Against the Current, No. 23, November/December 1989
The Editors When Boris Yeltsin took Manhattan, the ideologues of the Cold War could
no longer contain their euphoria. Victory was at hand. The bullet train
of events of the summer of ’89 in China, Eastern, Europe and the USSR
gave rise to an orgy of self-congratulation and high-flying metaphysical
speculation in the pages of the mass circulation periodicals and the
highbrow “opinion-shaping” journals. Celebrating the “Collapse of
Communism” in the Eastern Bloc, US News and World Report (6/19)
rhapsodized over “a system … victimized, in Hegel’s formulation of
history, by none other than the consciousness of freedom.”
Strikingly convergent and no less exuberant, New Republic and other such
serious publications have been hailing the theses of one Francis
Fukuyama, who advances the breathtaking proposition that Hegel was
indeed right in foreseeing the End of History and that, as Hegel
predicted over and against Marx, History has today reached its End with
the imminent universalization of free enterprise liberalism, proven to
be the best of all possible social systems and rendering henceforth
superfluous any politics based on moral principles or political ideologies.
Readers of Against the Current will find little to be surprised about in
these exultations—especially coming at the time they do—except perhaps
that Hegel could today be made fashionable by our chief opinion-makers
or that the “End of Ideology” fad continues alive and well among the
West’s leading ideologists. It doesn’t take even a vulgar Marxist to
understand that the “freedom” or liberalism” vaunted by USN&WR, NR, the
rest of the U.S. political and ideological establishment needs to be
turned right-side up and read more or less purely and simply as
“capitalism.”
These born-again dialecticians have obviously lost little sleep during
the past half century over the systematic repression of basic political
liberties in the name of free enterprise by the most viciously
repressive authoritarian capitalist regimes backed directly or
indirectly by the United States, in places like Greece, South Korea,
Taiwan, Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Chile, South Africa,
and so on. Not an eyebrow is raised over the glaring contrast between
Bush’s offer of loan and aid packages to Poland and Hungary, and the
United States’ attempt to strangle by military, economic, and undercover
means, a Nicaraguan state where an impressive multiparty democracy is
continuing.
The day that a USN&WR or NR headline hails the emergence of a
revolutionary mass workers movement in Korea or Soweto or Chile as the
sure sign that humanity’s longing for- Freedom can never be eradicated,
we will know that a new epoch in world history is definitely dawning.
Until that time, when these august publications appear to pay tribute to
the remarkable mass democratic struggles in Eastern Europe, the Soviet
Union, and China, we know that what is uppermost in their minds is
merely the ideological discrediting of the main competitor of the
capitalist social system on a world scale and the potential opening of a
massive new sphere for the penetration of capitalist investment using
cheap and pliant labor.
ATC has never subscribed to the slogan that “the enemy of my enemy is my
friend.” We do not mourn for a moment y the disintegration of
dictatorial bureaucratic regimes that have long exploited their working
classes, excluded their people from the smallest control over their
economies and their work places, and deprived their citizens of the most
basic political liberties.
We hail, as truly historic blows for freedom, Solidarity’s breathtaking
sweep of the first free elections in post-war Polish history, the mass
demonstrations in Budapest to honor Imre Nagy and other leaders murdered
after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the joined
hands of a million citizens across Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia marking
the fiftieth anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin pact and protesting the
violent annexations of those nations by the USSR in 1940. We stand
firmly on the side of these world-historic democratic struggles; their
enemies, the bureaucratic elites who rule in the name of the workers
they exploit, are also our enemies.
Still, it must also be said that the putative friends of our friends are
not necessarily our friends. Crucial leadership elements within the
opposition forces throughout Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China
support the restoration of capitalism in those countries and are looking
to Western powers to help them. This is a dismaying fact, though
partially understandable.
The bureaucratic regimes have the worst of both worlds. As under
capitalism, their workforce is alienated and exploited; but unlike
capitalist states they can neither foster inter-firm competition nor use
unemployment to discipline labor. The consequence is that the
bureaucratic regimes have managed to combine economic inefficiency and a
low standard of living with the absence of political freedom. As a
result, it is not only the East European intelligentsia, but also many
workers who have cone to equate private enterprise with efficiency,
higher living standards and political liberty.
In Poland—less than a decade ago the site of perhaps the most powerful
and far-reaching workers’ movement in the history of industrialized
societies—we have a highly paradoxical development. Historic leaders of
the Solidarity workers’ movement have decided to form a coalition
government with the Communist Party.
In itself this is a tactical decision we don’t pretend to be able to
judge in the abstract. Indeed, under some conditions, it is possible
that entering such a government would be the best way to strengthen the
workers’ movement. Strengthening the workers’ movement is, in our view,
the only mad to a truly democratic outcome in Poland throughout Eastern
Europe and the USSR—because it offers the potential of abolishing the
bureaucracy and preventing a restoration of capitalism.
Unfortunately, the various factions of Solidarity’s leadership that have
entered the government have done so as a more or less direct application
and extension of the explicitly reformist strategy of Jacek Kuron
(long-time advisor to Solidarity, former political prisoner and now
Minister of Labor in the new government) and others. They have agreed to
leave the organs of state repression—the military and the internal
security forces—in the hands of the Communist Party. The Solidarity-CF
government coalition will thus confine itself to limits set by a state
that remains in the hands of the party-bureaucracy.
Why, then, do these leaders of Solidarity nonetheless wish to govern
when they do not rule? The answer is, at least in large part, that those
sections of Solidarity represented in the new government are committed
to the restoration of capitalist property and the introduction of direct
foreign investment. They believe, with some justice, that their program
can be adopted because much of the Communist leadership also wants it.
There is much reason to doubt whether capitalism can be restored in
Poland, whoever wants it Major practical difficulties and powerful
social forces stand in the way, including sections of the bureaucracy
and perhaps the majority of the working class. Still, the question poses
itself in whose interest is the program of the Solidarity leadership?
To answer this question, we must begin with one central fact: despite
the pleas and the promises of Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders,
Western business has remained notably cool to the prospect of investing
in Poland. The reason is obvious: there would not be much profit in it.
Given the backwardness of Poland’s economic plant and infrastructure,
its economy could hope to provide a sphere of profitable investment for
Western capital only by offering a cheap and docile labor force. Yet the
last two decades of Polish labor struggles have produced a militant,
well-organized and battle-hardened working class.
To secure the conditions for Western investment, the Solidarity
coalition government faces the tragic prospect of taking responsibility
for imposing austerity which requires crippling the powerful workers’
organization that Solidarity has contributed so much to building over
the past decade. Whether this goal is achievable is a big question. But
should the Solidarity government succeed, its accomplishments would be
ironic indeed.
In the realm of the economy, it would have laid the groundwork for that
so-called “primitive accumulation of capital” that has been the first
necessity of capitalist development since England made the initial
industrial revolution. The Polish working class, like the English
working class in the early nineteenth century, would thus face the
prospect and the privilege of sacrificing its standard of living and
dignity for the possibility of economic development and rising living
standards one or two generations hence … this in the computer age of the
late twentieth century!
But the political upshot would be even more disheartening. Should the
Solidarity government succeed in destroying the ability of the Polish
working class to defend itself from an incipient capitalism, it would
succeed in dissolving what has been the central force for democracy in
general—and the Solidarity government in particular—in Poland.
It would thereby prove, once again, what has long been evident: that far
from free enterprise bestowing freedom and democracy, the condition for
early capitalist development is the denial of the most basic liberties,
let alone rule by the people (witness Korea, Taiwan and many other
cases). But that is not the worst of it. With the workers’ movement
beaten, a very possible outcome in Poland would be the return to
government of the old CF bureaucracy, but in its own name … and possibly
to preside over the first phase of Polish capitalism.
But is there an alternative? It seems to us that the question is
premature. By 1981, Solidarity had organized some ten million workers in
Poland, had succeeded in totally paralyzing the government, and had
adopted a program calling—in an ambivalent formulation, it is true—for
workers’ self-management What appeared at that time to be the chief
barrier to an historic experiment in workers’ democracy, that is,
socialism in Poland, was the threat of Soviet intervention This very
real danger gave a certain credence to the strategy of “self-limiting
revolution” advanced by a number of Solidarity’s leaders.
Today, however, militant mass movements have arisen in many East
European countries. Their existence offers a potential for
internationalism that did not exist in the early 1980s. Equally
important, the Soviet Union is in profound crisis and deeply preoccupied
with its own problems, specifically the rebirth of the Soviet labor
movement, which recently flexed its muscles in the great miners’ strike.
The likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Poland in the foreseeable future
is a great deal smaller than at any other time in postwar history.
At the same time, the Solidarity workers’ movement, though much weaker
than at the time of its great revolt, has survived a decade of
repression. Its potential for creating workers’ power is still very
great. Indeed, it has been largely the workers’ movement which has
prevented the bureaucracy from imposing an authoritarian austerity and
achieved, for the first time in postwar East European history, the
astonishing breakthrough of forcing the introduction of something like a
multiparty political system. This has opened up a whole new political
vista in Poland.
Nevertheless, the mad ahead is bound to be a difficult one, with much
depending upon the level of self-activity and creativity of Poland’s
workers.
The rank-and-file workers are, for their part, full of ambivalence. The
working class gave its support to a new Solidarity government which
represents not only an opening to democracy, but also an opening to
capitalism. At the same time, Solidarity’s trade union wing has been
highly critical of the middle-class dominated civic associations that
took primary responsibility for organizing the electoral fight and
appears on the verge of a split with its leaders in government It has,
moreover, so far shown itself no more willing to accept an austerity
imposed by “its” own government than by the bureaucracy.
Yet the Polish workers resist without offering their own positive
solution to the crisis. An alternative between the capitalist free
market and the bureaucratic command economy—genuine democratic
planning—has not emerged. This is a common situation throughout Eastern
Europe. Indeed, it would seem that the danger facing socialism today is
that it will be discredited and discarded before it has even been tried. © 2020 Against the Current November-December 1989, ATC 23