Kati Marton, author and journalist, has written a likeable book, Enemies Of The People: My Family’s Journey To America.  It is likeable as the romance of Endre and Ilona Marton, Budapest residents during a very dark period.  It is likeable as cold war history of Hungary.  It is likeable as a spy thriller with an unusual twist.  It is likeable as a family history rediscovered from the most evil of sources.  It is likeable as a personal narrative of a woman who reconstructs her childhood.  It is likeable as a story of the Americanization of a proud Hungarian family.

The Martons began life under the oppression of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, survived youthful resistance to the Nazis, only to find themselves raising a young family under the crushing control of Stalinism.  They became the two goats among sheep as the last independent journalists behind the Iron Curtain until they were arrested and imprisoned.  Their crimes were that they worked as correspondents for the Associated Press and United Press and they were friendly to the American Legation in Budapest as well as many other Westerners.  Their two young daughters witnessed the arrest first of their father and then a short time later of their mother.

Despite the imprisonment and punishment the parents received following the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 they survived to reunite their family.  They were released only because the Hungarian government and their Soviet managers wanted the advantages of trade and travel with the West.  They were finally expendable for a price.

The story continues during the years of Americanization for parents and children.  Putting the whole story together was possible only because the files of the AVO, the Hungarian secret police, and the FBI files were turned over to the author.  She found secrets aplenty but never shame or dishonor.  She was most fortunate of daughters and researchers.  Charles Marlin

Without doubt Saturday was one of the weirdest nights of my life. We travelled from the Land of the Free to the Axis of Evil in the space of about 30 minutes (via a Nepali rock concert, but that is a whole other story).

The evening began with dinner, courtesy of an American friend, at the American Club. This is a strange place. I mean no disrespect to the hospitality of my friends (and indeed the food and drink on offer were delicious) but there is always something curious about going to dinner at what appears to be a secure military installation. The whole compound is surrounded by a high wall topped with spikes and razor wire. The gates are clearly bombproof.  Signs everywhere explain that there must be no photographs.

Inside, there is a corner of a foreign field which shall remain forever US. The prices are in dollars, the beer (and I certainly don’t complain about this) is from Boston, and there is even a closely guarded American duty free supermarket stocking all those creature comforts which make life more bearable. Like pop tarts.

After a splendid dinner (and I really mean that: weird as it is to arrive in this quasi-military establishment, the food is worth the journey) we were considering our options. Where next?

Well…

…seemed like an obvious choice.

So, it seems that Pyongyang and Kathmandu are sister cities. (Whoever was responsible for that piece of twinning has a vivid imagination!) As such, Kathmandu is home to a North Korean restaurant/karaoke bar. Yes, you did read that right.

Arriving at my first North Korean restaurant was just about as weird as one would expect. The interior was spotless, in fact almost clinical. The staff were all flawless in every respect, turned out in immaculate red and blue uniforms which resembled air hostesses. The whole feeling was, to say the least, a little soulless and the other diners were sitting in near silence. We soon changed that.

We were ushered into a small private room which contained karaoke equipment, a table, and an embroidery of ‘The Last Supper’ on sale at Rs. 20,000. Informative reading material was on display including:

This curious publication contained countless informative articles explaining how the Dear Leader was giving his advice to improve the army, collective farms, and indeed teachers- Well actually the headline read “Kim Jong suk teacher training college”- but I assume that the message was one of improvement.

Our waitresses (minders) were attentive to an almost disturbing extent. Maybe it’s just me, but I find being asked what country I’m from seven times before being served a trifle likely to induce paranoia. This was allayed when they appeared with potent North Korean spirits and cranked up the karaoke machine. The music on offer was a surprising mix of English and Korean with Aqua’s Barbie Girl jostling for position with such Korean hits as (I assume- reading Korean has never been my strong point) ‘Isn’t the Dear Leader wonderful’, ‘Don’t worry Dear Leader short is beautiful’, and ‘oh Dear Leader, oh Dear Leader, where did you get that perm?’

We were handed microphones and our minders took control putting on music as they saw fit. We tried a few choruses before asserting our western splittist, imperialist mentality by asking to make our own choices. This they allowed, sulking behind the curtains whilst we sang. Despite our best efforts they would not leave. We tried asking, telling, singing etc etc but still they stayed. It is hard to feel jolly when two apparatchiks of a Stalinist state are standing in the corner of the room, glowering at you. They were even resolute in the face of my rewording of ‘I want to break free’ as ‘Do you want to break free’ (with the extra verse: ‘we could help you to defect’).

Much later (and considerably poorer- socialism sure is expensive) we bid them farewell. It had been an extraordinary and very odd evening. What has surprised me, on reflection, was how sanitised it all was. They had even done away with any pictures of the Great and/or Dear Leaders. In fact it was remarkable quite how little overt Socialism was on display. So maybe this was meant to be the clean, cuddly, tourist image of North Korea?! Well give me the Land of the Free any day…actually…I’ll just stick with Kathmandu for now.

David Davis

Read DH’s latest blogpost here. Fine stuff, but as he says, it sadly won’t happen.

Sod it: I might as well put it up anyway:-

Daniel Hannan: EU is ‘in a democratic mess’

The European Union is an economic, demographic and democratic mess, writes Daniel Hannan.

Published: 11:42AM GMT 21 Nov 2009

Comments 103 | Comment on this article

“It’s all very well to criticise, Hannan, but what would you do if you were in Van Rompuy’s shoes?” So asked a euro-enthusiast friend when I had finished tearing into Thursday night’s stitch-up.

It’s a fair question, and it won’t quite do to answer that I wouldn’t be starting from here. The EU is in an economic mess: its share of world GDP will fall from 26 per cent to 15 per cent in 2025. It is in a demographic mess: 40 years of low birth rates have left it with a choice between depopulation and mass immigration. And it is in a democratic mess, with turnouts plummeting.

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So what would I do? Step one is easy: I’d abolish the Common Agricultural Policy, thereby giving a greater boost to Europe’s economies than any number of bail-outs and stimulus packages. Food prices would fall sharply: the average family would save more than £1,000 a year in grocery bills, with the greatest savings being made by those on the lowest incomes. Scrapping the CAP would also be the single greatest gift Europe could give the Third World. It would remove the main barrier to a full WTO agreement. Oh, and it would take a penny off income tax into the bargain.

With the CAP out of the way, it would be easy enough to dismantle the rest of the Common External Tariff. I’d phase out all structural, cohesion and social funds, releasing armies of consultants and contractors to more productive work. Ditto the staffs of dozens of euro-quangos: the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Chemicals Authority, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions and so on.

Now the biggie: deregulation. According to the Commissioner for Enterprise, Gunther Verheugen, the benefits of the single market are worth around 180 billion euros a year, while the cost of complying with Brussels rules is 600 billion euros. In other words, by its own admission, the EU costs more than it’s worth. The solution? Heap the bonfire with pages of the acquits communautaire: the EU’s amassed regulations. Scrap the directives that tell us what hours we can work, what vitamins we can buy, how long we can sit on tractors, how loudly we can play our music. Return power to national governments or, better, to local authorities – or, best of all, to individual citizens.

I would confine the EU’s jurisdiction to matters of a clearly cross-border nature: tariff reduction, environmental pollution, mutual product recognition. The member states would retain control of everything else: agriculture and fisheries, foreign affairs and defence, immigration and criminal justice, and social and employment policy.

The European Commission could then be reduced to a small secretariat, answering to national ministers. The European Court of Justice could be replaced by a tribunal that would arbitrate trade disputes. The European Parliament could be scrapped altogether; instead, seconded national MPs might meet for a few days every month or two to keep an eye on the bureaucracy.

You will, of course, have spotted the flaw in my plan: it would put an awful lot of Eurocrats out of work. Which, sadly, is why it won’t happen. For, whatever the motives of its founders, the EU is now chiefly a racket: a massive mechanism to redistribute money to those lucky enough to be on the inside of the system.

Daniel Hannan is Conservative MEP for South East England. Read his Telegraph blog here

Vad? Se del 1 för förklaring och källor.

Tabellerna öppnar i nytt fönster:

Döda i fängelser i Sovjetunionen 1939-1951

Förändringar i lägerbefolkningen i GULAG 1934-1947

Könssammansättning av lägerfångar i GULAG 1934-1948

Könssammansättning av kolonifångar i GULAG 1943-1946

Gravida och barn i läger och kolonier i GULAG 1947-1953

Utbildningsnivå för lägerfångar i GULAG 1934 och 1941

Nyttjande av fängslade specialister och kvalificerad arbetskraft i GULAG 1 januari 1947

Ålderssammansättning av fångar i GULAG 1 mars 1940

Fångar i GULAG efter strafflängd mars 1940

Fångar i GULAG efter brottstyp 1 mars 1940

Fångsammansättning i GULAG efter brottstyp 1 januari 1951 (detaljerad)

Etnisk sammansättning av lägerfångar i GULAG 1939-1947, 1951

The world is becoming less safe by the day. Before the end of November, half a billion new terrorists will be added to the list kept by the US government.

On November 30, one day before the Treaty of Lisbon is scheduled to take effect, the ministers of justice of the European Union’s 27 member states will sign yet another security agreement with the US. It is supposed to be an essential weapon in the global “War on Terrorsim” the US claims to be fighting.

Under the new agreement, the US government will get access to all the banking data of all Europeans. This means that from December 2009, every single financial transaction done by every single European banking customer will come under the scrutiny of the US authorities. Henceforth, whenever the US government suspects a European “citizen” of supporting terrorism, it can request all his or her banking data, including all bank statements as well as any and all personal data connected with the account.

No doubt, many people will fail to see much harm in this, because “they have nothing to hide.” But such an attitude is based on the assumption the US is governed by benign, rational individuals, controlled by an elaborate system of checks and balances.

In fact, this is obviously not the case. If any conclusion can be drawn from recent history, it is that the US government does not act benignly, neither towards it own citizens nor to those of other nations. Especially not toward those of other nations, one should say. US policies are vindictive, vicious, ruthless, deceitful, destructive and murderous. Since the end of World War II, the number of people killed worldwide by the US government, directly or indirectly, runs in the millions. It is safe to say the US government finds itself in the same league as the Nazis and the Stalinists. And don’t let anybody retort that the millions of victims of US violence have died to make the word safe for democracy, or that their deaths were somehow necessary or inevitable or some such nonsense.

Today, under the very eyes of an indifferent world, hundreds of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis are being slaughtered every day by US bullets, bombs and missiles, just like during the 1960s and 70s every day hundreds were being killed directly or indirectly by US violence in Indochina and Latin America.

Within a few weeks, US authorities will gain full access to some of the most private data of all inhabitants of the European Union and this should be cause for alarm. After all, from a moral point of view the EU leadership (and of the 27 member states) is just as evil and corrupt as the US government.

All over Germany, propaganda events sponsored by profiteers such as Deutsche Telekom and starring international pop stars celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the annex of the GDR by West Germany.

The celebrations are a slap in the face of the East German people. In East Germany, unemployment is now so high that, according to a recent survey, 57% of East Germans state that life was better under the Stalinist dictatorship.

Review: Stalin’s Nemesis. The Exile, and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Bertrand M. Patenaude. Faber & Faber. 2009. Trotsky A Biography. Robert Service. Macmillan. 2009.

“Estimations of Trotsky tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall.” So comments Bertrand Patenaude. How should the man be considered? Why should we be interested in his defeat? Rigid, lacking sound political instincts, the overweening “flaw” in his haughty personality, – all judgements of Stalin’s Nemesis – Trotsky offered brilliant justification of the Russian Revolution, and mordant criticisms of Soviet rule under Stalin. To Robert Service Trotsky was “an exceptional human being and a complex one”. He was a major actor in a central drama of the 20^th century, whose “ideas, including those about Russian history, had a lasting impact”. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis is a solid, if not particularly friendly, account of Trotsky’s life following his expulsion from the Soviet Union. It frequently expands to encompass the longer course of his vocation, from inspiring mass leader to marginalised founder of the Fourth International. But to get the full flavour of a study that puts the emphasis on how the one-time Commissar’s personality, imprinted with a “definite ideology”, shaped his career, from a leading player in the October capture of power, to exile, and victim of Stalin’s brutal revenge one needs to read Robert Service’s biography. With all the faults, and these flow in abundance, of such a method. Not that would have expected a sympathetic portrait. In Stalin (2004) Service compared Trotsky’s use of violence to Stalin’s and stated that he alone of the leading Bolsheviks approached the Georgian “in bloodthirstiness”. Or indeed a rounded grasp of Communist ideology and history. In his Comrades (2007) Service asserted that by the end of the 19^th century Marxism had become “an infallible set of doctrines and political substitute for religion.” And that Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ “new type of state” based on “one-party, one-ideology” with no respect for “law, constitution and popular consent” that had spread to “mutate like a virus”, infecting the body of Fascism, and Nazism. It remains around, apparentl, to taint “the Islamist plans of Osama Bin Laden” and the Taliban.

Each book then offers not just narrative but assessments of Trotsky. That is, to the history of Communism and the Soviet Union. Patenaude’s story is largely centred on life in his Mexican homes in Coyoacán. Wider historical description and judgements about Trotsky tend to flow from this location. Despite its dismissive conclusion about the “dogma of Marxism” and Trotsky’s faith in the “glorious Soviet future” (did Patenaude mislay his style guide?) the book is gripping and illuminating. Aware of his previous writings, one expects less, and gets a lot less, from Service. In an ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist review David North (here) has rigorously unravelled the string of howlers that litter the book – apparently produced by a serious historian – from names, dates of people’s death, (including that of Natalia, Trotsky’s wife) to graver errors. The claim that this is the “first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist” may, nevertheless, be true. It is less than sure that Service’s efforts, to offer a “more searching approach” than previous biographies, such as Isaac Deutscher’s celebrated Trilogy, or the painstakingly documented publications of Pierre Broué, not to mention his subject’s own “self-serving and misleading” accounts, offer more than acres of darkness about Trotsky.

Mexico, after years of wandering in exile, initially internal, in Kazakhstan, to outside the USSR in Turkey, France, to Norway, was Trotsky’s final home. The axe had fallen. He was now, for the Soviet state, officially a “counter-revolutionary” who had formed an illegal anti-Soviet party. No state appeared comfortable with receiving this dangerous revolutionary. But, from 1937 up till his murder in 1941, he found a guarded welcome from the Mexican President Cárdenas, a supporter of the Spanish republic and protector of countless loyalist refugees. The agrarian reformer had yielded to lobbying from the celebrated muralist, and self-styled Trotskyist, Diego Rivera, and out of a sense that it was the “proper thing to do” had accepted the Russian revolutionary. The artist housed him in Coyoacán, in his casa azul (blue house), “filled with plants and flowers, pre-Columbian sculptures” and “a fruit bearing orange tree” in the patio. With talent Patenaude describes the enveloping clouds around Trotsky’s stay. Life in the Blue House, where he had an affair with Rivera’s wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (riven in many minds by Julie Taymor’s dashing bio-film), was not without drama. Sketches of Trotsky’s intimate relationship with his wife, Natalia, his pastimes, fishing, hunting, cacti collecting, and fraught diners, enliven the human side of – to anyone immersed in the drier side of Trotskyist literature – of the Old Man. There are snapshots of an earlier existence, from his role as the Bolshevik Army leader, the bitter struggles with Stalin following Lenin’s death in 1923, to his eventual hounding out of the Party.

That past was brought back quickly. In the growing Stalinist terror, Moscow ideologues attacked Trotsky the ‘counter-revolutionary’. Near-by the Mexican Communist Party launched violent campaigns against his presence. From the start Trotsky and his entourage were under siege. Unfortunately, not only real threats weighed on them. There were petty rows. “Life in the Trotsky household was marked by frequent periods of tension and petty strife which at times had the effect of undermining Trotsky’s security.” Which, by the time they had moved from the Blue House to the Avenida Viena (a result of the liaison with Frida) had become a full-time task. This was not always well carried out, despite efforts to recruit reliable guards, install alarm systems, and watch towers. Those out to crush him got closer and closer to Trotsky’s immediate circle. They imprisoned and executed members of his family, and assassinated important Trotskyist activists on the streets of Europe. This campaign spread to whole political movements. In Spain the 1937, a Stalinist-instigated a suppression of, at the height of the Civil War, the ‘Trotskyist’ POUM (an independent anti-Stalinist Marxist group. that Trotsky’s own dozen strong band of Spanish followers had been told to reject as ‘centrist’) was undertaken on the grounds of their ‘services’ for “European and Asiatic fascism”. Amid the repression their leader, the Catalan Andreu Nin was abducted from prison, tortured and murdered by a GPU-led squad. By the start of 1940 the henchmen of the Soviet Union’s GPU were operating with the purpose of eliminating Trotsky in his New World redoubt. The infiltration by Stalinist agents, first Bob Harte, then, the sadly well known, under various names, Mercador (Ramón, Raymond), Jacques Mornard, who wormed his way into the Coyoacán refuge, by the cruel seduction of the trusted Sylvia Ageloff, is outlined with all its tortuous mendacity.

Wider politics played the major part of Trotsky’s life in exile. The Marxist revolutionary had not come to Mexico to abandon the fight against Stalinism; he wished to confront it with all possible means. Apart from holding the reins of the nascent Fourth International – in preparation since Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and founded officially in 1938 – Trotsky wrote prolifically on international affairs. He offered  criticisms on a global scale of Communist policies. In the Bulletin of the Opposition, and countless articles for the international left (and bourgeois) press he showed the truth about the “privileged caste” that made up the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’, and the ‘gravedigger’ of the Russian Revolution, Stalin. Trotsky tried to organise resistance on a world-scale. Trotsky was still engaged in a biography of Stalin up to Mercador’s lethal assault.

Patenaude describes a central episode in this unequal combat: the Dewy Commission, (1937). This was set up to challenge the Soviet charge that Trotsky was behind untold plots ‘uncovered’ during the Great Terror, and prosecuted during the Moscow trials. The 78-year-old American educationalist and pragmatist philosopher, John Dewy, who headed the public tribunal, declared that the injustice of this ‘legal’ process ranked with the Dreyfus affair and that of Sacco and Vanceti. This Commission, an Inquiry into such claims, visited his Central American location. It took testimonies from many sources, was not without its difficult moments for Trotsky. Here his record as a leading Bolshevik came into play. How could the former People’s Commissar (as Service asserts much more frequently) demand the rights of democratic justice when his own actions in power had betrayed them? Stalin’s Nemesis suggests that Trotsky was forced into a corner over his defence of his action in suppressing the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion – his role as “the bloody Field Marshall Trotsky”. It might have been relevant here to read what Victor Serge had to say on the subject, that if, as Trotsky alleged (high-handedly) the revolt was led by men different to those who once rose in support of the October Revolution, that whether the Party that crushed them was also the same. Or was it not too already suffering from “bureaucratic befoulment”? Did in fact there have to be some kind of re-assessment, as Serge suggested, of the early years of Bolshevik power. To begin with the introduction of the Cheka (forerunner of the GPU and other state security organs) and the suppression of overt opposition to the Party? That, the “central Committee”, by condemning in 1918 the right to apply the death penalty “without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves” an “Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilisation.” *

If the Moscow trials, the Commission concluded, were a frame-up (a view, to our astonishment today, not shared by many on the left), this leaves unresolved the difficulties, moral and political, these particular issues raise. Patenaude outlines the American educator’s 1938 exchange with Trotsky on ethics. The Dialectical Materialist claimed that the class struggle was the ultimate basis of all morals. That under Lenin the Party had followed the ‘laws’ of social development and revolution in crushing its enemies. That, “the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of power of man over man.” In contrast Stalin used unrestrained terror to serve the authority of bureaucratic rule. Thus, he concluded, end had a ‘dialectical’ relation to means. Stalin’s goal needed repression, Lenin and Trotsky’s…. Dewey asked in reply if these ‘laws’ had testable proof, and what ‘means’ precisely were ruled out to achieve a world where people were free. One might conclude that how to maintain some kind of human decency regardless of the political circumstances remains unresolved. Dewey to an extent shared with Trotsky the premise that morality was not fixed but (as the American later wrote) based on “growth, improvement and progress”. He foresaw its future in a wider democratic process rather than formal political association – social development towards ending the rule of a minority over others in short. This leaves open what kind of political action gave an opportunity for Stalin to rise to power, and the lack of clarity about Trotsky’s defence of early Bolshevik methods of compulsion. In what sense, viewed today, can we say that they were in line with the promise of future human liberation? This end has yet to come.

What then of the politician, the Marxist, the revolutionary leader? Patenaude cites Max Eastman’s opinion that Trotsky “lacked the gift for personal friendship”. He had no real friends, but “followers and subalterns”. Their Morals and Ours wanted to end power over people; his political action was based on instrumental authority. That he saw “individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than personalities in their own right.” Eastman was well-placed to know: he fell out with Trotsky over his casual treatment well before he broke with the left and began a steady drift rightwards. But how far does this get us? Trotsky no doubt considered himself equally as a tool – of History (as Edmund Wilson described his self-image in To The Finland Station). In this fashion we was an actor in pre-written script. British intelligence agent (and financier of anti-Bolshevik forces), Bruce Lockhart, said of Trotsky during the Revolution “he strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.” But from this, to try, as Robert Service does, to align the course of Trotsky’s political career around his personal qualities, from “alienating others” to “will to dominate”, is less than savoury. Not that we can blithely reduce his arguments, as Tariq Ali so characteristically does, to the thesis that “Trotsky was a cold blooded and ruthless murderer” whose crimes merit exposure (Guardian Review. 31.10.09). Some of hard judgements are far from baseless (even Ali, given to hero-worshiping, admits the Bolsheviks decided to “hold onto power whatever the cost”). But that if there is one thing that marks out Service’s Trotsky it is a relentless wish to bring the role of the individual in History forward. Trotsky: A Biography constantly runs the risk of replacing critical historical determinism by a critique of one individual’s personality. However, Trotsky’s perception of himself as part of a broader movement of events was not wholly misjudged. His fate was laid out as much by history as by the workings of his character. His “greater propensity for commands than for discussion”, his “extremely violent” practice, (for the sake of argument, conceded without countervailing traits) only flourished in conditions where people and institutions obeyed. Where in fact violence had become entrenched – by causes far beyond the Will of a “high order” Intellect. Whose origins are beyond the character defects of one revolutionary leader.

Trotsky: A Biography is, then, dominated by the working out of an inner destiny. Yet, in Stalin Service had noted, “Neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created.” This is even truer of Trotsky. His inability sustain his position owed less to a general lack of political abilities to an absence of the very specific skills – mixing loud loyalty with low cunning, a capacity to reassure the apparatus and build a coterie around him – that were needed to win power in the emerging bureaucratic state. It is pretty obvious that organising a kaleidoscope of alliances, from the left to the United Opposition, on a platform of challenging the growth and power of this army of functionaries, was not going to make much head-way inside the very Party that swelled in symbiosis with the bureaucracy. Trotsky disdained to make appeals outside this circle. Then, the real issues are deeper. Why did he help build the administration only to attempt its transformation? Did he, even given his handicaps as a politician, offer anything other than a variant on the “model” of the one-party one-ideology state? Was Trotsky, for all his later criticisms of the Stalinist system, too wrapped in a set of near-identical assumptions about Capitalism and building Socialism, to offer a realistic different form of Communism? In sum, did he leave behind anything of value to the present world?

Service is in little doubt about the central responsibility Trotsky had in forming the Soviet regime.  To begin with, Trotsky’s life was marked out by a dictatorial personality-become-dictatorial politics. Living life on his own terms, the young Trotsky became father to the man; “intensely self-righteous” his ideology propelled him into enforcing a closed political system, his version of Marxism as a guide to creating a Communist society. The means? He rejected individual terrorism, only to support “mass terror realised by the revolutionary class” – which brooked no opposition to the “proletarian dictatorship” that would construct socialism. In this respect, “the Bolshevik regime was flawed from its inception”. Trotsky may have beguine as a supporter of workers’ liberation but “As soon as he had power, he eagerly suppressed popular aspirations by violence.” Next, Trotsky’s own inability to offer a convincing alternative, in democratic and economic terms, to Stalin’s version of a totalitarian state, was through-going. He had an inability to think outside of the Party, “the Party in the final analysis is always right because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its fundamental tasks”. Such fundamental ‘partyism’ Service calls “the frame of communist authoritarianism”. Trotsky had differences over policies with Stalin (and he claimed that some of them, promoting socialisation and land collectivisation, were adopted, albeit in a ‘deformed’ way during the period of the first Five Year Plans). Nevertheless, Trotsky’s strategy, for a whole decade, was to capture that party. When this failed he wanted to build a new one. But Trotsky’s own version of ‘workers’ democracy’ resembled the Bolsheviks’ own proto-totalitarian machine – the forging of that “sole historical instrument for the proletariat.” Finally, the failure of Trotsky’s prophetic Marxism was complete. Instead of an inevitable revolt to restore workers’ power. When there was (in the Transitional Programme’s words) the “downfall of the Bonapartist clique and the Thermidorian bureaucracy” there was no socialist take-over to take over the bureaucracy and create a new ‘superstructure’ over the ‘socialist’ foundations of the economy. Capitalism was restarted in the Soviet Union, and its satellites. Collective property ended up in the hands of a new state protected bourgeoisie.

Much of the argument of Stalin’s Nemesis resembles the Bellman’s in The Hunting of the Snark (“What I tell you three times is true”). Trotsky was bad, bad and bad. But what remains? For all this constant battering on one-theme Service still raises important problems (from the nature of political Marxism to the development of capitalism). We have, Trotsky, the  brilliant, World Actor, which first brought him to prominence, but whose inability to relate to others, and to act as an ordinary politician (making allies, cutting deals)  isolated him, while his know-all imperiousness and indifference to others, helped doom what little chance he had of forming a new International during his exile. Thus, Trotsky “did not suffer fools gladly: indeed he did not suffer them at all.” One supposes that this is not an attribute that recommends itself to anyone on a dispassionate jury selecting Commissars with the power of life and death over others. Though it seems a good qualification for many positions, from entrepreneurs, CEOs, political spin-doctors and indeed British government figures, all with at least (in theory) more constraints than Trotsky had around him during his years in power. Is this in any case a fair character assessment, if not exactly psychometrics? Service is not alone is describing a Trotsky that always saw the wood, the human mass, and never the individual human tree. That, Trotsky was barely a Politician at all. He never even began to present a challenge to Stalin, during his Soviet years. Or that afterwards in the vainglorious attempt to form a Fourth International as an alternative to Stalinist Communism and the reformist (and ‘centrist’ left-wing) socialist and social democratic parties, Trotsky overreached himself. He was left with, when all seemed lost, as Patenaude states, only faith in a better future.

But this leads us further. To the ‘dictatorial-political’ strain in Trotsky’s ideology and person. That is, Trotsky’s ingrained support for repression. Service justly brings forward Terrorism and Communism (1920). This is a key text (my edition is published tellingly by Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party). Trotsky polemicises against the German Second International Marxist Kautsky, who defended a conventional form of democratic socialist government based on free elections and civil liberties. In high Jacobin mode Trotsky argued that not only the needs of the hour called for the severest form of revolutionary dictatorship, but that ruthless repression of political enemies, and compulsion in all spheres of life, from labour armies, to swift punishment for any disobedience to Soviet Rule, were inevitable features of any transition to a socialist society. Service intercalates the reality behind such sentences. The Bolsheviks had indeed “Shot innocent hostages. They had stripped large social groups of their civil rights. They had glorified terrorist ideas and gloried in their application” That this is, if anything, an underestimation of Trotsky’s totalitarianism, can be seen from these oft-quoted words, “..The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. i.e., the most ruthless form of the state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.” (Terrorism and Communism. 1975)

 Nobody who supported these ideas, or even briefly entertained them, is much of an exmaple for the left. Even if the target, Kautsky’s conventional defence of progress through reform made little difference to the ruin and chaos of Europe in this period.

But how did Trotsky come to this view? This is not clearly explained. There is no serious reference to previous writings supporting such a comprehensive use of force over politics, and the prime motor of the economy, even if one can detect traces of it in earlier braggadocio and toying with the imagery of the French Revolution. For most of its existence, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was, for Marxists, in so far as it was used sparingly, hardly at all by Marx himself. It referred to a period when the working class imposes its rule as a class, not a party, and there is no doubt room for great ambiguity in the term. Hal Draper has argued that the phrase was taken over to gain, and transform, a large part of the contemporary radical left, that is those influenced and organised in the Blanquist tradition. This modelled itself on France in 1789 and truly wished for a sharp short period of outright forceful rule by a revolutionary minority to set the people free. By contrast Marx, he states, emphasised another side of ‘dictatorship in this sense (that is, in the 19^th century where the phrase was coined). For him it signified an emergency period of ‘rule’, turned into administration by the working class majority – that is, democracy, hence “nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat – the “conquest of political power, by the working class, the establishment of a workers’ state in the immediate post revolutionary period.” (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin. 1987). Draper argued that the problem with Lenin, and equally with Trotsky, was that they were unable to see the workers’ state in these democratic terms. That Trotsky in the above work went “farthest in advocating the workers; democracy in state affairs”. As a result throughout Trotsky’s life, Draper observes, there was confusion, a separating between ”the concept ‘workers’ state (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) from the question of working-class control from below (‘rule’).” (Hal Draper. Op cit.) Which leaves open the nature of what Draper calls the influence of the “environment”, the political atmosphere, that allowed/encouraged Trotsky to deform Marx. This fierce rhetoric, if it did not come from a close understanding of Marx, could not just be the product of the Russian left’s internal development.

It is history, not just Marxist classics, that supplies some of the answer. In the early Soviet Union Lenin’s initial programme of placing the workers in charge of all levels of the state – a plan to ensure its eventual ‘withering away’ as its functions were devolved to society – were overwhelmed by the needs of the Civil War. If, that is, it was ever seriously contemplated not much of it remained – from Taylorist One-Man Management in the factories, to state rule by decree. Soviet power, that is, the Bolsheviks; hold on the administration, had, Trotskyists still argue, to be defended at all costs. The Generals of the White Armies were open about their desire to crush their Bolshevik enemies. They smashed anything that stood in their way, they would have re-imposed autocratic rule over the corpses of the workers, the Jews, and the left. That in these conditions, “The question as to who will rule the country, i.e. the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.” (Terrorism and Communism) Can this be faulted? Some may say that a fight for life and death would be better pursued with a democratically mobilised country behind a left government and the Soviets. But then hindsight is not much of guide to historical explanation.

The issue here, though, is not only that Trotsky (according to his democratic critics) was wrong, preparing the way for a lamp that burnt right through the Russian people’s lives, but that “bloody Field Marshall” was also a personality which was moulded by long wars that had drenched the land on blood. That a soil which threw up so many similar types needs as much explaining as the individual, the theory, and the state machine that gave it free reign. That regardless of the contribution of the latter (which we will return to), the fields of slaughter in Europe and Russia were created not by Communist theory, or the Soviets, but by imperial clashes. That Trotsky’s militarism was largely their product not Marx’s, or even one strand within Russian Social Democracy (Trotsky’s own position in-between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks for much of his career would seem to make his views the result of many different influences) and that it is the height of a biographer’s vanity to imagine that he can judge the Man without looking deeply into the conditions in which he throve.

How is this? Service refers to Trotsky’s early championing of the terrifyingly brutal short stories of Isaac Babel. Trotsky showed his “eye for excellence” by picking them out. Lionel Trilling described The Red Cavalry based on the author’s experience of fighting with Cossack irregular troops in Poland, as about “violence of the most extreme kind”, “written in a kind of lyric joy” (Penguin 2007). In this it mirrors a substantial part of early 20^th century writing, early futurism, and given depth and realism in post Great War literature. A parellel is in the novels of the ultra-nationalist Freikörps supporter, Ernst Jünger, which was infected with descriptions of this “rush” of violence. In Britain we remember better anti-war memories, poetry and works such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But amongst accounts of the horrors of armed conflict, of the steady attrition of life, and daily deprivations of the trenches, and, naturally, of the Russian Civil War, we can see that not just characters in novels revelled in brutality, an ultra-modernist longing for a new world cleansed by violence, or a reactionary need to water the native earth with the blood of foreigners. A brutal cast of mind was widely spread in real life.

If Trotsky had his share of this, then it should be recognised that it was less his inner character that drove him than the forces of History he, after all, felt obliged to follow. Service’s ancient Greek drama, in which the path traced out by one’s inherent personal qualities is given, shows its limits here. The breakdown of ‘civilisation’ and its barbaric replacement profoundly shaped the politics and public personalities of the inter-war period. The resulting culture of ‘hardness’ contributed, as is more than well-known, to the ultimate cult of violence, the demarcation of Friend and Enemy on racial grounds in the Nazi State. Stalin had his own violent background, as a near-gangster, described in Montefoire’s Young Stalin (2007). This ingrained his predisposition to revenge any slight, and gave a taste for the liquidation of enemies. Trotsky, by contrast, had had time, when that régime’s nature became apparent, to show at least some self-reflection on the error of letting violence prevail over politics – a great deal of time during his Mexican exile. Is this the result? The Fourth International’s (FI) Transitional Programme (1938) calls for a state run by the people through Soviets in which “all political currents of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on the basis of the widest democracy.” Without defining what are the workers’ political currents, and what are not, this is not enough of a self-criticism. But a far cry from hurling anathemas at all but One current. And, if he did not recognise this change, Trotsky never got the hang of recognising that kind of turn.

Another layer of Trotsky: A Biography lies in the lengthy history of the FI’s founder’s political struggle and his policies. It would be wearying to delve too deeply here. There is much material that may be found wanting. Trotskyists (such as Pierre Broué) have claimed that the Trotsky and the opposition did offer an alternative political structure (workers’ democracy inside the Party), and a programme for administrative reform toward a democratic socialist economy. The crucial issue though is organisational. Trotsky soon retreated from War Communism. Rule by force, and the militarisation of labour was never extended to his planned subordination of Trade Unions to production. Lenin’s death left him the lurch. By 1923 he began to regroup and react to the growing power of Stalin and the emerging bureaucratic monolith. In that year’s The New Course he began to identify a new bureaucratic stratum – a distinction with Lenin’s conception of lingering influence of Imperial office practice. Against this Trotsky agitated for the right of the party masses to engage in ideological debate. This was largely justified on the grounds that the direct expression of differing opinions – from the base – would help root out bureaucracy. With echoes of his much earlier critique of Leninism Trotsky asked,

“If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary grouping must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinion, people inevitably group together.”

This was published; the gates barring all criticism had not closed yet. But it met strong resistance. Against this line of reasoning Stalin was able to make capital out of Trotsky’s acquiescence in the 10^th Bolshevik Party (R.C.P (B)) Conference’s secret decision to suppress all factionalising (1921). From there Stalin called Trotsky’s calls for vibrant inner-party discussion during the 13^th Conference (1924) “unrestrained agitation for democracy” an “absolute and a fetish” which “is unleashing petty-bourgeois elemental forces.” It was in vain that Trotsky protested that he was opposed to factions, that he believed that (as previously cited) “in the last analysis the Party is always right.” Stalin was in a position to go full throttle. Leninism, he asserted, was built as a “monolithic organisation, hewed from a single block, possessing a single will and in its work uniting all shades of thought into a single current of practical activities.” As Stalin gradually consolidated his power this version of Democratic Centralism won out, and the unitary Will found no place for Trotsky’s opinions.

Without exaggerating Trotsky’s chances – trapped, as he was, in a political web partly of his own making, which paralysed his freedom of action – this issue, of democracy, is the crucial one. Hal Draper grasped the nettle. Either Trotsky recognised freedom for factionalism inside a Communist organisation – which he was never to do – or he too would end up confronting the need to suppress “differences of opinion”. Nor can differences be confined inside a single party. Political history is the history of factionalising, from groupings, tendencies, cliques, fractions, factions, to sects. The Greek word, ‘stasis’, that is the attempt to upset the existing order, the urge to overthrow the powers that be, ‘sedition’, is the spring behind their existence. It is a universal political phenomenon (insofar as politics – disputing and agreeing – are human qualities), as much as production itself. Before the Russian Revolution Georges Sorel, who preferred anti-party syndicalism, was fond of referring to socialist parties that tended to smoother differences in bureaucratic oligarchies and engage in parliamentary office-seeking and jobbery. To some the turn of Bolshevism-in-power into Stalinism indicates an even worse fate. One major factor in party bureaucratisation (apart from the wider social hierarchy they often mirror) is a ban on factionalism – or (as in the more modern period) a gutting out of inner-party democracy to prevent differing currents’ voices having any effect on their policy. The Bolsheviks were long accused of tendencies in this direction (not least by Trotsky himself). This was false, though one should not idealise the freedom to criticise that existed in an atmosphere of heated clashes and the threat of expulsions inside Lenin’s party. Stalin, as we have seen, raised such a move to a point of principle. Trotsky attempted to halt the dynamic. That he did so only is a very half-heartened way, and completely endorsed the Communist monopoly of power, is clear. But from there to allege that Trotsky’s initial attempts to at least raise some degree of opposition to bureaucratic rule, at a terrible cost to his own political career, that he, in Service’s opinion had “laid several foundation stones for the erection of Stalin’s political, social and even cultural edifice” is presumptuous. It should not be forgotten that by 1923 he was doing his utmost to assemble the blocks in a very different way.

Trotsky, therefore, remains ambiguous. His later writings, displayed in the limpid prose of The History of the Russian Revolution (1932 – 3) the brilliant analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), which analysed Soviet bureaucracy in terms of administering shortages, should not dazzle us into ignoring that they were flawed. Claims that the revolution had left a fundamentally healthy socialist form of property – hence economy were deeply problematic. Service is right to note Trotsky’s inability to see any plausible way that the October Revolution could be ‘righted’ to correspond to this enduring ground. Perhaps more significantly this perspective skewed his judgement, anxious for the socialist productive forces to expand, Trotsky considered their growth over-rode many other considerations. His enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, largely founded on this perspective, in the years before his assassination, right up to the invasion of Finland, and the Partition of Poland, shows serious errors of judgement. Perry Anderson has claimed that far from ‘de-generating’ the dynamic of Stalinism reached out further and produced a “generation” of new Stalinist states, not only through force of Russian arms, but in Asia, by indigenous revolutionary combat (Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin. 1978). That this, against Anderson, was not a sign of a “transition beyond capitalism” can be seen in the present-day Chinese regime.

Was Trotsky a major Marxist theorist? He wrote and spoke in sweeping generalisations, with illustrations rather than conceptual analysis and thoroughly researched references peppering his paragraphs. In contrast to Lenin, his views were not presented through dense texts designed for an activist to chew over but by lyrical prose that aims to seduce a general audience. The histories move us, and the fate of the Russian Revolution is explained in a way that leaves its imprint, without necessarily satisfying our curiosity about those he disagreed with (all are given fairly short shrift), or taxing our minds too much. Amongst his theories the ‘law of combined development’ (called in Trotskyist circles “the Law of Combined and Uneven Development’), summaries some perhaps useful ideas. It is far from law-like – claims about the different rates of development across the world, and the potential for ‘leaps’ from forms of manufacturing to modern industrialisation, from autocratic regimes to democracies are heaped together with (Trotsky’s version of) socialism. This discovery’s presence is sometimes still glimpsed in academic leftist discourse about international development – uneven apparently, but ‘combined’ with global trends.

One has the impression that Trotsky wrote rather like some supercilious British leftist orator who imagines he has cleverly shown his enemies up as fools and knaves and expects the audience to nod in agreement. Is a fluent and appealing rendering of a speaking style everything? Lenin’s own production sharpens one’s critical senses despite often-wooden phraseology (one imagines the original Russian is not much different in that respect). But they compel because the founder of the Soviet State’s core works are very concrete analysis of specific political conjunctures – leading up to the 1918 Revolution, and the problems it faced afterwards. All that he produced was grounded on weighty studies about the development of capitalism in Russia, its politics and flashes of insight into the operations of the world system – imperialism. One who is opposed to the Bolsheviks’ Dictatorship of the Proletariat through a democratic centralist party, and any aspect of their policies, is always aware of these, rather than anyone else’s, (that is, Trotsky onwards) premises. When Lenin discussed philosophy in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism he went to the sources, even if he dosed his writing with heavy-handed polemic. This was no exception, when Lenin polemicised he read and grappled with his opponents’ arguments. His notes on Hegel demonstrate a remarkable effort under the hardest circumstances to think something new. Trotsky was different. Marxism was largely a settled matter for him. He replied to American critics of Dialectics by regurgitating the homilies of early Dia-Mat and showed few signs of grasping what the contrary opinion was about. As for conjunctural writings, Trotsky on Germany (the rise of Hitler) and France (during the Popular Front) never capture Lenin’s zest for detail. Their telegraphed message, that the workers’ parties should unite – against the merging Nazi threat – or to break from the mildly reformist and strongly respectable Parti Radical can be seen now, as rather thin. The latter – while in accord with rising French workers’ occupations, failed to anticipate that the fall of the Popular Front government (which relied on their co-operation) would not result in the rise of a powerful left party eager for Trotsky’s advice on how to form Committees of Action that would reflect the will of the “struggling masses”. Naturally the Popular Front collapsed – Trotsky was not there to help the left.

If these are well-known cases of Trotsky’s apparent foresight, even more contentious were efforts to roll out comment on a wider range of world political issues, from Britain to China. They stretch even the admirers’ capacity to defer to Trotsky’s authority. Trotsky’s role as Global sage became a major cause (or perhaps, symptom) of his failure to win converts from existing left-wing groups to the banner of the Fourth International. So, opining on Spain (not a country he was in any way really familiar with), Trotsky attacked one of the few independent European Marxist groups with any social weight, the POUM. His writings, which criticised the party for its willingness to engage in support for the Republican government, are a disgraceful farrago of wishful thinking and spite. It is not to their honour that Trotskyists today continue to try to snaffle some glory for having ‘defended’ the POUM, or lay claim to its desperate struggle – as Ken Loach attempted in the film, Land and Freedom. ** As for the predictions, sometimes Trotsky was acute (in foreseeing, like many others) a war between the USSR and Nazi Germany, other times, embarrassing, like his feeling that that the second World War would result in genuine Continent-wide workers’ revolutions. Régis Debray once described Trotsky as an expert on everything under the sun, and a few things more besides. This is fair comment.

It is sometimes said that Trotsky tried to ride the waves of history, buoyed up in an epoch of revolutions that had their own inner currents. Trotsky’s constant refrain that capitalism was in decline, that the world would soon see another crisis that would give birth to a new wave of radical Marxist-led revolutions, and that the miniscule Fourth international (the embodiment of historical truth) would play a major role in these uprisings, tend to confirm this. They are both quaint (his longing for the Sublime when we would all be geniuses) and misleadingly vague (the end of ‘power’). Yet there continues to be grandeur in his stand. If we can be harsh with our criticisms of him it is not to diminish the immense courage that he showed in raising the banner of opposition to Stalin. His ideas were not, by a long shot, completely misguided. He did fight, tooth and nail, against the burgeoning bureaucratic state – if on a basis which has its flaws, (but then what would not have been faultless given its origins inside the Communist Party?). He was hated enough by Stalin to be murdered. Patenaude notes that in 1961 Brezhnev gave his killer (released from gaol in 1960) the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal for, “heroism and bravery’ and ‘carrying out a special task’.

What of Trotsky’s legacy? Patenaude never musters the effort needed to go far into this question. He  contents himself with the solemn comment that the Marxist revolutionary died a “prisoner of the myth of October as a workers’ revolution.” Service at least tries to draw some balance-sheet. It does not ignore the most signification aspect – the destiny of his political following, as well as his place in the public imagination of the wider left. As he put it in Comrades, Trotsky was, around 1968, hauled onto the “pedestal of esteem” by students and young people. This has, he claims, faded. In Stalin’s Nemesis, he observes that Trotskyists have never been “much larger than groupuscles”, who “never came close to taking power anywhere”. That Trotsky was to become little more than a “comfort blanket for revolutionaries who did not mind that they were not making a revolution” These remarks may those who think the Russian Revolution’s myth is all that Trotsky’s politics represented, both as a legend himself, and the bearer of its mythology, he would seem for Patenaude and Service to have been tried, and, for all his better qualities, found severely wanting. It would be fruitless to protest that the real problems with Trotsky are political, and, apart from the assessment of his life and fatal decease, we should perhaps pay more than passing attention to what they indicate to present-day left political life.

What then of the Trotskyist movement? It is far more influential than Service credits – its impact continues throughout the left, notably in France, but also in Britain where Trotskyists had a hey-day in the 1970s Labour Party. More recently those with a Trotskyist background were elected to the Scottish Parliament (before descending into fractious dispute). Trotskyism has offered a political induction for countless individuals, including the former Prime Minister of France, Lionel Jospin, prominent Labour MPs, and even Ministers. In many counties Trotskyists is a significant presence in trade unions. Trotskyist groups have provided and still offer a range of different ideas on politics, a full galaxy of opinions on nearly every weighty issue. What then of their faults? Many of these can be traced back to Trotsky. Trotsky’s effort to build a new International involved him in constant attacks on all other independent anti-Stalinist groups – without exception. He could not have equal allies – the American SWP was tolerated for its ready obedience. When that dried up within sections of the New York party, his wrath was immense, showering his critics with abuse. The ability to tolerate contradiction was not the Dialectician’s forte. Like Trotsky many have not yet, despite the recognition of multi-party democracy by the Fourth International in 1977 not entirely agreed on the nature of democracy’s importance to socialism. This position is not universally accepted. Some from the Trotskyist tradition remain wedded to Trotsky’s hostility to factionalism, as the long list of expulsion and splits from the British Socialist Workers Party indicate all too clearly. Others are even more backward looking, basing themselves entirely on Trotsky’s words. But his or her judgements alone are unlikely to convince anyone who does not share this belief in a grace radiating from his life. Their time has passed, and we do not have to turn our backs every time we act to look at the works and deeds of Trotsky, Lenin or Stalin, to decide what we should do today. When we do – at some point we on the left have to have some guidance in the history that has shaped us – we will find matters of interest and reflection in writings such as Patenaude’s, the fruit of some honest toil in the archives – but precious little Enlightenment in any of Service’s words.

++++++++++++++++++++

** Victor Serge. Once More Kronstadt. 1938. In a full dossier of the affair, headed by Trotsky’s explanation. The Konstadt Rebellion in the Soviet Union 1921. Education for Socialists. 1973. The context was post-civil war worker unrest, notably in adjoining Petrograd (Petersburg), and demands for a lifting of the repression of civil rights. Trotsky claimed that the sailors demanded, “privileges”, that were out for privileged food rations, that the insurrection’s victory would “bring nothing but a victory of the counter-revolution” and that their ideas were “deeply reactionary”. They “reflected the hostility of the backward peasantry tot he worker, the conceit of the soldier of sailor in relation to the ‘civilian’ Petersburg, the hatred of the petty bourgeois for revolutionary discipline.” Later Alfred Rosmer, the French syndicalist, Communist and then left oppositionist, who was deeply involved with the early Soviet republic, offered a variant of this scarecrow of an argument. He cast aspersions on the political forces that flocked around the mutineers. Whatever the ‘tragic’ nature of the crushing of Kronstadt, the Communists afterwards took measures to assuage the causes of the defiance (rend of food requisition, dampening down peasant dissatisfaction, better bread rations and elements of small scale enterprise in urban areas). In any case, the uprising itself had rallied all the enemies of Bolshevism, “Que des éléments contre-révolutionnaires aient cherché à profiter de la situation, c’était normal; leur role était d’exciter les mécontentements, d’envenimer les griefs, de tirer vers eux le mouvement. D’où sortit le mot d’ordre des “ soviets sans bolchéviks ” ? il n’est pas aisé de le préciser, mais il était si commode pour rallier tout le monde, tous les adversaires du régime, en particulier les socialistes-révolutionnaires, les cadets, les menchéviks, empressés à prendre une revanche, qu’il est permis de supposer que ce sont eux qui en eurent l’idée, et la propagande qu’ils firent sur cette revendication pouvait toucher les marins et les soldats, la plupart jeunes recrues venant des campagnes, troublés déjà par les plaintes acrimonieuses que leur apportaient les lettres de leurs familles, irritées par la brutale réquisition.” Moscow sous Lénine. 1953. John Rees reiterates this, in a much more unsavory way, including repeating Trotsky’s charges that the mutiny was led by people who “not really” proletarians In Defence of October. International Socialism, 52. 1991. This reminds one of Stalinist claims about the workers’ uprising in Berlin 1953 that they were ‘not really; workers but US agents in disguise. The historical debate continues. But the main point is that the Bolsheviks were unwilling to allow any of these forces, from the left to the centre any political expression whatsoever. So “’c’était normal” that they flocked to support the Kronstadt revolt. As for the rebels themselves, most accounts state that their demands were for freedom of workers’ parties (Pages 113 – 114. Ian D.Thatcher. Trotsky. 2003). Even if the slogan about soviets without Bolsheviks were true, what was so wrong with wanting to get rid of one party from elected bodies – democracies do it all the time? The question was how could this be achieved democratically – a mechanism Lenin and Trotsky’s version of the dictatorship of the proletariat excluded at all costs.

** For the real (‘centrist’ not Trotskysist) campaign to help the POUM see, Marceau Pivert. L’affaire du P.O.U.M. (1938) SIA (organe hebdomadaire de Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste1).

Two Recent Books on Trotsky

Varför? Föråldrad – ofta – och felaktig – för det mesta – information om dimensionerna av förtrycket under Sovjet-tiden florerar trots att tillförlitliga uppgifter har funnits fritt tillgängliga i drygt tjugo år. Här presenteras, på svenska, baserad på interna uppgifter, statistik från den sovjetiska förtrycksapparaten, dess rättssystem och säkerhetstjänster, 1921-1953. (Se ref-länkarna för de tabeller som har varit min omedelbara förlaga.) Det här är del ett av två. Del två finns nu här.

Tabellerna har anpassats huvudsakligen från Viktor N. Zemskov:s artiklar (1991-) på basis av de öppnade sovjetiska arkiven.  Ytterst härrör mycket av informationen från Hruščiov:s undersökningar som låg till grund för det berömda talet 1956 som fördömde hans föregångare. Distanseringen från Stalin började ju redan med de omfattande amnestierna från och med 1953, samma år som Stalin dog.

Man bör på intet sätt tolka Zemskovs publiceringar som att sista ordet härmed var sagt, men det enda vetenskapligt godtagbara förhållningssättet har varit, är och förblir att utgå från dem.

Tabellerna öppnar i nytt fönster:

VČK-OGPU-ärenden under 1921-1929

OGPU-NKVD-ärenden under 1930-1936

NKVD-ärenden under 1937-1938

Ärenden under 1921-1938 (sammanställning)

Ärenden under 1939-1953

Antal fångar i fängelser i Sovjetunionen 1939-1948

Fångar i fängelser i Sovjetunionen 10 maj 1945 efter kategori

Antal fångar i GULAG 1934-1953 (översikt)

Ref:

http://soviet-history.com/doc/prison/1953_12_11_spravka_mvd.php

http://soviet-history.com/doc/prison/gulag_tab1.php

http://www.hrono.info/statii/2001/zemskov.html

The Socialist Party in England and Wales’ Socialism event in London had a session on Stalinism’s collapse. Mark Fischer points out what it represents for Marxists

Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe made a number of rather dubious claims in his competently delivered session entitled ‘Why did Stalinism collapse in the Soviet Union – what have the consequences been?’

Prominent amongst these was the assertion that his was “the only organisation” that recognised that the collapse of the Soviet Union – and in particular, the ignominious manner of its defeat – represented an important “ideological defeat” for the left as a whole that precipitated a rightwing global offensive on working class gains. He used the Labour Party as an especially pertinent example, correctly pinpointing the removal of clause four and growing confidence of the right as a political consequence of the collapse of Stalinism.

He did not even qualify this – manifestly untrue – statement about the ‘unique’ position of his organisation by admitting that the Socialist Party had arrived at it in hindsight. This was, after all, the same Peter Taaffe who told us in 1989 that talk of “capitalist restoration” was a “chimera” (Militant July 21 1989). Indeed, he once thought that “Gorbachev’s coming to power signified the beginning of the political revolution” and would define the coming decade as the “red 90s” (Militant January 19 1990). A tad on the over-optimistic side, I’m sure even comrade Taaffe would now concede.

He was not alone in this confusion, of course. Practically the entire Trotskyist/Trotskyoid left mechanically insisted that there were only two possibilities open to societies such as the USSR. There “will either be totalitarian rule under a one-party state” (i.e. the status quo) “or there will be control of industry and state by the workers” (i.e. a healthy workers’ state – Ted Grant, writing in Militant October 3 1980). Ironically, this was quoted as an example of how “Militant was absolutely correct and born out by events” in the May 1989 introduction to Grant’s selected works, The unbroken thread.

In vivid contrast, our organisation – despite its very different evaluation of the nature of bureaucratic socialism in those days – was able to point to the obvious fact that “in these countries capitalism is being restored with the consent of the broad mass of the population and that for the full-blown reintroduction of capitalism there exists no necessity for violently smashing the existing state” (editorial The Leninist April 1 1990). To halt this process, we called for “a real political revolution” in the USSR, not the counterrevolutionary farce headed by Gorbachev (The Leninist November 21 1987) – a simple fact that belies comrade Taaffe’s assertion in his reply to remarks I made during the discussion that it was our now highly critical attitude to the Stalinist states that was retrospective and that “no wing” of the Communist Party had made these sorts of criticisms at the time.

I decided not to explore these rather involved questions in my five-minute contribution to the discussion. Instead, I took issue with a much more straightforward difference – the notion that collapse of Stalinism equated with the “liquidation of planned economies”, an historical ‘gain’ of the revolution that had been preserved despite the bureaucratic excrescences.

I pointed out that planning for Marxists was not simply target-setting – it must have a genuine social content. Specifically, the democratic formulation of that plan by the direct producers themselves. The farcical nature of bureaucratic ‘planning’ in the USSR was perfectly illustrated in the five-year plans, when Stalin and Molotov arbitrarily leapfrogged one crazily unrealistic set of targets by another, with no concern for equilibrium or balance in the economy, nor indeed for genuine utility of the outputs.

Comrade Taaffe would later reply to discussion and underline that the “vital issues” that were raised as we endeavour to “understand Stalinism” would have a “direct bearing on our coming struggles”. This was not simply relevant to regimes such as Venezuela and its creeping Bonapartist authoritarianism, he suggested, but also because Stalin would be “used as a scarecrow to frighten new generations away from socialism”.

Absolutely. And the fact that SPEW comrades – including Peter Taaffe himself – can still see the unviable monstrosity of the USSR as an “anticipation from an economic point of view” of the society of the future is a pretty frightening prospect in itself. Summing up, the comrade told the meeting that what existed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe was “planning in a rudimentary form” (although quite why and how it “disintegrated” in the 1980s he did not elaborate) and, even in this primitive form, the mass of simple “empirical evidence” countered my claim about the absence of planning. I actually got quite nostalgic when comrade Taaffe cited achievements such as Sputnik and other SPEWers talked of the rights enjoyed by Soviet citizens to “a home, a job, a decent health service” – it was like being in a CPGB meeting from the mid-70s again.

One comrade put it particularly crudely. After listing all the economic advantages conferred on the population by even bureaucratic ‘planning’, he conceded “the bit that was missing was democracy”.

The notion that democracy is a desirable, but non-essential bolt-on in a workers’ state underlines that SPEW – in common with much of the rest of the left – in practice has a top-down, paternalistic view of socialism. Many of the comrades were reduced to citing the catastrophic collapse in living standards that followed the counterrevolutions as circumstantial evidence of the partially progressive nature of these regimes. Living standards are hardly an irrelevance, but the key when we evaluate such societies should be the levels of proletarian consciousness and organisation, its room for independent initiative and the genuine workers’ control that can be observed. It simply is not Marxism to work backwards from the growth in pig iron production or even – an example closer to home – the number of council houses put up in Liverpool and extrapolate from this dull “empirical evidence” that what we have in front of us is a working class entity in any meaningful sense.

I don’t tend to use this site for real time political polemics (see here for a rare example), However, I followed the recommendation from Socialist Unity for the new issue of Democratic Green Socialist’s new special 1989 issue. And I found most of the issue taken up with caveated apologies for Stalinism, with nostalgia for Uncle Joe. The issue shows that, even in 2009, Stalinophilia remains a persistent problem on the left. For example, Anne Edmonds says the DDR and the Stasi weren’t all that bad, Luke Ivory says “defend October” (a Stalinophiliac trope), John Wight laments the passing of the USSR, Andy Newman says there was good as well as bad in the DDR. Kevin Williamson’s excellent article, “Freedom is a Noble Thing”, is a shining exception, and Graham Jepps’ brief review of Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tuleyev is good too. Here’s Williamson:

[...] The collapse of the Berlin Wall was another such occasion best swept under the leftist carpet.  All over the world million rightly celebrated whilst many on the Marxist left grumbled privately among themselves.  Instead of raising a glass of cheer to the overthrow of the totalitarian regimes of Easter Europe they rued what might have been and predicted gloom and doom “under capitalism” for those who lived in the former Communist Bloc countries.

Many on the left still harken back nostalgically to a time when supposedly progressive leftist regimes created repressive obscenities like the Cheka (December 1917) and the Stasi (1950).  How could such a state of confusion exist?  What do secret police and surveillance and repression of political opponents have to do with progressive politics? Are universal suffrage and free elections not the foundations stones of democratic progress?

How could the left have become so blasé about democracy?  Lest we forget Chartists and Suffragettes had given their liberty, and even their lives, to prise universal suffrage from the grasp of a privileged elite.  It is on their traditions and gains the modern progressive leftist stands.  Only an obsolete antideluvian left would be as politically disorientated as to utilise the methods and ideology of revolutionary movements which took place in pre-democratic eras.
[...]

For the progressive left the concepts of freedom and democracy need to be positioned at the centre of everything.  The real challenge is to find new innovative ways to extend and deepen democracy into every area of life – economic and social – rather than undermine it through a contemptuous attitude towards its current failings.  It’s a challenge that will sort out the liberationist wheat from the authoritarian chaff.

P.S. To further avoid sectarianism, here are a couple of recommendations from the back issue: John Wight on James Connolly, Willie Duncan on Barca FC, and Stewart Hunter on the Spanish Civil War.

UPDATE: For the antidote, read this wonderful short post about 1989 at Facing The War.

UPDATE 2: From the new Socialist Review: Mark L Thomas, Mike Haynes and Colin Barker look at the tumultuous events of 1989 that brought down the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the impact of market capitalism which replaced them. Chris Harman looks back at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the continued relevence of the theory of state capitalism.

November marks twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall. This event represented one of the high points of a great mass struggle against the tyrannical order in the Eastern Bloc, and led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. But with the defeats of movements opposed to both these statist régimes and the free market, the popular movements of 1989 are now used to prove there is no alternative to capitalism.

Here we present sections of a series of interviews with communists from the former Eastern Bloc focussing on the struggles of the time, what system really existed in the “communist” countries and what has happened to the working class over the last twenty years.

How do you evaluate the events of 1989-1991 in the USSR and Eastern Europe in light of the aspirations of the time?

Goran Markovic, Workers’ Communist Party of Bosnia (GM): These were revolutions against the corrupt system of the Soviet Union and its satellites which saw itself collapse because of its economic inefficiency and the inability of its ruling class to adapt to people’s needs and aspirations. The revolutions fought for more human rights, especially in the political sphere, and for better living conditions. Unfortunately, in many people’s minds, these revolutions were understood as anti-communist revolutions, which they objectively were not. They caused great damage to the communist idea, that is for sure, but they were not revolutions against a communist or socialist society, which never existed in Eastern Europe. However, it is quite sure that people who were drawn into these revolutions didn’t expect to achieve what happened later and what is still going on — crude neoliberal capitalism.

Roman, Vpered, Ukraine (RV): As far as ‘aspirations’ are concerned, I would not misrepresent facts and feelings if I said that people had been expecting a lot from independence and the ‘market economy’. They were enthusiastic and though it was a victory. They couldn’t imagine capitalism was so horrific. Many believe that the capitalism we have in Ukraine is ‘false’, ‘deformed’, and there is a ‘right’, ‘true’ capitalism awaiting us out there, which ‘we will build’ some lucky day. The financial crisis, economic depression and capitalism’s inability to make it good ought to sober them up.

Marxist Labour Party, Russia (MLP): It was an objective historical process, and, as this often happens, a dialectically contradictory one. It led to the destruction of much of the productive forces of the USSR, to the impoverishment of a large segment of the population of the country. At the same time, it destroyed the “Iron Curtain” and thus provided the inclusion of Russian and other post-Soviet economies into the mechanism of global productive forces. The events in the USSR of the late 80s and early 90s of the last century, up to the liquidation of the Soviet Union itself, signified the completion of the Russian bourgeois revolution “in the broad sense”. This revolution lasted for almost 100 years – 1905-1991/93.

Volodymyr Ischenko, c0-editor of Commons, Ukraine (VI): Was revolutionary action necessary or was it possible to push the Soviet nomenklatura to some progressive reforms? The answer to this question largely determines our attitude to the 1989 protests. With hindsight we can say that the 1990s neoliberal reforms were disastrous for the Ukrainian economy, culture and society in general. But should we consider the 1989 mass protests as just legitimating cover for privatising property by the part of the old Soviet elite? I would say no. Many people in Ukraine and in the USSR in general genuinely aspired towards some kind of democratic socialism with a “human face”, some even for a self-governing, libertarian socialism.

The Confederation of Anarcho-syndicalists was not a small organisation in the  late 1980s and the first title of the People’s Movement of Ukraine (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy) was People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika [restructuring]. It was a strategic mistake by this popular wing of the 1989 events that they were closely allied with the so called “democratic” part of the split nomenklatura.

But many — even great — revolutions were defeated because of the lack of independent revolutionary organisations and we cannot disdain them for this. 1989 was a victory and a defeat at the same time: the victory of the emerging elite of a peripheral capitalist society and a defeat of the movement for genuine socialism. It would be absurd to call what we have now in Ukraine “western-style capitalism”. It is not “western-style” but it is becoming more and more similar to colonial-style, Third World capitalism with huge inequalities, the predominance of low surplus-value export production and mass migration from impoverished regions to wealthier countries. But we should also understand that the basis for this was laid down much earlier in the Brezhnev period when the USSR integrated to the world economy primarily as a supplier of natural resources.

How would you characterise the society that existed before 1989-91, and is there any continuity between then and today?

MLP: In the USSR there existed a catch-up model of state capitalism. The temporarily nationalised property allowed the Soviet Union (Russia) and many other countries of the “socialist camp” to successfully overtake the developed countries, as well as to quickly eliminate vestiges of feudalism. Indeed, in the USSR there existed commodity-money relations, wage labour, classes and other attributes characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. The classics of Marxism maintained: where there is hired labour, it generates capital.

These notions are inseparably linked. The “socialist state” making investments in certain sectors of the national economy, like other capitalist countries, was in fact a capitalist society, in which the functions of private capitalists were performed by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. This wasn’t, of course, a traditional capitalist society in the superstructure, but its basis was certainly a capitalist one.

It should be noted that Marx and Engels criticised the petty-bourgeois, bourgeois, state, etc. “socialisms”, which had no relation to the Marxist socialism. For all this the “state socialism” is a state capitalism in its essence. Today there exists in Russia a “normal” private-ownership capitalism, and Russia itself is an imperialist country of, so to speak, second order in contrast with the leading imperialist powers.

The continuity between the USSR and modern Russia is, first of all, in an enormous influence of the state bureaucracy on society, and in the absence of traditions of organised class struggle among Russian workers. The point is that in the Soviet Union this struggle, on the one hand, was forestalled by a wide range of social benefits and guarantees, and, on the other hand, if it occurred, it was severely suppressed by the repressive organs. The continuity also shows itself in the personal composition of the elite of society: many of the former party functionaries now occupy prominent positions in business and in the government bureaucracy.

Valeriy Predtechenskiy, Russia, (VP): Following the victory of Soviet Russia in the Civil War Lenin himself practically organised, and Stalin subsequently totalised, under the name of “socialism”, a state-capitalist phase in Russian capitalist development. .

A society with domination of state monopoly of the material means of production, the Soviet Union, represented the highest level of capitalist concentration of public material means of production in hands of the state – the state as a unitary capitalist, represented by the Politburo. There was a unitary system of forming the productive forces. All the sectors of the national economy were subordinated to a unitary state management. The population of the country was universally proletarianised in a unitary system of wage-labour.

When the USSR collapsed, the mode of production sharply fell down to small-scale commodity capitalism. Predatory types quickly embarked on looting, selling out and squandering the material wealth accumulated over the whole Soviet period.

At present, Russia is struggling to raise itself to the level of “civilised” sectoral monopolism (imperialism). However, this “rise” is again due to squandering its mineral wealth and in no way due to the development of the means of production. So Russia’s oligarchs, the richest billionaires are not a patch, as the saying goes, on their Western competitors as regards  productivity levels.

Do you think the events of twenty years ago represent the historic triumph of capitalism and the defeat of communism?

GM: The events of twenty years ago cannot represent the historic defeat of communism because communism or socialism did not exist as a society in Eastern and Central Europe. It could be said that it was a historic defeat of bureaucratic collectivism in its Stalinist variant. On the other hand, these events were not the historic triumph of capitalism because one social system does not triumph if it overbears its alternative but if it is unable to solve contradictions on its own terrain. Capitalism proved unable to do that and that is why it cannot be seen as eternal social system.

Myroslav, Vpered, Ukraine (MV): Absolutely, There’s no doubt about it. We don’t think that the Soviet Union was communist but at the same there’s no doubt that the path we chose twenty years ago has turned out the worst social and economic scenario. The so-called ‘civilised world’ doesn’t need us. Our role is to be a buffer zone between Russia and the West, to supply cheap labour force and brains, and to be a sump for migrants. That’s it.

Borys Chervonyy, Ukrainian Left Party (BC): Surely, no. It was a defeat; but it was the defeat of Stalinism and the dictatorial system represented by it. It was a triumph, but it was a triumph of  one part of the world capitalist system over the other.

What do you think the legacy of official and dissident communism is?

GM: Experiences of so-called communist regimes, on the one hand, and of communist movements which tended to liberate themselves from so-called official communism, on the other hand, give us plenty of useful conclusions. First of all, socialism cannot rest on the state, but on self-organised workers and citizens who govern the economy and the state by themselves, directly and through democratically elected delegates. Secondly, as each society, even a socialist one, is divided into different groups, with different interests and opinions, ideas of human rights, especially political liberties and political pluralism, are inseparably connected to socialism. Thirdly, there is no one group, even the communist party, that could claim to have a historic or any other right to be an a priori avant-garde and to have a special or privileged position in process of decision-making. The communist party is only one of many political and social organisations which is trying to persuade people in the correctness of its ideology, proposals and ultimate goals. Fourthly, the struggle for new, socialist society is in the first place struggle against the bourgeoisie and against the bureaucracy that has already been formed in the framework of the workers’ movement while still in opposition. There are two main means against the bureaucratisation of the workers’ movement and hence of socialist society: new forms of organisation and reliance on extra-parliamentary forms of activity

MLP:In the USSR this tradition was practically destroyed or it existed in the deep underground with no real influence upon social processes. Today there exist in Russia radical-communist organisations. But they have no serious influence due to the fact that the historical stage the country is experiencing is still far from the struggle for communism. Russia’s society is too consumer-bourgeois; there are almost no more or less large-scale sprouts of communist relations. Accordingly, there is no “demand” for communist activities…

VP: The legacy of official “communism” manifests itself in the propaganda for returning to the socialist system of the USSR. This is the common sin of all the present “communist” parties headed by the openly pro-bourgeois Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Dissident communists (of the left) define the socialist system of the USSR as a bourgeois one, state capitalism. However, there prevails the view of “backward state capitalism”. This opinion accentuates the fact that the USSR state monopolism used feudal forms of governing agriculture (restricting the possibility of persons to move) as well as the fact that the total state-capitalist neglected to provide the population with domestic appliances. I, personally, treat the USSR as an advanced state capitalism. After all, despite adverse natural conditions, it competed with the sectoral monopolies of the West, having been able to entirely control all branches of industry with the state. Even Hitler had never dreamt of that in Nazi Germany. And with us it was implemented relatively easily in the course of Stalinisation merely due to people’s hopes for the communism later to come. Today’s sectoral monopolism could not hope to generate such expectations.

Since the collapse of the USSR some in the left view America as the main imperialist power to be opposed,  but do you think Russia is also imperialist?

GM: Russia is trying to recuperate from heavy economic, political and military blows it received during capitalist restoration. That is why it still cannot play the role of imperialist state it would like to. However, it is an imperialist state in its intentions and goals and therefore communists should not have any hopes in its role in international relations.

VI: Of course, instances of anti-American and “patriotic” rhetoric should not deceive the left. Definitely Putin’s Russia cannot be viewed as any kind of progressive or anti-imperialist regime even of the Chávez or Morales type. The Russian oligarchic elite is quite well embedded in transnational ruling class networks whilst revenues from natural resources export are not spent on education, public health or any kind of social infrastructure. Instead, Putin continued with neoliberal reforms reducing labour rights in the new Labour Code, privatising housing and the public sector. But at the same time Russia should not be demonised. In the same way as nationalist rhetoric is used in Russia for ruling class legitimacy, an opposing nationalist rhetoric is used in Ukraine shifting responsibility for all problems to Russia’s hostile policies and its “fifth column” in Ukraine. Appeals to Russian imperialism as the most dangerous threat for the Ukrainian nation has become a common way to justify even neofascist movements. It became clear when ultra-right activist Maksim Chaika was killed in Odessa this spring. Many mainstream journalists and even president Yushchenko himself presented him just as a “patriot”. Antifascists at the same time were deceitfully presented as “pro-Russian paramilitaries”

What is the current situation of the working class?

MLP: In general, the Russian workers are not yet organised into a class. The class’s trade unions are being created, but this is the exception rather than the rule. There is an understanding of their oppressed position. But the struggle against capitalists is mostly led spontaneously and individually — through courts, changing places of employment, primitive forms of sabotage. As for prospects for a way ahead, we see them in the interaction of the organised Russian workers, first of all, with the organised Western proletarians.

MV: The situation in Ukraine is extremely difficult. Firstly, the working class is not extant as a political subject. It can be explained by the fact that it exists as a ‘class in itself’. Secondly, the existent division of labour erodes the term and makes it uneconomic to organisationally revitalise it in the future. Thirdly, the mass media propaganda promoted by the ruling class (mostly by oligarchs) leaves no chance to produce an acceptable image of a worker, a producer who stands up to defend their rights. The consumer has taken over, a subject whose sense of life is determined by their ability to consume various goods of status, services, etc. Workers’ sporadic attempts to self-organise around trade unions and actions of disobedience return no results. The labour movement is not even in a preparatory stage.

How do you think genuine communists should organise and operate?

MLP: We hold that the development of the left is directly connected with the development of the proletarian movement. They are like a political superstructure over this movement. Accordingly, a reliable basis for the organisation of communists can be only in proletarian class organisations. And their formation and growth occur in the real class struggle, in which communists must occupy an important place as well. As for the organisation of the current work of communists, we believe that one must proceed from the real present-day situation. Today we are in need of an all-left information network based on the new advanced technologies, as well as joint actions. We try to work in these directions.

MV: The Communist Party of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian post-Stalinist left today. Chinese-type state capitalism is their ideological orientation point. That is why Stalinist views are nothing but part of their history and aesthetics. In fact, they try to follow the line of revisionists such as Deng Xiaoping.

It seems to me that most important is to revitalise class and ecological discourse in all forms, first of all in organisational forms. We must build an organisation that could start the holy class war. And there is an enemy: according to the statistics, 2% of the population own 90% of the national wealth in Ukraine. So it is pointless to talk consensus, rapport, national solidarity and other bourgeois lies. We have two options: the closing of channels of vertical mobility and solidification of the existing asymmetric social structure, similarly to what they have done in Latin America, or the gradual building of class muscles for the struggle in the future.

VI: We can take some important insights from Ukrainian Marxists about the past but we cannot copy their analysis, rhetoric and action if we are striking for mass working class support not limited to certain regions and subcultures.

This is true not only for the Ukrainian Marxist tradition but for other more internationally recognised left-wing schools of thought. The left has to reconstruct and develop its theory in close connection with emerging grassroots movements: working-class, urban, environmental… The left’s theory should be once again re-connected to practical mass struggle. The problems of grassroots movements’ strategy, organisation and mobilisation should be the primary issues for the left. Only in discussing and solving practical problems of progressive social change can we develop our theory further, making it more adequate to the task of changing objective reality. Another problem is that the Ukrainian left should be more aware and connected to debates and struggles in global anticapitalist movements, learning its lessons and taking on inspiring examples and models of organisation.

What do you think real communism means today?

GM: For most people, communism means concentration camps, lack of democracy, inefficient economy, ideological indoctrination, even hunger, like in North Korea, etc. However, real communism does not have anything to do with these features and with societies where these things happened. Real communism means an end of economic exploitation and political domination. It means an end to the division of society into elite and masses. It means self-organisation and self-activity of all members of society who wish to be active participants of processes of decision-making, with almost limitless pluralism of organisations, opinions and activities of different subjects who do not oppress each other. It is a society based on social ownership and self-management, economically self-sustainable so that it guarantees free and universal health care, education, access to culture, without unemployment and with possibilities to its members to cultivate themselves as full persons.

VI: I do not dare to give exhaustive definitions of what real communism could mean today. But what is most important is that real communism now must be with the masses and for the masses. It is definitely not another subculture or chat room for a handful of freaks pretending to be a “real vanguard” just because they have read a few more 100 or 150-year-old books.

VP: Today the concept of “real communism” is interpreted by many as Stalinist socialism, but in a philistine manner — “with a human face”. i.e. meaning state monopolism without totalitarian repression i.e. utopia. Moreover, the versions of such utopian constructions are as numerous as their authors: you cannot count them. Whereas the real (true) concept of the real (true) communism, even according to the most simple and primitive logic, should be determined as the highest scientific achievement of humanity in its social structure.

Real communism represents primitive communism, but at the highest level of social development, using all the best in the achievements of humanity. The modern, social notion of “gens” is objectively, economically represented by the work collective of an enterprise. If the ownership of the workforce and production technologies is transferred into the hands of this collective body, then we get a self-reproducing, and self-governing collectivity — a gens — of a new, civilised generation, i.e., using modern language, a commune, a production and reproduction social cell.

BC: I think real communism means a classless and stateless self-managed society based on the principles of collective ownership of the means of production and distribution, and an economy which is oriented not for the market, but for real human needs. Communism will abolish all forms of  oppression; and will see the realisation of the idea of liberation in all its forms. Communism can come only from below, via diverse forms of workers’ self organisation.

Michale Winning, annoyed

Guess you can find out here. It’s not the lesbian-business I object to. If women want to pretend to shag each other then they can, it’s no business of mine it’s not.

But “parenting officials”? Boss says we should eat them, after a good barbecue, if he’s right about what certain people are up to, then we might have to.

It is a scandal that the British Morning Star does not print more news on the achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) (Hangul: 조선민주주의인민공화국, Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk).

It looks likely that  Kim Jong-un, the second son of former dancer Ko Yong-hi, Kim Jong-il’s favourite wife who died of cancer in 2004 will take the helm of the world’s leading socialist state.  After his dear father’s death. He is apparently called, in a touching gesture of solidarity with the UK paper of the toiling masses, “Morning Star King“.

Unlike the ungrateful newspaper of this name we publish up-to-date news from the homeland of Juche.

here.

The November issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF, or see articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

are we ready for a winter of discontent? – by Sheila Cohen

post strike: this is no deal – by Joe Thorne

underground pay deadlock – by Vaughan Thomas

what is the union bureaucracy? – by Alberto Durango

occupation and state building in the new afghanistan – by Emma Gallwey

mixed reactions to cwu-royal mail deal – interview with a communist postman

manchester students build solidarity with post workers – by Mark Harrison

honduras: democracy has not been restored – by Socialismo o Barbarie

month long strike in france: ‘papers for all!’ – interview with Seni cleaners and piece from Où va la CGT?

communism twenty years after the berlin wall fell – interviews with eastern european activists

scottish ruling class: division over union – by Allan Armstrong

obituary of chris harman – by Andy Wilson

university occupations in austria – interview with vienna student activist

question time row: did the straw man really slay the griffin? – by Adam Ford

communist recomposition and workers’ representation – by Chris Ford

‘full and open debate’ on post-no2eu project: ok, when? - by David Broder

building from below: the work of paulo freire – by Dave Spencer

the global commune, january 16th

activities of the commune around britain

Latest in a series of interviews with communists from the former eastern bloc upon the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Can you briefly introduce yourself/organisation?

My name is Borys Chervonyy. I’m a member of the executive committee of the “Zakhyst Pratsi” (Defence of Labour) independent trade union, a member of the “New Left” movement and a member of the organisational committee of the Ukrainian Left Party (ULP). The ULP is supposed to be an international revolutionary organisation; the program of the ULP will be based on the principles of communism and social liberation in all its forms; and will stand, in particular, on the traditions of Ukrainian left thought.

It is said that the declaration of independence by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991 marked the end of USSR. How do you evaluate the events of 1989-1991 in the Ukrainian SSR in light of aspirations at the time? Was it a victory or a defeat?

The events of 1989-1991 represented a mass movement, the main aims of which were, apart with fight for democratic rights, destruction of the USSR and a struggle for Ukrainian independence. As long as these aims were, at least in a formal way, achieved, in this sense it was a victory. At the same time, bourgeois forces succeeded in leading the movement and intruding into the movement with “traditional capitalist” values and aims; at  that time a very typical opinion was that after achievement of the aims of the movement “Ukrainians will live happily and richly, like the civilised people in the West”.

How would you characterise the society that existed before 1989-91 and Ukrainian society today? Is there any continuity between them?

The society that existed before 1989-91 was a dictatorship, calling themselves “communist”. In my opinion, it was a state-capitalist system. Ukrainian society today is a capitalist society, which some people describe as “traditional capitalism”. Presently Ukraine plays the role of a third-world country in the framework of this “traditional capitalism” dominating the world. Continuity between these two systems means that both systems represent capitalist society, while different in stages. And, correspondingly, both systems have all the features of capitalism – the operation of the law of value, alienation of labour etc.

Do you think the events of twenty years ago represent the historic triumph of capitalism and the defeat of communism?

Surely, no. It was a defeat; but it was the defeat of Stalinism and the dictatorial system represented by it. It was a triumph, but it was a triumph of  one part of the world capitalist system over the other.

Many people considered that western style capitalism would be progressive compared to the USSR, is that still the case?

Not at the moment. The first blow to these ideas was “shock therapy” in the early 1990s, resulting in huge continuing growth of prices and unemployment. The economic crisis of 1998 and especially the present one successfully undermined illusions in western style capitalism. Apart from that, a lot of people know about life in Western European countries via the Internet and/or satellite TV and even taking into account the fact that this information is provided by the bourgeois media, and in this way is distorted, it is clear even from these sources, that the West, to put it simply, is not a paradise, as it was presented by perestroika ideologists. The current mainstream feeling, at least in a considerable part of society, apart from left-wing thought, is paternalistic and even nostalgic ideas.

Before 1989 there were dissident communists, such as Leonid Plyushch and Ivan Dzyuba and there was a long tradition of Marxists who envisioned national liberation as a far more radical social transformation. What happened to this tradition, why did it not re-emerge?

This tradition is still alive, while still quite weak. The main problem is that the defeat of Stalinism in 1989-1991 is still viewed by a lot of people as the defeat of Marxist ideas itself. At the same time, facing all the problems connected with capitalism, quite a lot of people have nostalgic ideas like “back to the USSR”, including great-Russian chauvinist attitude to any national liberation ideas as “anti-Soviet” and “counterrevolutionary” “Banderism”. Under this pressure from both sides even such people as Leonid Plyushch, Ivan Dzyuba and Yuriy Badzyo moved to the right, into the “broad democratic camp”, considering their early Marxist views to be “honest mistakes of their youth”. At the moment, there are some attempts to re-vitalise this tradition by some small groups; I’m the member of one such nucleus – the organisation committee of the ULP. However, these attempts presently are at a very incipient stage.

Did the ‘Orange Revolution’ represent the continuation of the struggles of 1989-91?

To a certain degree, yes. As during the struggles of 1989-1991, among the main declared goals of the ‘Orange Revolution’ was the struggle for democratic rights, in particular, freedom of meetings and speeches, as well as achievement of real political and economic independence of Ukraine from Russia. In the both cases, the movement was led by bourgeois forces; and the masses were quickly disappointed with results of their “victory”.

Russia has been reviving as a state power and asserting itself, how is this viewed in Ukraine today?

A lot of people in Ukraine view Russian imperialism as a danger to Ukrainian independence; attempts of Russian imperialism to increase its influence, including in a military way, as it was in Chechnya and quite recently in Georgia, are viewed by a lot of people as a big threat both to the  political and economic independence of Ukraine. At the same time, a lot of politicians are making use of nostalgic and/or pan-Slavic ideas; and in these cases Russia is seen as a power, which should smash separatists, which, in turn, are viewed as the obstacles for returning to the Soviet Union or Great Russian Empire. Such ideas have some influence, in particular in Eastern and Southern Ukraine.

Many on the western left view America as the main imperialist power to be opposed, do you think Russia is also imperialist? How do you think the left in the West should relate to Russia?

Surely, Russia is also an imperialist power. I think that the present Russian state completely corresponds to Lenin’s definition of imperialism. In my opinion, the relation to Russia of the left in the West should not be differ from the relation of the left in other parts of the world – Russia is a growing imperialism, which is trying, quite successfully, to re-emerge as one of the main world imperialist powers. War in Georgia, continuing occupation of Chechnya and the recent series of “gas wars” are just a few examples of this. Any attempts to support “good” Russian imperialism against “bad” US or whatever imperialism, as is done by a lot of leftists not only in the West, but also in Ukraine and Russia, are absolutely unacceptable for real communists.

What is the current situation of the Ukrainian working class and the prospects for the labour movement?

The Ukrainian working class, as anywhere in the world, is presently in a very difficult situation. The Ukrainian bourgeoisie is trying to force the working class to pay for the crisis. A huge growth of direct and hidden unemployment rates, salary cuts as a result of inflation and sharp increases in the prices for public services and public transport are only a few among the features of the present situation in Ukraine. As long as “official” left parties are not interested in the workers’ and trade union movement at all and the “radical left” in fact are very small dogmatic grouplets, in my opinion, the main prospects for the labour movement are in the development of trade unions and an independent workers’ movement. Trade unions have considerably accelerated during last few years and their influence is constantly growing. I think that one of the main tasks of the left in Ukraine is to intervene actively in trade unions. The recent case of the occupation of the Kherson Mechanical Plant is a good example both of the high level of working class preparedness for action given the present situation, and the necessity of workers’ organisation in trade unions, and all the disadvantages of the absence of such organisations.

What do you think the legacy of official and dissident communism is in Ukraine?

The legacy of official communism is the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, which were easily available in Soviet Union. Apart from them books by such philosophers as Lifshits, Ilyenkov and Bosenko were more or less available. After 1986 the works by Trotsky and other left oppositionists, democratic centralists and workers’ oppositionists also became relatively available. The legacy of dissident communism in Ukraine is in works by Roman Rozdolskyy, Lev Rybalka (Yurkevych), UKPists, Borotbists and a lot of others. Works by Leonid Plushch, Ivan Dzyuba and Yuriy Badzyo written in the 1960s-1990s are also of great importance. But it’s necessary to note that the legacy of dissident communism is known to an insignificant number of people in the present Ukraine. The academics, which serve the present bourgeois power in Ukraine, are trying to popularize the idea that all national liberation opposition in Ukraine consisted from “integral nationalists” inspired with Mykola Dontsov’s ideas, leaded by Bandera, by doing so cleverly hiding the real history.

What do you think the prospects are for the post-Stalinist left today? How do you think genuine communists should organise and operate?

Hard-line Stalinist organisations, such as Union of Marxists, VKPB, PKBU and some others are continuing to be marginalized. The members of these organisations are getting older; the recruitment of new members, especially young people, is almost absent. On the level of ideology their slogans are limited to the need to return to the Soviet Union, punishment of all those who are guilty in its destruction and a “happy life in the family of Slavic people”. In some cases these ideas are expanded with anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia. At the moment the best possible position for hard-line Stalinists is the role of junior partners in the numerous temporary local electoral blocs. “Big” post-Stalinist organisations, such the parliamentary and ex-parliamentary parties like the CPU, SPU, PSPU, SDPU (o), “Spravedlyvist” and Union of Left Forces (SLS) have only two ways to avoid marginalisation – a movement toward social-democracy or becoming open Peronist-type paternalist parties. It looks like the recent establishment and self-promotion of the Block of Left Forces, which consists of the CPU, SDPU (o), “Spravedlyvists” and SLS, proves that they prefer the first course of action. It is clear that genuine communists have nothing in common with all these organisations and efforts: our task is to build our own organisations, most probably in the form of a network of nuclei and individuals, both in Ukraine and internationally, which should in a pluralist way discuss and decide on the best form of self-organisation, programme and operation of this network. I think that in doing so it’s absolutely necessary to take into account the negative experience of the “radical left” and its “traditions” since at least the second half of last century; and avoid their vanguardism, dogmatism and sectarianism.

What would you say are the main influences on left thought in Ukraine today?

One of the main influences on left thought in Ukraine today is the recent occupation of Kherson Mechanical Plant by the workers protesting against closing the plant. This occupation provoked very serious discussion regarding such points as nationalisation, unionisation, the role of trade unions and revolutionary organisations and, consequently,  imperialism and the present state and role of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy etc. Almost all left organisations, not only in Ukraine, in particular, New Left, the Organisation of Marxists, Vpered and a lot of others actively intervened in such discussions. The great importance of this discussion is determined by the fact that it is the result not of pure abstraction, but of direct mass working class action.

What do you think real communism means today?

I think real communism means a classless and stateless self-managed society based on the principles of collective ownership of the means of production and distribution, and an economy which oriented not for the market, but for real human needs. Communism will abolish all forms of oppression; and will see the realisation of the idea of liberation in all its forms. Communism can come only from below, via diverse forms of workers’ self-organisation.

Iubit popor,iubiti romani!

Sa ne unim cu toti eforturile ,cei care nu dorim sa-i mai aruncam gologanul, in poala, acestui cersetor pervers numit Basescu , sa punem mina de la mina si sa ii facem cadou, un mandat cu transmisie permanenta live ,sa aiba o Romanie numai a lui,cea din propria celula!

Sa-i spunem ,intreg poporul,la unison:

„Mars la puscarie ,escrocule!Mars la puscarie,Satan!”

Popor roman, sa-i dam un sut in cur lui Satan si tiitoarei sale diavolesti,Elena Udrea!

JOS TIRANUL!VIVAT PATRIA!

Bravo,Mazare,mi-a placut!Bravo, Mircea Dinescu!Bravo, Mircea Badea!Bravo,moguli!

Bravo baaaa,romani!M-ati uns la inima!

ASALT FINAL : REDUTA DIN COTROCENI!

Suntem alimentati de Basescu,ca mogulii reprezinta raul acestui neam.

Tot ce e potrivnic lui Basescu este impotriva interesului national.

Basescu se crede interesul national.

Mogulii sunt :

Liderii rezistentei poporului roman in fata unui dictator .Traian Basescu.

Traian Basescu este: CANCERUL ROMANIEI!

Mie nu mi-e scarba de Romania,nu mi-e scarba de institutiile statului.

Mi-e scarba de Traian Basescu si Elena Udrea!

Nu-i inghit nici cu un camion de lamai,vorba unui apropiat.

Traian Basescu a amenintat ,furios ,ca daca mogulii o sa mai „muste din Romania” o sa le arate el in viitorul mandat.

O amenintare.

Un atac direct la libertatea presei.

Traian Basescu spune :

”Daca nu va astamparati comisarul Daniel Morar va va ingropa in dosare!”

„Baaaaaaa,va fac dosare,lasati-ma sa ies presedinte!”

Traian Basescu isi elimina opozantii prin dosare de politie politica.

Curata mizerie!

Odios acest chelios si chior presedinte al Romaniei!

Cine sunt „mogulii”?

Dan Voiculescu si Sorin Ovidiu Vantu.

Fratii Paunescu proprietari ai televiziunii B1TV,unde se difuzeaza emisiuni de genul „Nasul” un fel de „Telejurnal” de pe timpul lui Ceasca nu sunt moguli.

Difuzeaza conform directivelor materiale de propaganda basesciana si exulta in laude.

Daniil Sihastru,din viitoarea chilie Gherla, maraie ceva de escrocii astia doi,fratii Paunescu ?

Mogulii au cladit prin munca imperii financiare.

Dau de lucru oamenilor.

Fac cinste Romaniei in relatiile internationale.

Se zbat,construiesc,nu dorm noaptea.

Investesc.

Sunt oameni de afaceri romani,fac parte din acest popor.

Mogulii sunt piinea de pe masa a multora.

Nu au averile ca Basescu si Berceanu dosite prin offshore-uri,nu au vase care navigheaza sub alte pavilioane.

Pe unul din acele vase se intoarce capitan ,Basescu?Nu mai apuca!

Procurorii de la DNA iau leapsa mereu de la avocati,de la ei mai invata si ei cate ceva.Politia politica DNA,nu respecta legile tarii si drepturile omului in Romania.

Ce sa faci cu facultatile private.Ecologica ,auzi!

Morar de la DNA, un fraier ca si Placinta Constantin, care copiaza rechizitoriile.

Morar este un papagal foarte bun cand ii rasuceste Basescu cheita.

Doru Tulus,Ionita Vasile,Doana Vasile: cheita si spaguta.

Basescu e nemultumit ca ,cei mai bogati romani, nu i-au aruncat gologanul in poala de cersetor lui si curvei aleia.

S-a lamurit lumea buna dupa cazurile Anghelescu si Becali.

Sa nu mai vorbim de consilierii prezidentiali care au zburat ca potarnichile in toate cele patru vanturi!

Arunca dupa ei cu scrumiera.

Baaaaa,mogulilor dati-i bani lui Basescu sa cumpere voturi!

Fara moguli la ce ne-am fi uitat?

La TVR unde,tara arde si baba se piaptana,la B1TV unde se lafaie Talpes protectorul criminalilor si Udrea santajista ?

Suntem o tara de manelisti sa ne uitam la „Taraf’ si mai stiu eu ce mizerii de televiziuni de-ale lui Prigoana ?

Nu mai zic de televiziunea care era favorita mea PRO TV care traieste,parca,intr-o lume paralela.

Dan Diaconescu e mai libertin,apare orice numai sa platesti factura,daca mai e vorba si de pupat in cur basescu e si mai bine.

Din care Romanie musca mogulii?

Romania este mosia masii,a lui Basescu?

Ce a facut acest betiv in viata?Nimic.

A furat banii impreuna cu frate-sau si Udrea.

De la primaria capitalei,de la ministerul transporturilor,de la Cotroceni.

Au nenorocit judetul Prahova cu furaciunile lui William Branza,Andrei Volosevici,Roberta Anastase si cele doua curve de pe centura politicii,Florin Anghel si Emanoil Savin.

Baaaaa chiorpecu’ dracu’ la Ploiesti ,la gazari,a fost republica.

Noi l-am dat pe Caragiale,noi l-am dat pe Nichita Stanescu.

Ioan Grigorescu ,un pionier al documentarului de televiziune, e tot al nostru.

Nicolae Iorga a trait,a scris si a murit tot la noi in Prahova.Hasdeu asisderea.

Ploiestenii nu sunt prosti.

Noi aveam lumina la coltul strazii cand toata Europa nu avea.

Noi ,ploiestenii,americanii si rusii,am invatat intregul glob petrochimie.

Prahova a fost rezervorul de petrol care a alimentat masina de razboi germana.

Americanii in al doilea razboi mondial nu stiau unde e Romania,dar Ploiestiul il stiau ca pe tatal nostru.

Pe noi ,prahovenii,ploiestenii republicani,ne pune in genuchi ,prostituata Elena Udrea si proxenetul,Traian Basescu?

Rusine prahoveni,rusine romani!

Are dreptate nu iti trebuie prea multa carte.

„How much?”sau „Skolko?” si „OK” sau „Davai”

Ce sa mai facem cu invatatorii si profesorii?

Le dam droguri usoare si prostituate la copii.Ce ne trebuie noua educatie?

Primul program al presedintelui american Barack Obama,se numeste „CARTI NU ARME!”

Investitii colosale in educatie.

Ai copii stiutori de carte,ai elita.

Valabil si in sport si in arte,cultura.Nu sadesti in pepiniera ,nu ai de unde sa culegi!

De unde echipa nationala daca nu mai avem un lot mare de selectie?

Am ras de „Daciada” lui Ceasca,luati sportivi,acum!

Copiii nu mai merg la sport de performanta.Nu au cadru,nu au burse de merit.

Un speculant,un bisnitar,un betiv,un curvar!

A adus el si piticul din Twin Peaks-Boc ,tara asta in sapa de lemn.

Niste diletanti la carma Romaniei!

Pe Basescu il deranjeaza 100 de oameni in plus in Parlament.In plus sau in minus ,cu toate cheltuielile aferente,nu insumeaza la un loc cat o singura teapa ca cea data de ministrul sportului Placinta.Un demagog.Cel mai prost presedinte al Romaniei!

Bag mina in foc ca l-a asasinat pe Anghelescu Florin.

Prea s-a atacat ,marti,cu internetul.

Sunt bucuros ca sunt in atentia presedintelui.

Multumesc de confirmare:Traian Basescu este un asasin!

Sunt responsabil pentru aceasta informatie difuzata in premiera de subsemnatul pe internet.

Sherlock Holmes ,sunt!Lazarus ,pe cai!

Romania este si a mogulilor dupa cum este si a mea,a altora ca mine dar si a ultimului maturator din tara asta amarata!

Nu o sa mai fie a ta,Basescule!

Era plin portul.,vanzoleala ,strigate de hamali,chingi care zburau prin aer.

Pescadoare pline cu peste.

Ma minunam ca un copil.

Cunosc portul din Constanta ca pe propriile mele buzunare.

Am avut cunostinte la capitanie.Oameni de treaba.

Machedoni de-ai lui Becali.

E pustiu azi.Unde-i flota tarii mai hotule,mai escrocule de Traian Basescu ?

Decat incarcaturile cu armament ale lui Mircea si arabii lui Ioan Talpes.

Transportul e gratis.

Iar marinari filipinezi sunt garla,cand nu mai are cu ce-i plati ii arunca peste bord.

Marinarii romani sunt someri.Au limbarnita.Cum sa-i angajeze?!

Neamul lui Basescu este inrudit cu Onasis,armatorul miliardar grec,nu stiati?

Va spun eu.

Garjania mamilor voastre de hoti!

Un popor de elite a ajuns sa fie condus de un proxenet.

Traian Basescu si cu Elena Udrea sunt criminali.

Liiceanule,elitistule sari dracu din bmw-utul tau pe care l-ai botezat,semn al senilitatii,fa ceva,repara ce ai lins in cur!

Florin Anghelescu ,bietul negustor,evazionistul de casa al lui Basescu, i-a carat valize cu dolari in campanie si l-a lasat sa moara ca un caine sau chiar i-au comandat asasinarea(vezi articol pe blog).

Cazul Gigi Becali:„Azi te beau,maine te iau!”

Dupa ce a baut cu Becali,i-a ticluit miseleste arestarea.

Sunt criminali.

Ce mod pervers de a-l mulge de bani.

Generalii de opereta Oprea si Iordanescu,evazionistul nr.1 in alcool,Netoiu, prostituata ,blonda falsa,Udrea,vor club de fotbal.

Inaintarea e Hagi,probabil inghioldit de DNA cu dosarele lui cumnate-sau Gica Popescu.ISM.

Au fost presedinti si Ion Iliescu si Emil Constantinescu,dar nu au facut golanii din astea .

Traian Basescu este o „hurjuma”,un neica-nimeni care o sa arda in iad,la smoala.

Un astfel de diavol criminal nu a mai stapinit Romania.

Romania are nevoie de moguli !

Unire!

Astfel de oameni construiesc,Basescu,darima!

Sa nu mai credem in povestile plasmuite de Petre Ispirescu- Basescu cand mogulii refuza sa sustina financiar despotul.

Strig:

Baaaaaa,mogulilor, hai sa-l dam jos pe Basea!

Cum rabda omul de afaceri ,Videanu ,sa fie coordonat de un excrement ca Basescu ?

Mai nea Videne,e prost rau seful asta al dtale…

Vasile Blaga-cap de porc,este un alt exemplu:

adica el cara bani pentru tot partidul sa cumpere voturi si pentru el nu putea?

Parol,Udrea l-a lucrat cand a candidat la primarie.

Bai,Vasile Blaga ,daca taica-tau vindea branza,il stiu.

Daca ala-i taica-tau,cum a iesit un prostavan si un hot dintr-un om asa istet si cumsecade ?

Stolojan este un alt exemplu:

i-a distrus in mod ireversibil cariera politica,i-a furat in mod nedrept imaginea,capitalul politic.

Scapati,mai oameni buni,de Satan si tiitoarea sa!

Apropo,cu cine are Basea un copil?

Cu Boagiu?I-a umblat ala micu ,Sida la motor?

Nea Bebe cauta-i femeie neinceputa la baiat,ca Eba ii distruge copilaria.

Aia e muiere in toata regula ,vorba lui Vadim !

Udrea Elena este Talpa Iadului!

Basescu este insusi Scaraotchi-capetenia dracilor.

Scarbit de Basescu am scris catre:

US-President,Mister Barack Obama,

US-Vice President Mister Joe Biden,

prestigioaselor Washington Post,Il Messagero,The Guardian,The Independent si institutiilor UE

Am mai scris tuturor presedintilor europeni.

Asa sa stii betivan ratat-Basescu!

Scriu tot ce stiu si este adevarat pe internet sa te ataci tu .

Mor de el, e vax,cel putin se crede Ganditorul de la Hamangia sau Esop.

Esti varza mai ticalosule!

Mars la puscarie!Ia-o si pe Udrea!

I-a mai ramas un singur sustinator ,curva cu care face sex oral in biroul de la Cotroceni,Elena Udrea.

Idiota suna la Realitatea cu vocea pitigaita de atata vascozitati care ii astupa gatlejul criminal.

Huoooooooo,cuplu odios,Adolf Hitler si Eva Braun !

Cu astia nu putem sa ne comportam civilizat, trebuie sa ne comportam ca pe stadion cand ne fura arbitrul echipa de suflet.

Cu prietenie si devotiune pentru poporul roman ,

Florin MIHAI.

http://florinmihai.wordpress.com

http://dinscarbadebasescu.blogspot.com

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/florinmihai

The third in a series of interviews with communists from the former Eastern Bloc on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Can you briefly introduce yourself?

I am one of the editors of “Commons” (http://commons.com.ua), a Ukrainian left-wing intellectual web-site aimed at filling the gap in quality leftist analysis that might contribute to social struggles here and now, in Ukraine and across the globe. There is a gap between existing leftist theories and the practical work of grassroots social movements, the latter not receiving satisfactory analysis. Local movements often fail to use practical experience and theoretical discussions from other regions of the globe.

At the same time, there is a lack of information in English on important events of grassroots social struggles in Ukraine. Besides, we are very worried about the small quantity of leftist texts in Ukrainian while there is a widespread cliche that “leftist” = “pro-Russian”. We also want to create an independent source of information beyond sectarian conflicts caused by petty political ambitions.
What was the society that existed before 1989-91, and was its collapse the historic victory of capitalism over communism?

There are a lot of rather boring discussions in the left-wing movement on “class nature” of USSR, whether it was “state capitalism”, a “degenerated workers’ state” or anything of this kind. Often a specific position on this question becomes a basis for founding political organisations and sectarian rivalry; often such discussions substitute for the real political actions necessary here and now. This is not to ignore this discussion at all, but to point out that it is not so important what exactly we call the Soviet society but what we think should and could have been done to improve it.

Was revolutionary action necessary or was it possible to push the Soviet nomenklatura to some progressive reforms? The answer to this question largely determines our attitude to the 1989 protests. With hindsight we can say that the 1990s neoliberal reforms were disastrous for the Ukrainian economy, culture and society in general. But should we consider the 1989 mass protests as just legitimating cover for privatising property by the part of the old Soviet elite? I would say no. Many people in Ukraine and in the USSR in general genuinely aspired towards some kind of democratic socialism with a “human face”, some even for a self-governing, libertarian socialism.

The Confederation of Anarcho-syndicalists was not a small organisation in the end of 1980s and the first title of the People’s Movement of Ukraine (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy) was People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika [restructuring]. It was a strategic mistake by this popular wing of the 1989 events that they were closely allied with the so called “democratic” part of the split nomenklatura.

But many – even great – revolutions were defeated because of the lack of independent revolutionary organisations and we cannot disdain them for this. 1989 was a victory and a defeat at the same time: the victory of the emerging elite of a peripheral capitalist society and a defeat of the movement for genuine socialism. It would be absurd to call what we have now in Ukraine “western-style capitalism”. It is not “western-style” but it is becoming more and more similar to colonial-style, Third World capitalism with huge inequalities, the predominance of low surplus-value export production and mass migration from impoverished regions to wealthier countries. But we should also understand that the basis for this was laid down much earlier in the Brezhnev period when the USSR integrated to the world economy primarily as a supplier of natural resources.

Did the ‘Orange Revolution’ represent the continuation of the struggles of 1989-91?

For nationalists and liberals obviously “yes”. They can symbolically connect the celebration of national identity and confirmation of their pro-Western orientation between 1989 and 2004. But, of course, this is not true for the left. In contrast to the 1989 movement the “Orange Revolution” did not include any significant and meaningful discussion of substantial reforms in Ukraine. The people were destined only to shout “Yushchenko! Yushchenko!” at Maidan.

What is the current situation of the Ukrainian working class and the prospects for the labour movement?

And, of course, the “Orange Revolution” in no way reduced class exploitation. On the contrary, the new Labour Code which was adopted in the first reading in the Ukrainian parliament gets rid of many important rights inherited from the Soviet time and fixes the new balance of forces between labour and capital (to the benefit of the latter). In the same time we see new independent trade unions emerging and the radicalisation of workers’ struggle. This February workers of Kherson Engineering Plant occupied the factory in protest at huge wage arrears and the closure of the enterprise. This was the first occupation in post-Soviet Ukraine. The struggle in Kherson ended this September when the state forced the Kherson plant owner to pay the arrears and to to hire back half of the staff.

Many on the western left view America as the main imperialist power to be opposed, do you think Russia is also imperialist? How do you think the left in the West should relate to Russia?

Of course, instances of anti-American and “patriotic” rhetoric should not deceive the left. Definitely Putin’s Russia cannot be viewed as any kind of progressive or anti-imperialist regime even of the Chavez or Morales type. The Russian oligarchic elite is quite well embedded in transnational ruling class networks whilst revenues from natural resources export are not spent on education, public health or any kind of social infrastructure. Instead, Putin continued with neoliberal reforms reducing labour rights in the new Labour Code, privatizing housing and the public sector. But at the same time Russia should not be demonized. In the same way as nationalist rhetoric is used in Russia for ruling class legitimacy, an opposing nationalist rhetoric is used in Ukraine shifting responsibility for all problems to Russia’s hostile policies and its “fifth column” in Ukraine. Appeals to Russian imperialism as the most dangerous threat for the Ukrainian nation has become a common way to justify even neofascist movements. It became clear when ultra-right activist Maksim Chaika was killed in Odessa this spring. Many mainstream journalists and even president Yushchenko himself presented him just as a “patriot”. Antifascists at the same time were deceitfully presented as “pro-Russian paramilitaries”

What dissident left existed during the Soviet era, and what are the prospects for the post-Stalinist left today?

We can be highly sympathetic to the Ukrainian vernacular socialist tradition but we cannot ignore the fact that Ukraine has greatly changed since 1900-1920s. This is the most important reason why we did not see the resurrection of a mass national communist movement in post-Soviet Ukraine. Ukraine is not anymore a predominantly peasant country. Ukrainian national identity now appeals to only roughly half of Ukraine (the Western and Central regions) and in these regions it was taken over by right-wing nationalists since World War II. We can take some important insights from Ukrainian Marxists about the past but we cannot copy their analysis, rhetoric and action if we are striking for mass working class support not limited to certain regions and subcultures.

This is true not only for the Ukrainian Marxist tradition but for other more internationally recognized left-wing schools of thought. The left has to reconstruct and develop its theory in close connection with emerging grassroots movements: working-class, urban, environmental… The left’s theory should be once again re-connected to practical mass struggle. The problems of grassroots movements’ strategy, organization and mobilization should be the primary issues for the left. Only in discussing and solving practical problems of progressive social change can we develop our theory further, making it more adequate to the task of changing objective reality. Another problem is that the Ukrainian left should be more aware and connected to debates and struggles in global anticapitalist movements, learning its lessons and taking on inspiring examples and models of organisation.

I do not dare to give exhaustive definitions of what real communism could mean today. But what is most important is that real communism now must be with the masses and for the masses. It is definitely not another subculture or chat room for a handful of freaks pretending to be a “real vanguard” just because they have read a few more 100 or 150-year-old books.

Idag skriver svd.se om vänsterpartiets otrevliga historia. En historia som väl är känd för de flesta men jag tänkte ändå lyfta fram det i dagsljus även här.

I artikeln menar skribenten att Lars Ohly gick med i Kommunistisk ungdom 1978, och engagerade sig i partiet, 1987 valdes han in som ersättare i partistyrelsen. Och de gemensamma kommunistpartierna i östeuropa samarbetade flitigt, samma kommunistiska parti som Stalin styrde över. Det är fint att Stalinister sammarbetar med S i Sverige idag. Om vänsterpartierna väljs in och ska bilda regering så ska alla veta att det kommer sitta en stalinist i regeringen, minst en! och han heter Lars Ohly. Sen kan folk tycka att Ohly är så gullig och söt och kommer med flinka kommentarer, men hur gulligt och sött var Stalins politik? Hur trevligt och demokratiskt var Gulag – koncentrationslägret för oliktänkande i Sovjetunionen? Det sägs att många miljoner människor dödades i det koncentrationslägret, människor som blev “besvärliga” för Sovjetunionens kommunistparti. Ska V skapa ett nytt Gulag för de som inte vill ha socialism/kommunism? Nu har ju dock Ohly gått ut och sagt att han inte längre är kommunist, och det känns ju lite tryggare för mig som inte är socialist/kommunist, men frågan är om hans uttalande stämmer och han inte hycklar? Jag tror att innerst inne är Lars Ohly samma person som han var 1978, då han valde att engagera sig i Kommunistisk ungdom och stödja DDR(Östtyskland) och dess kommunistiska styre där människor utsattes för terror av den egna staten.

Varför skriver jag ett så uppenbart inlägg om V’s samröre med kommunistpartierna? Det ska alltid fram vad kommunisterna gjort i världen. Det får inte glömmas! Precis lika mycket ska det minnas som andra världskrigets koncentrationsläger och utrotningen av judar, även om det sistnämnda måste ställas utanför och anses vara ännu värre, enligt mig.

Nej, jag vill inte ha in Lars Ohly i regeringen, jag vill inte ha in en stalinist/föredetta sådan. Jag vill inte ha in ett parti som så sent som på 1980-talets slut stod för en DDR-stat och ansåg att det var ett bra sätt att styra en stat. Jag vill inte ha in ett parti som tycker det är ok att spärra in folk i fängelse för att man tänker fritt och jag vill inte ha in ett sådant parti när vi har en FRA-lag i Sverige.

Finns det ett parti i Sverige som jag är riktigt rädd för så är det just V. Med tanke på den tidigare politiken och med tanke på den nuvarande politiken som är helt upp mot väggarna, en politik som skruvar tillbaka klockan till 1990 och gärna ännu längre tillbaka, en politik som skapar stagnation och passivitet. Kommunism är som heroin för folket!

Peter

by Alan Woods, London

Courtesy: Marxist.com, Monday, 09 November 2009

Twenty years ago as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down the bourgeoisie in the west was euphoric, rejoicing at the “fall of communism”. Twenty years later things look very different as capitalism has entered its most severe crisis since 1929.

Now a majority in former East Germany votes for the left and harks back to what was positive about the planned economy. After rejecting Stalinism, they have now had a taste of capitalism, and the conclusion drawn is that socialism is better than capitalism.

The year 2009 is a year of many anniversaries, including the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the founding of the Communist International and the Asturian Commune. None of these anniversaries find any echo in the capitalist press. But there is one anniversary they will not forget: On the 9th of November, 1989, the Border separating Western from Eastern Germany was effectively opened.

The fall of the Berlin Wall has passed into history as a synonym for the collapse of “Communism”. In the last 20 years since those momentous events, we have witnessed an unprecedented ideological offensive against the ideas of Marxism on a world scale. This is held up as decisive proof of the death of Communism, Socialism and Marxism. Not long ago, it was even presented as the end of history. But since then the wheel of history has turned several times.

The argument that henceforth the capitalist system was the only alternative for humanity has been exposed as hollow. The truth is very different. On the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of Stalinism, capitalism finds itself in its deepest crisis since the Great Depression. Millions are faced with a future of unemployment, poverty, cuts and austerity.

This vicious anti-Communist campaign is being intensified during this period. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. The worldwide crisis of capitalism is giving rise to a general questioning of the “market economy”. There is a revival of interest in Marxist ideas, which is alarming the bourgeoisie. The new campaign of slanders is a reflection of fear.

Caricature of socialism

What failed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not communism or socialism, in any sense that this was understood by Marx or Lenin, but a bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature. Lenin explained that the movement towards socialism requires the democratic control of industry, society and the state by the proletariat. Genuine socialism is incompatible with the rule of a privileged bureaucratic elite, which will inevitably be accompanied by colossal corruption, nepotism, waste, mismanagement and chaos.

The nationalised planned economies in the USSR and Eastern Europe achieved astonishing results in the fields of industry, science, health and education. But, as Trotsky predicted as early as 1936, the bureaucratic regime ultimately undermined the nationalised planned economy and prepared the way for its collapse and the return of capitalism.

In the 1980s, the USSR had more scientists than the USA, Japan, Britain and Germany combined, and yet was unable to achieve the same results as the West. In the vital fields of productivity and living standards the Soviet Union lagged behind the West. The main reason was the colossal burden imposed on the Soviet economy by the bureaucracy – the millions of greedy and corrupt officials that were running the Soviet Union without any control on the part of the working class.

The suffocating rule of the bureaucracy eventually led to a sharp fall in the rate of growth in the USSR. As a result, the Soviet Union was falling behind the West. The costs of maintaining high levels of military expenditure and the costs of maintaining its grip on Eastern Europe imposed further strains on the Soviet economy. The emergence of a new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 signalled a major turn in the situation.

Gorbachev represented that wing of the Soviet bureaucracy that stood for reform from the top in order to preserve the regime as a whole. However, the situation deteriorated further under Gorbachev. This inevitably led to a crisis, which had an immediate effect in Eastern Europe, where the crisis of Stalinism was exacerbated by the national question.

Ferment in Eastern Europe

In 1989, from one capital to another, a tidal wave of revolt spread, overthrowing one by one the Stalinist regimes. In Romania, Ceausescu was overthrown by a revolution and sent to a firing squad. A key factor in the success of the popular uprisings was the crisis in Russia. In the past Moscow had sent the Red Army to crush uprising in East Germany (1953), in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). But Gorbachev understood that this option was no longer possible.

The mass strikes in Poland in the first part of the 1980s were an early expression of the impasse of the regime. If this magnificent movement had been led by genuine Marxists, it could have prepared the ground for a political revolution, not only in Poland but throughout Eastern Europe. But in the absence of such a leadership, the movement was derailed by counterrevolutionary elements like Lech Walesa.

At first, the Polish Stalinists tried to hold the movement down through repression, but in the end Solidarity had to be legalized and allowed to participate in parliamentary elections on June 4, 1989. What followed was a political earthquake. Solidarity candidates captured all the seats they were allowed to contest. This had a profound effect in the neighbouring countries.

In Hungary Janos Kadar – in anticipation of what was to come ‑ had already been removed as General Secretary of the Communist Party the previous year in 1988 and the regime had adopted a “democracy package”, including elections. Czechoslovakia was very soon also affected and by November 20, 1989 the number of protesters assembled in Prague went from 200,000 the previous day to half-million. A two-hour general strike was held on November 27.

These dramatic events marked a major turning-point in history. For almost half a century after World War II the Stalinists had ruled Eastern Europe with an iron hand. These were monstrous one-Party states, backed by a powerful apparatus of repression, with army, police and secret police, and informers in every block of flats, school, college or factory workshop. It seemed almost impossible that popular uprisings could ever succeed against the power of a totalitarian state and its secret police. But in the moment of truth these apparently invincible regimes were shown to be giants with feet of clay.

East Germany

Of all the regimes of Eastern Europe, the German Democratic Republic was one of the most industrially and technologically advanced. The standard of life, although not as high as in West Germany, was good. There was full employment, and everyone had access to cheap housing, free medicine and education of a high standard.

However, the rule of a totalitarian one-Party state, with its ever-present secret police (the notorious Stasi) with its army of informers, the corruption of the officials, and the privileges of the elite, were a source of discontent. Before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans had emigrated to West Germany, many over the border between East and West Berlin. In order to halt this haemorrhage, the regime had the Berlin Wall built.

The Wall and other fortifications along the 860-mile (1,380-kilometre) border shared by East and West Germany succeeded in stemming the exodus. This action probably helped to boost economic growth in the GDR. But it caused suffering and hardship for the families that were divided and it was a propaganda gift to the West, which presented it as yet another example of “Communist tyranny”.

By the end of the 1980s the situation in the GDR was explosive. The old Stalinist Erich Honecker was implacably opposed to reform. His regime even prohibited the circulation of “subversive” publications from the Soviet Union. On 6 October and 7 October, Gorbachev visited East Germany to mark the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, and he put pressure on the East German leadership to accept reform. He is quoted as saying: “Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben” (He who is too late is punished by life).

By now the East German people had become openly rebellious. Opposition movements began to sprout up like mushrooms. These included the Neues Forum (New Forum), Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening), and Demokratie Jetzt (Democracy Now). The largest opposition movement was created through a Protestant church service at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche, German for Church of Saint Nicholas, where each Monday after service citizens gather outside demanding change in East Germany. However, these movements were confused and politically naïve.

A wave of mass demonstrations now swept through East German cities, acquiring particular strength in Leipzig. Hundreds of thousands of people joined these demonstrations. The regime entered into crisis that led to the removal of the hard-line Stalinist leader, Erich Honecker, and the resignation of the entire cabinet. Under the pressure of the mass movement, the new Party leader, Egon Krenz, called for democratic elections. But the reforms proposed by the regime were too little and too late.

The “Communist” leaders considered using force but changed their mind (with a little prodding from Gorbachev). Events were now spinning out of control. In the following days, one could almost speak of anarchy: Shops stayed open all hours, a GDR passport served as a free ticket for public transport. In the words of one observer: “in general there were more exceptions than rules in those days”. Power was lying in the street, but there was nobody to pick it up.

Faced with a mass revolt, the seemingly all-powerful East German state collapsed like a house of cards. On November 9, 1989, after several weeks of mass unrest, the East German government announced that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. This was the signal for a new eruption of the masses. Spontaneously, crowds of East Germans climbed onto and crossed the Wall, joined by West Germans on the other side.

Counterrevolution

The Berlin Wall was a symbol and a focal point for all that was hated about the East German regime. The demolition of the Wall began quite spontaneously. Over the next few weeks, parts of the Wall were chipped away. Later on industrial equipment was later used to remove almost all of the rest. There was a celebratory atmosphere, a mood of euphoria, more like a carnival than a revolution. But that is true of the early stages of every great revolution, beginning with 1789.

In November of 1989, the population of the GDR was overwhelmed by emotional moods – a sense of liberation, accomplished by a general feeling of elation. It was as if a whole nation was experiencing a general inebriation, and therefore was open to suggestions and sudden impulses. Overthrowing the old regime proved far easier than anyone had dared imagine. But, once having overthrown it, what was to be put in its place? The masses that had brought about the overthrow of the old regime, knew very well what they did not want, but did not have quite clear what they wanted, and nobody was offering a way out.

All the objective conditions for a political revolution were now given. The great majority of the population did not want the restoration of capitalism. They wanted socialism, but with democratic rights, without the Stasi, without corrupt bureaucrats and without a dictatorial one-party state. If a genuine Marxist leadership had existed, this could have led to a political revolution and the establishment of a workers’ democracy.

However, the fall of the Berlin Wall did not result in a political revolution but counterrevolution in the form of unification with West Germany. This demand did not feature prominently at the beginning of the demonstrations. But given the absence of a clear programme on the part of the leadership, it was introduced and gradually came to occupy a central role.

Most of the leaders of the opposition had no clear programme, policy or perspective, beyond a vague desire for democracy and civil rights. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. The presence of a powerful and prosperous capitalist state next door therefore played a determining role in filling the vacuum.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was an aggressive representative of imperialism. He used the most shameless bribery to persuade the East German people to agree to immediate unification, offering to exchange their Ostmarks for Deutschmarks on a one-to-one basis. But what Kohl did not tell the people of East Germany was that unification would not mean that they would have West German living standards.

In July 1990, the final obstacle to German unification was removed when Gorbachev agreed to drop Soviet objections to a reunited Germany within NATO in return for substantial German economic aid to the Soviet Union. Unification was formally concluded on October 3, 1990.

The masses deceived

The people of the GDR had been deceived. They were not told that the introduction of a market economy would mean mass unemployment, factory closures and the virtual destruction of large parts of the industrial base of the GDR, or a general rise in prices, and the demoralization of a section of the youth, or that they would be looked down upon as second-class citizens in their own country. They were not told these things but they have found them out through bitter experience.

Reunification precipitated a disastrous collapse in real Eastern German GDP, with falls of 15.6 per cent in 1990 and 22.7 per cent in 1991 cumulating to a one third decline. Millions of jobs were lost. Many eastern factories were bought by western competitors and shut down. From 1992, East Germany experienced four years of recovery, but this was followed by stagnation.

Before the Second World War, East German GDP per capita was slightly above the German average, and both at that time and in the GDR, East Germany was richer than other eastern European countries. But 20 years after unification, living standards in East Germany still lag behind the West. Unemployment is double western levels, and wages are significantly lower.

In the GDR unemployment was practically unknown. But employment declined by 3.3 million people from 1989-1992. East German real GDP has barely risen above its 1989 level, and employment languishes at 60 per cent of its 1989 level. Currently, unemployment in Germany as a whole is about 8%, but the figure for East Germany is 12.3%. However, some unofficial estimates put it as high as 20%, and amongst the youth even 50%.

Women, who achieved a high degree of equality in the GDR, as in other countries of East Europe, have suffered most. The German Socio-Economic Panel data for the mid-1990s indicate that 15 per cent of the eastern female population and ten per cent of the male population were unemployed.

In July 1990 the “chancellor of unity”, Helmut Kohl, promised: “In a joint effort we will soon turn [the East German regions] Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia into flourishing landscapes.” Fifteen years later, a BBC report admitted that “the statistics are bleak” Despite the capital injection of an estimated 1.25 trillion euro (£843bn, $1,550bn), the East’s unemployment rate was still 18.6% in 2005 (before the present recession) and in many regions it is more than 25%.

Halle in Saxony-Anhalt, once an important centre for the chemical industry with more than 315,000 people, has lost nearly a fifth of its citizens. Before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the “chemical triangle” Leuna-Halle-Bitterfeld gave employment to 100,000 people ‑ now 10,000 jobs remain. Gera once had large textiles and defence industries, and some uranium mining. They have gone, and much the same happened in most other state-owned industries since 1989.

Eastern GDP per capita improved from 49 per cent of the western level in 1991 to 66 per cent in 1995, since which time convergence has ceased to advance. The economy was growing by about 5.5% a year, but was not creating many new jobs. As a result the East is emptying. Since unification some 1.4 million people have moved to the West, most of them young and well-educated. Emigration and a steep fall in fertility have caused the eastern population to decline each year since unification.

It is a supreme irony of history that 20 years after reunification, people are leaving East Germany, not to flee from the Stasi, but to escape unemployment. Of course, some have done well. The BBC report says: “Grand bourgeois houses, many riddled with World War II bullet holes until 1989, have been restored to their old glory.”

Marxism revives

Like many other East Germans, Ralf Wulff said he was delighted about the fall of the Berlin Wall and to see capitalism replace communism. But the euphoria did not last long. “It took just a few weeks to realize what the free market economy was all about,” said Wulff. “It’s rampant materialism and exploitation. Human beings get lost. We didn’t have the material comforts but communism still had a lot going for it.” (Reuters report)

Hans-Juergen Schneider, a 49-year-old trained engineer has been unemployed since January 2004. He has sent out 286 job applications since then, without success. “The market economy can’t solve our problems,” he says, “big business is just grabbing the profits without accepting any responsibility.” He is not alone. A poll by Der Spiegel stated that 73% of East Germans believe that Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism is still valid.

Another poll published in October 2008 in the magazine Super Illus stated that 52% of people in Eastern Germany think that the market economy is “inept” and “rundown”. 43% would prefer a socialist economic system, because “it protects the small people from financial crises and other injustices”. 55% rejected banking bailouts by the state.

Of young people (18 to 29 years), who never lived in the GDR, or did so only briefly, 51% want socialism. The figure for people 30 to 49 years old is 35%. But for those over 50 years it is 46%. These findings are confirmed in interviews with dozens of ordinary easterners. “We read about the ‘horrors of capitalism’ in school. They really got that right. Karl Marx was spot on,” said Thomas Pivitt, a 46-year-old IT worker from East Berlin. Das Kapital was a best-seller for publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag, selling over 1,500 copies in 2008, triple the number sold in all of 2007 and a 100-fold increase since 1990.

“Everyone thought there would never ever again be any demand for ‘Das Kapital’,” managing director Joern Schuetrumpf told Reuters. “Even bankers and managers are now reading Das Kapital to try to understand what they’ve been doing to us. Marx is definitely ‘in’ right now,” he said.

The crisis of capitalism has convinced many Germans, both East and West, that the system has failed. “I thought communism was shit but capitalism is even worse,” said Hermann Haibel, a 76-year old retired blacksmith. “The free market is brutal. The capitalist wants to squeeze out more, more, more,” he said. “I had a pretty good life before the Wall fell,” he added. “No one worried about money because money didn’t really matter. You had a job even if you didn’t want one. The communist idea wasn’t all that bad.”

“I don’t think capitalism is the right system for us,” said Monika Weber, a 46-year-old city clerk. “The distribution of wealth is unfair. We’re seeing that now. The little people like me are going to have to pay for this financial mess with higher taxes because of greedy bankers.”

Even more significant than opinion polls were the results of the recent German elections. The Left Party registered a significant advance, getting almost 30% of the vote in the East. In the East there is now no majority for the bourgeois parties. What this shows clearly is that the people of East Germany do not want capitalism but socialism – not the bureaucratic totalitarian caricature of socialism that they had before, but genuine democratic socialism – the socialism of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

London, October 19, 2009

Courtesy and Thanks : http://www.marxist.com/fall-berlin-wall-20-years-later.htm

The most iconic moment in the collapse of Stalinism was when the Berlin wall was pulled down. What the capitalist media largely ignore, however, are the events taking place behind that wall in the weeks before its dramatic fall. Ingmar Meineke, of Sozialistische Alternative (SAV – CWI in Germany) provides a graphic blow-by-blow account of the East German revolution and counter revolution.
Germany – Power was lying on the street

East German revolution and counter revolution
Ingmar Meineke, Sozialistische Alternative (SAV – CWI in Germany). From November 2009 edition of Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales

“Dear friends, fellow citizens. It is like someone opened a window after all these years of spiritual, economic and political stagnation, dullness and bad smell, phrase-mongering and bureaucratic arbitrariness. What a change! Less than four weeks ago: a nice wooden tribune right here around the corner, the ordered and illustrious parade! And today! You have gathered here, today, out of your own free will, for freedom and democracy and for a socialism worth the name”. With these words the author, Stefan Heym, began his speech on Berlin Alexanderplatz in front of more than half a million people on 4 November 1989.

A revolutionary wave had engulfed the German Democratic Republic (GDR – East Germany’s Stalinist state). On 9 October, 70,000 people took to the streets of Leipzig, 300,000 on the 23rd. Between those dates, state leader, Erich Honecker, and other politburo members of the ruling SED party, resigned. Egon Krenz took over on 18 October and was the first to use the word ‘Wende’ (change). But he too faced distrust and rejection. On 4 November, placards read: ‘Socialism yes – Ego(n)ism – no’. On 8 November, the whole politburo resigned, while 50,000 SED members demonstrated outside for the renewal of their party.

One day later the Berlin wall falls – the wall that Honecker said in January would “still be standing in 50 or 100 years”. In 1987, Kurt Hager said of perestroika and glasnost: “You know, if your neighbour redecorates his home would you feel compelled to redecorate yours, too?” By 1989 it was not just about redecorating, the whole flat was unfit for human habitation. But, as we know, in the end, the flat got privatised, and the names of the new landlords were the West German Kohl & Co.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its allies won the Volkskammer (parliament) elections on 18 March 1990. On 1 July, the Deutschmark (DM) became the official currency. On 3 October, the GDR was attached to West Germany. Just a year after the beginning of the protests, the GDR had vanished from the map. How was it possible to divert the revolutionary train onto the tracks of capitalist reunification?
Growing anger

Developments in other Eastern Bloc countries had fanned the flames of unrest in the GDR. Elections in the Soviet Union in March 1989 included multi-candidates for the first time. Mass strikes in Poland in the summer of 1988 had led to round table talks involving the government, the Solidarnosc movement and Catholic church. Solidarnosc won the partial elections for the Polish parliament in June 1989, forming the government in September. This was in marked contrast to the GDR. The state reacted with over 200 arrests when opposition groups appeared on the Luxemburg-Liebknecht memorial demonstration in 1988 with a banner citing Rosa Luxemburg: ‘Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently’.

Three events in 1989 inflamed the situation further. SED endorsement of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing on 4 June, a thinly disguised threat against opposition, only undermined the regime. The same with the rigged local elections on 7 May. Officially, the National Front List (the ‘unity list’ of SED and other organisations) gained 98.77%. Election observers said there were at least 10-20% non-voters or ‘No’ votes. This time, public protests began to involve hundreds of people, 1,500 in Leipzig on election night, and continued for months.

The final impetus was the wave of people leaving the GDR. Hungary opened its borders to Austria and GDR citizens begin to use this route to the west – 25,000 by the end of September. West German diplomatic missions in Prague, Budapest and east Berlin are flooded by people wanting to leave. This triggered a debate: why are so many leaving? What kind of a country is it where people feel the urge to run away, leaving property, friends and family behind? Official reactions that we ‘should not shed a single tear over these people’ sickened many.

On Monday 4 September, 1,200 people demonstrated after the peace prayer in the Leipzig Nikolai church. They chant: ‘We want out’. Security forces intervene. This is repeated every Monday. On 25 September, 8,000 people come out to protest. The chant changes to: ‘We stay here’, a clear statement of intent against the regime, indicating a will to finally change things in the country itself.

The first opposition groups are founded, New Forum on 9 September. Its statement is signed by 4,500 people in 14 days. By November, 200,000 have signed. It starts with the words: “Within our country, the communication between state and society is obviously disrupted. This is proven by mass resignations and retreat into the private sphere, as well as mass emigration”. It mentions numerous problems, including environmental destruction and shortages of goods, and concludes: “In order to recognise all of these contradictions and to listen to and analyse opinions and arguments… there is a need for a democratic dialogue… Therefore we unite to build a political platform for the whole of the GDR, bringing together people from all occupations, backgrounds, parties and groups… to discuss and work on these vital problems of society in our country”.

Although this is vague, it hits the spot. Many people think that a call for dialogue is a good thing. Surely no one, including Honecker, can oppose that? But Honecker and the SED leadership don’t want dialogue, especially not with a platform that is working on a national level. On 21 September, the motion to get New Forum registered is ruled out. This only increases its popularity.

The founding statements of most opposition groups are pro-socialist. Democracy Now writes (12 September): “Socialism has to now find its proper democratic form, if it is not to be lost for history”. Democratic Departure writes: “We want to learn anew what socialism can mean for us”. The United Left, founded on 4 September, proposes a conference bringing together left-wing opposition groups: “This conference should be about working out minimal demands for the realisation of a fundamental reform of society towards free socialism”.

The only organisation not supporting this is the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Its founding statement (12 September) does not mention socialism but formulates the aim of a “social market economy, with a strict ban on the monopolies for the prevention of undemocratic concentrations of economic power”. It is the first organisation to pave the way for the re-establishment of capitalism, euphemised as a social market economy.
The masses on the street

October began with the 40th anniversary of the GDR’s existence. Shortly before 7 October, sealed trains drive through the GDR with refugees travelling from West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw to the west. In Dresden people try to jump on board. Volkspolizei (‘people’s police’) react brutally, with water cannons, previously unknown to the GDR population, put in position.

On 6 October, Mikhail Gorbachev arrives in Berlin. His presence encourages the demonstrators. On the morning of the 7th there is the official military parade on Berlin Alexanderplatz. At 5pm, a few hundred youthful protestors protest against the earlier rigged elections. By 5:20, 2-3,000 march on the Palace of the Republic, shouting ‘Gorby, Gorby’ and ‘We are the people!’ At 6pm a demonstration heads towards Prenzlauer Berg. Special units of the police and Stasi surround the Schönhauser Allee train station at 9pm. Five hundred are arrested, but 10,000 are on the street.

More march in Leipzig (20,000) and Dresden (40,000). The local Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper rants (9 October): “Rowdies disrupt normal life”. All eyes are on Leipzig. Will the GDR have its own Tiananmen? It becomes known that hospitals have been cleared and extra blood made available. Three days earlier, under the headline, Workers in the Area Demand: Don’t Tolerate Opposition to the State Any Longer, the Leipziger Volkszeitung threatened: “We are ready and prepared to stop these counter-revolutionary actions once and for all. If necessary, gun in hand”.

But the first splits show in the state apparatus: hit hard or try to mollify the protests through reforms? A call for de-escalation from three local SED leaders, Kurt Meier, Jochen Pommert and Roland Wötzel, conductor Kurt Masur and others, is broadcast locally. After that, Leipzig experiences the largest demonstration so far with 70,000 people. The powerful slogan, ‘We are the people’, rings all over the Georgiring. The Internationale is sung. In Berlin, 7,000 demonstrate, another 60,000 around the country. The pace quickens. The seemingly monolithic state and party bloc shows ever larger splits. The politburo sits in permanent session.

Parts of the ruling elite try to engage with opposition representatives locally. On 10 October, Wolfgang Berghofer, mayor of Dresden, orders the release of 500 people arrested the previous weekend. The demonstrations keep growing. The following weekend there are 20,000 in Halle and Plauen, 10,000 in Magdeburg, 4,000 in Berlin. Next Monday, the 16th, brings a new record number: 120,000 protesters in Leipzig, 10,000 in Dresden and Magdeburg, 5,000 in Halle, 3,000 in Berlin.

For the first time, on 17 October, newspapers print brief, factual reports about the Leipzig demonstrators, who had only a week before been described as rioters and counter-revolutionaries. On the same day, workers at the machine factory in Teltow leave the FDGB, the official trade union federation, and form the independent factory group, Reform, calling for new independent trade unions, “the right to strike, demonstrate, a free press, an end to travel restrictions and of official privileges”.

Sensational news on the 18th: Honecker resigns. His successor is Krenz. Other leading politburo members also have to go. But this does not calm the masses. On the contrary, more and more people feel encouraged to take to the streets. Krenz’s appointment is met with distrust. He was seen as Honecker’s crown prince for a long time. The slogans on the Leipzig Monday demonstration on 23 October, 250,000-strong, are: ‘Egon, who has asked us?’; ‘Free elections’; ‘Without visa to Hawaii’; ‘The people should play the leading role’. By the end of the month, protests have reached the entire country.

There are not only demonstrations. In Magdeburg, conscripted police officers elect a council and collect signatures for everyday demands: the right to go out in civilian clothes and to have access to the company club. Demands to shorten conscription and for a civilian alternative are added later. The revolutionary wave reaches school students. Their first victory is the ending of marks for discipline, and of Saturday lessons.
The breakthrough

In Leipzig, protests rise from 20,000 on 2 October, 70,000 on the 9th, 120,000 on the 16th, 250,000 on the 23rd, 300,000 on the 30th, to 400,000 on 6 November! Meanwhile, there are 500,000 (some say a million) in east Berlin on 4 November. On the 8th, the whole politburo resigns. On the evening of the 9th, politburo member, Günter Schabowski, reports to the press from the SED central committee that the borders have been opened and anyone can collect a visa from 8am the following day. People do not wait and besiege the border crossings to west Berlin, taking the border guards by surprise. At midnight, some commanders, forced by the mass pressure, open the borders. The wall falls.

During the following weeks a whole country goes travelling. Trains are crammed full. People are euphoric but not blind. West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, is booed during a rally outside Schöneberg town hall. At the same time, the new travel opportunities enable GDR citizens to compare the goods on offer east and west. They note that the GDR Mark is not worth much in the golden west.

After the initial euphoria, an impatient mood develops. A banner on the 4 November demo reads: ‘We need new deeds, not new phrases!’ The masses feel the bureaucracy’s resistance, that it is playing for time. The Neubrandenburg SED chief, Chemnitzer, threatened 20,000 booing demonstrators on 25 October: ‘If you don’t shut up we can do it differently!’ The SED bureaucracy is confused and hangs in the air. But it has not gone. On 17 November, Hans Modrow, who is seen as a reformer, takes over. He attempts to involve the opposition to stabilise the situation. On 22 November, he agrees to round table discussions.

But the former ruling elite is less and less able to govern. The state apparatus starts to dissolve. The fire is fanned by ever new discoveries of the old ruling clique’s privileges, especially the fat cat housing developments in Wandlitz and other ‘paradises’. ADN reports (28 November) on the hunting area of former premier, Willi Stoph: “After some pressure we are let into the house with its five baths, the many living- and bedrooms, the video room and cellar bar. There are more than five fridges, not only full of apples and meat but also expensive sweets and delicacies – all of western production”.

The question, not really posed by anyone but which hovers above everything, is: who has got power? The state and party apparatus has increasingly lost it, but the opposition has not got it either. The power was lying on the streets where the masses demonstrated. No one could get past them. But who would pick it up? Who would gain the trust of the people? In the beginning, the masses looked towards the opposition leaders who had come into this position overnight, often by accident. They also looked towards some SED reformers. And towards the artists and intellectuals, many of whom had appeared at the 4 November demonstration.

The internal renewal of the SED is too slow for most. As the extent of corruption becomes apparent, workers are more determined than ever to get rid of the whole leadership. The New Forum in Karl-Marx Stadt demands a general strike for 6 December. This is condemned by the FDGB, bloc parties and Bärbel Bohley, a co-founder of New Forum. Everyone fears the situation could spiral out of control. The demand is withdrawn. Nevertheless, there is a two-hour political warning strike at workplaces in Plauen on that date. There are strikes elsewhere, too.

The mood is now so heated that the bureaucracy has to withdraw even further. The Volkskammer deletes Article One and, thereby, the leading role of the SED. On 3 December, the whole politburo and central committee resign, after Honecker, Stoph (ex-prime minister), Tisch (ex-trade union leader), Sindermann (ex-Volkskammer president) and Mielke (ex-Stasi minister) are expelled from the party.
Hesitant opposition

Krenz goes on 6 December and the SED’s special congress starts on the 8th. It renames itself SED-PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism). The lawyer, Gregor Gysi, becomes party leader. But too much credit has been spent, too big the entanglement with the state, the disappointment and anger over privileges. This step alone could not calm the situation.

The round table starts meeting on the 7th. The weaknesses of the new opposition groups increasingly come out. Surprised by the speed of events they want to carry on talking with the SED rather than taking power. Rolf Henrich, co-founder of the New Forum, had stated in Der Morgen newspaper (28 October) that they want to carry on without a worked out programme for now: “We have to learn to accept how pathetic this beginning is”. The United Left gets bogged down in working groups, a discussion forum, coordination and documentation ‘centres’.

This indecisiveness has real foundations. How is it possible to really get rid of the old leaders and bureaucracy? What could the new society look like, especially the economic system? What role should capitalist West Germany play? These questions are permanently on the agenda, and are interwoven. The economy becomes central, with pressure building on the GDR’s currency since the wall came down. The government introduces tougher customs controls as an emergency measure and limits the availability of subsidised goods.

More important is the discovery of how desperate the East German economic situation is. Capitalist commentators paint an even bleaker picture, claiming that the GDR faces immediate state bankruptcy. They do this to cover up the consequences of future currency union, when the DM becomes the official currency in the east. But the situation was serious. The productivity of a GDR worker was estimated to be around half that of a West German worker. Subsidies for basic food and other everyday goods were increasingly financed through the accumulation of debt.

Attempts to decrease debt by reducing imports and increasing exports further cut the amount of goods on offer. In November, finance minister, Höfner, admitted that exports were not exchanged at one GDR Mark to DM1, but at 4.1 to one. On 3 January 1990, the new SED-PDS finance minister, Christa Luft, provides new data: the balance of payments deficit was $2.4 billion in 1989; financial debt is $20.6 billion; GDR currency reserves are $7-9 billion. GDP had fallen by 3.1% annually from 1986 to 1989. The Modrow government cuts subsidies immediately, massively increasing the cost of flour, children’s clothes and shoes.

Up to November, the GDR revolution had been pro-socialist. All the opposition statements (excepting the SDP), banners, demo chants, speeches, and singing of the Internationale are evidence of that. The writer Christa Wolf said, followed by incredible applause: “Imagine there is socialism and no one runs away!” Bohley talked about a “better socialism”. The formation of councils (soviets) was discussed: ‘All power to the councils’ read a banner on 4 November. But there was not much about how this ‘better socialism’ or rule of the councils could be achieved. The suggestions of opposition leaders and intellectuals remained abstract.
Pro-market, pro-unification

In the begining, the workers were reluctant to take strike action because they did not want to drive the economy further over the edge. So most actions took place on the streets. Although strikes increased in December, workplaces were not taken over, showing the lack of a tradition of workers’ independent organisation. Even where workers’ committees were formed, they did not necessarily get rid of the management. Bernd Reissmann, a programmer at Robotron in Dresden, describes what happened there: “We listened to the director for one last time… And this boss put forward his views in such a way that the others were convinced by it… So he stayed”.

Parts of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia begin very early to argue for a market economy. On 30 November, the Dresden based scientist, Manfred von Ardenne, bluntly demands more independence for companies, the eradication of the state monopoly of foreign trade, and a transition towards a market economy. The new opposition also steers in this direction. At the founding congress of Democratic New Beginning on 16 December, a delegate stated to loud applause: “The planned economy is dead. We do not want to resurrect a corpse. No more socialist experiments”.

This wing wins the majority. The wave reaches the New Forum. Joachim Gauck answers a question of the Taz newspaper (13 January 1990), regarding socialist principles: “We will revise all these aspects of our programme… At the moment the question posed is the one of unification and the market economy”. Even more left-wing forces do not have a clear position. One SED split-off, Die Nelken, defining itself as Marxist, stated that it would support a market economy because “Marx had only been against the capitalist chaos of his time”. Others talk about a ‘third way’ (Gysi), or a ‘socialist market economy’ (Luft).

An independent capitalist GDR was pointless. Thus, reunification was not just a national but, mainly, a social question. The speed of reunification can only be understood as an answer to the demands of the GDR revolution – a reactionary answer. The issue of reunification played next to no role in the beginning. Freedom to travel was far more important. On a larger scale, different voices were first heard at the Monday demonstration in Leipzig on 20 November. A New Forum speaker said: “We do not want to be the poor house of greater Germany”. But another speaker said he had endured 40 years of socialism and had no interest in any new versions. Reunification and the market economy were the only options. This got long applause and chants of ‘Germany, unified fatherland’.

It was not the main mood, but the demand gains ground. The mood is split. A survey on 17 December shows 73% for a sovereign GDR, 71% for socialism as an idea, 39% in favour of the West German economic system, 61% for a “thoroughly reformed socialist economic system”. While Kohl is celebrated in Dresden by 20-30,000 people on 19 December, 50,000 demonstrate in Berlin on the same day, “for a sovereign GDR, against reunification and the sell-out of the country”.

Previously, on 16 November, Heym had presented the following alternative: “We can either insist on the independence of our country and attempt… to develop a society based on solidarity, in which peace, social justice, freedom of the individual, freedom to travel for all and the preservation of the environment are guaranteed. Or, because of strong economic necessities and intolerable conditions on which influential big-business and political circles from the federal republic base their offers of help for the GDR, we will have to endure the start of a sell-out of our material and moral values, leading sooner or later to a takeover of the German Democratic Republic by the Federal Republic of Germany. Let us choose the first option”. Up to 23 January 1990, 1,167,048 people had signed this declaration. But among them was Krenz – the declaration had not distanced itself sufficiently from the old SED bureaucracy.

This was a dilemma for those who wanted the GDR to go in a socialist direction. They did not develop an independent position but remained interwoven with the SED reformers. However, the masses did not trust them, despite the popularity of individuals like Modrow. Because there did not seem to be a credible socialist solution many started to look towards reunification. There were huge illusions in the market economy which, according to everyone, would have to be a ‘social’ one which certainly would not lead to hundreds of thousands unemployed.

Initially, West German leaders did not want reunification. Its ruling class was surprised at the pace of developments. But the steady wave of people leaving the GDR and the collapse of the state apparatus force the West German government to move. They have to decide on which organisation in the GDR they want to build on. They finally pick the former CDU bloc party, which at least has a functioning apparatus. This is later joined by the Alliance for Germany, Democratic Beginning and the German Social Union.
Endgame

By the end of January the situation becomes critical. The Modrow government wants a new security service, the Verfassungsschutz. This meets determined opposition. Also, facts show that the Stasi is only being dissolved very slowly. Strikes increase. The Stasi HQ in Berlin is stormed. There are demands for a national strike on 26 January. The government and opposition try everything to regain control. A new ‘government of national responsibility’ is formed on 5 February in which eight ministers without portfolio are members of opposition groups. The Volkskammer elections are moved forward to 18 March. Faced with radicalising mass protests, the bureaucracy moves towards an ‘ordered unification’ with the west.

Only the United Left does not participate in the government after that. All other groups favour unification and the introduction of a market economy, capitalism. The major differences are about how. Kohl and the CDU/FDP government in Bonn hesitate about how quickly they should act. At first, they argue for a step-by-step process. But the East German CDU, under Lothar de Maiziere, argues that only the immediate introduction of the DM as the official currency will stop further mass migration. The next day, Kohl announces that negotiations with the GDR will start immediately. The West German government decides to take over the GDR. Kohl ruthlessly puts this into action. He refuses to give a financial aid package worth DM10-15 billion to the Modrow government.

The round table had decided that no western politicians should be allowed to participate in the election campaign. This is ignored. The Alliance for Germany (CDU, DA, DSU), above all, is merely a western puppet. But the same goes for the SPD and Liberals. FDP leader, Otto Graf Lambsdorf, guilty of tax evasion, celebrates in Werningerode on 9 March: “The world witnesses the final collapse of socialism”. The clear victory for the Alliance for Germany on 18 March comes as a surprise to many. But, once the political path had been chosen, the majority voted for those who seemed most likely to realise it in the quickest and safest way. The CDU wins 40.6%, SPD 21.8%, PDS 16.3%, with civil rights groups standing as Bündnis 90 on a catastrophic 2.9%.

There is one final round of mass protests on the issue of exchange rates. After the DM becomes the currency on 1 July 1990, the GDR witnesses the fastest and most drastic de-industrialisation ever in an industrial country. In June, industrial production was 86.5%. In August it had fallen to 48.1%. Unemployment went up to 7.2% in July. On 3 October 1990, one year after the beginning of the revolution, the country which it was meant to revolutionise vanishes from the map.
The missed opportunity

Stefan Heym later gave this honest assessment of his 4 November speech: “I remember the storming applause I got. But I also knew that a lot of Stasi people stood around the truck which served as the platform. I ended my speech saying that democracy was a Greek word meaning the rule of the people, and I said ‘let us build this rule of the people’. But I also wondered: should I not act now and call on people to start walking towards the government building which was only two streets away. Let us go in there and occupy the TV tower and, in other words, let us do a revolution. But I also wondered if this would be possible without bloodshed and whether the police had orders to shoot if that was the case. I did not know and so I ended my speech with the theoretical meaning of democracy and not with a practical creation of democracy. There was no organised group which wanted to take power. There was no conspiracy to unseat the government. There was only a forum of individuals but nothing that would be needed in order to carry out a revolution. This is why everything imploded. There was no one who could have taken power apart from the west… Imagine we would have had the time and opportunity to build a new socialism in the GDR, a socialism with a human face. This could have been an example for West Germany and things could have been different”.

From September to November 1989, even afterwards, there existed many features of a political revolution which the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, considered necessary in order to overthrow Stalinism, the bureaucratic deformation of socialism. In the end, the other option which Trotsky saw as a possibility became the reality: capitalist restoration. The most important reason for this was that there was no force which could develop a realisable way towards a true socialist society. This force did not exist in the GDR and did not form in the short period available. It did not exist in West Germany either. There was no impulse for Germany to take a socialist path. Once again, a revolution was betrayed by social democrats. The power was lying on the street. But the opposition of autumn 1989 left it lying there until Kohl & Co eventually picked it up.

9 November 2009

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n09.shtml

November 9 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since 1989, pictures of rejoicing people, hugging each other and dancing on top of the Wall after the opening of the border crossing, have been used as symbols for the collapse of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and the other Stalinist regimes that had come to power in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War.

Numerous celebrations are being held in Germany to mark the event. Thousands of visitors from throughout the country and abroad are expected to attend a “Festival of Freedom” around the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Amongst others, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will take part in the ceremony.

Popular enthusiasm for the event, however, is limited. According to a recent opinion poll, some 23 percent of eastern Germans consider themselves as losers in German unification. Another 30 percent see improvements in travel, housing and freedom, but consider developments in the area of income, health, social security and social justice to be negative. Only 32 percent assess their economic situation as “good”, compared to 47 percent in 1999.

The contradiction between official enthusiasm and public discontent speaks volumes about the real significance of the events of November 1989. The efforts of the media to glorify them as the beginning of a new epoch of democracy, freedom and peace grow all the louder the more obvious it becomes that they were nothing of the kind. There are few events in recent history that have been as thoroughly mystified as the end of the GDR.

The fall of the Wall initiated the end of a dictatorial regime that oppressed any sign of opposition, particularly from workers, employing a host of secret service agents. However, it was replaced not by democracy, but by another dictatorship—the dictatorship of capital. Following the fall of the Wall, the lives of East Germans changed dramatically—without any consultation or democratic participation of the people.

A total of 14,000 state-owned enterprises were sold, broken up or liquidated by the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency), whose leading figures consisted of representatives from western German big business. Some 95 percent of the privatized companies were acquired by owners from outside eastern Germany. Within three years, 71 percent of all employees had either lost or changed their jobs. By 1991, 1.3 million jobs were destroyed and another million disappeared in the following years. The number of workers in productive industries today amounts to a quarter of the number in 1989.

Large sections of the eastern German population soon lost hope in the future. The declining birth rate is a telling indicator of the social significance of this process. It sank from 199,000 newborn children in 1989 to 79,000 in 1994.

The consequences of this industrial and social devastation persist to this day. The total population of the new federal states amounts to 13 million, significantly less than the 14.5 million in the GDR. Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, an average of 140 eastern Germans still move across to western Germany each day.

For years, the unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent. Only in the last five years has it dropped to the current 12 percent. However, this reduction stems not from the creation of new regular jobs, but from the spread of low-wage and part-time jobs. Every second employee in eastern Germany works under the low-wage threshold of €9.20 per hour. The average gross wage is €13.50 per hour, far below the western German level of €17.20.

The demand for “open elections”—at the heart of the demonstrations against the GDR regime in the autumn of 1989—has given way to disappointment about bourgeois democracy. During the last federal elections, just over 60 percent went to the polls in eastern Germany. In state and municipal ballots, the turnout was even lower.

Another myth about the autumn of 1989 is that the people overthrew the regime of the SED (the Stalinist Socialist Unity Party of the former GDR) in a “peaceful revolution”.

The mass demonstrations that spread through the whole country in the two months prior to the fall of the Wall did contribute to the rapid collapse of the GDR. But the decisive impulse came from elsewhere. The demonstrators were knocking down an open door. As the first of the “Monday demonstrations” moved through Leipzig on September 4, the end of the GDR had already been sealed.

The decision was taken in Moscow, where Mikhail Gorbachev had risen to head the Soviet Union in 1985. As part of “Perestroika”, he had set the course for the restoration of capitalism. He was looking for the support of the Western powers, and severed ties with the eastern European “brother” nations by giving absolute priority to Soviet economic interests and demanding world market prices for Soviet exports.

This drove the GDR—critically reliant on energy supplies from the Soviet Union—to the brink of bankruptcy. Under the pressure of financial problems on the one hand and a disaffected population on the other, the SED turned to the West German government, on whose financial loans it had long relied.

Günter Mittag, responsible for the GDR economy for many years, later admitted to Spiegel magazine that he knew as early as 1987 that “the game was up”. And Hans Modrow, the last SED prime minister of the GDR from November 1989 to March 1990, later wrote in his memoirs that he had considered “the course towards a unified Germany to be irreversibly necessary” and “had decisively taken that course”.

Contrary to official mythology, the initiative to introduce capitalism into the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the GDR came from the ruling Soviet bureaucracy itself. This privileged caste had usurped power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s by displacing, suppressing and finally physically exterminating the Marxist opposition.

After the Second World War, this bureaucracy extended its rule into Eastern Europe, with the acquiescence of Moscow’s Western allies. It suppressed every independent movement of the working class—as on June 17, 1953, when it crushed the workers’ revolt in the GDR.

The Stalinist bureaucracy based its rule on the property relations established by the October Revolution in 1917. But it did so like a parasite that drains and finally destroys its host. By suppressing all forms of workers’ democracy, it strangled the creative potential of social ownership. On an international level, it and the Communist parties under its sway stifled every revolutionary movement. After the Second World War, it became a crucial pillar of the status quo, stabilising capitalist rule on a global scale.

This condition could not last forever. Leon Trotsky, leader of the Left Opposition against Stalinism, had already in 1938 posed the alternative futures of the Soviet Union. In the founding program of the Fourth International, he wrote, “Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism, or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism”.

Fundamental changes in the world economy, appearing in the early 1980s, sharpened the contradictions in the Stalinist countries to the breaking point. The globalisation of production, together with the introduction of computers and new communications technologies, left the nationally based economies of these countries far behind.

Signs of imminent social rebellion increased, especially with the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland. As Trotsky had predicted, the bureaucracy reacted by overturning the new forms of property relations and throwing the country back into capitalism. This is the significance of Gorbachev’s rise to power. It also sealed the fate of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe that owed their power exclusively to Moscow.

The demonstrators, marching through the towns and cities of the GDR in late 1989, were unaware of this context. They were venting their pent-up rage towards the ruling bureaucracy and a feeling of economic and political impasse. The movement originally began as a flight to the West. It was socially heterogeneous and politically confused, and had neither a clearly defined aim, nor an understanding of the social forces it was confronting. It thus lent itself easily to manipulation and exploitation.

The spokesmen of the protests came from the citizens’ rights movement. They were priests, lawyers and artists whose demands were limited to a reform of, and dialogue with, the existing regime. As soon as the regime made a few initial concessions—replacing Erich Honecker with Egon Krenz and Hans Modrow—they worked closely together with the SED in order to bring the protest movement under control and hand over the initiative to the West German government of Helmut Kohl. First they participated in the “Round Table” talks with the government of Modrow, and then they joined it.

With its agreement to a monetary union with West Germany in the spring of 1989 the Modrow government sealed the end of the GDR. The introduction of the D Mark was a poisoned chalice. It created access to sorely desired West German consumer goods, but at the same time led to the complete collapse of the East German industrial base. Priced in D-marks, East German products were no longer affordable in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with which the East German economy was closely intertwined, while, due to the lower level of productivity, Eastern products were not competitive in the West.

There were many workers taking part in the demonstrations in the autumn of 1989, but they lacked any perspective of their own to defend their social gains, which were intrinsically bound up with socialised property in the GDR. They had been cut off completely from the tradition of Marxism and only knew—and despised—its Stalinist perversion.

Their lack of perspective was itself a product of the decades-long domination of Stalinism, whose greatest crime was the systematic obliteration of the socialist traditions of the working class. Long before the founding of the GDR, Stalin had organised the liquidation of an entire generation of revolutionary Marxists in order to secure his regime.

Victims of the “Great Terror” of the years 1937/38 were not only the leaders of the October Revolution, but also most of the German communists who had fled to the Soviet Union in order to escape the Nazis. Those who survived were servile bootlickers who had betrayed their own comrades to the Stalinist hangmen. They later constituted the leadership of the SED.

Only the Trotskyist movement fought against Stalinism from a Marxist standpoint. While the Western media and politicians had access to the people of the GDR, the Trotskyists remained banned and were regarded as public enemy number one until its very end.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) not only fought against Stalinism but also against all those who adapted to it, such as the United Secretariat led by Ernest Mandel, which regarded the emergence of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe as proof of the capacity of Stalinism to play a progressive role. Under the most difficult political conditions, the ICFI defended for decades Trotsky’s standpoint that Stalinism could not be reformed but had to be overthrown by a political revolution.

In the autumn of 1989 the German section of the ICFI intervened in the GDR in order to provide the mass movement against the SED regime a revolutionary orientation. The Socialist Labour League (Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter), predecessor organisation to the Socialist Equality Party (Partei für Soziale Gleichheit), was the only organisation to warn of the disastrous results of a restoration of capitalism, without making the slightest concessions to the SED.

In an appeal distributed on November 4 at a mass demonstration in Berlin, the BSA explained, “Political freedom and democratic rights can be won only through a political revolution in which the working class overthrows the ruling bureaucracy, drives it out of all its posts and establishes independent organs of proletarian power and democracy, workers’ councils, elected by the workers in the factories and neighbourhoods, accountable to them and based solely on their strength and mobilisation.”

At the time, Ernest Mandel travelled personally to East Berlin in order to defend the SED against the critique raised by the Trotskyists of the BSA. His German co-thinkers took part in the Round Table and later in the government led by Hans Modrow. In this way, they played a vital role in cutting off the working class from the tradition of Marxism and setting course for the restoration of capitalism.

The end of the GDR, the Eastern European regimes and the Soviet Union unleashed a wave of triumphalism within the capitalist class, which it is now trying to revive with the current anniversary celebrations. However, such efforts cannot disguise the fact that capitalism all over the world finds itself in a profound crisis.

The contradictions between world economy and nation state—between the global character of production that has welded together millions of workers all over the globe in one socially unified process of production, and the division of the world into rival nation states—broke the back of the Stalinist regimes two decades ago. These contradictions, however, also lie behind the growing conflicts between imperialist powers, the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unceasing attacks on the social gains of the working class and the arrogance and greed of the financial elite.

These contradictions will inevitably lead to the eruption of fierce social conflicts and revolutionary struggles. Workers must prepare politically by drawing the lessons from 1989 and adopting the international socialist program defended by the ICFI against Stalinism.

Peter Schwarz

The second in a series of interviews with communists from the former Eastern Bloc on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and your organisation?

My name is Goran Markovic and I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am one of the co-editors of the socialist/Marxist regional magazine ‘The New Flame’ (Novi Plamen) which is published in the Croatian capital Zagreb. I am also the president of the Workers’ Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Novi Plamen is a magazine which deals very much with the development of workers’ and leftist movements in former Yugoslav republics and worldwide and carries analyzes, mainly from a Marxist viewpoint, of current economic and political events in former Yugoslavia and worldwide. The Workers’ Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a party established in the tradition of workers’ self-management and self-managing socialism.

How do you evaluate the events of 1989-1991 in the USSR, Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in light of aspirations at the time?

These were revolutions against the corrupt system of the Soviet Union and its satellites which saw itself collapse because of its economic inefficiency and the inability of its ruling class to adapt to people’s needs and aspirations. The revolutions fought for more human rights, especially in the political sphere, and for better living conditions. Unfortunately, in many people’s minds, these revolutions were understood as anti-communist revolutions, which they objectively were not. They caused great damage to the communist idea, that is for sure, but they were not revolutions against a communist or socialist society, which never existed in Eastern Europe. However, it is quite sure that people who were drawn into these revolutions didn’t expect to achieve what happened later and what is still going on – crude neoliberal capitalism.

How would you characterise the society that existed before 1989-91? Is there any continuity between them?

The society that existed in the Soviet Union and other countries of its bloc were bureaucratic collectivist or étatist societies. It was a new socio-economic formation which historically was situated between capitalism and socialism. However, it could by no means be characterized as the first phase of socialism. It was a new kind of exploitative society with the bureaucracy as a ruling class. Working class was sovereign only nominally: in practice as well as according to the legal system and production relations it did not change its social position in comparison to pre-war situation. Of course, this does not mean that its living conditions did not improve but that is not the most important criteria for evaluation of a society’s nature. After the 1989-1991 revolutions things changed in many ways but not in one of the most important – namely, one society based on exploitation in the economic sphere and dominance in the political sphere only changed for another society based on these same principles. Only the ruling classes changed – instead of the old bureaucracy a new capitalist class together with parts of the old bureaucracy became the ruling class.

Do you think the events of twenty years ago represent the historic triumph of capitalism and the defeat of communism?

The events of twenty years ago cannot represent the historic defeat of communism because communism or socialism did not exist as a society in Eastern and Central Europe. It could be said that it was a historic defeat of bureaucratic collectivism in its Stalinist variant. On the other hand, these events were not the historic triumph of capitalism because one social system does not triumph if it overbears its alternative but if it is unable to solve contradictions on its own terrain. Capitalism proved unable to do that and that is why it cannot be seen as eternal social system.

Before 1989 there were dissident communist currents, such as the Praxis group. They tried to develop a vision of a more emancipatory communism, engaging with Marx’s humanism and concepts of self-management. What happened to this tradition, why did it not re-emerge in the face of the other forces such a narrow nationalism?

The defeat of the existing regimes in Eastern Europe was seen as defeat of socialism as such. That is why all of its variants and currents were defeated or, better to say, were not able to re-emerge. Indoctrination with what was called vulgar Marxism in Eastern Europe was so strong and the ideology of the ruling bureaucracy was so much in incongruity with the objective social role of working people that when this ruling ideology collapsed no one really wanted to search for true Marxism or some other socialist currents because all of them were connected with the defeated bureaucratic system.

Since the collapse of the USSR some in the left view America as the main imperialist power to be opposed, do you think Russia is also imperialist? How do you think communists should relate to the power struggle between Russia, USA and other powers?

Russia is trying to recuperate from heavy economic, political and military blows it received during the capitalist restoration. That is why it still cannot play the role of imperialist state it would like to. However, it is an imperialist state in its intentions and goals and therefore communists should not have any hopes in its role in international relations.

During the recent crisis of capitalism there was a revival of calls for state ownership such a greater nationalisation of the banks etc. In light of historical experience what attitude do you think communists should take towards nationalisation?

Nationalisation is not a socialist measure that is for sure. That is why communists should not look for nationalisation as a measure in new socialist society. Socialisation of the means of production has to be their goal. However, in a capitalist environment nationalisation is a very positive step forward for two reasons. First, it lays a more solid basis for introduction of workers’ participation or workers’ control, which is another measure which must go along with nationalisation. Second, the state as an employer and a “businessman” has to take care not only of its social and economic goals but also about the fact that it is a political institution formally accountable to its citizens. That is why it is easier to put pressure on it for certain economic and social policies.

What do you think the legacy of official and dissident communism is?

Experiences of so-called communist regimes, on the one hand, and of communist movements which tended to liberate themselves from so-called official communism, on the other hand, give us plenty of useful conclusions. First of all, socialism cannot rest on the state, but on self-organized workers and citizens who govern the economy and the state by themselves, directly and through democratically elected delegates. Secondly, as each society, even the socialist one, is divided on different groups, with different interests and opinions, ideas of human rights, especially political liberties and political pluralism, are inseparably connected to socialism. Thirdly, there is no one group, even the communist party, that could claim to have historic or any other right to be a priori avant-garde and to have a special or privileged position in process of decision-making. E.g. the communist party is only one of many political and social organizations which is trying to persuade people in the correctness of its ideology, proposals and ultimate goals. Fourthly, the struggle for new, socialist society is in the first place struggle against the bourgeoisie and against the bureaucracy that has already been formed in the framework of the workers’ movement while still in opposition. There are two main means against the bureaucratization of workers’ movement and hence of socialist society: new forms of organization and reliance on extra-parliamentary forms of activity. The parliamentary orientation of many communist parties and “walk through institutions”, although they did and can have significance, captured these movements in chains of bureaucracy.

How do you think genuine communists should organise and operate?

Through democratically organized political parties and grassroots movements. All these organizations should have some joint principles such as maximum possible decentralization, a delegate system of election of members of executive bodies and of making decisions, the right to recall elected officials and principle of rotation of elected officials. Professionals in workers’ parties can have only administrative and not political functions. The right of tendencies should be guaranteed. In terms of their mode of operation, communists should combine parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forms, with prevalence of the latter. This means that they will have to orientate toward trade unions, students’, women’s and other social organizations in order to try to gather them into a united social movement against oppression, for social and other rights, and, in its perspectives, for a new society. A communist party should be only one of many organizations that participate in this social movement and its popularity and possible avant-garde role should depend upon its ability to persuade other social movement militants of its programme. Parliamentary activities could be only useful as an addition to activities of this social movement, where communist and other leftist MPs could put pressure on government only in coalition with the extra-parliamentary pressure of social movements.

What do you think real communism means today?

For most people, communism means concentration camps, lack of democracy, inefficient economy, ideological indoctrination, even hunger, like in North Korea, etc. However, real communism does not have anything to do with these features and with societies where these things happened. Real communism means an end of economic exploitation and political domination. It means an end of division of society into elite and masses. It means self-organization and self-activity of all members of society who wish to be active participants of processes of decision-making, with almost limitless pluralism of organizations, opinions and activities of different subjects who do not oppress each other. It is a society based on social ownership and social self-management, economically self-sustainable so that it guarantees free and universal health care, education, access to culture, without unemployment and with possibilities to its members to cultivate themselves as full persons.

East Berlin 09/11/89, 21:30

By now, crowds are building at crossing points. At Bornholmer Strasse nearly a thousand people press to be let through, chanting “Wir wollen rüber!” (“We want to go over!”). A kilometre long line of puffing Trabant and Wartburg two-stroke cars sit behind them as 52 armed border guards look on. “If we shoot them then they will hang us from the lampposts,” says one. Lt Col Jager calls Stasi headquarters for orders. He is told: Jager, I cannot give you any decision, I am not getting any instructions from my superiors either.”

23:50

The crowds are getting bigger – and more insistent. The Stasi orders the opening of all crossing points in the Wall including Checkpoint Charlie, Invalidenstrasse and Heinrich-Hein-Strasse. Everywhere there are scenes of frantic  jubilation. Decades of confinement in “communist” East Germany are ending.

“I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on” -George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to 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” -Margaret Thatcher (November 1989)

note by David Black: The Nature of the Stalinist Parties – a document of several thousand words – was published in the internal discussion bulletin of the Socialist Review Group in May 1951, with five sections:

1 The Importance of the Nature of the Stalinist Parties for our Movement

2 The Classical Trotskyist Position

3 The Stalinist International as the Instrument of the State-Capitalist Bureaucracy

4 The Social Composition Of The Stalinist Parties

5 Political Conclusions

Hillman concluded that the SRG could make no impact on the membership of the Stalinist British Communist Party, which he sought to show was becoming increasingly petit-bourgeois. Therefore, he argued, the SRG should concentrate on building in the Labour Party. In practical terms, as Ian Birchall has suggested, Hillman was more in tune with Shachtmanite ‘Third Campism’ than James/Boggs/Dunayevskaya. The ‘immovability’ of the CP membership proved to be a temporary phenomenon; but it was only shaken up by world events (especially Hungary) rather than pressure from the Far Left. As regards Dunayevskaya, I should point out that her later analysis (from 1953 onwards) was markedly different to that of ‘State-Capitalism and the World Revolution’ (1950). The latter, in my view, while important, was wrong on a lot of things (such as the national question), and inadequate on others (especially philosophy).

The following text consists of the introduction, plus two extracts: one from section 1 and one from section 3.

Introduction

The Secretariat of our Party has commissioned me to write an International Discussion Bulletin which will attempt to re-evaluate our attitude to the Stalinist Parties in the light of our analysis of the Russian regime as a totalitarian state-capitalist structure. It is important that all members of the party realise that the character of the three internal Bulletins that are being written is quite different from that of the Bulletins issued in the old movement. For a start, the RCP had both a fixed analysis of Russia and a series of perspectives that flowed from such an evaluation fully worked out. In the second place, the RCP carried over uncritically the whole body of Trotsky’s analyses and perspectives and “laid” it on the membership. The tendency which we are trying to build has emphatically rejected both the Fourth International’s semi-Stalinist analysis of Russia **and** the leadership cult which was at least partly responsible for the crack-up of the RCP inside the Labour Party. This particular Bulletin does not represent the fixed viewpoint of any particular person or grouping but rather it is written as a provisional statement of the viewpoint of the writer, a statement that will no doubt be modified in the ensuing discussion on the subject.

SECTION 1 – EXTRACT

Our own recent experience with the mushroom-like growth of the WIL[Workers International League] and the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party] (1941-49) as a result of the war-time fusing of the Stalinist and right-wing bureaucracies in the labour movement and the consequent polarisation of the anti-war forces around the ILP and the Fourth International could hardly have been more revealing. The crystallisation of a Trotskyist tendency inside the Labour Party today has been shown to be the only feasible and durable form of growth that can be envisaged in this present period. The Labour Party offers opportunities for left-wing polarisation moving in our direction which two decades of trailing behind the CP had failed to produce. The Stalinist rank and file is not indoctrinated with Marxism nor is any conscientious attempt made to theoretically equip the members of the organisation. The CP leadership smothers any independent development of its rank and file by teaching its members to accept loyally the decisions arrived at by the Politbureau (i.e. ultimately with the Politbureau of the CPSU):

“whatever the policy of the Soviet Union it is always in the interests of its people and the working people of every other country in the world” (Harry Pollitt, ‘Looking Ahead’ p42)

The CP rank and file is trained to regard the loyal super-activist who asks no questions as the best and most militant comrade. The policy of involving the rank and file in continual demonstrations, Daily Worker sales, the collection of signatures for the “Peace Petition” is quite deliberate. It diverts the Stalinist militant from theoretical matters by separating the functions of the Politbureau, Central Committee and District Committes in descending orders of importance. The party organisation decides, develops and works out the theory, the perspectives and applications of the particular ruling, and the rank and file carries out the decisions unquestioningly with the maximum expenditure of energy. On such a basis, in such a totalitarian atmosphere it is *impossible* to break the stranglehold of the centipede grip of the CP organisation on its members, except by the mass mobilisation of the proletariat on a mass basis under the roof of the mass parties of the working class. The free, independent and spontaneous development of the revolutionary current within the Labour Party can alone smash the Stalinist movement.

The Johnson-Forest [James- Dunayevskaya] document, “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution” (published in August 1950) accurately describes the situation we are faced with, as a consequence of the contemporary unfolding of the Stalinist movement as a movement aspiring to world domination.

“The Stalinists are not class collaborationists, fools, cowards, idiots, men with ‘supple pines’, but conscious aspirants for world power. They are deadly enemies of private property capitalism. They aim to seize the power and take the place of the bourgeoisie. When they support a war or do not; support the bourgeoisie or do not support, they know exactly what they are doing. The bourgeoisie also knows. In fact, everyone, including most of the workers, knows this except orthodox Trotskyism.

But the Stalinists are not proletarian revolutionists. They aim to set up power by help, direct or indirect, of the Red Army and the protection of Russia and the Russian state. That is the reason they follow the foreign policy of the Kremlin – it is clear naked self-interest.”

SECTION 3 – EXTRACT

He who controls the state machine controls the economy. The Party machine which is now evolving today is no longer the blind instrument of economic classes in society. The party machine constitutes a model of the type of the changing society it subsists in, or is rooted in. The Labour party, for instance, reflects, by and large, the capitalist relations in a bourgeois democracy. This is true, whether the Labour Party is actually yielding state power or is in ‘opposition’ to His Majesty’s Government. Similarly, the Stalinist parties reflect not merely by and large, but *absolutely* the state capitalist relations within the USSR, as expressed in the construction and make-up of the Stalinised Bolshevik party. A careful study of the Stalinist Party in the USSR reveals the totalitarian political nature of its edifice and the complete identity of form and nature that can be established between the Big Brother party and the satellite parties in both Eastern Europe and outside.

It is perhaps opportune at this point to refer to the two great theoretical works produced by the Johnson-Forest tendency in the SWP, “The Invading Socialist Society” (1947) and “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution” (1950). Here for the first time in the history of the Trotskyist movement, a serious departure for re-orientation of the Fourth International has been indicated. It is no exaggeration to say that comrades Johnson-Forest’s last work, “State-Capitalism and the World Revolution”, is of a theoretical level at least the equal of Trotsky’s last works and a logical and fruitful development of them. The works on the state-capitalism thesis that have been written so far have become obsolete since. Comrades Johnson-Forest have succeeded in correlating the *political structure* of the Stalinist parties with the economic foundations of State-capitalism, and have thus rendered an invaluable service to the elucidation of new tactics and strategies flowing from our defeatist position in espect of the USSR. It is essential that the Johnson-Forest document be studied in conjunction with this particular section as some of the conceptions to be developed may strike the reader as rather startling.