Vol. 73/No. 47      December 7, 2009

The Financial Times claimed that the world has become a “safer, freer, richer” place since the shattering of these regimes and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The London Times urged politicians participating in the celebrations to commit themselves to a “compassionate capitalism … compatible with European ideals.”

The wall fell in the face of growing popular mobilizations across the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), leading to the reunification of Germany in October 1990. The imperialist rulers thought the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would open prospects for them to regain what they had lost when workers and farmers took power in the 1917 Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. Capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe were overturned following World War II.

Today however, Europe is marked by sharpening differences among rival capitalist nations and growing assaults on the toilers as the rulers seek to make working people pay for their crisis.

Following onerous conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund on Latvia, the government is cutting wages for public employees by up to 20 percent, pensions by 10 percent, and reducing working hours. The government has also sharply reduced subsidies for medical prescriptions.  
 
Declining profit rates
The underlying cause of the crisis is rooted in the decades-long decline in profit rates. In Germany, consumer prices fell 0.6 percent over the last year—the first annual decline in 22 years. Deflation is part of intensifying competition among capitalists, putting enormous downward pressures on their investment in manufacturing and production. To shore up profit rates, the bosses are trying to get more work out of fewer workers.

In the United Kingdom youth unemployment has risen to 18 percent, and half of all employers say they plan a wage freeze. Unemployment in Spain stands at 18 percent, the highest in Europe.

Across Europe workers increasingly face a common future. In August thousands of car workers at the state-owned AvtoVAZ plant in Russia protested the reduction of working hours to 20 a week. General Motors is planning to cut 10,000 jobs at its car plants across Europe. Following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in 1989 and the credit-led boom of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of workers from Eastern Europe emigrated to find work, transforming and strengthening the working classes in the countries they moved to.

The current crisis is sharpening tensions among Europe’s capitalist nations. Earlier this year José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, noted that different European countries had taken unilateral action to bail out their nation’s banks. Politicians in each country have turned toward protectionist measures, and each government embarked on “national recovery paths without reference to European Union rules,” reported the Daily Telegraph.  
 
Germany reunification a burden
The reunification of Germany has turned out to be a huge burden for the German rulers. They have poured billions into eastern Germany for unemployment benefits and a range of social programs in hopes of postponing a showdown with workers and farmers. In 1990 German government debt stood at $300 billion. The Finance Ministry in July estimated that it would reach $2.8 trillion by 2013. To this day incomes in the former East Germany still only average 71 percent of what is earned in the west.

In reality, German reunification led to a relative weakening of German imperialism in relation to its rivals. An article in the November 15 issue of the Economist noted, “Germany’s relative importance has diminished. Today it is a medium-sized power whose influence looms large within Europe but is spotty beyond it.”

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes across Europe was not followed by greater stability, but by the first war in continental Europe in 50 years, in Yugoslavia. The war was a product of sharpening interimperialist rivalry, and conflict among the would-be capitalist politicians in the deformed workers state.

For decades, the Stalinist leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party blocked efforts to build on gains of the 1949 revolution and unite toilers of different national origins. The imperialist rulers saw the war as an opportunity to advance efforts to overturn the conquests of the Yugoslav revolution, and restore capitalist property relations, on the backs of a bloody assault on the peoples of Yugoslavia.

The 20 years since the disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe have demonstrated that contrary to the hopes of the imperialist powers, the working classes in these countries have not been defeated by the collapsing bureaucratic castes. The rulers cannot accomplish this simply by pouring in money. With the collapse of these regimes, the world’s imperialist rulers lost a valuable transmission belt for bourgeois values among privileged layers of the toilers and now have to take on workers in these countries directly.

It took revolutionary struggles by the toilers to overturn capitalism and it will take counterrevolutionary force for the capitalist class to reimpose their exploitation on workers and farmers.

What disintegrated in 1989 were the Stalinist parties across Eastern Europe. With the weakening of this obstacle went their counterfeit of communism. As today’s social and economic crisis deepens, prospects have increased that new generations of fighters will find their way to the example and lessons of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1959 conquest of power by the workers and farmers of Cuba.  
 
 
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