'Capitalism can never meet the needs of the people'
WW Party Conference: Excerpts from a talk by Gloria La
Riva
It was Sam Marcy, founder and chairperson of Workers World
Party, who by 1950 had developed a Marxist analysis of the
world in the modern era as a struggle between two class camps,
that of the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union, and that
of the imperialists, headed by the United States. That analysis
was called the Global Class Struggle or Global Class War.
It seems so basic, but it was a great development in the
Marxist movement at a time when so many socialist parties were
capitulating to bourgeois ideology in the U.S., and either
attacked the USSR or dismissed it.
What was the Soviet Union?
It was the first successful revolution of the working class,
and the dawn of a finally realized socialist world.
Its official name was the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. While it was commonly referred to as socialist, the
USSR had not achieved socialism in the full sense that we
understand it. The revolution of 1917 had abolished the rule of
capital. It had a planned economy and social ownership of the
means of production, and was in the processing of building
socialism.
The "Union" in USSR was of 16 separate republics, 20
autonomous republics, eight autonomous regions and 10 national
areas.
Unifying more than 100 distinct nationalities into a
workers' state, with equal rights for all nationalities, was
one of the stellar achievements of the revolution, and a
historic first in the world.
On Nov. 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks and the masses overthrew the
Kerensky government. And the whole world was changed forever.
The workers and peasants were in power.
But from day one, the revolution was under fierce attack by
imperialism. This is very important to keep in mind. It was
never allowed to live and develop in peace.
Within months of the revolutionary triumph, 14 imperialist
armies invaded from 1918 to 1919. They were determined to crush
the Bolsheviks. At the same time, Russian
counter-revolutionaries known as the White Armies launched a
war of terror against the masses, who supported the Red Army of
the Bolsheviks.
FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE
The new revolution was fighting for dear life. Yet from 1917
to 1920, when the civil war ended, a great deal was
accomplished, even though the economy was shattered. Land was
expropriated and given to the peasants, schools were set up in
various languages to educate peoples who suffered almost
complete illiteracy under the Czar.
Treaties were signed with the former colonized peoples of
Czarist Russia, republics of other areas were established, and
the USSR was formally established in 1922. Racist and
anti-Semitic laws were abolished. A massive affirmative action
campaign was launched to bring up the lesser developed regions
of the country to the level of the more developed regions.
Internationally, the revolution inspired millions of workers
and oppressed peoples around the world to fight for their own
revolution. There was a world to win! From 1917 and through the
decade of the 1920s, Communist parties were formed in dozens of
countries on every continent.
The civil war had taken a terrible toll. By 1920, the
country's economy dropped to only 13 percent of the level
before the war. The population had dropped by 7 million from
war and famine. But the counter-revolutionaries were defeated
and the imperialist armies were kicked out.
And in 1929, when the capitalist stock markets crashed and
the world was plunged into years of deep depression, that very
same year, the Soviet Union launched its first Five Year Plan.
It established goals of production to meet the basic needs of
the people.
From 1921 to 1985, except for the years of the Nazi
invasion, the Soviet Union never experienced a period of
economic recession. There was never an economic crash because
they didn't rely on the capitalist market, which isn't reliable
at all.
By 1941, when Nazi Germany unleashed its fascist fury on the
Soviet Union and invaded the country, only 24 years had lapsed
since the revolution began. Yet in those very short 24 years,
the country had developed enough economically and politically
that the people were able to rally and defeat the fascist war
machine.
The Nazi invasion took an unbelievable toll. Some 27 million
Soviet people perished, half of them civilians. The Nazis
destroyed 75 percent of Soviet industry. Yet they were crushed
on Soviet soil, and the strength of the socialist system once
again proved its superiority to the capitalist system.
Though it received no "Marshall Plan" of aid from the West,
by the 1970s the USSR became the second-largest economy in the
world, after the U.S. It was still only one-third the size of
the U.S. economy with about the same population, but it had
made remarkable gains.
Every worker was constitutionally guaranteed the right to a
job; food prices remained stable for 50 years; rent was a tiny
percentage of income; free healthcare and education were the
right of all; women workers were given a year's paid maternity
leave.
With all of its remarkable achievements, why did the Soviet
Union collapse in 1991? First, it was never allowed to develop
in peace. Instead, for 74 years, it faced unrelenting war,
military encirclement and economic blockade.
NOT JUST EXTERNAL REASONS
But at the same time we can't say that the fall of the USSR
was due solely to external factors.
We are unable within this brief presentation to analyze a
negative development within the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union that spanned decades. This development, however, reached
a decisive moment in 1985 when a group within the CPSU
leadership headed by Mikhail Gorbachev seized the reins of the
party. The leadership of the Soviet CP was then split into two
factions. The Gorbachev group wanted to make concessions to
imperialism that undermined the existing bloc of socialist
countries in Europe and the central planning of the economy. He
also wanted to reintroduce private property in agriculture.
Others, dubbed "conservatives" in the Western media, tried to
retain the status quo.
After Gorbachev, the most counter-revolutionary elements,
led by Boris Yeltsin, had the full social, economic, political
and military support of the U.S. and all of NATO behind
them.
The Communist Party split had a paralyzing effect on the
Soviet working class, which remained largely passive throughout
this life-and-death struggle. The fact that the masses of
workers could remain passive at such a critical juncture was
the result of decades of political misleadership, for which all
the party leaders must be held responsible.
The masses stayed on the sidelines even in the fateful days
of August 1991, when an attempt by the pro-socialist faction in
the party leadership was defeated, and Yeltsin, backed by the
U.S., came to power. It was the triumph of the
counter-revolution. Four months later, the USSR was
dissolved.
It is impossible to overestimate the loss our class suffered
with the break-up of the USSR. We agree with Fidel Castro's
view that it was "the greatest tragedy in the history of the
working class."
The defeats of socialist Europe and the Soviet Union,
however, do not prove that socialism is invalid. The defeat of
a trade union, even if its own workers are involved, does not
diminish the need of workers to have a union.
We were the staunchest supporters of the USSR, at the same
being aware of the difficulties it faced and the deficiencies
it needed to overcome. We are also supporters and defenders of
Cuba, China and the other workers' states.
Our confidence in the inevitable triumph of socialism was
never based upon the existence of any particular state, but
rather on the Marxist analysis of the development of society in
general and capitalism in particular.
The conditions and revolutionary developments that brought
about the Soviet Union's rise are a potential everywhere.
Capitalism must go because capitalism can never meet the needs
of the people; capitalism must go because it is destroying the
world.
The 20th century will be remembered not as the century in
which socialism died, but as the century in which it was
born--in the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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