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EDITORIAL

Looking backward: the 20th century

At the end of the 20th century and the end of the second millennium, at least by the Christian calendar, those who profit by the bourgeois order are triumphalist. They are trying to find magic in these numbers to prove that their system is eternal, has vanquished all challengers, is indeed the only "natural" economic relationship and therefore the only social order possible for humankind.

Just as those who oppress women invent historical justification for their misogyny by falsely claiming prostitution as "the oldest profession," the millionaires and billionaires of today ignore 99 percent of human history when they find production for profit to have been eternal. If anything is ingrained in the makeup of homo sapiens, it is the tens of thousands of years of cooperative work by sharing social groups that lifted humanity out of the mud.

Those who have grabbed today's vast social product for their own private property present the history of this century as one in which communism failed. They pat themselves on the back over the collapse of the USSR and the sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful transition back to capitalism of its republics and of the former Soviet-bloc countries of Eastern Europe. That the result has been social disaster for hundreds of millions of workers seems not to faze the bourgeoisie. They measure success in terms of money, not life expectancy or infant mortality or tuberculosis or renewed ethnic hatreds.

Is that really how this century will be remembered? We don't think so.

In the epic transition from capitalism to socialism--and that is the stormy era we are living through--the 20th century will be remembered as the first time in which workers' and peasants' revolutions pulled down the high and mighty in countries encompassing nearly half the people on this earth.

First in Russia and other lands under the czarist empire. Then in Mongolia in the 1920s. By the 1930s larger and larger sections of China were liberated in a revolution that culminated in 1949. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Red Army had freed most of Eastern Europe from Nazism. The Yugoslav and Albanian partisans, led by communists, took care of the rest. By 1948, the new governments established on the ashes of the war took the first tentative steps toward socialist construction--although bourgeois political influence never was eradicated.

At the same time, Communist-led movements in Korea and Vietnam were defeating the Japanese imperialist occupiers and transforming class relations. And in 1959, a socialist revolution in Cuba defeated the Batista dictatorship and with it U.S. control over the island. Tiny Grenada tried in the 1970s but was immediately invaded by the U.S. Goliath. Impoverished Ethiopia succeeded in overthrowing the feudal order but could not succeed in socialist construction without massive outside help.

In most of the socialist revolutions a bloody war of conquest among the imperialists had hastened the overthrow of the political machinery of a weakened and outmoded social order. Which is one reason why the imperialists today have to think many times over before actually taking their internecine rivalries to the point of armed conflict, even though they brandish their high-tech weapons against the oppressed every day.

Enormous capitalist expansion has also been a hallmark of this century. But at what a terrible cost. The ferocious struggle among competing groups of capital led to two horrendous world wars and thousands of military interventions against those once held as colonial slaves and now bound tightly by the invisible strands of debt.

What would this century have been like had capitalism been vanquished at the end of World War I, as most workers in Europe had hoped and expected? What if the German workers had defeated their bourgeoisie and prevented the rise of fascism? What if the Soviet Union had not been left to battle alone against a hostile capitalist world? What if there had been a worldwide affirmative action program to undo the vast inequality created by colonialism? What if the unimaginable sums--literally trillions of dollars--spent by the imperialists on war and repression had instead been spent on homes, schools, hospitals, roads, playgrounds, theaters and parks by socialist governments around the world?

How much further would our human society have progressed by now?

The goal of communism is a world without classes, without exploitation, without oppression. There is no question that this is what most of the world's people want. Does anyone's idea of heaven include foremen or cops or billionaires?

But how we get this in the real world is the question.

The resistance of a new industrial working class to brutal exploitation in the 19th century led to a tremendous ideological breakthrough in understanding what drives social change. Marxism was born as the science of social development and as a clarion call for proletarian revolution. Marx's analysis of how capitalism works, and also of its periodic crises of a devastating character, stood the test of time. Marxism was adopted all over the world as the doctrine of the conscious movements of the working class.

Since Marx's time, what was primarily merchant and manufacturing capital in the U.S., Europe and Japan has evolved further into the rule of monopoly finance capital--the huge banks and corporations--and their imperialist expansion around the world. Every characteristic of the bourgeois system described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto--including the tendency to make the rich ever richer and the poor ever poorer--has been taken to incredible lengths. And this at the end of the 20th century, when the tempestuous growth of productivity brought about through science and technology means there is no reason for anyone, even in the remotest corner of the earth, to live in poverty.

Unbridled capitalist development has brought new acute problems, particularly environmental destruction caused by unplanned industrial expansion. When the life-and-death struggle for profits dictates what gets produced and where, then human need in the most immediate as well as in the long-term sense is subverted.

Will the struggle for socialism rise again?

It is doing so even now, even in what is still the longest period of capitalist boom in the century. Throughout Latin America, there is a new defiance of both U.S. imperialism and the local oligarchs. In Washington they're burning the midnight oil over what to do about Colombia and Venezuela in particular.

And even in Seattle, this new militant alliance of workers, students, environmentalists and other social activists made it clear that "corporate capitalism" is the problem. Well, there is no other kind of capitalism these days. So what can replace it? This movement may not articulate the socialist answer, but it must move in that direction when bourgeois promises of reform turn out to be hollow.

The most oppressed--people of color, women, immigrants--are more and more leading the working class struggle in countries that have been bastions of imperialist privilege. New movements against sexual and gender oppression are finding common ground with labor in fighting the status quo. Marxism is being brought up to date with the lessons of new struggle experiences.

So Happy New Year! Bourgeois triumphalism is already souring. It's time to remember the words of Frederick Douglass: Truth crushed to earth will rise again. He said it about the struggle to end chattel slavery. Now let every worker know the truth about wage slavery--for that truth will set humanity free.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org