A framework for discussion
The Soviet Union and the struggle for socialism
Based on a talk by Fred Goldstein to the Dec. 6-7
conference in New York.
Since the theme of this conference is reviving the struggle
for socialism, I would like to turn to a subject that is
ideologically and politically highly essential to that
effort-that is, taking back our own history from the capitalist
class on the question of the Soviet Union.
The socialist movement has long been laboring under a cloud
of demoralization and doubt because of the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Of course, the collapse was arguably the greatest
setback for the working class movement in history. The
political and economic gains were enormous for world
imperialism. It reaquired one sixth of the globe. It gained a
free hand to make war and intensify its plunder among the
oppressed countries, which used to rely on the USSR as a
partial shield against imperialism. And it intensified
imperialism's assault on the labor movement everywhere.
But the demoralization and weakening of the socialist
movement is not confined to concern over material and political
setbacks. It goes deeper than that. It is a matter of having
lost confidence in the revolutionary socialist goal itself.
Much of the movement has consciously or unconsciously
accepted the bourgeois interpretation of the collapse of the
USSR as a proof that socialism--socialism in the communist
sense of establishing the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat and organizing a planned economy--is fundamentally
flawed. The movement has been in a defensive posture in the
face of a bourgeois ideological onslaught. It has retreated on
this question in the face of a mountain of bourgeois lies and
distortions. The most common response of those who do not
simply jump on the bourgeois bandwagon is to remain embarrassed
and silent or ambiguous and apologetic on the whole
subject.
Marxist approach to the Soviet Union
Thus, this question has everything to do with the future of
the movement. The question of dealing forthrightly with the
collapse of the USSR from a Marxist point of view is not merely
a matter of setting the historical record straight for
posterity, but rather it has become a measure of the degree of
confidence in Marxism, historical materialism, the doctrine of
the class struggle and the outlook for the struggle for world
socialism and communism. The movement must retake the
initiative on this question, dispel the clouds of confusion and
doubt, and renew its confidence in Marxism and especially in
the teachings of Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik
Revolution.
In a talk of this length it is only possible to propose a
framework for what must be a thoroughgoing discussion and
analysis. So the first thing to establish is that there is not
one iota of historical evidence that the collapse of the USSR
represents the failure of socialism as a social system. On the
contrary, the extraordinary achievements of the first
victorious workers' state in history are a living demonstration
of the potential of socialism to lift the world out of the
morass and nightmare imposed by private property, once
socialism can be built on a strong economic foundation and be
freed from the destructive influences of world imperialism.
The Bolshevik Revolution took place on a foundation of
poverty in the poorest capitalist country in the West. It was
isolated in its poverty and backwardness once the revolutionary
attempts by the European working class to seize power were
crushed by the European ruling classes after World War I. Yet,
amidst the devastation caused by imperialist intervention and
bloody civil war, the revolution finally expropriated the means
of production from the capitalists and landlords, instituted
the monopoly on foreign trade and inaugurated the planned
economy.
Socialist accomplishments of the USSR
The revolution overcame the near-total collapse of the
productive forces and raised Russia and its colonies from a
semi-feudal region to the second industrial power in the world.
The USSR led the world in steel and coal production. In the
sphere of science and engineering, the USSR inaugurated the
space age, built the largest construction projects in history,
and, most importantly, from a class point of view, it did all
this while lifting the peasants and workers out of poverty,
bringing literacy, medicine, vacations, early retirement, and
numerous other social benefits to the people.
The planned economy eliminated economic crises. Not once in
its history, save during the Nazi invasion, did it suffer a
decline in production. The five-year plans brought a steady
growth in the economy while the capitalist world went through
boom and bust, including a world depression in the 1930s.
Unemployment was abolished. The present horrendous living
conditions of the peoples of the former USSR are sufficient
testimony to what was lost.
The revolution gave the oppressed nations who were in the
tsar's "prison house of nations" the right to self-
determination and created the first legislative house of
nationalities in history. In its early years the Soviet
government exposed the secret treaties of imperialism and
called upon the oppressed peoples of the world to overthrow
their colonial masters. It supported anti-imperialist
governments and liberation struggles around the world and
inaugurated a foreign policy of internationalism.
These accomplishments of the USSR took place in the face of
a constant war by world imperialism, including intervention by
14 imperialist countries in 1918, the Nazi invasion which
killed over 20 million people and wrought massive destruction
on socialist industry and agriculture, and the 45-year
military, economic and political Cold War by the U.S., NATO and
Japanese imperialism.
Retreats, violations of socialist norms and imperialist
pressure
To be sure, the demise of the USSR was immeasurably aided by
the leadership's eventual abandonment of socialist norms and
Leninist practices. The growth of excessive material privilege
and social inequality under the guise of material incentives,
the abandonment of revolutionary proletarian internationalism,
and the use of repressive measures which went beyond the
justifiable repression of the bourgeoisie and landlords to
include the party and loyal communists, helped to undermine the
revolutionary spirit of the workers-the fundamental asset of
the revolution. The disastrous split with the People's Republic
of China during the PRC's revolutionary phase, caused by the
Soviet leadership and fostered by U.S. imperialism, was one of
the truly historic setbacks to building a strong, united
socialist camp that could hold the imperialists at bay.
But these reactionary retreats from socialist norms took
place under crisis conditions imposed by imperialism and under
conditions of extreme material hardship. These setbacks had
nothing whatever to do with socialism and everything to do with
imperialist encirclement, a world imperialist embargo on
technology, and a 24-hour-a-day threat of nuclear attack during
the Cold War. This permanent state of war constantly disrupted
socialist construction, exacerbated social tensions, promoted
bourgeois elements fearful and conciliatory to imperialism, and
undermined the development of socialism in the extreme.
None of the setbacks caused by bourgeois influence can
nullify or disqualify the extraordinary world-shaking
achievements in production, science, economic stability,
rational planning for human need while raising the material and
cultural level of the workers and peasants. The great strides
forward in affirmative action for formerly oppressed peoples
and support for the world liberation struggle were strictly due
to the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class
and socialist institutions.
On balance, it was the combined forces of material
insufficiency and the campaign of aggression and pressure by
imperialism that were the dominant factors in the demise of the
USSR, not its attempts to build socialism.
In analyzing the development of the USSR, communists should
take the approach of Lenin. After the collapse of the
international working class movement known as the Second
International, millions of workers were pitted against each
other in a great imperialist war and the bourgeoisies of all
the countries were riding high. In the midst of that war, in
1916, Lenin wrote his book "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism," in which he showed that world imperialism was
preparing the way for world socialism.
Lenin could do this amidst the horrendous collapse because
he had a profound scientific understanding of capitalism and
its historical development that led to his confidence in the
decisiveness of the class struggle. Lenin viewed the immediate
situation as so bleak that in January 1917 he gave a speech in
Switzerland stating that he would probably not see the
revolution in his lifetime. Yet he was confident in the
inevitability of the revolution.
Lenin and Marx in face of defeat
Karl Marx himself never let victorious counterrevolution
force him to abandon his scientific view of history, and
consequently never lost faith in the struggle. After the
revolution of 1848, in which he and Frederick Engels were
participants, the workers in Paris were slaughtered and the
Prussian and Austrian monarchies, with the aid of the Russian
tsar, crushed the revolutions in their realms. Revolutionaries
all over Europe were executed, jailed or exiled. By 1852,
reaction reigned supreme.
But in the midst of reaction, on March 5, 1852, Marx wrote a
letter to a friend in New York, Joseph Wedemeyer, in which he
calmly said that "... no credit is due to me for discovering
the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle
between them. ... What I did that was new was to prove: (1)
that the existence of the classes is only bound up with
particular historical phases in the development of production,
(2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship
itself only constitutes a transition to the abolition of all
classes and to a classless society."
This was written 20 years before the Paris Commune and 65
years before the Bolsheviks established the dictatorship of the
proletariat in the Soviet Union.
The collapse of the USSR, as catastrophic as it was, has not
changed the fact that capitalism creates its own grave diggers,
the working class. A setback in the workers' struggle, no
matter how bad, does not change the laws of historical
development nor can it rescue capitalism from its fatal
contradictions. To regard the Soviet Union as an historical
anomaly would be to abandon materialism altogether. We must
regard it as the first and crucial phase in the struggle for
world socialism, which arose out of the fundamental
contradiction between private property and socialized
production.
The same forces of capitalist exploitation that drove the
Russian workers to make the Bolshevik Revolution are now
operative on an even broader global scale, and will eventually
propel the entire working class to make the world socialist
revolution and lay the basis for communism.
The achievements of the USSR in its attempts to build
socialism showed that society could be planned in a rational
way to meet human need and could make enormous progress without
private property, without the profit motive and without bosses.
In a word, when the socialist side of the USSR is separated out
from the regressions induced by world capitalism, it showed
that the capitalist class is historically unnecessary,
parasitic and an obstruction to the progress of society.
The two fundamental impediments that distorted and strangled
socialist development and brought the USSR down--the material
insufficiency of the productive forces to support advanced
socialist relations and the weight of world imperialism--would
both be removed with the socialist revolution in the United
States. It is the revolution in the developed imperialist
countries that lays the basis for an era of true peace and
solidarity to begin, that is, the beginning of human
history.
Reprinted from the Dec. 18, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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