Czech Republic
Communist rally remembers 1948
By John Catalinotto
An event in the Czech Republic in February
raises anew some important questions about the struggle for
socialism-and about how the working class needs to smash the
old oppressive state, seize state power and keep it.
These questions are even more important now that the
capitalist class controls the Czech Republic. The capitalists
have turned it into a puppet of U.S.-German-NATO imperialism.
They even promise Czech troops for use against Iraq.
Members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (SCK) and other
working-class groups rallied on Feb. 25 in Prague to
commemorate the 1948 general strike that brought the Communists
to power. SCK leader Miroslav Stepan called the 1948 event a
"unique, historic, revolutionary and democratic event."
To see the importance of this revolution, first you have to
cut through the Cold War lies of capitalist historians and
media pundits. They describe the 1948 revolution as a Communist
"coup" that made Prague captive to the USSR.
This description distorts reality. It especially understates
the active role of the Czechoslovak working class. And it
avoids discussing the constant danger Czechoslovakia faced of
being absorbed by the Western imperialist powers.
Nazi Germany had occupied and dismembered Czechoslovakia
during World War II. An active partisan movement, led by the
working class, fought the German occupation throughout the
war.
By the summer of 1944, the partisans began a general
uprising against the Nazi rulers. In 1945, the Soviet Red Army
entered Czechoslovakia. With the aid of the partisans, the Red
Army drove out the Nazi German puppet government in Prague.
Those who opposed the Nazis formed a coalition government of
both capitalist and working-class parties.
The Communists won 38 percent of the vote in the 1946
election, becoming the biggest party in the parliament. The
left parties held a slight majority.
At that point President Edvard Benes represented the Czech
capitalist class. Communist Prime Minister Klement Gottwald
represented the working class in the coalition government.
Cold War on in earnest
By 1948 there was no longer talk in Western capitals of "our
heroic Soviet allies."
The imperialists, with a nuclear-armed United States at
their head, were pointing their weapons at Eastern Europe and
Moscow. They would rearm West Germany, even using the generals
who served under the Nazis.
The U.S. ruling class maneuvered against the popular
Communist parties in France and Italy. It put $20 billion into
the Marshall Plan, which became a cover for CIA-type operations
and secret slush funds to bolster the capitalist
opposition.
By the end of 1948 the Communists had been pushed out of the
capitalist governments in which they had participated.
The Marshall Plan also targeted Czechoslovakia. This was the
topic of secret and public meetings between U.S. High
Commissioner for West Germany John J. McCloy and pro-capitalist
members of the Czechoslovak cabinet.
However, the Czech party had support from the USSR. Many of
its own people were in the military and police apparatus. It
moved before it could be out-maneuvered.
A popular party, the Communists had backing from most of the
working class. It could call on the workers to come out in
struggle.
In February 1948, mass strikes and demonstrations forced
Benes out. On Feb. 25, 1948, some 250,000 workers assembled in
Wenceslaus Square to welcome Gottwald as head of the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
But the bourgeoisie was not crushed. It began to make a
comeback, especially after a right turn in the Soviet Union in
1956. Pro-capitalist intellectuals eventually became leaders of
the Czech CP.
By 1968 a formidable counter-revolutionary movement in
Czechoslovakia tried to dismantle the socialist basis of the
economy and align with Western imperialism.
It took a military intervention by the Warsaw Pact to stop
such a reactionary development. But in 1989, the
counter-revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe succeeded,
breaking up what remained of the socialist states.
However, from 1948 to 1989 Czech technology and
manufacturing-including its military technology-had been at the
service of revolutionaries from Vietnam to Southern Africa.
Salaries among Czechs were among the most egalitarian in the
world.
Czech workers enjoyed full employment and full social
benefits. The rights of minority peoples were protected.
Just this Feb. 15, a woman became the 29th Roma victim of
racist murder since the 1989 counterrevolution, which had
unleashed racist bigotry. Unemployment has returned. And
desperate to become part of NATO, the Czech regime was one of
the few in the world that offered military forces to aid the
Pentagon in its attack on Iraq.
As the Communist leader Stepan said at this February's
rally, the 1948 event "launched a period of development in
Czechoslovak society." It's a development a growing number of
Czech workers are again longing for.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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