From Labor's Champion
February 15-28, 1990
The last few months have seen the fall of revisionist governments throughout Eastern Europe - in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and finally Rumania. The U.S. government and capitalist news media have been hailing this as "the downfall of communism" and the end of "Stalinism." But this is a lie. Over 30 years ago, the ruling cliques in these countries had overthrown genuine socialism, the dictatorship of the working class, and had instead set up a new type of capitalist dictatorship, the dictatorship of the state bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Far from being "Stalinist," these cliques had all joined in with Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin since the mid-1950s, signaling their break with Marxism-Leninism.
Under genuine socialism, centralized production is carried out to meet the increasing material and cultural needs of the working people. But in the revisionist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, production, even though it was generally on the basis of nationalized industry, was carried out for profit. This profit was for the benefit of both the managerial and state bureaucrats in these countries, as well as of the Soviet social-imperialists and the Western imperialists.
Politically, the ruling parties in these countries kept the label of being "communist parties," but they were far from that. A genuine communist party consists of the most dedicated, selfless fighters of the working class, the vanguard of the proletariat. But the leaderships of the revisionist parties in Eastern Europe had become the managers of the state capitalist apparatus. And much of the membership of these bloated parties (which, as in Romania, formed up to 1/6th of the total population of the country) consisted of careerists looking for petty privileges.
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The former "hard-line" revisionist regimes, though politically dependent on Soviet social-imperialism, were all in varying degrees also economically dependent on the Western imperialists. For example, East Germany, under the previous regime of Erich Honecker, had by the early 1970s already incurred a debt of $10 billion to the West, mostly to West Germany. Although this amount is fairly large considering that East Germany is a small country of only 16 million people, the imperialists considered such a debt to be "supportable," that is, the East German government has been able to continue paying its debt service. However, the debt was one of the causes of shortages of such basic items as fresh fruits and vegetables that East Germans complained of, for much of these products were exported to the West to obtain hard currency for debt service payments. East Germany was even willing to accept toxic waste from West Germany in return for hard currency. East Germany, on the other hand, also exploited some 84,000 "guest workers" from other countries, such as Vietnamese who did work such as repairing streets in East Berlin. The conditions in the more backward, agricultural countries, such as Poland and Hungary, were even worse. Polish workers, for example, serve as agricultural migrants picking grapes for West German wine makers.
That the "hard-line" nature of certain revisionist regimes is no obstacle to their being plundered by imperialism can be seen clearly in another part of the world, in China. The U.S. ruling class hypocritically condemned the Chinese government's bloody suppression of the "democracy" movement in that country last June. But now it became known that only a few weeks later, U.S. President Bush sent two of his top aides to China to let the regime there know that, despite any verbal protests, it was business as usual. The U.S.'s phony "restrictions" on deals with China have now been ended. The exploitation of Chinese workers through joint ventures with U.S. monopolies, particularly in the "Special Economic Zones," has if anything been increased. One need only observe the great number of clothing articles with labels from American department stores marked "Made in China," as well as holiday toys with labels such as "Mattel. Made in China", or similarly marked electronic appliances. The whole phony U.S. protest over the military crackdown in China resembles nothing so much as when the U.S. government would noisily recall its ambassador from a Latin American country that had just suffered a military coup, only to send him back quietly a few weeks later after the fanfare had died down.
But the downfall of the revisionist regimes will not mean any improvement in the lives of the working people in Eastern Europe. On the contrary, their conditions will get considerably worse. This is most clear already in Poland and Hungary, where new openly capitalist regimes are now in power. Both countries are planning to privatize (i.e. turn over to private capitalists) large-scale industry, and to speed up the domination of large farmers over agriculture, all under the guise of "modernization." They have applied to Western imperialist countries and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for large-scale loans to "revive" their stagnant economies. But such loans are only granted with conditions - that the exploitation of the workers be increased. The U.S. capitalist press is already openly admitting that the IMF-imposed austerity programs will mean the closing down of "inefficient" factories (that is, those whose rate of profit is not high enough) and steeply rising unemployment. This will also mean the end of price subsidies for such basic items as food, rent and transportation, while wages are kept down. Lech Walesa, the head of Poland's "Solidarity" "trade-union," has been going to such known "friends" of the working class as Thatcher in Britain and Bush in the U.S. seeking additional loans to speed up the exploitation of the Polish workers. in the U.S., Walesa was granted the "privilege" of speaking before a joint session of Congress, and was feted by President Bush and the chief U.S. labor traitor, Lane Kirkland. The new loans that Poland will get will do nothing but increase that country's dependency on imperialism. Poland already suffers from a debt of some $40 billion, incurred under the earlier revisionist regimes. Anyone who is under the illusion, promoted by the U.S. lackey press, that such "aid" will improve conditions for the Polish workers, must only look at the situation of Latin America. Imperialist loans can not bring "freedom" to Poland while they have increased the enslavement of the working peoples of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.
The downfall of the revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe was due not just to economic reasons, but came about under the slogan of "democracy." It is true that the working people of Eastern Europe had few democratic rights. But the leaderships of the former opposition movements who now head several of the new regimes, inspired by Gorbachev's views in the Soviet Union, have been praising "Western democracy" to the hilt. However, as Lenin long ago made clear, there is no such thing as pure democracy, as democracy above classes. For democracy is a form of state power, and the state is always a tool for the oppression of one class by another. Democracy in the U.S. is democracy for the rich. Both major parties, the Democrats as well as the Republicans, are tools of the capitalist exploiters, who use the term democracy to ensnare and deceive the workers. Marx pointed out that capitalist democracy in essence allows the workers every few years to choose who will "represent and repress them." Just look, for example, at the situation of the Pittston coal miners in Virginia. When they exercised their democratic right to strike recently, they were jailed and fined millions of dollars, and had to face the armed state power of the capitalist class in the form of the National Guard. No, the essence of bourgeois democracy still is, as it always has been, the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
The workers of Eastern Europe have been deceived into thinking that multi-party bourgeois democratic regimes will represent them. Many were deceived by the claims of the former revisionist regimes that they represented "socialism," and have begun to doubt the possibility of genuine socialism. In all the events in East Europe, the workers played the role of the tail of capitalist forces, whether following the bourgeois pro-imperialist leadership of Solidarity in Poland, or openly reactionary forces like Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, or social-democratic intellectuals like the Neues Forum in East Germany. As time goes on, they will see that the road they are on leads only to a continuation and deepening of their own exploitation and oppression. The only way out for the workers of Eastern Europe, and all over the world, is to form their own independent class-conscious organizations, new genuine Marxist-Leninist communist parties. These parties must lead the workers in a new, revolutionary fight to smash the state power of the revisionist and outright capitalist forces, to establish genuine, proletarian democracy, the dictatorship of the working class.
There is no reason to be cynical about genuine socialism. The October 1917 revolution in Russia led to genuine socialism during the time of Lenin and Stalin. The people's democracies formed after World War II in Eastern Europe made some genuine socialist reforms before they were overthrown by the revisionist forces that followed Khrushchev's line. And genuine socialism exists today in Albania, the one country in East Europe that refused to follow the revisionist road. As comrade Ramiz Alia said in a speech in December to the General Council of the Trade Unions of Albania: "There are foreigners who ask: will Albania experience such processes as those occurring in Eastern Europe? We answer in a clear cut and categorical way: No... We won freedom on our own, through blood and innumerable sacrifices, of our free will we chose the people's power and the socialist road and no one imposed them on us... Socialism brought the Albanian people to light, no other social order could do what socialism and the people's power did. Albania develops and progresses in all directions... Do we have problems to solve? We have. But we solve these problems by ourselves, following the road indicated by Marxism-Leninism and in compliance with our circumstances, experiences and traditions. The prescriptions of the capitalist road, as perestroika and bourgeois reformism, are unacceptable to us. They lead to economic and political dependence on big capital, they lead to the establishment of the order of exploitation and oppression."
The revisionist forces in the U.S. also are using the events in Eastern Europe to step up their attacks on Marxism-Leninism. Gus Hall, the leader of the revisionist CPUSA, in an article in the People's Daily World of 11/30/89, claims that this is a "new era of peaceful competition between the two socioeconomic systems." He says that the revisionist countries are rejecting outworn concepts, such as "'the dictatorship of the proletariat,' which our party stopped using 40 years ago." Groups like Line of March and the Guardian newspaper are openly embracing social-democracy.
But these views of a new, peaceful era are fantasies meant to deceive the working and oppressed peoples, to divert them from the path of revolution. Was the invasion of Panama evidence of the peaceful intentions of U.S. imperialism? On the contrary, the U.S. ruling class has already been admitting that the "relaxation of tensions" in Europe will allow it to further the development of its "Rapid Deployment Forces" to intervene militarily in other areas of the world. The increased use of the state power - National Guard, courts, etc., against striking workers, and police killings, particularly of Afro-Americans and other oppressed nationalities, continue to show that the U.S., like all bourgeois democracies, is still a vicious dictatorship of the capitalist class. The need for revolution, for the workers under the leadership of their genuine Marxist-Leninist party, to smash the capitalist state apparatus and establish their own dictatorship, in the form of proletarian democracy, is as great as ever. The downfall of the revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe must make us step up the struggle for genuine socialism in the U.S., and not retreat down the path of reformism.
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