Poland is state capitalist (1982)

From the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before the Second World War Poland had been governed by a military junta led by Pilsudski. The political outlook of Pilsudski was close to that of the largest pre-war political grouping in Poland, the National Democrats — a band of crudely anti-semitic fascists whose national ideal was similar to that of Hitler’s Germany. During the war the Polish working class were victims of some of the foulest Nazi atrocities. In June 1945 a Committee of National Liberation declared Poland to be a ‘People’s Democracy'. There was by no means a wide Polish consensus in favour of the new government, which was seen to be a political puppet of the Stalinist state bureaucracy which was effectively the capitalist ruling class of Russia. In 1945 a "Democratic Alliance", comprising the Communist Party of Poland and the Socialist Party of Poland, won a number of votes in the election. Soon after the election the Socialist Party was expelled from the “Alliance" and the agents of Russian capitalism dominated Poland.

The leader of the Polish Communist Party in 1945 was Gomulka who, above all else, was a Polish nationalist. Even before adhering to the Russian policy of state capitalism he was committed to the equally anti-socialist policy of strong national pride. The difference between state capitalism and private capitalism is that under the former a state bureaucracy (composed of senior Party members) possess capital, whereas under the latter form of capitalism the means of wealth production and distribution are privately possessed. Neither form of capitalism excludes the other entirely; for instance, in 1945 the Labour Party nationalised a number of industries; this did not stop them from being capitalist concerns, which produced wealth for profit rather than use. but simply altered the political arrangements.

Similarly, although Gomulka's Poland was primarily state capitalist, this did not stop his government from trading with the West and borrowing 40 million dollars from Western banks. These bank loans are of crucial importance: as soon as a professedly ‘socialist state’ borrows money from a bank it has to repay the loan and the only way it can do this is by the process of exploiting its workforce. A second economic area in which Gomulka resisted pressure from the Kremlin to establish total state capitalism was agriculture. The Stalinist policy was to nationalise all land, but Gomulka found it politically inexpedient to do this. He had gained power by promising the Polish peasant farmers that they could retain ownership and control of their land. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had promised the same thing to the Russian peasants in 1917, but they broke their promise when in power. Gomulka kept his promise to his supporters and as a result 80 per cent of the agricultural land in Poland remained the possession of 10 per cent of the population. This is still so today.

Gomulka's political insolence, which he was forced into in order to retain the support of his capitalist-nationalist-minded supporters, earned him the criticism of his Russian masters. In September 1948 Gomulka was removed from the leadership and replaced by the hard-line pro- Kremlinite, Bierut. From 1949 until 1956 Poland, like other Stalinist satellites, underwent a period of state terror and unprecedented economic hardship for the workers. During this period, marked by the notorious Six-Year Plan, everything was sacrificed so that industrial capital could be accumulated. The aim of the government was to turn Poland into an industrial power and in order to do this maximum profits had to be extracted from the labour of the wealth producers.

Just as in Britain in the early 1800s. and in Chile and Zimbabwe today, working class combination is outlawed so as to ensure the passivity of labour which is necessary for the rapid accumulation of capital, so in Poland the trade unions were regarded as an unacceptable obstacle to the objectives of state capitalist production. As in Nazi Germany, the state did not ban unions, but took them over. During 1949 and 1950, 80 per cent of Polish trade union officials were purged. The state-run unions ceased to be a weapon of working class resistance against the rate of exploitation (which even before 1948 they were hardly able to be) and became a weapon in the hands of the exploiters to extract as much profit as possible out of the exploited. The excellent Polish film, Man of Marble, provides a vivid social portrait of the appallingly tyrannous condition of Polish capitalism during the period of the 'plans' for capital accumulation.

The death of Stalin and Bierut, and the relaxation of state terror which occurred after Krushchev denounced Stalin at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resulted in a desire on the part of many Poles — including some Party members — to liberalise state capitalism. In Hungary, the period of so-called destalinisation was considered by the Kremlin to be excessive and in 1956 the Russian tanks went in to Budapest. In Poland the end of the brief period of “liberalism" was decisive, if less dramatic. In 1956 fifteen thousand workers in Poznan held a demonstration to complain about the high production targets which they had been set. The militia was used to break up the demonstration and eighty workers were murdered on the streets.

After 1956 Gomulka returned to power. As in 1946, he chose to finance Polish industrialisation by borrowing from the Western banks. Between 1957 and 1963. 529 million dollars were borrowed from America alone. The result was a consistent effort by the state authorities to intensify the rate of exploitation — notably in heavy industries like ship building. In 1970 the workers in the Gdansk shipyard decided that enough was enough: they went on strike and made the fatal mistake of demonstrating in the streets. The state responded in the only way it knew—just as the authorities in Manchester did at Peterloo — and once again workers were fired on and killed.

In Gdansk in 1970 the state had exposed itself as a ruthless defender of capital and an opponent of the working class interest. Learning from the street demonstrations of 1970. many Polish workers began to realise the need for organisation. After the Gdansk affair Gomulka was removed for a second time and Gierek was brought in to replace him. Although the leader was new, the policy remained the same: Gierek borrowed heavily from the West, receiving 100 million dollars from Russia and 50 million dollars from the West in 1971 alone. There seemed to be an initial success. By 1973 Poland had the third fastest productivity growth rate in the world. Production of consumer goods rose by 7 per cent and real wages rose by 40 per cent between 1970 and 1975. By 1975 Poland owed 6,000 million dollars to the Western banks. To pay off these debts more wealth had to be produced. To produce more, machinery had to be imported. To buy the machinery, more debts were incurred. Eventually, the Polish state decided to cut back on the production of consumer goods for the home market and devote more and more production to goods for export. The contraction of production for the home market led to increased prices of consumer goods and a second problem: the private farmers, who own most of Poland's land, refused to sell their agricultural produce to the state because they had nothing useful to buy with the money. The commodities required by the peasant farmers, such as machinery and chemicals, were being produced for export. Consequently there was a desperate shortage of food, as the price increased still more.

By 1980 the Polish state owed 27,000 million dollars to the banks. It was finding it difficult to sell its goods on the world market because of the world recession. Productive growth, which increased by about 9 per cent between 1971 and 1977, was contracting. Sixty per cent of the industrial products due to be completed in 1980 were unfinished at the end of that year due to lack of goods, leaving Poland with 10.6 billion dollars worth of frozen assets. In 1975, 30 per cent of Polish government expenditure was on food subsidies and welfare services; by 1980 this had fallen to 20 per cent. In 1980 there was a coal shortfall of 12 million tons; shipbuilding amounted to 400,000 tons, 35 per cent less than in 1978. Truck production fell by 6 per cent of 1979 figures and there was a sugar beet shortfall of 30 per cent.

It was thus in response to a crisis of capitalism that the workers in the Gdansk shipyard went out on strike in 1980. In 1981 the workers' journal, Jednosc, contained an article which posed the question: how is the emancipation of labour to be achieved? The answer given was that "it involves true socialism, undistorted socialism . . ." and went on to make the highly perceptive statement that “State ownership and social ownership of the means of production are two completely different concepts which should never be confused. The means of production may be owned by the state, but this does not mean that it is thereby the property of the working class”.

Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the world and everything in it by the whole community. There cannot be socialist countries or socialist governments or socialist banks or socialist police or socialist prisons. Our fellow workers in Poland must learn from their experience of opposing their oppressors in recent times. The enemy is capitalism, whatever its form, and to the end of destroying it the Polish workers will have the support of socialists everywhere.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: An innocent abroad (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is no news that Communists are fatheads, but Arthur Scargill is obviously a fathead par excellence. This “Marxist” miners’ leader went on two weeks’ holiday to the “workers’ state” of Bulgaria, and on his return told newspapers how surprised he was at what he found:

Corruption in State-owned shops and restaurants ‘that would have done credit to the Mafia’;

Massive overbooking by State agencies that kept tourists stranded for hours;

A State-Run voucher system of paying for meals that left holiday-makers hungry and out of pocket.

‘It was a disaster’, said Mr. Scargill. ‘I have no intention of ever returning’.

‘If this is Communism they can keep it.’

The report in the Daily Mail on 9th September was supplemented by an article giving further details of holidays and life in Bulgaria. No doubt the Mail’s readers would admit their need for such illumination; but not Scargill, surely? He, after all, has been an advocate of the “workers’ state” and presumably went to Bulgaria because he thought well of the régime.

The tragedy is that workers in Britain have been accepting militant leadership from this simpleton who confesses he didn’t know what he was talking about. He is described as a “Marxist”, and would probably rush about telling everyone of his astonishment if he opened a book by Marx, too.

Let us explain that in the so-called “Communist” countries the workers do not own the means of living, and production is carried on for sale and profit as it is in other countries. Which means you are as likely to be done, if you are a holidaymaker, in Bulgaria’s Sunny Sands as in Torremolinos or Blackpool; and as certain to be exploited, if you are a worker, in Sofia as in Bradford.

Arthur Scargill was open-mouthed because he did not know what either Socialism or capitalism is. Perhaps he will refrain from further utterances until he has found out.

[From the article, 'An Innocent Abroad', Socialist Standard, October 1975]

The Class Struggle in Poland (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of June, following the announcement of huge increases in food prices, strikes and riots broke out in many Polish towns. The government subsequently altered its proposals. At the end of 1970 strikes and riots were started by the dockers and shipyard workers of Gdansk (Danzig), in which the police shot down and killed at least six workers. The 1970 strikes led to a change in the leadership of the “Communist” Party with Gierek, the present Party leader, replacing Gomulka (who had himself come to power following strikes and riots in Poznan in 1956 in which 38 workers were murdered by the police).

The Polish working class like workers the world over, has had to resist attempts by their capitalist rulers to reduce their living standards. If the protest has taken the form of rioting and looting, as well as going on strike, it is partly because there are no independent trade unions in Poland: though no doubt there are political axe-grinders urging workers that this is what they should do. The organizations calling themselves “trade unions” are merely government agencies for disciplining workers and getting them to work harder.

The strikes in Poland show clearly that, even in state-capitalist countries ruled by a dictatorial “Communist” party, the class struggle of the working class against their exploiters cannot be suppressed. It is a myth that the exploitation of the working class has been abolished and Socialism established in Poland, as claimed by the government. The workers of Poland are exploited by the privileged minority who, through their dictatorial control of the State machine, monopolize the use of the means of production just as much as the private capitalists of the West.

An increase in food prices without a compensating increase in wages means of course a cut in living standards; it was to object to the size of the cut that the Polish workers went on strike. For the present the government has postponed its plans, but it has no choice in this matter because the world crisis has led to Poland developing a serious trade deficit. Exports have fallen and import prices risen, so squeezing the profits of the country’s state-capitalist enterprises, the source of income both for capital accumulation and the privileged consumption of the Polish ruling class. As The Times (26th June) put it:

The increases had become an economic necessity. Since 1970, real wages have risen by about 7 per cent a year while food prices have been artificially frozen. At the same time, world inflation has been pressing in on Poland. Government subsidies for protecting the consumer have reached enormous proportions and became a particularly heavy burden because Poland needs desperately to pay off its heavy foreign debts.

So working-class living standards are to be reduced in order to pay off the debts of the Polish state capitalist ruling class! A familiar story and a proof that the establishment of state capitalism with a State monopoly of foreign trade, in place of private capitalism does nothing to free a country from the pressures of capitalism on the working class. A further proof that there is no national solution to working-class problems.

Our message to the workers of Poland is to urge them to recognize this and, while doing what they can and must to maintain their living standards, to join with their fellow workers in other countries with a view to replacing world capitalism, in both its private and State forms, by world socialism. 

Adam Buick

Sting in the Tail: Their Problems . . . (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Problems . . .

David Mellor's little lapse certainly hogged the headlines, but another story concerning more serious lapses by political leaders was tucked away inside The Guardian (25 July).

Professor Hugh Freeman, a prominent psychiatrist, told a meeting of fellow shrinks In Dublin that world statesmen have often been:

Incapable of exercising normal decision-making powers through abnormalities of brain functioning.

According to the Prof., Prime Minister Anthony Eden was heavily into booze and drugs during the 1956 Suez crisis and "was not fit to be In charge of national affairs at that time”: US President Woodrow Wilson was "severely mentally handicapped" for the last year of his term: Stalin ended up "so irrational" that he could have started World War 3, while JFK was almost certainly taking steroids and amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis. The Profs case is made and he didn’t even mention Hitler!

As the poet wisely put it:

Great men are great In our eyes -

While we kneel.

Let us rise!

. . . Our Solution

Is it any wonder that 'World Statesmen" go barmy? Consider the hassle George Bush faces over the proposed sale of 5 billion dollars worth of US fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

If the deal goes through he risks outraging the Israelis and, in this election year, the Jewish American vote, if it doesn’t go through then 30,000 defence industry jobs will be lost along with who knows how many votes.

Of course, he could buy-off the Israelis and their supporters by granting Israel the 10 billion dollar loan guarantees he has been holding out on, but this will not pacify the American arms control groups: how, they ask, can Bush claim to be promoting Middle East peace and sell arms there at the same time?

All heads of government constantly face such mind-bending problems: let's save the poor souls from their mental anquish by relieving them of all that decision-making and simply re-organise society for the benefit of humanity.

Footloose Faldo

Most days that Scorpion gets up he is quite pleased to find a pair of boots to wear. Sometimes he feels lucky just finding his feet.

That is not the case with Nick Faldo, recent winner of the British Open Golf Championship. Mr. Faldo has been paid £100,000 a year since 1989 to wear Stylo Matchmaker shoes during televised tournaments. Turns out that the naughty Faldo wore Footjoys shoes In his recent triumph. Stylo are not best pleased.

There is talk of-some action being taken which is understandable considering Stylo's holding company lost £9 million last year.

It says a lot about capitalism when even an enjoyable pursuit like an afternoon on a golf course has been turned into just another business opportunity for the money grubbers. Everything capitalism touches It spoils.

That's History

Are you baffled by the complexity of the ethnic mix of Eastern Europe and how it got that way? Then Malcolm Bradbury's description of an imaginary Eastern European country in his satirical novel "Rates of Exchange" could give you a clue:

It is a land that has . . . been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, Indeed almost every tribe or race specialist In pillage and rape, have been here . . . and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths, their architecture, their genes . . . And so its culture Is a melting pot, Its language a pot-pourri, Its people a salad.

So how do those "ethnic-cleansers" square all that with their racial nonsense?

All In The Game

Labour and Conservatives are fond of pretending that they are radically different from each other. Really, of course, it is all a bit of a game.

John Biffen, Tory MP writing in The Guardian (21 July) and discussing John Smith's future prospects had this to say:

He will have to provide a convincing policy alternative . . . He will be under great constraint to do this particularly as Labour's public spending and interest rates policies broadly reflect those of the Conservatives.

It Never Fails

Recently we saw a poster for an SWP meeting entitled "Will The Economy Ever Recover?" We saw it too late to hear what the speaker had to say, but our answer to that question is, yes, the economy will recover.

This will happen for several reasons: One is that the present slump will eventually bring down interest rates to the point where companies find it attractive enough to borrow in order to invest: another is that growing unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages and this will also attract employers.

Then the property crash means that factory, warehouse and office space can be had cheaply, and because of production cut-backs stocks will become depleted and need replacing, while companies will be able to buy the plant and machinery of bankrupt competitors at knock-down prices.

Factors like these will encourage capital to invest again in production because of the prospects for bigger profits and the economy will have recovered. Every slump contains the seed of the next boom and vice-versa.

Caught in the Middle (2024)

Book Review from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Goodbye Eastern Europe. An Intimate History of a Divided Land. By Jacob Mikanowski. Oneworld. 2023. 375pp.

Jacob Mikanowski’s book tells of how over many centuries, in what we still commonly call Eastern Europe, people and territories mixed, split and merged and empires came and went. Goodbye Eastern Europe is remarkable both for the eloquence and flair with which it is written and for the immensely broad and detailed knowledge it displays of the complex history of so many peoples and so many lands, into which the author also poignantly interweaves the story of his own Polish family. In a wide-ranging and dramatic but dispassionate narrative of shifting frontiers, multi-layered identities and changing nationalities, we view both worlds that have vanished and new cultures and systems of governments that have arisen, from medieval times right up to the present day, with even a perspective on the current war in Ukraine.

In comparing Eastern to Western Europe the author points to major developmental differences. In the West, he writes, ‘rulers worked hard to homogenize their states’, ‘the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging began very early’, and ‘the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found’. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, empires were much more pragmatic, tending to accept and indeed ‘accentuate difference rather than suppress it’. So, for example, Christians of all persuasions and Jews were allowed to manage their own affairs by the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs. A Hungarian king, we are told, ‘lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants’ on the grounds that ‘a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile’ and newcomers should be treated ‘with goodwill and honor’, in order that ‘they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place’. So Eastern Europe became a land of diversity and difference and remained largely so until the wars of the last two centuries tore the old empires apart (the Ottoman Empire, for example, ‘was crumbling like a mouthful of rotten teeth’), and made it begin to take on the homogenized, nationalistic model of the Western nation state. At the end of the First World War, in particular, with these new political formations taking shape, the map of Eastern Europe ‘resembled a sky full of shifting clouds’, as national mythologies (that ‘nemesis of the working class’, as someone has put it) developed.

Part 3, the last main section of this book, deals with how these clouds shifted and eventually came to rest, via a series of illuminating chapters entitled, respectively, ‘Moderns’, ‘Prophets’, ‘War’, ‘Stalinism’, ‘Socialism’ and ‘Thaw’, and ranging over the whole stretch of what could be called Eastern Europe from Poland and the Baltic states in the north to Bulgaria and Albania in the south. The chapter on war – World War 2 – though magisterially and dispassionately told, is hard to read for its unflinching account of the near extermination of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. Then, in the chapter on Stalinism in particular, while not dwelling on the horrors of the Soviet pre-war period when millions of Stalin’s supposed ‘enemies’ were starved, deported or eliminated, the author presents a stark view of the expansion of the Soviet dictatorship from 1939 onwards, as it initially took in eastern Poland and the Baltic states and then, after the end of the Second World War, completed the process of domination, in which ‘every country in the region was a one-party state, dominated by a local version of the Communist Party’, with leaders approved by Stalin who ‘dictated their foreign policies and determined their relationships with the rest of the world’. This was, as the author so eloquently puts it, the ‘dreamworld of High Stalinism’, a revolution ‘imposed not from below but from above, and not from within but from without’. It was, furthermore, he tells us, not just a model of political oppression but also failed to provide anything resembling decent living standards to its working masses and any claim to be establishing socialism was ‘shameless puffery’.

A contradictory and misleading thing, unfortunately, is that, having said this, the title he gives to the chapter that comes next, referring to the Khruschev-Brezhnev era that followed Stalinism, is ‘Socialism’. Misleading both because the reality of this era bore no relation to the classless, stateless, moneyless society of free access that proper socialism is and also because the author himself then goes on to portray that reality as very much the same as before but in a milder version. He characterises it thus: ‘Stalinism eliminated its enemies. The socialist regimes that followed neutralized them instead’. Whatever the case, it carried on being, as he puts it, ‘a realm of deceit, of empty slogans and meaningless exhortations’ as well as ‘status and scarcity’, where queues were one of’ ‘the defining experiences of life’.

It could not last and, from 1989 onwards, what the author – again misleadingly – calls ‘real socialism’ began to break up, both in the satellite states and the Soviet Union itself, leading to what he refers to as ‘thaw’. He sees this shift as a process of moving from socialism to capitalism, whereas in reality capitalism already existed in the East. It was not the private or ‘mixed economy’ capitalism of the West but capitalism nonetheless, state capitalism, a system with all the characteristic features of that system – money and wages, buying and selling, an elite class controlling (if not formally owning) the means of production and living off the benefits of this. Something that is still largely the case in countries such as China and Cuba.

The following overview in the book’s epilogue provides a fitting epitaph: ‘For Eastern Europe, the twentieth century was a century of barely interrupted cataclysms. The old ties that bound people together dissolved, only to be replaced with murderous aggression. As rival armies flooded into the region from east and west, neighbour killed neighbour. When the wars ended, mass expulsions and population transfers unravelled what was left of the old Eastern European tapestry’.

Howard Moss

Nationalism and Communism by Hugh Seton-Watson (1964)

Book Review from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism and Communism, by Hugh Seton-Watson, Methuen, 36s. 

One of the minor effects of the many years of political tension between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, that has become known as the Cold War, is a widespread ignorance of those European countries that are within the Russian bloc. Occupied by Russian troops at the end of the second world war, and kept in military and economic subjection ever since, they tend to be dismissed as of no importance.

People with extensive knowledge of West European or American politics and their economic problems, know nothing of the affairs of Eastern Europe. Only when, as in 1956 in Hungary, the scene erupts into violence, do they receive much attention. Yet a hundred million people live here in an area of nearly half a million square miles. We buy food and manufactured articles, gramophone records and books from them in ever increasing numbers, but most of us have a very scanty knowledge of the countries themselves.

Nationalism and Communism is a collection of essays written between 1946 and 1963, and first published in a wide variety of newspapers and periodicals. It contains interesting and detailed reports from the Eastern European States, of the ruthless and cynical methods used by the Communist parties of those countries to gain and hold power.

The book contains also an excellent potted history of the rise of Nationalism. The conceptions of “nation” and “race” that have played so large, and so destructive, a part in recent history, are modern.

The idea of the “nation” was largely unknown before the 18th century, and it first became a major political issue in the French Revolution. As late as 1815 Metternich and Alexander 1 of Russia regarded nationalism as a subversive idea. It was in the 19th century that nationalistic theories spread throughout the world. Not only the major powers, but economic groups seeking independence from domination by a greater power, began to build up theories about their origins to prove that they were a race apart.

Les Dale

The Gnomes of London (1966)

From the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of March discussions, began between the British and Rumanian governments over various debts owed to British capitalists by Rumania. These discussions, of course, didn't involve the interests of workers either in Britain or in Rumania but they are interesting in so far as they show how capitalism works as an international system.

In the past the City was more the centre of international finance than it is today. Foreign governments and companies used the capital market of London to raise funds. The Rumanian government was no exception. The capitalists expected a price for the use of their capital and got it in the form of interest on the bonds. Up to the Second World War the Rumanian government “met its obligations”, i.e., the capitalists got their share of the exploitation of workers in Rumania, as contracted. In the war, however, Rumania was an ally of the Axis Powers and this source of interest dried up in 1941. Ever since, the owners of Rumanian bonds have been clamouring for compensation. Although Rumania was on the losing side in the war most of these debts have yet to be paid. After the war Rumania fell into the hands of Russian State capitalism and was along with the other States of Eastern Europe, ruthlessly plundered to build up Russian industry and military might. In addition, many foreign-owned industries were nationalised without compensation.

After the death of Stalin the native Rumanian exploiting class began to complain about having to send so large a share of the loot they got from exploiting workers in Rumania to their masters in Russia. They sought to sell their products for as high a price as possible on the world market. The capitalists who had loaned money to previous Rumanian governments saw their chance. Ably aided by the Council of Foreign Bond Holders, they exerted pressure to see that before being allowed favourable trading terms Rumania paid up. In 1960 an Anglo-Rumanian Financial Agreement was signed, under which Rumania agreed to pay £l¼m. to settle certain debts. A further clause said that the settlement of the remaining debts should be discussed in 1966. Hence the recent talks.

Rumanian bonds are still traded on the London Stock Exchange and quoted in the Stock Exchange Daily Official List. For instance, 4 per cent Consols exchange at about £13 for £100 nominal stock. So do 4 per cent External Loan 1922 and 7 per cent Monopolies Institute 1929. Considering that some foreign bonds, like the Chinese 4½ per cent 1898, exchange at only 40s, this shows that some capitalists think there's a comparatively good chance that their government can get something out of the Rumanian government as a price for access to the world market.

A glance at the list of foreign bonds quoted in the Official List gives a panorama of the past glories of British Imperialism. Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and South American bonds exchange for little or nothing. Interesting items are the Baltic bonds issued by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during their short period of political independence between the world wars. In 1940 they were grabbed by Russia and another source of interest dried up. Yet now these bonds exchange at what seems the surprisingly high price of £50-60. The reason for this is that although Russia got the land and industry of these countries unfortunately for them the gold reserves were kept in London. Talks between Britain and Russia over the division of the property of these former States still go on. The last round finished in April. These Baltic bonds are a better buy than those of Tsarist Russia (also still traded) which are never likely to be paid. 

Russia and Rumania are not the only States negotiating with Britain over debts. Last August a delegation from Hungary was in London to discuss Hungarian bonds (now exchanging at about £14). Poland settled most of its debts in 1955, paying £40 for £100 face value. In 1960 Yugoslavia agreed to pay interest on some pre-war bonds. Thus on June 15 the interest on its 5 per cent Sterling Fund Bonds 1936 is due. Greece has also been forced to pay up.

The States of Eastern Europe in recent years have been gaining a degree of independence of Russia. Their privileged rulers now no longer have to share so much of the loot with those of Russia—-instead they are having to share it with capitalists in Britain, France and elsewhere! This is the price of “independence”. It is no accident that Yugoslavia has been forced to pay the most, precisely because it has achieved the most independence of Russia. In capitalism might is right and capitalists and their governments always drive a hard bargain. Incidentally, the Labour government in the person of junior Minister Walter Padley has been just as zealous in pursuing the interests of foreign bondholders as previous governments—thus showing their attempts to stir up xenophobia by talk of “the gnomes of Zurich” to be the hypocrisy it is.

Finally, it looks as if British capitalists are again moving in on the workers in Rumania. In March last year Lazards, the merchant bankers, signed an agreement with the State Bank of Rumania for a loan of £2m. from three British banks to build two cargo ships. This loan is to be repaid over a ten year period after delivery of the ships. At 5½ per cent rate of interest.

Adam Buick

Acid Rain (1987)

Book Review from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Acid Rain by Fred Pearce,  Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1987)

Acid rain kills trees, eats away at stone, brick, paper and rubber, kills soils and fish and humans. This study attempts to explain how acid rain affects the environment and what causes it. It is not a new phenomenon for, as Pearce points out, the London pea soup fog of 1952 that killed some 4,000 people contained "water droplets. . . nearly as acid as the water in a car battery". The problem is exacerbated by the complexity of the chemical reaction. Ozone is formed in sunlight from hydrocarbons and nitrogen dioxide. It damages trees and acts as an irritant to human lungs. Ozone also helps in the conversion of gases to acid rain. We have begun to understand how the chemical soups are formed and we also have the technology to deal with that problem. The question is whether the political and economic will exists to carry out the necessary measures.

There has been much talk of acid rain but the actual extent of the environmental consequences are perhaps less well known. Sixty seven per cent of Norway's lakes have lost their stocks of brown trout during the century. Much of the poisoning emanates from the world's largest concentration of coal-fired power stations in a 20 kilometre stretch of the Aire valley. Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge combined pump out 600,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide each year. The problem is not restricted to the interchange between Britain and Scandinavia. West Germany exports 500,000 tonnes of sulphur each year — and receives about the same amount. There is also as much nitrogen dioxide in circulation, from the many cars on which our transportation system is reliant. Sulphur dioxide is converted to sulphuric acid while nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide are converted to nitric acid. Nitrogen oxides are also a key ingredient in the formation of ozone. Such acids are no respecters of national frontiers:

Around 17 per cent of the acid that falls on Norway comes from Britain. About 20 per cent of that falling on Sweden comes from Eastern Europe. It leaps oceans, too. Perhaps five per cent of the add falling in Europe has blown across the Atlantic from North America (p. 23)

Britain has made strides in reducing sulphur emissions mostly through the Clean Air Acts. The pea soup fogs no longer happen. The dominant players in the league table of filthy air are now East Germany, Czechoslovakia. Poland and Russia. As an example 20 per cent of Polish people live in areas with sulphur dioxide levels in excess of permitted government levels (which are in any case four times higher than levels set in the USA.) Sunshine levels in Cracow have been reduced from an average of five hours a day in 1945 to about three hours at present. Twelve per cent of East Germany's forests are now damaged by pollution. We are fully aware of the extent to which acid is capable of eating into buildings. Marble is converted by acid into gypsum which is washed away by rainfall. The problem of attaching a price to aesthetics and history is an additional complication. Another estimate has suggested that the medieval glass of Europe may "disappear within a generation". At a more basic level the corrosion of Britain's water-mains is being exacerbated by the action of acidic water. More frighteningly the action of acidic water has attendant consequences. Pearce says of Scotland that:

Millions of people live in areas where the public water supply comes from reservoirs where the water is soft and acid, partly because of acid rain. This water scours the lead from the old lead pipes and tanks that are still found in millions of homes in Scotland and all over Britain. The lead, in a highly digestable form, comes out of the tap. (p.87)

A study by the Greater Glasgow Health Board in the early 1980s pointed out that some ten per cent of all new born babies in Glasgow had more lead in their blood than was considered safe for adults. Lead drunk by mothers is able to cross the placental barrier and so accumulate in the foetus. The more obvious consequences of this process can be still births or children born mentally retarded. The intention is that by 1990 British water will be dosed with lime to counteract the acid. There are also unknown elements such as aluminium washed from soil by acid rain. At present parts of Birmingham. Manchester and South Yorkshire are among areas whose aluminium tap water content is greater than European Community limits.

The damage to European trees has been well documented although there are still arguments over the actual mechanism whereby the damage takes place. West Germany's fir trees have an 87 per cent damage classification with some two thirds considered by foresters to be in the most severe categories. It ought not to be forgotten that food crops are also sensitive, in particular to ozone which has become more widespread in the past ten years. Damage to plants can occur with ozone levels of 50 parts per billion (ppb). In the summer of 1976 (notable for its heat — a prime ingredient in ozone production) levels of 200-260 ppb were recorded. For a factory worker 80 ppb is considered the safety margin for working. A main contributor to ozone is the car with its emissions of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons. A possible consequence will be that the ozone will act as a "greenhouse", absorbing the sun's radiation and acting as a thermal blanket.

The traditional response to any pollution problem is the concept of disposal through dilution. It is compounded by two attitudes, that of the cheapskate and the optimist. The cheapskate says that there is a mass of water and air and so anything deposited will become insignificant by dilution. The optimist adds that if a problem should occur some future generation will have the technology to deal with it. To add credibility to these attitudes the role of the scientific vacillators is necessary. They propound other theories and hypotheses in order to confuse or more importantly to deny the facts of any one perspective. This suits capitalism well for it means that it need not invest excessive resources in dealing with a problem that is not fully accepted or understood. Ironically there are occasional reversals of the pollution syndrome. During the early years of the Thatcher administration the decline in manufacturing led to a 25 per cent reduction in the amount of sulphur dioxide put into the atmosphere although the CEGB estimate a 30 per cent rise by the end of the century- Such hiccups merely hide the reality of what is taking place:

Today there is more pollution than ever before. It is chemically much more reactive. And its reach has extended from the industrial heartlands of the continent to the most remote comers. There are no refuges. Nowhere is untainted. (p. 128)

The British Electricity Authority stated in 1954 that sulphur dioxide was one of the most harmful of all pollutants. The response has been a recognition of the need for flue gas desulphurisation but this was replaced by the building of big chimneys. Britain has still not been prepared to join the 30 per cent club (those nations committed to a 30 per cent reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions) although a programme of flue gas desulphurisation is to be undertaken. Sulphur dioxide can also be reduced by burning low sulphur coal. Such coal can be found in Scotland and South Wales where British Coal appears to be closing mines as fast as possible. This inconsistency is a direct consequence of the economic demands of capitalism.

We live in a society of misconceived priorities. How do we attach values to the alternative demands of trees, crops, fish, humanity, architecture? The profit system puts all at risk because the treatment of one issue must be made at the priority cost of profit. Even if we deal with sulphur dioxide it is probable that nitrogen oxides will be a greater danger and. in any event the faster growing problem. This will be the next debate for the vacillators. In the meantime the waste remains and kills.

Philip Bentley

Czechoslovakia ten years ago (1978)

From the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Czechoslovakia, as its unwieldy name suggests, was one of the artificial “nation-States” set up after the First World War, containing within its borders not only people whose mother-tongue was Czech or Slovak but considerable minorities speaking Hungarian, Polish, German and Ukrainian. These last two minorities provided the excuse, before the war, for parts of Czechoslovakia to be annexed by Germany (since restored) and, after the war, for parts to be annexed by Russia (where they still are today).

A mere glance at the map of Europe shows why, for strategic reasons, Czechoslovakia could never hope to pursue an independent foreign policy for any length of time. One end of the country points into the middle of Germany, the other (even more prominently on pre-war maps) into Russia. The victorious powers in the First World War who had set up Czechoslovakia in 1919 agreed twenty years later, at Munich, that it should form part of the German sphere of influence. After the war, at Yalta, it was agreed that it should be transferred to the Russian sphere, where it has been since the Stalinist coup d’etat in 1948, a position which was dramatically re-asserted ten years ago this month when Russian tanks rolled into the streets of Prague.

The Russian re-invasion of Czechoslovakia was motivated mainly by strategic considerations, the fear that the political changes begun by the Dubcek government would get out of hand and lead to Czechoslovakia trying to break away from the Russian empire.

Dubcek had succeeded Novotny, a hard-line Stalinist, as the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in January 1968 as part of a process in which the “liberals” in the Party triumphed over the “conservatives”. The sort of state capitalist regime which exists in Russia and East Europe is based on a State monopoly over the means of production, but where the State is itself monopolised by a privileged group who thus own and control the means of production just as much as the more traditional capitalist class of Western countries.

This state capitalist ruling class monopolises the means of production as a class, but within it there are various groups with their own sectional interests such as the military, Party and managerial bureaucracies. In the classic Stalinist model, power is firmly in the hands of the Party bureaucracy — people as often as not originally from working-class backgrounds, who are basically politicians without technical qualifications; they make policy and it is to them that the military and managerial bureaucracies are subordinated. But because factory managers and other technocrats are also generally obliged to be members of the Party, conflicts of sectional interest within the state capitalist ruling class express themselves as conflicts inside the Party.

In Czechoslovakia the election of Dubcek as Party leader, and the “Prague Spring” which followed with the relaxation of censorship and talk of “socialism ( = state capitalism) with a human face”, represented the victory of the managerial section of the ruling class over the more strictly party-political section. The overcentralized state capitalism of the Stalin era, in which all decisions were taken centrally by the Party bureaucracy and industrial managers had merely to execute them was beginning to become inefficient even in Russia itself and various experiments in decentralization and so-called “market socialism” (an absurd contradiction in terms since socialism necessarily involves the disappearance of the market) were made. It was the implementation of such measures that in Czechoslovakia gave the managerial bureaucracy a certain degree of independence and allowed them to mount a challenge against and eventually oust the Stalinist old guard.

The Dubcek period in Czechoslovakia, then, represented the coming to power of a different section of the capitalist ruling class: the managers as opposed to the politicians. Some people were quite frank that this was what it was all about. The present writer recalls a Czech tourist at one of our meetings in Hyde Park in the summer of 1968 who somewhat arrogantly declared that Dubcek represented the end of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” by which he meant the end of “stupid workers”, i.e. political leaders from a working-class background) giving orders to more educated managers and technocrats like his father.

The programme of the triumphant Dubcek wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was essentially an extension of “market socialism”. This would have involved a further relaxation of centralized planning and more competition between enterprises for sales and profits. Enterprises were to be given the right to hire and fire, so turning the “hidden unemployment” (over manning) associated with the old system into an open reserve army of labour. There was even talk of enterprises being allowed to raise money by issuing bonds which would be traded centrally on a revived stock exchange! Ota Šik, the theorist of all this, now recognises, in exile, that the old system was a form of State capitalism but fails to realise that his “market socialism” was even more recognisably a form of capitalism.

Together with this economic liberalisation was to go a political liberalisation. Censorship in the newspapers, on the radio and television and in the arts was relaxed; the powers of the police were reduced. Here, as opposed to the economic reforms, was something from which the working class might have benefited. For freedom of discussion is the ideal, even indispensable, condition for the development of socialist ideas since it is only out of a full and frank discussion of their experiences under capitalism that the working class can come to acquire the majority socialist understanding necessary before capitalism can be replaced by Socialism. In the spring of 1968 a small, tentative step was taken in Czechoslovakia in a direction which might have led to the limited political democracy such as exists in Western countries, with its relative freedom of speech, more than one political party, collective bargaining between trade unions and employers, etc.

It was precisely a fear that such a system might eventually lead strategically-important Czechoslovakia out of the Soviet bloc that led the Russian ruling class to decide to send its troops in to overthrow Dubcek and install the puppet regime under Husak which is still in power today. The Dubcek regime itself had never suggested leaving the Soviet bloc (they had learnt the lesson of Czechoslovakia’s brief history: that it can’t have an independent foreign policy but must be dominated either by Germany or by Russia), but, as far as the Russian ruling class were concerned, this was no guarantee as to what, with the advent of a measure of political democracy, some future Czech government might try to do.

Socialists are naturally concerned about whether or not political democracy exists under capitalism. For the existence of some political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be by the class structure of capitalism, is central to our case for the peaceful propagation of socialist ideas culminating in the peaceful establishment of Socialism by democratic political action based on majority socialist understanding.

The Dubcek regime represented a section of the state capitalist ruling class and would have proved to be just as anti-working class as the previous Stalinist governments of Czechoslovakia. So no tears needed to be shed for it. But this split in the ruling class was beginning to allow workers in Czechoslovakia (just as had happened in Western Europe in the 19th century) a certain freedom to manoeuvre, both on the political and industrial fields and the continuation of this process might have led to a situation in which the open propagation of socialist ideas in Czechoslovakia became possible.

Adam Buick

War, Peace and Profits (1942)

From the September 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

The casualties of war mount with the scale of military operations, but outnumbering even the victims of the battlefield are the legions who succumb to the fearful heritage of war—hunger and pestilence. That was the experience after the last world-war, as we are reminded in a book just published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

“Medical Relief in Europe,” by Dr. Melville D. Mackenzie, is described in “The Londoner’s Diary” (“Evening Standard,” 24/7/42) as being the “grimmest, most fascinating book I have read recently.” Its grimness cannot be questioned, for it tells the author’s experiences in Eastern Europe after the last war, where he worked with Nansen in an endeavour to relieve the plight caused by starvation and disease. Despite their efforts, “more people were killed by famine and disease in the three years after the war than by guns during the war.” We do not know whether the author’s work took him to Central Europe, where the devastation wrought by these “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was equally fearful. Amid such parlous conditions the democratic republic of Weimar was born — puny and rickety, like many of its children. No wonder it did not survive.

In Hungary, the revolt led by Bela Kun was crushed, according to the Communists, not so much by superior force, but by the American shipments of wheat placed into the hands of Hungary’s old ruling class, the reactionary landowning aristocracy. Whilst bombs are raining on cities and millions of men are blowing each other to pieces, the horrors and problems of the present crowd speculations as to the future into the background. Only our rulers permit themselves occasional, highly rhetorical, glimpses.

Mr. Anthony Eden, perhaps second in popularity only to Mr. Churchill, and a strong tip for future premiership, in a speech at Nottingham on July 23rd, delivered himself of the following : —

“Industry has reached a stage in which there is no necessity for anyone in the world to go short of food, or to lack the means to build themselves a better life. The problem is to organise a full production and an equitable distribution for all.” (“News-Chronicle,” July 24th, 1942.)

A problem indeed. For Mr. Eden and his class, none of whom conceive or admit the need for Socialism, it is insoluble. But there is no harm in trying, at any rate, on the public platform.

Bearing in mind the disappointment which awaited the workers in the years of slump and unemployment that followed the last war, Mr. Eden added a word of caution :

“We must have no illusion about the future even after the war is won. To win the peace will be as hard a task as to win the war. We shall need the same national unity at home. We shall need true friendship between the nations who have fought as Allies.” (Ibid.)

We shall need something far more drastic, the abolition of the capitalist social order. But Mr. Eden would not be able to help in that direction. He can only hold out hopes for a continuation of some form of “National Government” and agreement on international policy among the victors. We are not told what contribution an alliance of political parties, all of whom have had their chance of dealing with the problems of poverty, unemployment and other evils, but failed, can make to the future happiness of mankind. In the sphere of international relations there are already signs of rifts in the lute. Mr. Cordell Hull, United States Secretary for Foreign Affairs, declared in a speech of the same date as that of Mr. Eden, that the welfare of the post-war world demands “the removal of trade barriers.” Whilst Free Trade may suit the interests of American capitalists, it is not so clear that it would be welcome to ruling class interests in Britain and elsewhere. Wherever we turn, the interests of capitalist ownership of the means of life nationally and internationally effectively prevent any substantial amelioration of human suffering. It is idle for Mr. Eden to avow in the same speech that “Never again must we tolerate the chronic unemployment, the extremes of wealth and poverty, and slums, and lack of opportunity for so many, which have disfigured our national life in the past.”

And may we add, continue to disfigure it in the present. In a written statement by Captain Crookshank, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, it is seen that—

“The number of big incomes shows no reduction. A hundred people still receive over £100,000 a year, but whereas in 1939 they paid 12½ millions in tax, they now pay 17.3 millions.” (“Evening Standard,” July 24th, 1942.)

We are not told whether their combined incomes have risen since 1939, though that may well be the case.

At the other end of the social line-up, 5,700,000 taxpayers are in the £125—£250 per year class. With the cost of living at its present rate, it is not necessary to be a student of economics to appreciate the hardships suffered by those wage earners and their dependents.

Nowhere have the ruling class relaxed their grip on the economic and political life of the country. Rather have they strengthened it. Squeezing out the smaller capitalist fry will give greater power and security to the monopolies, just as it will lower the social status of a working class having to contend with powerful combines, whose representatives personally occupy the pivotal positions within the machinery of State. These are the realities of the present and they count for more than the chimera of platform speeches.

They also reveal the future trends of capitalist society. In other countries, too, this centralisation of control and ownership has been put into effect or else discussed; the motive is not a new one; it is the same that has actuated capitalist production from the beginning—profits and the greater security in obtaining them.

Bearing in mind what has been said at the beginning of this article, the following item of news is of special interest : —

Under the heading, “A European Plan for Farming,” the “News-Chronicle” which reported the speech of Mr. Eden also brings news of a conference in London between representatives of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria.

“These representatives,” the report goes on to say, “have prepared a peasant programme aimed at opening new post-war markets for their countries in Western Europe—the only way to free them from economic and political domination by Germany.”

“Their programme insists on peasant ownership, with peasant institutions, democratically organised; ample facilities for credit, including a Central Agricultural Bank; and regulated prices.”

Can the futility of capitalism be demonstrated more convincingly ? There are prospects of mass starvation for some time after the war in these very countries, and landowning interests there are looking to Western Europe for a “market” !

Unless the workers of the world awaken to the urgency of Socialism, the epitaph of all human civilisation may well be :

“They wanted work and they gave them munitions factories and war; they wanted bread and they gave them a Central Agricultural Bank and regulated prices.”

Sid Rubin

“Red Elvis” (2006)

Radio Show Review from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dean Reed: Death of a Comrade. Radio 2, 11 July. Presented by Mark Lamarr.

For a time in the 1970s, Dean Reed was probably the best-known American in South America and Eastern Europe. Though, as he sang, “Nobody knows me back in my home town.” Born in Denver in 1938, Reed was a rock singer who never quite made the big time in the US. Understandably enough, he felt that nobody who worked in Hollywood could keep their integrity.

When one of his records became a hit in Chile, he travelled there to perform and was struck by the obvious inequalities in power and wealth. He later settled in Argentina, but after some unwelcome attention from the dictatorship he moved to Europe. His left-wing views attracted the attention of cultural bosses in Russia, and he was invited there. He became a great success with young people in eastern Europe, who were keenly interested in Western popular music.

In 1973 Reed decided to move to East Germany permanently. The secret police or Stasi were initially suspicious of him and spied on him, but they later tried unsuccessfully to recruit him as an agent. By the 1980s, however, he was no longer a star in Eastern Europe, as younger musicians from the West were touring there. He considered returning to the US, but remarks on radio and TV chat shows (e.g. comparing Reagan to Stalin and defending the Berlin Wall) led to him receiving hate mail. In June 1986 he was found dead in a lake near his home in East Berlin – officially an accident but probably suicide.

Mark Lamarr’s programme contained interviews with people who knew Reed and excerpts from his (unexceptional) music. It also made the point that he failed to see how ordinary East Germans felt about the regime that governed them and how they viewed him as an establishment figure. So the rebel became another apologist for the Bolshevik dictatorship, one who certainly would have had no place in a unified Germany.

Paul Bennett

Nationalisation (2000)

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Realism, New Barbarism. By Boris Kagarlitsky, Pluto Press, 1999.

Socialism has never existed, anywhere. However, Boris believes that socialism did exist in Eastern Europe but has now been replaced by capitalism, so we now have global capitalism. He is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Comparative Political Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Boris is no government stooge, however. He was a political prisoner under Brezhnev and is currently an adviser to the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.

Following the collapse of the state capitalist dictatorships in Eastern Europe in 1989 and after, neo-liberal (Thatcherite) “New Realism” became global. The current global system, according to Boris, is a “New Barbarism” wherein the relatively few wealthy countries of the centre exploit the poorer countries of the periphery. Eastern Europe has now become part of the periphery, with debt dependency and declining living standards for many. In Russia the old nomenklatura (ruling class) has become the new capitalist class by converting its political power into money and property. However, the process of change has not been identical throughout Eastern Europe, ranging from civil war in Romania to a change of power witnessed by a largely passive population in Hungary. But the end result was more or less the same: an acceptance (even by the reformed Communist Parties) of market capitalism.

The technological revolution of the late twentieth century is developing according to the same logic as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so Boris argues. The Internet in particular has important social consequences. The Internet is intrinsically socialist in that its success depends on the free flow of information and data within a non-hierarchical network. But its full development is fettered within global capitalist relations of production. The Internet can only really flourish when free and equal access is established.

Boris claims that unless a socialist alternative “challenges the system of global capital and its local political representatives, it has no chance to change anything.” But his “socialist” alternative turns out to be the failed and discredited policies of “nationalisation and redistribution.” This conclusion is just as mistaken as his belief that globalisation is a new phenomenon. Globalisation is just another word for capitalism.

Lew Higgins

The almost-war in Ukraine (2022)

Blogger's Note:

A version of this article originally appeared on the WSPUS website as long ago as the January 30th of this year, and events in the past week have obviously overtaken both the article and its title. The March issue of the Socialist Standard was going to press when Russia invaded the Ukraine.

From the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

They told us that 16 February would be the day that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. But diplomatic discussions continued. What had happened? Did Putin really intend to go to war? Or were what appeared to be war preparations merely a means to exert pressure and win concessions from the West?

Developments within Ukraine

Ukraine has been in the grip of civil war since the coups of 2014 — the Ukrainian-nationalist coup in Kiev and the west and the counter-coup in the east.

The split between western and eastern Ukraine goes back to the 19th century, when Ukraine was divided between the Austro-Hungarian and tsarist empires. Eastern Ukraine, where the country’s industry is concentrated, is mainly Russian-speaking and depends on economic ties with Russia, while western Ukraine is oriented toward Europe. Yanukovych, who was president in 2010—2014, tried to hold Ukraine together by developing closer economic relations with both the EU and Russia, but the EU insisted that he choose – he could not do both. As a representative of the east Ukrainian capital and its Party of Regions, he could not afford to break ties with Russia. This placed him at loggerheads with west Ukrainians, who aspired to join an idealized ‘Europe’, and in 2014 he was overthrown.

The ‘Maidan’– the movement that overthrew Yanukovych – began with peaceful mass protests against corruption, but developed into a violent struggle between riot police and extreme Ukrainian nationalists. The regime that emerged, with the support and guidance of Western politicians and propagandists, was semi-fascist in spirit despite a thin democratic veneer (for a fuller analysis see ‘Ukraine: popular uprising or fascist coup?’ tinyurl.com/mr3m689x).Its hostility to ethnic Russians and citizens of mixed ethnic identity and a massacre of Russian activists in Odessa struck terror in the hearts of easterners, who responded with the ‘anti-Maidan’ – an uprising against the Maidan.

The anti-Maidan also began with peaceful demonstrations and even shared certain themes with the Maidan, such as a concern with corruption. But it too was taken over by militaristic nationalists – Russian nationalists in this case. The process went furthest in the two easternmost provinces, where there emerged breakaway mini-states called the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic, supported and manipulated by the Russian government and Russian nationalist organizations.

The new Ukrainian government conducted an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ to crush the DPR and LPR and reincorporate their territory. The civil war dragged on spasmodically, without decisive results. Two million people fled the war zone and became refugees.

Whole communities in parts of Ukraine resisted the draft, unwilling to sacrifice their sons in a cause of no concern to them. Immunity to nationalist propaganda is especially characteristic of people with mixed ethnic identities, such as Ukrainians long resident in Russia and children of Russian-Ukrainian marriages. Most people in eastern Ukraine see no contradiction in identifying simultaneously as Russian and Ukrainian (in many places they speak a mixture of the two languages called Surzhyk). When interviewed, residents of the war zone are inclined to blame both the Ukrainian and the Russian government.

Russia and its ‘near abroad’

A key security requirement for Soviet leaders was that the USSR be surrounded by a belt of states that were either allies or at least ‘friendly neutrals’ (like post-war Finland). ‘Friendship’ entailed willingness to develop economic and cultural ties, consult regularly with the Kremlin and refrain from offensive propaganda campaigns. Above all, it meant not joining hostile military alliances like NATO.

This attitude was inherited by leaders of post-Soviet Russia, except that now the belt of friendly neighbours had to consist mainly of other post-Soviet states. Due to their shared Soviet and tsarist heritage, these states are felt to be less ‘foreign’ than countries beyond the old borders. The two zones came to be referred to as ‘the near abroad’ and ‘the far abroad’.

It is no longer regarded as essential that all former Soviet republics belong to this ‘friendly neighbourhood’. It is now accepted as a fact of life that the Baltic states are going to remain ‘unfriendly’. However, such tolerance does not extend to the three large inner states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Belarus and Kazakhstan remain ‘friendly’ but since 2014 Ukraine has not behaved in a ‘friendly’ manner.

This has an immediate impact on Moscow’s approach to border issues. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the internal administrative borders between its ‘union republics’ suddenly turned into interstate borders, even though they did not closely reflect the pattern of ethnic settlement. The international community nonetheless soon began to treat them as no less inviolable than any other interstate borders.

The Kremlin too accepted these borders, but not unconditionally. Borders with ‘friendly’ neighbours were accepted, however anomalous they might seem, because border issues were not felt to be important enough to justify spoiling good relations by raising them. Thus, Russia has never objected to the inclusion in Kazakhstan of large areas in the north and east with predominantly Russian-speaking populations, and has lent no support to attempts at secession by Russian nationalists in those areas. Nor did the Kremlin contest Russia’s border with Ukraine until 2014, when the overthrow of Yanukovych was quickly followed by the annexation of Crimea, thereby reversing Khrushchev’s transfer of the peninsula from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine. For the Kremlin, the anti-Russian stance of the new government in Kiev also justified support of the secessionist ‘people’s republics’ in eastern Ukraine.

NATO expansion

The eastward expansion of NATO, especially when it extends to the ‘near abroad’ and right up to Russia’s borders, is a bitter grievance of Russia’s power elite. That is because it violates the security requirement of a ‘friendly neighbourhood’ deeply embedded in their psyche. It is also because it violates the verbal promises made by Western politicians to Gorbachev that if he allowed Germany to unite and united Germany to remain in NATO then NATO would not expand ‘an inch to the east’. These promises were ‘forgotten’ under pressure from American arms manufacturers, whose sales were flagging due to improved relations with Russia and who sought new markets in Eastern Europe. (For a detailed account see Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine, Verso 2021, Chapter 6.)

Hence the feeling of Russian leaders that Russia – and they personally — have been deceived, swindled and humiliated. It is surely understandable that there should eventually come a time when as a matter of self-respect they say ‘enough is enough’ and ‘take a firm stand’ in defence of core state interests as they perceive them.

Russia first ‘took a firm stand’ against NATO expansion when it invaded Georgia in 2008, partly in order to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. As Georgia has still not joined NATO, that war – together with Russia’s subsequent recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — may have achieved its purpose, although Georgia may have remained outside NATO even without Russian intervention. The invasion of Georgia provided a precedent for the confrontation with Ukraine when it adopted the goal of joining NATO.

The recent crisis

Thanks in large part to Western arms supplies, Ukrainian forces in the east grew strong enough to make it seem likely that they would succeed in breaking the stalemate and penetrate core areas of the DPR and LPR. Residents of these areas feared what might then happen to them, especially as the forces facing them contained Nazi formations like the Azov Battalion. Russian commentators too envisioned a scenario like the massacre of Moslems at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, in which case Russia would be morally obliged to intervene.

Russian spokesmen often promised that Russia would not be the first to violate the status quo. However, a major Ukrainian offensive against the DPR and LPR would be regarded as a violation of the status quo and Russia would respond forcefully to any such ‘provocation’. Kiev took the view that it has a perfect right to move against secessionists on its own territory. So each side would be able to blame the other for starting a war.

However, there was no guarantee that hostilities would be confined to eastern Ukraine. The concentration of Russian forces in southern Belarus, close to the border with Ukraine and just 120 kilometres from Kiev, prefigured a possible blitzkrieg to install a ‘friendly’ government.

Many signs appeared in recent weeks of a deep division within Russia’s power elite over the expediency of invading Ukraine. Two senior army officers, one retired from the defence ministry and the other from the General Staff, publicly warned against the prospect of protracted occupation of a hostile population. The main threats to Russia, they declared, are internal ones like corruption and demographic decline. Prominent civilian experts likewise argued – as Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, was quoted on St. Petersburg Online (fontanka.ru) – that ‘any analysis shows that war is to Russia’s disadvantage’.

The prospect of cancelation of Nord Stream, the pipeline through the Baltic Sea to bring Russian natural gas to Germany, is likely to have pulled the huge gas corporation Gazprom into the anti-war camp.

The main advocates of war seem to have been officials of the security services, more concerned with the threat to the regime posed by Colour Revolutions than with broader national interests.

Even the most ‘democratic’ governments, having decided on war, suppress public expression of anti-war opinion. So the fact that it was possible during the recent crisis in Russia openly to oppose any resort to war shows that Putin was not committed to military action. He may have been keeping his options open until the moment when a decision had to be made. (The high level of mobilization of Russian troops could not be sustained for long: they had to be set in motion fairly soon or else demobilized.) Or he may have never intended to go to war at all, resolved in advance to content himself with whatever gains the crisis might yield.

Russian gains

The Ukrainian crisis was accompanied by intensive diplomacy, involving mainly Russia, the United States and major European member states of NATO (Britain, France, Germany). Much of this diplomacy remains secret. But clearly NATO has agreed to take some account of Russian security concerns and revive the stalled process of European arms control. On January 12, after a hiatus of two and a half years, the NATO—Russia Council reconvened in Brussels.

Western governments have affirmed the continuing validity of the NATO—Russia Founding Act of 1997 and the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015. Kiev and its unconditional supporters inside NATO have been lobbying hard to consign these agreements to oblivion, thereby releasing Kiev from such unpleasant obligations as granting a special status to the areas controlled by the People’s Republics.

Russia has obtained no guarantee against Ukraine joining NATO, but it is conceivable that France or Germany, which take pride in maintaining a certain autonomy from the US, secretly promised to block Ukraine’s admission – requiring, as it does, a consensus of existing members.

The Russian parliament (State Duma) is now asking Putin to recognize the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as independent states, maybe as a step towards their subsequent annexation to Russia (as happened to Crimea).

Our attitude

Socialists need feel no great temptation to take sides in disputes between Russia and Ukraine. In both countries wealth is concentrated in the hands of wealthy capitalists known as ‘oligarchs’ who own the mass media and control political parties. (One difference is that Russia under Putin, unlike Ukraine, has acquired a state strong enough to limit the rivalry and political power of the oligarchs.) Corruption remains rampant in both countries, despite the best efforts of Maidan and anti-Maidan activists. Human and democratic rights exist on paper, but just try to exercise them and you will find yourself at the mercy of nationalist vigilantes and paranoid security agencies. Fascist groups are actively engaged on both sides. The anti-nationalist Left is weakened by the depth of ethnic and religious divisions and the continued association of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ with the Soviet past.

As always, we urge our fellow workers in Russia and Ukraine to reflect. Where do their true interests lie? With ‘their own’ oligarchs and politicians? With the oligarchs and politicians on the other side? Or with one another?

Stefan

Editorial: The Peace Settlement : Back to 1815 or on to Socialism? (1941)

Editorial from the September 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Times, in a recent editorial, was discussing the kind of settlement that should be made when the war is over. Comparison was made between the Versailles Peace Treaty made after the last war and the settlement made in 1815, when Napoleon’s armies had been disposed of, and the comparison was wholly in favour of 1815 !

 Neither ingenious formulas nor noble aspirations will of themselves suffice. Those who made the Vienna settlement of 1815 were less affected by sentiment and took less account of abstract ideals than the peace-makers of Versailles. But the settlement proved more enduring because it was based on a shrewder estimate of the relative strength of the principal European Powers. No peace settlement can last which is not rooted in the realities of power. Mr. Eden was right, in his speech last Tuesday, to set down as the first of peace requirements the military measures necessary “to prevent a repetition of Germany’s misdeeds.”— (Times, August 1st, 1941.)

Thus does the Capitalist world progress. During and after the last war the keynote of the utterances of most of the leaders of the Liberal and Labour Parties was that the mistakes of 1815 must not be repeated. Instead of a peace based on the balance of force we must have, they said, a peace based on principles and ideals. Now that it is popular in the same quarters to ascribe the present war to the last peace, there is a revulsion of feeling, and back we go to the good old principles of the reactionaries who disposed of the boundaries of Europe 126 years ago. And what will that mean?

One thing the Times does not attempt to hide is that even when the Peace is settled, trouble will still be round the corner.

  “The danger point is likely to occur not at the moment when the settlement is made, but some 15 to 20 years after . . . when a new generation rises to challenge it.”

Indeed, the Times need not have postponed the trouble for so long a period. In accordance with its newfound enthusiasm for 1815, the Times pointed out that after this war.

  “Leadership in Eastern Europe is essential if the disorganisation of the past 20 years is to be avoided … This leadership can fall only to Germany or to Russia.”

This line naturally caused some apprehension in the minds of the Governments of the smaller Powers, notably Turkey and Poland, especially in view of the Times’ further remark that “an enforced disruption of Germany would run athwart the modern trend towards larger and more integrated units, and would be unlikely to endure.”

The rulers of the smaller Powers anxious to preserve independence can see the difficulty of doing so whether Germany or Russia rules the roost in Eastern Europe.

Then, a few weeks later, came a Times report about the growth of a Pan-Slav movement in Russia: —

  “Hence to-day virtually the whole Russian nation— and, indeed, all the Soviet peoples—stand in conscious solidarity behind the Government. They believe that a greater Russia may arise, destined to be the nucleus of the Slav peoples, and to play the same unifying role as Prussia did in Germany.”—(Times, August 25th, 1941.)

What with the existing Empires and new Russian and Chinese Empires in process of formation, or at least being thought about, will the new world be any better than the old? Let there be no mistake about it, there is no formula or principle, new or old, Prussian or Russian, British or American, which will solve the nationality problems of Europe and the rest of the world under Capitalism. Capitalism breeds conflict, and conflict leads on to war even though a Napoleon gives place to a Kaiser or a Hitler.