the framework of the EU and the European monopolies.
All fit members of society, working in the interests of the common good, ensure welfare and prosperity. There will still be differences in wages under socialism, but less than today, and gradually these differences will be reduced.
Equal wages for men and women, the same pay for the same work, will be reality from the first day.
For the first time in history, it will really be possible to abolish the double oppression of the workingwomen due to their class and gender. Real equality and the abolishment of the oppression of women mean economic, political and social equality between men and women. This means that women should not go on with two jobs any longer, but it must be guaranteed that the right to work and to have a family and children at the same time can be implemented. A very big part of the housework can be turned into a social responsibility, among other things, by ensuring good and cheap eating-places and proper food at the workplaces, in the schools and day-care centres. Socialism and workers’ power means that every cook, every checkout assistant, becomes able to take part in administrating society. The heavy heritage of the oppressive ideology, tearing women apart by diminishing their self-esteem, will be overcome through a new position of the woman in society.
Present-day immigrants and their children will more easily become integrated in the socialist society, which will neither isolate nor integrate them by force. The socialist society does not need the import of foreign labour power. It will receive political refugees. The large streams of immigrants and refugees under imperialism will cease as the imperialist countries become socialist and the oppressed countries liberate themselves from imperialism, thereby getting the possibility to start developing.
Socialist Denmark will support the development of the revolution all over the world.
It will work for establishing friendly relations between the peoples in the fields of culture, sports and science, and for strengthening ties between Danish workers and workers in the rest of world. It will enter into and respect international agreements and commitments which do not violate Danish sovereignty, and which are not imperialist in nature, including international environmental agreements.
It recognises the right of the peoples of the Faroe Islands and Greenland to national self-determination, including the right to secession.
Socialist Denmark will defend itself against any imperialist aggression, but will never take part in looting wars against other nations and peoples.
It will be a socialist constitutional state with a clear legislation, without mousetrap clauses or paragraphs where the constitutional rights are cancelled by some subparagraph.
The citizens’ social rights, such as work, housing, education, health etc., will be guaranteed by the socialist state. The socialist society will not just write these rights down on paper, but carry them into effect.
Contrary to what is the situation under capitalism, the democratic rights, such as the freedom of speech and of assembly, will be of substance to the working class and other working people, and at the same time they serve to consolidate and develop the socialist democracy. The objective of all constitutional rights under socialism is to strengthen and develop the socialist society towards communism. Therefore, there neither exist any “right” to fascist and racist propaganda and organisation, nor the “right” to make propaganda and actively work for the restoration of capitalism.
The workers’ class rule will fight and punish the swindle with public assets and the corruption of those who because of their position in society have the possibility of doing that.
The crime, which stems from poverty and expulsion, will soon be reduced.
The workers’ power will suppress all attempts of restoring capitalism and will hinder the former ruling monopoly bourgeoisie and its allies or any new bourgeoisie and revisionist elements in exercising undermining and subversive activities.
The communist party plays a decisive role in the construction of the socialist society. It remains the most important tool of the working class for strengthening the victories of socialism and its development.
As a central driving force in the development of society and as a necessity for the construction and the successes of socialism, democracy and its forms must be developed. The socialist society marches forward according to a central plan for the whole society, which is decided through thorough discussions by those who have to carry them out, that is, all members of the society. Through the revolution, the workers build their own democratic organs for exercising their power. The socialist society builds its own local organs of decision-making and power, municipal councils, neighbourhood councils, tenants’ councils etc. A democratically elected popular assembly, where the workers and the people are virtually represented, is the supreme political authority and appoints the government.
The socialist society will be a republic.
The organs of the socialist democracy must and will necessarily be built and further developed on the basis of the democratic and humanistic traditions of the Danish people.
The Communist Party of the Working Class
The Marxist-Leninist communist party of the working class unites the most conscious fighters of the class. It defends the autonomous class interests of the workers against all other classes and strata, and at the same time it defends the interests of the great majority in the daily struggle against the monopoly capital and its state.
It is a party differing from all other parties. It is not a party that ensures a bunch of career politicians their daily meal, nor is it a chatting club. Its objective is not to deceive the people, but to head the working class and its allies in a socialist revolution and in the construction of socialism.
It is a fighting party. It is not a party, which will reform through the parliament or tries to make the working class believe the existence of a parliamentary and peaceful way to socialism. It tells the truth: a socialist Denmark will claim sacrifices and demands struggle.
Its foundation is the revolutionary theory of the working class, Marxism-Leninism, and it uses this theory in a creating manner on the reality in Denmark, in solving the problems of the class struggle and the revolution. Its organization is based on the principles of democratic centralism.
It seeks to master all the methods of revolutionary struggle in order to continue its activity under all conditions, both legal and illegal. It evolves by taking part in the battles of the class struggle wherever they may be. It does not reject parliamentary work, but does not engage in this work for making horse-tradings, but for using the representation in the Folketing (the parliament) and other parliamentary forums as a mouthpiece of revolutionary policy and for unmasking the same assemblies as pseudo-democratic façades of the dictatorship of the monopoly bourgeoisie.
It seeks to win the majority of the working class for its policy, to unite broad parts of the working people in support of it and to make the revisionist and reformist parties a negligible minority.
It tries to unite the working class, to make all of its strata conscious of their common goal and to strengthen the organization and striking power of the class in the daily and long-term struggle.
In this struggle, the Party works to unite forces around the nucleus of the workers (the industrial workers) and its broadest and most militant stratum, the non-skilled workers.
It works to unite the workers and the great majority in a joined struggle against the capital, in a popular united front against crisis, war and reaction.
It works to achieve a worldwide front against imperialism.
In these matters it may enter a common unity of action with other political forces in the fight for concrete objectives.
In the trade union movement, it fights for winning the majority for the line of class struggle and for isolating the reactionary trade union leadership and trade union bureaucracy.
It fights to win the popular mass organizations, progressive movements and the organizations of the youth for a united struggle against the capital. It seeks to strengthen them as important instruments for creating unity and developing the organizations and militancy of the working people.
It works to bring together the revolutionary youth and make them join its youth organization, Communist Youth League of Denmark (DKU).
It continues the traditions of the young and revolutionary Social Democratic Party. It is firmly based on the many experiences of struggle of the communist movement. It is formed in the struggle against the attempts of the bourgeoisie, reformism and modern revisionism to destroy organized communism in Denmark. It is the heir of the revolutionary Communist Party of Denmark (DKP) and the revolutionary Communist Party of Denmark (Marxist-Leninist) (DKP/ML). It combats all false communist parties and organizations which seek to divert the revolutionary struggle.
The Marxist-Leninist communists of our country have headed the daily defensive struggle, headed all the fights of the class and the people in the whole epoch of imperialism and the revolution.
They were at the head in the struggle against fascism and the occupation of Denmark by Nazi-Germany and in the fight against Danish membership of NATO and the EU. They supported the socialist countries, the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin and socialist Albania, and they are defending them today against the slander of the bourgeois propaganda. They were and are telling the working class the truth about the revisionist counter-revolution. The Marxist-Leninist communists did not, unlike the leadership of the revisionist DKP, form part of an agency of a revisionist and social-imperialist superpower. They were and are fighting revisionism head on. The Marxist-Leninists of the revisionist countries were the first to go to jail during the revisionist counter-revolution. They were working highly illegally as communists were and are doing in fascist countries.
The communist party of the working class is part of the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement, which continues the revolutionary struggle of the Communist International. It works to strengthen its unity on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, to develop and coordinate the worldwide struggle still more closely and to fulfil the international unity of the working class in the struggle on the basis of the great principle: Workers of all countries, unite!
The Two Lines in the Workers’ Movement
The revolutionary theory of the working class for revolutionary change and the construction of the new society is Marxism-Leninism. Marx and Engels founded scientific socialism; Leninism is Marxism in the epoch of imperialism and the revolution.
Historically, there exist two lines, two main currents, in the workers’ movement: the reformist line of class cooperation, which aims at maintaining the capitalist system, and the revolutionary line of class struggle, which aims at overcoming capitalism and establishing a socialist society. The reformist and revisionist parties represent the former; the Marxist-Leninist communist party represents the latter.
Reformism and modern revisionism are the two main reflections of bourgeois influence, of opportunism, in the workers’ movement. Revisionism is the policy of class cooperation; it is reformist policy in Marxist or Marxist-Leninist disguise.
The international social democracy is the main representative of reformism. It is the advocate of certain reforms with the object of getting people to put up with the present state of affairs. It preaches class cooperation in order to get the workers to refrain from fighting for their interests. In certain periods, the ruling monopoly capital prefers to have the social democracy in government as a trustworthy instrument for the administration of capitalism. The social democratic parties of yesterday claimed to be supporters of a certain “democratic socialism” for which their reforms should pave the way. Today, the modern Euro-social democratic parties are acting as supporters of the current imperialist system, as bourgeois reform parties.
The top stratum of the Social Democratic Party, including the top stratum of the trade union movement, has socially grown together with the bourgeoisie, thereby becoming fund capitalists.
The Social Democratic Party is in a deep and insuperable crisis, a strategic crisis; its influence in the working class is on the decline.
The small social democratic parties, the reformist and revisionist parties like the Socialist People’s Party (SF) and the Unity List (Red-Greens) (Enhedslisten) are attempting to take over part of the role of the old Social Democratic Party, of the so-called left-social democrats; they are preaching structural reforms of the capitalist society and are seeking a middle course between capitalism and socialism, that is, the present-day capitalism plus 10-15 percent. They are against the revolutionary transition to socialism. Their role is to contain the increasing dissatisfaction in the worker class and prevent it from taking the revolutionary path, prevent it from supporting and joining the communist party of the working class.
The same holds for the small revisionist parties, Communist Party in Denmark (KPiD) and Communist Party of Denmark (Marxist-Leninist) (DKP/ML), which are both part of international modern revisionism. This current makes common cause with the existing revisionist countries, which it calls socialist.
They have each constructed their own particular “anti-monopolist project”, an “anti-monopolist democracy” and an “anti-monopoly front” respectively, with a “popular and national government” under capitalism. Both should allegedly pave the way for a peaceful transition to socialism.
Modern revisionism, with all its different variants, the discredited Soviet revisionism, Titoism, Eurocommunism, Maoism, Kim-Il-Sungism, Castroism/Guevaraism, Trotskyism etc. suffers defeat after defeat, but renews itself and is revived all the time, because imperialism and the bourgeoisie need it in the battle against the revolution and the genuine Marxist-Leninist communist parties. The revisionist parties and organizations are enemies of the socialist revolution; disguised as revolutionaries, they discredit, distort and undermine scientific socialism, the guideline to the victory of the revolution.
The Marxist-Leninist communist parties wage an extensive struggle in the defence of Marxism-Leninism as a whole and all its fundamental teachings and expose and fight revisionism, its parties and organizations, every kind of opportunism, “left” as well as right, and all bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and reactionary ideologies and policies. Right opportunism, that is, revisionism, still remains the main danger to the communist movement.
The two paths, the two lines in the workers’ movement, have fought each other endlessly since the birth of the workers’ movement. This battle will continue throughout the present epoch, because it has objective social and material roots in both the present capitalist society and in the coming socialist society, where its forms and manifestations will change.
To the Marxist-Leninist communist party, the danger of sliding over to revisionist positions, of turning into a revisionist party, exists continuously. With an interval of decades, this happened twice in the history of the Danish communist movement, in the DKP and the DKP/ML respectively. Both times this was the result of the pressure of the bourgeoisie, which made them give up Marxism-Leninism, the result of a dream of becoming “communist mass parties”, of finding an easy way to socialism, without struggle and sacrifices, without revolution, and of a dream of making an alliance with the Social Democratic Party and its so-called “left-wing”.
Both times, workers’ aristocratical elements, petty-bourgeois intellectuals and degenerated functionaries of the party apparatus played a key role in the coup against the party and its ordinary members. And both times, the Marxist-Leninist communists of the party fought the revisionist development and were forced to leave the party, when it was clear that the battle for its revolutionary character was lost. Hereafter, they undauntedly set to rebuild a strong Marxist-Leninist party without which socialism remains a dream.
The class struggle inside the communist party as a reflection of the class struggle in society, as a reflection of the two lines in the workers’ movement, continues non-stop.
Therefore, the unity of the Party on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, which is its most important and precious property, is strengthened, when the Party cleanses itself of opportunist, factionalist and degenerated elements. It must constantly improve its social composition and ensure that the workers constitute the overwhelming majority of its members, and that its leading positions are filled by industrial workers and unskilled workers and not by petty-bourgeois elements, parliamentarians or party or trade union functionaries. It is strengthened by continuously raising its Marxist-Leninist level, by always being in the forefront of the class struggle, in revolutionary actions, and by always being ready to make sacrifices, big as well as small.
The degeneration of the communist party is not inevitable, although many forces unite in order to fight the Party, and although the intelligence service takes an active part, too.
The communist party can neither be destroyed nor defeated, because it is the most important instrument for the struggle of the working class, because it is borne by the best forces of the class, and because it is guided by an invincible theory.
It is the guarantee for victory of the revolution, for the realization of a socialist Denmark.
