A socialist manifesto from the editorial board of Socialist Organiser

Submitted by martin on 26 April, 2007 - 12:05

A socialist manifesto from the editorial board of Socialist Organiser

Socialist Organiser 434, 15 February 1990

Today the bourgeoisie can march in triumph right across Europe. Ex-Stalinists, ex-socialists, ex-Marxists, ex-radicals join the loyal crowds.

But beyond the cheering squads, off the thoroughfares, out of the limelight, grow bitterness and anger, lacking only confidence to turn into rebellion.

As the economy of the free market and private profit spreads in Eastern Europe, the exuberant joy of the democratic revolutions will turn into the hard, set, strained faces of the workers on the streets of Poland's cities. There, where the drive towards capitalist orthodoxy has gone furthest in Eastern Europe, the workers have their living standards cut by up to two-thirds in the course of one month, and a sudden rise of unemployment.

In the western advanced capitalist countries there is now a permanent pool of over 30 million unemployed. Growing numbers are not only unemployed but destitute. London and New York, the two greatest centres of the new fortunes grabbed in the money markets and stock exchanges in the 1980s, have 75,000 homeless apiece. Beggars line their streets.

The misery of the minority is an index of the insecurity of the majority. Industries and enterprises move from boom to slump at feverish speed; almost no worker can be sure of their livelihood; almost no working-class family is untouched by the wild gyrations that periodically scoop thousands out of the workforce and hurl them on to the dole queues.

Inequality and exploitation are increasing everywhere. In the United States, real wages have been stagnant or declining since the early 1970s. In those countries where wages have risen incomes from exploitation have risen much faster.

In Latin America and Africa there are not tens, but hundreds of millions of unemployed. Rich Western banks demand their interest payments; the local exploiters who squandered the money borrowed from the banks pass on the bill to the workers and peasants. They have forced down workers' living standards by an average of 25 per cent in many countries. The majority lose whatever slight progress out of poverty they made over previous decades; great numbers suffer malnutrition; sizeable minorities starve.

Capitalism does develop the productive forces. It does draw millions out of rural squalor educate them, expand their horizons, develop their ambitions. Taunting and shoddy though its promises are, they lever society out of stagnation.

But the essence and foundation of capitalism is the confiscation of the creative powers of the workers by the capitalists, and the trashing of those workers for whose labour the capitalist market has no demand. It pulls the workers into more productive, more concentrated, more cooperative more technically-equipped labour and at the same time pushes them away from participating in the creative possibilities of the technology they create.

Fifty years ago the capitalist free market was utterly discredited as a way of regulating production and distribution. It created chaos and misery. Only a "managed" capitalism, if that, seemed sustainable and defensible.

In the 1950s and '60s the defenders of capitalism began to hope and to claim that such "management" could cure all the essential ills of capitalism, and provide for security, increasing equality, and stable democracy In the 1970s and '80s all those claims for capitalist state economic management were thoroughly discredited. But now the argument has turned full circle: the free market is the banner which leads the bourgeoisie's new triumphal parade.

Relatively free trade on a world scale does offer better prospects for capitalism than a world of trade blocs, which is the only alternative in a system of nation states and private profit. Today that relatively free world market is being used by the capitalists as a sharp weapon of
restructuring.

Nationalisation in the West turns out to have been merely a method for capitalism to put some large-scale industries under state protection when they were considered nationally essential, discarded once they are no longer so. State welfare is shown to have been a hand-out which capitalism conceded in a boom period, but will take back in time of economic difficulty, when it can get a sufficient reserve army of workers fit to work without such expense.

For the destructive purposes of the bourgeoisie, the free market works quite well. Yet the best use of new technology demands more education and training, freer flow of information, more social investment. It demands planning and cooperation.

The free market produces just the same evils that it always produced. Capitalism has not rediscovered some lost magic. It has not conquered its ills. It has not solved its inner conflicts. The world regime of relatively free trade, on which its recent successes depend, is vulnerable, not secure. It has been under pressure from protectionism for two decades now. The stock exchange crash of October 1987 gave warning of how unstable its financial balances are. A similar crash affecting the dollar could send the whole world into a huge slump. The lives of millions could be wrecked by the fluctuations of millionaires' greedy gambles with pieces of coloured paper: that is how capitalism works, more so today than ever.

The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe does not vindicate capitalism. Stalinism was never the working class alternative to capitalism. It was not made by the working class. The Russian Revolution was made by the working class; but the Stalinist structure was erected only on the grave of that revolution, only by crushing all the organisations of the working class and in the first place crushing the Bolshevik party which had led the revolution.

That crushing, in one form or another, was inevitable if the workers' revolution remained isolated in backward Russia; the Bolsheviks knew that and had predicted it The reason why it remained isolated was the lack of revolutionary workers' parties like the Bolshevik in Western Europe.

Stalinism is not the achievement of workers' struggle, of socialism, of Bolshevism. It represents the defeat of workers' struggles, of socialism, and of Bolshevism, both in the USSR and in all other Stalinist countries where the Stalinist regimes were imposed on the working class by bureaucratic military machines.

Stalinism is an ugly sibling of capitalism, not its successor. Inequality; exploitation; alienation of the creative powers of labour and of human solidarity; domination by a small privileged minority; irresponsible destruction of the environment in pursuit of narrow economic goals - the characteristic evils of capitalism are reproduced under Stalinism, and to them is added a hideous totalitarian regime similar to the worst of capitalist tyrannies.

Where Stalinist regimes have introduced job security in place of capitalism's characteristic insecurity of employment, they have accompanied it with equally harassing forms of insecurity for the worker - routinely, goods and services can be got only by bribery, string pulling, the black market, or queuing.

As East European workers will find a great deal of what they rebelled against in the Stalinist systems was no more than an exaggerated and twisted form of what workers have rebelled against in capitalism. Their revolt vindicates not capitalism, but the workers' revolt against capitalism.

Even limited democracy of the parliamentary sort is won and sustained only by workers' struggles. A fuller democracy giving the masses of the people real control over their lives - including their economic circumstances - is possible only through the working class replacing capitalism. Dignified, secure, creative lives for the majority are possible only with working-class scialism, not with capitalism.

Socialism means the substitution of democratic planning for need instead of the bankers' and shareholders' bottom line as the guiding principle of production. It means conscious solidarity and cooperation instead of the free-market law of devil take the hindmost. It means movement towards the replacement of wage labour by the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". It means democracy which covers economic affairs, too.

It means a "semi state" of working-class self administration in place of privileged militarist, bureaucratic state machines. It means individual freedom based on lifting the burden of insecurity, poverty, servility and exhausting drudgery from the majority and given them access to education, culture, and the development of their creative abilities. It means people using technology, rather than technology using people.

The collapse of Stalinism revalidates these ideals. In no way does it brand them as utopian or unworkable.

Socialism is possible. But it will not come automatically. It has to be made by the working class.

And for now the working class lacks the confidence and clarity to disrupt the triumphal parade of the bourgeoisie. For now many workers in Eastern Europe say they want no experiments with some ideal new system opposed both to Stalinism and capitalism; they want something which works, something tried and tested, and they believe the market economy is it.

But it could never have been the case that the progress of the working class would be like the progress of the bourgeoisie, a gradual rise of wealth, culture, organisation and self-confidence under the old regime. The workers' struggle for self-liberation is a struggle with great zig-zags, tremendous leaps forward and terrible regressions. It cannot be otherwise with a class which is the basic slave class until its day of self-liberation.

The worst of those regressions was the triumph of Stalinism in one third of the globe. It corrupted, disoriented and demoralised most of two generations of worker activists.

The disorientation and demoralisation does not end with the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. In the short term it may get worse. Nor is Stalinism dead. It still rules a quarter of the world's people, in China. It may still make comebacks, though surely minor ones, in Europe.

Yet the revolts in Eastern Europe are not only inspiring examples of how the masses can make history against the rulers and exploiters; they are also a great step towards ridding the whole world workers' movement of the syphilis of Stalinism.

In every decade of this century the workers in some country or another have shown their ability to organise as a potential ruling class, a force to remake society. They have been defeated, and in most of those defeats Stalinism played a great role.

New workers' revolutionary struggles will arise, and Stalinism will be weaker. The struggles can win Whether they win depends on what replaces Stalinism as a political influence in the workers' movement. That it will be some sort of socialist, cooperative or collectivist influence we can be sure: the position of the working class under capitalism guarantees that. Whether it is a clear revolutionary Marxist influence depends on us. We have a world to win.

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