Frankel’s society
association for Marxist theory and politics
Leo Frankel’s society brings together people who share an interest in the political and theoretical questions of the anti-capitalist movement. This movement strives to establish a new, socialist form of social relations. It has always been both politically and ideologically heterogeneous, not only in the past, but especially today. After the separation of its social-democratic branch, it consists of communist (proletarian) and radical democratic (petit bourgeois) parties and groups. Some of them are based in Marxism; others are more or less eclectic. Frankel’s society is a part of the communist dissent – dialectic, revolutionary Marxism that represents the class interests of the proletariat. We are nevertheless aware of the necessity of a common strategy within the wider anti-capitalist resistance movement.
In 1989, the socialist social order in the former Czechoslovakia has collapsed. Consequently the old regime, characterized by class antagonism, has been restored. Under the guise of noble phrases about truth, love, freedom and democracy, the dictatorship of the minority of capital owners who live off the work of an exploited majority was reinstalled, against the wishes of the Czechoslovak people. This illegitimate dictatorship, which claims to represent universal freedom and democracy, is politically represented by parties defending the interests of capital (from clericals to social democrats), and can thus be nothing but reactionary.
The central tendency of the post-November era has been the return to the past. The powers of the past became the powers of the present. The bourgeoisie, lying, suppressing and denying the class essence of its power, has legally robbed the country of its former national wealth to sell it to foreign neo-colonialist capital. It has thus deprived it of its own industrial and agricultural base. In the superstructure of the society, this development led to a regress in almost all of its important sectors (social sphere, culture, education, health care, science, personal relations etc). Religion has become the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions, particularly in the form preached by the rich and privileged Roman Catholic Church, the main ideological support of the feudal dictatorship in the past and the capital dictatorship in the present.
To maintain its wealth and power, this dictatorship relies on systematically eliminating all possible mass resistance. To make people forget, abandon critical thinking and the search for alternatives to the anti-popular, barbarian and inhumane capitalism, the saint bourgeoisie, apart from preaching religion, has to demoralize the masses by the mainstream media (diverting attention from social phenomena to a vulgarized form of individual life), nationalism (creating illusions of national unity and emotional antipathy towards other nations), anticommunism (criminalizing attempts to establish non-capitalistic social relations) and social democratism (pretending to politically represent and defend the working people).
Frankel’s society seeks to contribute to the recognition and exposure of the antidemocratic and reactionary nature of the post-November bourgeois-clerical regime, which could lead to a relapse of clerical fascism, as well as to the criticism of its ideology and propaganda, its profit-seeking defense and the perspectives of overcoming it.
It is named after a representative of the Hungarian and international socialist movement, Leo Frankel, a commissary of the Paris commune, member of the General Council of First International, and one of the closest associates of the founders of Marxism.
Down with dictatorship, for a real democracy. Not for a minority, but for the majority!
Frankelova spoločnosť 