 |
|
| Politics Forum Index » Socialism Politics (Trotsky) Forum » The Soviet Union and the struggle for socialism... |
|
Page 1 of 1 |
|
| Author |
Message |
| irongron... |
 Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 8:53 pm |
|
|
|
Guest
|
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. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
|
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Sun Dec 06, 2009 5:19 pm
|
|