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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 14, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Marxism, reformism and anarchism
Lessons from a steel mill in Slovakia
By Deirdre Griswold
Who actually won the Cold War and who lost?
Every new report on the living conditions of the workers in the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe shows that their lives have deteriorated drastically since the breakup of the planned economies.
But they're not the only losers. It's not far-fetched to say that workers here are also victims of U.S. imperialism's victory in the Cold War. That far-reaching triumph for U.S. corporations and banks has given the ruthless bosses a new club with which to beat down wages and assault unions.
Phase one: break it up
To illustrate what this means in practical terms, take what used to be the socialist country of Czechoslovakia in Eastern Europe. Capitalist reformers took over in 1989 in what was dubbed by the West the "Velvet Revolution." They broke it into two separate nations in 1993--the Czech Republic and Slovakia. But Czechoslovakia had been greater than the sum of its parts.
Czechoslovakia was a world industrial power. It had many manufacturing industries based on steel, which it produced at a high level of quality. Czechoslovak workers took for granted many social guarantees like jobs, free health care and education, pensions, paid maternity leave and vacations, low-cost facilities for rest and recreation, and low prices for essentials like food and rent.
One product made by Czechoslovak workers was the AK-47, the famous banana clip semi-automatic rifle used by the Vietnamese in their struggle for liberation. No one who was active in the anti-war movement in the United States will forget the photograph of a Vietnamese woman capturing a downed U.S. pilot twice her size. She was carrying an AK-47.
The VSZ steel complex in Kosice, now Slovakia, employed tens of thousands of workers at that time. It was built in the 1960s and is much more modern than many of the plants in the U.S. Midwest, which sneering economists have dubbed the "Rust Belt." It has automated ladles, controlled by workers far from the intense heat of the furnaces, which can pour 180 tons of molten metal at one time.
This mighty industrial complex was brought to its knees by the capitalist reformers, until it completely ran out of cash. The managers didn't have the money to buy the iron ore or the power needed to run the plant. Thousands of steelworkers were laid off, while the rest didn't know when they would be paid.
Phase two: take it over
Now it has been sold to U.S. Steel for the bargain basement price of $450 million. This multibillion-dollar company, which along with Marathon Oil makes up the conglomerate known as USX, doesn't have to build new facilities or train new workers. Everything was right there waiting for them.
The first phase of the transition to capitalism was the dismantling of the socialist economy in a way so painful for the workers that they would welcome anyone who could get production moving again.
The second phase is for big imperialist corporations to pick up the pieces at rock-bottom prices.
Phase one has been a disaster for the workers of the former Czechoslovakia. Phase two is proving to be a disaster for U.S. workers, too, who have been losing their jobs in droves as companies close their plants in the U.S. and move their capital to where desperate conditions have driven down the social wage.
An article from Kosice, Slovakia, in the Nov. 30 New York Times explains what has happened since U.S. Steel bought the VSZ steel works:
"For U.S. Steel, this is the first major expansion after more than two decades of relentless contraction. The Slovak mill will account for one-quarter of U.S. Steel's entire production capacity. With more than 17,000 workers, the operations here employ twice as many people as U.S. Steel's biggest American sites.
"But while American steelworkers earn $35 to $42 an hour, wages here are about $2 an hour....
"For Slovaks, the last few years have been grueling. Unemployment averages about 20 percent across the country; 23 percent in Kosice. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined more than 8 percent this year.
"Here in Kosice, a picturesque city of 300,000, the municipal government is so short of money that it is trying to sell public forest land and buildings. Young people graduating from vocational school or the university set their sights on leaving, and many parents encourage them."
When bosses see the possibility of cutting steelworkers' wages from $35 an hour--which of course includes benefits--to $2 an hour, there is no crime they will not commit.
The irony is that many here in the labor movement facilitated the triumph of U.S. imperialism in the Cold War. The AFL-CIO of that time, under the conservative leadership of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, conspired with the Central Intelligence Agency and other counter-revolutionary arms of the government to help undermine the planned econo mies of the Eastern bloc.
When the bourgeois reformers took over in Czechoslovakia, many people here and in western Europe who had been part of the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s fell for the propaganda of the corporate media and thought it was a victory for democracy and freedom. They hated the capitalist state with its repressive armies, police, jails and courts, and were easily persuaded that the states in Eastern Europe were even worse. They doubted that these were real workers' states because there was privilege and bureaucracy.
Theories that haven't stood the test of time
Some in the left movement added to the confusion by calling these societies "state capitalist." If they were indeed capitalist, and run by the state in an undemocratic and heavy-handed way to boot, then why should anyone defend them?
Some of these "leftists" became the shrillest opponents of the Eastern bloc.
What has happened since then, however, should sink in with anyone who cares about the working class. It should be crystal clear by now that, despite their imperfections, these states defended some very basic rights of the workers. Until their overthrow, they held the ravenous corporate globalizers from the U.S. and other imperialist countries at bay.
In the new movement against globalization arising in the United States today, there is a strong anarchist tendency that dismisses all states as "authoritarian." Here again, those involved are repelled by the every-day brutality of the capitalist state, which all too often reaches lethal proportions.
Marxism agrees with anarchism that the goal of the revolutionary struggle is a society without repression, without the compulsion of an armed state standing above the people. But the question is, how to get there? How can it be done without asserting the authority of the working class and the oppressed? Once the old state is overwhelmed by the militant struggle of the people and dismantled, does this mean that the revolution has accomplished its goals?
The day after the revolution, immense inequality will still exist. Some classes have enjoyed everything that society has to offer for generations; others have been virtually enslaved for generations. And that also goes for whole nations.
There must be a plan to restructure human society so that, in as short a time as possible, those at the bottom can be lifted up while those who had been at the top are prevented from creeping back into positions of power and influence. And there must be a vigilant organization with the power to enforce the revolutionary will of the working class.
Giving up state power to the new bourgeoisie--often without a fight--was the greatest sin of the bureaucrats in the former workers' states.
As long as there is inequality in the world, there will be states. The difference between a capitalist state and a workers' state, however, is that the former exists to defend the privileges of a few, and is therefore self-perpetuating, while the latter exists to end privilege and create a classless society, thereby dissolving itself. As the revolutionary party realizes this goal, the state becomes more and more an organ to administer social and economic relations and less and less an organ of repression--until it ceases to be a state at all.
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