Editorial
On the
Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
The western media have seized upon the
occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to launch
a massive propaganda campaign against socialism and communism. They repeat over
and over again buzz words like “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” to describe
the systems that existed in the former Soviet Union and people’s democracies of
Eastern Europe and describe their collapse as “the failure of communism”. At
the same time, commentator after commentator is forced to admit that those
things that the people of Eastern Europe were fighting for 20 years ago have
still not been achieved. However, rather than actually analyzing why that is
the case, they simply dismiss it as another “failure of communism”, as a
consequence of the political immaturity of the people of those countries.
Two questions emerge from this
propaganda campaign. First, if communism died 20 years ago with the fall of the
Berlin Wall, then why do the imperialists and their media find it necessary to
continuously discredit communism as a political and economic system? Second, if
communism was responsible for all of the problems of the people of Eastern
Europe, why do those same problems exist after 20 years of capitalism?
The fact is that the imperialists and
their media know very well that what fell in Eastern Europe in the period from
1989 to 1991 was not socialism or communism. They were quite aware at the time
that socialism had ceased to exist in anything but name in those countries by
the early 1960s, replaced by a form of state monopoly capitalism ruled by a new
bourgeois ruling class comprised of the top state and party bureaucrats. As in
the western capitalist countries, the dominant political ideology was social
democracy – the “welfare state”.
By the 1980s social democracy was in
crisis everywhere in the world, not just in the Soviet Union
and countries of Eastern Europe. Social democracy and the welfare state
were instrumental in restoring high rates of capitalist profits following the
Great Depression. However, by 1982 profits were in steep decline and social
democratic policies were no longer working to reverse that trend. In order to
address this crisis of capitalism the imperialists, particularly the
Anglo-American imperialists, created a new set of policies that became known as
neo-liberalism. One of the central tenets of neo-liberalism is privatization of
the public sector, especially publicly-owned corporations or what can loosely
be described as the state monopoly capitalist sector. In Canada this sector
included Air Canada, Canadian National Railway, many of the provincial
telephone and electricity utilities, most of which were privatized during the
1990s.
However, the Soviet Bloc represented the
mother lode of state monopoly capitalist institutions – virtually their entire
economies. The Anglo-American imperialists spent millions of dollars during the
1980s to convince the economic and political elites in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe of the tremendous profits that could be realized through the
privatization of those economies and large sections of those elites were won
over, including many of the leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachov.
In the late 1980s, the would-be oligarchs within those countries, with the help
of various western intelligence agencies, systematically organized protest
movements demanding democratic reforms. In country after country the storming
of embassies was organized as a focal point for these movements. In 1989 a
flood of East German émigrés was organized to go through Hungary and other
countries to get to West Germany. Under intense pressure, the East German
government resigned en masse and on November 9, 1989 masses of protesters began
to tear down the Berlin Wall.
What followed during the next several
years can best be described as the rape and pillage of entire nations. The top
state and party bureaucrats simply appropriated companies and even entire
industrial sectors as their private property. The pensions and savings of the
people were stolen. The health and education institutions collapsed. And all
the while, trillions of dollars flowed out of these countries and into the
hands of “investors” in New York, London, Frankfurt and elsewhere. This pillage
was not anarchic in nature, but was systematically carried out under the
direction of a team of Harvard economists, who quickly became billionaires
themselves.
It is important to distinguish between
the motives of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the motives of the imperialists
and oligarchs who were the only ones to benefit from the dismantling of the
welfare states of Eastern Europe. The communist movement in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe emerged from the Second World War at the head of an
international movement for democracy – an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and
anti-capitalist movement. During the post-war period some strides were made in
terms of expanding economic democracy in those countries, but for various
reasons they balked at expanding political democracy. As a result, socialism
was strangled and most of the advances in economic democracy were reversed. The
political and economic elites paid themselves huge salaries and converted the
socialist economy into a form of state monopoly capitalism which was operated
for the collective enrichment of this new bourgeois class. The economies of the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe stagnated under the combined pressure of the
arms race, incompetent management and rapidly increasing foreign debts.
Standards of living declined and discontent was met with state violence, just
as it was in many of the countries under the domination of imperialism and
capitalism.
That discontent could have gone either
of two ways. It could have coalesced around demands for a return to real socialism
and communism or, as it did, around false promises that open capitalism could
give the people what pseudo-socialism could not. The experience of the Soviet
Union and countries of people’s democracy prior to 1989 demonstrates that
economic democracy without political democracy cannot endure. The experience of
those peoples since 1989 demonstrates that political democracy (however
illusory) without economic democracy is equally doomed to failure. The net
result for the peoples of the former Soviet Union and countries of people’s
democracy has been massive unemployment, dire poverty, insecurity and a life
expectancy that has been reduced by decades from previous levels.
Now that the peoples of these countries
have learned from their own experience that capitalist “democracy” is just as
hollow as pseudo-socialist “democracy”, they once again are faced with the
choice – capitalism or socialism – that is faced by all of the peoples of the
world. One of the objectives of the current imperialist propaganda campaign
against communism and socialism is to divert the people from the path of
revolution and socialism into the dead-end politics of fascism and tribalism.
There is an urgent necessity for all those who consider themselves socialists
and communists to unite and give rise to a great movement for democracy and
socialism, a movement capable of providing the people with the democratic
reforms they desire and need and to block the great tragedies being organized
by the imperialists in the name of “freedom”, “democracy” and “human rights”.