Sorry dave for the late reply. But this has been a really insane week here!
Reply to Dave...
History speaks its verdicts loudly. The ascendancy of counterrevolution in the former
USSR is an unparalleled defeat for working people all over the world, decisively
altering the political landscape on this planet. No longer challenged by Soviet
military might, U.S. imperialism has proclaimed a "one-superpower world," running
roughshod over semicolonial peoples from the Persian Gulf to Haiti. No longer the
unrivalled economic powerhouse of world imperialism, the United States still maintains
the murderous advantage of its military might, while often preferring to camouflage
its terror under the "humanitarian" fig leaf of the United Nations "den of thieves"
(Lenin's description of the UN's predecessor, the League of Nations). But rival
imperialisms, especially Germany and Japan, no longer constrained by anti-Soviet
unity, are pursuing apace their own appetites for control of world markets and
concomitantly projecting their military power. In the conflicts between rival regiona!
!
l trade blocs today, the outlines of future wars are sharpening. In the face of
growing inter-imperialist rivalry, we reassert: "The main enemy is at home!"
Looking back retrospectively to the pre-World War 1 period, today's "post-Cold war
world" presents many parallels. And with the question posed of new interimperialist
conflict, we can expect today's reformists and centrists to act in the spirit of their
social-democratic forebears of 4 August 1914 in backing their own rulers in wartime.
Fully in this spirit was their support for counterrevolution in the USSR.
Alongside mass pauperization in the USSR, "ethnic cleansing" fratricide rages
throughout the weak new capitalist states of East Europe and former Soviet republics
where nationalist ideology substituted for non-existent capital as the motor force of
counterrevolution. Often a resurgence of the pre-World War 2 national antagonisms in
the capitalist states of this region, in the aftermath of counterrevolution,
nationalist ideology again becomes the chief roadblock which revolutionaries have to
smash through.
In West Europe the safety net of social welfare measures is slashed as the
bourgeoisies no longer see any need to stave off the "spectre of communism" by
providing necessities. While the ideological climate of the "death of communism"
affects the consciousness of the proletariat, in many countries of the world sharp
class struggle provides the objective basis for the regeneration of Marxism as the
theory of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution. It is not communism, but
its parody, Stalinism, which has been shown to be a dead end.
Victorious counterrevolution has not only devastated the ex-Soviet and East European
proletariats materially and ideologically; where Communist Parties commanded the
allegiance of advanced layers of the working class, the proletariat has been sold the
lie that "socialism has failed," promoted by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies who
had headed these deformed workers states and presided over their destruction. The
Kremlin abetted bt the East German Stalinists led the counterrevolution in the DDR,
rushing to hand the country over to the Fourth Reich. The Kremlin bureaucracy under
Gorbachev carried out its ultimate, terminal betrayal, declaring that socialism has
been a doomed utopian experiment and proclaiming the superiority of the capitalist
market system. The disintegrating CPSU spawned openly counterrevolutionary gangs led
by Boris Yeltsin who acted as the open agent of U.S. imperialism in the restoration of
capitalism. Hence the Stalinist ruling castes and their cothinkers!
!
in the West bear direct responsibility for the destruction of the socialist
aspirations of the advanced proletarian layers in Western Europé and elsewhere.
Trotsky's assertion in the 1938 Transitional Program that "The world political
situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership
of the proletariat" predates the present deep regression of proletarian consciousness.
The reality of this post-Soviet period adds a new dimension to Trotsky's observation.
The only way in which this regression can be overcome and the working class can become
a class for itself, i.e., fighting for socialist revolution, is to reforge an
international Leninist-Trotskyist party as the leadership of the working class.
Marxism must once again win the allegiance of the proletariat.
In China, the extreme nationalist ideology pushed by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy
is a direct bridge to capitalist restoration. The essence of "market reforms"
counterrevolution in China is the bureaucracy seeking to become partners in
exploitation with capitalist forces and especially the Chinese capitalists who were
not destroyed as a class (as were their Russian counterparts after October 1917) but
continued to function in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. China has carved
out "special economic zones" as islands of imperialist exploitation and keeps the
reverted Hong Kong's capitalist economy untouched, while the army and bureaucracy
generally are engaged in large-scale business ventures. Now the bureaucracy, sections
of which seek to become the new capitalist exploiters, looks toward wholesale
destruction of state industry, thereby posing the dismantling of what remains of the
planned economy of the deformed workers state.
This course cannot be accomplished without breaking the resistance of the militant
working class. The ruling Stalinist bureaucracy showed in Tiananmen Square in 1989-an
incipient political revolution-both its fear of the proletariat and its intention to
rely on brute force with no trappings of "glasnost" (Soviet leader Gorbachev's
political "openness"). The choices for China are proletarian political revolution or
capitalist counterrevolution. The crucial factor is revolutionary leadership to
reintroduce the internationalist class consciousness which animated the founding
Chinese Communists of the early 1920s. The battle for workers political revolution in
China has enormous stakes fir the workers internationally. The outcome will have a
huge impact in the remaining deformed workers states (Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea)
and also in Asian countries like Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and the
Philippines, where a militant young proletariat has emerged as a powerful !
!
factor..
Bob
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