How powerful is global capitalism at present?

Well a very interesting question indeed as it would appear contradictory. On one hand you have a system which seems incredibly powerful and somewhat untouchable in terms of any real threat from an outside force from an opposing system. We used to have Stalinism of course in the east with the USSR and the Chinese totalitarian regimes which for all their brutal dictatorial and clamping down on freedoms and democracy at least offered the idea that there was at least a different system possible if you wished. Yet there is no movement that looks likely that it will take power any time soon in terms of an alternative economic system. Not to do the working class down as they are extremely powerful yet I am not convinced are ready to take power anywhere on the planet. On the other hand we have a system of capitalism which is in probably the biggest crisis its faced since the 30's and possibly ever some say. So we do have a real contradiction in many ways. It is hard to understand on the surface anyway how powerful and how strong of a system capitalism is at the moment. On the one hand it seems quite fragile and yet on the other side it looks indestructible and that there is no way of changing things. Of course as we know and as we learn from the past no social and political system is indestructible and nothing stays the same forever. Dialectics tells us as much so to think that capitalism is here to stay and it can’t be changed or removed is just not true. It may seem like we are a long long way from change and in many ways we are yet change is always on the agenda and is constantly happening even when we cannot see it at the very moment. Revolutions are not just things that appear they are constantly being developed and worked on. I do believe that we can start to begin to build the new society in the shell of the old by putting into practice our ideals and values right now not after the revolution we can begin to shape things even if all be it on a small scale to start with. We must be in a way the change we want to see to oppose things we don’t agree with and we don’t want to take with us to the new society we must start today by opposing the likes of racism, fascism , sexism and all forms of discrimination. We must lead from example as revolutionaries we cant expect others to follow us and buy into our ideas if we ourselves do not live up to our own ideals. So in terms of power capitalism is still very much in the driving seat but for how long and in what form we cannot say. We must remember any victory we win off the ruling class must be forced home and if there is the opportunity to remove this rotten exploitative system then we must cease any chance we get!

Kronstadt, the rebellion forgotten by many

If you speak to many Trotskyists and mention the K word they will go white in the face and shift uneasy as Kronstadt for them is a difficult one to explain. The workers rebellion of March 1921 stands out as one of the most brutal acts the BOLSHEVIKS Committed in their time in power. For me the Russian Revolution itself is a major inspiration to my political ideas but the Kronstadt rebellion which I brought up once when I was a member of the socialist party was rarely discussed and if it was I was brought to one side and told this act by the BOLSHEVIKS Was necessary to defend the revolution from "outside forces". This seems to be the common line from Trotskyists who try to justify this brutal act on the good sailors and workers who helped in the early days of the revolution who were not happy with the authoritarian nature of the BOLSHEVIKS And their methods of suppression of freedoms. “An understanding of the Russian revolution is vital for any understanding of why the left failed in the 20th century. Yet most discussion amongst revolutionaries never goes beyond the usual argument about the Kronstadt rebellion. The left's present crisis has forced rethinking in some circles but many of us continue to cope with isolation by clinging onto our respective traditions. Anarchists and libertarian communists emphasize the Bolsheviks' authoritarian policies, blaming them for the revolution's failure, while underestimating the difficulties of constructing a new society in an isolated country devastated by civil war. In contrast Trotskyists blame these material conditions exclusively for the revolution's degeneration, dismissing most left-wing criticisms of the Bolsheviks as giving comfort to the right. Bolshevik policies were problematic from the start. In 1917 Lenin argued that, as private capitalism could not develop Russia, a revolutionary state would have to use 'state capitalism' to build the prerequisites for the transition to communism. This approach was always likely to come into conflict with the working class. Then, as the revolution failed to spread outside Russia, the Bolsheviks imposed even more external discipline on workers, effectively abandoning Marx's insistence on "the self-emancipation of the working class". This concept of "self-emancipation" implies that the working class can only create communism by freely making and defending the revolution themselves. So the action of workers taking day-to-day control of every aspect of society is itself the essence of the revolutionary process. Considerable compromises with the ideals of self-emancipation were inevitable in the crippling conditions of the Russian revolution. By October 1917 there were 900 workers' councils or soviets, controlling everything from housing to hospitals. There were also more than 2,000 elected factory committees which were even more powerful because they had been compelled to supervise the factory owners and production. The Bolshevik party was dwarfed by these bodies and was often overtaken by the rapid radicalization of workers. However, unlike the reformist Mensheviks or the peasant oriented Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), it had not joined the repressive Provisional Government; a regime that had totally discredited itself by its failure to maintain living standards, authorise land seizures or provide peace. The openness and flexibility of the Bolshevik party allowed it to express workers' desire for a government of all the soviet parties. On 25 October it organised the overthrow of the Provisional Government and set up a Soviet government headed by Lenin Once in power the overriding concern of the Bolshevik leadership was the revival of industry to overcome a largely feudal crisis-ridden society. To this end they proposed to nationalise the largest monopolies, initially leaving the rest of industry under capitalist ownership combined with both government and workers' control. This was consistent with Lenin's arguments before October that "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly." He later said, "we recognise only one road - changes from below; we wanted the workers themselves, from below, to draw up the new, basic economic principles." But, like the Second International he came from, Lenin never developed a consistent theory of workers' self-management, tending to only advocate "inspection", "accounting and control" by workers of the decisions of others.” This is very similar to many Trotskyist parties today and their programme is very close if not identical to the original programme Lenin looked to set about putting into place. The term those who fail to learn the lessons from history are doomed to repeat them. So for me whilst being inspired by the early days of the Russian revolution what followed the suppression and the terror does not inspire me and has lead me to re assess my thoughts and political feelings as to how a revolution can be carried out. Kronstadt for me is a chilling tale of a rebellion by workers who were involved in the original revolution in 1917 yet had grown tired of the lack of freedom and democracy that was allowed. They feared the growing tide of suppression by the government. “Trotskyists usually justify the Bolshevik's actions on the grounds that the heroic sailors of 1917 had been replaced by newly recruited peasants, easily influenced by counter-revolutionary ideas. But Evan Mawdsley and Israel Getzler cite Soviet research which shows that three-quarters of all the sailors in Kronstadt in 1921 had probably been there since World War One. It also clearly demonstrates that 90% of the sailors on the two main battleships were drafted before 1918 White exiles had tried to help the mutineers and the main leader of the rebellion, Petrichenko, did join the Whites for a period after the mutiny was suppressed. Still, there is no convincing evidence that the mutineers had any ties to the Whites during the rebellion itself and it appears that no foreign power even attempted to take military advantage of the situation. Moreover Lenin himself said, "There they do not want either the White Guards or our government". So the Bolshevik regime's need to suppress any rebellion calling for democracy was at least as much a factor in its attitude to the sailors as the threat of intervention from abroad. Trotskyists are right to say that a major cause of the degeneration of the revolution was its inability to spread which meant that it was crippled by objective factors such as economic backwardness, isolation and civil war. Nevertheless they are wrong to advocate a rigid determinism, minimising ideological factors. This is especially the case when at every stage of the bureaucratisation of the regime there were vocal critics within the Bolshevik party itself who proposed alternative policies that might have slowed this process. Even if the appalling conditions of the civil war justified their policies then, they cannot excuse the repression both before and after the war. Of course Trotskyists could argue that the civil war and economic collapse started in 1917 so Lenin's attitudes were justified from the beginning. But soviet democracy withstood the crises of 1917 and then expanded sufficiently to make a revolution in October. So it must have had the potential to survive the threats of 1918 better than it did, especially as it was supposedly holding state power. The civil war also cannot be used to excuse the Bolshevik leaders' lack of regret about their use of repression. For instance, although Lenin described the NEP as a 'defeat', at no stage did he describe the suppression of soviet democracy and workers' control in such language. Indeed the Bolsheviks even called their civil war policies "communist" although they were obviously the antithesis of genuine communism. It is easy to criticise with the benefit of hindsight. However there is something very disturbing about the fact that Trotskyists still claim that the Bolsheviks were acting as communists after 1918 when they were clearly acting more as agents of the degeneration of the revolution. Material conditions did limit everything at this time but this includes Lenin and Trotsky's ideas so their applicability eighty years later is surely also severely limited. Effectively many Trotskyists are arguing that, if it is necessary, Marx's insistence on "self-emancipation" and a democratic workers' republic can be postponed provided people like Lenin and Trotsky run the 'workers' state' and raise the red flag for international revolution. Yet for the Bolsheviks to suppress the Russian working class - on behalf of a world working class that has no say in this policy - contradicts any concept of proletarian self-emancipation. Workers will never be inspired by a Marxism that offers the possibility of state subjugation in a 'holding operation' until the whole world has had a revolution. This argument also assumes that Lenin's internationalism could have remained intact while the revolution degenerated all around him. But future writing will show that his internationalism was compromised not long after October. Some Trotskyists do have criticisms of a number of Bolshevik policies, such as the post-war restrictions on soviet democracy. However none of them are willing to stray too far from Trotsky's own reservations which he only really voiced when he had lost power. Their lack of appreciation of what might be valuable in the Bolshevik tradition is shown by the fact that no Trotskyist organisation today allows the range of views that coexisted in the Bolshevik party even during the civil war. Besides, considering the extent of the repression resorted to by Lenin's regime, the priority is not to criticise individual policies but to try and work out how revolutionaries could have avoided getting into this appalling situation in the first place. If the Bolsheviks had respected workers' democracy they may well have lost power. Nevertheless this would have been a gamble, like the October revolution, that they would have been right to take, one that in itself would have restored some of the party's popularity. It would also have had more chance of success than Trotsky's bureaucratic attempts to prevent Stalin's dictatorship. Even if the gamble had failed, the outcome could not have been worse than 'Stalinism', which not only slaughtered millions, but did so in the name of communism and so stifled the prospects for revolution world-wide for the rest of the century. In the end perhaps the most interesting aspect of this whole issue is why so many Marxists who claim to believe in workers' self-emancipation defend a politics that effectively denies it. “ With thanks for quotes and extracts at libcom http://www.libcom.org/library/beyond-kronstadt

Comments on the state

The state as a Marxist understanding is a group of armed individuals being that of the police or the army this is something which looks to be the guard for one class over another. As we stand capitalism is protected by the state and by the police and the army they will come to protect capitalism and its rule no matter what. State ownership is not communist or not even socialist when you think about it. Looking for the state to run things on our behalf is like handing the keys to your new boss not your old boss. The fact is they are still your boss. I oppose state capitalism in all forms it cannot and will not be our friend in any shape or form. Many revolutionary parties are it the SWp or the socialist party call for the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy which is in affect calling for the capitalist state to take over and run these organisations on our behalf while keeping the boss’s in place. This is not good enough in my opinion as a boss is a boss wheatear they are claiming to be socialist or not. For over a century now all sorts of social democrats, Stalinists and Trotskyists have espoused the view that the state can be used to bring about a communist society through reforms and/or seizing the state on behalf of the workers. This has often been dubbed by libertarian communists as “state socialism”. One of the staple demands of this statistic strategy is the nationalisation of banks and other industries, bringing them under the direction of the state. This is usually disguised in leftist terms like “public” or “social” ownership, offering the illusion of a “worker’s state”. However, state ownership of industry is in no way a communist measure – by communism we mean a society free of state direction and based on direct democracy, common ownership and production for need, not want. Nationalisation takes control out of the workers’ hands and into those of the state, which bolsters the rule of class over class. In the Soviet Union, as in the West, there was still a small boss class who gained profit from the labour of the mass of the population. Nationalisation is not only the preserve of the left. Other “state capitalist” ideologies exist which use nationalisation as a tactic. These include those on the right (such as the Nazis) and so-called “democratic” governments (such as Roosevelt’s with the “New Deal” and the Labour party prior to 1997). Often, nationalisation has been a tactic for large scale industrial restructuring. It was used in 19th century Europe to develop infrastructure. A classic example is the railways, built at a time when it was believed that market forces would reward the good and useful and eliminate the bad or socially useless. However, it was necessary, as early as 1840, for the government to regulate and supervise them, simply to protect the public. In Russia, after the revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik regime used state ownership to develop Russian industry defending it as socialist by saying that fully fledged capitalism was required for socialism to be achieved. In post-war Europe nationalisation was used to restructure devastated economies. Attlee’s Labour government, elected in 1945, brought the Bank of England, coal mining, steel, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport under state direction. It also developed the “cradle to grave” welfare state. However, in the past 30 years, nationalisation was thought to have dropped off the mainstream political agenda. The rise of neo-liberalism, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Labour Party’s dropping of its commitment to state ownership before its 1997 landslide, were, for many, the final nails in the coffin. Too many people’s surprise though, nationalisation has made a comeback. Facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the near collapse of the banking sector has forced the state to once again openly intervene in the economy. With workers’ militancy at a low ebb, leading to a low wage economy, the growth in credit provided the money to keep consumers spending. This was coupled with the UK economy’s reliance on banking and “mortgage derivatives”. So when the housing bubble burst credit dried up, banks teetered on the verge of collapse and the economy went into recession. This was most spectacular in the case of Northern Rock with the first run on a bank in over a century and its eventual nationalisation. Since then, the state has also rescued Bradford & Bindley and the Royal Bank of Scotland, while the Anglo-Irish Bank was bailed out by the Irish government. The car industry has also been hit with renewed calls from some on the left for its nationalisation. However, governments do not nationalise industries because ministers heed the calls of small leftist groups. They do so because of a need to prevent a banking collapse and its inevitable consequences – economic disaster, falling profits and the danger of social unrest. This use of state intervention by so-called free marketeers like Brown and Bush isn’t new. Accord-in to one expert, Ronald Reagan, great that defender of the individualistic free market, “presided over the greatest swing towards protectionism since the 1930s”. In essence, American workers bore the brunt of “free market discipline” whilst the rich benefited from the actions of the state. Laissez faire principles didn’t apply to the working class in that they had no freedom in opposing their exploitation. In Britain, after 17 years of Thatcherism economic gospel, public spending was still the same, 42.25% of GDP, as it had been when she took over. Meanwhile sustained attacks on the working class continued which saw the breaking of militancy and chronic levels of poverty. Unsur-prisingly, finance and industry did very well for themselves. In this recession conditions for ordinary working people are coming under further attack. Redundancies, unemployment, wage cuts, cuts in public services and home repossessions are all on the rise. Benefits are also being targeted with the unemployed, single mothers and recipients of incapacity benefit, among others, in the firing line. At JCB workers voted for a £50 a week pay cut to avoid redundancies only for the company to make workers redundant anyway. With repossessions hitting record levels the government has even had to ask banks to go easy on mortgage defaulters. So, yet again, we see attacks on working people as a small minority of fat cats get billions in state aid. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the state can have in an economic organisation, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the state cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the revolution to finish with the state. Either the revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organise themselves for due collective distribution and the state has nothing to do; or the revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the revolution has been a lie and the state would continue. Diego Abad de Santillan So, with all this state intervention, why are we no closer to a glorious socialist future? Why are we actually seeing peoples’ lives devastated by homelessness and unemployment? Simply put, nationalisation is not, and cannot be, a tool for achieving a communist society. Nationalisation by state socialist regimes has never eliminated capitalism. In the Soviet bloc there were superficial differences with the West. Most capital was owned by the state; there was no free >>> market in labour; the poor had the “right to work”. Fundamentally though, the conditions of life for the working class were the same as in the West. Capitalism still existed, because workers sold their labour power and consequently were dispossessed of the means to freely create the conditions of life. As in the West, there was a ruling class which lived off the surplus produced by the workers – this class consisted of a central Party elite which owned the state. Peter Kropotkin argued that: Everywhere the State has been, and still is, the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses. Nowhere, since States have grown up, have the masses had the freedom of resisting the oppression by capitalists. . . The state has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter. It has always granted him protection in robbery, given aid and support for further enrichment. And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions – the chief mission – of the State. So when left wing groups today call for the nationalisation of the banks and other industries (as the Socialist Party of England and Wales and their local councillors do) they are not arguing for socialism. After all, state intervention Has historically been a way to save capitalism from itself as it expands and dominates. After a decade of the Labour Party claiming there was no alternative to the free market, an alternative was soon found once the capitalism system faced the threat of collapse. Thus we argue for the socialisation of the economy, not its nationalisation. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

Review of George Orwell’s 1984 stage show

Last night in Hertford a tory county town if ever there was one I went to see a stage show adaptation of George Orwell’s Science fiction come political story of 1984. I wasn’t sure what to expect turning up having read the audio book before and really enjoying it and its deep and dark storyline I was unsure how the story would translate to the stage. I was not disappointed from the word go the actors on stage not many of them by the way two main characters Winston Smith and Julia his partner who works for the “party” develop a relationship together away form the prying eyes of “big brother”. The sub plot is of George Orwell’s 1984 story which details his ideas and horrors of fascism and Stalinism which in 1940’s was very real and taking over large areas of the globe at frightening rates. The ideas of the thought police, double speak, constant surveillance and keeping to a party line are quite interesting I found as in many ways you can see this in today’s society with news outlets such as the BBC who carry out the governments line/propaganda everyday with little to no scrutiny or alternative put despite their claims of impartiality . At the interval I could hear people in the seats behind me discussing how similar and freaky this feels to today and that society is crumbling around our very eyes with greater powers to the police including secret courts being pushed through into law very soon if the Tories get their way all add to the feeling that George Orwell’s predictions or premonitions were more real than even he could have imagined 60 odd years ago. You really got the feeling even if you couldn’t see the play like myself who is blind the atmosphere of the production and the sense of fear that George Orwell tried to get across that if you stepped out of line under the system you could find yourselves in huge trouble and even torture as the final part of the story details. The idea of room 101 which the popular TV show today shows is your worst fears which will force you to submit to the will of the party and the leader as it were I imagine Stalinism was very much like this with the left opposition leaders in Russia who kept their principles along with Leon Trotsky fighting for greater democracy and keeping to the original ideas of the October 1917 revolution which Lenin and Trotsky so bravely lead the working class to power. In parts the play was quite dark when Winston Smith the main character in the story was being tortured and interrogated to his thought crimes of rebelling against Big Brother and for some it borders on scary for a time but the atmosphere of this is very well done with the eventual breaking of the man to thinking the way of the party and the party line once he is “reformed”. This reminded me very much of the Water boarding episodes the US and British governments were accused of using during the Iraqi invasion to gain intelligence from the Taliban. A lot of this play reminded me that in any revolution the workers must have democracy at all times and the leaders of any movement must be accountable to those who they claim to represent. The degeneration of the Russian revolution reminds us of the need to ensure socialism is international and not isolated like Russia was. We live in a far more advanced world today and the likelihood of a violent revolution is fewer. But we must be aware any attempts for the workers to gain power will be fought with resistance from the ruling class’s who fear the loosing of their wealth and ultimately power. I’d highly recommend going to see George Orwell’s 1984 for its storyline but also its political messages. Just after the interval you get to hear George Orwell’s idea of a class structure which is still relevant today the idea of a Lowe class middle class and a high class and their constant struggle is as relevant today as ever. A timely reminder of the tasks in front of us today as socialists.

How Stalinism distorts Marxism

Stalinism as an ideology is a dieing set of ideas but for decades it distorted the true ideas of Marx Engels and Lenin too. I thought I’d give some examples and explained perhaps why the Stalinists looked to distort the real ideas of Marxism over the years. Stalinism basically the safe guarding of the bureaucracy the elite in the labour movement quite often was something born out of Stalins ideas in the Soviet Union. Those who like to draw the conclusion that Lenin’s ideas were carried on to their natural conclusion by Stalin are completely incorrect in many ways. Stalin was a brutal dictator and abused Marxism to fit in with his own agenda unlike Stalin Lenin was a big supporter of debate and discussion rather than persecution and murdering your opponents who seem to be a threat to your leadership. Lenin debated with them, fiercely demanding high standards of evidence and principle in his opponent’s arguments, always calling people to task for unclear, illogical, factually weak positions. He brought the best out in people, who on their own were fatally flawed. He even threatened to resign several times in order to make his points. Lenin was a master of Marxism at the global level, European wide level, national, regional and city by city level. One of Lenin's most powerful accomplishments was his ability to translate Marxism to the individual and personal level and then return to broad general points, not just "What is to be done" but what is to be done by you and I right now. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin, in leadership by himself, with his cynical tendency unchecked, then gutted Marxism's emphasis on carefully considered revolutionary action. Stalin's disastrous political line equating the Social Democrats as an equal danger to the fascists was a prejudiced course of action reflecting his cynicism about the Social Democrats rather than a careful examination of them. Stalin did not abandon this ill-conceived perspective until after it was too late to stop Hitler. As Lenin might have put it, the "What is to be done?" was replaced by "Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder." Stalin replaced Marxian dialectics with a mechanistic version that emphasized the "inevitability" of socialism in place of Karl Marx's stark choice for revolutionaries in "The Communist Manifesto," "a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes" (CW Marx Engel’s V 6 pp.482). For Marx the possibility of terrible defeat was so real that all prejudice and intellectual short cuts had to be abandoned because each serious choice in a crisis that revolutionaries make on the "ground they have been given" can lead to advance or "the common ruin of the contending classes." Stalin's disastrous line equating Social Democracy as an equal enemy to the workers movement as Fascism was so clearly prejudiced and filled with intellectual short cuts that it can only be explained, at least in part, by the same character flaws that Lenin wanted Stalin removed as Secretary General of the Communist Party for in 1922. All revolutionaries have to accept "the ground they have been given" such as the militarized imperialism and ferocious racism in Germany in 1932, but Marxists have no excuse to abandon careful analysis for cynical prejudice. We have no excuse now nor should we excuse Stalin. Stalinism doesn’t see Marxism as a guide to action more an excuse to batter your opponents with. Using revolutionary language doesn’t make you a revolutionary its in your actions that your judged and Stalin and Stalinists today do not apply genuine Marxism only a bastardised version of it with rigid dogma out dated and used to sure up their own positions in the labour movement and the unions. Stalinism also subscribes to the stagiest theory that we must have a period of growth under capitalism first and deal with a socialist revolution at some undefined point in the future in essence this point never comes as its all about Suring up your own positions and fearing the working class Justas much if not more than the capitalist class. This was the case in the Soviet Union where great purges and mass killings took place to put down workers revolts to quash dissent. This is not socialism and has nothing in common with Marxism we follow today. Its brutal dictatorship looking to up hold its own privileged positions. Thankfully Stalinism is all but dead today in the labour movement mass communist parties around the world are dieing if they haven’t already. In their place we must fight to build new workers party true and democratic with a right to free speech and critical thinking without the fear of reprisal.

How Lenin looked to deal with bureaucracy

"In the last period of his life Lenin was desperately concerned about the growth of bureaucracy in the Soviet state and in the Party." Lenin feared for the party and the Russian state and could sense Stalin’s rise and him concentrating more and more power in his hands. Many people understand wrong the definition of bureaucracy today many believe bureaucracy" as if it were simply a matter of "bureaucratic behavior", excessive red-tape, officialdom, etc. Such an approach has nothing in common with the Marxist method, which explains bureaucracy as a social phenomenon, which arises for definite reasons. Lenin, approaching the question as a Marxist, explained the rise of bureaucracy as a parasitic, capitalist growth on the organism of the workers' state, which arose out of the isolation of the revolution in a backward, illiterate peasant country. Lenin’s ideas did not grow into Stalinism as many opponents of socialism tell us. Stalinism was a rise of the bureaucracy which h fed off of the degeneration of the Russian workers state. In one of his last articles, Better Fewer but Better, Lenin wrote: "Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, not yet reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the past." (Works, vol. 33, page 487) The October revolution had overthrown the old order, ruthlessly suppressed and purged the Tsarist state; but in conditions of chronic economic and cultural backwardness, the elements of the old order were everywhere creeping back into positions of privilege and power in the measure that the revolutionary wave ebbed back with the defeats of the international revolution. Engels explained that in every society where art, science and government are the exclusive of a privileged minority, then that minority will always use and abuse its positions in its own interests. And this state of affairs is inevitable, so long as the vast majority of the people are forced to toil for long hours in industry and agriculture for the bare necessities of life. After the revolution, with the ruined condition of industry, the working day was not reduced, but lengthened. Workers toiled ten, twelve hours and more a day on subsistence rations; many worked weekends without pay voluntarily. But, as Trotsky explained, the masses can only sacrifice their "today" for their "tomorrow" up to a very definite limit. Inevitably, the strain of war, of revolution, of four years of bloody Civil War, of a famine in which five million perished, all served to undermine the working class in terms of both numbers and morale. The NEP stabilized the economy, but created new dangers by encouraging the growth of small capitalism, especially in the countryside where the rich "kulaks" gained ground at the expense of the poor peasants. Industry revived, but, being tied to the demand of the peasantry, especially the rich peasants, the revival was confined almost entirely to light industry (consumer goods). Heavy industry, the key to socialist construction, stagnated. By 1922 there were two million unemployed m the towns. Immediately after the seizure of power, the only political party which was suppressed by the Bolsheviks was the fascist Black Hundreds. Even the bourgeois Cadet Party was not immediately illegalized. The government itself was a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries. But, under the pressure of the Civil War, a sharp polarization of class forces took place in which the Mensheviks, SRs and "Left SRs" came out on the side of the counter-revolution. Contrary to their own intention, the Bolsheviks were forced to introduce a monopoly of political power. This monopoly, which was regarded as an extraordinary and temporary state of affairs, created enormous dangers in the situation where the proletarian vanguard was coming under increasing pressure from alien classes. In relation to Stalin, Lenin writes that "Comrade Stalin having become General Secretary has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution." Repeatedly, Lenin characterized the bureaucracy as a parasitic, bourgeois growth on the workers' state, and an expression of the petty-bourgeois outlook - which penetrated the State and even the Party. The petty-bourgeois reaction against October was all the more difficult to combat because of the exhausted state of the proletariat, sections of which were also becoming demoralized. Nonetheless, Lenin and Trotsky saw the working class as the only basis for a struggle against bureaucracy, and the maintenance of a healthy workers' democracy as the only check on it. Thus, in one article Purging the Party Lenin wrote: "Naturally, we shall not submit to everything the masses say because the masses, too, sometimes - particularly in time of exceptional weariness and exhaustion resulting from excessive hardship and suffering - yield to sentiments that are in no way advanced. But in appraising persons, in the negative attitude to those who have "attached" themselves to us for selfish motives, to those who have become "puffed-up commissars" and "bureaucrats", the suggestions of the non-Party proletarian masses and, in many cases, of the non-Party peasant masses, are extremely valuable." (Works, vol. 33, page 39) As the bureaucracy became more remote from the working class within Russia, so it increasingly gave up confidence in the proletariat abroad. The Communist International was transformed into an agency of the bureaucracy's foreign policy. Searching for national security, the bureaucracy began to play a counter-revolutionary role on the world arena. The perspective for an independent struggle for socialism was abandoned. In an effort to provide theoretical, 'Leninist' justification, Stalin exhumed Lenin's old formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. In other words, they returned to the policy they had supported at the beginning of 1917 - before they had been defeated by Lenin in the struggle within the party. The revival of this discredited policy was applied with disastrous results to the Chinese revolution of 1925-26. Against the wished of the leadership of the Chinese Communists, the Stalinist bureaucracy imposed a policy of subordination to the Chinese bourgeoisie led by Chiang Kai-cheek and the Kuomintang. This led to the defeat of China's dynamic working class, with the massacre of thousands of Communists and militants. Since then, the same policy has been applied with the same disastrous results. In the post-Second World War period the ex-colonial lands have experienced a series of revolutionary upheavals. The communist party leaders, still dominated by Stalinist ideology, have invariably subordinated the workers' organizations to the interests of national-capitalist leaders. In many cases this has meant support for Bonapartist, including military bonapartist leaders. Sukharno in Indonesia, Kassim in Iraq, Gonclaves in Portugal - the list could be extended around the world many times. Lenin stood for all workers officials to only receive the wage of a skilled worker, an immediate right to recall, a rotation of tasks to not get too bogged down in one position for too long and for all officials to be accountable to their members. These policies we still stand by today in the socialist party and look to popularise them in our fight against bureaucracy and for the most open democracy at all times with thin the labour movement. With extracts taken from Lynn walsh’s introduction to Lenin’s April thesis and Ted Grant and Alan woods lenin’s fight against bureaucracy

misrepresenting socialism, answering the critics

Socialism is a system that is often misrepresented on purpose and accidentily by various groups of people.

If you’re a capitalist or a person who supports capitalism you will look for any way at all to discredit Marxism and socialism that it cannot work and is doomed to failure.

I thought I’d look at some of the most common attacks that are made on socialists and others who see a future in a alternative system of socialism.
People tend to accept as true the things they hear over and over again. But repetition doesn't make things true. Because the truth and the facts often contradict "common knowledge", socialists have to show that "common knowledge" is wrong. That takes more words than just accepting the status quo.

How would a socialist economy work?
Under capitalism, institutions where immense wealth is concentrated (corporations) run the economy, exploiting working people to increase their own concentrated wealth. The essence of a socialist economy is to flip this relationship upside-down, with working people running the economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to enrich their lives. To do this, we would have to take over all the biggest banks and corporations and put their resources into public ownership and democratic control.

Employing those out of work and reallocating investment and jobs towards social priorities – healthcare, education, clean energy, etc. – would give a huge boost to productivity and wealth in society. Democratic planning of the economy would allow us to make sure everyone had a good-paying job, high-quality health care, free education at all levels, and, of course, basic physical necessities like food and housing. It wouldn’t be limited to just the basics, though; we could choose to invest in empowering people to make music, art, writing, film, fashion, and all sorts of other forms of cultural development.

This type of economic system would require conscious planning, but this is already true to a large extent under capitalism. Corporations, with economies larger than entire countries are able to plan out their levels of production, spread of distribution, pricing schemes and so on without falling to pieces, so there’s no reason working people shouldn’t be able to do the same.

The difference is that planning under capitalism is fractured, incomplete and undemocratic, with the goal of maximizing profit for the individual firm. Under socialism, we could structure investment of the world’s wealth with a big picture, bird’s eye view of the whole economy, with the goal of fulfilling human needs, sustaining the environment and enabling a liberated human existence.

A socialist economic system would have to be globally integrated. This is also the case already under capitalism, where we live in a globally interdependent world. Right now globalization on a capitalist basis means brutal exploitation of the weaker economies, and a race to the bottom for workers everywhere. Under socialism, global economic integration would be part of the plan to enrich people’s lives on a global scale.

A socialist economy would handle the environment very differently. Today, companies don’t care about environmental costs because they are able to externalize them onto the public. The costs associated with contaminated air and drinking water are real, but they don’t show up as a red number on Monsanto’s balance sheet. That is why no corporation will ever undertake the necessary steps to save the environment on the basis of “free market” principles.

Democratic planning of the economy would eliminate the profit motive behind externalizing the costs of pollution. Instead, efficiency, environmental sustainability and meeting the basic needs of all would form the core principles of economic decision-making. Instead of inadequate measures like energy-efficient light bulbs and recycling-awareness programs, a socialist economy could invest in completely overhauling the way everything is produced, utilizing all the latest green technologies for maximum sustainability and creating millions of jobs in the process.

How would a socialist democracy work?
As most of us currently experience it, “democracy” boils down to voting once every couple years for which wealthy career politician will make all the decisions for us. Of course, there’s nothing democratic about this at all, especially when the whole process is corrupted by corporate money.

In contrast, socialist democracy would take place day to day, week to week, in every workplace, school and community. Workers would rotate management tasks, and elected managers would be subject to recall and replacement whenever the workers saw fit. All decisions could be overturned by majority vote.

School curriculum and policy would be jointly agreed upon by parents, teachers and students, rather than imposed by distant administrators and bureaucrats. Neighborhood assemblies would decide who is and is not empowered with policing authority and instruct elected officers how to prioritize their efforts.

All investment and economic decisions should be made democratically. Workplace and neighborhood assemblies would elect representatives to massively expanded local and regional councils, which in turn would elect national representatives. Elected representatives should have no special privileges or pay above their electorate, and they should be subject to instant recall.

In order to facilitate this process of democratic decision-making, there should be space roped off in regular work and school schedules for decision-making meetings and discussions. With the increased wealth created, the work-week could be shortened without loss of pay to allow people time and energy to become engaged politically, and to pursue their other life goals outside work and school.
Wouldn’t a bureaucratic elite just take over?
Undoubtedly, in the first stages of a socialist society, a struggle against careerists and corruption within the system would be necessary. The poisonous ideological baggage inherited from centuries of class rule would not just fade away overnight. However, by establishing public ownership of society’s productive resources, eliminating privileges, and creating bottom-up structures of democratic management and control, the obstacles to prevent aspiring bureaucrats seizing power would be immense.

The main example driving fear of a bureaucratic takeover is Stalin seizing power in the Soviet Union only a few years after Russia’s working-class revolution in 1917. This tragic degeneration of the Russian Revolution is something Marxists have grappled with in numerous books. The basic conclusion supported by a serious historical analysis is that this degeneration was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of particular circumstances.

Russia was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of its revolution, and it was even further devastated when the deposed capitalist rulers, backed by 21 foreign armies, tried to violently retake power from the democratic workers’ movement, resulting in a bloody civil war. Though revolutions took place elsewhere across Europe, most notably Germany, they were all defeated, leaving Russia poor, broken and alone.

This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built. The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from?

It was this vacuum of workers’ power from below, fueled by the isolation and economic starvation of the country, that spawned the bureaucratization of Russian society and the rise of Stalin as this bureaucracy’s dictatorial figurehead. Even then, it was not a natural progression. Stalin had to jail, murder, exile, or otherwise force into submission literally millions of people whose only crime was adherence to the democratic principles of the 1917 revolution.

This experience shows the importance of building the fight for socialism as a global movement. Because of imperialist plundering of resources around the world, some countries may lack a stable economic basis for socialism, and will need to trade with and get help from the richer countries. If Russia had been joined by a successful revolution in even one other country, such as Germany, history would have turned out very differently.
Wouldn’t it be easier to reform capitalism?
Unfortunately, contrary to official accounts, the history of capitalism is not one of consistent progress towards ever loftier heights of democracy and prosperity. Rather, every serious reform has required mass struggle, often shaking the system to its core.

Reforms are not granted out of the kind hearts of well-meaning politicians, but are concessions grudgingly granted to appease or distract rising movements of working people hungry for real change. Whether we’re talking about civil rights, the weekend off, or the right to organize a union, every one of these required an all-out fight against the profit-driven logic of capitalism, where countless innocents were murdered by elites desperate to put down their struggles.

Under capitalism, even these partial reforms are not permanent, not a foothold or new baseline to work from. As we have seen in the last few decades, the capitalists and their politicians will roll back reforms as soon as they think they can get away with it.

Social programs that people fought tooth and nail for in the past are being dismantled or undermined via budget cuts. After almost destroying unions in the private sector already – where less than 7% of workers in the US are in a union – corporate politicians in state after state are now going after the public sector, where over a third of workers are still unionized.

A stable basis for ongoing reforms will require working people to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and wield it themselves – that is, overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. There’s no way around it; the fight for reforms and the struggle for socialist transformation are one and the same.
Socialism sounds great on paper, but is it realistic?
The only constant in history is uninterrupted change. From ancient slave states to the feudal landowner lordships to the global capitalist system of today, people have repeatedly overthrown old systems after they became a brake on progressive development. The truly unrealistic and utopian idea is that problems like war, poverty and environmental devastation will be solved on the basis of capitalism.

Though socialism is realistic, it’s not inevitable. Again and again, crisis-ridden capitalism has forced workers and the oppressed into revolutionary uprisings. Several have happened in the last year, most prominently in Egypt and Tunisia. But while many revolutions succeed in toppling governments, few have achieved system change. Capitalism will always find a way out on the backs of workers, youth and the poor if we fail to replace it with something better.

That’s where socialists come in: We take seriously the study of history, learning from both defeats and successes of revolutions and mass movements. We aim to spread these lessons widely so that future revolutions succeed in establishing socialism. That doesn’t just mean reading a lot of books. It means actively building and engaging with the movements that exist right now, boldly bringing in socialist ideas while learning from others in struggle, working out the way forward together.

If you agree with these ideas, consider joining the Socialist Party today.

North Korea, a gross distortion of what socialism is

The death of the long time Stalinist dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Ilwww.
, brings no relief to the workers of the country. They suffered many years under Japanese occupation (1905-1945), then during the Korean war (1953-1955) and many, many years of the most ruthless Stalinist rule. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy of North Korea suffered setbacks and it is estimated that more than two million people lost their lives during famines at the end of the 1990s. North Korea is now one of the poorer countries in the world, but until well into the 1970s, the income per head of the population was higher than in South Korea.

Stalinist rule in North Korea adheres to the “Juche“ ideology, of ‘self-sufficiency’. The North is unsuitable for food production, because it is mountainous and cold. It has many minerals in its soil, even quite rare ones. The Chinese government prefers the present regime because it gives them relatively easy access to these minerals, and North Korea provides it with a buffer. If North Korea ceased to exist, China would border a country that houses a large contingent of American military forces.

For Japan and South Korea, the presence of the Stalinist regime is discomforting, but it provides a useful excuse for obscene military expenditure. One of North Korea’s military trump cards is that it possesses a nuclear bomb. This seems to be a fairly primitive thing, like the American nuclear bombs in their early stages of development. It is probably too big to fit on a missile, but the North Koreans conducted two test blasts after the US invasion of Iraq, to show the world that they too had the bomb. North Korea’s large land force is meant to defend the country and to repress the population; there is no credible air force or navy.

Most of the expenditure of North Korea is on its military apparatus. This will not change. The new leader, Kim Yong Un, is young and there is no doubt that the military council will firmly hold on to the reins of power. If they do not fall prey to dissension, they could hold on to power for quite a while - the regime has shown itself to be quite tenacious. The regime has effectively isolated the country and ruthlessly repressed any independent working class activity.

Life in North Korea is a nightmare for workers: a harsh struggle for survival in a country with has almost no heating and extremely low temperatures in winter, little and/or very primitive food, and almost no lighting (often one bulb for an apartment). Life is difficult for workers even if you do not take into account the horrendous repression, the concentration camps, the controls over the family and the workplaces, the total lack of information (mobile phones and internet are prohibited) and the ubiquitous secret police.

The death of this tyrant has again provided the representatives of capitalism with an excuse to besmirch the ideas of socialism, despite the brutal reality that this regime, among the most horrific and oppressive band of despots ever to have falsely bore the name. The CWI stands for a struggle to overthrow the brutal corrupt Stalinist dynasty, an integral part of the international struggle to end the poverty, repression, dictatorship and conflict which dominates the region. Asia, through mass struggle. Such a struggle to establish a workers’ democracy and genuine socialism in Korea, based on the democratic control of government, and planning of the economy, may seem far away at this point in time, but like the North Korean football team, the Korean workers always manage to surprise.



with extracts by Gerbrand Wisser, Ofensief (CWI in Netherlands)

Is human nature a barrier to socialism ?

This excellent article posted on the Committee for Workers International website this afternoon answers many of the questions i am asked day in day out as a socialist. The idea that socialism can never work as as humans its not in our nature to work and help eachother. This article below from a American comrade looks to answer these points in a brillinatly put way.

Aren’t people motivated by money? Wouldn’t socialism stifle hard work and innovation?

Canyon Lalama, Socialist Alternative (CWI USA)

The world is a mess. War, poverty, and oppression are now part of the daily lives of billions round the globe. Even during the last boom 80% of the world’s population – 5.4 billion people – lived on less than $10 a day. Now that the world is in the midst of this crisis even the head of the World Bank has said it will result in “a human and developmental calamity… the number of chronically hungry people is expected to climb over 1 billion this year”. The wars in the middle east, enviromental destruction and worsening economic turmoil are only the most recent striking examples of the crises facing humanity.

At the root of this suffering is the economic, social, and political system of capitalism. Capitalism has given rise to large multinational corporations that are locked into a system of cut-throat competition, where corporations single-mindedly pursue short-term profits, power, and resources, regardless of the human cost.

Corporations and imperialist countries may have taken over the world, but millions of impoverished, oppressed people from Lebanon to Iraq, Venezuela to Mexico, are fighting back. Since the outbreak of the international economic crisis movements of workers and young people, in the more advanced capitalist countries, fighting against attcks on their living standards have shown the huge anger building up from below.

Many of the people involved in these struggles are searching for an alternative to the misery of capitalism, and many, especially in Latin America, are again beginning to turn towards socialism. However, people often come up against arguments that socialism is unrealistic because it goes against “human nature”. This article attempts to answer some of these questions about socialism.

Aren’t people motivated by money? Wouldn’t socialism stifle hard work and innovation?
In reality, it is capitalism that stifles the motivation and creativity of the majority of the population “the working class”. There is nothing more unmotivating than being forced to do the same repetitive job for 8 or 12 hours per day just to pay your bills.

As the American socialist Eugene Debs put it: “[People] do not shrink from work, but from slavery. The [person] who works primarily for another does so primarily under compulsion, and work so done is the very essence of slavery.”

After 40-plus hours of mind-numbing work and other life pressures, most workers have no time to develop their creative skills and talents. To make matters worse, under capitalism workers have no incentive to develop labor-saving inventions and more efficient methods of work. In a fiercely competitive market economy, greater labor productivity generally leads to layoffs and a more thorough exploitation of the workforce, sending profits up and workers’ living standards down.

But if workers collectively owned and managed their workplaces in a democratic socialist economy rather than taking orders from a boss, workers would be much more motivated. Every new innovation would mean either less working hours or higher living standards.

And if all jobs provided good pay, benefits, and security, people would pursue careers they enjoyed rather than jobs that just provide economic security, which would make people far more productive.

Aren’t people too greedy and selfish for socialism to work?
There is a difference between selfishness and self-interest. There is absolutely no doubt that human beings look out for their self-interests, and the struggle for socialism is completely in line with this tendency. Socialists fight to achieve a living minimum wage for all, for free national healthcare, free public education through college, affordable housing for all, and other programs that would dramatically raise the standard of living for the vast majority.

As the history of the trade union movement has shown, working people have the most power to improve our lives when we work collectively instead of desperately trying to succeed as individuals in a system rigged against us.

Ironically, it is the same pro-capitalist ideologues who preach that people are too “greedy” for socialism who then turn around to demand workers “tighten their belts for the common good” whenever they want to lower our wages, lay us off, or cut our social programs.

But self-interest is not the only thing that guides us. Take a look at the amount of people doing volunteer work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 65 million Americans volunteered in some way in 2005.

After Hurricane Katrina, individuals around the country donated $4.25 billion to help the victims, whereas corporations donated a pitiful $400 million (Charity Navigator, 8/8/06). These figures show the enormous sacrifice and solidarity working people are capable of.

Won’t socialism result in a dictatorship like in Russia?
The monstrous bureaucratic dictatorships in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere were a complete negation of genuine democratic socialism. At the same time, it is crucial for socialists today to study the experience of the Russian revolution in order to explain the reasons behind its bureaucratic degeneration, which lay in specific historical conditions, not human nature.

The Russian revolution of 1917 was the first time the working class overthrew capitalism and started building a new socialist society. The early Soviet Union was the most democratic government the world has ever seen: ordinary workers and peasants ran society democratically through workers’ councils (called soviets). It was one of the very first countries in the world to give women full legal rights, including the right to vote and have abortions, and to legalize homosexuality.

The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, always explained it was impossible to build socialism in one country by itself, especially in the undeveloped and semi-feudal conditions of Russia. They argued the Russian revolution would only survive if it spread to the powerful capitalist countries of Western Europe.

The major imperialist powers themselves recognized that the Russian revolution was not a purely local affair, but threatened capitalism internationally. They therefore moved, along with the Russian capitalists and landlords, to instigate a bloody civil war to overthrow the new Soviet government. 21 countries, including the U.S., France, and Britain, invaded Russia to help the counter-revolution.

Decisive in the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was the wave of revolutions throughout Europe and the world, sparked by the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ call for workers to rise up against World War One. The revolutionary uprisings in Germany and across Europe brought the war to a decisive end, and compelled the ruling class internationally to withdraw their troops from Russia in order to avoid further upheavals at home.

Unfortunately, these revolutions did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism. This was because unlike in Russia there was no mass revolutionary party that was willing to lead the revolutions through to completion. Instead, the mass working-class parties in Europe were dominated by reformist leaders who played a decisive role in saving capitalism.

So, while the Soviet Union defeated the attempt at counter-revolution, it remained isolated. The bloody civil war left the country in shambles with the masses exhausted, unemployed, and hungry. This laid the basis for the rise of a conservative, bureaucratic caste. The bureaucracy, centered around Stalin, consolidated power in its hands in the 1920s and 1930s and demolished the democratic rights the Russian working class had won.

The many revolutions in the neocolonial world and Europe that subsequently took place unfortunately looked to Russia as an example to follow, and the Soviet government was able to export their Stalinist model to China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Is capitalism part of human nature?
The ruling class would have us believe that capitalism or class society is the inevitable result of human nature. While biology determines certain aspects of our behavior, human nature is not a permanent, unchanging thing that magically fell from the sky. How we act, and how we relate to the world and each other, develops in response to the changing material conditions of society and our relationship to the natural world.

For millions of years, people lived in egalitarian, nomadic hunter-and-gatherer societies. Food, shelter, and the necessities of survival were equally shared throughout society. Only after the agricultural revolution, when nomadic tribes settled down to cultivate crops, did a surplus of wealth develop that allowed a ruling class to arise for the first time in history.

Various ruling classes since then have claimed that it was “human nature” for one person to own another as a slave, or for there to be a divine king appointed by God to rule over everyone else. Today people would rightly dismiss this as utter nonsense!

By harnessing modern technology to provide for everyone, socialism would create the material basis for human culture to change in the most fundamental way. Instead of a society that rewards the most vicious and greedy, a socialist society would develop a new culture based on equality and justice.

Decisions would be made democratically, not by electing one capitalist party or the other every five years but by regular working people making decisions themselves through mass meetings and direct elections. People in power, such as managers and public representatives, would be elected, subject to instant recall, and paid only the average wage of the people they represent.

Shortening the workweek, sharing out the work with the unemployed, and providing for people’s basic needs would liberate women and men to finally take control over their lives and pursue all forms of creative and intellectual endeavors, unleashing humanity’s vast creative potential.

20 years on from the fall of the soviet union, Claire Doyle of the CWI takes a look back at events

Clare Doyle, International Secretariat of the CWI

This week-end marks the 20th anniversary of the attempted military coup in the Soviet Union. It took place at a time of economic, social and political turmoil within, and outside the USSR. Aimed at preventing the break-up of the Soviet Union, its failure actually led to a dramatic speeding up of that very process. This attempted political counter-revolution by old-time Stalinists led on directly to the victory of the capitalist counter-revolution, the disintegration of the USSR and the rapid rise of a new class of super-rich capitalist oligarchs.

Clare Doyle looks at the dramatic events of 19 to 21 August 1991 and what followed.



Barricades next to the "Supreme Soviet" during the coup

In the early hours of 19 August, 1991, tanks and armoured cars began to move from the outskirts of Moscow towards the Kremlin. An announcement was made by the news agency TASS that Michail Gorbachev, secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and president of the state, was no longer able to carry out his duties "for health reasons". He had been replaced by his deputy, Gennady Yanayev, a representative of the ’Old Guard’ within the ruling ’communist’ party.

A statement was broadcast that banned all gatherings of three or more people as well as all social and sporting events. A ’State Committee for an Emergency Situation’ (GKChP) was supposedly in charge with a general, a police chief and a minister of defence amongst them. Their stated aim was to "save the Soviet Union from fratricide and civil war".

All normal radio and TV programmes were suspended. No news was given. The only thing shown on television, repeated throughout the day, was the ballet, Swan Lake – a familiar tactic of the Stalin era for blotting out awkward news.

At five o’clock, the coup ’leaders’ held a press conference with Yanayev in the centre repeating rehearsed phrases and with hands shaking! Already the putschists were aware of the mounting opposition to their plans. The control over the army and special forces that they thought they could rely on was not guaranteed.

Mass defiance
Far from cowering in their homes, however, hundreds, then thousands of people made their way to the buildings that housed the elected authorities - in Moscow the White House, home of the Russian Federation’s parliament, and in Leningrad, the Marinsky Palace where the local council was based. Barricades were erected from whatever was available - overturned buses in Moscow, cement-mixers from building sites in Leningrad. Weapons were stock-piled inside the buildings in case armed confrontation was necessary. The people who turned out to defy the putschists were determined not to see the clock of history turned back, the old Stalinist regime re-imposed and all promise of democratic change erased.

Boris Yeltsin, elected president of the Russian Federation, had been pushing for ‘reforms’ which would clear the path for the re-introduction of capitalism. They would mean misery for workers but in true Bonapartist fashion, he would lean on workers at this time of crisis. Hypocritically he borrowed from the workers’ movement the idea of a general strike to use as a battering ram with which to defeat the ’putsch’. Workers anyway, across the Soviet Union, were already walking out of their workplaces in readiness for a fight.



In Moscow, soldiers were already defecting. Later whole divisions would come over. Yeltsin famously stood on a tank amidst the crowds that had assembled at the White House to voice total defiance of the GKChP and rally the forces. Hundreds of thousands made their way to the Russian parliament building (– the same building that just two years later, Yeltsin himself was to bombard with tanks! (See Yeltsin obituary on this site).

Anatoly Sobchak, Mayor of Leningrad, called for a mass demonstration in Winter Palace Square for the next morning, 20th August. Up to half a million people made their way to this historic site to learn how the coup leaders could be defeated. One day later the GKChP was falling out and falling apart.

Some saw the attempt at a coup by this layer as a necessary and ’progressive’ step to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union and to halt the process of privatisation and a return to capitalism. Some still do. The Russian Communist Party under the long-time Stalinist, Gennady Zyuganov, is holding a commemoration of the event. They say none of the problems of today in Russia would exist if the coup had succeeded!

It was very rapidly becoming clear at the time that Yanayev and Co. did not have a chance of succeeding. They would not prove capable of holding on by force to a centrally planned state-owned economy already in crisis. The bloated, 20 million strong bureaucracy sat like a gigantic parasite on the back of the workers’ state. When stagnation beset the economy, those they had held in submission for generations began to move against them.



Workers in the USSR, at the end of the 1980s had seen their economy slowing down to a snail’s pace compared with the past. Many had welcomed the ’perestroika’ and ’glasnost’ introduced by Gorbachev in an attempt to breathe new life into the bureaucratically overburdened planned economy. They had begun to taste at least some elements of change. There were new consultative committees in the workplaces where grievances could be aired. Management could be challenged. There had been elections of new leaderships in the republics and a campaign vigorously promoted by Yeltsin, for parties other than the ruling ’communist’ party to be able to organise and stand in elections.

The position of the CWI members in the USSR in August 1991 was to actively oppose the coup but to give no truck to the policies of Yeltsin and co. who clearly wanted to push ahead with wholesale privatisation and wipe out all elements of a state-owned planned economy. Independent action by the working class – strikes and a struggle for a workers’ government - would have been the best way to defeat both the coup and the pro-capitalists and to take society forward. But there was no force or party with any weight in society advocating this.

As the CWI document ’Revolution and Counter-revolution in the Soviet Union’ put it (para 53):

„During the coup therefore, the Marxists in the USSR called for support for the general strike, not on the programme of Yeltsin (for the return of Gorbachev and the continuation of the market reforms), but to defeat the coup with a revolutionary programme for workers’ democracy. We explained that the limited democratic rights of the last period could only be safeguarded by the working class taking power. We called for the building of democratic workers’ committees, arming of the workers and an appeal to the rank and file soldiers.”



Doomed to defeat
The ’emergency council’ had the idea of protecting the planned economy from the onslaught of the privatisers but, without democracy from below, it had become unviable to maintain it. Their statement spoke of the need to ’protect all forms of property’. But they clearly did not want to see the end of state ownership of industry and finance for fear of the consequences for themselves and the system that had sustained them until now. They saw Yeltsin, Gaidar and Co, even Gorbachev, as a threat to the old way of doing things. The putschists thought they could defeat this layer simply by using the only instruments at their disposal - the forces of the state. And these crumbled in their hands! Their ’take-over’ did not even last three days.

They had not learned from the experience of Jaruzelski in Poland who in 1981 had moved against Solidarnosc and imposed military rule but had failed in his attempt to re-establish the old Stalinist regime. He had found it impossible to save the planned economy by force and abandoned the attempt.

The coup leaders had put Gorbachev under house arrest at his Summer retreat on the Black Sea. Within three days he was in Moscow. The president of the Soviet Union arrived in the capital, beholden to the president of the Russian Federation. Nominally he remained head of state. In fact, he never recovered his full power and status. By the end of 1991 (25 December) he was making a televised speech resigning as president of an almost non-existent entity. This would then be seen as the final ratification of the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.



19 August

What was the background?
The disintegration of the Soviet Union was already in process before the attempted coup. It ran parallel with the growth of major economic problems. An agreement known as the Byelavezha Accords or ’New Union Treaty’, establishing a looser federation of states, was to be signed on 20 August. The coup leaders could see their power base disappearing. The ‘shock therapy’ wing of the bureaucracy who wanted to take the fast-track route to the restoration of capitalism, was gaining the upper hand. Gorbachev was floundering – not sure how to proceed. His popularity had plummeted to 14% in the polls.

He had promoted reforms to try to prevent an explosion from below and to retain the state-owned planned economy intact. This was the structure that had for decades provided his own caste in society with its income and privilege. Already during the miners’ strikes of 1989 he had reinstated the use of anti-strike laws. He was putting the lid back on reforms. What was the alternative?

Boris Yeltsin had already been elected president of the Russian Federation, against the wishes of the hardliners, and was eroding the powers of Gorbachev and the Union. Yeltsin most forcefully represented the growing layer within the state bureaucracy who wanted to proceed more and more rapidly with the ’transition to the market ’ - to the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. He was popular amongst workers, including miners in Vorkuta, in the Kuzbas and in the Donbas. They had been engaged in major strike struggles to get a better return on the heavy expenditure of their Labour and had demonstrated their anger against the privileges of the bureaucracy. Yeltsin, who like to be seen as a man of the people, had supported them for his own reasons as they pushed local representatives out of office and attacked their perks and privileges sometimes literally – blocking the path of their limousines, opening up their boots full of luxury items!

The stranglehold of the Stalinist bureaucracy on society had by this time been loosened; it was split and divided on how to proceed. There was a ferment amongst the intellectuals and the middle layers in society who looked towards capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Unlike today, world capitalism was still going ahead and apparently offering opportunities for personal and cultural advancement – an escape from the nightmare under Stalinism.

The 100 million or so working class of the vast USSR - stretching across eleven time zones – was wracked with shortages of all the basic necessities of life - bread, meat, eggs, soap, toilet paper! There was no sugar, in the shops to preserve what fruit and berries could be foraged from the countryside. Mushroom-picking became a frantic exercise in survival rather than the traditional leisurely late Summer pastime.

The conditions were developing for the working class of the Soviet Union to move to throw off the vast, parasitic bureaucracy from its back and take control, through elected committees, of the state-owned, centrally planned economy and society as a whole. This had long ago, at the time of the rise of Stalin and his gang, been the programme of Trotsky, the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian revolution of October 1917. This is what led Stalin, who had crushed all those who had argued for the spread of the revolution and workers’ democracy, to send his agents to physically annihilate him.

In the long dark decades up to the 1980s, the economy of the Soviet Union had advanced dramatically, on the basis of state ownership and a plan. This was even without the ’oxygen’, as Trotsky called it, of workers’ democracy that could keep the vast state-owned system functioning healthily. Now that it was stagnating, only workers’ control and management, through totally democratic elected committees making all the planning decisions could enable it the planned economy to survive. This would have meant also fighting to establish a genuine workers’ government to clear out all that was rotten under Stalinism.



19 August 1991

No political force
What was needed was a political force that had the clear aim of carrying through a political revolution, of the working class taking over the reins of power and spreading the idea of genuine socialism internationally.

There was no such force. All opposition had been brutally suppressed, from the annihilation of the heroic Left Opposition in the ’20s, the purge trials and mass executions of the ’30s through decades of police state dictatorship; it had not been possible for such a force to develop. Now it was too late.

If, as today, capitalism was in a major crisis and held no attraction in terms of an alternative way forward, things could have been different. In the crisis in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, brought on by stagnation and political paralysis, some may have found their way towards the ideas of Trotsky - of a way out on the basis of a struggle for workers’ democracy. But this was not what happened.



22 August 1991: the end of the putsch

USSR
If the trigger for the Yanayev gang’s attempt to take power was the imminent dissolution of the USSR, the very words ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ had long been a misnomer. Set up in 1922, following the victorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Russia, it was originally a voluntary federation of states in which Tsarism, landlordism and capitalism had been overthrown. These states were on their way to establishing socialism. The soviets, at the very beginning, were the seats of real, totally democratic, power.

With Stalin’s rise to power and the crushing of all workers’ and democratic rights, the move towards genuine socialism, with an internationalist approach, was halted. Stalin and his vast state machine then held the nationalities of the Soviet Union together with a rod of iron. Whole nations were punished for representing a threat to his rule, most dramatically in the case of the Crimean Tatars and Chechens, killed in vast numbers and removed en bloc from their homelands.

In the 1980s, as the economic situation across the USSR began to deteriorate and the bureaucracy lost its raison d’etre of presiding over a growing economy, the desire to break free from Moscow domination developed in a number of republics. Neither decentralisation nor centralisation under bureaucratic centralist control could ‘deliver the goods’, satisfy the needs of the workers and poor. In the Baltics and elsewhere nationalist movements grew in strength and came out in open revolt against the centre.

Gorbachev, who now lays great stress on peace and non-intervention, had ordered troops in to hold the line, in fact to crush the movements for independence. This had failed. Lithuania, after the bloody events in Vilnius in January 1991, had simply broken away from Moscow domination.



23 August 1991

In August, as soon as it was clear that the putschists were defeated and Yeltsin had the upper hand, a whole series of Republics declared themselves independent – Estonia on the second day of the attempted coup and Latvia on the third, as the Emergency Committee itself was already collapsing. In September, Moldova, Tajikistan, Armenia and Turkmenistan declared independence. By November only four remained nominally in the Soviet Union.

Independence was being declared in the name of democracy but was being decided by a tiny handful of gangsters at the top of society - in their own interests and without the slightest reference to the wishes of the majority. In fact, it was the same cliques in power in the republics under the old regime – as heads of the Communist Parties - who transformed themselves into national, generally pro-capitalist, powers in the newly reborn states. Their aim was to get their hands on the loot that was to be had through the privatisation process. Witness Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and Shevardnaze in Georgia.

In the opinion of a Swedish economist who advised the Russian and Ukrainian governments in the early ‘90s on how to make the transition to capitalism most of the newly formed states, “are corrupt states that have as their purpose to allow the elites to enrich themselves through corruption”. He says this now; the CWI said it then!

Lukashenko in Byelorussia, has retained far more of the old state ownership but also tightened the old Stalinist methods of repression, including brutal beatings and imprisonment of journalists and oppositionists.

Back in 1991, on 8 December, the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus created the Commonwealth of Independent States which broadened out to include most ex-republics of the USSR. At the same meeting the 1922 union treaty, established under Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was annulled.

On 24 December, the Russian Federation announced it would take the place of the USSR at the United Nations, including a seat on the Security Council. On 25th of that month, after Gorbachev’s formal resignation, the red hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolour.

Parties and prospects
In Russia, the present day leaders and the people who preceded them in power, including Yeltsin, were all part of the CPSU apparatus. Suddenly, after the collapse of the coup, they became god-fearing anti-communists but used all their connections in the party and state apparatus to enrich themselves in the orgy of privatisation that swept the country.

The Communist Party itself was banned by the victors of the coup around Yeltsin. Later it reappeared with a new name - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It still had the same Stalinist leadership with no word of criticism of the old dictatorship, yet accepting capitalism as an established fact.

In today’s conditions, a new party needs to be built to give a real voice and representation to workers and young people and linking up with the task of building democratically controlled trade unions independent of the state and the bosses.



Putin and Medvedyev’s ruling party – United Russia – is the political face of Russian oligarch-ridden capitalism today. It looks set to win again at the next elections through rigging and fraudulent practices as usual. It has been described by Gorbachev recently as “authoritarian” and a “worse version of the Communist Party”. He has made it known that he favours Medvedyev for president rather than see Putin standing for a third term, but he has still praised Putin for “bringing Russia out of the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years”.

At a press conference on 18 August this year, the last man to preside over the USSR said he regretted not resigning in April 1991 and setting up a “democratic party of reform” to rival the Communist Party which was blocking the transition to capitalism. He imagines that the catastrophic collapse in the economy that followed the failed coup and the avalanche of privatisation coup could have been avoided. (It is this that the Chinese Communist Party also is desperate to avoid. It is torn between reform and repression as it tries to ride the tiger of a transition to full-blooded capitalism.)

The English Guardian of 17 August this year carries a graphic representation of what happened to the ex-soviet republics in the years immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the planned economies. Moldova’s GDP and that of Tajikistan shrank by more than 60%. That of Georgia, Ukraine, Kirgizstan, Azerbaijan and Russia itself fell by 50% and more. The second largest of the ‘new states’ – Ukraine – has never recovered a positive growth rate. In the past 20 years its average has been minus 1.4%.

Only five of the 15 newly formed states saw a growth in their population; most declined - Russia by 7 million people. Life expectancy plummeted due to poverty, insecurity and the concomitant drug and alcohol abuse. None of the five new states in Central Asia has held a genuinely free and fair election and only one in the Caucasus - Georgia. Even in that country, only two of the eleven elections it has held in the past 20 years, were deemed came into the free and fair category!

So much for capitalist democracy and progress! Many amongst the older generation of the USSR have come to regret the transition to the market; few see what the alternative could have been and can be now. With the world economy spiraling into the depths of depression, Russia will be dragged down again, in spite of its oil riches. (The price of oil is anyway falling.)

Effects and lessons

The collapse of Stalinism and the Soviet Union allowed the capitalists and their defenders to conduct a sustained ideological campaign against socialism which still has a baleful effect on the outlook of workers and young people, even those who enter struggle against the bosses and their system. For twenty years they have been told that there is no alternative to capitalism - not only by capitalist politicians but by leaders of organisations which they and their forbears painfully constructed – the trade unions and most of what once were workers’ parties. Now the task of building new powerful workers’ organisations to combat capitalism in its death throes is urgent.

All the lessons of history have to be learned and re-learned. That includes the inspirational histories of revolutionary movements but also the educational history of counter-revolutions.


Only by understanding processes, the clash of economic and social forces, can a new generation prepare for the disturbed period that lies ahead. The creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a magnificent feat, not possible without the insights and leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. Its degeneration under Stalin and his successors and its final destruction twenty years ago are deserving of study, if only to confirm the validity of Trotsky’s ideas. He foresaw in horrible detail how the capitalist counter-revolution would develop in the Soviet Union if workers were unable to carry through a successful political revolution.

A new era opens up in which the nightmares of Stalinism and its aftermath can become a thing of the past and in which successful revolutions are back on the agenda!

What effect could a collapse or shrinking of the EU have ?

We hear it all the time. the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stalinist states and the falling of the berlin wall was the defeat and the last nail in the coffin for socialism . Despite this not agreeing with how we see socialism did have a major impact on the working class and contiousness around the EU.

WIth the invention of the EU and teh common market with us being up to 25 member states now and one of the biggest if not the biggest threat to the European Union on the horizon could a similar thing occur to capitalist ideas.

Well we'd like to hope so. With the possible defaulting of Greece likely to be the fire starter for this burning flame which will start to lick at the rich nations Germany, France and the Uk no doubt this will make the ruling class tremble with fear that their system may be on the brink.

I do not ultimatly think the EU will break up totally i do think it will have to shrink to survive though. I think there are two sets of countries, The stronger ones like Germany, France and the UK but there are several nations which havent been stable for some time such as Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece.

This is the biggest worry if Greece defaults and i do ultimatly think it will even with this new austerity package forced on them it will not be able to keep up the repayment on the debt.

So i feel Greece will have to leave the EU to stablalise itself and allow itself to control its inflation and defalation of their own currency.

But would a break up or a partial break up lead to a defeat for the contiousness of the ruling class. I would suggest not as such powerful capitalist nations are still there and still growing like China and the US to some extent.

We as socialists oppose the EU as we do not feel it is democratic at all with it being run in teh interests of the capitalists and teh ruling class that they represent.

Capitalism will find anyway of surviving in a way that is its greatest feature to survivie even if that be at the expense of the working class they do not mind that.

Thi is what we are seeing now the taking back of all the gains we have made over the last 75 years to refinance their system to go again.

One of the most worrying parts for me is that when the working class has been crushed and any workers contiousness has been destroyed and this has happened before then the capitalists can play workers of different nations off against eachother. This is how dictators and world wars come about. But i wont go there but just to say one of the ways capitlaists have got themselves out of a hole is by the building and creation of something. As we all know wars cost money but can also make money. The destruction of towns and cities will all need rebuilding so what a coincidence that would be that there is money to be made there.

This is a extreme example but a example all the same of the lengths the ruling class will go to protect their system.

After the second world war there was a huge growth in GDP due to us rebuilding much of our country. This did not ultimatly serve in the workers benifit but the money makers, the boss's as per usual.

Ok the working class may have recieved concessions at the time such as the NHS but these are only given out as and when the c apitalists can afford them and are worthwhile and can be profited from.

So a interesting time is upon us many factors at play but i'd sadly never underestimate how far the ruling class will go to protect its system.

The workers contiousness which was battered down after the fall of the soviet union that people like Margret Thatcher made out socialism was dead and a workers state cannot be achieved had a desired affect. But as we feel the pinch of austerity measures many workers will be wondering does it have to be like this ?

They will be lead to the writings of such great thinkers and socialists like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky and feel inspired by their ideas.

From this we hope to gain a new generation of revolutionary thinkers which c an lead the prolitariat forward and beyond.

revolutionary ideas

This was a excellent article in issue 147 of socialism today a monthly in depth look at socialist oand trade union matters and matters the world over. This last month Peter Taaffe looks at Eric Hobsbawm recent publications and looks to set the record straight in terms of marxism and socialist ideas.
Marxism as we all know has sadly been rubbished and made out to be something it is not. Hopefully Peter in this article makes it clearer to people what marxism is and what we stand for as marxists. The capitalists have tried to rub the name through the mud but true socialists will know its true meaning even till this day. It is our job to reintroduce those ideas to the mass's.


The relevance of the ideas of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky has been underlined by recent events. Financial crisis, economic recession, savage austerity and waves of revolution are sparking new interest in socialism and Marxism. Left-wing intellectuals are keen to ride this wave. However, as PETER TAAFFE explains in this review, their writings often fall far short of providing real answers to the question, how to change the world?

How to Change the World
By Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 2011, £25
ERIC HOBSBAWM IS enjoying a revival of interest in his ideas, particularly through this book in which he sets out to ‘change the world’. This, he freely admits, arises from a growing inquisitiveness in the ideas of Karl Marx. It is a pity, however, that his book could be the first introduction to Marx’s ideas for many. Its subtitle is ‘Tales of Marx and Marxism’. They are indeed tales, because the book’s contents bear very little relationship to what Marx really stood for and how Marxism can change the world in the modern era.

Hobsbawm has a long pedigree as a Marxist academic and theoretician. He appears to recant his former position of slavish support for Stalinism, but he has not yet fully broken with its baleful heritage. He remained within the British Communist Party even after the Stalinist obscenities of the suppression of the Hungarian political revolution in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Even in this book, he continues to employ the term ‘socialist’ in relation to the former Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe, etc. In reality, these regimes were much closer to capitalism than the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky as to what constituted genuine socialism – even though they did possess the vital elements of a planned economy based on the nationalisation of the main productive forces and, therefore, were relatively progressive. To continue to describe one-party totalitarian regimes as ‘socialist’ will further the aims of bourgeois ideologists in discrediting socialism, in the eyes of the new generation in particular.

It is quite incredible that Hobsbawm relegates Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism to a minor historical role. As Terry Eagleton points out, Hobsbawm consigns "one of the most fertile currents of modern Marxism – Trotskyism – to a few casual asides". (London Review of Books, March 2011) Yet it is absolutely impossible to begin to understand the phenomenon of Stalinism without reading and understanding the works of Trotsky and the Russian and International Left Opposition on this issue. Moreover, it is not possible to approach the struggle for socialism today without clearing out of the way any apology or connection with Stalinism or totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, which are still used as scarecrows by capitalist ideologists to frighten the working class away from real democratic socialism.

This is underlined by bourgeois reviewers of Hobsbawm’s book. While praising him for his erudition, they remorselessly mention his Stalinist past. Hobsbawm "has never convincingly dispelled accusations of being an apologist for the Soviet Union [read Stalinism]", writes Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. (9 January 2011) Geoffrey Goodman, former industrial correspondent of the Daily Mirror, argues, quite mistakenly, that Hobsbawm "offers neither illusions nor excuses for the failure of Soviet communism". (Camden New Journal, 10 February 2011) But even if this were true, he offers no real explanation as to why Stalinism triumphed and effectively strangled all the ideals of the October revolution: workers’ democracy and the international goal of world socialism.

There is no mystery as to why Hobsbawm fails to do this. A rigorous examination, from the Marxist point of view, would lead him back to the analysis and conclusions advocated by Trotsky: that a political revolution against the one-party totalitarian Stalinist regimes could have saved the planned economies and re-established genuine workers’ democracy. The continuation of Stalinism, which Hobsbawm did not do anything to defeat, led to the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes and the liquidation of the planned economies, which was a massive ideological victory for world capitalism.

A revival of interest
IN THE FIRST chapter, Hobsbawm records the revival of interest in ‘Marxism’ in the recent period. Even hedge fund billionaire George Soros has praised Marx. There is no surprise in this; it is connected intimately with the current economic crisis, one of the greatest to affect the system that Soros supports, world capitalism. The capitalists, however, are more interested in Marx now because of his diagnosis of the maladies of their system rather than the remedy he recommends, socialism.

There have been times in history when the bourgeois have similarly sought to use Marx for their own ends. For instance, in pre-revolutionary Russia, bourgeois ideologists attempted to use Marx’s ideas to argue for the ‘inevitability’ of a stage of capitalism to replace tsarism. In this, they garnered the support of the Mensheviks – in the early part of the 20th century, the minority in the Russian workers’ movement – to argue that socialism was the music of the future. Vladimir Lenin and particularly Trotsky, in his famous theory of the permanent revolution, opposed this and argued that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be carried through by an alliance of the working class and the peasantry. Once having come to power, this alliance would be compelled to pass over to the socialist stage of nationalising industry, the land, etc. This, in turn, would provoke the international socialist revolution. This is what actually happened in the aftermath of the first world war and the 1917 October workers’ revolution.

But for the betrayal of the social democratic leaders, a European socialist democratic revolution would have resulted. This would have transformed the objective situation in Russia itself and eradicated the backwardness from which Stalinism was a later outgrowth. All of this is absent in Hobsbawm’s analysis.

Hobsbawm, in seeking to account for the renewed interest in Marxism, asserts that there are two reasons for this: "The first is that the end of the official Marxism of the USSR liberated Marx from public identification with Leninism in theory and with the Leninist regimes in practice". Thrown overboard in a single phrase is the colossal contribution made by Lenin, who created and led the Bolshevik party – the most democratic mass workers’ party in history – supplying the necessary ‘subjective factor’ to carry through the greatest single event in history, the Russian revolution. It is a gross bourgeois and Stalinist slander to link Lenin with the subsequent bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. Lenin and Trotsky stood for socialism – creating the basis for this in the planned economy in Russia – and workers’ democracy.

There is also an airy dismissal of the "official Marxism of the USSR", with which Hobsbawm was identified for a very long time. Again, there is an evasion of any historical analysis of this "official Marxism" which, to give it its real name, was a Stalinist distortion of genuine democratic socialism and the ideas of Marxism. So long as Hobsbawm is imprisoned in this ideological straitjacket he will continue to make some of the political mistakes evident in this book.

Take his remarks on the economic foundations of the Soviet Union: "The claim that socialism was superior to capitalism as a way to ensure the most rapid development of the forces of production could hardly have been made by Marx". This is a quite astonishing admission of this ‘scholar’s’ lack of awareness of the historical schemas traced out by Marx, and developed by the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky and their work in the October revolution and subsequently.

Socialism remains a utopian dream unless it can develop a higher productivity of labour, and is able to develop the productive forces – science, the organisation of labour and technique – onto a higher level. This is necessary, argued Marx, in the very first period of socialism, its lowest level. Its starting point should be on a higher level than the most advanced capitalist economy, for instance, the USA today. Marx summed up this idea in one of his first works, German Ideology. He wrote that, unless the productive forces could develop in a new socialist society, "want would be generalised and all the old crap would reappear". What he meant is that classes, the state, as well as the bureaucratic remnants of the old society, inequality and the rest, would exist and even grow to some extent in the ‘new society’ unless it possessed a higher economic level and productive capacity.

Is this not the reason why Stalinism developed in Russia and elsewhere? The October revolution took place under the signboard of democratic socialism, the abolition of inequality, and of a democratic workers’ state controlled by the masses with workers’ control and management. And this did exist to a great extent in the first immediate period after the October revolution – but in a ‘besieged fortress’. The Bolsheviks never perceived that this could be maintained, particularly in an economically and culturally backward society like Russia, unless the revolution spread to the west – particularly to Germany, which probably had the most industrially developed economic capacity in the world at that stage – and, ultimately, to the whole world. Therefore, all the old ‘crap’ was revived in the growth of the bureaucracy, reflected, unconsciously at first, by Stalin. The working class was elbowed aside and power concentrated in the hands of the greedy and inefficient bureaucracy. Hobsbawm seems to be ignorant of all this, leading him to discard the progressive elements of the planned economy which showed, in practice, what would be possible on the basis of a genuine workers’ democracy.

An eclectic mishmash
HOBSBAWM’S BOOK IS an eclectic mishmash, without a clear idea being pursued to the end. For instance, he states that "the traditional socialist vision of socialism [is of] essentially a non-market society, which probably Karl Marx also shared". There is no ‘probably’ about it. The idea that socialism was the answer to capitalism runs like a red thread throughout Marx’s works. What this comment really indicates is that Hobsbawm, in full flight from his previous, mistaken pro-Stalinist position, is discarding central features of Marx’s analysis, particularly relating to the goal of socialism.

This is not the first time he has engaged in such an exercise. He was the high priest of so-called ‘new realism’, which evolved from the Eurocommunist layer of the Communist Party of Great Britain, around the journal Marxism Today in the 1970s and 1980s. Neil Kinnock drew heavily on Hobsbawm’s ideas to shift the Labour Party towards the right, furnishing the basis for the expulsion of the Marxists around the Militant newspaper (now the Socialist Party) from the Labour Party. This was decisive in the emergence of Blairism, which transformed the Labour Party from a workers’ party at its base into a bourgeois formation.

Hobsbawm and the Eurocommunists saw in the decline of the industrial working class – a product of so-called ‘post-Fordism’ – an overall weakening of the labour movement, industrial militancy and class consciousness. Marxists opposed these ideas, amongst other things pointing to a growing industrial militancy of former ‘white-collar’ workers – teachers, post office workers, technical workers in offices, etc. The bourgeois were forced to attack these layers because of the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s and the need to boost their profits and increase capitalist accumulation. In the process, they undermined their social reserves. The ideas of new realism were themselves products of the overall ideological offensive of neo-liberalism – individualism against so-called ‘statism’ (privatisation, etc) – which came to full fruition after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the liquidation of the planned economies.

Hobsbawm, Kinnock and Blair were not apostles of a new ‘realistic’ adaptation to changing conditions. They represented the liquidation of the combative fighting spirit and programmatic class opposition of the labour movement to all aspects of pro-capitalist ideas and methods. Any real balance sheet of the failure of the ideas of ‘new realism’ is entirely absent from this work. Hobsbawm mentions the opportunist reconciliation of the German Social Democratic leader Eduard Bernstein to capitalism, during a boom period at the end of the 19th century. Yet he and those like him did exactly the same thing in the British labour movement in a similar period – the short economic boom in the 1980s. Moreover, they reconciled themselves to the more sustained boom of the ‘noughties’. We, on the other hand, never ceased to argue that the financialisation of world capitalism was creating massive bubbles, which would end in tears for capitalism. Our prognosis was borne out with the onset of the present devastating economic crisis, from which capitalism is finding great difficulty in extricating itself.

On almost every page, examples of praise for Marx can be found alongside thinly-veiled dismissals of some of his major conclusions. In the chapter ‘Marx Today’, on the one side Hobsbawm believes that Marx’s idea that capitalism would be superseded is "a prediction that still sounds plausible to me". In the next paragraph, he writes: "[Marx’s] prediction that industrialisation would produce populations largely employed as manual wage-workers, as was happening in England at the time… was correct enough as a middle-range prediction, but not, as we know, in the long term". On the contrary, while the industrial working class has declined in the formerly industrialised countries, given the industrialisation of China, India and Brazil, Marx’s ideas still retain their validity, from a world point of view. On a global scale, the industrial working class has probably grown in the past ten to 20 years in numbers as well as in specific weight in society.

Even if this was not the case, the proletarianisation of formerly ‘privileged’ layers means that, today, they form a substantial section of the working class who will be involved in the task of ‘expropriating the expropriators’, democratic socialism. Hobsbawm seeks to sanitise Marx’s more revolutionary conclusions, to make them more acceptable, perhaps to academia and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois public opinion. In the process, this blunts the message for workers, particularly young workers, who are engaged in a mighty struggle against capitalism.

This clearly comes out when Hobsbawm deals with the issue of the state: "The mature Marxian theory of the state was thus considerably more sophisticated than the simple equation: state equals coercive power equals class rule". Contained in these lines is the same opportunistic approach, beginning with the German Social Democratic reformists and their counterparts in Britain and France, etc, towards the problem of the capitalist state. As Hobsbawm concedes, Marx was quite clear that the working class could only take power if it were organised "as a ruling class" through "the dictatorship of the proletariat". This term did not denote, as the detractors of Marx argue, a kind of anticipation of one-party dictatorial Stalinism. Marx’s idea clearly meant what subsequently transpired in Russia in October 1917: a state organised as a ‘workers’ democracy’. For Marxists, this term is preferable today. We do not use the term ‘dictatorship’ because it conjures up visions of one-party totalitarian regimes synonymous with the idea of a socialist society.

Hobsbawm qualifies ‘his’ Marxist definition of the state: "The concept of the state as class power was modified, particularly in the light of the Bonapartism of Napoleon III in France and the other post-1848 regimes which could not simply be described as the rule of a revolutionary bourgeoisie". This is not a valid interpretation of Marx – certainly not a rounded-out one – let alone of Engels, Lenin and Trotsky on the state. Marx brilliantly described the phenomenon of Bonapartism where, because of the deadlock in the class struggle, the state is able to attain a relative independence and balance between the classes. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, it represents the "dominant economic class" which in France post-1848 was the bourgeoisie, who were not so ‘revolutionary’ at this stage. Hobsbawm seeks to water down the Marxist conception of the state in order to smuggle in the idea that the state can in some way be ‘reformed’. The struggle is seen by him as taking power away from the ruling class – the capitalists – and creating a new state. A rupture, a sharp break, is therefore not necessary to establish socialism.

Hiding behind Gramsci
THIS INFORMS HOBSBAWM’S whole approach. This is revealed in the chapter dealing with Antonio Gramsci, leader of the young Italian Communist Party (PCI) after the first world war, who was jailed by Mussolini and died in prison. Gramsci had many fine qualities. Trotsky, for instance, credits him with understanding the character of fascism – that after the victory of Mussolini in 1922, the working class, weakened and scattered, would be in for a lengthy struggle – earlier than others, including Trotsky himself. But Hobsbawm asserts that he was "the most original thinker produced in the west since 1917".

Gramsci, because of his imprisonment, was cut off from developments in Italy and internationally. Therefore, it was not possible for him to form a complete picture of the development of the workers’ movements and, particularly, of events in Russia with the rise of Stalinism. But it is no accident that Hobsbawm lights on the figure of Gramsci. He thinks he has found in some of his prison writings a theoretical explanation for both his own and the PCI’s adaptation to capitalism. Is it entirely incidental that the long-time PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, also used the alleged ideas of Gramsci to shift his party to the right? The net effect of Togliatti’s actions and those of his successors was to lead effectively to the disintegration of the once mighty PCI.

Hobsbawm’s attempts to single out the objective conditions of Italy to explain the unique character of the Italian labour movement and the figure of Gramsci are one-sided to say the least. He highlights the character of Italy combining features of backwardness and semi-feudal conditions with the elements of modernity, industry, factories in the north, etc. But Italy was not the only country, even in Europe, where the working class was a minority, with a rural population, the peasantry, together with the rest of the middle-class forming a majority. In Germany and France, the task of winning these intermediate layers to the side of the working class was also posed. Hobsbawm states that Gramsci "pioneered a Marxist theory of politics", regarding "politics as ‘an autonomous activity’." Hobsbawm invokes Gramsci to underline "the autonomous role of the superstructure in the social process, or even the simple fact that a politician of working class origin is not necessarily the same as a worker at the bench". Gramsci also sought to analyse the ideological role of "intellectuals".

Of course there is more than a grain of truth in these ideas. Politics is not an automatic reflection of the economic situation. If that was the case, the politics of the working class today would be clearly revolutionary given the devastating world economic crisis. Consciousness – which is a bedrock for a Marxist’s approach to ‘politics’ – is formed by events, together with the intervention of the organisations of the working class, and develops in a contradictory fashion. An economic crisis does not automatically lead to mass radicalisation and rising consciousness, no more than a boom lowers it. The Russian revolution of 1905-07 was followed by an economic crisis. This did not lead to a radicalisation of the masses because it came after the defeat of the revolution. On the other hand, the boom beginning in 1910, by economically strengthening the working class, laid the basis for a further upswing in the class struggle. Having said this, however, politics is not completely ‘autonomous’. Marxists are not crude reductionists. Politics, like the state itself, can retain a certain relative ‘autonomy’ for a time. But, ultimately, it is dependent on and reflects the economic fortunes of the ruling class and those of the middle class as well as the working class.

Hobsbawm betrays his real intentions in drawing on Gramsci’s alleged ideas: "Italy was a country in which, after 1917, several of the objective and even subjective conditions of social revolution appeared to exist – more so than in Britain and France and even, I suggest, than in Germany. Yet this revolution did not come off. On the contrary, fascism came to power. It was only natural that Italian Marxists should pioneer the analysis of why the Russian October revolution had failed to spread to western countries, and what the alternative strategy and tactics of the transition to socialism ought to be in such countries".

To paraphrase Trotsky, every word here is a mistake and some are two. Different objective conditions were not the primary reason that the revolution did not transpire in Europe – although there were different conditions in all the European countries, particularly compared to Russia. If anything, opportunities for revolution were greater because of the greater strength of the working class and the huge upheavals following the first world war. Nor did the failure of the revolutionary wave lie in the subjective consciousness of the working class who threw themselves against capitalism following the Russian revolution. It was entirely due to the perfidious role of the social-democratic leaders who betrayed the revolution. Hobsbawm indicates his pure Menshevism when he implies that Britain and France were not ready for revolution after 1917, ‘or even Germany’.

The German working-class movement was probably the strongest in the world outside of Russia at this stage. Between 1917-23 the German working class tried again and again to take power, throwing itself against capitalism in mighty mass movements. In 1923, the German workers, faced with a very favourable position, failed to take power because of the fatal prevarication of their leaders at a decisive moment. Hobsbawm does not even mention this. He looks for a different, easier, more ‘objective’ reason. How ironic that this book with this message is published against the background of the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa! The Egyptian and Tunisian masses ignored the nostrums of their ‘Hobsbawms’ in their chosen methods to overthrow their dictators. In the circumstances that obtained, they could take no other road. The weak bourgeois forces in each country and the region had built a brick wall against all attempts to reform the system either from above or below

Hobsbawm’s pessimism
THE CONCLUSION FROM Hobsbawm’s interpretation of Gramsci is that the gradual transformation of the state, the conquering of ‘civil society’ and a kind of ‘long march’ towards ‘changing the world’, is the only possibility for the workers’ movement. This reformist approach, where it was tried, from Spain in the 1930s to Chile in the 1970s, broke its neck against counter-revolution, which is the chosen method of the bourgeois when all else fails. They have no recourse to such methods today because they are not being seriously challenged politically by mass organisations of the working class, which have either been ‘Blairised’ out of existence or, like the trade unions, have been effectively neutered up to now by cowardly and passive leaders.

One of the positive things in the book – few in number it must be confessed – is Hobsbawm’s reference to Engels’s demand for the independence of the working class and the creation of its own organisations: "Never mind how, so long as it is a separate workers’ party", wrote Engels. This is exactly the task which the Committee for a Workers’ International has set itself around the world, in order to politically rearm the working class in the stormy battles to come. One of the reasons why this task is necessary today, 150 years after Engels first made the call, is precisely because independent organisations of the working class disappeared in the ‘noughties’, partly helped by the likes of Hobsbawm, the theoretician of the gravediggers of the old Labour Party like Kinnock.

Gramsci wrote a great deal about the role of ‘intellectuals’. He was dealing primarily with this issue from the point of view of the development of consciousness, including the dominant consciousness or ideology of the bourgeois. This general idea, which has been misunderstood by his latter-day interpreters, is an important one. The labour movement, including the Marxists, wish to influence and win the intellectuals, the best of them at least, to their side. For instance, a struggle is necessary in the state to win over technicians, the middle class in general, and even managers.

Moreover, as the present situation in Britain indicates, savage attacks on state employees – including the police and armed forces – can radicalise layers who have never seen themselves as allies of the working class. Lawyers will protest against the cuts on 26 March. Faced with attacks on their rights and conditions, they can be drawn over to the side of the labour movement. But this will not be achieved by watering down the programme of struggle, solidarity and socialism.

It is only by offering a new vista, the idea of a change in society, that state employees, as well as intellectual ‘brain workers’, will be attracted to the labour movement and, even then, not just by propaganda but by struggle. This has been underlined in all the great social movements seen in Britain, from the poll tax to the miners’ strike, etc. A similar situation can now develop in the anti-cuts movement. It is emphasised by the revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. That part of the intellectuals and youth going through universities and colleges can also be attracted to the labour movement. A significant section can be influenced and won to Marxism.

Hobsbawm writes: "Granted that in Italy and most of the west there was not going to be an October revolution from the early 1920s on – and there was no realistic prospect of one – [Gramsci] obviously had to consider a strategy for the long haul". But Hobsbawm admits that Gramsci was not committed to just this one strategy. He did not rule out a ‘frontal attack’, that is revolution, in the classical sense of October 1917. He feared the ‘integration’ of the revolutionary movement into the capitalist system. He elaborated, in the manner of Machiavelli’s idea set out in The Prince – which, for Gramsci, meant the party – a programme for the working class to establish ‘hegemony’ over other classes in the struggle for power. Ironically, this idea of ‘hegemonism’ has been interpreted in exactly the opposite sense of what Gramsci intended. It is used as a criticism, usually by anti-Marxists, against any attempt to establish the primacy of the working class and its organisations or of Marxists striving in a principled political fashion to win a majority in the organisations of the working class.

Overall, despite the title of the book, Hobsbawm is pessimistic about how to change the world. Surely, the starting point today would be how to face up to the devastating economic crisis afflicting the whole world, the deepest since the 1930s? One indication of this is that, according to the International Monetary Fund, world capitalism lost a total of $50 trillion from 2008-10, through the loss of production and the devaluation of assets – equal to the total output of the world in goods and services in a single year! Yet, Hobsbawm comments: "The socialists, traditional brains-trust of labour, do not know any more than anyone else how to overcome the current crisis. Unlike in the 1930s, they can point to no examples of communist or social-democratic regimes immune to the crisis, nor have they realistic proposals for socialist change".

The collapse of his former idols, the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and Russia, means for him that there is no traction in arguing for the socialist alternative. However, before the Russian revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union, socialists did argue, and quite effectively, for socialist change – without having a prepared model. Without this struggle over generations, the labour movement would not have been built and the subjective factor necessary for carrying through a revolution and social change would have been absent. There were many periods of disillusionment because booming capitalist economies appeared to be ‘doing the job’ – for instance, between 1896 and 1914. Then, reformists like Bernstein in Germany, Millerand in France and MacDonald in Britain sought to reconcile the labour movement to an inch-by-inch ‘march toward socialism’. The first world war, which signified the absolute impasse of the productive forces under capitalism, put paid to these ideas, although their advocates were not completely defeated politically within the labour movement.

True, the actual creation of a workers’ state in Russia was followed by the terrible historical fact of Stalinism. That is an obstacle to workers easily drawing socialist conclusions today. Stalinism has acted as a blot on the history and the reputation of the labour movement, introducing complications that did not exist prior to the first world war and the Russian revolution. But the only way to overcome this ‘contradiction’ is to have an honest and serious balance sheet of why the revolution in Russia degenerated and how this can be avoided in the future. Hobsbawm is incapable of doing this because of the tawdry political garments of the past he still clings to, the remnants of a much distorted ‘Marxism’ which has not come to terms with the phenomenon of Stalinism.