Democracy and Class Struggle: November 2017

Thursday, November 30, 2017

By not following through with overtures for detente after its own sixty-day deadline, the United States blew its last chance at negotiating with North Korea before it declared itself a de facto nuclear weapons state by Hyun Lee.

The sixty-day clock has run out. After two months of relative quiet, North Korea test-launched another missile in the early morning hours of November 29 (local time). This time, it launched the Hwasong-15, confirmed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that reportedly flew 700 miles in 53 minutes before landing in the sea west of Japan. The missile reached an unprecedented altitude of 2800 miles, more than ten times the height of the International Space Station and is said to be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to anywhere in the United States.

Last month, Joseph Yun, the U.S. State Department’s top official on North Korea policy, had told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that if North Korea halted its nuclear and missile tests for sixty days, the United States would resume direct talks with Pyongyang, according to the Washington Post.

His comment echoed those of State Secretary Rex Tillerson: “The best signal that North Korea could give us that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches. We’ve not had an extended period of time where they have not taken some type of provocative action by launching ballistic missiles. So I think that would be the first and strongest signal they could send us is just stop, stop these missile launches.”

The last North Korean missile test before this latest one was the launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile on September 15, a little more than sixty days ago.

Rather than reach out for talks, as Yun had said, the United States chose to ramp up military exercises. Earlier this month, it sent three aircraft carriers—the USS Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz—and their multi-ship strike groups as well as B-1 bombers to the area to participate in four days of exercises with South Korea and Japan.

Next week, the air forces of South Korea and the United States are scheduled to hold another exercise. Vigilant Ace, which will run from December 4 to 8, will deploy six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters and F-35 aircraft.

About 12,000 U.S. personnel will participate with South Korean troops while 230 aircraft will be flown at eight U.S. and South Korean military installations, according to a news statement released by the U.S. Seventh Air Force. The U.S. Marine Corps and Navy troops will also participate.

Events could have taken a different turn had the United States matched Pyongyang’s restraint by halting the war games, says Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov: “If Pyongyang’s demonstrated restraint over the past two months was met with similar reciprocal steps on behalf of the United States and its allies then we could have moved to the start of direct talks between the United States and North Korea.”

After the latest missile test, Kim Jong-un declared North Korea “a full-fledged nuclear force.” He added that his country’s nuclear weapons are aimed solely at “defending the sovereignty of the nation from the US nuclear threat and protecting the peaceful life of the people” and that no other country is under threat from his country’s nukes.

By not following through with overtures for detente after its own sixty-day deadline, the United States blew its last chance at negotiating with North Korea before it declared itself a de facto nuclear weapons state.

Now it seems its only options are: war to denuclearize North Korea by force—which would claim millions of lives and destabilize the entire region as well as the global economy—or a Peace Treaty to finally end the sixty-five year old Korean War and the withdrawal of its troops from the Korean peninsula.

SOURCE:
http://www.zoominkorea.org/n-korea-declares-itself-a-full-fledged-nuclear-force/

The Russian foreign minister has accused the US of deliberately provoking North Korea into expanding its nuclear program.

Democracy and Class Struggle says the Russian Foreign Minister speaks the truth about US policy on the Korean Peninsula.

Time for a change in Chinese Foreign Ministry shameful kowtowing to Trump's USA.

South Korea's Moon Jae-in has still not developed a spine since taking the Presidential office and disappoints the Korean People and has justly earned the epithet running dog of US Imperialism.

Long Live the Republic : Spain 1939 - directed by Esfir Shub, English Subtitles

Documentary on Spanish Defense of the Republic - Soviet Aid pours into Barcelona lots of emotive scenes with historic comrades and personalities in this Soviet Documentary - the fight for a Democratic Republican Spain continues in 2017 - 1978 created some democratic illusions which Catalonia is smashing.

THE SPANISH MONARCHY AND FRANCO IN THEIR OWN WORDS - PABLO HASEL ON JUAN CARLOS EL BOBON

Poland's Far Right Gains Strength with Government's Tacit Approval

Lenin on Philosophy: Dialectics - The logic of revolution Philosophy and natural science by Evald Ilyenkov

Dialectics - The logic of revolution

Philosophy and natural science

Democracy and Class Struggle says the October Revolution of 1917 is also not just about the event but about the social processes behind the event and the revolutionary philosophical outlook of Lenin which is here vigorously defended by Evald Ilenykov

As for ‘philosophers’ who write today as if Lenin was not interested in dialectics when he was working on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism but was simply defending the ‘universal ABC’s of all materialism’, it must be that they just have not carefully read this chapter of his book.

Or, what is also possible, they have a conception of dialectics which is essentially different from Lenin’s and about which he speaks not only here, but in all his subsequent works on philosophy including the Philosophical Notebooks and the article ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’.

The development of the revolutionary process from 1908 to 1917 completely demolished the pretensions of the Russian Machists in the realm of social and political thought. On the basis of their philosophy they proved to be incapable of creating any influential fraction in the revolutionary movement, not to mention a party which was theoretically and politically able to lead this movement. Not a single one of the progressive forces in the country – and most of all, of course, the revolutionary proletariat – took their philosophy seriously.

The course of events most clearly of all showed that the logic of their thinking was merely the logic of those who had completely lost their heads; a logic dooming them to impotence, without giving or being able to give a scientifically grounded political orientation.

But it was precisely the pretension to being scientific which was the essence of Bogdanov’s position as well as that of the other Russian disciples of Mach. They seriously believed that their philosophical constructions were the ‘philosophy of 20th century natural science’, that it was distinguished by the ‘force of strict and consistent scientific methods’, and that the genuine Marxist point of view consists of an orientation toward a ‘scientific method’ and its application to the cognition of social life.

Their appeal to the authority of natural science was the main line of their argumentation. ‘One can learn a great deal from Mach. And in our stormy times, in our country which is drowned in blood, the most valuable lesson that he teaches is: a tranquil steadiness of thought, strict objectivism of method, ruthless analysis of everything accepted on faith, and the unsparing extermination of all the idols of thought’ – proclaimed Bogdanov and his cothinkers at every step.

Therefore, no matter how formally irreproachable Plekhanov’s criticism of Machism as terminologically disguised Berkeleianism was, it made virtually no impression upon the Machists. ‘Who cares,’ they would say, ‘that our philosophy doesn’t correspond to the criteria of “Baron Holbach” or the “verbal trinkets of Hegel”? This upsets and disturbs us not in the slightest – our strength lies in our agreement with the principles of contemporary scientific thought.’

Bogdanov

It is not surprising that Bogdanov considered it sufficient to simply brush Plekhanov and his supporters aside with one phrase from all their criticism – he didn’t even want to examine their ‘polemical ploys’ against Mach which accused him of idealism and even solipsism. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘is nonsense, having nothing to do with the essence of the argument, which is that Mach teaches mankind “the philosophy of 20th century natural science,” while Plekhanov has stayed behind with the “philosophy of 18th century natural science, as contained in the formulations of Baron Holbach”.’

‘Modern natural science’, ‘the logic of thinking of contemporary natural scientists’ – this was the basic ‘beach-head’ for the Russian positivists in their war against materialist dialectics. And as long as they held on to this beach-head, no ‘philosophical’ argumentation had any effect upon them. And it was precisely this which neither Plekhanov nor his disciples understood. Or to be more precise, they didn’t understand the importance of this circumstance, for it was impossible not to notice the fact – the Machists themselves in all their writings loudly proclaimed that their philosophy was the ‘philosophy of modern science’, the philosophical generalisation of its successes and achievements.

But Plekhanov passed by this aspect of the matter in silence, which the Machists joyfully interpreted as an argument in their favour. They described Plekhanov’s position as the position of a reactionary who was hindering the process of ‘enriching’ Marxism ‘with the methods of exact or so-called “ positive” science.’

Thus until Lenin joined the polemic, to a reader who had not thoroughly investigated the essence of the argument, the situation looked something like this: on the one hand there was the ‘school’ of Plekhanov-Orthodoks-Deborin, who neither knew nor cared to know and apply in politics ‘the methods of exact science’ and who were stubbornly trying to reinforce archaic concepts and fetishes in Marxism which had supposedly been thoroughly refuted by 20th century natural science; an equals sign was placed between Plekhanov’s school as it was thus described and materialist dialectics.

On the other hand there was the group that was attacking this ‘conservative school’ – Bogdanov, Bazarov, Suvorov, Lunacharsky, Yushkevich, Valentinov, Berman and Helphond – who were calling for the union of Marxism with natural science and fighting for a revolutionary, active trend of thought both in natural science and in politics. Mach played here the role of an authoritative symbol of the revolution in natural science, the role of a fully empowered and universally recognised leader of revolutionary philosophical thinking in the sphere of understanding nature.

Such a portrayal of the essence of the argument, in which there was a fairly good dose of demagogy (frequently involuntarily, for the Machists themselves sincerely believed their arguments), was able to win over and actually did win the sympathies of those people who were of a revolutionary frame of mind but who were not very well versed in philosophy; they were won over to the side of empirio-criticism and its variations. There were quite a few of these people both among the workers and among the scientific-technological intelligentsia. And it was for their minds that the philosophical battle was waged.

Plekhanov’s silence on this point – in the debate over the question about the relationship between dialectical materialist philosophy and 20th century natural science – the Machists joyfully interpreted as direct and irrefutable proof of their correctness and their advantage over Plekhanov (over materialist dialectics).

Therefore Plekhanov’s silence, as well as the loud demagogy of the Machists, could have made and actually did make an impression upon the reader which was highly unfavourable for the authority of materialist dialectics. In addition, the Machists very assiduously tried to discover in Plekhanov’s writings even insignificant inaccuracies regarding the special problems of natural science and the terminology of its specialised fields. They played these up with malicious joy, but they rejoiced even more at the definite vagueness which Plekhanov sometimes allowed in his formulations of extremely serious propositions of philosophical materialism; this is the well-known slovenliness which is often encountered in Plekhanov’s writings but which he evidently did not consider very significant. For instance, the definition of sensations as a special kind of ‘hieroglyph’.

In the context of the discussion of the problem as a whole, these inaccuracies and vagueness were perhaps not all that terrible, but when they were torn out of this context, they gave cause for malicious back-biting concerning the ‘consistency’ and ‘principled nature’ of his position.

Plekhanov

But these, of course, were only minor details. The main deficiency in Plekhanov’s position was that he ignored what was actually the central question raised by the Machists: the relationship of the philosophy of Marxism – dialectical materialism, materialist dialectics – to the events which had taken place in natural science, i.e. to the improvements which had been made in the logic of the thinking of natural scientists. This was the central point of the question, and only Lenin understood at that time the full significance of this fact for the philosophy of Marxism.

And only he was able to examine this extremely complex question on a truly principled level. It was on such a level that even now, 70 years later (and what years!), it remains a standard for any Marxist who ventures to examine the problems of the relationship between philosophical dialectics and developing natural scientific thought or theoretical science.

Of course, the chapter in Lenin’s book The Latest Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism struck a crushing blow at Machism as the most typical variety of positivism in general, which had until then portrayed itself as the only philosophy having the supposed right to lay down the law in the name of 20th century natural science, in the name of modern science. This blow proved to be so crushing to the Machists because it was unexpected: the empirio-critics had grown too accustomed to considering that they had a monopoly on the philosophical problems of natural science. They did not expect Lenin’s blow to come from this direction. But the blow proved to be not only well-aimed, but irrefutable.

The chief advantage of Lenin’s criticism of the Russian Machists over Plekhanov’s consisted of the fact that while Lenin agreed with Plekhanov in his assessment of Machism, he tried to examine the roots of this philosophy. That is, he struck his blow not at the effects, but at the causes. He did not proceed to pluck off the tops of the flowers; he tore out the roots. This is the main significance of Lenin’s chapter about the ‘revolution in natural science’. And in this lies the fundamental and timely instructiveness of Lenin’s method of struggle against idealism for us today.

Let us try to briefly formulate the main principles in Lenin’s struggle against the Russian Machists, which show how this struggle radically differs from Plekhanov’s defence of materialism.

... One cannot take up any of the writings of the Machists or about Machism without encountering pretentious reference to the new physics, which is said to have refuted materialism, and so on and so forth. Whether these assertions are well-founded is another question, but the connection between the new physics, or rather a definite school of the new physics, and Machism and other varieties of modern idealist philosophy is beyond doubt. To analyse Machism and at the same time to ignore this connection – as Plekhanov does, is to scoff at the spirit of dialectical materialism, i.e., to sacrifice the method of Engels to the letter of Engels.

This ‘scoffing at the spirit of dialectical materialism’ by Plekhanov is shown by the fact that during the debate with the Machists, because of a number of considerations (among them Lenin noted the desire to inflict moral and political damage on the Bolsheviks by portraying ‘Bogdanovism’ as the philosophy of Bolshevism) he limited his task to demonstrating that the philosophy of dialectical materialism and Bogdanov’s philosophy are two different things. He set out to prove that dialectics and materialism are integral components of Marxism and by no means the verbal atavism of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy, as Bogdanov’s supporters had tried to suggest to the reader.

Plekhanov fulfilled this task with serious knowledge of the matter. He contrasted the system of the philosophical (epistemological) views of Marx and Engels with the system of Bogdanov’s psychophysiological phraseology and demonstrated that these were different things which had nothing in common. There was either Marxism, which is inconceivable and impossible without dialectical materialist philosophy, without materialist epistemology and dialectical logic, or there was the epistemology and logic of Machism, which are fundamentally hostile to Marxism and destructive to it – this was the truth which Plekhanov demonstrated, and here Lenin was in complete solidarity with him.

North Korean Statement on new ICBM Hwasong-15 [English]

DPRK Gov't Statement on Successful Test-fire of New-Type ICBM

The government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea announced the following statement Wednesday over the successful test-fire of new-type ICBM:

The test-fire of intercontinental ballistic rocket Hwasong-15, newly developed under the political resolution and strategic decision of the Workers' Party of Korea, was successfully carried out.

The ICBM Hwasong-15 type weaponry system is an intercontinental ballistic rocket tipped with super-large heavy warhead which is capable of striking the whole mainland of the U.S. This system has much greater advantages in its tactical and technological specifications and technical characteristics than Hwasong-14 whose test-fire was conducted in July last, and it is the most powerful ICBM which meets the goal of the completion of the rocket weaponry system development set by the DPRK.

Upon authorization of the WPK and the government of the DPRK, ICBM Hwasong-15 was launched at 02:48 on Nov. 29, Juche 106 (2017) in the suburbs of Pyongyang under the guidance of Comrade Kim Jong Un.

After making a 53-minute flight along its preset orbit, the rocket accurately landed in the target waters set in the open sea in the East Sea of Korea.

The test-fire was conducted in the highest angle launch system and it had no adverse effect on the security of neighboring countries.

The rocket soared to the highest altitude of 4 475 km and then flew the distance of 950 km.

After watching the successful launch of the new type ICBM Hwasong-15, Kim Jong Un declared with pride that now we have finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, the cause of building a rocket power.

The great success in the test-fire of ICBM Hwasong-15 is a priceless victory won by the great and heroic people of the DPRK who have upheld the WPK's line on the simultaneous development of the two fronts with loyalty without the slightest vacillation despite the vicious challenges by the U.S. imperialists and their followers and manifold difficulties.

The development and advancement of the strategic weapon of the DPRK are to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country from the U.S. imperialists' nuclear blackmail policy and nuclear threat, and to ensure the peaceful life of the people, and therefore, they would not pose any threat to any country and region as long as the interests of the DPRK are not infringed upon. This is our solemn declaration.

As a responsible nuclear power and a peace-loving state, the DPRK will make every possible effort to serve the noble purpose of defending peace and stability of the world.

Catalonia: ‘Jailed pro-independence leaders, in court on Friday’

Democracy and Class Struggle Articles on Russian Revolution centennial

The real meaning of the October revolution is lost in the celebration of it as an historic event - the event came at the end of a long revolutionary social process which goes back to 1905 if not earlier of the birth of a party that built revolution - the Bolshevik Party.

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-real-meaning-of-october-revolution.html

In the final analysis, the October Revolution was not only an insurrection but a revolutionary war that lasted for several years. Consequently, in the imperialist countries the revolution can only be conceived as a revolutionary war which today is simply people’s war - Chairman Gonzalo

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/in-final-analysis-october-revolution.html

The national-colonial question was at the heart of the October Revolution because the October Revolution was not only a movement for socialism, but a revolution against empire by Bill. Fletcher

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-national-colonial-question-was-at.html

Democracy and Class Struggle publishes a chapter of the Marxism Leninism Maoism textbook of the CPI Maoist on the National and Colonial Question.

The recent wave of Imperialist Economism on the Left in Europe around Catalonia has been exposed by Maoist comrades in Franceand Italy and Spain and shows how critical the national question is when confronting modern revisionism and its trotskyist incarnation and the ideological if not yet organisational strength of Marxism Leninism Maoism in Europe

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-october-revolution-and-national-and.html

Democracy and Class Struggle publishes the chapter from the Marxism Leninism Maoism textbook of CPI Maoist on the October Revolution

The period after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution was a period of extreme repression and reaction under the leadership of the Tsar’s Prime Minister, Stolypin. The working class was made the main target of attack.

Wages were reduced by 10 to 15 per cent, and the working day was increased to 10 to 12 hours. Black lists of worker activists were drawn up and they were not given jobs. Systems of fines on workers were introduced. Any attempt to organise was met with savage attacks by the police and goondas organised by the Tsar’s agents.

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-great-october-socialist-revolution.html

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION LIVES IN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE IN 2017

In the video from Moscow we can see first the column of the United Communist Party (OKP) with banners “All power to the Soviets”, “New October will come”

We can see there also the flags of Italian Partito Communista, as their large delegation came to Russia to celebrate the centennial.

In the column with red banners and black banners with a red star, we can see also Rot Front members, Russian Left Front, New Communist Movement (The Red Dawn), The Association of the Soviet Youth, Labor Russia.

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/red-march-moscow-7th-november-2017.html

The question of the middle strata is undoubtedly one of the basic questions of the workers' revolution. The middle strata are the peasantry and the small urban working people. The oppressed nationalities, nine-tenths of whom consist of middle strata, should also be put in this category.

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-october-revolution-and-question-of.html

The development of the revolutionary process from 1908 to 1917 completely demolished the pretensions of the Russian Machists in the realm of social and political thought. On the basis of their philosophy they proved to be incapable of creating any influential fraction in the revolutionary movement, not to mention a party which was theoretically and politically able to lead this movement. Not a single one of the progressive forces in the country – and most of all, of course, the revolutionary proletariat – took their philosophy seriously.

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/lenin-on-philosophy-dialectics-logic-of.html

The Revolution against ‘Capital’ : Gramsci and the Russian Revolution

The Revolution against ‘Capital’

Source: La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale;
First published: Avanti!, 24 December 1917;
Translated: for marxists.org by Natalie Campbell.

The Bolshevik revolution has become a definitive part of the more widespread revolution of the Russian people. The Maximalists, up until two months ago, had been the force necessary to stop the cause grinding to a halt, to stop the road to the future coming to a dead end, to give rise to a final settlement – that would have been a bourgeois settlement.

They have taken possession of power, they've established their dictatorship, and they are developing forms of socialism that mean the revolution will finally have to ease off in order for things to continue harmoniously, without too many great conflicts; with its basis being everything that has already been achieved.

The Bolshevik revolution is based more on ideology than actual events (therefore, at the end of the day, we really don’t need to know any more than we know already). It’s a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was the book of the bourgeoisie, more than of the proletariat. It was the crucial proof needed to show that, in Russia, there had to be a bourgeoisie, there had to be a capitalist era, there had to be a Western-style of progression, before the proletariat could even think about making a comeback, about their class demands, about revolution.

Events overcame ideology. Events have blown out of the water all critical notions which stated Russia would have to develop according to the laws of historical materialism.

The Bolsheviks renounce Karl Marx and they assert, through their clear statement of action, through what they have achieved, that the laws of historical materialism are not as set in stone, as one may think, or one may have thought previously.

Yet, there is still a certain amount of inevitability to these events, and if the Bolsheviks reject some of that which is affirmed in Capital, they do not reject its inherent, invigorating idea.

They are not ‘Marxists’, that’s what it comes down to: they have not used the Master’s works to draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed.

They live out Marxist thought, the one which will never die; the continuation of idealist Italian and German thought, and that in Marx had been corrupted by the emptiness of positivism and naturalism.

In this kind of thinking the main determinant of history is not lifeless economics, but man; societies made up of men, men who have something in common, who get along together, and because of this (civility) they develop a collective social will.

They understand economic matters, they evaluate them and adjust them according to their will, until it is this which becomes the driving force of the economy, that which shapes objective reality and lives and moves; it takes on the characteristics of a scolding hot sheet of metal, which can be sculpted in any way they so choose.

Marx predicted the predictable. Though he couldn’t predict the European war, or better put, he couldn’t predict how long it would go on for and the effects it would have. He couldn’t predict that this war, 3 years of unspeakable suffering, of unspeakable misery, would reawaken the Russian people’s collective will like it did.

A will, of such a sort normally needs a long period of development in order to permeate society; it normally needs a long line of class experience. Man is lazy, it needs to organise itself, firstly on the exterior, it needs to form bodies and associations, but then on the interior, in terms of thought, of will [...] it needs a never-ending continuity and a host of external motivations.

This is why, normally, the rules of Marxist historical criticism take a hold on reality, grasping it with both hands and making everything appear clear.

Normally, it’s through an ever-more intense class struggle that the two classes of capitalism are able to make history. The proletariat is fully aware of its current state of misery, its continuing poverty and it pressures the bourgeoisie to create better conditions.

It fights, obliging the bourgeoisie to better techniques of production, so that the most urgent needs of the proletariat can finally be satisfied.

It’s a long, hard road towards something better, which helps to speed up the pace of production and continually increase the amount of goods which can be of use to all. Many fall along the way, which only makes the wishes of those who remain even more urgent.

The masses are in a permanent state of turmoil, and because of such chaos they become even more ordered in their thinking, they become ever more conscious of their power, of their ability to take on social responsibility and to become the judges of their own fate.

That’s what happens normally. When events run in a certain order. When history passes through ever more complex situations; situations full of increasing meaning and importance, yet at the same time that are so similar. However in Russia, war only helped to ignite the people’s will.

After the suffering which had built up over three years, they found themselves becoming one very quickly. Famine was impending, hunger, or death by hunger, could strike anyone, crush tens of millions of men in an instant. Different wills were united, firstly, in a superficial way, but then in an active and spiritual sense after the revolution.

Socialist thinking allowed the Russian people to reach the experiences of other proletariats. Socialist thinking instantly gave life to the history of the proletariat, to their fight against capitalism, the long line of pains they have had to go through to free themselves ideally from the clutches of a servility which made them poor; it allowed them to create a new consciousness and be living proof of a time yet to come. Socialist thinking gave rise to the social will of the Russian people.

Why should they have to wait so that the history of England is repeated in their own country, so that a bourgeoisie is formed in Russia, that class struggle is ignited, that a class consciousness is born, that the fall of the capitalist world finally comes?

The Russian people have already gone through these events in their minds, and in the mind-set too, of a minority group. They've overcome these experiences. They are what they needed in order to establish themselves, just as they will need the capitalist experiences of the West in order to reach, in a short period of time, the heights of Western production. North America is, in capitalist terms, more advanced than England, because in North America the Anglo-Saxons started from a point which England only reached after a long evolution.

The Russian proletariat, educated in Socialism, will start its history from a high level of production that England has only got to today; its starting point will be something which has been accomplished elsewhere, and from this accomplishment it will be driven to reach the economic maturity that Marx sees a necessary for collectivism. Revolutionaries will themselves create the conditions needed for a full and complete fulfilment of their ideal and they will do so in less time than capitalism would have.

Socialist criticisms of the bourgeois system, which highlight its shortcomings and the unequal distribution of wealth, will enable revolutionaries to do better, to avoid such shortcomings themselves, to not fall into the same traps. In the beginning it will be a collectivism based on misery, on suffering. But it would have been these very conditions of misery and suffering which would have been inherited from a bourgeois regime. Capitalism in Russia, right now, wouldn’t be able to do any more than collectivism can. In fact at the moment it would do much less, as it would find itself facing a discontent and rabid proletariat, incapable of putting up any longer, with the pain and disappointment that economic poverty brings.

Even from an absolute, human point of view, pre-empted socialism can be justified in Russia. The suffering that will be left behind after peace will only be tolerated by the proletariat as long as they feel that their will is intact, that through their persistence they will be able to make it end as soon as possible.

One has the impression that the Maximalists, at this time, are the natural, biological expression, needed to stop the Russian population falling into an atrocious state of ruin, to ensure that the Russian population, caught up in the autonomous, colossal effort of ensuring their own regeneration, will be able to feel a little less the pain caused by the ravenous wolf’s bite; so that Russia doesn’t become a huge forest of wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces.