SPEECH BY D.T. SHEPILOV
Secretary of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. AT THE 20TH CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
FEBRUARY 16, 1956
Soviet News Booklet, No.10
Published by Soviet News, 3 Rosary Gardens, London S.W.7 and
Printed By Farleigh Press Ltd. (T.U. all depts.)
Beechwood Rise, Watford, herts
SPEECH BY D.T. SHEPILOV
Secretary of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.
16 FEBRUARY
COMRADES, the central committee’s report to the 20th Party Congress gave a profound and comprehensive Marxist-Leninist analysis of the present international situation and a scientific generalization of the results of our country’s development in the economic, government and cultural spheres. At the same time, it put forward the major national economic tasks for the next few years and elaborated important propositions of Marxist-Leninist theory illuminating our path in the further struggle for the triumph of the ideas of scientific communism.
The report reflects the feeling for the new uncompromising attitude towards shortcomings, and the spirit of creative quest and initiative which are inherent in the Leninist style of party leadership. These features make themselves felt in all the work of the central committee, in the entire activity of our party.
Take the sphere of international relations, for example. What bold initiative and how many important steps the central committee has taken in this sphere in the recent period in order to ease international tension. This has produced beneficial results which are felt by the masses of the people in East and West.
Now take the sphere of home policy. The central committee has very soberly and critically appraised the situation in various branches of the socialist economy, has disclosed colossal untapped reserves lying latent in our economy, and has mobilised the people of the Soviet country for great constructive effort towards the continued vigorous advance in all fields of socialist production, the foundation of our country’s wealth and power. This initiative of the central committee and the party’s gigantic organisational and educational work among the masses of the people have yielded abundant fruit.
There exists a decisive and objective index showing that our party’s policy is correct, that it expresses the best interests of the country as a whole the interests of the people. This index is the unanimous support given by the masses of the working people to all the measures carried out by the party; it is the great solidarity of the working class, the collective-farm peasantry, and the Soviet intelligentsia with the party and its central committee.
There is no doubt that, following our congress, the entire party, the whole Soviet people, and the progressive forces the world over will heartily welcome the central committee’s report, which strikingly testifies to the great, all-conquering force of the eternally living and eternally developing teaching of Marxism-Leninism.
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Comrade Khrushchov forcefully and convincingly described in his report the laws of development of the two opposite systems-the socialist and the capitalist systems. The whole course of historical development has irrefutably confirmed the thesis of the great Lenin, that the present era is an era of the disintegration and doom of the capitalist system, and of the formation and rapid flowering of the new, socialist system. Today, it is no longer enough lo say that capitalism has ceased to be a single, all-embracing system. That was true before the momentous change which took place as a result of the Second World War. Today socialist relations have taken root not only in our country but in a number of other countries of Europe and Asia, and socialism has become a world system which is gaining in stature and strength.
Before the Second World War the socialist system accounted for 17 per cent of the world’s territory, about 9 per cent of its population, and only 7 per cent of its industrial production. Today the countries of the socialist camp occupy more than 25 per cent of the world’s territory, comprise upwards of 35 per cent of its total population, and account for roughly 30 per cent of its industrial production.
The socialist system is establishing itself at a faster rate than any other social formation ill history. Indeed, it took feudalism more than 200 years to demonstrate its advantages over the slave system of economy and to establish itself as the dominant mode of production. It took the capitalist system of economy about a century and a half to demonstrate its advantages over the feudal system, attain a high level of industrial development, and take shape as a world system. In a third of a century, however, the socialist system has not only demonstrated its complete superiority over capitalism but has taken shape as a world system which is steadily developing along an ascending line.
These are historical facts. Yet in defiance of the facts, bourgeois ideologists are attempting to refute the scientific appraisal that present-day capitalism is decaying and dying away, and to represent it as healthy and prosperous. Only recently, on 5 January, a Presidential message to the United States Congress said that America’s economy had reached an unprecedented level of prosperity.
But is that really so? Let us turn to the figures. In the past twenty-six years the volume of industrial production in the capitalist world increased by 93 per cent, that is, less than two-fold, while in the Soviet Union it increased more than twenty-fold. But the first question that arises is: on what basis did capitalist industry effect this extremely modest expansion? Comrade Khrushchov’s report analysed the four basic factors behind this small increase in production. I should like to dwell in greater detail on one of them.
Let us take the most highly developed capitalist country, the United States of America, where industrial output in the past quarter of a century increased by 134 per cent. The facts show that it rose on militarist yeast, that the Second World War turned out to be a goldmine for the American monopolies, which is why industrial production reached its peak by 1943. Immediately after the war, however, American industry was compelled to curtail production by nearly 30 per cent. This was followed by two slumps-in 1948-49 and in 1953-and today United States industry is only slightly ahead of the 1943 level.
The American monopolies are trying to stimulate business activity by intensifying the arms drive and militarising the economy. A huge share of the national income is being diverted, through the Federal budget, to pay for arms orders. Various forms of state monopoly capitalism are growing considerably stronger. A tremendous mass of finished products and raw material resources goes into unproductive military consumption or lies frozen ill strategic stockpiles. During the postwar years United States military expenditure has totalled more than $340,000 million.
Huge armaments expenditure necessarily leads to a chronic deficit in national budgets and derangement of financial systems. Compared with before the war, the money in circulation in 1954 had increased as follows: in Britain by 250 per cent; in the United States by 370 per cent; in Canada 6-fold; in France 23-fold; in Italy 80-fold; in Japan 200-fold. The real values of the respective currency units in 1954, compared with 1938, were: the U.S. dollar 46 per cent; the pound sterling 31 per cent; the French franc 3.7 per cent; the Italian lira 2 per cent; the Japanese yen less than 0.5 per cent. In 1955 the national debt and private indebtedness in the United States amounted to more than $600,000 million, according to American sources. That is more than two-thirds of the entire national wealth of the United States.
All this brings out an inevitable feature of the present stage in the development of capitalism: it demands constant militarist stimulation. Life has shown that government arms orders to the tune of thousands of millions of dollars and direct military aggression Can, of course, postpone the onset of an economic crisis for a certain length of time, of even temporarily check its progress. That is what took place in the United States as a result of the war in Korea. It is also taking place today in connection with the efforts to carry out the broad plans for forming and arming West German divisions. But it is one thing temporarily to postpone the onset of a crisis, and another thing to nullify the operation of objective economic laws.
Here is what the progressive American economist, Hyman Lumer, has said in this respect: “In resorting to war production as a panacea against economic crises, monopoly capital resembles nothing so much as a drug-addict in whom a dose of his drug at first produces a pleasant sense of well-being. But this is soon followed by the painful after-effects which in turn can only be relieved by another larger dose of the drug. And with each successive dose the immediate sense of well-being becomes less while the after-effects become more agonising until, through ever more frequent and massive doses of the drug, the addict ultimately destroys himself.”1
The entire course of post-war economic development has further intensified the uneven and spasmodic nature of capitalist development. Large-scale militarisation of the economy, carried out through greater exploitation of the masses of the working people, and growth of the tax burden lead to a still greater drop in effective demand, stagnation in the consumer goods industries, a sharpening of the contradictions between town and country, and one-sided economic development, inevitably paving the way for a grave economic crisis. and other social upheavals.
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1Quotations are re-translated from the Russian.
In face of the mounting economic difficulties, the struggle for sources of raw materials and markets is growing particularly bitter. While the capitalist home markets are becoming narrower and narrower under the action of the law of the relative and absolute impoverishment of the working class and ruination of the peasantry, the transition of a number of countries to the socialist path of development and the continuing disintegration of the imperialist colonial system have contracted the foreign markets. By their policy of deliberately breaking up market relations. that took shape among various countries of the world through the centuries, and hindering trade with the socialist countries, the United States monopolies are making the problem of markets more acute than ever, which reduces the manoeuvring potentialities of the monopolies. The struggle between the imperialist forces, above all between the United States and Britain, for markets and sources of raw materials has therefore become extremely sharp, and now two such powers as Western Germany and Japan, which have recovered from the upheavals of the war, have entered this struggle.
That is how things stand with respect to the development of the capitalist system if one looks into the underlying processes hidden behind external conjunctural phenomena. We cannot now therefore speak of a stabilisation of capitalism, not even partial, conditional, restricted stability, as distinct from the middle twenties.
It does not follow, however, that we should draw simplified conclusions about a steady down-grade in capitalist production. Marxist-Leninists have always decisively rejected the theory of the “stagnation of capitalism-the erroneous and unscientific view that the decay of capitalism in the imperialist era means the “bottling up” of productive forces, that a stop is put to technical progress.
The drive for maximum profits and the contraction of the market accentuate the competition between the capitalist countries, between their monopolies, to an unprecedented degree, and this competition inevitably stimulates the renewal of fixed capital. Substantial technical progress is taking place in a number of industries: new highly efficient equipment and all manner of improvements are being introduced. Two trends, as Lenin emphasised, are characteristic of imperialism: one towards technological stagnation and decay, and the opposite trend towards technological growth as a result of competition and the drive of the monopolies for maximum profits.
The offensive of the capitalist monopolies against the working people’s vital interests, the high degree of full and partial unemployment in the major capitalist countries, the colossal rise in the cost of living, the increasing ruination of small commodity producers, and the growth of the tax burden-all this inevitably sharpens the contradictions between labour and capital, and intensifies the struggle of the masses of the working people against the arms drive and the entire system of capitalist oppression.
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Comrades, the central committee’s report pointed out that the exacerbation of the contradictions in the strongholds of the capitalist system-the metropolitan countries-is accompanied by a world-historic process of victorious struggle by the peoples of the far-flung colonial world for their freedom and independence.
“Capitalism”, Lenin said, “has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced countries’.” (Works (Russian edition), Vol. 22, p. 179.)
Capitalism built up a huge pyramid of colonial oppression. On its summit stood a few powers of the white race, and then came various other countries, placed according to their dependence on the colonial “masters”, while the entire weight of this structure pressed down unbearably on pariah nations deprived of all human rights.
On the threshold of the twentieth century there arose a situation which was figuratively described by Cecil Rhodes, prominent ideologist of imperialism and “father” of the British Empire, who voiced the boundless thirst of the colonialists for the seizure of foreign countries. He wrote: “The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided Up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” The imperialist oppressors regarded the colonialist system as eternal, as a normal, “natural” state. Lord Dalhousie, a British governor-general, arrogantly declared that “so long as the sun shines in the sky, so long will the British flag fly over Burma”.
History has shown that the colonialists did not reach the stars, but that here on earth, in vast expanses of the colonial world, the waves of national liberation movements are rising higher and higher.
The October Socialist Revolution dealt imperialism and its rearguard a crushing blow. The gigantic pyramid of colonial oppression is crumbling before our eyes; In 1939 there was still a population of about 1,500 million in colonial and dependent countries. Today more than 1,200 million have already thrown off the yoke of colonial and semi-colonial dependency.
Great China has broken the imperialist and feudal chains and taken to the road of a new life. True, there are some who refuse to recognise the Chinese People’s Republic, but; as the people aptly say, the, great Chinese revolution is in no need of an American resolution. India, who has the world’s second largest population, Indonesia, Egypt, Burma and other countries have also cast off the yoke of colonialism and acquired national independence. A great process of the regeneration’ of peoples of the Arab: East, Africa and Latin America has begun. The entire shameful system of colonial oppression is bursting at the seams.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the forces standing for the preservation of colonialism do not want to reconcile themselves to their defeat, that they are trying to turn back the wheel of history. They want to entrench themselves in important positions in the Asian and African zones, and in the Near and Middle East; they are inciting Asian peoples against one another; and Arab peoples against one another.
The colonialists now assign a special place in their plans to Africa. In a book dealing with the African problem the American journalist, John Gunther, says the African continent “is vital to the western world not merely because it is important strategically and is packed with vital raw materials, but because it is our Last Frontier. Much of Asia has been lost; Africa remains.”
The ideologists of colonialism like to talk about the imperialist powers’ “mission of civilisation” in the colonial countries. They try to screen the policy of neo-colonialism with a false drapery of economic and cultural “aid” to backward and underdeveloped countries. No drapery, however, can hide the real state of affairs in the colonies and dependent countries. What, for example, have the colonialists brought to Africa? The overwhelming majority of the African population is illiterate. In Nigeria there is one doctor for every 133,000 inhabitants, and in the Transvaal, one for every 150,000: A British magazine has estimated that the average wage of Africans in Nyasaland, after taxes, ranges from 20 to 40 per cent of the local subsistence minimum. In Northern Rhodesia an African miner is paid a fraction of the wages a European miner gets for the same work. The foreign colonialists are making fabulous profits there.
Another large zone of colonial domination which the present-day rulers of the capitalist world like to keep behind a screen is Latin America. Most of the Latin-American countries have been turned into agrarian raw material ‘appendages of the powerful American monopolies; their economies have been developed in an extremely one-sided and distorted manner. The living standards in a number of Latin-American countries are extraordinarily low. In Peru the average life-span is only slightly more than thirty years, according to data published in the American press. The average rate of profit obtained by American monopolies in the Latin-American countries, where more than a third of United States capital abroad is invested, is twice as high as the average rate of profit in the United States itself. It is not surprising that the North American monopolies are keeping such a tight grip on their privileges in the Latin-American countries and that, as the Guatemalan events in 1954 showed, they do not balk at direct intervention to suppress the indignation of the oppressed peoples.
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That is what the system of domination and subordination in the countries of the capitalist world really looks like. The efforts of the imperialist ideologists to attach the label of “free world” to the world of capitalist exploitation and colonial oppression are therefore the height of hypocrisy and a mockery of the essence of concepts and human conscience.
Comrades, the entire course of historical development has demonstrated the indisputable superiority of the socialist system over the capitalist system.
Take, for example, the question of rates of economic development. Over the past twenty-six years (1930-55) the average annual increase in industrial production was 12.3 per cent in the U.S.S.R., 3.3 per cent in the United States, 2.4 per cent in Britain, and 0.9 per cent in France. If we take the eleven pre-war and nine post-war years, a twenty-year period of, so to say, normal war-free development of the economies of the two worlds, the picture becomes more impressive still. The average annual increase in industrial production was 18 per cent in the U.S.S.R., 2.8 per cent in the United States, 3.5 per cent in Britain, and 2.5 per cent in France. In other words, the socialist economy is moving ahead from five to seven and more times as fast as the capitalist economy.
It is on this historically tested experience, on the firm foundation of Marxist economic theory, that we base our profound conviction that socialism will win in the economic competition between the two systems, that we shall accomplish, in a very short time, historically speaking, the U.S.S.R.’s principal economic task, namely to overtake and surpass the most highly developed capitalist countries in industrial production per head of population.
The socialist system implies rapid development of productive forces, the abolition of exploitation and parasitic consumption, the absence of economic crises and of wasteful expenditure of the social wealth. It also implies a system under which the aim of social production is man and his requirements, the welfare of the people. That is the first and most fundamental reason for the great attractive force of the ideas of socialism for hundreds of millions of people in East and West.
The second reason is that the socialist system has established a great fraternity of different nationalities, has raised the lowest strata of the people, strata which capitalism has mauled and strangled, to the summits as creators of history, has made them the masters of their destiny. Is it surprising that the common people in all countries associate all their hopes for a better life with the ideas of socialism?
The great attractive force of the ideas of socialism is based, thirdly, on the fact that socialism is a standard-bearer of peace and friendship among all nations, big and small. Is it surprising that in their struggle against capitalist oppression and the policy of war gambles the masses of the people throughout the world are rallying themselves more and more around the banner of peace and socialism?
The ideas of socialism are taking ever wider possession of the masses of the people and have truly become a powerful motive force of toiling mankind. On the other hand, the incurable evils and ulcers of the capitalist social system and of the imperialist ideology are becoming increasingly apparent. It is these opposite lines of development of the two systems that determine the essence of what might be called the ideological strategy of the capitalist world.
Wherein lies the essence of this strategy? The first line of strategy consists in the spokesmen of contemporary capitalism seeking primarily to redecorate the facade of the capitalist edifice in some sort of “popular style”, to inscribe the words “free world” on it in bold letters, and light it. up with some attractive illuminations in the hope of counteracting the powerful beacons of the ideas of socialism. An American author, John Fisher, put it in so many words in a book of his. What the United States lacks, he says, is purpose, an ideal, a mirage; if you please, capable of firing the imagination of people in the West;
In War and Peace, by John Foster Dulles, the present. U.S. Secretary of State, which was published in 1950, we read: “Something has gone wrong with our nation… What we lack is a righteous and dynamic faith. Without it all else avails us little. The lack cannot be compensated for by politicians: however able; or by diplomats, however astute; or by scientists, however inventive; or by bombs, however powerful.”
What is the ideal which the spiritual armour-bearers of contemporary capitalism would like to conjure up in order to camouflage the facade of the edifice of capitalism, what is the “dynamic faith” they are yearning for?
In recent years such a newly concocted ideal has been supplied by the myth of a so-called “new capitalism” or, as the imperialist ideologists are more and more frequently calling it, “people’s capitalism”. According to this myth, old-time capitalism has allegedly passed away. In the twentieth century, the economist Berle claims, there has been a “capitalist revolution”, which has supposedly resulted in fundamental changes in the spheres of both economy and class relations. One set of bourgeois publicists define this “new capitalism” as capitalism “with a planned economy” or “a balanced full-employment economy”. Others claim that the “new capitalism” has itself created a “counter-balance” for the vices of capitalism arising from monopoly domination. A third set go so far as to say that this is capitalism without capitalists or workers, inasmuch as both the one and the other, they claim, work alike, only in different spheres.
In the United States the “new capitalism” myth has been elevated to an official state doctrine, and the propagation of this “people’s capitalism” has been assigned to a special government information agency. Washburn, one of the heads of this agency, recently made the noteworthy statement that it is “important that we have a phrase that distinguishes between capitalism today in the United States and capitalism in Europe 100 years ago, when Marx was writing. The favoured phrase is people’s capitalism.” The information agency has even organised a special “people’s capitalism” exhibition, to be put on display at fairs all over the world. Yet “people’s capitalism” is as absurd an idea as fried ice!
How great indeed must the magnetic force of the ideas of socialism be if in that bastion of the capitalist world, the United States of America, prominent government leaders and their spiritual armour-bearers are compelled to cover up the senile and rotting body of capitalism with a “popular” toga!
The imperialist. politicians use the fig leaves of “Atlantic unity”, “European community” etc. also to cover up the creation of military blocs like the North Atlantic bloc, S.E.A.T.O., the Baghdad Pact, and others. Under this cover an incessant attack is being conducted all along the line against the principle of the national sovereignty of the countries of both East and West.
Similar camouflage is employed by the aggressive powers also in regard to the colonial countries. There was a time when the imperialists did not trouble to resort to masks and spoke of the true aims of colonialism with utter brazenness. The well-known British political leader, Joynson Hicks, for instance, once said that Britain conquered India not for the good of the Indians, and that the glorification of this conquest at meetings of missionaries as something aimed at improving the conditions of the Indians was hypocrisy. Britain, he said, subjugated India in order to find a market for British goods-subjugated it by the sword and had to maintain her power there by the sword.
Now times have changed.. In the face of mighty national liberation movements, the present-day colonialists are compelled to camouflage their policy of expansion, the policy of building up-aggressive blocs, by pretending to be “friends” and “defenders” of the colonial peoples. But they are finding it harder and harder to deceive the enslaved peoples. Recently, in connection with the Eisenhower-Eden declaration, the Egyptian newspaper Al Cumhuria wrote: “The times have gone when the affairs of the Middle East countries could be discussed in London, Paris, and Washington and when Middle East policy changed at the dictate of Western politicians.... The peoples of the Middle East have achieved independence and are capable of solving their problems themselves without foreign interference. They need neither guardians nor mentors.”
The second line of ideological strategy pursued by the forces of aggression consists in smearing and distorting scientific socialism, in misrepresenting the great accomplishments of the countries of the socialist camp and the essence of the liberation movements.
One of the most threadbare methods is the attempt to distort the peaceable character of the foreign policy of the countries of the socialist camp, to represent these countries as a source of danger for peace and the aggressive imperialist countries as peacemakers. In this connection the unfounded thesis is dragged out alleging that the Marxist precept, that capitalism must inevitably be succeeded by socialism, is incompatible with the possibility of peaceful co-existence of the two systems-the capitalist and the socialist systems.
No, these two precepts are fully compatible. Lenin discovered and substantiated the law of the unequal economic and political development of the capitalist countries in the epoch of imperialism. The fact that the pre-requisites for the transition to socialism mature in different countries at different times, that all countries do not break away from the capitalist system at once, signifies that the simultaneous existence of capitalist and socialist states is inevitable in this world of ours. Whether some people like this or not, it is a law of historical development
We know that there are a great many people in the bourgeois countries who believe that capitalism is better than socialism. We Soviet people, just as millions of working folk in all corners of the world, are convinced of the contrary. We are certain that in the historical competition of the two systems, the final victory belongs to socialism, as the higher, more progressive social system.
It goes without saying that we offer capitalism no compromise in ideological, programmatic questions. The capitalist and socialist outlooks cannot be reconciled. Nor is this necessary for the peaceful co-existence of the two systems. It is the task of our scientists, artists of the written word, all workers in the sphere of ideology to reveal the grandeur of the Soviet socialist ideology, to educate our people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, in the spirit of friendship among peoples, in the spirit of irreconcilability to all forms of slavery, oppression, colonialism, and national and racial discrimination. And we shall do this with all resolution and consistency. Moreover, we categorically reject the “cold war” method which has become so popular with the ideologists of reaction. The controversy over which system is better-capitalism or socialism-cannot be settled by force, by the “cold war” method.
The Soviet State, all the countries of the socialist camp, propose that the advantages of the two social systems be tested in competition in the arena of peaceful economic construction, and not in rivalry on the battlefield. He who rejects this principle, to all intents and purposes stands for war, no matter how loud he may trumpet the word “peace” or the latest formula “peace on the brink of war”.
The aforementioned precepts of Marxist-Leninist theory also completely refute the notorious posing of the question of “export of revolution”. It is precisely Marxism, as distinct from all bourgeois ideological conceptions, that has shown that revolutions are not made to order, not by the wishful thinking of individuals, but are the result of the laws of historical development.
“Of course,” Lenin said, “there are people who think that a revolution can be made in another country to order, by agreement. Such people are either mad or provocateurs.... We know that revolutions cannot be made to order or by agreement, that they come about when tens of millions of people come to the conclusion that they no longer can live as before” (Collected Works (Russian edition), Vol. 27, p. 441).
The theory of scientific communism teaches us that the transition from tile capitalist mode ‘of production to the socialist mode is a revolutionary process effected under the leadership of the working class. This distinguishes Marxists from reformists and opportunists, who on the pretext of propounding gradual, evolutionary transition from one mode of production to another, actually uphold the capitalist system. However, revolutionary transformations take different forms.
Comrades, our country was the first in the world to break with capitalism and launch out on the path of socialism. Centuries and thousands of years will pass, but humanity will always pay grateful homage to the working class of Russia, to the heroic Communist Party, to the immortal Lenin, who raised high the sacred banner of struggle for the emancipation of mankind and, ensuring the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, opened a new era in world history-the era of communism.
Nearly four decades have passed since that great historical landmark. In this time the world situation has changed radically. A mighty camp of countries of democracy and socialism, where the ideas of communism constitute the philosophy of many hundreds of millions of people, has come into being. The victorious struggle of the peoples of the colonial and dependent countries against imperialist oppression is developing. In the countries where capitalism still prevails, millions of people are drawn with all their being to socialism. Are not the British workers who are following the Labour Party and the trade unions supporters of socialism? Not to speak of the militant, glorious working class of France and Italy, which has given ample proof of its loyalty to socialist ideals.
In these conditions only formalists and those who would make Marxism dogma can assume that such deep-going transformations as the transition from one social system to another can be effected after a single pattern-in one and the same manner in, say, Denmark and Brazil, Sweden and Malaya. This is a distortion of the essence of Marxism, of its creative spirit. History has fully confirmed the foresight of the great Lenin when he said that “the revolution is developing in different countries in different forms and a different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise)” (Works (Russian edition), Vol.28, p.56). Everything depends on the concrete conditions in each country.
The masses of the people and the Communist and Workers’ Parties have produced much that is new and unique in the course of the profound social changes that have taken place in each of the European people’s democracies. Still more is the course of the socialist revolution in China unique. After the revolutionary establishment of the people’s power, the Chinese Communist Party, creatively applying Marxism-Leninism, concluded that in the conditions of China, “not only individual private property can be replaced by socialist, collective property, but also capitalist property by socialist property by means of peaceful methods, that is, methods of persuasion and education,” as Comrade Mao Tse-tung has pointed out. Having isolated and made harmless that vicious enemy of the people, the comprador bourgeoisie, the Chinese State is transforming, step by step, private ownership in its various forms into socialist ownership.
From the point of view of pedants whose Marxism is all book-learning, such an approach to the question of transforming the property of the exploiters into socialist property is nothing less than a travesty of the principles of Marxism-Leninism, yet actually this is creative Marxism-Leninism in action, the masterly, bold and wise application of Marxist dialectics to the concrete conditions of China by her heroic Communist Party.
There is no doubt that in the future the creative efforts of the millions will produce a still greater variety of forms of transition from capitalism to socialism.
In this connection the precepts set forth in Comrade Khrushchov’s report in the section “Some Fundamental Questions of Present-Day International Development”, among them the precepts on the forms of transition to socialism in different countries, are of tremendous theoretical and practical significance.
It goes without saying that in the concrete conditions of a country where there is a strong reactionary bureaucratic apparatus of bourgeois dictatorship and a strong military caste, and where the exploiting classes offer desperate resistance to the working people’s struggle to remake society along new, socialist lines, the dictatorship of the proletariat will have to break this resistance by violent means. The sharpest forms of class struggle may prove inevitable in such conditions, forced, as they may be, on the working class by the exploiting classes.
But Lenin repeatedly stressed that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the use of force against the exploiters, and not even mainly the use of force” (Collected Works (Russian edition), Vol.29, page 386). Civil wars, the most violent forms of the class struggle, are by no means inevitable in all countries and in all situations. Not long before his death, Engels wrote that the working class is capable of turning universal suffrage”... from a means of deception, which it was before, into an instrument of emancipation” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Russian edition), Vol.1, p.101). He pointed out that after winning the support of the masses of toiling peasants and other exploited sections of the population, the working class can develop “into the decisive power in the land before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like it or not” (ibid., p. 107).
In the contemporary, new world conditions it is fully possible that a situation may arise in a number of countries when the working class, led by its Communist vanguard, and having rallied around itself all other working people, all the progressive forces, may in the course of the revolutionary struggle transform the parliament into an organ of genuine democracy acting in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the nation. Leninism demands concrete reckoning with concrete situations.
One of the characteristic features of our time is the combination of the socialist revolution in certain countries with the mass struggle “of all the oppressed and dissatisfied”. The great Lenin rejected as “pedantically ludicrous” the view that capitalism will be succeeded by socialism when “one host takes up a certain position and declares ‘we are for socialism’, and this will be the social revolution!” (Works (Russian edition, Vol.22, p.340). Actually, in the conditions of the general crisis of capitalism, many socialist and non-socialist currents and streams which are washing away and undermining the dilapidated edifice of capitalism from different sides are converging into a mighty flood of the people’s liberation struggle.
Do these currents and streams differ as to motive forces, ideology and immediate alms? Unquestionably they do. The attraction of these the ideas of socialism has increased to such a measure that, besides Marxist proletarian revolutionaries, political leaders, groups and parties whose understanding of socialism does not coincide with the principles of revolutionary Marxism, but who are ready to fight against imperialism and for the vital interests of the working class and all other working people, declare themselves supporters of socialism. That is why in many cases common interest in the struggle against capitalist oppression, for freedom and democracy, may compel differences and diverging views to recede into the background.
Communists are opposed as a matter of principle to sectarian limitations and narrow-mindedness. They want all contemporary mass movements whatever their type or shade, to unite against imperialism. Struggle against social oppression, against colonialism, for peace and democracy will bring about the realisation of the great hopes of all oppressed peoples, whether they be Arab, Asian, or Latin-American; of all working people, whether they be Catholics or Protestants, Buddhists or Mohammedans.
Never before has the great watchword of unity carried such an active and comprehensive purport. We stand for working class unity and extend the hand of friendship and proletarian solidarity to all workers’ organisations and parties, to all who are prepared to help the working class fulfil its historic mission with honour.
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Comrades, the report of the central committee and the draft directive on the Sixth Five-Year Plan put forward new great tasks in economic and cultural development. In 1960 the output of pig iron will be 3.6 times as great as in the prewar year of 1940, the output of steel 3.7 times, and of oil 4.3 times. Numerous new giant enterprises will spring up all over the country. Suffice it to mention such a great construction undertaking included in the new Five-Year Plan as the Bratsk hydro-electric station, with a capacity of 3,200,000kw. This is five times the capacity of such a large power plant as the Dnieper station. Agriculture is to produce in 1960 no less than 11,000 million poods1 of grain. What titanic socialist economic might is explicit in these figures!
A major step forward will be taken in raising the material wellbeing and the cultural level of our people. We are looking forward to going over to a seven-hour working day, increasing the national income roughly by 60 percent, substantially increasing the real wages of workers and other employees as well as the incomes of the collective farmers. A country which not so long ago was still called “bast-sandal Russia” will introduce universal secondary education in both town and country in the current five-year period.
Of course, comrades, we still have many big and complex tasks to solve: productivity of labour is still low, many of the machines, devices and other goods we make are not as good and are more expensive than those made abroad, the housing question is still a serious problem; we have difficulties to cope with and contradictions to overcome. But our party knows what to do and is successfully solving these tasks, overcoming the difficulties and contradictions.
To create an abundance of material and spiritual wealth in our country with the utmost speed, we must resolutely improve all party and government work, the forms and methods of economic management, and all aspects of the party’s ideological work. The role and significance of Marxist-Leninist theory grow steadily in the conditions of the gradual transition from socialism to communism. For communism does not emerge spontaneously, but is created by the labour of the millions of Soviet people, in full conformity with objective economic laws, according to plans and projects drawn up by the Communist Party on the basis of a profound understanding and correct application of these laws. Hence, the most important tasks of all our ideological work are to perceive the laws of economic development, apply the principles of Marxist theory in practice, generalise the results of the practical activities of the masses of the people and disseminate the experience of the best workers.
Marxist theory teaches us that material being, the mode of production of material wealth, is that decisive force which determines the basic features of a society, the level of its development, and its spiritual life. In other words, for all the importance of this work, we must not limit ourselves only to explaining Marxist-Leninist theory. We Communists are not passive custodians of the Marxist-Leninist heritage, we are not keepers of ideological archives. Ideological work which is not connected with the pressing tasks or economic and cultural development resolves into either talmudistic and dogmatic repetition of well-known truths and principles or empty phrase-mongering and hosannas. To pull one’s weight worthily in the sphere of ideology means to work for Dew achievements in economic and cultural development, to stimulate the growth of socialist consciousness in Soviet people and on this basis facilitate increased production of coal, steel, oil, electric power, machines, grain, butter, meat, potatoes and other vegetables, so as to meet fully the material and cultural needs
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1 62 poods 1 ton approx.
of our people.
In this connection I should like to stress particularly the need to put propaganda and the dissemination of advanced experience on a new footing that will really promote the interests of the state. The propagation and wide-scale application of the methods of trail-blazers in production is the shortest way to abundance. Allow me to illustrate the importance of this with a few simple examples.
The average monthly productivity of the coal-cutting combine teams working at the Kuzbas collieries in the last quarter of 1955 was 7,944 tons, whereas the teams at the Polysayevskaya No.1 pit of the Lenin coal trust brought up in October more than 22,000 tons, in November more than 20,000 tons, and in December more than 25,000 tons. If the productivity achieved by these teams were to be extended to all the pits of this colliery organisation, the output of coal in the Kuzbas would be trebled.
Take agriculture. In many regions the grain yields in some years range from 8 to 10 centners per hectare1 and now and then are even less. Yet last year Kirovograd Region harvested an average of 21 centners of grain per hectare, while 388 field teams in the region raised 25-30 centners per hectare; Dniepropetrovsk Region obtained an average grain harvest of 20.7 centners per hectare. A still higher yield was registered last year by the collective farm ill Berezovsky District, Odessa Region, where Comrade Posmitny is chairman. This farm obtained from its total area of 1,800 hectares2 an average of 35 centners, or 210 poods per hectare.
If we disregard records and set ourselves an aim fully within the reach of every district in our country-to obtain from each hectare not 210 poods, as Comrade Posmitny’s collective farm does, but 100 poods of grain everywhere-we could raise on our present cultivated areas more than 12,000 million poods of grain annually.
Comrades, thousands of facts testify to the gigantic latent potentialities we possess. Because industry failed to fulfil the Five- Year Plan for growth of labour productivity, the output of our economy in the last year of the Five-Year Plan alone was 40,000 million roubles’ worth less than it would have been if the productivity target had been reached: 40,000 million roubles! Or take another example. Owing to indifference to questions of technical progress by our machine builders and leading workers in the field of agriculture, we still mainly use tractor-hauled implements. By going over from this type to tractor-mounted attachments, which is something that was done a long time ago in a number of advanced capitalist countries we could release the majority of the more than 1 million workers who now operate the tractor-drawn implements.
Such are the gigantic potentialities which we possess but which our scientific institutions, economists, agriculturists, propagandists, writers, and many practical workers often ignore.
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1 1 Centner per hectare=0.797cwt. per acre. 1 centner=1.97cwt. aproox.
2 1 hectare=2.47 acres
Thousands of leading workers, innovators, heroes and heroines of labour have come to the fore in all branches of the national economy, and the entire country is rightly proud of their accomplishments. But speaking of heroes, we often forget that the decisive factor of our economic advance is not records set by leading workers but the growth of the productivity of labour of all people engaged in the national economy. Alongside the achievements of the leading workers one can frequently find the most glaring instances of low productivity of labour, and occasionally even downright waste of manpower and material means. In this connection I take the liberty of reading the following unpublished letter written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and dated 12 April 1922. He writes:
“The worst thing we suffer from is an overabundance of generalities in the press and political twaddle while study of local experience is neglected to the extreme. Both in the localities and on top there are powerful currents opposed to truthful popularisation and fair appraisal of this experience....
“What is needed is more and still more concreteness in the study of local experience, detail, trifles, practical work, management of affairs; deeper acquaintance”, with real life in the uyezds,1 volosts,2 and villages alike; we must go into every real, however small, improvement achieved in the face of abysmal poverty and ruin and establish who accomplished it, where and why (by what means); we must not fear to expose mistakes and incapability; we must popularise and advertise in every way each local worker who has distinguished himself even in the slightest, set him up as an example. The more work of this kind is done and the more we go into living practice… the more successfully will the improvement of our press and all our construction proceed...
“With Communist greetings, Lenin.”
It must be mentioned that some of our people are inclined to what can be called Communist conceit and cocksureness, to looking down on the great creative contribution of the masses of the people, as well as the achievements of science and engineering abroad. Such tendencies prevent our cadres from mastering living experience, with a view to placing the achievements of the best workers and enterprises that are promoting technical progress, as well as the achievements of world science and engineering, at the service of the construction of communism.
It is necessary resolutely and with the utmost speed to put an end to such an attitude. At the same time our party demands that all workers in the sphere of ideology combat lack of principle and political alertness, all manifestations of bourgeois ideology, with still greater fervour and firmness. Our ideological work must be truly creative.
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1 County Districts.
2 Rural Districts.
Comrades, the attention of the entire Soviet people is concentrated on the 20th Congress of our party. The hearts of hundreds of millions of our friends throughout the world reach out to it, for time and again they have seen for themselves that the congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are not only important landmarks in the life of the Soviet people but exert a powerful influence on the entire course of world development.
The historical significance of the 20th Party Congress is tremendous. The highest party body has advanced the task of overtaking and surpassing the most highly advanced capitalist countries in production per head of population as the pressing task of our time. And we propose to the capitalist world that it compete with us in the sphere of peaceful economic and cultural development. We are fully convinced of the victory of our new, young, thriving system. The Communist always matches the deed to the word, for the tasks advanced by the Communist Party are always an expression of pressing historical necessity, of the vital interests of the masses of the people, the dictates of social progress.
As it launches on a new Five-Year Plan, our party is filled with inexhaustible energy, great plans of construction, of life-asserting optimism. How many of the political groups and parties that have appeared in the world arena in recent decades have failed to withstand the test of time and have either met” with complete bankruptcy or are dragging out a miserable existence! Only our party, the Communist Party, which started out as a small closely knit body of men rallied around Lenin, has become the mightiest party of our time, a party with a membership of many millions. This is due to the fact that our party derives its strength from two life-giving fountains. The first fountain is the eternally young and all-powerful teaching of Marxism-Leninism, which guides all the practical activities of the party and in turn is constantly enriched by practice. The second is the party’s inseparable and ever-strengthening bonds with the broad masses of the people.
The immortal Lenin created the Bolshevik Party at the borderline between two centuries. A great epoch called to life a great party. Is it not a fact that the heroic accomplishments of the Leninist party are the glory and honour of our time, the pride and hope of all progressive mankind?
Leninism has become the battle standard of our time, the ideology of hundreds of millions of people, a great prime mover of the masses of the people, who are reaching out to a new life, to light and progress.
Long live Leninism!