November 20, 2009 - No. 214
Discussion on the 20th Anniversary of the
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Defend the Advance of the Peoples in
the
20th Century -- The Road of the October Revolution
• Defend the
Advance of the Peoples in the 20th Century -- The Road of the October
Revolution
• Contributions to
Discussion on the Fall of
the Berlin Wall
Discussion on the 20th Anniversary of the
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Defend the Advance of the Peoples in the 20th Century
-- The Road of the October Revolution
"The Internationalists
and CPC(M-L) have always upheld the view
that it is the people, in whose interest it is to have deep-going
transformations through revolution, who must make the decisions and
implement them and that the role of CPC(M-L) is to provide them with
consciousness and organization." - Hardial Bains
The counter-revolution in Eastern Europe twenty years
ago, marked
at this time with the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is
full of lessons for the Canadian working class about the need of the
people for consciousness and organization. Lack of consciousness and
organization was a factor
leading to the failure of the movement for democratic renewal in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union itself and their ultimate
collapse into the anarchy and chaos of neo-liberalism.
The Soviet Union since the mid-seventies and especially
during the
later years of the 1980s was in serious economic crisis as were the
countries in Eastern Europe. The Cold War arms race and the war in
Afghanistan (1979-1989) had sapped the financial and moral limits of an
empire that could no
longer mask the fiction that it was a socialist state of the working
class. The forces that seized control of the Soviet state in the late
1950s and '60s were either bitter opponents of the Soviet working
class, democratic renewal and the socialist legacy of social programs,
or totally incapable of opening society's path
to progress. The mentors and heroes of Mikhail Gorbachev, General
Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until
1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, from 1988 until its
disintegration in 1991 were those capitalist leaders actively
organising the neo-liberal anti-social offensive such
as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and U.S. President
Ronald Reagan.
The rulers who had seized power in the Soviet Union had
long upheld
their bourgeois right to a greater claim on social product than the
working class. This was effected through a widening inequality of wages
and salaries and growing privilege based on position within the
socialized economy, state
and Communist Party. Widening inequality of wages and salaries and a
culture of privilege and impunity based on position led to an aim
amongst the ruling class to restore capitalist ownership of socialized
property in state law and official practice. An obstacle to legal
private ownership of socialized property was
the psychology of the Soviet Union's working class that socialized
property could not be alienated, that socialized property was the
people's property, a common asset held collectively through the state
and guaranteed by its laws and constitution.
For Gorbachev and other anti-working class Soviet
leaders the
problem was to break the psychology of communism and a sense or
expectation built up over the decades of socialism that working class
rights were poised not to be negated but expanded and fulfilled through
democratic renewal. Leaders
throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe knew that workers'
expectations of social programs and their sense of rights as inherent
to being human, and their demand that their rights be fulfilled in
practice could explode into a rebellion for democratic renewal to vest
sovereignty in the working class and build
their nations anew with a pro-social alternative. For the ruling
elites, the possibility of a movement for democratic renewal had to be
sabotaged. The anticipation of a movement for democratic renewal was
compounded by the reality that U.S. and European imperialism wanted a
disintegration of the Soviet Union
under their leadership to put its vast human and natural resources
under their control.
The Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact
of Eastern
Europe by 1989 were already integrated within the imperialist system of
states. A few examples illustrate the growing hold of the international
financial oligarchy on their socialized economies, which were not
unique. By 1979, Poland
alone owed $20 billion to U.S., European and Japanese finance capital
for which debt-service costs consumed up to 80 percent of its export
earnings. Ten years later, Poland needed $2 billion in annual export
earnings just to pay the interest on its debt. To service its external
debt to the West, Hungary needed $1
billion, and debt across the countries of the Warsaw Pact owned by West
European centres of finance capital had reached $90 billion. The U.S.
and European imperialists wanted political changes in Eastern Europe to
mirror their already substantial economic stranglehold.
Gorbachev and others within the Soviet elite decided
that a
controlled collapse of the Soviet Union and its European allies was the
only solution to break the communist psychology of the working class,
forestall a working class rebellion because of the economic crisis and
the people's desire for democratic
renewal, and block an uncontrolled collapse that could possibly lead
either to democratic renewal or a takeover by competing imperialists.
Others within the Soviet leadership opposed the controlled collapse of
the Soviet Union, as they were certain that it would lead to a
disintegration of their empire, especially within
Europe but by 1989 that section of the leadership had lost power and
the controlled collapse was underway. Neo-liberal globalization and
capitulation to the imperialist centres of Europe, the United States
and Japan were presented as solutions to the economic and political
crisis. This was similar in many ways to
today's phony neo-liberal solutions to the current economic and
political crisis such as working class concessions, starving social
programs of funds, paying the rich and capitalist democracy dominated
and controlled by a cartel system of political parties of the owners of
capital and their political allies.
The fall of the Soviet Union and its allies unleashed
an
anti-social offensive that was thoroughly planned by the ruling elite,
both its objective and subjective aspects. The masses were subjected to
a non-stop barrage of anti-communist propaganda extolling the virtues
of a neo-liberal agenda of privatization,
destruction of social programs, free trade, a European Union of the
monopolies, NATO membership as liberation and peace, and the creation
of a super-rich class of parasites from whom wealth would eventually
"trickle down" to the masses.
The objective features of the anti-social offensive
were
characterized by an orgy of feasting on socialized property as it was
transferred into official legal private property of a few. This was
coordinated with an attack on all social programs that upheld the
Soviet-standard of living, especially security
of livelihoods, wages, benefits and pensions. The neo-liberal agenda
blamed social programs for the economic crisis and swore that their
destruction and the creation of a labour market, "managed risk" within
a capitalist economy based on competition and controlled by parasites,
and a sense of insecurity of personal
being and outlook of "fend for yourself" would unleash the people's
initiative and eventually bring a semblance of prosperity at least for
some. What followed was an unparalleled collapse of living standards on
all fronts unseen in human history. The plunder of socialized property
together with a massive decrease
in spending on social programs and collapse of the value of the ruble
and other currencies resulted in a massive shift of wealth from the
working class to owners of monopoly capital. This was the breakthrough
the ruling elite had planned. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991
it went from a country dominated
by bourgeois right and its inequality of wages and living standards, to
a Russia of monopoly right to plunder the entire socialized economy and
own and control it directly, all legally sanctioned by the Russian
state. This disaster for the working class and many in the middle
strata was presented as a solution to the
economic crisis and democratic renewal but the reality was the
opposite: a prolonged period of economic chaos and disintegration and
downward spiral until a bottom was reached and for Russia at least oil
prices began to rise sharply more than 12 years later. The collapse of
the Soviet Union and its former allies
did not lead to democratic renewal but to a consolidation of the
dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class and for most of the
countries of Eastern Europe their integration within the imperialist
system of states controlled by the U.S. and the most powerful states of
Europe, an imperialist system fraught with dangerous
conflicts and potential for war, as already witnessed in the former
Yugoslavia and Georgia.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was engineered by the
Soviet
ruling class to smash any remnant of communist psychology amongst the
masses and prepare conditions for the privatization of socialized
property, elimination of social programs, to sabotage any rebellion of
the working class and its allies
for democratic renewal and to forestall an uncontrolled collapse that
could have led to a takeover of Russia by competing imperialists.
The controlled collapse of the Soviet Union oversaw a
massive
transfer of social wealth and claims on social product from the working
class and many within the middle strata to the de facto
owners of Russian monopoly capital. Most of the ruling elite remained
in place after the fall and
became part of a financial oligarchy. The anti-social offensive in the
Soviet Union was modeled on the neo-liberal shock therapy of Thatcher
but for the rich elite was wildly more successful in a relative sense.
It destroyed the expectations of the Russian people for the social
programs that had become their right and
the psychology that was growing that people have rights by virtue of
being human. It destroyed the movement towards democratic renewal that
had been rumbling and simmering throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union put behind it the traditional
social programs of socialism
and dumped on the people the cold cruel reality of state monopoly
capitalism.
The lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union
emphasize the
necessity to heed Comrade Bains' teaching to pay first-rate attention
to the need of the people for consciousness and organization. In the
same letter cited above he concludes: "The work to strengthen and
consolidate CPC(M-L), which means
to provide the working class and people with consciousness and
organization, is not one-time work or one-stage work. It is not like
putting up a building of one kind and hoping that it will be suitable
for all conditions. The work to strengthen and consolidate CPC(M-L)
goes from stage to stage. It can be said that,
like consciousness, it also follows a spiral which goes from one level
of strengthening and consolidating CPC(M-L) to a higher level,
according to concrete conditions, raising the level of consciousness
and organization of the masses and their combativeness as its necessary
condition. Each time a decision is to be
made and implemented, the consciousness and organization of the masses
has to be raised to the level required. Only then will the masses be
able to arrive at decisions and implement them."[1]
Notes
1. Hardial Bains, Letter to All
Members and
Alternate Members of the CC of CPC(M-L, November 1, 1994. Published
under the title "Paying First-Rate Attention to the Need of the
People for Consciousness and Organization," TML Weekly,
May 17, 1998.
Contributions to Discussion on the
Fall of the Berlin Wall
November 9, 1989 is considered the date that the Berlin
Wall "fell." Each year, the most reactionary elements in society use
this anniversary as an occasion to create massive ideological confusion
about the real significance of the historical events of 1989-91 in
Eastern Europe. Over and over it is proclaimed that
these events marked the "victory of capitalism" and the "fall of
communism," as if announcing such "big lies" often enough can make them
come true. The goal of this anti-communist offensive was then and is
now to get the working people to end their fight for progressive and
democratic ideals, and to accept their
oppression. But, of course, this has not happened.
In this issue TML
is publishing excerpts from discussions held across the country on this
occasion.
***
The real essence of what happened in 1989-91 was that
tens of millions of working people went into the streets demanding
political and economic changes. The bourgeoisie manipulated the
people's sentiment for change in order to install the classical
capitalist system in the Eastern European countries and the
former Soviet Union. It is mainly this fact of mass discontent which is
obscured because it shows that the working people did not trust the
parties in power at the time and they still do not. Since 1989, whether
"radicals" or "conservatives" have held power, the new capitalist
governments have worked hand-in-hand
with foreign imperialism to suppress the interests of the working
people. Nothing has been settled in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union where the new capitalist parties are already hated by the
people.
***
What these twenty years have shown in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union is the further advance of reaction against the
working class, not the proliferation of any so-called democracy. This
is why so few bourgeois commentators want to talk about what has
actually happened over the past twenty years
or about the concrete reality today. They would rather revisit the
"fall" of the Berlin Wall and find people who say the past was better
than the present. They are trying to rekindle the euphoria which took
them over in 1989 to stop discussion on the fact that nothing has been
resolved by the so-called victory of capitalism
which has on the contrary given rise to a worldwide consciousness that
capitalism itself is the cause of the crisis. Meanwhile the working
people are still dissatisfied with their situation in which they
exercise no control over their lives. Everywhere, they are still
calling for their political rights and economic well-being,
opposing the use of force in resolving conflicts between nations, and
demanding protection of the environment and for the resources to be
used in a manner which favours the people.
***
Did the fall of the Berlin wall establish "democracy" in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as has been claimed? No,
what followed was war in Bosnia, the Russian invasion of Chechyna,
Georgia's claims over Abkhazia, Armenians and Azeris fighting over
Nagornoa-Karabakh, air strikes against Serbia,
and massive unemployment and the accumulation of poverty on one pole,
and the accumulation of riches on the other, e.g., the infamous Russian
oligarchs and most reactionary elements ruling in favour of foreign
powers. Did the fall of the Berlin Wall improve "democracy" in the rest
of the world? On the contrary,
first George Bush senior initiated the Gulf War conflict and in the
past nine years in particular, the George W. Bush government became
notorious for using the events of 9/11 as an excuse to unleash attack
after attack on the democratic rights of peoples across the world. In
fact, the reign of George W. Bush will
go down in history for its complete disdain for democracy and for its
bloodstained legacy of war, aggression, and torture. Now we see the
current President of the U.S. Barack Obama developing his doctrine
which advocates some form of fascism with a human face as the means to
expand U.S. interests all over the
world.
***
Imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie never had
the aim of solving any of the problems faced by the peoples of Eastern
Europe. By presenting "liberal democracy" as the ultimate aim of social
development, as the middle road and the golden mean, their goal
continues to be to impose their dictate on the
entire world. From the beginning they have used the pretext of opposing
communism in order to subjugate the Eastern European countries,
reinstate the most reactionary regimes, and exploit their resources and
labour. In the past twenty years, it is not democracy which has spread
in Eastern Europe but enslavement.
It is not democracy but reaction that is nestling everywhere. In March,
Latvian Waffen-SS Legions held a pro-Nazi march in Riga at which three
anti-fascists were arrested, while in July, a Romanian mayor and his
son flaunted Nazi uniforms at a fashion show, as did the second heir to
the British Throne at a party.
Goebbels must be smiling in his grave. He has trained his followers
well and they are preparing disasters for the workers and people of
Eastern Europe who already suffered so much during two world wars and
since the advent of the so-called democratic era, every infamy
committed against them.
***
The loudest shouts about the Berlin Wall have always
included the word "freedom." The loudest of all come from those who are
most notorious for opposing the rights of the workers and the peoples
of the world. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher stated that "Those of us who
have visited Eastern Europe and felt the
new freedom in the air find it profoundly moving." Under Thatcher's
reign British coal mining was destroyed, unemployment more than
doubled, the trade unions were broken and Britain was led into its
biggest recession since the 1960s. In 1987 Ronald Reagan stated that
"The wall cannot withstand freedom." This
is the same Ronald Reagan who in 1981 fired 11,345 striking air traffic
controllers, and who drew world-wide condemnation when in 1985 he laid
a wreath at Berlin's Bitberg Cemetery where Nazi and SS troops are
buried. So how is it that Thatcher and Reagan can attack the workers of
their own countries yet
supposedly be so interested in the freedom of the workers of Eastern
Europe?
***
The reunification of Germany, said to be one of the
greatest achievements of the fall of the Berlin Wall, created a big
power vying for a dominant role in Europe and Asia. The Western allies
used West Germany originally to ensure the elimination of communism and
of any vestiges of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.
This was to try to eliminate all memory of the great sacrifices, led by
the Soviet Union, to end Nazism and fascism. George H. W. Bush, Mikhail
Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl hoped it would spell the end of anti-fascism
and anti-imperialism. They held the same dream that Adolph Hitler had
in regard to communism.
Today the media must downplay the discontent of the working people and
their unshakeable drive for emancipation. They have to minimize this
feature and convert it into a crusade against communism.
***
Was the goal of the workers of Poland to create the
conditions such that people like Czarnecki could build their
multi-billion dollar capitalist empires on their backs? Where are the
Canadian trade union leaders today who supported Solidarity and Lech
Walesa? Are they not ashamed that their chauvinist attitude
towards the bourgeois democracy promoted this traitor who is today
parading around Europe and North America supporting Nazi causes?
***
What is going on in Eastern Europe today? Capitalist
exploitation and imperialist domination are at the heart of the
workers' and peoples' discontent, whether in Eastern Europe, Western
Europe, the United States, Canada or on the world scale.
In Eastern Europe, World Bank officials recently
referred to a social and human crisis in the area. Unemployment has
leapt from 8.3 million in 2008 to 11.4 million in 2009. It has doubled
in the Baltic countries. There are already 145 million poor in the
region, almost one-third of the total population, and this
is expected to increase by 15 million in 2009. Massive cuts continue to
be made to already minimal social programs. Before 1989, Poland's
Gdansk Shipyards provided work for over 20,000 people, while today they
have gone through restructuring using the fraudulent practices imposed
on the workers in the imperialist heartlands. Under the bankrupcy
fraud, the Gdansk Shipyards became foreign-owned, and now provide
only 2,200 jobs. Moldova
is one of the poorest nations in Europe today with an average monthly
salary of $350.
Since 1989, Hungary has been flooded with over 60
billion euros of foreign capital, mainly from the U.S., Germany, the
Netherlands, and Austria. About two-thirds of Hungary's banks are
foreign-owned, while foreign ownership of the national newspaper market
is over 80 percent. The minimum rate of sales
tax is 20 percent. Wages in Hungary are only 12-15 percent of the
European level, while inflation is at 8 percent. "Austerity measures"
were instituted in 2006, leading to a 7 percent decline in real wages.
Unemployment is over 10 percent and rising, with youth unemployment at
almost 25 percent. Almost 30,000
jobs have been axed since last October, and Hungary's official economic
statistics office forecasts that 105,000 jobs will be lost this year.
The population is shrinking; there are more emigrants than immigrants.
Is this what the Hungarian workers fought for in 1989-90? A Hungary in
thrall to foreign capital, where
the working people can barely make a living? Is this the vision that
the Hungarian workers had of the "new Hungary"? Are these the hallmarks
of the "victory of capitalism"?
At a 2004 Fraser Institute luncheon Vaclav Klaus,
President of the Czech Republic, addressed the theme: "Saluting 15
years of freedom." The content of this freedom is clear. The Fraser
Institute wrote: "The next decade (i.e. after the 'velvet revolution'
in Czechoslovakia) saw the building of a genuinely democratic
political system, liberalization of prices, the restitution of property
to its pre-1948 owners, and the mass privatization of companies.
...
The 1997-99 recession brought on further corrective measures -- the
privatization of the banking industry and the improvement of the
country's legal framework." (Our
emphasis)
***
The celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall are part
of the anti-communist campaign to block the path of the new society
striving to be born. The motive behind blaming communism for the
world's problems is to deceive the workers and organize them against
their own interests in order to ensure that workers
do not turn to Marxism-Leninism. Condemnation of communism is designed
to scare the working people; it is being used for its propaganda value.
The workers must realize that the attack on the new society which is
striving to come into being has its basis in the anti-workerism, racism
and anti-communism
which are being pushed as Canada's "official ideology." States
of various countries have spent millions of dollars and made great
efforts to install anti-communism as a block in the minds of the
people, in the minds of the workers.
***
The workers are not satisfied with the present but are
looking for solutions. There is a total mystification of what communism
is. The content of what is said about modern communism is so
prejudicial and false that it bears no resemblance to what it really
is. The bourgeoisie and imperialism want the events in
Eastern Europe to be accepted as a sign that the theory of
Marxism-Leninism has erred and is objectively invalid. The greatest of
ideals of humankind is to end the exploitation of persons by persons.
Modern communism is the condition for the complete emancipation of the
working class and all humanity. The point
is to get the working class to fight for its own interests. We must
find solutions to the present problems. We must go from here to a truer
form of democracy, a democracy which conforms to the need to provide
the rights of the working people with a guarantee. The program of
CPC(M-L) is to lead the people in working out
how.
***
The Great October Revolution is a reminder that the
problems facing society and humanity can and must be addressed and
resolved. All the talk about "failings" by those who champion a system
that continues to utterly fail humanity and to lead it towards greater
and greater disasters is imbued with a self-satisfaction
that is deadly. All the talk about "the crimes of communism" is utterly
oblivious to the crimes committed in the past and that continue to be
committed today by the murderous system of capitalism and imperialism.
***
Two world wars and unending wars of aggression and
occupation from the turn of the 20th century to today, all for the
capture of markets and the control of resources are not things of the
past, they are also what awaits humanity on an ever more deadly scale
if solutions are not found to the problems of the progress
of society and of establishing new relations between peoples and
countries.
***
The ugliest forms of power, that of fascism for example,
are not in the past, they are being today legitimized and organized
either as an "unavoidable collateral damage" of exceptional
circumstances, such as the "war on terror," or as the alternative to
totalitarianism as in the so-called democratic coup d'état in
Honduras and all the coloured revolutions and invasions and blockages
for regime change. They are preserving the system of capitalism and
imperialism.
***
On all fronts society demands that the block to progress
be removed -- the block to all-sided and sustained economic development
in all countries, advanced or developing, the utter crisis of the
political process, not at the time of the Soviet Union or even in
Africa, Afghanistan and other countries, but precisely
in Canada, the U.S., Europe, etc., the social ills of violence,
criminalization of the youth, extreme poverty, insecurity, failing
health and education systems and the cultural and identity crises which
remain because of the control of a few over the many.
***
The smugness of the talk about "failures" without
addressing how to advance is a luxury humanity cannot afford. The
smugness is to say that the "magic hand" of the markets always manages
to make things right. The Canadian economy has been robbed of hundreds
of billions of dollars worth of the added value
that was created and that is required to invest in future development.
These recurring crises and the greater and greater damages they bring
upon society are said to be acceptable because in the end "everything
evens out." The smugness is to say that we should accept the inability
of our societies to act in the face
of the dangers posed to the environment because of who controls the
levers of economic and political decisions, that ineffective measures
deemed as "good intentions" should be good enough.
***
It is contrary to human nature to not solve the problems
facing the development of society. The massive disinformation about the
"crimes" or "failures" of communism, on the 20th anniversary of the
fall of the Berlin Wall, serves no other purpose than to prevent people
from looking at where we are at in the
historical progress of human society. What are the failures, why did
they happen and how can they be overcome? Are these not the questions
humanity naturally asks itself? The fight to answer those questions has
become sharper than ever. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the shameful
smugness of the "celebrations"
of that event (what is there to celebrate precisely?) shows that there
is a wide open space for all those who want to address the problems
facing society and humanity.
***
Solving the problems of society and humanity must be at
the centre of the review of historical events such the fall of the
system put in place in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
To be continued
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