By Raju prabath lankaloka
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and USSR were presented by the defenders of capitalism as the equivalent of the final victory of the ‘free market economy’ over ‘Communism’. Three decades ago, it produced a wave of euphoria in the bourgeoisie and its apologists. They spoke of the end of socialism, the end of communism and even the end of history. Ever since then, we have witnessed an unprecedented ideological offensive against the ideas of Marxism on a world scale.
The then American President, George Bush, triumphantly announced the creation of a ‘New World Order’ under the domination of US imperialism. Martin McCauley wrote: “The Soviet Union is no more……The great experiment has failed… Marxism in practice has failed everywhere. There is no Marxist economic model capable of competing with capitalism.” “We Won!” exclaimed the editorial of The Wall Street Journal (24/5/89). Francis Fukuyama uttered his notorious prediction: “The period of post-history has arrived… Liberal democracy has triumphed, and mankind has reached its highest wisdom. History has come to an end.”
Three decades later, not one stone upon another remains of these foolish illusions. Capitalism has entered into the most serious crises since the Great Depression. Millions are faced with a future of unemployment, poverty, cuts and austerity. Wars and conflicts ravage the entire planet, the very future of which is placed in jeopardy by the depredations wreaked by the uncontrolled market economy. Now in the cold light of day, those triumphalist proclamations sound ironic. The global crisis of capitalism and its effects have falsified those confident predictions. All the lavish promises of milk and honey by the Western leaders, that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, have evaporated like a drop of water on a hot stove.
America’s dream of world domination lies buried beneath the smoking ruins of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. All the triumphalist pronouncements of the bourgeois strategists have been falsified. History has returned with a vengeance. The same Western observers who exaggerated every defect of the Soviet economy are now struggling desperately to explain the manifest failure of the market economy. Now there is only economic collapse, political instability, uncertainty, wars and conflict.
Nature of the Soviet Union
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest event in human history. For the first time in history, the oppressed didn’t just rise up, but they rose up, took power and held on to it. American journalist John Reed wrote: “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, and the rule of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of worldwide importance.”
Even the combined forces of all the world’s imperialist nations failed to dislodge the new workers’ state. However, the victory in the civil war came at a heavy cost. Russia was never a rich nation, but after a world war and a civil war, both industry and agriculture were in tatters.
The Russian Revolution should have been the beginning of the world revolution, but for reasons, which we will discuss in another article, this didn’t happen. The isolation of the revolution in this state of economic backwardness laid the foundation for the rise of the bureaucracy. By the end of the 1920s, the workers’ state had degenerated into what Trotsky termed a deformed workers’ state. Within the party and the state machinery, the new bureaucracy, made up largely of enemies of the revolution of 1917, expropriated political power from the working class and the peasantry.
This new bureaucratic caste was living off the backs of the workers in a way that closely resembled the capitalists of the west. They had villas, luxury cars and other luxuries. But of course, they acquired their wealth not through private ownership, but through looting the state’s coffers.
This was also why they had to stifle all kinds of democratic discussion. Because the moment that the lid was lifted, the privileges of the bureaucracy would become the target of criticism. The capitalists, at least historically, played a progressive role in saving and investing, and received their profits in return. The bureaucracy, on the other hand, played no such role. It was completely parasitic.
The bureaucrats sitting at all levels of administration had no interest in developing the economy. They were just interested in their own position. Instead of leading the world towards socialism, the bureaucracy blocked further development, and even acted as a brake on revolutionary developments elsewhere. The reactionary state bureaucracy was feeding off the demoralisation of every defeated revolution, which strengthened its hold on power.
Despite the crimes of the bureaucracy, the Soviet Union was rapidly transformed from a backward, semi-feudal economy into an advanced, modern industrial nation. It was not the degenerate Russian bourgeoisie, but the nationalised planned economy that dragged Russia into the modern era, building factories, roads and schools, educating men and women, creating brilliant scientists, building the army that defeated Hitler, and putting the first man into space.
According to Trotsky, the first possibility was that the working class would overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy (that is, carry out a political revolution) and rebuild a healthy state superstructure, without contradictions and with the correct economic-social bases and therefore “open the path to socialism.” The second possibility was that the bureaucracy would end up restoring capitalism since, in order to defend its privileges, it would need to make them permanent, a promise assured only by “private property rights.”
Trotsky was absolutely correct. Several times workers of Stalinist States have attempted to carry out the political revolution but were brutally crushed by bureaucracy. Soviet tanks crushed demonstrators in East Berlin in June 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and again in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
To the bureaucracy, the choice between workers’ control and a return to capitalism was not difficult. The bureaucrats feared the workers more than the Western imperialists. They preferred capitalism.
Decades of Stalinist bureaucratic and totalitarian rule had a far greater effect than we realised in throwing back consciousness. Stalin had succeeded more than he could have hoped in liquidating the traditions of Bolshevism. The most advanced elements of the working class had been exterminated, and because the regime lasted far longer than Trotsky had anticipated, the very memory of the genuine traditions of October had been almost wiped out from the consciousness of the Soviet workers and youth.
The bureaucracy went from being a relative fetter on the development of the economy to an absolute one. That is, under workers’ control the economy could have developed faster and in a more sustainable way in the whole period. But even under the bureaucracy from the 1930s to the 1960s there was some development, sometimes even rapid. But by the end of the 1970s, the economy was stagnating and a collapse was around the corner.
In the end, however, the bureaucracy was not satisfied with the colossal wealth and privileges it had obtained through plundering the Soviet state. As Trotsky predicted, they passed over to the camp of capitalist restoration, transforming themselves from a parasitic caste to a ruling class.
This was the ground on which the seeds of capitalist counter-revolution were planted and then thrived. The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and USSR was not at all a collapse of genuine socialism, but its deformed caricature called Stalinism. The developments that took place after the collapse of Stalinism have proved again and again that Capitalism is not capable at all of developing the productive forces and solving the problems faced by mankind. True Socialism is the only alternative which can liberate mankind, develop productive forces and save / restore the planet once again to a level, where humanity can live and thrive.
