What is the meaning of the projected summit meeting to be held on U.S. and Soviet navy ships in the Mediterranean in early December between President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev?The site of the meeting itself is enough to make progressive, anti-imperialist workers sick at heart. Why meet in an area which has been the object of U.S. intervention so many times in recent history? Why in an area where millions of oppressed peoples in the Middle East view foreign ships, especially American, with apprehension?
Of all the conferences between representatives of the U.S. and USSR, in war and in peace, never has one been projected in such a hurry. Why the haste? It is a symptom of the nervousness, of the heightened tensions, which envelop the entire planet.
Doesn't it indicate great urgency on the part of those who are so eager for accommodation between West and East, between the exploiters and the exploited? One would have to be completely ignorant of any of the international developments in the socialist camp not to know that much of Eastern Europe is on the brink of counterrevolution.
Spreading chaos and discouragement
Wherever Gorbachev goes, he spreads dismay and discouragement on the part of class-conscious workers, of communists, of real socialists. Wherever he goes, he undermines the standing of socialist countries, and gives aid and comfort to bourgeois, anti-socialist elements intent on overthrowing progressive socialist governments.
He lauds the bourgeois economic reforms and denigrates the socialist achievements of the working masses. He has become the hero of the enemies of the working class. Above everything else, he undermines the defense of the USSR by promoting and encouraging the counterrevolutionary developments in Poland and in Hungary. He has set in motion a development which has left virtually helpless the organizations of communists who have developed their lives in the struggle against bourgeois influence and imperialist penetration.
That was the meaning of his visit to the German Democratic Republic. It was the meaning of his visits earlier to Hungary and Poland, and even to China. All the riffraff of the developing counterrevolution cheered him on.
Let us ask ourselves, why are Bush and Gorbachev meeting? What is the overall objective of each participant?
U.S., Soviet objectives at cross purposes
It must be acknowledged at the start that their respective aims are at cross purposes.
The overall objective of the Bush administration and the capitalist class which he represents is to dump the problems of imperialist expansion onto the backs of the workers in undeveloped countries, among which they now would include Eastern Europe--and if possible the USSR and China. In the latter, however, the U.S. has been set back recently.
The problem of imperialist expansion is that the momentous advances and changes made in technology are running up against an unchanging profit system. It is the unchanging social character of the profit system, in the face of spectacular advances in technology, which causes so much destruction and dislocation, bringing on such phenomena as unemployment, homelessness, poverty and the destruction of the global ecological balance.
The objective of the Bush administration is to dump these problems in areas away from the center of their operations. Eastern Europe is a central objective of imperialist ambitions.
What is the objective of the Gorbachev administration? It is to appease the imperialists' avaricious appetite for expansion by making substantial concessions to them in the hope of winning a lasting accommodation. However, it is these very concessions which Gorbachev has set in motion, from the Volga to the Danube, that are eroding the foundations of socialist construction and have made the countries of Eastern Europe ripe for counterrevolution.
Even in the USSR, where Gorbachev has had more than four long years to prove the progressiveness of his reform program (perestroika), Pravda in its latest edition admitted that ``three million people had already lost their jobs because of economic restructuring programs and predicted the number would grow fivefold by the year 2005.'' (New York Times, Nov. 1.)
One has to remember that Gorbachev recently removed the editor of Pravda and replaced him with one more akin to his thinking. So that this admission can be regarded as incontestible evidence that the restructuring program, that is, the bourgeois reforms, has caused the economic crisis in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
It is an artificial, capitalist crisis foisted upon a basically socialist centralized industry which is incompatible with capitalist enterprise. It is this incompatibility, this antagonism between two social systems at opposite poles which has provoked the counterrevolutionary uprisings and mass demonstrations. Unfortunately, they have also been stimulated and encouraged by actions of the Gorbachev administration.
What the Gorbachev administration wants from the Bush administration is a peaceful accommodation, a promise to stop further provocations of a counterrevolutionary character in Eastern Europe, and most of all economic aid via loans or credits.
None of this can come easily from the Bush administration. It is overloaded with debt. Rather than provide significant aid, it instead envisions dumping otherwise unmarketable commodities on the Soviet-East European market of more than 300,000,000 people.
A one-way street
After four years of negotiating with the U.S. to a chorus of incredible flattery from the imperialist press, the Gorbachev administration has been unable to wrest a single economic concession from the imperialist bourgeoisie. Washington has not abandoned even such flagrant discriminatory practices as those detailed in the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which prohibits U.S. loans and credits except upon such political conditions dictated by imperialism as the emigration of Jews from the USSR. The Bush administration still refuses to waive its provisions.
On the other hand, it continues to clamor for more political concessions, such as forcing the USSR to abandon aid and assistance to the anti-imperialist movements.
The problems in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe are clearly solvable on the basis of the inner resources of the entire bloc. It is not necessary to import the capitalist system to reinvigorate the rapid pace of development that was shown in the USSR and Eastern Europe in earlier decades. What is necessary is to dislodge the super-imposed anti-socialist, pro-capitalist reforms which have brought both Hungary and Poland to economic disaster.
Billions upon billions of dollars loaned out by the imperialist banks have strengthened the stranglehold of monopoly capitalism there and frustrated the efforts of socialist construction. These banks collect interest out of the sweat and blood of the working classes only to invest it in other areas for the purpose of exploitation.
Linked to capitalist crisis
It is impossible to understand the nature of the crisis in Eastern Europe unless one takes into account that the principal culprit is not the socialist character of industrial development in these countries but the capitalist market, cultivated by the bourgeois reforms.
Viewing the situation from a global point of view, one must come to the conclusion that the crisis in Eastern Europe is economically the result of the developing capitalist crisis as a whole. The basic reason it has first become evident in Eastern Europe and not in the principal imperialist countries is that the capitalist crisis first of all manifests itself at the periphery of the capitalist system, that is, in parts of Eastern Europe and among the Third World countries. The financial and economic crisis in Budapest and Warsaw is substantially of the same character as that in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Nigeria.
The global character of the capitalist crisis is key to understanding the situation. The outmoded social system of capitalism stands in the way of advancing technology, bringing about the destructive capitalist crisis.
What Gorbachev hopes to get
The capitalist press is full of speculation on how the deepening economic crisis in the USSR is pushing Gorbachev in the direction of surrendering the shield of the USSR over Eastern Europe in exchange for would-be economic gains. What cost the Red Army the lives of millions of soldiers to secure against imperialist penetration and economic strangulation, Gorbachev is now throwing to the winds, hoping that the imperialists will be placated enough to make a peaceful arrangement with the USSR. All this is supposed to help build socialism, but in reality he is dismantling it.
Moscow today is full of hundreds of U.S. experts, advisers and well-wishers for the bourgeois reformers. It is a measure of the times that somebody like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the promoter of the CIA's plans for the continuation of the war there, is now in Moscow as part of an ``academic'' delegation conferring with Soviet ``experts'' about Eastern Europe.
``If reforms in East Germany,'' says Brzezinski, ``take the shape of Hungary or Poland, then you have to ask, what is the point of East Germany?'' (New York Times, Nov. 1.) That's where matters stand now. They are attempting to scuttle the arrangements made as a result of the Second World War in favor of a spurious new East-West accommodation, in hopes of economic aid from U.S. imperialism and a retreat of U.S. military aggressiveness and arms buildup. None of this is coming true.
But Mr. Brzezinski, a product of the Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations and Carter's national security adviser, ought to be familiar with the real problems of U.S. imperialism. On the same day that the projected Gorbachev-Bush summit was announced, it was also revealed that a Japanese giant transnational corporation, Mitsubishi, had bought one of the prize jewels of U.S. finance capital--Rockefeller Center. This is an astonishing development in light of the fact that the Exxon building, a diamond in the crown jewels of the Rockefeller dynasty, was recently bought by the Sony corporation.
What does that indicate about the capacity of U.S. imperialism to really extend loans, especially on generous terms? And what does it say about Japanese imperialism, when in Japan there is increasing edginess and skepticism about overextending themselves, going beyond the reach of their national limits and resources?
The coming collapse of the ``mini-booms'' in south Korea, Taiwan and Singapore is bound to accelerate the general crisis. Nobody knows this better than the Japanese finance capitalists. This explains their efforts to try and divert political attention to the U.S. and blame world capitalist instability on Washington's great indebtedness and huge deficit. The counterpoint to this here is the growth of anti-Japanese chauvinism, which points up again that the old imperialist antagonisms are by no means dead but take on a new viciousness in the contemporary era.
The working class in Eastern Europe and the USSR has everything to gain and nothing to lose in combating the manifestations of capitalism and becoming part of a united struggle of the workers and all the oppressed to overthrow imperialism on a global basis.