One more from 2009, on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (Nov. 9): 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 societys 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 Unions working class that socialized property could not be alienated, that socialized property was the peoples 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 peoples 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 todays 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 peoples 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 peoples 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, Georgias 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 Thatchers 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 Berlins 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, Polands 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 Hungarys 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 Hungarys 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 countrys 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 worlds 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 Canadas 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 détat 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. cpcml.ca/Tmld2009/D39214.htm
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 18:57:17 +0000
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