    Hail the Reds By Stephen Gowans

    http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/reds.html

    Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so
    much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, the Soviet
    Union managed to create one of the great achievements of human history:
    a great industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of
    wealth, income, education and opportunity that plagued what preceded it,
    what came after it, and what competed with it; a society in which health
    care and education through university were free (and university students
    received living stipends); where rent, utilities and public
    transportation were subsidized, along with books, periodicals and
    cultural events; where inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous,
    and child care was subsidized. By 1933, with the capitalist world deeply
    mired in a devastating economic crisis, unemployment was declared
    abolished, and remained so for the next five and a half decades, until
    socialism, itself, was abolished. The Communists produced social
    security more robust than provided even by Scandinavian-style social
    democracy, but achieved with fewer resources and a lower level of
    development and in spite of the unflagging efforts of the capitalist
    world to see to it that socialism failed. Soviet socialism was, and
    remains, a model for humanity -- of what can be achieved outside the
    confines and contradictions of capitalism. But by the end of the '80s,
    counterrevolution was sweeping Eastern Europe and Mikhail Gorbachev was
    dismantling the pillars of Soviet socialism. Naively, blindly, stupidly,
    some expected Gorbachev's demolition project to lead the way to a
    prosperous consumer society, in which Soviet citizens, their bank
    accounts bulging with incomes earned from new jobs landed in a robust
    market economy, would file into colorful, luxurious shopping malls, to
    pick clean store shelves bursting with consumer goods. Others imagined a
    new era of a flowering multiparty democracy and expanded civil
    liberties, coexisting with public ownership of the commanding heights of
    the economy, a model that seemed to owe more to utopian blueprints than
    hardheaded reality.

    Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were
    kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and
    Eastern Europe was proclaimed, not least by leftist intellectuals in the
    US, as a great victory for humanity, more than a decade later there's
    little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a
    catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it
    promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former
    socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well.
    Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has
    been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed
    under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry
    unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries,
    where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless
    voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has
    been stolen from them -- and from humanity as a whole: "We lived better
    under communism. We had jobs. We had security." And with the threat of
    jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern
    Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer
    working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a
    desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats
    many. They too lived better -- once.

    But that's only part of the story. For others, for investors and
    corporations, who've found new markets and opportunities for profitable
    investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that
    attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has,
    indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by
    the feudal and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose
    estates and industrial concerns have been recovered. But they're a
    minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?

    Prior to the dismantling of socialism, most people in the world were
    protected from the vicissitudes of the global capitalist market by
    central planning and high tariff barriers. But once socialism fell in
    Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with China marching resolutely
    down the capitalist road, the pool of unprotected labor available to
    transnational corporations expanded many times over. Today, a world
    labor force many times larger than the domestic pool of US workers --
    and willing to work dirt cheap -- awaits the world's corporations. You
    don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the implications
    are for American workers and their counterparts in Germany, Britain and
    other Western countries: an intense competition of all against all for
    jobs and industry. Inevitably, incomes fall, benefits are eroded, and
    working hours extended. Predictably, with labor costs heading south,
    profits grow fat.

    Already, growing competition for jobs and industry is forcing workers in
    Western Europe to accept less. Workers at Daimler Chrysler, Thomas Cook,
    and other firms are working longer hours, and in some cases, for less
    pay and without increases in benefits, to keep jobs from moving to the
    Czech Republic, Slovakia and other former socialist countries -- which,
    under the rule of the Reds, used to provide jobs to all. More work for
    less money is a pleasing outcome for the corporate class, and turns
    out to be exactly the outcome the fascists of Germany and Italy
    engineered for their countries' capitalists in the '30s. The methods, to
    be sure, were different, but the anti-communism of Mussolini's and
    Hitler's followers, in other hands, has proved just as useful in
    securing the same retrograde ends. Nobody who has to subject themselves
    to the vagaries of the labor market - including workers in the United
    States -- should be glad communism was abolished.

    Maybe some us don't know we've been mugged. And maybe some of us haven't
    been. Take the radical American historian Howard Zinn, for example, who,
    along with most other prominent Left intellectuals, greeted the
    overthrow of communism with glee [1]. I, no less than others, have
    admired Zinn's books, articles and activism, though I've come to expect
    his ardent anti-communism as typical of left US intellectuals. To be
    sure, in a milieu so hostile to communism, it should come as no surprise
    that conspicuous displays of anti-communism become a survival strategy
    for those seeking to establish a rapport, and safeguard their
    reputations, with a larger (and vehemently anti-communist) audience.

    But there may be another reason for the anti-communism of those whose
    political views leave them open to charges of being soft on communism,
    and therefore of having horns. As dissidents in their own society, there
    was always a natural tendency for them to identify with dissidents
    elsewhere - and the pro-capitalist, anti-socialist propaganda of the
    West quite naturally elevated dissidents in socialist countries to the
    status of heroes, especially those who were jailed, muzzled and
    otherwise repressed by the State. For these people, the abridgement of
    civil liberties anywhere looms large, for the abridgement of their own
    civil liberties would be an event of great personal significance. By
    comparison, the Red's achievements in providing a comfortable frugality
    and economic security to all, while recognized intellectually as an
    achievement of some note, is less apt to stir the imagination of one who
    has an income, the respect of his peers, and plenty of people to read
    his books and attend his lectures. He doesn't have to scavenge discarded
    coal in garbage dumps to eke out a bare, bleak, and unrewarding
    existence. Some do.

    Karol, 14, and his sister Alina, 12, everyday trudge to a dump, where
    mixed industrial waste is deposited, just outside Swietochlowice, in
    formerly socialist Poland. There, along with their father, they look for
    scrap metal and second grade coal, anything to fetch a few dollars to
    buy a meager supply of groceries. "There was better life in communism,"
    says Karol's father, 49, repeating a refrain heard over and over again,
    not only in Poland, but also throughout the former socialist countries
    of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. "I was working 25 years
    for the same company and now I cannot find a job - any job. They only
    want young and skilled workers." [2] According to Gustav Molnar, a
    political analyst with the Laszlo Teleki Institute, "the reality is that
    when foreign firms come here, they're only interested in hiring people
    under 30. It means half the population is out of the game." [3] That may
    suit the bottom lines of foreign corporations - and the overthrow of
    socialism may be a pleasing intellectual outcome for well-fed,
    comfortable intellectuals from Boston - but it hardly suits that part of
    the Polish population that must scramble over mountains of industrial
    waste - or perish. Under socialism "there was always work for
    everybody." [4] And always a place to live, free schools to go to, and
    doctors to see, without charge. So why is Howard Zinn glad communism
    collapsed?

    That the overthrow of socialism has failed to deliver anything of
    benefit to the majority is plain to see. More than a decade after
    counterrevolution swept through Eastern Europe, 17 former socialist
    countries are immeasurably poorer. In Russia, poverty has tripled. One
    child in 10 - three million Russian children - live like animals,
    ill-fed, dressed in rags, and living, if they're lucky, in dirty,
    squalid flats. In Moscow alone, 30,000 to 50,000 children sleep in the
    streets. Life expectancy, education, adult-literacy and income are in
    decline. A report by the European Children's Trust, written in 2000,
    revealed that 40 percent of the population of the former socialist
    countries -- 160 million people - lives in poverty. Infant mortality and
    tuberculosis are on the rise, approaching Third World levels. The
    situation, according to the UN, is catastrophic. And everywhere the
    story is the same. [5, 6, 7, 8]

    In Russia, the Kremlin passed a new labor code in 2001 that critics
    denounced as Dickensian - for good reason. Aimed at creating a climate
    conducive to profit-making, Soviet-era union guarantees were abolished,
    maternity leaves shortened, the minimum wage slashed, and the working
    day lengthened to a "voluntary" 12 hours. [9] "Life was better under the
    Communists," concludes Aleksandr. "The stores are full of things, but
    they're very expensive." Victor pines for the "stability of an earlier
    era of affordable health care, free higher education and housing, and
    the promise of a comfortable retirement - things now beyond his reach."
    [10] That Aleksandr and Victor are now free to denounce the new
    government in the strongest terms, if they wish, hardly seems to be a
    consolation.

    Ion Vancea, a Romanian who struggles to get by on a picayune $40 per
    month pension says, "It's true there was not much to buy back then, but
    now prices are so high we can't afford to buy food as well as pay for
    electricity." Echoing the words of many in Romania, Vancea adds, "Life
    was 10 times better under (Romanian Communist Party leader) Ceausescu."
    [11]

    Next door, in Bulgaria, 80 percent are worse off now that the country
    has transitioned to a market economy. Only five percent say their
    standard of living has improved. [12] Mimi Vitkova, briefly Bulgaria's
    health minister for two years in the mid-90s, sums up the decade
    following the overthrow of socialism: "We were never a rich country, but
    when we had socialism our children were healthy and well-fed. They all
    got immunized. Retired people and the disabled were provided for and got
    free medicine. Our hospitals were free." But things have changed, she
    says. "Today, if a person has no money, they have no right to be cured.
    And most people have no money. Our economy was ruined." [13]

    In East Germany a new phenomenon has arisen: Ostalgie, a nostalgia based
    on the old regime's full employment, free health care, free education
    through university (with living expenses covered by the State), cheap
    rents, subsidized books and periodicals and dirt cheap public
    transportation. During the Cold War era, East Germany's relative poverty
    was attributed to public ownership and central planning - sawdust in the
    gears of the economic engine, according to anti-socialist mythology. But
    the propaganda conveniently ignored the fact that the eastern part of
    Germany had always been less developed than the west, that it had been
    plundered of its key human assets at the end of World War II by US
    occupation forces, that the Soviet Union had carted off everything of
    value to indemnify itself for its war losses, and that East Germany bore
    the brunt of war reparations to Moscow. [14] On top of that, those who
    fled East Germany were said to be escaping the repression of a brutal
    regime, and while some may indeed have been ardent anti-Communists
    fleeing repression by the State, many were economic refugees, seeking
    the embrace of a more prosperous West.

    Today, nobody of an unprejudiced mind would say that the riches promised
    East Germans, if only they would restore capitalism, have been realized.
    Unemployment, once unheard of, runs at 25 percent, rents have
    skyrocketed, and nobody goes to the doctor unless they can pay. The
    region's industrial infrastructure - weaker than West Germany's during
    the Cold War, but expanding -- has now all but disappeared. And the
    population is dwindling, as economic refugees, following in the
    footsteps of Cold War refugees before them, make their way westward in
    search of jobs and opportunity. [15] "We were taught that capitalism was
    cruel," recalls Ralf Caemmerer, who works for Otis Elevator. "You know,
    it didn't turn out to be nonsense." [16] As to the claim that East
    Germans have "freedom" Heinz Kessler, a former East German defense
    minister replies tartly, "Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now
    free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care,
    free from social security." [17] Still, Howard Zinn is glad communism
    collapsed. But then, he doesn't live in East Germany.

    So, who's doing better? Otto Jelinek, a Czech whose family fled to
    Canada after the Red Army booted the Nazis out and helped install an
    antifascist government, became a cabinet minister in Canada's
    conservative, pro-Reagan Mulroney government in the 80s. Today he lives
    in Prague, one of "many individuals in positions of high influence, in
    politics, in business [who] have moved back to the country." [18] What
    brings Jelenik, and his fellow movers and shakers back? "These people
    understand that they better than almost anyone help our nation make the
    transition to a market economy," says the director of the Institute for
    Contemporary History in Prague, Oldrich Tuma, [19] another way of saying
    that owing to their connections, they, more than others, know there's a
    buck to be made and how to make it. And, of course, there's the lure of
    restitution—getting back property, some of it which can be pressed into
    service as a rent-bearing asset, they, and their families, used to own.
    Jelinek didn't recover his old family home. It's an embassy, and hence
    would have proved to be a spacious, comfortable abode for the Jelinek
    family in its day, but the Czech government "did return 20 acres of real
    estate outside of Prague." [20]

    Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright turned President, comes from a
    prominent, vehemently anti-socialist Prague family. Havel's father was a
    wealthy real estate tycoon, who developed a number of Prague properties.
    One was the Lucerna Palace, "a pleasure palace…of arcades, theatres,
    cinemas, night-clubs, restaurants, and ballrooms," according to
    Frommer's. It became "a popular spot for the city's nouveau riche to
    congregate," including a young Havel, who, raised in the lap of luxury
    by a governess and chauffeured around town, "spent his earliest years on
    the Lucerna's polished marble floors." Then, tragedy struck - at least,
    from Havel's point of view. The Reds expropriated Lucerna and the
    family's other holdings, and put them to use for the common good, rather
    than for the purpose of providing the young Havel with more servants.
    Four decades later, Havel, as president -- and now celebrated throughout
    the West as a champion of intellectual freedom -- presided over a mass
    return of nationalized property, including Lucerna and his family's
    other holdings. As a business investment, Havel's anti-communism proved
    to be quite profitable. Is he a champion of intellectual freedom, or the
    formerly pampered scion of an establishment family who had a material
    stake in seeing socialism overthrown?

    The Roman Catholic Church is another winner, which may explain, in part,
    why the Vatican takes such a dim view of communism. The pro-capitalist
    Hungarian government has returned to the Roman Catholic Church much of
    the property nationalized by the Reds, who placed the property under
    common ownership for the public good. With recovery of many of the
    Eastern and Central European properties it once owned, the Church is
    able to reclaim its pre-socialist role of parasite -- raking in vast
    amounts of unearned wealth in rent, a privilege bestowed for no other
    reason than it owns title to the land. Hungary also pays the Vatican a
    US$9.2 million annuity for property it has been unable to return. [21]

    The Church, former landowners, and CEOs aside, most people of the former
    socialist bloc aren't pleased that the gains of the socialist
    revolutions have been reversed. Three-quarters of Russians, according to
    a 1999 poll [22] regret the demise of the Soviet Union. And their
    assessment of the status quo is refreshingly clear-sighted. Almost 80
    percent recognize democracy as a front for a government controlled by
    the rich. A majority (correctly) identifies the cause of its
    impoverishment as an unjust economic system (capitalism), which,
    according to 80 percent, produces "excessive and illegitimate
    inequalities." [23] The solution, in the view of the majority, is to
    return to the status quo ante (socialism), even if it means one-party
    rule. Russians, laments the anti-Communist historian Richard Pipes,
    haven't Americans' taste for multiparty democracy, and seem incapable of
    being cured of their fondness for Soviet leaders. In one poll, Russians
    were asked to list the 10 greatest people of all time, of all nations.
    Lenin came in second, Stalin fourth (Peter the Great came first.) Pipes
    seems genuinely distressed they didn't pick his old boss, Ronald Reagan,
    and is fed up that after years of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist
    propaganda, Russians remain committed to the idea that private economic
    activity should be restricted, and "the government [needs] to be more
    involved in the country's economic life." [24]

    So, if the impoverished peoples of the formerly socialist countries pine
    for the former attractions of socialism, why don't they vote the Reds
    back in? In some countries, reconstituted Communist parties have
    received popular mandates to govern. And in Russia, Unity and
    Fatherland, the party that has become the parliamentary extension of the
    president, Vladimir Putin, has tapped into a deep well of nostalgia for
    Soviet socialism. "They've managed to create a new party of power, which
    in fact is replacing the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," says
    Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Moscow-based Institute of
    Globalization Studies. "It functions like the old Communist Party; it
    looks like the old Communist Party; it behaves like the old Communist
    Party." [25]

    But socialism can't be turned on with the flick of a switch (not that
    the Unity and Fatherland party would, if it could.) The former socialist
    economies have been mostly privatized and placed under the control of
    the market. Those who accept the goals and values of capitalism have
    been recruited to occupy pivotal offices of the State. And economic,
    legal and political structures have been altered, to accommodate private
    production for profit. True, there are openings for communist parties to
    operate within the new multiparty democracy, but the pillars of
    socialism - public ownership, central planning, and the lead role of the
    working class - have been dismantled and carted away, tossed, we're
    told, into the dustbin of history. Getting them back will take something
    more than returning Reds to parliament.

    Of course, no forward step will be taken, can be taken, until a decisive
    part of the population becomes disgusted with and rejects what exists
    today, and is convinced something better is possible and is willing to
    tolerate the upheavals of transition. That something better is indeed
    possible - not a utopia, but something better than unceasing economic
    insecurity, private (and for many, unaffordable) health care and
    education, and vast inequality - is plain. It has been reality in the
    Soviet Union, in China (for a time), in Eastern Europe, and today, hangs
    on in Cuba, despite the incessant and far-ranging efforts of the United
    States to smash it.

    It should be no surprise that Vaclav Havel, as others whose economic and
    political supremacy was, for a time, ended by the Reds, was a tireless
    fighter against socialism, or that he, and others, who sought to reverse
    the gains of the revolution, were cracked down on, and sometimes muzzled
    and jailed by the new regimes. To expect otherwise is to turn a blind
    eye to the determined struggle that is carried on by the enemies of
    socialism, even after socialist forces have seized power. The forces of
    reaction retain their money, their movable property, the advantages of
    education, and above all, their international connections. To grant them
    complete freedom is to grant them a free hand to organize the downfall
    of socialism, to receive material assistance from abroad to reverse the
    revolution, and to elevate the market and private ownership once again
    to the regulating principles of the economy. Few champions of civil
    liberties argue that in the interests of freedom of speech, freedom of
    assembly and freedom of the press, that Americans ought to be free to
    replace their republican form of government with a pro-British monarchy,
    or, more to the point, that Germans ought be allowed to hold pro-Nazi
    rallies, establish a pro-Nazi press, and organize fascist political
    parties, to return to the days of the Third Reich. To survive, any
    socialist government, must, of necessity, be repressive toward its
    enemies. This is demonized as totalitarianism by those who have an
    interest in seeing anti-socialist forces prevail, regard civil and
    political liberties (as against a world of plenty for all) as the summum
    bonum of human achievement, or have an unrealistically sanguine view of
    the possibilities for socialist survival.

    Where Reds have prevailed, the outcome has been far-reaching material
    gains for the bulk of the population: full employment, free health care,
    free education through university, free and subsidized child care, cheap
    living accommodations and inexpensive public transportation. Life
    expectancy has soared, illiteracy has been wiped out, and homelessness,
    unemployment and economic insecurity have been abolished. Racial strife
    and ethnic tensions has been reduced to almost the vanishing point. And
    inequalities in wealth, income, opportunity, and education have been
    greatly reduced. Where Reds have been overthrown, mass unemployment,
    underdevelopment, hunger, disease, illiteracy, homelessness, and racial
    conflict have recrudesced. Communists produced gains in the interest of
    all humanity, achieved in the face of very trying conditions, including
    the unceasing hostility of the West and the unremitting efforts of the
    former exploiters to restore the status quo ante. What they achieved
    surpassed anything achieved by social democratic struggle in the West,
    where the advantages of being more advanced industrially, made the
    promises of socialism all the more readily achievable - and to a far
    greater degree than could be achieved elsewhere in the world. Hidden, or
    at best, acknowledged but quickly brushed aside as matters of little
    significance, these are achievements that have been too long ignored in
    the West - and greatly missed in the countries where they were reversed
    in the interests of restoring the wealth and privileges of a minority.

    1. Howard Zinn, "Beyond the Soviet Union," Znet Commentary, September 2,
    1999.

    2. "Left behind by the luxury train," The Globe and Mail, March 29,
    2000.

    3. "Support dwindling in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland," The Chicago
    Tribune, May 27, 2001.

    4. Ibid.

    5. "An epidemic of street kids overwhelms Russian cities," The Globe and
    Mail, April 16, 2002.

    6. "UN report says one billion suffer extreme poverty," World Socialist
    Web Site, July 28, 2003.

    7. Associated Press, October 11, 2000.

    8. "UN report....

    9. "Union leader tastes McVictory," The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2001.

    10. "In Post-U.S.S.R. Russia, Any Job Is a Good Job," New York Times,

    January 11, 2004.

    11. "Disdain for Ceausescu passing as economy worsens," The Globe and
    Mail, December 23, 1999.

    12. "Bulgarians feel swindled after 13 years of capitalism," AFP,
    December 19, 2002.

    13. "Bulgaria tribunal examines NATO war crimes," Workers World,
    November 9, 2000.

    14. Jacques R. Pauwels, "The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second
    World War," James Lorimer & Company, Toronto, 2002. p. 232-235.

    15. "Warm, Fuzzy Feeling for East Germany's Grey Old Days," New York
    Times, January 13, 2004.

    16. "Hard lessons in capitalism for Europe's unions," The Los Angeles
    Times, July 21, 2003.

    17. New York Times, July 20, 1996, cited in Michael Parenti,
    "Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism,"
    City Light Books, San Francisco, 1997, p. 118.

    18. "Jelinek: 'There's no looking back'," The Globe and Mail, April 15,
    2002.

    19. Ibid.

    20. Ibid.

    21. U.S. Department of State, "Summary of Property Restitution in
    Central and Eastern Europe," September 10, 2003.
    www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/or/2003/31415.htm

    22. Cited in Richard Pipes, "Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think
    and Want," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.

    23. Ibid.

    24 Ibid.

    25. "Putin's party echoes the Communist past," The Globe and Mail,
    December 6, 2003.