DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The Communist Party of Labour (Partido Comunista del Trabajo, PCT) was founded
in the conviction that the working class and the other working people need their
own class party in order to fulfil their duty of revolution, to seize political
power and, after doing so, to realise the social, economic and political
transformation by which not only their own class but also the whole of society
will be emancipated.
Based
on the general conclusions of Marxism-Leninism, the founders of the PCT
pledged their revolutionary and militant dedication to the Dominican working
class and other oppressed people.
Fifteen
years later, this idea has remained fresh, and oriented by the conditions of the
present, we are working in order to transform it in reality with revolutionary
enthusiasm.
The
3rd Conference of our party decided that "to continue with the construction
of the Marxist-Leninist Party on the basis of the scientific theory of
Marxism-Leninism constitutes the principal duty of the Dominican
communists." (1)
Of
course, we accept that many things have changed in the world and we even
recognise the great adversities which we communists, and revolutionaries in
general, face in the theoretical, ideological and political fields as we attempt
to work out our ideas and positions in society.
We
even admit that many of our positions have to be developed and explained in the
light of the changes which, during the last years, have shaken the world. But
all that is far from accepting the decline of Marxism-Leninism as the science of
revolution or of the Communist Party as a historical necessity, which is what
the propagandists of imperialism tell us.
After
the scandalous collapse of the so-called socialist bloc of Eastern Europe and,
more especially, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and with the
developments in science, technology and communications, the ideologists of
capitalism have found arguments and reasons to back their claim that socialism
and revolution are dead for all time, and that the capitalist order is eternal.
In
the economics, philosophy and politics of today, theses and all kinds of
formulations abound which claim that the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin
are defeated for all time.
But
what is the truth of such claims?
The
fundamental thing in Marx' theory is his perspective on the class struggle, the
profound analysis in Capital of the dynamics whereby some men and women, the
owners of the means of production, accumulate more and more riches at the price
of generalised, increasingly accentuated misery of other men and women who, not
being owners of such means of production, are forced to sell their labour power
in exchange for a wage.
This essential feature - which is an objective fact
within capitalism- inevitably results in a differentiation of interests and grim
struggles between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
In reality, as described by Marx and Engels, the
class struggle is not the product of capitalism alone. "The history of all
hitherto existing societies", they say in The Communist Manifesto, "is the history of class
struggles." (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto).
Capitalism did not suppress such struggles but, on
the contrary, concentrated them on two basic groups and made them, at the same
time, more acute and incessant.
In one way or another, the theorists of the
bourgeoisie have been obliged to boldly negate or to veil the differences and
struggles between classes. Almost always, bourgeois sociologists and economists
have looked for excuses in order to hide the obvious fact that, in the process
of capitalist production, a minority gets the lion's share of what has been
produced by the large majority.
These efforts of the bourgeois theorists were evident
in the 1840s, exactly when, in the period of the so-called industrial revolution
which implied an unusual rise in the level of productive forces, European
countries, especially England, reached unprecedented levels of economic
development. In the same way that they do today, these bourgeois theorists
called for the complete liberalisation of the market in order to invade all
corners of the world with their cheap commodities. As from 1848, there was a
rise in industry and an extraordinary increase in world trade in those
countries. All that permitted the respective bourgeoisies to raise the real
wages of a minority of the elite of the working class which as a result of such
"crumbs" improved their social situation to a certain extent.
The apologists for capitalism of that time made
efforts to blur every difference between the classes by alleging that the
development of capitalism improved the living conditions the working people to
such a degree that one could no longer speak of differences between them and the
owners of capital.
In the Inaugural Address of the International
Workingmen's Association, Marx unmasked this false idea and showed that although
a privileged stratum of the workers had derived an uncertain benefit through
capitalist expansion, the difference between rich and poor, between exploiters
and exploited had been multiplied many times over, as a result of this
expansion.
Marx showed that whilst capitalism could show its
enormous potential for development, and the bourgeoisie accumulated abundant
riches, alongside this reality and bound to it, there appears another brutally
clear reality: "increasing misery and hunger of the immense majority."
During that dizzy epoch of economic progress, Marx said: "death by
starvation has been elevated to the category of an institution." (2)
The
fate of the workers and of the majority of the population has never been any
different under capitalism, and therefore, their struggles for better living
conditions and against the capitalist order have been a constant factor so that
more and more wage earners participate in such actions. More than 700 million
workers participated in strikes between 1919 and 1939. From the end of the
Second World War till the first years of the sixties, this rose to more than 150
million people and in the seventies the figure amounted to 400 million. All that
gives the lie to the claims of the bourgeois propagandists who declare that the
class struggle has lost its meaning, since the workers have become beneficiaries
of the gains of the imperialist monopolies and that they are more interested in
peace and stability of the system than ever before.
Today,
more than ever before, nominal increases in wages are absorbed by the rise in
the prices of consumption goods and services for the masses. In addition, they
are insignificant in comparison with the increases in the productivity of labour
which have become possible through the scientific and technical revolution and
the development of productive forces.
Computerisation,
robotisation, in short modernisation of the productive processes has resulted in
a reduction in the value of labour power and in a substantial increase in the
surplus value that capitalist exploiters extract from working people.
In
consequence, it is clear that the objective reasons which lead to class
confrontation between the exploited and the exploiters remain and are further
developing.
During
the last 10 or 15 years, a series of events and phenomena have taken place which
have had an impact on the world and have restructured it to a certain extent.
The disintegration of the so-called Soviet Bloc and the influence of the
so-called scientific and technical revolution have created a new situation in
certain regards.
The
rise of biotechnology, microelectronics, telematics, the innovations in the
forms of the organisation of production, computerisation and robotisation of the
assembly lines, the immediate communication at a distance of thousands of
kilometres, the global integration of markets, the increase, predominance and
integration of financial markets, the strategic alliances and fusion of
enterprises which, a short time before, had been rivals belonging to capitalists
of different countries, amongst other processes and situations, appear today as
elements inspiring the capitalist system.
They
demonstrate the potential for development that capitalism still possesses and
they allow its ideologists to make propaganda about the end of class struggle
and revolution, and the establishment of this social, economic and political
system as the highest stage human kind may hope for.
The
countries with a high level of economic development, which promoted the progress
of the productive forces in this period and have taken their profits from it,
imposed market economies on the world economy and restructured it to the
detriment of those countries whose development has been impeded, which are
situated in the so-called Third World.
It
has accomplished what Marx and Engels established in The
German Ideology: "The relations between nations depend on the level of
development of the productive forces in each." (3)
For
futurologists such as Alvin Toffler, "a new civilisation is emerging in our
lives." Of course, in this "new civilisation" there is no place
for class conflicts since in an economy based on computers with predominance of
information technology, the exploited worker does not appear because he simply
no longer exists. Of course, according to Toffler, the exploiter, too, will
disappear.
With
respect to Karl Marx, Toffler tells us: "History has played a nasty trick
on him" (4) as neither the owners of the means of production nor the
workers have assumed power in society. According to him this role is played by a
class which he calls "integrators", people who determine the
enterprise's course instead of directors and planners.
According
to this bourgeois theorist, the technicians will definitely impose themselves on
the workers as well as on the proper owners since industrial society is becoming
increasingly complex and the owners of the enterprises are being squeezed out of
the sphere of production and a bureaucracy imposed. "And instead of the
workers appropriating the means of production in the way Marx predicted it, or
of the capitalists maintaining the power in the way that the pupils of Adam
Smith had desired it, a totally new force has emerged, defying both." (5)
With
this distortion, Toffler and other apologists of the system try to veil the fact
that the true power in an enterprise is held by its owners who have the economic
power.
The
same is valid, although not so directly, for the matters of state as the
governments which administer them are essentially nothing but a concentrated
expression of economic power, independent of the fact that in certain
circumstances this government may seem to be above classes, including the class
of exploiters. In the final analysis, its purpose and activities serve to
maintain the "status quo".
Nowadays
it is clear that the big enterprises and monopolist syndicates are the main
sources of finance for election campaigns with the aim of selecting the central
authorities and the members of parliament. What is more, a characteristic fact
of the last years is the disposition of the capitalist class to have themselves
represented within the state directly. In more and more countries, professional
politicians are giving way to technical entrepreneurs in public affairs.
The
"third wave" is a metaphor with which Toffler and others characterise
the great changes in science and technology and their impact on communications
and production. Undoubtedly, they create new circumstances which no reasonable
person can deny. Work is reorganised, a new type of wage earner is created, the
international division of labour, too, is modified. As can already be seen, an
economy is established whose main axes are services. All this necessarily has
repercussions for the general culture and individual and collective
consciousness.
But
there is no reason to think that the "new" economy being constructed
in the world will end the exploitation of man by man and thus class differences.
The economy of the so-called third wave is capitalist and based on the
appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist entrepreneur, though this
surplus value may today be more veiled than before.
The
computer revolution and the dominance of information technology in the
productive process has given rise to the transition from the economy with a
higher component of physical force from the wage worker to the so-called
"intelligent economy" where computers and robots replace a large
number of persons. At first sight, it may seem that here the exploited and the
creators of surplus value are the computers and robots, and that class struggle
is out of the question.
But
the fact is that man is the subject of knowledge. The human being is the
principal component of the productive forces, through his capacity for making
material things and of always generating new knowledge by which society in
general and production in particular progress in future. Man, who in his origins
developed with the production of agricultural tools, has after thousands of
years reached the moon, explored space and the microcosmos and brought nature
under his control to a large extent.
Man
has been at the centre of all social, political and scientific revolutions and
will continue to be so in future.
With
the gradual automation of production, man stops making manual things and moves
on to other functions such as software creator, computer programmer, system
technician, engineer and technologist in constructing machines etc. This is a
new type of wage earner who indeed sells his skills, in this case his knowledge,
at a better price, nevertheless he does not stop being exploited.
For
some bourgeois theorists, the scientific and technical revolution has eliminated
the proletariat and, at the same time, elevated society to a stage of
post-capitalism. According to them, "knowledge is today more essential than
capital or manpower". They argue that knowledge is "the refuge of
excellence for the wealth of nations" and thus this change "will
create a new dynamic in society and in the economy, and a new policy." (6)
This is said to result in modern society becoming "post-capitalist",
that is, the dialectical negation of capitalism.
At
root, there is the view of the North American philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who
alleges that the current social, economic and political order is the highest
stage of development and of cohabitation mankind could ever reach. Socialism as
the dialectical negation of capitalism is denied as this place is occupied by
post-capitalism, a society in which, as has been shown, knowledge determines
all.
However,
this is a knowledge at the margin of man, neither being an attribute of man nor
of the historic-social relations in which it has been developed. A knowledge,
furthermore, which has no links to capital. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
The
"cognotariat", the substitute for the proletariat, in the
"post-modern", "post-capitalist", "knowledge"
society, or whatever one wishes to call it, is, according to these theorists,
neither bourgeois nor exploited. Of course, in this conception the distribution
of the results of the productive process does not arise, because, on this point,
there is no room for either speculation or tricks of any type. The money
generated from knowledge unquestionably belongs to precisely those who are able
to finance not only the scientific research and discoveries but also the
laboratories and the machines through which such inventions become concrete
within the production process.
In
the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: "The bourgeoisie cannot
exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society." (7)
From
a Marxist perspective, the entire process through which the bourgeoisie has
continuously developed the productive forces to the colossal levels of the
present time itself leads not only to a quantitative and qualitative increase in
the working class but also to the exacerbation of the levels of exploitation.
This also involves proletarianisation of the middle strata of the population
which cannot survive the competition of capital, and become bankrupt and are
forced to sell their labour power.
These
are the objective facts, which apply not only in developed countries but also in
other countries such as the Dominican Republic.
Objective,
too, is the tendency, also predicted by Marx and Engels, whereby the incessant
increase in the level of the productive forces, at a certain moment, will rebel
against the relations of production and social relations in which the increase
has been produced. There has never before been a situation in which men and
women's productive capacity reached such a high level within the framework of
such narrow relations of production as those of the capitalist society.
Within
rather closed circles, the bourgeoisie can make propaganda about the discoveries
of recent times, about the marvels created in the field of communication and its
capacity to produce goods and services.
But
the capitalists will not be able to explain, without unmasking themselves, how
such a high productive capacity can exist in alongside an enormous and
increasingly high level of poverty all over this planet; how, in the very
countries where the development of the productive forces is the highest, 7 out
of every 1,000 live births must die; how it is possible that, in the world,
there are 200 million children below the age of five who live in conditions of
complete malnutrition and 100 million children and youth whose "homes"
are the streets of the metropolitan centres.
Nor
will they be able to explain how it is that 1,300 million people live in
absolute poverty, 800 million are without any employment, 2,000 million have no
access to drinking water, and 100 million are illiterate. (8)
The
reasons for these problems lie in the unjust nature of the capitalist system
itself. They form the objective components of the crisis of that system which
leads to the struggle of the popular masses demanding substantial improvements
in living conditions. Although they do not question the bases of capitalism,
these struggles form a part of the general class struggle taking place on an
increasingly large scale and with greater frequency in almost every country.
Having
resisted the ideological offensive and the escalation of anti-communist
propaganda after Perestroika and its disastrous effects in the European
countries, our Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations are making efforts to
co-ordinate with one another, to participate in a resolute manner and to grow in
the actions of the workers and other sectors of the people in order to develop a
revolutionary perspective.
In
our opinion, the difficulties and confusions which the international
revolutionary movement has been confronted with after the so-called "events
of the East" have reached the bottom, and at present there is a period of
recuperation and realignment of revolutionary ideas and proposals.
As
stated in the Communist Proclamation to the Workers and Peoples, approved at the
International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations in
Ecuador in 1994: "Again we have come up in all continents. We communists
experience a renaissance in each workers' strike, in each mass mobilisation, in
each struggle of the working class and of the peoples for liberty and democracy,
in each youth rebellion, in the cells of guerrilla fighters ... we unite, we
draw lessons from the events and continue to
move forward." (9)
The situation for the capitalists is not as good as their servants would
suggest. In each country or centre of economic power, the increasing economic
and social problems accumulate, step by step creating political difficulties,
and popular protests are growing.
Tensions are developing between the main countries of the regional
economic blocs, threatening the closure of markets for goods and services coming
from other countries as well as protectionist measures to defend the products of
their own country, which often give rise to conflicts between one another in
order to protect their own interests, in flagrant violation of the clauses and
dispositions recently adopted around the so-called Uruguay Round Table which
were approved by the notorious GATT.
Although globalisation and the integration of markets have progressed
sufficiently, it is certain that serious problems persist without being
resolved, both within each specific bloc and the world economy as a whole.
We are confronted with an objective situation in which the peoples' struggles may develop incessantly. In such struggles, Marxist-Leninist parties and organisations have to grow. Uniting revolutionary ideas with the masses becomes the imperative of the current period.
The PCT has decided to get started on facing up to this responsibility
with new inspiration, and to this end, it is stressing the decision of the 9th
National Conference of Activists which invited all of our men and women to
support the resolute struggle of the masses by making a programmatic political
and transcendent social contribution, to resolutely oppose the government and to
participate in the struggle, remaining close to the people at all time and in
all circumstances.
Manuel
Salazar
Footnotes:
(1)
On The General Lines of the Global Strategic Plan, approved
at the 3rd Conference.
(2) Karl Marx, Inaugural Address of
the International Workingmen's Association.
(3) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology.
(4) Alvin Toffler, The Change of Power, Barcelona 1992.
(5) Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, Barcelona 1992.
(6) Peter E Drucker, "The Rise of the Knowledge Society”
in the periodical FACETAS No. 104, 2194
(7) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
1.c.
(8) Report of the United Nations Organisation (UNO) and the World Health
Organisation (WHO) to the Summit Meeting on Social Development in Denmark in
March 1995
(9) Unity
& Struggle, periodical of the International Conference of
Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations, No.
1, 1995