Hail the Reds
By Stephen Gowans
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/reds.html
Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, the Soviet Union managed to create one of the great achievements of human history: a great industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of wealth, income, education and opportunity that plagued what preceded it, what came after it, and what competed with it; a society in which health care and education through university were free (and university students received living stipends); where rent, utilities and public transportation were subsidized, along with books, periodicals and cultural events; where inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous, and child care was subsidized. By 1933, with the capitalist world deeply mired in a devastating economic crisis, unemployment was declared abolished, and remained so for the next five and a half decades, until socialism, itself, was abolished. The Communists produced social security more robust than provided even by Scandinavian-style social democracy, but achieved with fewer resources and a lower level of development and in spite of the unflagging efforts of the capitalist world to see to it that socialism failed. Soviet socialism was, and remains, a model for humanity -- of what can be achieved outside the confines and contradictions of capitalism. But by the end of the '80s, counterrevolution was sweeping Eastern Europe and Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the pillars of Soviet socialism. Naively, blindly, stupidly, some expected Gorbachev's demolition project to lead the way to a prosperous consumer society, in which Soviet citizens, their bank accounts bulging with incomes earned from new jobs landed in a robust market economy, would file into colorful, luxurious shopping malls, to pick clean store shelves bursting with consumer goods. Others imagined a new era of a flowering multiparty democracy and expanded civil liberties, coexisting with public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, a model that seemed to owe more to utopian blueprints than hardheaded reality.
Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed, not least by leftist intellectuals in the US, as a great victory for humanity, more than a decade later there's little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well. Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them -- and from humanity as a whole: "We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security." And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better -- once.
But that's only part of the story. For others, for investors and corporations, who've found new markets and opportunities for profitable investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has, indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by the feudal and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose estates and industrial concerns have been recovered. But they're a minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?
Prior to the dismantling of socialism, most people in the world were protected from the vicissitudes of the global capitalist market by central planning and high tariff barriers. But once socialism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with China marching resolutely down the capitalist road, the pool of unprotected labor available to transnational corporations expanded many times over. Today, a world labor force many times larger than the domestic pool of US workers -- and willing to work dirt cheap -- awaits the world's corporations. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the implications are for American workers and their counterparts in Germany, Britain and other Western countries: an intense competition of all against all for jobs and industry. Inevitably, incomes fall, benefits are eroded, and working hours extended. Predictably, with labor costs heading south, profits grow fat.
Already, growing competition for jobs and industry is forcing workers in Western Europe to accept less. Workers at Daimler Chrysler, Thomas Cook, and other firms are working longer hours, and in some cases, for less pay and without increases in benefits, to keep jobs from moving to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other former socialist countries -- which, under the rule of the Reds, used to provide jobs to all. More work for less money is a pleasing outcome for the corporate class, and turns out to be exactly the outcome the fascists of Germany and Italy engineered for their countries' capitalists in the '30s. The methods, to be sure, were different, but the anti-communism of Mussolini's and Hitler's followers, in other hands, has proved just as useful in securing the same retrograde ends. Nobody who has to subject themselves to the vagaries of the labor market – including workers in the United States -- should be glad communism was abolished.
Maybe some us don't know we've been mugged. And maybe some of us haven't been. Take the radical American historian Howard Zinn, for example, who, along with most other prominent Left intellectuals, greeted the overthrow of communism with glee [1]. I, no less than others, have admired Zinn's books, articles and activism, though I've come to expect his ardent anti-communism as typical of left US intellectuals. To be sure, in a milieu so hostile to communism, it should come as no surprise that conspicuous displays of anti-communism become a survival strategy for those seeking to establish a rapport, and safeguard their reputations, with a larger (and vehemently anti-communist) audience.
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