Workers' Liberty

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution it is important to recognise that it was more than a Russian event. It swept across the entire Russian Empire with the long oppressed nations making their bid for freedom. The most important challenge was in “Russia’s Ireland” – Ukraine. To mark the anniversary of the proclamation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic ninety years ago on November 22, 1917 this article examines the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21, which was pivotal in deciding the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the entire European socialist Revolution.

The political situation in Poland before the parliamentary elections (scheduled for 21 October), is dominated by competition between two parties of the right. These are Law and Justice (PiS) (now in power) and Civic Platform (PO). Both represent right populist politics, but of different kinds.

Last week I was in Budapest which is my first time in the former eastern block, and part of that experience has got me thinking about certain aspects of post stalinist societies.

Amongst the shops selling Prada and Louis Vuitton on the Andrassy Utca in

By Tom Unterrainer

The past few weeks have seen courageous actions by gay communities in Russia, Latvia and Poland.

A collection of articles on solidarity with workers in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, and on those revolutions and the prospects they opened up

British workers and the Stalinist state 'unions'

By John O'Mahony

What's in the coffin at the funeral of socialism?

By John O'Mahony

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.

It is rejected most explicitly by the working class who, for example, gave the right the bulk of its vote in last month's East German election.

The workers want capitalism, and socialism, "history's great dream" - so bourgeois and ex-socialist propagandists alike say - goes the way of other ignorant yearnings and strivings, taking its place in the museum of quackery alongside such relics of barbarism as alchemy.

For sixty and more years, "socialism", in common discourse, has been what existed in the USSR. The ideas conveyed by the words socialism and communism before Stalin established his system sixty years ago faded into the mists of pre-history, and "socialism" came to be the theory and practice of Stalinism - what became known in the '70s as "actually existing socialism".

That was "socialism". There has been no other socialism (unless some fool wants to cite Western "democratic socialism", Sweden for example).

And yes, it is this "actually existing socialism" that is ceasing to exist, melting like islands of ice in the warm seas of international capitalism. And yes, its enemies are the very working class in whose name the "socialist" states claimed their historic legitimacy

So much for "socialism", "actually existing socialism' . But for the socialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci, it is a good thing that millions of people in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union have risen in revolt against 'socialism" and "communism". In fact it is the best thing that has happened for socialists in fully half a century.

The fact that those millions hate and despise "socialism" is the best pledge we could have that socialism has a future, that socialism is indeed the "wave of the future."

This becomes clear when you ask yourself the question: what have the workers revolted against when they revolted against "socialism"? What has been proved or disproved by the indisputable failure of the Stalinist system?

The workers and others have revolted against:

* National oppression by the USSR and within the IJSSR.

* Subordination of individuals, social groups, and nations to an all-powerful regulating state through which a bureaucratic ruling class exercised its dictatorship

* The denial of free speech, free press' free assembly, free organisations.

* Exploitation and poverty, combined with outrageous privilege.

They want instead:

* National and individual freedom.

* Democracy.

* Prosperity and equality - an end, at least, to the peculiarly glaring sort of inequality imposed on the Eastern Bloc by bureaucratic privilege.

That the workers think they can get these things, or get more of them, under a market system, is very important, and determines what happens now, but it is not the whole story. It is not even the gist of the story. And it is not the end but the beginning of the chapter that opened in the East last autumn.

And what has the failure of Stalinist "socialism" proved? That rigidly bureaucratic systems, where all power, decision, initiative and resources are concentrated in the hands of the state, cannot plan their economies effectively. No Marxist ever believed they could.

That the workers become alienated when a supposed "workers' state" actually means rule over them by privileged bureaucrats.

That socialism is impossible without freedom and democracy, without free initiative and comprehensive self-rule.

That socialism is impossible when the socialists set out to develop backward national economies, rather than the working class seizing power on the basis of the technology created by advanced capitalism and beginning with equality and freedom.

Eastern Europe proves all these things. But then its evidence vindicates, rather than disproves, the ideas of Karl Marx.

Marx argued that socialism would grow out of advanced capitalism, which had developed the means of production far enough that want could be abolished almost immediately; that socialism would be the creation of the mass of the people, led by the working class, and, by definition, therefore, democratic; and that socialism would immediately destroy the bureaucratic state machine, substituting an accountable system of working-class administration.

What came to be known as "socialism", and in fact was "actually existing socialism", was never socialism. Lenin and Trotsky did not believe that socialism was possible in the backward Tsarist empire. What they believed was that the workers could take power there, and make the first in a chain of revolutions that would reach the advanced countries where socialism was possible.

The revolutions in Western Europe were betrayed and defeated. In isolation, the Stalinist mutation, a new form of class society with collective property, emerged by way of a bloody one-sided civil war against the workers of the USSR, led by the genuine Marxists, Trotsky and his comrades. After World War 2 it spread.

Stalinism was never socialism. But the revolt against it is socialism in embryo - the mass self-assertion and revolt of millions of people is the raw material of socialism.

It would be a true miracle if the workers in the Stalinist countries had political clarity after years in darkness. It would be remarkable if they were not confused by the official "socialism" which meant tyranny and poverty, and by the capitalism of Western Europe which means comparative prosperity and liberty.

What they are gaining now is the freedom to think, to organise, the freedom to struggle and to learn from their struggle. Out of this, the first steps towards socialism - independent workers' organisations, parties and trade unions - w ill emerge again in countries in which History did indeed seem to have ended in hell forty or more years ago. In the East, working-class history- has begun again.

Working classes which fail to shape their own history sometimes get a second chance - in the first place the chance to learn from and not repeat that history.

"Socialism" is dead. Long live socialism!

(Originally published in Socialist Organiser, March 1990. This version from Workers' Liberty 28, February 1996)

Their nightmare, our hope

By John O'Mahony

The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions

John O'Mahony

A socialist manifesto from the editorial board of Socialist Organiser

Socialist Organiser 434, 15 February 1990

Socialism, yes! Stalinism, no!

Why we should back Solidarnosc - despite Fleet Street's effort to use lech Walesa against the miners

By John O'Mahony

Poland's government has been sending scab coal to Britain, while Solidarnosc has declared support for the NUM:. But some people on the Left are using a Sunday Mirror report that Lech Walesa attacked Arthur Scargill to justify their hostility to Solidarnosc. John O'Mahony discusses the issues.

The anniversary of the 1956 revolution has been overshadowed by a political crisis in Hungary with violent clashes between anti-government protesters and the police. The government of the Hungarian Socialist Party is headed by Ferenc Gyurcsany a former Stalinist turned ‘successful businessman’. Tamás Krausz is an editor of Eszmélet, a left-wing journal opposed to the “pro-capitalist left and national conservative right”. He explains what’s happening.

Bruce Robinson reviews ‘Remembering 1956’, Revolutionary History Vol. 9, No. 3, edited by John McIlroy

“1956 was a memorable year – a horrible one for Stalinists and a good one for Trotskyists… For the first time, we Trotskyists saw a chink of light shining through the torn curtain of Stalinist lies. Instead of having to defend ourselves from the slanders hurled at us, we were able to approach bewildered Communist Party members with confidence.” Harry Ratner

By Tamás Krausz

1. Prehistory
The history of the workers’ councils of 1956 cannot be understood without the history of the Hungarian working class. The intellectual-political and socio-cultural development of the Hungarian working class has been shaped by diverse and complex historical processes in the interwar period. The counter-revolutionary system of Horthy destroyed and criminalised the 1918-1919 revolutionary tradition of the workers’ councils of the Hungarian working class, it banned the communist party and it declared in the name of the sanctity of private property that communal property – which was defined as the essence of socialism from Marx and Lenin till Zsigmond Kunfi, Justus and Lukács – was a sinful idea. The official Christian-nationalist ideology, which defined the treaty of Trianon as the ruin of Hungary, put the revisionist aspirations – which followed from the policy of the ruling classes - in the center of the national policy and memory. This served later as the basis of the alliance with the Nazi Germany in the period of the Second World War. In spite of the decade-long, nationalist brainwashing the former, predominantly multiethnic Hungarian industrial skilled working class, which constituted the backbone of organized labor of about one hundred thousand members, remained loyal to social democracy even in the most difficult times. At the same time with the Nazi advance the extreme rightist-Hungarian Nazi (Arrow Cross) organizations and the racist-anti-Semitic ideologies of the system also took root among the unemployed masses in the periphery of the working class of the small-scale industry, mainly in the outskirts of Budapest.

It is now fifty years since the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the events have faded and their meaning and importance to socialists perhaps lost in time. The struggles, the barricades, the workers councils and resistance to Russian imperialism are a vague memory even for those involved in the movement at the time. The real struggles and aspirations of the Hungarian revolution will be reduced even further to the strong box of history by the official commemorations attended by the great and the good of the bourgeoisie who will claim the mantle of the freedom fighters of 1956. In so doing they will continue such myth as the decisive role in the fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe was played by the prayers of Pope John Paul II and the foreign policy of the American President Ronald Reagan and his ally Thatcher.

By Dan Jakopovich

Fifty years have passed since the great uprising of the Hungarian people against the Stalinist dictatorship.

by Piotr Kendziorek and August Grabski, Members of the Revolutionary Left Current

Anti-semitism in Poland has not been articulated in the political language of the left since the time of the “anti-Zionist”(in fact: anti-semitic) propaganda campaign of the 1960s inspired by General Moczar, and a later episode of the so-called Patriotic Association ‘Grunwald’ at the beginning of the 1980s.

By August Grabski

Click here for a French translation of this article.

On 16 February 2006 Stefan Piekarczyk died of cancer in Warsaw. Stefan was a socialist, a Trotskyist, a translator and an economist.

He was born in 1955 and grew up in a Polish family in Glasgow and there he joined a British section of the Fourth International (FI) — the International Marxist Group.

Ewa Groszewska writes from Poland. Ewa is a member of New Left

“Free Belarus!” was chanted by students in Wroclaw recently. “There is no freedom or democracy there, the authorities deal with the opposition by using force,” they argued. At the same time French students of the Sorbonne University were being pacified by the police. A democratic country? And Polish students didn’t even think they could protest against the Labour Code...

Amina Saddiq tuned in to the Radio 4 Women’s Hour special on Poland.

The accession of Eastern European countries to the EU is supposed to have helped bring up respect for human rights there to “modern” standards. Maybe not.

Events in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed the anti-working class character of Stalinism. But, more importantly, it demonstrated workers' ability to oppose Stalinism. In Hungary in 1956, workers set up factory councils and district-based revolutionary councils to maintain the general strike.

Many British labour movement activists and leaders were hostile to Solidarnosc — most prominently miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. Scargill was — and still is — a Stalinist who believed that police-state Poland was a genuine socialist country. Like many militants, Scargill’s views were reinforced because the Cold War leaders of the Eastern Bloc were in a head-to-head stand off with his own immediate enemies — Margaret Thatcher and the hated US president Ronald Reagan. Large sections of the left and some on the right of the labour movement made the elementary mistake of assuming that their enemy’s enemy was a friend.

A quarter of a century ago, Poland’s Stalinist police-state system was rocked by a massive wave of working-class action.

On 26 July eight thousand miners from Silesia (south-west Poland) demonstrated in front of the parliament building in the Warsaw.

Members of all 13 miners’ trade unions demanded pensions rights for miners after 25 years work, regardless of their age. The miners do not want to accept a normal pension age (65) because it would mean working until their death. (The life expectancy of a Polish miner is 64.)

Tesco stores across Britain and Ireland were picketed on 4 August in solidarity with two Polish agency workers sacked after protesting about conditions at a distribution centre in Dublin.

Rapport par Anna Rzymska à la réunion internationale en Paris, le 18 juin 2005.

By August Grabski

About 10,000 workers demonstrated on 19 May in Warsaw, organised by the OPZZ (the former Communist trade union) and the trade union Solidarity 80.