Vol. 79/No. 21      June 8, 2015

In Defense of Marxism: Against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party by Leon Trotsky is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for June. The book explains how the Stalinist misleadership in the Soviet Union led a counterrevolution to throttle workers democracy and destroy the revolutionary program of the Bolshevik Party, but, at the same time, the USSR remained a workers state. It explains why working people had to stand up to growing pressures from bourgeois public opinion and defend the USSR from imperialist attack as Washington prepared to enter World War II. Below are excerpts from the 1995 preface by Doug Jenness that discusses the drive to re-establish capitalism following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-90. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

The various petty-bourgeois layers heading these regimes have pressed ahead — without much success — to privatize their economies. In their view, the only road forward is to seek incorporation into the world capitalist system, including imperialist institutions of debt slavery such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and even the European Community.

Far from providing the promised abundance of affordable food, fiber, and goods, however, this course has only deepened the economic and social inequalities built up by more than six decades of anti-working-class methods of planning and management. And far from providing a boost to the imperialist economies, it has placed new economic strains on the world capitalist system.

Throughout Eastern Europe and the former USSR structural unemployment is widespread and large inflationary swings are endemic. Food shortages and malnourishment are increasing. Production has plummeted since the early 1990s — by some 40 percent in Russia, 50 percent in Ukraine, and almost 25 percent in Hungary.

Living and working conditions of the producing majority are deteriorating and cuts in the social wage are mounting. Infant mortality has risen sharply and life expectancy has dropped. For example, in Russia infant mortality jumped from 17.4 per 1,000 new born babies in 1990 to 19.1 in 1993. And life expectancy of males born today is lower than it was in the mid-1960s. A UNICEF report in October 1994 noted that in Russia and Eastern Europe there has been a resurgence of infectious, parasitic, and nutritionally related diseases such as tuberculosis and diphtheria.

Moreover, there is no prospect that conditions will improve or that any significant economic aid from the richest capitalist powers will be forthcoming. To the contrary, the situation for working people continues to worsen as this part of the world is increasingly swept into the maelstrom of capitalism’s deepest economic and social crisis since the 1930s. Politically the trend in these countries, as it will become increasingly so in the capitalist countries too, is toward strong-arm Bonapartist regimes, rather than toward bourgeois democracy.

In the face of fierce price competition, rival imperialist governments are being drawn into sharper and sharper conflicts. The governments of Eastern Europe and those of the countries that once made up the USSR will inevitably be drawn into these disputes. In the now-dissolved Yugoslavia, for example, we can see how the interests of the ruling rich in the United States, Germany, France, and Britain come into conflict as they jockey for position among warring gangs who are attempting by means of “ethnic cleansing” to build capitalism in the territory they control.

The process that toppled or deeply shook the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe culminated in mass protests that began in 1989–90. Unleashing decades of pent-up anger and frustration, millions across these countries took to the streets demanding justice and political rights. The USSR, a prison house of nations under Stalinist rule, was broken up. The disintegration of the Stalinist parties and the formation of weaker and more unstable regimes opened the way for workers and farmers to take the first steps toward becoming involved in public life, organizing to defend their class interests, and viewing as their own the struggles of working people and fighters for national liberation in other countries.

The euphoria of 1989 and 1990 has since been swept away by the intensifying assault on workers’ and farmers’ social rights, and protest actions today by workers are less frequent. The struggles of the future, however, were foreshadowed in Germany, where workers in the east and west joined forces in 1993 to rally against cuts in social benefits and to strike against wage inequality in the east. …

[T]his political consciousness has eroded so much under the stultifying conditions imposed by the Stalinist regimes that today there is no organized communist working-class vanguard in the former Soviet Union or anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe. Instead, there has been a break in continuity with the rich communist traditions of the early Soviet government under Lenin’s leadership and the first five years of the Communist International.

Workers throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, however, are regaining political room to organize and become involved in politics. They are beginning to resist attacks on their economic and social conquests. It is through struggles like these that working people from Berlin to the Pacific coast of Russia will link up with fights by other workers and farmers the world over, test alternative strategies and ideas, and begin anew the building of proletarian communist leaderships.  

 
 
Related articles:
Ukraine toilers fight to defend jobs, sovereignty, political rights
Moscow cracks down on Tatars in Crimea
Help send ‘Militant’ reporting team to Ukraine
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home