Workers' Liberty

Chronology

It is 20 years since the destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of then divided Germany signalled that Russia’s control over Eastern Europe was collapsing. Russia had held Eastern Europe in a brutal grip for four and a half decades, since the end of the Second World War.

We have seen a tremendous series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, the latest in Romania during Christmas week [1989]. At the beginning of the week the Ceaucescus were in full control. By its end they lay crumpled like rag dolls, dead beside a bullet-marked wall.

BOURGEOIS propagandists and ex-Stalinists alike tell us that we are witnessing the end of socialism. Socialism is dying of shame, failure and self disgust before our eyes in Eastern Europe. Socialism has been tried and is now deservedly rejected as an all-round social and historical failure.

“But socialism is dead, darling!” This was one response on the street to the front page of Socialist Organiser with the headline: ‘Stand up for socialism’ And there were many similar responses, sad as well as gleeful.

The system Stalin built in the old Tsarist empire has collapsed irretrievably. The USSR is collapsing, too: most of its republics have now declared themselves independent. In most of those republics the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union” has either been banned outright, or banned from activity in the army and the KGB, and in factories.

Immediately after the August coup in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin and his friends turned the Russian parliament into a veritable revolutionary committee which, backed by the people, took measures it had no legal power to take, to break up the old order.

What is happening in the former USSR now is a grotesque triumph of unreason. In its destructiveness and senselessness, it will rank in history with the carnage of the First and Second World Wars as an almost inexplicable piece of 20th century madness.

The erstwhile rulers of the Stalinist system — which they said was the realisation of socialism — are now working openly for the restoration of capitalism. So are most of those they rule, and in the first place the working class.

Socialists like ourselves, watching the replacement of the Stalinist state economies not by socialist workers’ power and a democratic collectivist system, but by capitalism, are in a position roughly similar to the pioneering Marxists George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky when they watched the Russian workers take power although their dogmatic expectation was that only the bourgeoisie could replace the Tsar.

The Russian socialist revolution is dead? It died long ago! It died not in December 1991, when the USSR formally ceased to exist, nor in August 1991, when the failure of the attempted coup finally broke the back of what power the “Communist Party” had left.

Comrade Ernest Mandel: Certain of your critics — James P Cannon reasonably in the 1950s, the degenerate sectarians (Healy, Lambert) ridiculously in the 1960s — named the “Fourth International” current you lead “Pabloism”.

“When Erin has ceased with their memory to groan, she will smile through the tears of revival on thine”. Those were the words with which an English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, addressed the Irish Republican Robert Emmett, who in 1803, at 25, had been hanged, cut down still alive, disembowelled and then chopped up by a servant of the then all-powerful British government of Ireland.

AND WHERE WERE JACOB SVERDLOV'S SONS?

Sverdlov killed the bloody Tsar,
He signed the warrant for it;
So when they struck his statue down
The Tsarists cheered who saw it:

The program we advocated: WSL fusion platform, 26 July 1981

The system they overthrew: Workers’ Fight (first series), no.8, August 1968

1. The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions. Socialist Organiser 429, 4 January 1990

2. What’s in the coffin at the funeral of socialism? Originally published in Socialist Organiser, March 1990. This version from Workers’ Liberty 28, February 1996

3. The lies against socialism answered: Eastern Europe: Towards capitalism or workers’ liberty?, Socialist Organiser special pamphlet issue, 427-8, 7 December 1989

4. Stalin’s system collapses. Socialist Organiser 497, 29 August 1991

5. Why socialists should support the banning of the CPSU. “Against the tide”, Socialist Organiser 501, 3 October 1991

6. Market madness in the ex-USSR. Editorial, Socialist Organiser, 9 January 1992

7. What was the Bolsheviks’ conception of the Russian Revolution? Socialist Organiser, 1990

8. Why the workers want to restore capitalism. Socialist Organiser 496, August 1991

9. In the beginning was the critique of capitalism. Editorial in Workers’ Liberty 16, February 1992

10. An open letter to Ernest Mandel. Pamphlet, 23 October 1992

11. Trotsky and the collapse of Stalinism. Editorial, Socialist Organiser 459, 7 September 1990

12. And where were Jacob Sverdlov’s sons? Verse, Socialist Organiser 498, 5 September 1991