Laurence points to the imperialist course to expand NATO to the east, as well as the collapse of the productive forces in Russia, as evidence that the U.S. has not really lost the Cold War. Imperialism is still pursuing its goal of capitalist restoration in the East, and seems to be making headway.
The appearance is that the former Soviet Union lies in ruins, while the U.S. imperialists remain strong and in control. If the Cold War is over, it would seem that the U.S. won it. Or you could argue, as Laurence does, that the Cold War is not really over yet, but that so far it looks like imperialism is winning.
This position, however much it appears to be grounded in the facts, fails to come to grips with the reasons for the collapse of the Stalinist mechanisms in the period 1989 to 1991.
Was this collapse due to a weakening of the workers' state in the face of imperialist pressure? Or was it due to the weakening of imperialism together with its Stalinist prop in the old Soviet Union? I believe that the latter explanation is the right one.
It is important to bear in mind that the Stalinist state structure is a function of imperialist pressure on the workers' state. Stalinism could never have been born in the first place had not imperialism been strong enough to impose the conditions which made bureaucratic parasitism take root and grow in the workers' state. This is the key to understanding the current situation.
The growing weakness of imperialism in the post-WWII period meant that the Stalinist repressive apparatus could no longer be sustained, and it collapsed through the natural evolution of its own internal contradictions.
The fact that Russia is now in a horrible mess does not prove that imperialism "won" or "is winning" anything in the world class struggle. It only proves that the old way of providing the necessities of life for the masses of the people is no longer functional.
The workers are in the process of gathering the experience which they will use to find a way to reorganize the productive forces on a new foundation. And they are now in a better position to do this because the travesty of communism that they endured for so long has been swept away, and the workers' state has survived.
Jim Miller
Seattle, Washington
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