Communism and industrial imperialism

I have written before about how the “communist” revolution in the USSR was a scheme cooked up by the global criminocrats to impose on the Russian people their long-term authoritarian-industrial agenda of dispossession and enslavement. [1]

One book I hadn’t yet read when I wrote The False Red Flag was a 1963 analysis by Kostas Papaïoannou, a Greek writer who emigrated to France at the end of the Second World War.

In 2023, his work La Prolétarisation des paysans was republished by Editions La Lenteur and it adds some important insights to what I have already related about the Soviet experiment.

As the preface from La Lenteur sets out: “Papaïoannou reveals in a clear and concrete manner what industrialisation meant in the USSR, the social hegemony of the Party bureaucrats, the monstrous exploitation of manual labourers, the setting-up of scandalous economic privileges, the political terror, the famine, the massacres”. [2]

And there is a particular resonance with the 2020s in the regime’s mission to wipe out small farmers in the name of “progress”.

Its crimes were justified by means of political propaganda, Papaïoannou explains: “By labelling these millions of impoverished mujiks ‘petit-bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’, Lenin and Trotsky got Marxist intellectuals and workers used to the idea of deploying force against the vast majority of small farmers and ideologically paved the way for the ‘final solution’ of the 1930s”. [3]

Joseph Stalin (pictured here with Lenin) was to raise the tone still further, describing Russian farmers as blood-drinking “vampires”, says Papaïoannou. [4]

He adds: “In just a few years, from 1930 to 1936, 25.5 million independent producers were expropriated and forcefully incorporated into some 240,000 collective farms designed to suck dry the farming economy.

“At the same time, a new class of rural bureaucrats was literally created out of nowhere and placed in control of the rural economy”. [5]

Throughout the book, Papaïoannou makes comparisons between the writing of Karl Marx and those who proclaimed themselves his disciples.

In particular, he compares the dispossession of the Russian people under communism to the dispossession of the British people by the enclosures, a historical phenomenon described by Marx.

In both cases the aim was the same – rural people had to be robbed of their self-sufficiency in order to make them available as factory fodder for the exploitative overlords.

In the USSR, the wealth extracted, by force, from the land and the farmers, was used to finance its industrialisation programme.

As I have tried to explain on numerous occasions, industrialism lies at the heart of the global mafia’s activities.

It is the physical means by which its usury-based theft from the rest of us is made material and its supposed benefits for humanity are vastly overshadowed by its noxious effects on our societies, our cultures, our health, our freedom and the living world to which we belong.

Correctly identifying the existence of the global mafia, but not being opposed to its industrialism, is akin, in my mind, to correctly identifying a criminal but not caring less about stopping the crime he is committing.

With regard to the USSR, Papaïoannou writes: “We know that the first five-year plan could only be achieved at the price of a gigantic increase of the industrial workforce: according to the plan’s forecasts, there should have been 15.8 million employees in the national economy for the last year of the period; in fact, in 1932, there were more than 23 million, that’s to say 45% more than expected.

“In eight years (1928-1935), the towns sucked out 17,686,000 small farmers, so 2 million a year.

“During the famine years, 1931 and 1932, 7 million farmers moved into the towns, whose population doubled in less than ten years.

“It is obvious that only complete ‘collectivisation’, in other words the total appropriation of agricultural production, could allow the bureaucracy to confront the problems caused by such accelerated urbanisation, unique in history”. [6]

Unique so far, anyway, because the industrial-financial imperialists are now planning to do the same thing to Latin America, Asia and particularly Africa, as I set out in The Single Global Mafia. [7]

Papaïoannou argues that the massive theft of wealth from rural Russians amounted to what Marx termed “primitive accumulation” and situated historically as a kind of prelude to capitalism.

Thus the Soviet regime, far from representing a social advance beyond capitalism, as it claimed, was in fact a return to the violent feudalism that preceded capitalism.

Papaïoannou points out that it used the same simple and brutal method as ancient despots like the Egyptian Pharaohs or Chinese, Byzantine and Roman emperors.

It was based on the state being regarded as legally owning the land and thus being entitled to receive its produce.

This notion allowed, for example, imperial Rome and then Constantinople to extract around 12.5% of the agricultural produce of occupied Egypt over seven centuries, says Papaïoannou.

But the communist tyranny went still further: “The totalitarian technique enabled much higher percentages; during the 1930s, the state confiscated a third of agricultural production”. [8]

And the Soviet machine was as ruthless as any classical tyrant in carrying out its programme of dispossession and industrial enslavement.

Its true nature had, as I set out in The False Red Flag, already been obvious in its first few years, when it declared war on the real revolutionaries whom Lenin described as “anarchist”. [9]

Thousands upon thousands of freedom-loving people were slaughtered by Trotsky’s Red Army, at Kronstadt and all across the rural parts of the empire, most notably in Ukraine.

And the top-down tyranny continued thereafter.

For instance, a 1931 decree obliged collective farms to “provide” a certain quota of their members to the state, with 2.6 million men subsequently sent to work in the mines and in central Asia. [10]

This was nothing less than slavery.

Papaïoannou describes how in one small rural district, Velikié Louki, the first month alone of Stalin’s campaign against small farmers led to the destruction of 3,551 farming households – 1,307 by means of deportation, 947 by arrest and 1,297 by transfer to poor-quality land. [11]

Three years later, Stalin and Molotov’s Instructions recorded a Soviet prison population of 800,000 (more than four times as many as under the Tsar), and that did not even include those in work camps and colonies. [12]

Stalin passed “unprecedented terrorist legislation” aimed at protecting the state’s “collective farm property” from members of those same collective farms, says Papaïoannou.

“Thus, the decree of August 7 1932 on the protection of state property introduced the death penalty for any pilfering in the fields”. [13]

Even the collective nature of its own farms came to be seen as a threat by the regime, since this encouraged a sense of solidarity not always shared by individual farmers, which Stalin warned could be exploited to subversive effect by what he called “anti-Soviet elements”. [14]

I suppose that in our society today these dissident “elements” would be branded “far right”, “blockers” or “anti-semitic”.

In 1939 a decree was passed forcing Russians to work, without pay, for the state farms for a certain number of days a year (60, 80 or 100 depending on the region), in a blatant revival of the feudal system under the false flag of so-called “socialism”. [15]

Notes Papaïoannou: “It is uniquely thanks to these ‘feudal-military’ methods of exploitation that the state could carry out the primitive accumulation of capital that allowed it to industrialise the country and secure the domination of the bureaucratic class”. [16]

This amounted, in fact, to a kind of imperialist plundering of Russia by what Papaïoannou calls, deploying Marx’s language, an “artificial caste”. [17]

These phoney “revolutionaries” had, as I explain in my booklet, been financed and placed in power by foreign financiers in order to push their profiteering industrialisation plan.

Indeed, Papaïoannou makes a direct comparison with the way that the African slave trade, the imperial pillaging of India and the forced labour of colonised peoples across the world formed part of the huge “primitive accumulation” of wealth that was required to launch the first industrial revolution in Britain. [18]

His book serves as a useful reminder that British imperialism, US imperialism, Soviet communism, globalisation and the proposed “multi-polar” new world order are all aspects of one single ongoing crime against humanity.

[Audio version]

[1] Paul Cudenec, The False Red Flag.
[2] Kostas Papaïoannou, La Prolétarisation des paysans (Saint-Michel-de-Vax: Editions La Lenteur, 2023), p. 9. All translations are my own and all subsequent page references are to this work.
[3] p. 22.
[4] p. 101.
[5] p. 105.
[6] p. 102.
[7] Paul Cudenec, The Single Global Mafia, 2024.
[8] p. 75.
[9] Lénine, Oeuvres choisies (Moscow: Editions en langues étrangères, 1948, vol II), p. 840, cit. p. 19.
[10] p. 111.
[11] p. 107.
[12] pp. 107-108.
[13] pp. 67-68.
[14] Staline, ‘Le travail à la campagne’, in Les Questions du léninisme (Paris: Editions sociales, 1946-47, vol II, pp. 113-114, cit. pp. 68-69.
[15] p. 72.
[16] p. 82.
[17] p. 32.
[18] pp. 45-46.