Soviet experience holds many lessons
From a talk by Workers World editor Deirdre Griswold Dec.
6 to the New York conference on the "Communist Manifesto in the
Age of Imperialism."
As we meet here talking about "The Communist Manifesto,"
there are lots of people out there who will say, How can you
talk about communism? Communism is dead. The collapse of the
Soviet Union proved it doesn't work.
Some groups on the left answer them this way: Well, the
Soviet Union wasn't really socialist, the bureaucrats there
acted just like bosses. So really nothing has been lost. We're
the real socialists and we never had anything to do with
the Soviet Union.
Well, that's not the view of Workers World. We think the
collapse of the Soviet Union was a great tragedy and setback.
It has brought terrible hardship for millions of workers.
This winter, for the first time since World War II, many
people in Russia and other former republics of the USSR are
going to die of hunger and cold. The population is actually
declining because things have become so much worse since
capitalism took over. And the loss of the USSR has set back
national-liberation struggles all over the world, from Angola
to Palestine.
Do we think the Soviet Union was an ideal socialist society?
Of course not. How could it be when, from its very first day,
it had to fight the capitalist powers just to stay alive?
The Russian Revolution came during World War I, after great
devastation. This new country run by the workers and peasants
tried to build up an economy from practically nothing, and the
first thing that happened was that it was invaded by the United
States and 13 other capitalist countries in 1919. It barely
survived.
It didn't really begin to industrialize until the 1930s. But
then Nazi Germany invaded in 1940. It is a fact that the
fascists were defeated in that war by the USSR, not by the
United States and Britain--which didn't open up a second front
until after the Nazis were on the run. But in five years the
Soviet Union lost 30 million people and almost everything they
had built.
You know what happened next--40 years of Cold War, with the
ruling class of the United States threatening them with nuclear
annihilation.
So they had a lot of problems. This led to bitter political
struggles inside the USSR over what to do. And we who are
fighting for socialism should study the Soviet Union's problems
as well as its achievements, because we can learn a great deal
that way.
It's like the first airplane that the Wright brothers flew
at Kitty Hawk. That plane flew for a few minutes, and then it
crashed.
There were people who said: "Well, that proves human beings
can't fly. It is unnatural to even try. If we were meant to
fly, wouldn't we have been born with wings?"
But what did that flight really prove? That human beings
can't fly? Or did it prove the laws of aerodynamics?
The people with a scientific outlook were thrilled. Even a
few minutes in the air showed them it could be done. Yes, there
were flaws in the design of the plane. And the pilot was
inexperienced. But they studied that plane, and they made
better ones. And today, millions of people fly every day and
you can't imagine life without airplanes.
The Soviet Union lasted more than a few minutes. It lasted
for over 70 years. And in that time it was the first country to
provide free and universal health care and higher education, to
set the cost of rent at no more than 5 percent of income, to
grant women three months' paid maternity leave and retirement
with full pension at 55, to guarantee everyone a job. It was
the first country to eliminate the capitalist boom and
bust--and during the Great Depression, too!
It launched the first satellite, put the first man in space,
the first woman in space, the first person of color in space.
And all this from a country that at the time of the revolution
had barely emerged from feudalism--most of the people had never
seen a city, couldn't read or write, and didn't know a thing
about electricity or automobiles or any modern invention.
So they accomplished a whole lot in just two generations.
But we can't expect the countries that have been the most
oppressed to beat back the imperialists single-handed. Not with
nuclear weapons aimed at them. Not when the imperialist
countries control most of the world's wealth.
The struggle for socialism is a worldwide struggle, and for
it to truly succeed the workers here, and in Europe, and in
Japan--in all the highly industrialized countries--will have to
take on their own ruling classes and fight in their own class
interests.
What would Karl Marx have thought about the Soviet Union?
Both Marx and Engels, of course, died long before it happened.
So we can't quote Marx on the Russian Revolution.
But we know what he thought about an earlier event when the
workers actually took the power and set up their own
government. It was called the Paris Commune, and it happened in
1871, also at a time when a bloody capitalist war made things
so bad the people couldn't stand it any more and rose up.
The Commune lasted only a few months before it was
crushed--nowhere near as long as the Soviet Union. But in that
time, it also did a lot to show what a workers' government
would be like.
Marx had warned that it was premature for the workers in
Paris to rise up, that they weren't strong enough and organized
enough and hadn't won over the people in the countryside.
Nevertheless, when they rebelled and established the Commune,
he supported them 100 percent.
I bring this up today because some who used to sing the
praises of the USSR have abandoned it altogether, have
questioned the wisdom of the revolution itself. They think it
should never have happened. That if Lenin and the Bolsheviks
had acted more like Mensheviks, maybe they could have played
the role of a social democratic opposition and Russia could
have gone through a peaceful capitalist development.
That's not our view, and we don't think that's Marxism.
You see, you can't turn back the clock. When intolerable
conditions force the masses of people to rise up and put their
lives on the line, the role of revolutionary leaders is to be
with them, not sitting on the sidelines keeping a
scorecard.
Just as in childbirth, once the labor pains begin, you can't
push the baby back and wait for a better time.
Conditions inside Russia were ripe for revolution. The
October Revolution took place with very little fighting. The
problem was with the rest of the world, especially Europe. All
the socialists thought the war would bring revolutions there,
too, and Russia wouldn't be isolated. But where there were
revolutionary uprisings, they were defeated. Russia was left to
go it alone.
The Russian Revolution combined many struggles: peasants
against landlords, soldiers against officers, democrats against
a semi-feudal autocracy, and most decisive of all, workers
against capitalists. Russia was both an oppressed and an
oppressing country. Lenin called the czarist regime a "prison
house of nations" because it oppressed so many
nationalities.
But old Russia was also a place where the Rockefellers were
exploiting the oil, where Germany, England and France were
investing in huge factories and paying pennies a day in
wages--like U.S. plants today in Mexico or Indonesia. So it had
features of being both a Western country and a Third World
country, to use today's terminology.
Let's fast-forward to the 1980s. When the Gorbachev
leadership took over, it was after years and years of
confrontation with the United States that had drained the
economy. They thought that by giving up the struggle against
imperialism and the bourgeois elements that had grown up within
Soviet society, they'd get both an end to the Cold War and a
Western standard of living for the more privileged--while
keeping a watered-down version of socialism for the
workers.
Instead, the USSR was torn apart. Far from becoming a
partner with the imperialists, it has become an oppressed
country looted for raw materials and cheap labor.
We can and should examine the policies of Soviet leaders
like Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, to understand better how the
USSR could have been lost without a real fight. I strongly
recommend the book "Perestroika: A Marxist Critique" by Sam
Marcy to anyone who hasn't read it.
But what we will NOT do is say that the cause was all
subjective. That the problem was just a betrayal by individual
leaders. That's not Marxism.
These leaders came from a privileged layer of Soviet
society. Yes, they betrayed the workers and the revolution. But
saying that doesn't explain much. How did they get to be in
authority? Why weren't they just kicked out when they began
changing the economy, breaking up central planning, allowing
enterprises to deal individually with voracious corporations
from abroad?
It's because they had support from a whole grouping that had
begun to think like a bourgeoisie. Even though they used the
language of communism in public, their outlook was more and
more bourgeois, and some of them were leaders in the party. The
workers lost confidence in the government and the party, and
didn't know who to believe.
As long as these careerists were just officials in the
Soviet government or managers of enterprises, they were not a
bourgeoisie. They didn't own the industry, the oil, the
newspapers, etc. It wasn't capitalism. It was still a workers'
state, even if distorted.
If anyone was confused about this, they should know better
now. Now there is capitalism, and what a difference! All the
most horrible features of the system have returned.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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