Rebirth of socialist democracy

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THE REBIRTH OF

SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the return of the Prague spring, the massive changes in Eastern Europe and Russia has led many commentators to proclaim the final victory of capitalism.

The rulers of the imperialist powers have been much more cautious. They have their own crises to face and they are aware that because the workers of Eastern Europe don’t want bureaucratic rule there is no guarantee that they support a capitalist restoration. Many want socialism and below JAMES MACKIN analyses the crisis and the opportunities that it opens for the working class on a world stage.

In his excoriating critique of the Stalinist state “The Revolution Betrayed’ (1937) Trotsky, leader of the red army, wrote; “The tendencies of bureaucratism which strangles the worker’s movement in capitalist counirics, would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian revolution. But it is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the stemer and more naked would be the expression of this ‘law’, the more crude would be the forms assumed by bureaucratism, and the more dangerous it would become for socialist development. The Soviet state is prevented not only from dying away, but even from freeing itself from the bureaucratic parasite, not by the ‘relics’ of former ruling classes, as declares the naked police doctrine of Stalin, for these relics are powerless in themselves. It is prevented by immeasurably weightier factors, such as material want, cultural backwardness, and the resulting dominance of ‘bourgeois law’ in what most immediately touches every human being, the business of insuring his personal existence” later in the same work he wrote; “Competition, whose roots lie in our biological inheritance, having purged itself of greed, envy and privilege will indubitably remain the most important motive force of culture under communism too. But in the closer-by preparatory epoch the actual establishment of a socialist society can and will be achieved, not by those humiliating measures of a backward capitalism to which the Soviet government is resorting, but by methods more worthy of a liberated humanity - and above all not under the whip of a bureaucracy. For this very whip is the most disgusting inheritance from the old world. It will have to be broken in pieces and bumt al a public bonfire before you can speak of socialism without a blush of shame.”

Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism goes to the heart of the historic changes taking place today. The Stalinist ice age established over Eastern Europe is beginning to tremble and crack. The response to this outside the circles of revolutionary marxism can be placed in two complementary groups. The capitalist response has been to crow about the death of socialism and the tnumph of liberal democracy. Linked to this the Social Democratic left and the Eurocommunists are preparing to abandon the remnants of their socialist aspirations. For example, the Communist party in Britain.have launched a debate around the

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slogan “new times’ in which many of the basic principles of marxism have been discarded.

The Worker’s party here has in its own way been atrendsetter, with its welcome for “market forces’ and for imperialist economic domination of Ireland. One of the keynotes of this sector has been the uncritical assumption that Perestroiaka in the USSR is irreversible and a tendency to see the decisive struggles being located in the Politburo around the Gorbachev leadership. After years of uncritical acceptance of the immovability of the Stalinist bureaucracy they have come to involve all in the reforming powers of that same bureaucracy! As events in Tianaman Square in Beijing have demonstrated, the potential repressive power that resides in the bureaucracy is still enormous.

Clearly the success of the reforms in Eastern Europe depends on the independent mobilisation of workers organisations and the development-of workers democracy.

In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union we are seeing a dialectic between political and economic crises. The bureaucracy is attempting to co-opt the political awaking of major sectors of the population to a pragmatic solution oriented to the dismantling of the social gains of the working class and towards opening the economy to the world market and the private sector of the economy. Clearly the process of change which is underway is real and deep-seated. There have been real gains against the repressive apparatus of the state. The space for a real unfettered debate so necessary for any real progress towards socialism grows greater every day.

This rupturing of Stalinism is even more pronounced in the satellite states of Eastern Europe, where the bureaucracy, rather than being the result of the degeneration of revolution, was Gorbachev meets the people in Siberia: can he deliver his economic reforms? And what will they cost the workers?

simply imposed by the red army. Poland has achieved its first semblance’ of democracy for generations and in Hungary the advance of similar reforms is proceeding swiftly. In East Germany the Berlin wall is down and the old stalinist leadership forced out of office. (Although in Ireland there is much cynicism about the refugee ‘crisis’ - there are no batteries of cameras to record the mass exodus of our young people for similar economic reasons).

In the heady atmosphere of reform in the workers states it is not surprising that much of the flavour of the criticism of the performance of Stalinist economies has a strong anti-socialist flavour. Much of this criticism is confused and self-contradictory. Many of the leaders of solidarity talk openly about the restoration of capitalism, ignoring the fact that debt to Westem banks is a major element of the crisis. This has already led to a ‘left solidarity’ current being formed among sections of the working class aware that they will pay a heavy price for capitalist restoration. Revolutionary Marxists are opposed to any command society, whether run by a bureaucracy, by managers or by so-called experts. While it has long been a maxim of marxism that a major area of market relations is inevitable ina society moving towards socialism, sucha sector must be dictated to by a choice of social priorities fixed democratically by workers organisations. It is a lie to suggest that the only way out of the stagnation of stalinism is to deflate the poverty-level buying power of the workers even further - the real priority of many of the socalled ‘reformers’ in the bureaucracies. In this they meet pro-capitalist ‘reformers’ in sections of the opposition coming from the opposite direction. Glasnost must be supported unreservedly, but it is the workers defending their own interests which is the only engine that can guarantee a victorious advance to full democracy ina multiparty system. In this respect the miners strikes in the USSR

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ers. By ‘efficiency’ they-mean mass redundancies. This is already happening in Hungary and Yugoslavia. In the absence of real democracy the workers will face this process unprotected. So for the ‘reformers’ in the bureaucracy mass mobilisations of workers are a real threat. For their part, the demand by the miners for the suppression of certain cooperatives (primitive forms of privatisation) demonstrates that they are aware that the reform programme reflects the concems of the social forces that have shaped it; the more dynamic elements of the bureaucracy, a part of the intelligentsia and the most privileged of the highly skilled workers. The majority of the working class has been excluded from this process and the regime fears their emergence as a political force. The force and dynamism of the miners strike are a foretaste of the real political revolution in the Soviet Union. As the quotes at the beginning of this article demonstrate, the Trotskyist tradition provides a rich theoretical framework for understanding the bewildering pace of change and the array of social forces which are shaping the upheavals in Eastern Europe. More importantly it provides a confident socialist policy which proudly proclaims that the advance of democracy must be unequivocally supported.

In the final analysis it is the extension of workers democracy that will provide the antidote to the capitalists’ ahistorical crowing about the death of socialism. Far from being the death of socialism, the removal of the dead hand of the bureaucracy ushers in the socialist agenda on a world stage.

JAMES MACKIN.

pose big problems for the bureaucratic reform-