Stalinism
and after
When the Berlin wall was
dismantled in 1989 and Stalinist regimes came crashing down, capitalism
declared itself victorious. The collapse of Stalinism was used in a
global ideological offensive against socialism, which was unjustly
equated with that dictatorial, bureaucratic system, to drive through
brutal, neo-liberal capitalist policies worldwide. Introducing a special
anniversary edition of Socialism Today, PETER TAAFFE looks back at the
incredible events of 1989 and their consequences.
ON THE TWENTIETH anniversary
of 1989 the ideologues, politicians and media of world capitalism wish
to reinforce in popular consciousness that the events of that tumultuous
year signified just one thing: the ‘final defeat’ of Marxism,
‘communism’ and socialism itself, buried forever under the rubble of the
Berlin wall. This also meant the final victory of capitalism, which
‘ended history’ according to Francis Fukuyama, and established this
system as the only possible model for organising production and running
society. An economic paradigm, abolishing even capitalism’s ‘boom and
bust’ cycles, had established a golden staircase which would lead
towards an ever-increasing humane, fairer and civilised existence. The
economic crisis of the early part of this decade, accompanied by the
Iraq and Afghan wars, severely dented this prognosis. The current
devastating ‘great recession’ has utterly discredited it. Moreover, it
was Marxism – members and supporters of the Socialist Party and this
journal – which predicted this. Yet we were supposed to have been
relegated to the margins, destined never again to exercise an influence.
The outcome of the momentous
events of 1989 was indeed a ‘revolution’, but a social
counter-revolution, resulting in the ultimate liquidation of what
remained of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern Europe. But this
movement, which swept from one country to another, did not start out
with this ultimate aim, particularly on the part of the masses. Nor did
the capitalists – through their representatives like British prime
minister Margaret Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand –
expect or, initially, wholeheartedly welcome the mass movements that
accompanied the collapse of the Stalinist regimes.
The brutal organ of American
finance capital, the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the competition
between capitalism and the ‘communist’ regimes of Eastern Europe,
declared simply at the beginning of 1990: ‘We Won’. A no less exultant
Independent (8 January 1990) spoke of "confidence that – as a system –
capitalism is a winner". The impression given then and since is that the
Olympian soothsayers of capitalism foretold the events of 1989. Yet the
Financial Times – the mouthpiece of finance capital then and now –
wrote: "East Germany has no mass movement on the horizon yet,
Czechoslovakia’s leadership cannot allow the questioning of the source
of its legitimacy in the Soviet invasion of 1968, Hungary faces
dissidents, but not yet a proletariat aroused. Bulgaria will introduce
Soviet-style reforms, without yet Soviet-style chaos or fledgling
democracy, Romania and Albania are clamped in iron". This was written by
John Lloyd, formerly of the New Statesman, not three decades before but
on 14 October 1989, less than a month before the collapse of the Berlin
wall!
Understanding Stalinism
IN MITIGATION FOR this
‘relapse’ in ‘perspectives’, the late Hugo Young wrote in The Guardian
newspaper (29 December 1989) that "not a single seer foresaw" the
momentous events of that year. This is not true. It was precisely the
Marxist theoretician, Leon Trotsky, with his ‘antediluvian’ methods, who
more than half a century before had foretold the inevitable revolt of
the working class against Stalinism (at that time confined to the
‘Soviet Union’). He predicted a mass movement to overthrow the
bureaucratic usurpers who controlled the state and a political
revolution to establish workers’ democracy. But he also wrote in the
1930s in his monumental work, The Revolution Betrayed, that a wing of
the bureaucracy could preside over a return to capitalism.
This idea was not sucked out
of Trotsky’s thumb but was grounded in meticulous analysis of the
contradictions of Stalinist misrule and the forces that this would
inevitably conjure up. Karl Marx pointed out that the key to history was
the development of the productive forces – science, technique, and the
organisation of labour. He also said that no system disappears without
exhausting all the possibilities latent within it. Capitalism, an
economic system based on production for profit – the unpaid labour of
the working class – as its raison d’être, rather than social need, faces
a cycle of ‘boom and bust’, which even Gordon Brown is now forced to
recognise. But, as Trotsky analysed, Stalinism – for different reasons
to capitalism – by exercising a bureaucratic stranglehold, would become
an absolute fetter on the further economic development of society at a
certain stage.
In the period until probably
the end of the 1970s, despite the monstrosities of Stalin and the regime
he presided over – the purge trials, the slave labour of the gulag –
industry and society did develop. At this stage, despite the colossal
overheads arising from bureaucratic misrule, Stalinism played a
relatively progressive role. There were some analogies with capitalism
with its rise in the nineteenth century until 1914, when it became a
barrier to further progress, signified by the horrors of the first world
war. Faced with stagnation, regression and even disintegration, which is
what occurred in the Stalinist states – particularly in Russia from the
late 1970s – the regimes lurched from one expedient to another. They
moved from centralisation to decentralisation and then to
recentralisation in vain attempts to escape from the bureaucratic dead
end.
The methods of bureaucratic
rule, of commandism, could have some effect when the task in Russia was
to borrow industrial techniques from the West, develop an industrial
infrastructure, etc, and when the cultural level of the mass of the
working class and the peasantry was still low. But by the 1970s, Russia
had become highly industrialised and, even if some of the claims of
success were exaggerated, an industrial rival to the USA. It did produce
more scientists and technicians at one stage than even the US. But the
very creation of a more culturally advanced workforce – highly educated
in some senses – meant that rule from the top came into collision with
the needs of industry and society. Prices for millions of commodities,
for instance, were set bureaucratically in the central ministries in
Moscow as the regime became more and more of an impediment. Mass
discontent grew and was reflected not just in the attempts at political
revolution in Hungary in 1956, Poland, Czechoslovakia in 1968, etc, but
also Russia. The strikes in 1962 in Novocherkassk, for instance, showed
the danger which threatened the continued rule of the bureaucracy.
Lifting the lid
IT WAS IN this situation that
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union representing a more
‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy, pledged to open up through
perestroika (restructuring politics and the economy) and glasnost
(openness). In subsequent historical accounts, Gorbachev has become the
figure presiding over the return to capitalism in Russia and the
liquidation of the former USSR. However, he did not start out with this
intention. Like all ruling classes or elites, and in the tradition of
former bureaucratic rulers from Stalin onwards, feeling the mass
rumblings of discontent from below, Gorbachev tried desperately to
introduce reforms as a means of heading off revolution. Inevitably, a
slight lifting of the pressure cooker produces the result of mass
revolt, which it was intended to avoid.
In commenting on 1989,
capitalist representatives have dropped their usual hesitation with even
uttering the word ‘revolution’. This contrasts with their description –
repeated ad nauseum, particularly in the recent biography of Trotsky by
Robert Service – of Russia’s October revolution of 1917 as a ‘coup’. In
describing 1989 as a revolution, they are at least half correct. There
were the beginnings of a revolution – to be more precise, elements of a
political revolution – in East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, China
with the Tiananmen Square events, and even in Russia itself, even though
the mass movement did not reach the same heights. In all these countries
there was an unmistakeable expression, initially, for democratic reform
within the system, which was an implicit acceptance of the continuation
of the planned economy. This movement swept with tremendous speed like a
prairie fire from one country to another. A poster in Prague at the time
read: ‘Poland – 10 years. Hungary – 10 months. East Germany – 10 weeks.
Czechoslovakia – 10 days. Romania! 10 hours’.
Moreover, the methods used to
blow away the Stalinist regimes were mass demonstrations and general
strikes – not the usual methods of bourgeois counter-revolution – with
demands aimed at cutting down or abolishing the bureaucracy’s
privileges. In one of many reports in Militant (predecessor of The
Socialist) prior to the collapse of the Stalinist regime in East
Germany, the demand for democracy was evident. On 24 October, we
reported: "A few thousand youth were marching through the streets. They
were blocked by rows of police who linked arms. The youth marched right
up to them and started chanting ‘You are the people’s police. We are the
people. Who are you protecting?’ They sang the Internationale then they
started a song from the struggles against the fascists called ‘The
Workers’ United Front’. Its words had a particular effect on the police:
‘You belong to the workers’ united front also, because you are workers
as well’. The police simply stood and were brushed aside as the youths
surged forward. In the pubs, corps of soldiers openly discussed with
workers and youth. One group was discussing the prospect of the regiment
being ordered to fire on demonstrators. A conscript interjected: ‘They
may order it but we will never fire on the people. If they do that we
may turn on the officers instead’."
In Russia posters appeared:
‘Not the people for socialism but socialism for the people; do away with
the special privileges for politicians and bureaucrats, servants of the
people should have to stand in queues’. At this stage, one opinion poll
in Russia showed that only 3% would vote for a capitalist party in
multiparty elections. The serious representatives of capitalism feared
that the demands for a political revolution would take precedence over
the pro-capitalist mood that undoubtedly existed in some layers. One,
perhaps even two, million workers were on the streets of Beijing, with
half a million greeting Gorbachev in May. After the bloody suppression
of Tiananmen, former British Tory prime minister Edward Heath appeared
on television alongside Henry Kissinger, president Nixon’s notorious
right-hand man in the bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia. Heath stated:
"The Chinese students and workers aren’t after the sort of democracy we
advocate… they were singing the Internationale". Kissinger complained
that it was ‘unfortunate’ that the mass movement had sullied the end of
Chinese leader Deng Xiao-Ping’s career.
For the record, both opposed
the spilling of blood. But more important for them was the maintenance
of trade and other relations with the Chinese bureaucracy. Sickeningly,
right-wing Labour MP Gerald Kaufman – famous recently for having his
hand in the till over MPs’ expenses –then Labour’s foreign affairs
spokesperson, declared: "One could understand the Chinese government
wanting to get control of the square, although they have gone
immeasurably too far in retrieving control".
Alarm in the west
THATCHER ALSO EXPRESSED alarm
at events in Eastern Europe, particularly the prospect of German
reunification after the collapse of the Berlin wall. Files recently
smuggled out of Russia and published in The Times in September mention
that Thatcher "two months before the fall of the wall… told president
Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the
reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet
leader to do what he could to stop it". She stated: "We do not want a
united Germany… This would lead to a change in post-war borders, and we
cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the
stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our
security".
In a meeting with Gorbachev
she insisted that the tape was turned off. Unfortunately for her, notes
were taken of her remarks. She did not mind what was happening in
Poland, where the Communist Party was defeated in the first open vote in
Eastern Europe since the Stalinist takeover, "just some of the changes
in Eastern Europe". Incredibly, particularly given the subsequent
bellicose statements of US president George Bush senior on the Warsaw
Pact, she wanted it to "remain in place". She particularly expressed her
"deep concern" at what was happening in East Germany.
Mitterrand was also alarmed
at the prospect of German reunification and even contemplated a military
alliance with Russia "to stop it". He was prepared to camouflage this as
"the joint use of armies to fight natural disasters" used, in effect, as
a warning against the East German masses going too far. On the one side,
the stance of Thatcher and Mitterrand expressed the fear of a
strengthened German capitalism, but also that the repercussions of these
developments could trigger an uncontrolled mass movement in Western
Europe and elsewhere. One of Mitterrand’s advisers, Jacques Attali, even
said he would "go and live on Mars if [German] unification occurred".
Thatcher wrote in her memoirs: "If there is one instance in which a
foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy
on German reunification".
Gorbachev and his Kremlin
entourage, while flattered by the hosannas to him in western capitalist
circles, were panicking at the pace and sequence of events in Eastern
Europe. Gorbachev naïvely believed that by partial concessions, a
refusal to prop up the Stalinist dinosaurs in East Germany (he thought
Erich Honecker, East Germany’s unbending autocrat, was an ‘arsehole’),
the masses would be grateful and call it a day. Gorbachev had no
intention at the outset to ‘liberalise’ Stalinism out of existence. He
certainly had no declared intention of ushering in capitalism. But, like
the rest of the ruling Stalinist regimes, he was dragged along by
events. It was not just Honecker, the Ceaucescus in Romania, the ruling
Stalinist gangs in Bulgaria and elsewhere who were toppled. Eventually
the movements in Eastern Europe – on the ‘periphery’ of Stalinism –
spread to the Russian heartland. The net result was a return to
capitalism throughout Eastern Europe and Russia itself.
Was capitalist restoration inevitable?
WAS THIS AN inevitable
outcome? There is no ‘inevitability’ in history if, when conditions for
revolution mature, the ‘subjective factor’ is present in the form of a
tried and tested revolutionary leadership and party. This was clearly
missing in all the Stalinist states, particularly in Russia itself.
There was widespread revulsion at the untrammelled rule of the
bureaucracy and demands for cutting down privileges and wide-scale
corruption. There was a yearning, a searching by the masses for the
programme of workers’ democracy in all the states. Events, moreover,
were being driven on the streets, in the factories and workplaces in the
main. Prior to this, Marxists hoped and believed that it was possible
that on the morrow of a mass revolt, even with a limited number of
Marxist cadres, a mass party could be created. Then, with the necessary
leadership, this could assist the masses in carrying through the tasks
of the political revolution: maintaining the planned economy but
renovating it on the basis of workers’ democracy. But they were working
in the dark, in the main, without roots or a real presence in the
Stalinist states. Given the continued appearance of ‘strong states’ of a
totalitarian character in the period right up to the events of 1989,
serious mass work in particular was problematic.
This was less the case in
Poland, where pronounced pro-capitalist tendencies had been evident
throughout the 1980s, but emerged particularly strongly following the
failure of the 1980-81 Solidarity movement. At that time, the elements
of a political revolution existed even in the programme of Solidarity,
although under the leadership of Lech Walesa it was under the signboard
of religion, the Catholic church. Already coexisting alongside these
elements were pro-capitalist sentiments. The military crushing of the
Solidarity movement in 1981 was accomplished not by the Polish
‘Communist’ party – whose authority had completely evaporated by then –
but by the Stalinist military-bonapartist regime of General Jaruzelski.
This, allied to the economic upswing of capitalism throughout the 1980s,
pushed into the background the hope of workers’ democracy and the
maintenance of the planned economy. Mass sentiment turned to other
alternatives, particularly a return to capitalism, revealed during the
visits of Thatcher and Bush to Poland in 1988. They received a mass
greeting on the streets of Warsaw with the masses, naïvely as it turned
out, expecting greater results in terms of increased living standards
than the discredited Stalinist model crumbling around them.
This process was not as
pronounced elsewhere, certainly not in Russia. There, the hope of a
political revolution was not entirely extinguished amongst Marxists in
Russia and internationally, even given the events in Poland. After all,
the revolt of the Hungarian people in 1956 was accompanied by the
creation of workers’ councils along the model of the Russian revolution.
This after the masses had been kept in the dark night of 20 years of
Horthy’s fascist terror followed by ten years of Stalinist terror. There
was no dominant trend for a return to capitalism in 1956. The same was
true in Poland in the same year, in 1970 and 1980-81. By 1968 in
Czechoslovakia there were forces arguing for a return to capitalism but
they were in a minority, with the overwhelming majority of the masses
searching for the ideas of workers’ democracy, summed up in prime
minister Alexander Dubcek’s phrase, ‘Socialism with a human face’.
The crushing of the 1968
Czechoslovak ‘Spring’ – before it could blossom into the summer of a
political revolution – dealt a heavy blow to the perspective of the idea
of workers’ democracy as a way out of the impasse of moribund Stalinism.
History does not stand still; the death agony of Stalinism over a decade
and more, combined with the seeming economic fireworks of the world
capitalist boom of the 1980s, generated the illusion that the system
‘over the wall’, western capitalism, offered a better model for progress
than the stultifying system of Eastern Europe and Russia.
Why the limited resistance?
ONE OF THE most perplexing
issues confronting Marxists then and since was how little resistance
there appeared to be amongst the mass of the population once Russia took
steps in the direction of capitalism. However, an answer to this
conundrum can be found in the history of Stalinism, particularly the
different phases through which it passed. In particular, the purge
trials organised by Stalin in 1936-38 represented a decisive turning
point. By annihilating the last remnants of the Bolshevik party –
destroying even the capitulators like Zinoviev and Kamenev – Stalin
hoped to blot out the memory of the working class of the USSR. Until
then, a couple of generations were still connected to the Russian
revolution and its gains, in the form of the nationalisation of the
productive forces and a plan of production.
There was generalised
support, moreover, amongst the then developed layers of the working
class internationally for the advantages and main conquests of the
Russian revolution. This was despite the fact that, already in Russia in
the 1930s, as Trotsky pointed out, there was widespread criticism of the
bureaucratic regime presided over by Stalin. The advent of the Spanish
revolution also had an electrifying effect in Russia, both in generating
hopes for the triumph of the world revolution and for stirring the
memory of what had happened in Russia two decades before. Stalin
therefore conducted a ‘one-sided civil war’ to destroy the last vestiges
of the Bolshevik party. But the purge trials went much further than
this. He also used the situation – in the process maligning Trotsky and
the International Left Opposition as the agents of a foreign-inspired
counter-revolution in the USSR – to wipe out all remnants of the
bureaucracy connected to the memory of the revolution. It was not just
the Left Oppositionists who were murdered but hundreds of thousands of
workers and peasants, including significant sections of the bureaucracy.
Through these barbaric methods, Stalin had constructed, in effect, a
bureaucratic machine that was in no way now connected with the heroic
period of the October revolution. People like Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri
Andropov and the rest who dominated the state for the next decades had
not participated in the Bolshevik underground or in the October
revolution and were, in this sense, ‘without history’, certainly
Russia’s rich revolutionary history. All the critical elements within
the working class were also eliminated at this stage.
Despite the monstrous crimes
of Stalinism – including the execution of the top military command of
the Red Army, which facilitated Hitler’s invasion in 1941 – the
advantages of the planned economy were still a plus. Moreover,
capitalism was plagued by crises, with the mass unemployment of the
1930s great depression. As Trotsky pointed out, there was mass
opposition to Stalinism but the hand of the working class was stayed
from overthrowing the regime by a combination of factors. Not least was
the fear that when moving against Stalin and the bureaucracy, this would
open the door to capitalist counter-revolution. At the same time,
industry and society in gross general terms – and to a certain extent
the living standards of the masses – went ahead despite the bureaucracy.
The death of Stalin, however,
led to the revelations of Khrushchev at the 20th congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union and his so-called ‘thaw’. Khrushchev
denounced Stalin and some of his crimes but, in reality, only
‘admissible’ doses of some truths were allowed. Even then these mixed-up
partial truths with lies and did not touch the Stalinist myths and
falsifications. Khrushchev feared going too far and the Russian
Stalinist leaders like Leonid Brezhnev, who overthrew Khrushchev,
clamped down on any further real ‘revelations’ of the crimes of Stalin
and of the causes of Stalinism itself. Later, they even accepted his
partial rehabilitation. Therefore, as the system began to come apart, no
real Marxist alternative, never mind a developed mass consciousness or
forces putting forward a programme of workers’ democracy, existed in
Russia.
It would have been entirely
possible at the time of the collapse of Stalinism from the late 1980s to
present a clear picture of the reasons for the purges, the trials, the
causes of Stalinism and the alternative to this discredited system. But,
ironically, the purge trials and the repressive machine had decimated
any ‘subjective factor’ that could have developed and played a decisive
role. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that there were no
elements in Russia searching for a programme for workers’ democracy – as
the accompanying article by Rob Jones shows (page 17). But these were
too weak to counter the pull of the capitalist west, particularly for a
completely unprepared new generation, lured by the seeming abundance of
consumer goods which they were led to believe was there for the asking.
Gangster capitalism
THE RETURN TO capitalism put
paid to any attempt to honestly investigate the roots and reasons for
Stalinism, in preparation for a restoration of the planned economy on
the basis of workers’ democracy. The few who tried were overwhelmed by a
wave of malicious anti-communist propaganda from so-called ‘democratic’
journals in the service of the emerging bourgeoisie. They were a
bourgeois mirror image of the Stalinist school of falsification.
Stalinist totalitarianism, it was argued, arose from the ‘criminal’
character of Bolshevism; the Russian revolution was a ‘coup’, etc.
What followed was an orgy of
capitalist propaganda which flooded post-1989 Russia. This was
accompanied by promises of what the then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl,
predicted would be ‘blooming landscapes’ in a post-Stalinist world.
Along the road of a return to capitalism, the masses in these states
would eventually arrive at German if not American living standards. ‘Via
Bangladesh’, retorted the small band of Marxists in Eastern Europe. At
best, what could be hoped for the working class of Russia and Eastern
Europe, we argued, was perhaps that they would sink to Latin American
living standards. This, we have to confess today, was a hopelessly
optimistic perspective. Russia experienced an unprecedented collapse in
its productive forces exceeding in its scope and depth the 1930s great
depression.
Between 1989-98 almost a half
(45%) of its output was lost. This was accompanied by an unprecedented
disintegration throughout the former USSR in the basic elements of a
‘civilised’ society, with murder and crime rates doubling. By the
mid-1990s the murder rate stood at over 30 per 100,000 people, against
one or two in Western Europe. Only two countries at that time had higher
rates: South Africa and Colombia. Even the notoriously crime-ridden
Brazil and Mexico figures were 50% lower than Russia. The US murder
rate, the highest in the ‘developed’ world at 6-7 per 100,000, paled in
comparison. By 2000, a third of Russia’s population was living below the
officially defined poverty line. Inequality had trebled.
The murder rate was a product
and a symptom of unrestrained gangster capitalism. Ex-members of the
Young Communist League, like the owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman
Abramovitch, grabbed the lucrative part of former state enterprises –
such as the oil industry – for themselves. A Chicago-style shootout on a
national or even continental scale took place between different groups
over the division of the state pie. The Russian economy effectively
halved in size because of the destruction wrought by the return to
capitalism. Real incomes in the 1990s plummeted by 40%. By the mid to
late 1990s more than 44 million of Russia’s 148 million people were
living in poverty – defined as living on less than $32 per month. Three
quarters of the population were on less than $100 a month. Suicides
doubled and deaths from alcohol abuse had tripled by the mid-1990s.
Infant mortality fell to third-world levels while the birth rate
collapsed. In a mere five years of ‘reform’, life expectancy fell by two
years to 72 for women and by four years to 58 for men. Incredibly, for
men this was lower than a century previously! If the death rate had
continued the Russian population would have collapsed by a million per
year, falling to 123 million, a demographic collapse not seen since the
second world war when Russia lost 25 to 30 million people. At the end of
1998 at least two million Russian children were orphaned – more than in
1945. Only about 650,000 lived in orphanages, while the rest of these
unfortunate waifs were homeless!
The new bourgeoisie, in what
has been described as a hellish free-for-all of ‘grabification’, in
effect stole everything they could lay their hands on. They plundered
the nation’s wealth and natural resources, sold state-owned gold,
diamonds, oil and gas. The horrors of the industrial revolution – the
birth of modern capitalism – described graphically in Marx’s Capital was
as nothing compared to the monstrous crimes with which the new Russian
bourgeoisie celebrated its entry into the world. This hell on Earth
abated somewhat towards the end of the 1990s with a growth in national
income fuelled mainly by the export of oil and gas which, in turn, was
on the back of the world capitalist boom and has now juddered to a halt.
Politically, the chaos of the 1990s was replaced by the ‘order’ of
Vladimir Putin and now Dmitri Medvedev. But Russia has still not
reached, in manufacturing production at least, the level of 1989-90.
This is a devastating indictment of the ‘rebirth’ of capitalism in
Russia. Compared to the healthy robust child of the industrial
revolution at the birth of capitalism the modern Russian equivalent is
still struggling to breathe, let alone walk and run. Truly the masses of
all the ex-Stalinist states carry a terrible burden for the return of
capitalism.
Far-reaching consequences
THE WORKING CLASS
internationally has also paid a heavy price. The collapse ushered in by
1989 was not just of the Stalinist apparatus but, with it, the planned
economies, the main gain inherited from the Russian revolution itself.
The social counter-revolution which has turned back the wheel of history
in these states also decisively changed world relations for a period.
Alone amongst Marxists, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)
recognised just what this reverse represented. It was an historic defeat
for the working class. Before this an alternative model for running the
economy – despite the monstrous distortions of Stalinism – existed in
Russia, Eastern Europe and, to some extent, China as well. That was now
eliminated. Fidel Castro compared the demise of these states as
equivalent to ‘the sun being blotted out’. For Marxists, these societies
did not represent the sun. But they did, at least in their economic
form, represent an alternative which, on the basis of workers’
democracy, could take society forward.
While recognising what had
taken place, we also showed that this defeat was not on the scale of the
1930s, when Hitler, Mussolini and Franco crushed the workers’
organisations, thereby laying the basis for the catastrophe of the
second world war. The defeat at the end of the 1980s was more of an
ideological character which allowed the capitalist ideologues to jeer at
any future socialist project.
Nevertheless, while the
collapse of Stalinism was largely an ideological blow to the working
class internationally, it also had serious material repercussions. It
led to the wholesale political collapse of the leaders of the workers’
organisations, who abandoned socialism even as a historic aim and
embraced capitalist ideas in one form or another. Not just in Britain,
with the advent of New Labour, but internationally the former workers’
parties imploded into capitalist formations. They only differed from
openly bourgeois parties in the same way as ‘radical’ liberal capitalist
parties did in the past and still do in the USA, in the form of
Democrats and Republicans – different sides of the same capitalist coin.
In the trade unions, the leaderships in the main abandoned any idea of
an alternative to capitalism. They therefore sought to accommodate
themselves to the system, bargaining between labour and capital, rather
than offering a fundamental challenge.
If you accept capitalism, you
accept its logic, the laws of capitalism, especially the drive by the
capitalists to maximise the greatest profitability on behalf of the
bosses to the detriment of the working class. This goes hand-in-hand
with ‘social partnership’. This can lead to ‘business trade unionism’,
which limits any militant movement of the working class for more than
the bosses can allegedly give. In fact, the development of tame trade
union leaders, accommodating to the limits of the system, together with
the abandonment of the historic aim of socialism by the leaders of the
workers’ organisations, enormously bolstered the confidence and the
power of the capitalists. This facilitated – without real resistance
from the trade union leaders – the massive income disparity on a scale
not seen since before the first world war. Unbridled capitalism has not
been checked by the trade union leaders. On the contrary, it has given
full scope to them to remorselessly squeeze the working class for
greater output – with a smaller and smaller share going to wages – all
on the altar of a revived capitalism.
Testing the left
THE EVENTS OF 1989 and their
aftermath were tests for Marxists and those who claimed to stand on a
Trotskyist position. With the exception of the CWI, the reaction of most
Marxist organisations was found wanting to say the least. The Morenoites
in Latin America (the International Workers’ League, LIT) sought to bury
their heads in the sand, refusing to recognise that capitalism had been
restored. They only changed their position when events struck them on
the nose and it was no longer possible to deny reality. The ‘state
capitalists’ – the leadership of the International Socialist Tendency,
including the British SWP – believed that Russia and Eastern Europe were
not deformed workers’ states but were state capitalist. The return to
capitalism was not considered a defeat but a ‘sideways move’. In East
Germany, the IST supported the reunification of Germany on a capitalist
basis. This approach was accompanied by the disastrous theory that
nothing had fundamentally changed in the world and that, therefore, the
1990s were favourable to Marxism because it was the ‘1930s in slow
motion’. Unfortunately, the adherents of the United Secretariat of the
Fourth International also drew pessimistic conclusions. Their main
theoretician, Ernest Mandel, confessed to Tariq Ali just before his
death that the ‘socialist project’ was off the agenda for at least 50
years!
All of those who predicted
the colossal extension of the life cycle of capitalism, accompanied by
the burying of socialism for generations, were answered in theory in the
arguments and ideas put forward by genuine Marxism in the last two
decades. But the impact of events has been the biggest answer to the
sceptics, particularly the present devastating world crisis of
capitalism. The economic intervention of capitalist governments
worldwide has managed to avoid an immediate repetition, perhaps only
temporarily, of the world depression of the 1930s. At the same time, the
consciousness of the working class of the gravity of the situation has
not yet caught up with the objective situation. This partially restored
the previously shattered confidence of the spokespersons of world
capitalism who dreaded that mass upheavals challenging the very
foundations of their system would develop on the back of this crisis.
In general, human thought is
very conservative; the consciousness of the working class always lags
behind events. This is reinforced when the working class has no mass
organisation which can act as a point of reference in the struggle
against capitalism. The right, even the far-right, seem to have been the
first major political beneficiaries of this crisis. This is not unique
or exceptional in the first phase of an economic crisis. Something
similar also developed in some countries in the 1930s, as the British
political commentator Seumus Milne pointed out recently in The Guardian.
However, he was too sweeping in giving the impression that this was the
immediate reaction in all countries then. The 1930s crisis also
witnessed a political radicalisation amongst the working class to a much
greater extent than has yet developed in this crisis.
Out of the 1930s crisis, it
is true there was the strengthening of the Nazis in Germany. But also
the Spanish revolution began to unfold and the masses moved into action
belatedly but decisively in France from 1931 onwards. The factor that
was present, although imperfect, in the 1930s and not yet present today,
was mass socialist and communist parties and organisations of the
working class that, formally at least, stood in opposition to
capitalism. Even in the US during the crisis of 1929-33, while the
working class was paralysed industrially, significant sections were
radicalised politically and even the Communist Party, for instance,
filled out with new members. That this has not yet happened on a
significant scale is largely the result of the absence of even small
mass parties of the working class, the creation of which remains an
urgent task for socialists, Marxists and the labour movement. However,
even then, as the attempts to create such organisations have already
underlined, without a firm Marxist core providing the theoretical
backbone for these formations, many of these new developments could
falter, some could be stillborn and even collapse. Nevertheless, a
fundamental task remains to create the basis of such formations in the
next period.
1989 was a turning point in
general and also for Marxism. As the most optimistic but also the most
realistic trend within the labour movement, we recognised what had
occurred was a significant setback for the workers’ movement. But we
were not thrown off balance. The collapse of Stalinism did not eliminate
the inherent contradictions of capitalism. True, the system was given a
boost, furthering the process of globalisation through the supply of
cheap labour, a new source of exploitation, even super-exploitation by
capitalism. But the very weakness of the labour movement encouraged the
confidence, indeed the overweening arrogance of the ruling class, which
overreached itself in the bubble economies of the last two decades.
Hubris has been followed by the nemesis of this crisis. The landscape of
world capitalism is not at all ‘blooming’ but is littered with millions
of discarded unemployed workers and the growth in the army of the poor.
The working class is stirring
and is fighting back. Marxism, relegated by capitalist ideologues to the
margins, by squarely facing up to this situation has demonstrated its
viability in this difficult period. But it is not only in periods of
defeat that its advantages are shown through a sober analysis. Its
programme and policies, through the Socialist Party and the CWI, in this
new period of increased mobilisation by the masses against capitalism,
will also come into their own. 1989 did not bury socialism or Marxism.
It temporarily blurred the vision of the working class, which is now
being cleared through the present crisis and the incapacity of this
system to solve even the basic requirements of the mass of the peoples
of the planet.