For several weeks the world press has focused on serious developments in Eastern Europe and the USSR which vitally concern not only the socialist countries but the interests of the working class and the oppressed people on all five continents.
The ruling classes everywhere are hailing these developments as a turning point in the direction of restoring capitalism. Indeed, some go further and say they signal the disintegration of the socialist camp. So sure are some in the imperialist ruling circles that they are beginning to haggle among themselves over how to divide the booty that should fall into their laps as a result of the breakup of solidarity among the socialist countries.
As serious as the present situation is, however, the euphoria in the bourgeois camp will be short-lived.
Hungary breaks solidarity with GDR
The latest development, which must be given the most serious attention, is a breach of the socialist solidarity agreement between Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. This agreement provided that visas issued by each country to citizens of the other would be honored for the purposes of exit and entry, but not to go to third countries with whom they had no such bilateral agreements. This meant that Hungarian or East German tourists could not legally cross into Austria or West Germany, countries within the imperialist bloc, without getting specific permission from their own governments.
However, the Hungarian government has now taken it upon itself to violate this agreement and allow East German tourists to cross into Austria and West Germany. Some 16,000 or 17,000 East German tourists took advantage of this vital breach in the solidarity agreement between the two governments.
These few thousand (out of 2 million GDR tourists who visit Hungary each year) would receive scarcely any attention in the Western capitalist world were this not part and parcel of a scheme to destabilize, if not destroy, the German Democratic Republic. That's how serious this incident really is. It is the product of collaboration between the new bourgeois governing clique in Hungary and the West German capitalist class, with the encouragement of the Soviet government.
And so there is a big hullabaloo in the capitalist West about the fate of the so-called refugees and the urgent necessity to bring them to ``freedom.''
The fate of real refugees
This should be compared to the fate of real refugees. There are millions of displaced persons all over the world. They are the victims of imperialist wars, dozens of counter-revolutionary insurrections, border disputes instigated by bourgeois and pro-imperialist elements, economic strangulation and natural catastrophes.
The press is callous and shameless when it comes to the refugees from Central America and Haiti, for example. Take the hundreds left to die on small craft in sight of the U.S. Coast Guard. If they are picked up, it is only to be brought back to the hated pro-imperialist rulers of Haiti. Those who get through to the U.S. are imprisoned here.
But, says the capitalist press, please make way for the East German refugees! They cut a heroic picture, but in reality they are deserters enticed by imperialism.
What labor solidarity means
It is necessary to look at the situation from the angle of working class and anti-imperialist interests, and above all from the viewpoint of socialist internationalism and labor solidarity in general.
Let us take it on the most elementary working class level. Picture two significant trade unions, which over a period of years were able to wrest concessions from their respective bosses and establish themselves in the international labor movement. However, over a period of time one has established a cozy relationship with the employers. In the course of this cozy relationship (called in diplomacy an accommodation), it has abandoned its close alliance with its sister union, which valiantly continues to struggle against the employers and for the improvement of the workers' conditions.
When the relationship between the two unions was formed, it was agreed that an injury to one is an injury to both, and that each would defend the security of the other against the common enemy, the exploiters. Isn't that the essence of the agreement among the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR? Wasn't mutual self-defense the purpose behind the formation of this socialist community?
To go back to our analogy with the unions: the one making an ``accommodation,'' in this case Hungary, has in fact canceled the solidarity agreement with the other. And by doing so, it is allowing several thousand scabs to break away from the union.
What impelled the Hungarian regime to embark upon this course in the first place?
In its pursuit of illusory economic advantages from the U.S. and West Germany, it has accumulated billions of dollars in debts, has opened the country wide to all sorts of imperialist interests, and has virtually turned the economy over to the mercies of the imperialist banks. Inflation is at a record high and unemployment greater than at any time since World War II.
No one any longer doubts the overriding economic and financial leverage of the imperialist banks in Hungary. But what about the promises made by the bankers and the U.S. government? It's now been at least ten years since the U.S. first promised it would lift all trade discrimination if Hungary would only abandon its centralized economy and open up to the capitalist market. Only today, after the Hungarian government broke its solidarity with the GDR, and at the same time made the diplomatic concession of recognizing Israel, has this happened.
Some in the bourgeois camp are speculating about forcing the GDR into some sort of federation with capitalist West Germany, where its efficacy as a socialist factor would be insignificant and probably even dissolved. Only the fear of the emergence of an even stronger capitalist Germany that would rival all the other imperialist powers keeps this prospect at a distance.
Hungary conferred with USSR
The clique now running the Hungarian government could not have acted as it has without the approval of the USSR. And indeed, a dispatch to the Washington Post of Sept. 17 states:
``Hungary's reform government consulted the Soviet Union before deciding to allow thousands of East German citizens to flee to the West this week, according to Western officials, who report that the Soviets offered no objections to a decision that has openly split the Warsaw Pact into two hostile blocs.''
If this were a false report, it would have been quickly denied by the USSR and Hungary. It is very plain that the Gorbachev administration has given the bourgeois clique now running Hungary the green light to make a deal with the West German capitalists and undermine a vital socialist ally.
One could say, as a mitigating circumstance, that the Gorbachev grouping inherited this problem from its predecessors. But by pushing bourgeois market reforms in the USSR itself, it has in fact exacerbated the situation in the entire socialist bloc.
The enormity of the crime committed by the Hungarian leaders should not be underestimated in the community of progressive socialist and working class opinion.
It is akin to the crime committed by the German Social Democratic leaders in August 1914 who voted for war credits (today they'd be called defense appropriations), giving the bourgeois government the go-ahead to conduct a predatory imperialist war. It was a betrayal of the 1912 agreement made in Basel among all the European socialists not to support the coming capitalist war. This treacherous act led to the downfall of the Second International and to an unprecedented carnage in Europe, which cost 20 million lives and untold destruction from 1914 to 1918.
The Gorbachev administration is responsible for this latest blow to socialist solidarity and the undermining of the capacity of the worldwide working class and oppressed peoples in their struggle against imperialism.
How much further can the Gorbachev administration go with its so-called innovative, imaginative, democratizing schemes, that provoke applause and malicious delight in the ruling classes everywhere? What good does it do to send emissaries to Washington, London and Bonn, hat in hand, begging for loans, when the USSR retains more than one-sixth of the earth's surface, has the second greatest industrial-technological apparatus in the world, and has built up a vast scientific community? How can it dicker with the capitalists to try and obtain so-called advantages when these just turn out to be a noose around the neck?
How long will the class-conscious workers of the USSR, the collective farmers, the socialist intelligentsia, put up with this adventure into capitalist schemes, which after four years have proved nothing but their bankruptcy?
What good did it do for a high-ranking Politburo member, Boris Yeltsin, who only recently was considered an able administrator and respected Party functionary, to come here and act like a virtual fool, praising the capitalist system to the skies and embracing Rockefeller, only to go home empty-handed? Whose interests does Yeltsin's trip serve?
Can the imperialists regard the USSR as stable when Gorbachev himself speaks openly of the serious economic, technological and financial situation and goes to the extent of discussing the possibility of a coup, even if only to dismiss it? Where is there any Leninist tact in all this? Surely there must be wiser heads in the Soviet Union.
Historic setbacks have been overcome
There have been many grave and serious setbacks for socialism and for the working class in the many decades since the working class arose as a major factor in world politics with the revolution of 1848. However, that defeat led to a new period of capitalist development that helped strengthen the working class, not only numerically but from the point of view of class consciousness and awareness of the socialist perspective.
It brought about the organization of the first International of working people under the leadership of Marx and Engels, and made possible the solidarity of the working classes in Europe and, to a more limited extent, in the United States. While the first effort of the working class to establish its own government in Paris in 1971 was brutally suppressed by the French bourgeoisie, it did not signal the end of working class solidarity, of revolutionary internationalism, or of the perspective of socialist revolution. All the dire forebodings and the delight of the bourgeoisie proved to be short-lived.
The fact that the capitalist system made momentous steps forward in the development of the productive forces gave rise to opportunism in the upper, more highly paid circles of the working class. But it also laid an even stronger basis for the reemergence of revolutionary Marxism. Not even the catastrophic effects of the First World War, which did so much to disrupt, disunite and demoralize large sectors of the working class, could annihilate the revolutionary spirit for the overthrow of capitalism.
Instead, the hopes of the ruling class were dashed to pieces when their mad, predatory imperialist war provoked the greatest revolutionary transformation in Russia and insurrections in the very center of European capitalism.
A new international of the working class was formed. This not only involved the metropolitan imperialist countries but spread far and wide into the colonial empires of the imperialist powers, rousing the masses to struggle in a way the imperialists had never encountered before.
In the years since the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR, it has faced the most violent and brutal efforts at destruction by imperialism. Nevertheless, it has survived seven decades of imperialist subversion, intervention, blockade and economic boycott. It helped the workers and peasants of China develop and bring to victory their own socialist revolution. A socialist consciousness was awakened in Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, and many other countries which suffered under the yoke of imperialist bondage.
The bourgeoisie for over 70 years, as we have seen, has proclaimed the disintegration and the death of the socialist movement and the socialist perspective. But the specter of communism, which Marx projected in the Communist Manifesto, continues to haunt the bourgeoisie and will continue to do so until it is ultimately overthrown.