Socialism, yes! Stalinism, no!
As we go to press Czechoslovakia seems set to follow Poland's, Hungary's and East Germany's lead in losing its monopoly of power or having it severely knocked out of shape.
Miners are reported to be on strike. Theatre workers and students are certainly on strike. Hundred of thousands march in Prague every day, demanding free elections, the resignation of the Party leader Milos Jakes, and the release of political prisoners.
The Stalinists' puppet parties have started to rediscover some independence. Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec has promised an official inquiry into the police assault on last Friday's demonstration (17 November) and "dialogue" with the Charter 77 opposition.
In East Germany, mass demonstrations continue. Every day the regime makes more concessions and promises: sacking the old leaders; opening the Berlin Wall; promising a coalition government; promising free elections; legalising the opposition. Yet the mass movement remains combative, unwilling to be demobilised until it has won democracy.
The capitalist media claim that this is the collapse of socialism. They lie. The East European systems were never socialist. They were systems whose bureaucratic ruling classes exploited the workers to gain privileges for themselves and to build up the industry which the bureaucrats' state owned and controlled.
Now, when the terrible political tension to which these societies have so long been subjected finally unwinds, the economic substructure emerging is not socialist but capitalist.
In Poland and Hungary the bureaucrats frankly avow their intention to restore the private-profit economy. In East Germany, the new prime minister, Hans Modrow, is a self declared admirer of Japan as an economic model.
Many workers in Eastern Europe also look favourably on the market and private profit For decades they have been told that the bureaucrats' systems were socialism. They see that workers in the West have higher living standards and more democratic rights. No wonder they favour a return to capitalism.
But there's more to the movement than that - and the Western bosses know it. That's why the have been nervously advising East German workers to stop their protests.
Not all the workers in Eastern Europe, by any means, are starry-eyed about the West. The main opposition groups in East Germany define their aim as a "better socialism".
In Poland Lech Walesa says he doesn't want Solidarnosc's trade union organisation to be too strong now, because it would cause trouble for the reform of the economy. Many Solidarnosc trade unionists don't agree!
A minority, around the Polish Socialist Party (Democratic Revolution), argues explicitly for a democratically planned economy with workers' control as an alternative both to Stalinism and to capitalism. That minority is small as yet, but active, and sure to gain more support as Polish workers learn about the free market in their struggles to defend jobs and living standards against it.
If the present upheavals in Eastern Europe end with the restoration of capitalism across the board, that will be a terrible defeat for the possibilities of the movement.
Socialism is not what has existed in Eastern Europe for 45 years - it is what will emerge there if the workers are able to take advantage of the decay of the rotten bureaucratic order to seize control of the wealth of society for the majority.
Stalinism is dying. Long live socialism!
Socialist Organiser 425, 22 November 1989