The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) delegation was at the European Communist Meeting organised by the Communist Party of Greece in the European Parliament on December 2. TKP General Secretary Kemal Okuyan contributed to the event, which was organised under the theme of ‘The EU of imperialist wars, capitalist exploitation and anti-communism and Lenin’s timely work “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”, with his speech.
The full text of Okuyan’s speech ‘From the United States of Europe to the European Union: THE PRAISE FOR BETTER CAPITALISM IS ANTI-MARXISM’ is following below:
Lenin’s books, articles and speeches are always oriented towards a specific purpose. Although he was a writer with an excellent command of the language and a sharp orator, he always had in his mind the needs of the struggle for socialism that corresponded to that certain moment; in this sense, Lenin was a revolutionary who did not say unnecessary words or waste paper.
Perhaps for this reason, when we read his collected works, which consist of dozens of volumes, from beginning to end, including short telegram texts, we get the feeling of reading a complementary, creative, dynamic, ‘single work’.
Nevertheless, one cannot help marvelling at the enormous density of his 1915 article ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’. This is a text of less than 1500 words. It is a short article, but of such importance that a comprehensive book could be written on it and meetings could be organised as we are doing now.
Undoubtedly, every text should be analysed by considering the historical context in which it was written, but at the same time, its contemporary value should be revealed and it should be reproduced considering the time that has passed without betraying the main direction intended by the author.
With this understanding, 109 years after its publication, the following remarks can be made about the article ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’:
The article should be taken alongside other works of Lenin that are the product of his attitude towards the confusion, crisis and betrayal witnessed in the international labour movement after the outbreak of the Imperialist War in 1914 and his 1916 book ‘Imperialism’. All these written and verbal contributions are proof that even in the darkest and most hopeless moments Lenin never abandoned the socialist revolution perspective.
Lenin states that under the ‘economic conditions of imperialism’, which can be explained by such phenomena as the export of capital and the division of the world by the ‘advanced’ and ‘civilised’ colonial powers, the United States of Europe would be either impossible or reactionary. Impossible because of the contradictions among the ‘handful’ of advanced capitalist countries, reactionary because of the economic and political destruction that such a union would bring about for the working peoples of both the ‘handful’ of countries and the rest of the world.
When Lenin speaks of the division of the world by a ‘handful’ of powers, he never has the perception of justifying the existing forms of class domination in the rest of the countries. However, in those years, as today, capitalism was not only unevenly distributed on a world scale, but countries played different roles in the international arena. This is an objective fact and the product of the law of unequal development, which Lenin describes in the article with its ‘absolute’ character. Even though the great powers have disintegrated and colonialism in that form has been liquidated, capitalism continues to produce inequalities both in individual countries and on a world scale. These inequalities have economic and political dimensions.
It is also very meaningful to think about Lenin’s emphasis on the fact that the socialist revolution can first take place in one or a few countries together with the law of uneven development of capitalism. Because the law of uneven development means that the dynamics of crisis are also unevenly distributed and, as Marx repeatedly emphasised, revolutions coincide with periods of crisis. Before 1914, the idea of a ‘crisis-free transition to socialism’, which began to dominate the social democratic parties, was given great importance by Lenin, not only because it meant giving up the class struggle, but also because it meant the denial of the most fundamental reality of capitalism.
The salute to the European Union, which emerged years later, this time as a concrete imperialist project, as a ‘progress’ by some so-called Marxists is the result of the same betrayal. The expectation that in a crisis-free and stable Europe, societies will be secured in terms of both welfare and freedom means seeking shelter in the comfort zone of bourgeois politics and an absolute break with Marxism. One of the reasons why, after so many years in which it has been clearly and repeatedly proved that a stable and contradiction-free European Union is an illusion, right-wing and even fascist movements fuelled by ‘crises’ have emerged in many parts of Europe, is the huge social and political gap caused by the revolutionary labour movement being caught up in this illusion.
Today, in 2024, to speak of a ‘better’ or ‘stable’ capitalism, to try to democratise or reform capitalism, to open space for imperialist aggression in the name of ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, to take sides in imperialist wars, to postpone an independent class attitude against a capitalist government in this or that country, to deny the fact that socialist revolution is the actual and only option for all countries must be seen not as a variant of Marxism, but as a break with Marxism. This is the current conclusion to be drawn from Lenin’s article.
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