Communist workers see the hunger for ideas everywhere we go abroad, whether it is along the Silk Road in Iran or Azerbaijan, or at a conference of the African National Congress in South Africa, or to young people we meet at a gathering somewhere in Asia. We find that same interest among workers and young people we meet in Cuba and fellow revolutionists we collaborate with there.

But there is frustration as well. The fact that world capitalism has been weakened does not translate into a burst forward of working-class struggles or an advance for independent labor political action and organization. It does not mean that the working class conquered new ground.

Similarly, the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses does not, on its own, increase the size of the communist movement. It is one thing to celebrate the collapse of these oppressive regimes and to recognize that this tears down the greatest obstacle to drawing workers into world politics and leading the best of them to communist conclusions and organization.

But it is another thing to say the working class in these countries has been strengthened politically or organizationally; it hasn't been. In order for communist leadership to be qualitatively expanded, the class struggle must first sharpen and expand.

The most important thing for class-conscious workers to understand, however, is that communists are in a better position today than at any time since the opening years of the Russian revolution to fight for proletarian leadership of revolutionary struggles as they develop. And the worst mistake we can make is to think that the rulers, that the enemies of the working class, are stronger than they are. To the contrary, they are weaker than they appear.

Everything we might think is strong--if we believed the bourgeois propaganda--is actually weaker than it seems. The rulers' moves are moves from weakness, not strength. They are moves marked by the extended, deflation-biased wave of capitalist development since the opening half of the 1970s.

This closing month of 1994 has been a particularly good one for illustrations. The peso was weaker than it seemed, wasn't it? NAFTA was weaker than it seemed. The U.S. dollar is weaker than it seemed (and at the same time relatively stronger compared not only to the Mexican peso or Canadian dollar but to the currencies of its rivals in Europe and Japan). The Russian army is weaker than it seemed.

What about NATO? NATO is not only weaker than it seems; it is not even an organization, contrary to what the name North Atlantic Treaty Organization implies, and it is less of an alliance than ever before. For most of the political lives of many of us, we thought of NATO as a thing. Even at its strongest, however, NATO was never a thing; it was the registration of a certain international relationship of class forces. It was a name for a collection of imperialist nation-states, each with its own government, its own armed forces, its own currency, and its own class interests. But we used shorthand, as human beings do, and fetishized the NATO alliance (with no substantial damage to our political orientation, in this case, I should add).

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact, however, the rulers of the various European and North American capitalist powers no longer have any commonly perceived threat greater than their own diverging interests that would impel them to pay the price they once did to huddle under Washington's strategic nuclear umbrella. At the same time the imperialist rulers, and the masters of U.S. finance capital above all, want to place themselves in the strongest position militarily under these new conditions to someday roll back the remaining conquests of the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and reimpose the unimpeded dominance of capitalist exploitation.

Let's look at another ruling-class institution: the Catholic Church. The Holy Apostolic Church of Rome is today weaker than at any time in the modern period. Pope John Paul II is Time magazine's man of the year for 1994; the issue is on the stands at grocery counters right now. That should tell us something right there. I'm sure some of us can remember when Richard Nixon was Time's man of the year, or a while later Mikhail Gorbachev!

But bourgeois propagandists have sought to create an image around John Paul of a new church militant, a church on the march. The first Central European pope, a Polish pope who allegedly brought down communism. A church that will not only speak its mind but will mobilize the faithful and wage a fight against abortion rights and contraception.

But the truth is that the Catholic Church is weaker than ever in its modern history. Never before has there been such a gap between the real views, the real practices, and the real doubts of the faithful, on the one hand, and the doctrine of the hierarchy, on the other. The hierarchy cannot get a majority of the faithful to agree with their line on birth control or with their line on abortion. And this phenomenon is not limited to the United States; even in Ireland the grip of the hierarchy has slipped, and perhaps the greatest gap of all is in Italy, the Vatican's home base.

Why is it, then, that institutions that are actually so weak can be presented as so strong? What allows such illusions to persist?

The answer, above all, is that the international labor movement has gone for so long without any mass revolutionary leadership that speaks and acts in the interests of the working class and challenges the petty-bourgeois misleaders who parrot and trail after the bourgeoisie.  
 
 
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