Workers Hammer No. 191	Summer 2005

From Berlin to Moscow:

The ICL's fight against capitalist counterrevolution

For new October Revolutions!

The Spartacist League/Britain held a dayschool in London on 21 May to celebrate the International Communist League’s fight against capitalist counterrevolution in East Germany and the former Soviet Union in 1989-92. We reprint below a slightly edited version of the presentation given by comrade Jane Clancy.

1989 was quite a year. The events that erupted then would come to fundamentally change the entire political landscape of the world. I will give you some snapshots of what took place. In February, the last Red Army troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan. These troops had been fighting against a reactionary cabal of Islamic fundamentalists, tribal chiefs and landowners committed to the enslavement of women and the elimination of any scintilla of social progress and who were armed and bankrolled to the tune of billions of dollars by US imperialism. The withdrawal was not because the Soviet troops were losing; this was not “Russia’s Vietnam” as it was portrayed at the time. Rather, the troops were withdrawn as part of a Kremlin bid to try to appease the imperialists.

In May, hundreds of thousands of students and workers rallied in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Singing the revolutionary workers anthem, the Internationale, they had come out in opposition to the corruption of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucrats and the devastation wrought by their introduction of “market reforms”. In June, counterrevolutionary Solidarność — the only “union” that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ever supported — swept the elections in Poland. The same month, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping drowned the nascent political revolution in Tiananmen Square in blood. In July, the Soviet Union was shaken by the first ever nation-wide miners strike. Provoked by the impact of market reforms on their lives and livelihoods, the miners quickly generated organisational forms of proletarian power: strike committees and workers militias.

In October, coincident with the official celebration of the 40th anniversary of the East German deformed workers state, the DDR, that country was erupting in increasingly massive protests against the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker. On 4 November, the largest demonstration in the country’s history took place as half a million people rallied in East Berlin under banners reading “For communist ideals — No privileges”, “For a German Soviet Republic — Build Soviets!” On 9 November, the Berlin Wall was opened.

The other speakers at today’s dayschool will provide accounts of the intervention of our international tendency — the International Communist League — into these momentous events. We fought for the defeat of the forces of capitalist counterrevolution and for the defence of the gains for the working class and oppressed of the world that were embodied in the collectivised industry and planned economy of these countries, however warped and distorted by Stalinist bureaucratic mismanagement. We fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist traitors, whose bureaucratic stranglehold over economic, political and cultural life and betrayals of revolutionary struggles internationally in the name of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism undermined and, in the end, paved the road to the destruction of these workers states. We fought for the revolutionary, internationalist programme that animated Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party which led the first and so far only successful workers revolution in history in October 1917. We did not prevail, but we fought!

By 1990 the forces of capitalist counterrevolution were sweeping Eastern Europe. In 1991-1992 these forces would devour the Soviet Union, the homeland of the Russian Revolution. The world we live in today is the product of that world-historic defeat for the workers and oppressed of the world out of which US imperialism emerged as the world’s unrivalled “only superpower”. It is common coin now for outfits like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other so-called leftists to decry the deranged nuclear cowboys in the White House as the “world’s biggest terrorists”. True enough. But these self-proclaimed socialists, who cheered the forces of counterrevolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, made their own small contribution to this outcome. Now where do they turn? To the European imperialist rulers! On the eve of the one-sided slaughter in Iraq, they appealed to the European heads of state to “give peace a chance” and stay the hand of US imperialism. Now they raise the call for a “social Europe” as a counterweight to US imperialism. The European rulers want a counterweight all right. They are out to increase their competitive edge, economic and military, against the US. To do so they are taking it out of the hides of the working class and oppressed, savaging what remains of the so-called welfare state. The reforms collectively known as the welfare state were themselves introduced to try to piece off a combative and politically conscious proletariat and to ward off the “spectre of communism” as the Soviet Union’s authority was renewed with its defeat of Hitler’s Nazis in World War II.

Now you have this “Make Poverty History” campaign appealing to none other than the G8 to come to the aid of the impoverished masses of the so-called “Third World”. This is revealed as such a fraud by the fact that even Gordon Brown has called on people to join the demonstration in Edinburgh this July coincident with the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. The SWP thinks this is great, as long as Brown puts his money where his mouth is, which is exactly what he intends to do. Brown’s tour of Africa earlier this year made clear that “Make Poverty History” is simply a cynical cover for increasing “free trade” — that is the increased pillage and exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa. Declaring that it is time to stop apologising for the British Empire — not that I’ve noticed too many people apologising for the crimes of the empire — he saluted it as “open, outward looking and international”. I believe he made these remarks in Kenya! One need look no further than the mass graves of the tens of thousands killed by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s for a taste of Britain’s bloody and brutal colonial heritage.

When the Soviet Union existed, the nominally independent former colonies had the breathing space to at least manoeuvre between the Soviets on one side and the imperialists on the other. No more. Now the imperialists think it’s open season. Together with the total devastation and fratricidal wars that erupted in the wake of counterrevolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, increasing imperialist depredations and military repression from Africa to Central America to Asia have forced many thousands of people to leave their homes in order to seek a better life for themselves and their families (often just to stay alive) in the advanced capitalist countries. They have been met with a backlash of racist and chauvinist reaction fomented by the capitalist rulers — as the recent electoral contest between the Tories and Labour is testament to. The capitalists are happy to use these immigrants to do the dirtiest, the most gruelling and lowest paid jobs. The purpose of their anti-immigrant campaign is to keep the working class divided, pitting one against the other and all against the “foreigner”.

To this is added the “war on terror”. Here the Islamic fundamentalists who were yesterday’s allies in the imperialists’ war against “godless communism” are today’s enemies. Of course this is no war at all in any military sense. Rather it is a political construct aimed at strengthening the capitalist state’s machinery of repression against any perceived challenge to its rule.

It is surely not the case that the Soviet Union in its Stalinist degeneration was the beacon for world revolution that it was under Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. Nonetheless it was a counterweight to the untrammelled ambitions of the world’s imperialists. Economically it not only demonstrated an alternative to capitalist exploitation but the superiority of a planned economy. Militarily it stayed the hand of the imperialist rulers, particularly the US, in the nuclear eradication of any perceived enemies. It was the military and industrial powerhouse of the states where capitalism had been eradicated. And now that it no longer exists, the imperialists have their sights aimed at the destruction of the remaining workers states — Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea; China, the largest and strongest of these states, is the big prize. All of the imperialist powers are jockeying both through economic and military means to reconquer China for imperialist exploitation.

The Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy has opened the door in whole areas of the country, the free-trade zones, to the imperialists and off-shore Chinese bourgeoisie. Their increasingly aggressive introduction of market reforms, or as they call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, has eroded the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Organisations like the Socialist Party and Workers Power, who joined in the chorus of Cold War anti-Communism against the Soviet Union, now simply write off China as capitalist. But that verdict has yet to be decided. It is not a question to be observed like a bug under a glass but one of real living social struggles. And there have been a lot of such struggles by the workers and peasants of China, and increasingly so.

We are not passive observers. The lessons of our interventions against the forces of capitalist counterrevolution from East Germany to the Soviet Union arm us for the fight to defend the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution against the forces of capitalism and for political revolution and the institution of the rule of workers and peasants soviets, based on proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The latter is the key, for the defence of the Chinese deformed workers state is an international one, linked to the fight for new October Revolutions in the imperialist centres.

Today we want to give you a picture of the revolutionary opportunities that existed, before the defeats that followed, and how we fought to seize on them to advance the cause of working people internationally. Looking back at these past fights is preparation for future struggles. This is particularly important today when the idea of the proletarian socialist liberation of humanity is at best considered some kind of idealist utopia. This too reflects the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which unleashed an ideological offensive by the imperialist rulers that “communism is dead” and that the destruction of the Soviet Union simply proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment”.

Consciousness has been thrown back to the extent that today there is little identification among workers between their struggles and “socialism”, however that was previously understood. For most youth, the idea that there even is a working class, much less the understanding that the proletariat has the social power and historic interest to bury the capitalist system, is considered some kind of antiquated Marxist notion. This is encouraged by endless gobbledegook churned out by the ideologues of the “anti-globalisation” movement who simply seek to give capitalism a more “democratic” and “humane” face-lift. And the putative “socialist” left has followed suit.

The SWP dares not breathe the word “socialism” in its Respect electoral coalition for fear of alienating its allies in the mosques. Even the mention of “secularism” is verboten. The Socialist Party, for whom the Labour Party’s Clause IV, translated into “nationalising the commanding heights of the economy”, was long presented as the epitome of “socialism”, can barely even choke that out these days. It’s reserved for what they used to call Sunday “speechifying”, that is, when you present your “maximum” programme. Then there is Workers Power. In 1979 they saw Khomeini’s mullahs as the ticket to a revolutionary mass movement. In the early 1980s, they saw Solidarność as such a vehicle, even while allowing that its aims were counterrevolutionary. Needless to say, their previous mass movements didn’t work out too well. Now they look to the European and World Social Forums as the vehicle for building a new “revolutionary” international. This has all the promise of their previous endeavours. These social forums are nothing other than the vehicles for class collaboration and for various out-of-power popular frontists to get back into the business of ruling with and for the capitalist class.

The impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution

In preparing for this presentation I went back and re-read a speech by James P Cannon, a founding leader of American Trotskyism, given on the 25th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1942, amidst the carnage of World War II and following the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler’s war machine. He spoke to the impact of the Russian Revolution amidst another period of reaction brought on by World War I:

“I can remember the dark days of the First World War, 1914-1918. Then as now, all the hopes for humanity’s progress seemed to be drowned in the blood of the war. Reaction seemed to be triumphant everywhere. The enemies of the proletariat gloated over the treachery and capitulation of the socialist parties [which had lined up behind their “own” capitalist rulers in the war]; and to many — to the great majority, I venture to say — the theory and the hope of socialism seemed vanished like a utopian dream. And then, as now…fainthearts and deserters mocked at those who continued the stubborn struggle and held on to the revolutionary faith. The whole world labor movement was overcome with depression and despair in 1914-1917.

“But the Russian Revolution of November 7 changed all that overnight. At one blow, the revolution lifted the proletariat of Europe to its feet again. It stirred the hundreds of millions of colonial slaves who had never known political aspiration before, who had never dared to hope before. The Russian Revolution awakened them to the promise of a new life.”

— “The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution”, Speeches for Socialism (1971)

The October Revolution created a workers state based on workers councils (soviets). The Soviet government expropriated both the Russian capitalist and imperialist holdings and repudiated outright Russia’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the former tsarist empire. Laws discriminating against ethnic and national minorities, against women and homosexuals were eliminated. The revolutionary government declared that the state had no business interfering in the consensual sexual relations of the population whatever form they took. This statement would have the “no sex please we’re British” left in this country — who go into a frenzy over our defence of Michael Jackson against the American state’s anti-sex, racist witch hunters — in an uproar.

The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health, housing and education, and took the first steps to building a socialist society. But as Marx put it, “right can never stand any higher than the material conditions on which it is based”. Today there are all sorts of new “theories” that you can win without taking power, or that the road to liberation lies through the utopia of building “autonomous” zones which somehow will be free of capitalist exploitation. But the fight for the emancipation of humanity is not some kind of mental act by good-willed, right-thinking people. Nor can it be achieved while scarcity remains, which simply perpetuates the fight for survival. As Marx understood, the eradication of the exploitation of man by man must necessarily be based on conditions of material plenty.

There is great material abundance in the world, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. Our job is to seize that wealth, overwhelmingly created through the labour of the masses of working people, from the hands of capitalist owners who expropriate the fruits of this labour for their own profit. Only the working class has the social power — deriving from its role in production, its numbers and organisation — and the clear objective interest to eradicate the capitalist system. What it lacks is the political consciousness and revolutionary leadership to wage such a struggle. It is that critical element that the Bolshevik Party brought to the workers of Russia.

But the material conditions for the actual development of a socialist society did not exist in backward Russia, nor do they exist within the confines of any one country. From the beginning the Bolsheviks understood that the fledgling Soviet workers state would not survive unless the revolution was extended internationally to more advanced capitalist countries. They saw the October Revolution as the opening of a Europe-wide workers revolution and indeed at the end of the war a wave of revolutionary upheavals swept Europe. The social democrats — who had gone over to the side of “their own” imperialist rulers during the war — acted to save the rule of the bourgeoisie from the working class. The newly founded communist parties, which had been formed in response to the example of the Russian Revolution, were too weak and inexperienced to lead these revolutionary upsurges to victory.

The capitalist world surrounded and isolated the Soviet Union. From 1918 to 1920 the revolution had to fight for its very survival in a civil war, when the forces of every major imperialist power intervened on the side of the counterrevolutionary White Guards. The already backward economy was almost completely devastated through World War I and the ensuing civil war. The vibrant proletariat which had accomplished the 1917 Revolution had practically ceased to exist as a class and famine ravished the countryside. But even under these conditions, in 1923 when an extraordinary revolutionary crisis shook Germany, the workers of the Soviet Union rallied to its cause. The German workers looked to the German Communist Party, the KPD, to lead them. But the leadership of the KPD looked to the left wing of the Social Democracy as an “ally” and they let the opportunity for proletarian insurrection pass.

This defeat had an enormous impact in the Soviet Union, leading to a wave of demoralisation among the already ravaged proletariat. Out of these conditions of scarcity and backwardness, and the isolation of the Soviet workers state, arose a conservative, nationalist bureaucracy headed by Stalin. At the beginning of 1924 this bureaucracy seized political power out of the hands of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard. Repudiating the very programme of revolutionary proletarian internationalism which had led to the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, and which continued to be defended by Trotsky’s Left Opposition, the bureaucracy came up with the anti-Marxist “theory” of “socialism in one country” as the ideological justification for its rule. The bureaucracy consolidated its power by destroying the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party through the blood purges of the infamous Moscow Trials. The Communist International was turned from an instrument for world revolution into the foot soldiers of the Kremlin’s efforts to seek “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism in the name of “building socialism in one country”.

As we wrote in “When Was the Soviet Thermidor?” — one of the early articles that we translated into Russian for our intervention into the Soviet Union — “After January 1924, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled had all changed” (Spartacist no 43-44, Summer 1989). But this was a political not a social counterrevolution. The collectivised property forms created by the October Revolution were not destroyed but remained as gains for the workers of the world. While waging a relentless struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Trotskyists fought unstintingly for the defence of these gains against world imperialism and counterrevolution.

At the same time the situation was very unstable. The rule and privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy derived from their position on top of the Soviet workers state. But they simultaneously acted as the transmission belt for the relentless and hostile pressures of world imperialism which was committed to the destruction of the workers state. The 1938 “Transitional Programme”, the founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International, defined the Soviet Union as a bureaucratically degenerated workers state and laid out two basic historical alternatives confronting it:

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Yet this very unstable and very contradictory situation continued on for over another 50 years. Why was that? The answer lies in the outcome of World War II.

The aftermath of World War II

During World War II and ever since, the lie has been peddled — as it was again at this year’s VE day celebrations — that World War II was the “great democratic war against fascism”. In fact, like World War I, it was an interimperialist war, a battle for markets and greater spheres of influence and domination by the imperialist powers. Like the Bolsheviks in World War I, the Trotskyists’ policy was one of intransigent defeatism towards all the imperialist bourgeoisies. This meant fighting to transform the imperialist war into a civil war — into proletarian revolutionary struggle against all of the imperialist combatants. At the same time, the Trotskyists fought for the world’s working class to come to the defence of the Soviet Union from the blows of the capitalist enemies of whatever camp.

Trotsky had predicted, and with great justification, that World War II would shatter the bureaucracy and would provoke revolutionary upsurges of the proletariat, just as had been the outcome of World War I. Stalin did bring the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster: he beheaded the Red Army and ignored repeated and desperate warnings from heroic Soviet spies like Leopold Trepper in Nazi Germany and Richard Sorge in Japan of the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler’s Nazis. Nonetheless it was the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis, at the cost of well over 20 million dead. As Cannon remarked in his 1942 speech:

“[The] economic strength of the Soviet regime, and the strength of the revolutionary tradition, are being reflected now in the military field. The whole world has been surprised and astounded by the military prowess of the Red Army. All the military experts counted upon a defeat of the Russian armies in the space of a few weeks or months…. The Trotskyists were not taken by surprise. Trotsky predicted that imperialist attack on the Soviet Union would unleash marvels of proletarian enthusiasm and fighting capacity in the Red Army. He could do that because he, better than others, understood that the great motive power of the victorious revolution had not all been expended. The Red Army that the world hails is an army created by a proletarian revolution. This revolution lives in the memory of the Soviet people. That and the basic conquests, which they still retain and upon which they stand, constitute the basis upon which the Red Army has unfolded such unparalleled capacity for defense and resistance and heroic sacrifice.”

Defeating the Nazi forces in the battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army swept through Eastern Europe and straight into Berlin, and smashed the Third Reich. The other regimes in Eastern Europe — overwhelmingly collaborators with the Nazis — fled to the nearest American headquarters, leaving behind a power vacuum. In the aftermath of the war, the imperialists turned on their erstwhile Soviet “allies” with the launch of Cold War I, aimed at the “containment” and destruction of the Soviet Union. In the face of this renewed imperialist offensive, the Stalinists moved to establish deformed workers states throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet-occupied East Germany as a “buffer zone”. The ruling classes, whose power had been smashed, were expropriated. However, with the exception of Yugoslavia, where Tito’s partisans prevailed in a peasant guerrilla war, these expropriations took place from without, through cold social transformations from the top down. The workers states were deformed from the outset — the mirror image of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union — as collectivised property forms predominated under the political rule of nationalist bureaucracies. The Soviet military forces were effectively the state power, and nowhere was this more true than in East Germany, which was the frontline state directly facing the imperialist West.

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the creation of deformed workers states represented tremendous gains, which we defended. But as Trotsky wrote of the earlier Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, the central question was the impact of these social transformations on “the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones”. There was no such consciousness and organisation of the proletariat leading to the social transformations in Eastern Europe. While the Soviet victory over Hitler’s Nazis was testimony to the continued impact of the memory of the October Revolution, this was increasingly supplanted by the Stalinist bureaucracy with a defencist national patriotism. Coming out of the war there were revolutionary situations in Italy and Greece and massive strikes in France, Belgium and other countries. But these struggles were disarmed, in some cases literally, and overall politically, by the Stalinist parties. These parties wielded the renewed authority which had accrued to them coming out of the Soviet victory to push the class-collaborationist programme of keeping class peace with the so-called “democratic” bourgeoisie. Thus, in terms of the central political criterion of the impact on consciousness, organisation and capacity of the proletariat to defend former conquests and fight for new ones, the role of the Stalinists confirmed what Trotsky had written earlier: “From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.”

Cold War II and the unravelling of “socialism in one country”

Economically, the Soviet Union demonstrated the vast superiority of a collectivised planned economy over capitalism. But this was distorted, limited and deformed under the bureaucracy and its dogma of “socialism in one country”. In his 1936 book The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky analysed the vast contradictions of the Soviet degenerated workers state:

“It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command — although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the further you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow.... Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative — conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

Economic planning can be effective only when the workers identify themselves with the government that issues the plans. And to identify with the government means workers must rule through soviets. When they are alienated from the government, the plan will be subverted from the base: the formal target plans may be met, but by poor quality goods. Raw materials will be used wastefully and state-owned supplies diverted into the black economy. All of these conditions were present in the Soviet Union over the course of decades. By the late 1970s, the contradictions of “building socialism in one country” would come dramatically to the fore.

In the early part of that decade, the Soviet Union had achieved rough military parity with US imperialism, which was bogged down in its long, losing, dirty war in Vietnam. The Soviet economy also got a big boost from the rising world market price of oil. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the living standards of the population increased dramatically. The states in Eastern Europe were also beneficiaries as the Soviet Union supplied them with oil at a fraction of the world market price.

But all of this began to change in the mid-to-late 1970s. Defeated by the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants, US imperialism began to rearm itself, building up a huge military arsenal directed against the USSR, which had been the central target of the imperialists since the 1917 Revolution. This began under Democratic Party president Jimmy Carter and his “human rights” campaign for a whole cabal of Soviet dissidents. The aim here was the “moral rearmament” of US imperialism, to overcome the American population’s deep distrust of the government and to refurbish the tarnished “democratic” and military credentials of US imperialism.

This renewed Cold War got red hot with the intervention of the Soviet Army into Afghanistan at the end of 1979. As we wrote in our article “The Russian Question Point Blank” (Spartacist no 29, Summer 1980):

“Afghanistan is a flash of lightning which illuminates the real contours of the world political landscape. It has exploded the last illusions of détente to reveal the implacable hostility of U.S. imperialism to the Soviet degenerated workers state. It has stripped away all diplomatic cover for Washington’s alliance with Maoist/Stalinist China. And it has confronted the left inescapably with ‘the Russian Question’: the nature of the state originating in the Bolshevik Revolution and its conflict with world capitalism.

“For revolutionary socialists there is nothing tricky, nothing ambiguous about the war in Afghanistan. The Soviet army and its left-nationalist allies are fighting an anti-communist, anti-democratic mélange of landlords, money lenders, tribal chiefs and mullahs committed to mass illiteracy. And to say that imperialist support to this social scum is out in the open is the understatement of the year.”

We said “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!”

It should have been a reflexive response for any self-respecting leftist or radical to take the side of the Red Army in a war where they were fighting not only in defence of women from barbaric reaction but the defence of the gains of the October Revolution. But overwhelmingly the generation of leftist radicals who only years earlier were marching in mass protest against the Vietnam War chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” now found themselves on the side of US imperialism against the Red Army. The likes of Tariq Ali who during the Vietnam War was the epitome of “anti-imperialist” radicalism, reportedly even the model for the Rolling Stones song “Street Fighting Man”, wasn’t street fighting anymore. He was baying along with the imperialists demanding the withdrawal of the Soviet troops. Here was a big change in political period. It had been somewhat fashionable to be a leftist during the Vietnam War. At the time most radicals identified with Marxism as the road to liberation, regardless of how they might have understood that. But now the winds were blowing in a distinctly different direction, as Cold War anti-Communism was the order of the day. While the left’s support for Khomeini’s mullahs in the 1979 Iranian Revolution was the precursor to siding with the imperialist-backed forces of Islamic reaction in Afghanistan, they really went whole hog behind counterrevolutionary Solidarność in Poland. After all, here was a “movement” commanding the allegiance of masses of Polish workers. How had this happened?

These were the bitter fruits of Stalinist misrule, which had come to a head under the weight of burgeoning foreign debts. As I said before, in the early 1970s the Soviet Union had heavily subsidised the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe, particularly with cut-price oil as well as other raw materials. But by the mid-1970s, the oil prices were jacked up and the shipments cut down so that the Soviets could sell on the world market. This itself is a savage indictment of “socialism in one country”. At the same time these countries were hit by a world capitalist recession, which collapsed their export markets. To maintain employment and living standards, the East European Stalinist regimes turned to the loan sharks of Wall Street, the City of London and the Frankfurt Börse. Having mortgaged their countries to the Western banks, to meet their debt payments these regimes imposed ever more severe austerity programmes dictated by the IMF. In Poland the economic crisis drove the historically socialist Polish workers into the arms of Solidarność, which was heavily backed and bankrolled by the Vatican and the CIA.

The Gorbachev regime

At the same time all the contradictions, deformities and limitations of the “socialism in one country” which Trotsky had so brilliantly analysed in The Revolution Betrayed were also coming to a head in the Soviet Union. Under the increasing military pressure of US imperialism, and trying to preserve domestic stability at home through maintaining living standards (not to mention the bureaucrats handsomely enriching themselves), economic growth had fallen by about half under the corrupt Brezhnev regime. Here again they ran up against the limitations imposed by their own bureaucratic rule when it came to the technical and scientific innovation needed for the renewal of Soviet industry. Hostile to workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism, the only means at the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy to raise labour productivity was to subject workers and managers to the discipline of market competition. Coming to power in 1985, the new “modernising” regime of Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika — “market reforms”. To increase productivity, workers’ wages were geared to profitability; piece rates were reintroduced, widening income differences between workers, managers and the technical elite; factory was pitted against factory, industry against industry in the struggle for resources and consumers. It fuelled nationalism and the break-up of the USSR, pitting far richer, more industrialised areas against more backward, less industrialised ones.

Underlying this growing inequality was the appetite, especially among a layer of younger bureaucratic functionaries and intellectuals, to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class. A privileged layer, many of them the sons and daughters of the bureaucracy, envied the indulgences of their counterparts in the West. This was reflected in increasingly open expressions of belief in the superiority of Western-style capitalism.

To relieve the overhead of military expenditures in the face of the increasing military build-up of US imperialism, the Gorbachev regime offered a “partnership” to the imperialists. Here Afghanistan was key and in 1989 the Red Army troops were withdrawn. Days before the last troops left, on 7 February 1989, the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League/US, sent a telegram to the Afghan government offering to “organise an international brigade to fight to the death” to defend “the right of women to read, freedom from the veil, freedom from the tyranny of the mullahs and the landlords, the introduction of medical care and the right of all to an education”. We anticipated drawing into this international effort the ranks of militant fighters in many parts of the globe who would see in such a brigade the opportunity to strike a powerful blow against the imperialist system by which they themselves were oppressed and dispossessed. We also saw that this could have a powerful effect among the Soviet army veterans who saw themselves as performing their internationalist duty in Afghanistan. This would have been an important lever for advancing the programme of revolutionary internationalism and proletarian political revolution within the Soviet Union itself.

Though our offer of a brigade was turned down, the Afghan government did ask if we could undertake a publicity and fund-raising effort for the embattled citizens of Jalalabad, then under siege by the bloodthirsty mujahedin. We raised over $44,000, largely from working people and minorities, a number of whom had their origins in the region. But this campaign had greater significance. It showed that with the betrayal of Afghanistan, as well as developments in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China, the absence of a communist party worth its name was acutely felt. And in 1989 we founded ourselves as the International Communist League.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was the opening act of the counterrevolutionary tide that would engulf Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union itself. In 1992 this was admitted by Eduard Shevardnadze, then Soviet foreign minister, who said: “The decision to leave Afghanistan was the first and most difficult step. Everything else flowed from that” (Washington Post, 16 November 1992). Less than a year later, the Kremlin bureaucrats would pull the plug on the East German deformed workers state, giving the green light for capitalist annexation of the DDR by the Fourth Reich of German imperialism. This will be addressed in the remarks of other speakers here today.

I will simply conclude where I began. Our fight to defend the gains that were embodied in these workers states, however warped and deformed by Stalinist misrule, and our fight today in defence of China and the remaining workers states was and is part of our struggle for new October Revolutions. As Trotsky said: “Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.” The period we live in now, one conditioned by the destruction of the world’s first workers state, is deeply reactionary. But the lessons of past struggles are the ammunition for arming new cadre for the struggles that can and will break out. Out of such struggles will further be steeled the cadre for building a revolutionary, internationalist proletarian vanguard — the crucial instrument for the socialist liberation of humanity.