Daily Times

Lenin struggled against this degeneration before his early death in 1924. Lenin’s last testament which criticised and called for a struggle against this bureaucratic deformation was concealed in the iron vaults of the Kremlin, and finally exposed in 1956 at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. But the hostile objective conditions, the exhaustion of the proletarian vanguard due to war and revolution created a situation where a bureaucratic regime began to emerge around Stalin in the Soviet government and the state. Trotsky created a left opposition and put up a valiant resistance against this degeneration but that was crushed because of the ebbing of the revolutionary tide. This led to the consolidation of a bureaucratic totalitarian apparatus with huge perks and privileges. The maximum wage differentials of 1:4 were abolished. This political reaction against the October revolution was so repressive that by 1940 there was only one survivor, apart from Stalin of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party that had led the revolution in 1917. All others were either exterminated, died, committed suicide, were incarcerated or exiled.

In spite of this Stalinist degeneration of the revolution, the economy remained a planned one. The bureaucracy was not a class that owned the means of production but was a caste or a clique which controlled and usurped the surplus. Inspite of these severe setbacks the economy of the USSR grew at a pace that capitalism never achieved anywhere. Ted Grant wrote in his brilliant work, Russia — From Revolution to Counter Revolution, “In the fifty years from 1913 (the height of pre-war production) to 1963, despite two world wars, foreign intervention and civil war, and other calamities total industrial output rose more than 52 times. The corresponding figure for the USA was less than six times, while Britain struggled to double its output. In other words Soviet Union was transformed from a backward agricultural economy into the second most powerful nation on earth, with a mighty industrial base, a high cultural level and more scientists than the USA and Japan combined. Life expectancy more than doubled and child mortality fell by nine times. Such economic advance, in such a short a time, has no parallel anywhere in the world.” The equality and full involvement of women was ensured in all spheres of social, economic and political life — the provision of free school meals, milk for children, pregnancy consultation centres, maternity homes, crèches and other facilities free of cost were provided by the workers state. The superiority of the planned economy was proved to the world not in the language of dialectics but in the language of unprecedented social and material advances.

However as the economy expanded rapidly it became more sophisticated, complex and advanced. An economy producing one million commodities cannot be run by the same methods as those for an economy producing 1,500 items. Trotsky had once said that, “For a planned economy, workers democracy is as essential as oxygen is for the human body.” By the late 1960s the economic growth had begun to falter. By 1978 it plummeted to zero percent. The dead weight of mismanagement, waste, corruption and bureaucracy weighed down heavily on the economy, eventually dragging it to a standstill. The isolation of the revolution, nationalist caricature of socialism and the lack of workers democratic control and management of the economy and society were the real reasons for the degeneration of the Russian revolution, not the so-called ‘failure of socialism’. What actually existed in the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse was not socialism or communism but its caricature, Stalinism.

Today with the crisis of capitalism on a world scale there have been massive upheavals against this harrowing system that has plunged the vast majority of mankind into the pit of misery, poverty and disease. It is a historically doomed system and can only cause more pain, agony and grief to the human race. Marx and Engels understood from the beginning that the crisis of the capitalist system is the crisis of overproduction or overcapacity. Even the most far-sighted bourgeois economists acknowledge this crisis and how it has brought the capitalist system into extreme crisis at the present time. The Economist bemoans in its analysis of the world economy, “Modern politics needs to undergo a similar reinvention — to come up with ways of mitigating inequality. Some of those at the top of the pile will remain sceptical that inequality is a problem in itself. But even they have an interest in mitigating it, for if it continues to rise, momentum for change will build and may lead to a political outcome that serves nobody’s interests”.

The mass revolts of a renewed class struggle arising around the world in the present epoch that is dawning are clearly rejecting capitalism. The most daunting problem for these movements is the determination of an alternative system. Most of the ex-socialists and ex-communists are in the forefront of condemning revolutionary socialism as a scientific alternative to resolve the crisis. They have capitulated to the reactionary theories of ‘end of history, etc’, i.e. capitalism. But the greater damage being done by these intellectuals is trying to ‘modernise’ Marxism by venomous revisionism. However the only road to the salvation of mankind still today is revolutionary Marxism. Ninety five years later, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 is the only way forward for the accomplishment of this historic task. In 1917 it took about two weeks for the news of the Russian revolution to reach the leftwing activists in the Indian subcontinent. Now the masses can watch revolutions live on television. In more than nine hundred cities of the five continents there were mass demonstrations in support of the ‘Occupy Wall Street movement’. This is the internationalism that Marxism anticipated and strived for by creating the First International. At this juncture in human history if there is another October it would not and could not be confined to any national frontiers. A socialist revolution in any major country today shall redeem Lenin’s pledge that the whole world will develop into a USSR with a mighty revolutionary storm transcending the planet. Thus the process of the conquest of universe by the human race shall 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