Daily Times

November 9th is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and later on the collapse of the Soviet Union. In China, the Deng faction of the Communist Party had already ushered in the process of the capitalist counterrevolution in 1978. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe provoked a wave of euphoria in the west. The demise of the rule of communists was heralded as the “end of socialism”. The final victory of the free market was trumpeted from the pages of learned journals from Tokyo to New York. The strategists of capital were exultant. Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to proclaim the “end of history”. Henceforth, the class war would be no more. Everything would be for the best in the best of all capitalist worlds. These epic events in Eastern Europe and later collapse of the Soviet Union in fact ushered in a period of lull and disorientation in the class struggle. This was amplified by betrayals and renunciation of socialism by the former left capitulating to capitalism.

Ironically, the leaders of the Russian revolution had predicted the degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union themselves, long before its collapse. In 1921 Lenin said, “Berlin is the heart of Germany and Germany is the heart of Europe. If there is no revolution in Germany the Russian revolution is doomed.” In his epic work, Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky wrote in 1936, “The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalism with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.”

Alan Woods, defying the noxious propaganda, vicious attacks of the imperialists and cynical attributions against socialism by these ex-left renegades, wrote in 1997, “What failed in Russia was not socialism, but a false model, a caricature of socialism. The demagogic attacks on socialism, Marxism, communism have an increasingly hollow ring, because they are made against a background of deepening crisis of capitalism. Only a few years later all these dreams of the bourgeoisie and the reformists lie in ashes. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the very existence of the human race is threatened by the ravishing of the planet in the name of profit; mass unemployment, which was confidently asserted to be a thing of the past, not to speak of the nightmare of poverty, ignorance, wars and epidemics which constantly afflict two thirds of humanity in the so-called ‘Third World’. There is war after war and terrorism is spreading like a dark stain all over the planet. On all sides there is pessimism and a deep sense of foreboding about the future, mingled with irrational and mystical tendencies.”

The financial crash of 2007-2008 has laid bare the terminal decay and the historical and economic redundancy of capitalism. Inequality has reached unprecedented proportions. The number of billionaires in the world has more than doubled to 1,646 since 2009, with inequality reaching new extremes, according to a new Oxfam report. The combined wealth of today’s billionaires has grown by 124 percent in the last four years to $ 5.4 trillion. The 85 richest people saw their fortunes increase by around $ 240 billion over the past year, and own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population – the equivalent of $ 668 million per day or almost half a million dollars per minute. Just $ 70 billion a year is enough to fill the annual gap of funding needed for basic medical care and education in poor countries.

While the number of super rich is skyrocketing, one million women have died in childbirth due to lack of basic healthcare and 57 million children did not receive any form of education in 2013. The report states: “In a world where hundreds of millions of people are living without access to clean drinking water and without enough food to feed their families, a small elite has more money than they could spend in several lifetimes. The consequences of extreme inequality are harmful to everyone – it robs millions of people of better life chances and fuels crime, corruption and even violent conflict.” The report concluded, “Put simply, it is holding back efforts to end poverty. There is rising evidence that extreme inequality harms, durably and significantly, social stability and growth in the economy. It retards development of the human, social and physical capital necessary for raising living standards and improving conditions of life.”

The sickness of the 21st century is not without historical precedent. We can observe the same symptoms in every period of decline, when a given socio-economic system has exhausted its potential and becomes a brake on human development. Capitalism is no longer capable of developing the means of production it once did. In fact, it is no longer able to tolerate the continuation of the reforms of the past that provided at least some of the elements of a semi-civilised existence in developed capitalist countries. But now, all the gains so painfully won by the working class in the past, mainly in advanced countries, are coming under attack. However, the workers and youth will not surrender their gains without a fight. The stage is set for an unprecedented explosion of the class struggle. And in the underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the impasse of capitalism, in the words of Lenin, means horror without end.

The representatives of capitalism are terrified by the prospect of another revolution in today’s burgeoning crisis on Bolshevik lines. This fear of the international bourgeoisie was revealed in a recent lead article on Ukraine in The Economist. The article says, “Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers still at the front are unable to vote. With the fighting nearly over, they will soon come home to find a government they played no part in electing. If they see no change in the way their country is run, they will take to the streets, not with wooden shields and sticks as they did a year ago, but with real weapons. The next Maidan will look less like a carnival and more like the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. If nothing else, this should concentrate the minds in the Ukrainian government.”

In the present, severe crisis of capitalism and the agony of the masses that flows from this devastating mayhem, nothing less than a workers’ revolution can emancipate the oppressed billions. The revolution that can ensure an end to this pain, misery and deprivation can be victorious and successful only if it is based on the ideas, methods and strategy of Bolshevism. With the present state of technology and the advancement of the consciousness of the workers and youth, its victory in one major country will enable it to sweep across the planet swiftly and irreversibly. With this shall dawn the epoch of communism, and the journey for the conquest of the universe by humankind shall then commence.

(Concluded)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com