It is easy to be a cheerleader for a newly won historic victory. It is something else to endure a monumental setback and yet retain one's revolutionary socialist perspective.On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union became the first country in world history to successfully launch an earth satellite. The launching of Sputnik achieved what will probably go down as the greatest scientific achievement of the century. It electrified the world. It showed what a workers' and peasants' government could do. Moreover, this feat was accomplished in a country which just 40 years earlier at the time of the revolution had had an economic and technological level among the lowest in the world, due in large measure to the devastation caused by foreign military intervention, internal sabotage by the bourgeoisie, insurrection and widespread political reaction fomented and directed from abroad.
After this unprecedented scientific development, the Soviet Union offered the West in general and the U.S. in particular cooperation in outer space as against destructive competition. The ruling class in the U.S. had been taken completely by surprise. Rather than take it in stride and explore the possibilities of joint or indeed world cooperation, the U.S. ruling class scornfully turned down the offer and moved swiftly in an opposite direction.
It set off alarm bells, claiming the U.S. faced disaster unless the world scientific community in general and the U.S. military-industrial complex in particular were revamped to achieve superiority over the USSR, not only in this specialized field of outer space, but in all-around military capability. Thus it embarked upon a giant program to militarize space, combined with a new vastly enlarged nuclear program. It all added up to an all-out effort to achieve total domination on the ground, on the high seas, in the air and, above all, in outer space.
The dimension and significance of this sharp turn in the U.S. military program is rarely given the prominence it merits in light of the consequences it held for the USSR.
Whoever achieves dominance in space, said the Pentagon, will dominate the planet. Such was the response of the U.S. to what was a peaceful, scientific achievement of the USSR won on the basis of hard-earned socialist construction.
Disrupted socialist planning
The effect of the Pentagon's new military program of total domination was to disrupt long- as well as short-term socialist planning in the USSR. From then on the USSR had to revise its plans and recalculate how to utilize its vital but meager resources to continue socialist construction.
It also strengthened elements of the Soviet industrial, technological and military establishment who feared the consequences of lagging behind the U.S. in military and scientific development. This included both those who were conciliatory to U.S. imperialism and those who were determined not to let their country fall behind lest, once overtaken decisively, the USSR would become a victim of U.S. aggression.
However one may interpret the post-Sputnik era and its truly magnificent achievements, it can now be seen that it was quite impossible for the USSR to achieve a "balance of terror," as some bourgeois politicians called it, without falling dangerously behind in social policy responsible for the well-being of the overwhelming majority of workers and peasants.
As for U.S. imperialism, it mobilized virtually the entire world capitalist scientific establishment to support the U.S. Cold War effort, just as in World War II when the U.S. achieved a preeminent position on the basis of enlisting scientists for the Manhattan Project from all over the world--such as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard.
All the world knows and should not forget that the USSR offered many times to mitigate the nuclear race. One need only remember that the USSR stopped atmospheric and underground testing years ago. The U.S. continues underground testing to this very day.
Rise of counter-revolution
How should we regard the colossal setback in the USSR and the victory of the counter-revolutionary grouping? It is not the definitive end of the great historic epoch of world revolution ushered in by the victorious October socialist revolution. It is merely a phase in the continuing world class struggle.
Practically no one expected the collapse of the Soviet Union to come with such suddenness, with virtually no opposition. Of course, it was only the last phase of a long series of historic retreats. But they were not as consequential as the collapse of the USSR itself.
However, the debacle in the USSR comes precisely at a historic turning point in the fortunes of imperialism. For more than half a century, militarism has artificially stimulated capitalist development. The defeat of the Axis powers did not usher in the promised world peace but brought about one counter-revolutionary military intervention after another, until this very day. The cost of this was on top of the military expenditures to finance imperialism's cold war against the USSR.
A new capitalist economic crisis emerged just prior to the U.S. intervention in Iraq. The war was calculated, very coldly and deliberately, as a stimulus to reverse the sharply downward trend in the capitalist economy. All sectors of the capitalist class gambled on it. But even while this genocidal war was still underway, it became plain that the stimulus wasn't working.
Has militarism run its course historically as an economic stimulus? It served imperialism well at the time of the Korean war and again later with the war against Vietnam. It worked again a decade later when the U.S. set up a super armada to subdue uprisings in the Middle East and guard the fabulous profits derived from its oil booty.
But none of these was a substitute for a really great war. Even the war maniacs in the Pentagon can only dream of such a long-term project. That takes a long stretch of the imagination which would involve first militarizing Japan and Germany, and possibly a new, thoroughgoing neocolonialist USSR.
The basic problem
Capitalism's long-term problem is that its productive forces, which are organized on a socialized basis, are in conflict with its method of private appropriation. The private ownership of the means of production is in conflict with the social aspect of capitalist production. Private ownership limits the further development of capitalism, which is at last running out of artificial stimulants.
Marx's premise that this insoluble contradiction between socialized production and private ownership will reach its ultimate crisis is at last emerging and cannot be talked away by bourgeois economists.
The need to fight against discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation is of course paramount as immediate demands. But the time has come to expose the fundamental contradiction of capitalism and to pose the socialist alternative as the only possible one which can achieve full employment, peace and prosperity.
However, no sooner do we pose the socialist alternative than the question of the USSR comes up. Then it is most incumbent upon us to show what the USSR as a workers' state achieved during its brief revolutionary period and what the prognosis is as of today.
First surviving workers' republic
With the Russian Revolution, a republic of workers and peasants for the first time survived both external counter-revolution and internal reaction, sabotage and insurrection. Its durability and its apparent stability were considered its most remarkable features. The only previous example of a workers' state was the heroic 1871 Paris Commune, which lasted scarcely three months before being drowned in blood.
During all those years from 1871 to 1917 the lessons of the Commune seemed to have been lost. The reformists drew the conclusion that violence was not the answer, forgetting in the meantime that it was the bourgeoisie that had provoked the violence. Is that not always the case? It was the capitalist war between France and Germany in 1870 that brought on the objective basis for the establishment of the Paris Commune.
During the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris had been reduced to a shambles, the bourgeoisie fled to Versailles, leaving the workers saddled with the destruction and unrestrained violence. So the workers took over the city. Their political parties got together and established the Commune to run the affairs of the city in the interest of the working population and not in the interest of the bourgeoisie. The workers saw an opportunity to take over because the bourgeoisie got itself involved in a war, one of many wars it regularly conducts for its own profits.
Lessons of Paris Commune
The bourgeois press and its ideologues drew one lesson from the Commune: The communards should not have taken up arms. But in fact it was the armed violence of the bourgeoisie which forced the communards to fight back. Yet this elementary truth was and continues to be buried by all bourgeois politicians, including many social democrats. The Commune began to be seen as an object lesson of what the workers should not do during a war rather than what they should do.
Lenin and his co-thinkers in Germany and France reversed this. He brought out the truth, which helped him clarify what was going on in Russia. The Czarist government, together with France, Germany, England and later the U.S., was conducting a capitalist war of unparalleled ferocity. More than 20 million lives were lost in the First World War.
Unlike France and the Paris Commune, the Russian workers had developed a strong, disciplined and profoundly revolutionary party that had a clear vision of what the bourgeoisie could sink to. The Bolshevik Party had absorbed the lesson of the 1905 Russian Revolution in which the Czarist government, like the French government earlier, had drowned the workers in blood.
They knew that the politicians could speak endlessly about democracy, freedom and peace but were in reality tied to the bourgeoisie and were determined to continue the capitalist war, which was making fabulous profits for the bankers and the bosses while bringing more poverty and misery at home and more casualties at the front.
Lenin knew well the lesson of the Paris Commune: Not to trust the bourgeois politicians or give credence to their promises. He urged the Russian workers and peasants in military uniforms as well as the Germans, French and others to stop killing each other, to declare peace and fraternize instead. It was the boldest revolutionary slogan ever brought to the workers' attention. It terrorized the bourgeoisie everywhere. This slogan was an update of Karl Marx's slogan in the Communist Manifesto--"Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains." It was later referred to as the "defeatist" slogan.
Almost immediately it took hold among millions of Russian soldiers and sailors. It paralyzed the bourgeoisie and disrupted the military and diplomatic plans of the Czarist government. As in Paris, when the bourgeoisie was involved in a war with another capitalist power, the workers had an opportunity to set up their own Communes in the principal cities. They were called Soviets.
What could the workers do? They had three alternatives. One was to continue the war. Another was to waver and continue endless negotiations while the situation was steadily deteriorating and the reactionary Czarist wing of the bourgeoisie, headed by General Kornilov, was preparing to do to the Russian workers what the French bourgeoisie had done to the Commune with such unparalleled brutality.
Revolutionary alternative
But Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a third alternative. They were wise to the danger. They weren't taken in by the smooth talking of the bourgeois politicians or by the minority of social democrats called Mensheviks, who were all too eager, some of them naively so, to compromise and believe in the promises of the capitalist politicians.
In the meantime, the reactionary bourgeois Czarist military leaders were secretly mobilizing their military supporters to attack Moscow and St. Petersburg and destroy the Soviets.
This was a great turning point in world history. The Bolsheviks got there first, aided by the revolutionary workers and peasants. Their leadership organized itself, selected a Revolutionary Military Committee with the aim of overthrowing the oppressive and exploitative Czarist government and sending its smooth-talking, lying and deceptive politicians packing. The Czar and his entourage had already fled.
The Bolsheviks and their supporters in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere seized the historic moment and presented a resolution to the Soviet which declared the Soviet to be the legitimate government of the workers, peasants and soldiers. It declared the war at an end. It said the land belonged to the peasants and the factories belonged to the workers and asked the workers of the world to support them in this great historic effort.
This electrified the whole world. At last a workers' government had been established that meant what it said. When it said peace, it stopped the fighting. When it talked about the land, it declared it the property of the peasants. When it talked about the factories, it said they belonged to the workers. It had a big, big job ahead. It was to be tested in fire and in blood.
When the Soviet government was established, it enacted equal suffrage for both men and women over 18 years old. Women couldn't vote in the U.S. at that time. The USSR was the first state to do it. This was done not by a capitalist democracy but a proletarian dictatorship, that is, a democracy of the workers.
The USSR legalized abortion. This is still a divisive issue in the U.S. But the USSR, notwithstanding the heritage of feudalism and superstitious fears, went ahead and legalized abortion at a time when no capitalist state dreamed of doing it.
It declared the right to self-determination for every state, including the right to secede if they wanted to. It was on this basis that the USSR maintained the unity of nearly 100 nationalities for a long period.
It struck down all the discriminatory laws against women and against lesbians and gays--and again was the first country to do so.
If this is what a workers' state could do in a country that was at that time poor, on one of the lowest technological levels in the world after being devastated by war and counter-revolution, think of what can be done in a highly industrialized country.
Laid the foundations
No new social order ever passes away until it exhausts its possibilities for further development. The Soviet government had not exhausted its possibilities for socialist development when it was cut short by counter-revolution.
The Soviet government, the first workers' state in history, merely laid the foundations for building a socialist society by virtue of the ownership of the means of production, a monopoly of foreign trade and later the collectivization of the land.
However, in the field of distribution of the national income, the workers' state was obliged to temporarily utilize the methods of capitalism, which meant unequal distribution and the growth of privilege.
The society that was ended by the ascendancy of the counter-revolutionary Gorbachev-Yeltsin group was not a fully developed socialist state. Nevertheless we must be careful not to exaggerate or overstate the significance of the ascendancy of that counter-revolutionary grouping and assign to it a permanence which it by no means has.
Not a fascist onslaught
The ascendancy of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin group did not result in a counter-revolution of the type led by Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile. Such a counter-revolution means not only the overthrow of the governing group but the crushing of the workers and all progressive and democratic movements.
This has not taken place in the Soviet Union nor does it, at the present time, show an ability to move in that direction, even though the U.S. in particular is pushing and shoving the Yeltsin counter-revolutionaries to take strong-arm measures. True, the counter-revolutionary grouping, taking advantage of the unfortunate coup attempt, legally dissolved the Communist Party; the government's edict in that connection is being contested in the courts, which indicates a weakness on the part of the Yeltsin regime.
But communists as such are not illegal in the sense of the counter-revolutions in Europe, or China during the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Nor have the social gains of the working class and peasantry been wiped out and appropriated by the Gorbachev-Yeltsin usurpers. These gains have been significantly diluted and inflation has taken its toll. But a full-scale social counter-revolution has a considerable way to go. The working class is by no means in the position of a defeated class. It is ideologically and politically disoriented. A variety of communist groupings are vying for its leadership under difficult and repressive conditions. But the counter-revolution has by no means triumphed definitively.
For instance, in the weakest economic sector, agriculture, collectivization remains strong despite all the predictions of the bourgeois economists and their paeans of praise for the alleged individualistic cravings of the collective farmers. On July 8, ABC-TV's Moscow correspondent, Barry Dunsmore, reported from a collective farm in Russia with about 600 farmers. While all now have the legal right to become private farmers, only one (!) has chosen that option.
Dunsmore concluded that not only is there no rush to privatization, but on the contrary it's virtually nil. One must also draw the conclusion that not only the working population on the farms but also the industrial sectors with which they deal are supportive of the collectives.
The leadership of Boris Yeltsin and his Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar had counted on the rapid dissolution of the state and collective farms as peasants rushed to privatization. Had that happened, it would have relieved the Yeltsin-Gaidar camarilla of paying wages and other social benefits to those who left the collectives. They thought that with these savings, they could subsidize privatization. But the rush to privatize did not happen.
Even the banks that were supposed to lend to private entrepreneurs at low interest rates have balked. They have been thrown into turmoil by galloping inflation--which they, as the trustees of the monetary system, are supposed to guard against. So neither the banks nor the state itself are in a position to advance enormous sums of money to finance private farmers coming from the agricultural sector.
Yeltsin goes hat in hand
All this is putting further pressure on the Yeltsin counter-revolutionaries to beg for funds from foreign lenders. Yeltsin has become a steady fixture at every international conference of the imperialist powers, whether it be the IMF, the European conference on cooperation and security or the latest G7 meeting of the seven imperialist powers. He never seems to get more than promises and photo opportunities.
The only serious development in relations with the foreign monopolies is in the extraction of oil and gas. But they are concerned with drawing out the lifeblood of the country while contributing a minimum of cash. They want the right to take out their profits and be able to suspend production virtually at will.
From this it follows that the Yeltsin counter-revolutionaries and those who prepared the road for them, the Gorbachev grouping, are unable to consummate their plans for a full-scale restoration of capitalism.
To do so they would have to wipe out the social gains of the proletarian revolution and utilize the wealth built up during socialist construction to finance the transformation to capitalism. In Germany and Spain, the economic loot and political power appropriated through the bloody fascist counter-revolutions gave both Hitler and Franco a modicum of independence against the other imperialists.
This is not the case with the Yeltsin camarilla. Nor is the USSR like Poland and Hungary, where there were actual mass counter-revolutions, even though they were manipulated by pro-imperialist forces. No such developments have taken place to date in the former USSR.
The breakup of the Soviet Union is strictly the result of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin bourgeois reforms. There were no nationalist uprisings during the many decades of Soviet rule. None was reported in the imperialist press, which had its ears close to the ground through its intelligence network. We are therefore left to conclude that the Yeltsin social and political grouping currently on top is relying not so much on mass support as on imperialist promises.
It is very necessary to carefully arrive at a formulation of the class character of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin usurpers. They are bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, but what is the character of the state they govern at the present time?
What is class character of state?
In its basic features the former USSR is now a neocolonialist social formation. Its heavy debt to the imperialist banks and governments is a heavy contributing factor. (Before the counter-revolutionary seizure of power, the USSR was the most credit-worthy country in the world. Imperialist banks competed to offer loans to the Soviet Union, precisely because it was so prompt in its payments, whether of interest or principal.)
But an even weightier factor in characterizing the former USSR as a neocolonialist social formation is that the new bourgeoisie, notwithstanding its tolerance and cultivation under previous administrations of the Soviet government, is still a narrow sector.
It lives in constant fear because it exists in a vast sea that is socially and politically antagonistic to it. Hence, and this is the key point, it indispensably needs not only economic but political support from the imperialist bourgeoisie. Thus in its quintessential elements it is a classic example of the compradore bourgeoisie witnessed earlier in the colonial countries, such as China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere.
The compradore bourgeoisie need Yeltsin as they needed Gorbachev earlier. They are the pliant tools of imperialism. They underwrite the most significant adventures of U.S. imperialism and act in unison with it. It would be altogether different if they had an independent, fully formed capitalist state. Such servility to imperialism would be totally out of accord with their political and class position at home.
From the point of view of Marxist sociological analysis, the present social character of the former USSR state must be viewed as transitional. It is constantly wracked by internal class antagonisms that do not permit this state to achieve the stability that the imperialists are eager to see but cannot afford to pledge their fortunes to.