Vodka-cola (1979)

Book Review from the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Co-production deals between Western enterprises and East European governments are becoming big business and attract a lot of notice in the press. These deals now represent 10 per cent of East-West trade and are rapidly growing in number and importance.

Co-production is distinct from normal East-West trade, which is handicapped by the fact that it doesn’t allow the Eastern bloc to buy all it needs. The West doesn’t want payment for exports in roubles or other Eastern currencies as these are practically worthless. Russia has been paying for much of its imports with large amounts of gold but as this tends to reduce its price then Russia’s trading position simply worsens, while other Eastern countries have little or no gold anyway.

Barter deals are hopelessly inadequate as Western exporters rarely want the commodities being offered in exchange. Even so, barter does exist. Pepsi-Cola, long reviled by communist propagandists as a “monopolist”, has built a plant in Russia capable of producing 74 million bottles a year for Russian consumption. Since Pepsi wouldn’t take roubles and Russia needed its gold for American wheat, payment is made in Vodka and Pepsi were given the monopoly for selling Russian wines in the USA.

Despite Kruschev’s boast that Russia would surpass the West economically within 15 years, she has fallen further behind and the gap is widening all the time. To catch up, Russia and her satellites need Western technology but cannot acquire enough of it for the reasons given. Also, they already owe the West such a staggering debt (at least 80 billion dollars) that they cannot count on extended credit forever.

However, steps are being taken to rescue the Eastern bloc from its predicament, for a price, by none other than Western big business —the very “multinationals” who are supposed to be the mortal enemies of “international communism”. Just how and why this is being done is explained in a new book, Vodka Cola, by Charles Levinson. (Gordon and Cremonesi, £7.90.)

In the book Levinson lays bare the reasons for the current “detente” between the West and the Eastern bloc. This has nothing to do with either side learning to love the other but is dictated by their respective economic needs. The East must modernise its industry in order to keep its population passive. After all, expectations of a better life must be met someday. For Western big business there is the glittering prospect of a potential new market of 400 million people, plus the opportunity to switch its production away from a unionised, high-wage, strike-prone labour force to one which is state regimented, low-wage and forbidden to strike.

So the last thing the multinationals want to do is disturb the status quo behind the Iron Curtain. Any growth of political freedom there would produce genuine trade unions and the inevitable inroads into profit margins. Hence their enthusiasm for detente. Levinson also points out that the agreements signed by Eastern and Western politicians are only political window dressing. It was the businessmen of both sides who made the real breakthrough and all the politicians have done is merely help smooth the way for future deals. When it comes down to it, ideological differences are demolished by economic realities.

These co-production deals enable the West to sell the East what it needs and get paid, not in dud currencies or shoddy, inferior products, but in cheap Eastern made goods manufactured to Western standards which can be sold on the world market at a fat profit.

Co-production takes a variety of forms:

LICENCING: until the early 1960s only a few licences to use Western technology were purchased in the East. Now there are several thousand. These were previously paid for in scarce hard currency but now payment is likely to be in the products being made under licence. For example, Fiat, Volkswagen and British Leyland have been paid for their licences in vehicles and parts.

BUY-BACK: this means that industrial giants like Renault of France and Montedison of Italy will supply—in this case Russia—with an entire car factory and chemical plant and be paid in cars and chemicals for sale throughout the world. The Eastern partner is also helped to market its share of production through distribution companies specially set up for the purpose. In this way much needed hard currency flows back to the East to enable it to buy more of what it requires.

LEASING: the Eastern bloc also uses equipment rented from Western companies. So far this has not happened within Russia itself, but its merchant fleet has leased thousands of cargo containers and other equipment from the West, so privately owned means of production and distribution exist in part of the Russian economy. Levinson’s view is that leasing will increase because of the advantages it offers the East, among which is the acquiring of modem technology without spending huge amounts of hard currency. He predicts that it is only a matter of time until leasing will be allowed within Russia.

The list of “monopolists” involved in co-production deals makes fascinating reading: General Motors, Exxon (Esso), Ford, Unilever, IBM, Krupp, ITT (played a leading part in setting up Pinochet’s regime in Chile), Coca-Cola, Du Pont, Westinghouse, ICI, Union Carbide, Fiat . . . Many of them are bitter opponents of trade unionism in their own plants and all of them, needless to say, collect their share of the surplus value created by the Eastern workers employed in the various projects.

Cyrus Eaton, the American multimillionaire, revealed how it is done when he explained his 40 million dollar 50/50 deal for building a tyre factory in the East in 1970. The communist state partner would own and operate the plant. Eaton’s half would be in tax-haven Switzerland and would market the tyres in the West. Eaton says

“This enabled the Eastern country to earn hard currency and because of lower labour costs the venture can sell tyres cheaper than Western countries can. The plant in the East sells the tyres to the marketing subsidiary at cost —thus leaving profits to the joint marketing subsidiary.” (p. 87.)

Nice one, Cyrus.

All of this must have its effect on Western jobs. Naturally, the co-production partners deny this and claim that the increased trade will provide the West with 2 million new jobs. But the Eastern products, because they are made by low-wage labour, consistently undercut similar Western products. Indeed Western manufacturers and trade unions are forever protesting about “dumping” on Western markets. In Britain the footwear, textile, tailoring, motor car and TV tube industries, to name a few, have been badly hit by cheap imports from many countries and thousands of jobs have been lost. So while the British Communist Party demands action to “fight unemployment” their Eastern counterparts are busily contribute: it.

Unfortunately for the Eastern bloc the present type of co-production deal cannot fully solve their problem. The technology they are buying tends to be second rate and outmoded by Western standards. The West will not hand over the latest developments because it feels it does not have sufficient safeguards as things stand. For example, equipment and know-how supplied under one deal can easily be pirated and used by the East for other projects of its own, so Western companies are increasingly demanding a 50/50 share in the ownership of the plants as well as the products and profits. Because the Russians have refused to allow this they have failed to clinch several important deals. The Russian government’s refusal stems from an unwillingness to lose face: how would it be able to explain away such a blatant example of private, as opposed to state, ownership of part of “socialist industry?

Hungary and Rumania have gone some way towards meeting this problem. Although not allowing Western-owned plants, they do permit Western companies to own a large share of the profits of the joint venture (payable of course in hard currency). Volvo of Sweden has an agreement with Hungary for the assembly of Volvo cars with 48 per cent of the profits going to Volvo shareholders. This represents legal ownership of part of Hungary’s means of production. In Poland the government has gone all the way; foreign companies can legally own the entire project and if the deal is terminated then company can take out its original investment plus its share of capital gains.

The pressure on Russia to come some sort of compromise is enormous. Russia apparently needs the latest in mini computers but IBM and other suppliers are refusing to provide them. They want to protect their technology by retaining control over its use and means joint ownership of the project where it is being used. Only in this way can the company prevent its technology being applied outside of the contract.

Levinson frequently refers to the theories of Karl Marx and seems to have understood these better than most writers. For example, he says

“The end result of co-production operations is profits for the capitalists, and this means that the socialist enterprises are involved in creating the surplus value which Marxism regards as the basis of the capitalist class’s exploitation of the worker.” (p. 261.)

If the words “Eastern state capitalist” had been substituted for “socialist” then we couldn’t have put it better. He mistakenly attributes the failure of Russian nationalisation to “Marxist ideas” but continues

“Nobody (in Russia), unfortunately, had raised the minor question, ‘Whether the business be private or nationalised, how does it profit the worker who is subjected to the same authoritarian labour methods in either case?’ ” (p. 224.)

Although the book contains several other mistakes regarding Marx’s views, these cannot obscure the value of Levinson’s work as an aid to understanding how business, East and West, operates and what its priorities are. And we cannot help noticing that the analysis of modern society by Levinson, and many others outside our ranks, is very similar to our own. Nowadays, you don’t have to be a socialist to be struck by capitalism’s glaring contradictions and antisocial nature.

Vic Vanni

Blogger's Notes:

Charles Levinson replied to this review in the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard.

In connection to Levinson's book, the following might be of interest to some readers. In 1981, there was a fictional adaptation of the book entitled Beloved Enemy. Directed by Alan Clarke (who also directed Scum, The Firm and Elephant) and adapted for television by David Leland, it was transmitted on the BBC as part of the Play for Today series of dramas.

Beloved Enemy is available to watch on YouTube:

Notes on Russia: Russia and world trade (1962)

From the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years there have been many signs that Russian industry is becoming more and more interested in finding foreign markets for its products, from ships and motor cars to oil and from timber to diamonds.

Immediately after the Communists captured power in Russia in 1917 they introduced State control of all foreign trade largely because they feared that German and other exporters would undercut Russian home industries with a flood of cheap goods. It was the aim of the Russian Government to restrict imports to those articles regarded as essential and to pay for them by exporting surpluses produced in home industries. There was at that time no urge to expand trade and in 1938 the volume of foreign trade was only fifty per cent of what it had been before they came to power, though trade was expanding fast in the world as a whole. But by 1959 with the successful building up of great manufacturing industries Russia had come into line with the general expansion of foreign trade, and her imports and exports had recovered so far that they were half as large again as in 1913 and three times what they had been in 1938.

This change of trend found expression during June of this year at the Conference of the Russian bloc countries in Moscow, which dealt with industrial and trade relations with each other and with the rest of the world. They are reported (Times 9 June, 1962) to have “expressed their desire for the further expansion of foreign trade with capitalist countries”, and also supporting a call for an international conference to set up a worldwide organisation to promote trade, and remove discriminatory actions by one country against another. Doubtless, from the Russian government’s standpoint, the latter proposal is directed against the development of the European Common Market and the possibility of Britain joining it, both of them developments that may threaten Russia’s position as expanding exporter in world markets.

Edgar Hardcastle

What! Another Mistake? (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

1. Old.

In the October, 1936, Socialist Standard there appeared an article “The Russian ‘ Terrorist ’ Trial,” dealing with the infamous “Moscow Trials.” It contained extracts from a special number of “International Press Correspondence,” Vol. 16, No. 41, September 9th, 1936—a journal of the late, unlamented “Third International” (“Comintern,” Moscow). The article is contained in the pamphlet "Russia Since 1917” (Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1948, 1s.) from which the following is quoted (pages 59, 60):—

(Vishinsky, prosecutor, cross-examining Holzman):

" 'We drove in a taxi—Holzman continued his deposition—but I do not remember the street. Sedov took me into a flat. It was on the fourth floor. Here I gave him the report and code. ... I met him like this six to eight times in the course of four months. 'In November,' Holzman continued, 'I again 'phoned Sedov, and we met again. Sedov said to me: 'As you are getting ready to go to the U.S.S.R., 1 would advise you to go with me to Copenhagen, where my father is.' "

“Vishinsky: ‘That is?'

“ Holzman: 'That is, Trotsky?'

“Vishinsky: 'You went? ’

“Holzman: "I agreed and told Sedov that in two or three days I would go to him in Copenhagen and stay at the Hotel Bristol, where we could meet. I went straight from the station to the hotel, and met Sedov in the lounge.' (Page 1120)."

The writer of the “ S.S.” article commented:

“ Let us consider this statement.

“ The second paragraph states that Holzman went to a flat with Sedov, but Holzman could not remember the street, although he visited the flat ’six to eight times in the course of four months.' How very curious!

“This paragraph states that they met in 1932 at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Unfortunately for this statement the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (September 17th, 1936) points out that the Hotel Bristol was pulled down in 1917! Possibly one of those who took part in preparing the case had been in Copenhagen during the war but did not know the dirty trick someone had played in 1917! ”

There is much more in the article quoted from, which throws grave doubts, to say the least, on the reliability of these confessions and the evidence on which conviction is obtained.

2. New.

“. . . Two and a half years ago, ... the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party passed a resolution of congratulation on the occasion of ... (the) birthday ... of the party’s general secretary.” (Vernon Bartlett, News Chronicle, December 19th, 1949.) 

He continues: —

“ One sentence in it is worthy of repetition: ‘ Your deep Marxist-Leninist knowledge, your great culture, your well-known industry and steadfastness, your modesty, your iron will, your unquestionable loyalty towards the Party and [! ] the working class, are those Bolshevist characteristics which beautify your whole life.’ ” 

This was for Traicho Kostov!

Later, when his Bulgarian Nationalism appeared to be superceding his Russian Nationalism, “Kostovism” became “Titoism on Bulgarian soil,” according to a report from Sofia. (“Titoism” appears to mean Yugoslav Nationalism superceding Russian Nationalism “ on Yugoslav soil.")

The following is quoted from the Evening News December 13th, 1949. If a correct report of proceedings it would indicate an incident similar to the “Hotel Bristol 'mistake'. "

"The Foreign Office said to-day that Mr. 'Billy' Watson, whose name has been mentioned in the treason trial in Sofia of Traicho Kostov and others, was a business man who lived in Sofia. It was alleged that Mr. Watson had contacted Kostav in February, 1948; in fact, he died in January of that year . . ."

Perhaps this is a case where we should add : "Psychic News: please copy ”!

Alec Hart

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

Editorial: Armies of Liberation (1944)

Editorial from the October 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Our men marched singing with a smiling light in their eyes. They had done their job. They thought it was the war to end war. They had won, they thought, the greatest victory in the world.” (Sir Philip Gibbs on the Armistice, 1918. Evening Standard, September 6, 1944.)

“It is against Hitlerism we fight. And we have no quarrel save with those who would help to perpetuate its tyranny in Europe. Because this is the issue, it transcends national frontiers. It transcends nationality itself. . . . Thus the freedom-loving German Socialists make common cause with the British Trades Union Congress, whose president said yesterday that ‘We stand four-square until we have smashed Hitlerism forever and created a world of true brotherhood among the worker'” (Daily Herald Editorial, September 5, 1939.)

If the course of war is rarely predictable, the same is true about war’s aftermath. There are people who, forgetting what happened after 1918, went into the war in 1939 with a simple faith that the military defeat of Nazi Germany would solve all problems and liberate humanity from a prison of oppression into a world of universal peace, and harmony; they must already be wondering. The departure of the German armies from the occupied countries opens up a situation quite unlike the visions of the Daily Herald five years ago. The war, said the Herald, was not to be one for possessions but for spiritual values in keeping with true internationalism. Yet the coming end of hostilities in Europe finds most of the Powers staking out their claims for territories. Russia wants a large slice of Poland and offers in return that Poland shall have a large slice of Germany. This is 1918 again, but on a larger scale, for the Labour Party 25 years ago vigorously condemned the Treaty which gave Poland comparatively small areas in which the population was German or Russian. Russia, according to Negley Farson (who defends the claim), wants to keep the former Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, though he makes no pretence that the population’s views will be considered : —

“In 1940, under strictly Soviet commissar-conducted plebiscites, Stalin made the people of all three little countries declare themselves members of constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. Not even the Russians will try to pretend there was any such thing as a choice or freedom about it.” Daily Mail, July 26, 1944.)

American spokesmen are busy laying claims to strategically situated territories in the West Indies and the Pacific. China is demanding territories all round the Pacific, hitherto conquered and held by Japan and the Western Powers. French political parties are contemplating an extension of France to the Rhine and beyond, and most of the smaller Powers that were early on the winning side are hoping to get something in the carve-up.

The Daily Express, in its editorial on September 18th, 1944, candidly admits and encourages the Imperialist aims of U.S. A. and Britain.

“Here is a section of American opinion arguing in favour of United States Imperialism after this war. And here in this country concern and apprehension are sometimes expressed in high places on that account. Such fears are quite out of place. If British Imperialism is good for the British, then American Imperialism is good for the Americans. . . . The American Imperialists want a foothold in Dakar, and in the East and the Far East. They seek control of those islands in the Pacific which have been a source of menace and misery to them when held by the Japanese. Is that a good policy for the Americans ? Of course, it is. … Is it good for Britain too? Of course.”

It will be noticed that the Express here writes as if the world is going to be divided between American and British Imperialisms, saying nothing about the fact that other Powers (among them Russia) will also want a say.

It will be argued that these claims are justified on the ground that the Allied Powers will need to hold territories to bar any further attempt by German capitalism to gain military and economic control of Europe—but is this what the Daily Herald and its supporters envisaged by their talk in 1939 of “a world of true brotherhood among the workers?” Obviously the post-war world is going to be a world of capitalist competition, as it was before. Sir Stafford Cripps is so apprehensive about this that he warns us : “A return to open competition between the nations will inevitably lead to another and even more disastrous war” (Daily Express, September 18, 1944).

What of the promised re-establishment of democratic methods ? In some of the defeated countries this is likely, though experience after the last war shows that such re-establishment is no guarantee of permanence in a world of capitalist poverty and crisis. Moreover, one-party dictatorship is still the rule in Russia, and, according to the News-Chronicle correspondent recently in China, the present trend is towards totalitarianism in that country. He writes : —

“Already in China there is no freedom of the Press or of speech or assembly—no right to express any opinion that does not conform with the Government’s political line.” (News-Chronicle, May 2, 1944).

He pointed out that the Kuomintang Government (which he referred to as “Kuomintang Fascists”) has half a million of its best troops engaged, not in fighting the Japanese armies, but in blockading the Chinese Communist forces. He ended his article with the ominous words, “A Fascist China might in time be as dangerous as an Imperial Japan.”

Coming back to Europe and the populations liberated from Nazi occupation, no one need doubt the enthusiasm with which liberation has in the main been received, even though this is by no means universal. A correspondent with the advancing Allied armies in France records that in Alsace and Lorraine (territories annexed by Germany in 1871 and “liberated” in the first world war) the reception of the Allies was distinctly cold :—

“As you near Germany and touch the fringe of Alsace-Lorraine, you can sense the change in the attitude of a people that has lived so near to Germany as to be almost German in outlook and in blood. No longer, as we enter a village, do we get the vociferous welcome that cheered our progress to Paris. . . . The villagers look on you sourly; they are less ready to be helpful. Cases of sabotage which we never had in Normandy or on the way to Paris are now being reported.” (News-Chronicle, September 7, 1944.)

What sort of world is it into which the populations are liberated? Are they to open one prison door only to find they are faced with others? Since the world is still to be a world of capitalism, that is what is bound to happen. What is going to be the outcome when workers find that liberation and the end of the war merely means a return to the old chaotic conditions of pre-war capitalism, aggravated for at least some time by the problems of the switch-over to peace? Some will turn to Socialism, others will fall for new nostrums or return to old ones.

Mr. Alan Moorehead, writing on his impressions of France and Belgium, says that from the standpoint of living conditions, life under German overlordship was not as bad as had been reported—”if you were willing to obey the Germans and keep out of their way, then you did not have a bad life—certainly a more comfortable one than in war-time England (Daily Express, September 10, 1944), The reason why the Germans were “hated passionately and viciously” was “because they took away the one thing the people finally cared about, their liberty.” When the Germans went, the population regained their right to take part in political activities, but as the war in Europe ends they will also suffer in the changeover which will affect workers in all countries, the change from capitalism working at full pressure for war and providing full employment to capitalism resuming its normal peace-time condition with unemployment again mounting in volume. This has already occurred in Italy. The Manchester Guardian writes : —

“The economic situation is admittedly disastrous, and it is claimed, it is to be hoped wrongly, that the Germans allowed the people more food than the Allies…. It is extremely short-sighted to allow the Italian people to fall into a mood of such misery and despair that they will blame us for their misfortunes, rather than the Fascist Government which led them to disaster. (Manchester Guardian, August 15, 1944.)

A Times correspondent in Rome writes in a similar strain : —

“The Allies cannot afford to have the population of a capital city on their lines of communication reduced to desperation. A hungry and idle people becomes an easy prey to any extremist political agitation which promises it a quick way out of its troubles.” (September 8, 1944.)

Part of the present difficulty in Italy may be due to military demands on transport, but even when these have ceased and everything is normal again, Italian workers, like other workers, are going to have to face the usual evil results of capitalism. The war has not removed these evils; they are as insoluble as they were before 1939 or before 1914, though this was not at all foreseen by leaders of the Labour Party when they went into the war. They did not envisage the war ending with a return to the conditions of 1939 but vainly imagined that capitalism would be on its last legs and Socialism almost here—just as they had in the world war of 1914-1918. Here is an extract from a speech by a Labour Party spokesman, Mr. Arthur Greenwood, M.P., at his Party’s Conference at Bournemouth in May, 1940. It makes curious reading now : —

“Because we have the courage of our convictions as a movement now, we shall have greater power when it is over than we have to-day. We shall have a trembling capitalist system which can never recover again. We shall have broken the back of the vested interests, and we can build a Socialist commonwealth which will be a powerful factor in the world.” (Daily Herald, May 14, 1940.)

It would be an insult to Mr. Greenwood’s intelligence to ask if he thinks that his prophecy has been fulfilled. Instead, we would like to ask whether he would risk prophesying what the state of Europe and the world, seething with nationalistic hatreds and torn by the rival claims of capitalist groups, will be like at the end of the next four years. Will it be Socialism triumphant, democracy safe, and “true brotherhood among the workers,” or will it be the same old capitalism? Austrian workers who declared (Manchester Guardian, July 33, 1944) “that they do not intend to work for Anglo-American capitalists but desire to collaborate with progressive elements in the Allied countries,” have the right view of the situation, but, contrary to Mr. Greenwood’s anticipation of a trembling and broken capitalist class, that class is in power and the world is still their world.

Not mere release from foreign rule or home-bred dictatorship, but only Socialism will ultimately unite the world’s workers and achieve their emancipation. The workers’ army of liberation is the international army of class-conscious, politically organised Socialists, bent on achieving the conquest of political power for the purpose of ending capitalism and inaugurating world-wide Socialist society.

The GDR: up against the wall (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Democratic Republic’s location on the periphery of the Soviet bloc and its constant confrontation with one of the most powerful economic forces of the Western world, the Federal Republic, has had its effect on the formation of internal opinion and dissent. In contrast to its East European neighbours, there is no sustained civil rights movement and manifestos of ‘opposition’ have appeared in official publications. As the country celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, however, there are signs that the East German leadership cannot re-establish with the population an understanding similar to that which existed in the early 1970s.

A new, tough orientation on the regime’s part is linked to a challenge to the Communist Party leader Honecker’s authority. His failure to manage the economy over the last few years (and what some see as his dangerous concessions to consumerism) have laid him open to attack from sections of the leadership who fear a general decline of political controls. Since the spring, the government has sought to link political repression against writers directly to its drive against the ‘grey’(Deutschmark) market. Sharply rising prices for raw materials and a deterioration in the terms of trade with the Soviet Union have led to demands for greater effort, without the Party being able to provide adequate rewards. Wages of East German workers have risen faster than the supply of consumer goods, with private savings at the beginning of last year standing at a record level of 80,000 million marks. A reluctance to respond readily to yet another call by the Party for increased production, voluntary shift work and rationalisation points to further clashes.

Although rents, electricity, transport services and basic goods like bread, potatoes, sugar and salt are relatively cheap, their sales price does not cover production costs — the low prices of these products correspond to the extremely low wages drawn by the majority of the population. The state takes its subsidies, which maintain the price of necessary goods at a low level, from the enormous differences which exist between the production costs of luxury items and the sales price to the consumer. For the majority, then, there are low wages, and therefore necessary goods are cheap and permit the reproduction of their labour power, while the privileged receive high salaries and have access to luxury items. ‘Illegal work’, normally undertaken at weekends, brings more income than a whole week of regular work in state enterprises.

Additionally, the suicide rate in the country is striking. According to the most recent figures it stands at 35 for every 10,000, while there are 22 for every 10,000 in the Federal Republic.

Widespread anger and resentment exists, on the one hand over the privileges enjoyed by the ruling elite in the form of exclusive shops selling Western goods, and on the other over the scarcity of items such as cars, television sets, good clothes and furniture. Recent strikes in the Fritz-Hekert-Werke in Karl Marx- Stadt, the Narve electric lamp factory in Berlin, and demands for payment in hard currency (Deutschmarks) for workers who are employed in export production for the West, indicate the scope of the difficulties with which the Party is faced. An ‘affluent society’ similar to the West is not just the ambition of the rulers anxious to perpetuate their power, but also corresponds to the immediate interests of the ruled.

While the size of the country and the thoroughness of police surveillance have prevented the growth of a significant underground, the last two years have seen the coming into the open of the first dissident, inner-Party opposition in Eastern Europe. Coping with such internal critics has posed more of a problem than would be the case with religious/ ethical reformers and ‘anti-Marxists’.

At the beginning of 1978 a manifesto purportedly drawn up by the ‘League of Democratic Communists of Germany’ was published in the West German magazine, Der Spiegel (2 and 9 January). Predictably, the document’s main concerns were with the establishment of a pluralist democracy in the East and the reunification of Germany. Attacks on the Soviet Union and the corrupt and inefficient system in the GDR were the manifesto’s other main thrusts:

No ruling class of Germany has ever sponged so much and secured itself against the pepple as those two dozen families who run the country like a self-service store. None has ever had such excessively golden ghettoes built in the forests which are guarded like fortresses. None has so shamelessly corrupted and enriched itself in special stores and private imports from the West, through decoration, bonuses and special clinics, pensions and presents, as has this caste.

Calling the Soviet leaders ‘Red Popes’, Communist leaders generally ‘Red-lacquered Nazis’, and the East German Party’s Politburo ‘Polit Quislings’, the League seek an end to what they call “the Asian production method of bureaucratic state capitalism”.

The most telling attack on the Party in the 1970s has come from a middle ranking cadre, Rudolf Bahro, presently serving an eight-year sentence after being found guilty of ‘treason’ in July 1978. Published in West Germany in 1977 (and in England last year), The Alternative in Eastern Europe is a left-Communist critique of the GDR system and what he calls a “strategy for a real communist alternative”.

Bahro argues that the Soviet type system, which is a model for the GDR. constitutes a distinctive type of social formation which is neither capitalist nor socialist. He suggests a parallel to Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production in which there exists a ruling class not based on private property ownership but organised as an administrative and ideological apparatus. But he ignores the hallmarks of capitalism which predominate in the GDR just as much as in the West. The fact that a monopoly of the means of production is not legally recognised is immaterial — wealth is in effect the property of an individual or group if there exists a right in fact against the other members of society to use it and control its use.

Bahro’s position is not the familiar Trotskyist one, however. He shares our view that the objective backwardness of revolutionary Russia and the weakness of the working class there led inevitably to a new omnipotent state apparatus; that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whatever their intentions, had paved the way for Stalin’s forced industrialisation and all the “practically unavoidable consequences of a definite historical progress”. For him, as for us, the East European system is not a deformation of socialism.

In the GDR, social and political needs are subservient to the goal-rationing objectives of the state Party apparatus. The oligarchy at the top of the pyramid decides the goals for which the surplus product should be used, and subjects the entire reproduction process of economic, social and cultural life to its regulations. Bahro’s concern is with the conception of the division of labour in society, and he argues that the basic attitude of the producers to ‘their’ state is not essentially different from that of workers in Western society to ‘their’ corporations. He points out that “given the perpetuation of the division of labour, commodity production and money, nothing has altered in the principle of how work is assessed. Wages are simply the price that the appropriator state pays for the commodity labour-power.” (p.205). Just as the worker in the West not only improves his own conditions of existence by productive activity, within the given limits of the system, but above all expands capital, so in the GDR “he increases the potential for the Party and state machine’s power of disposal, and thus increases his own impotence in relation to it” (p.241).

Bahro maintains that for the last twenty years the GDR has been spending labour on a growing scale for luxury goods for the privileged strata. “We can hear”, he says, “ the director of a Berlin textile works, a factory moreover which predominantly employs female labour, say on the radio that ‘the growing needs of the population dictate to us the three-shift system’ — even if wardrobes are bursting! If you do not want to remain ‘backward’, you must throw out your furniture three times in the course of your life. We accelerate the ‘moral depreciation’ of technical consumer goods.” (p.269). This pressure on workers to keep buying is depressingly familiar, although Bahro rightly points out that while in the West trade unions are a reality, it is scarcely possible in the GDR to influence the relative level of income since it is the Party and government which adjust the proportions in favour of particular groups.

Bahro places his hopes in an accumulation of what he calls “surplus consciousness” which can no longer be satisfied and contained within the system of subordination and hierarchical division of labour. For the first time in human history, he argues, an energetic capacity is no longer absorbed by the immediate necessities of human existence. Whereas previously the scarceness of the means of satisfaction always opposed educated elites with uneducated masses, the increasing demands of technology bring about the conditions for widespread growth of individual development and consciousness.

Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, his ‘alternative’ programme leaves much to be desired: the abolition of all bureaucratic privileges and the democratic control of administrative processes is its extent. A new ‘League of Communists’ is to implement a series of measures, including university education for all and the rotation of manual and intellectual work, and the result (which he calls socialism) will demand the continued existence of the Party.

To be an effective opposition, however, the workers’ struggle for legal rights of political expression in the GDR must be coupled with a determination to achieve socialism, a world society where goods and services are freely available according to need; where the state, national frontiers, political parties and the wage labour and capital relationship itself no longer obtain. Only this is worth an eight-year prison sentence.

It should not be forgotten that the GDR remains a Soviet military zone, with twenty Russian divisions kept on a war footing. The three million East German workers who voted with their feet between 1949 and 1961 doubtless have few regrets about leaving what is now considered the best example of ‘socialism’ in practice. Yet it would be wrong to say that the grass is greener over the Wall; seeds on both sides have scarcely taken root.

Melvin Tenner

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

Under False Colours (1948)

From the March 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have recently seen a display of bitter antagonism between Soviet Russia and the Communist Party on one hand, and the Labour Party and the Government on the other.

Following Russia’s crystallization of Eastern European countries into a Soviet-controlled bloc the Communist Party has answered the Labour Party’s opposition with charges of misrepresenting Socialism, supporting American Imperialism, and opposing “the new democracies of Europe.”

The Labour Party claims, however, that it is the C.P. that is misrepresenting Socialism, and, further, attempting by underhand methods to gain a dominant influence in the trade unions. Moreover it charges the Russian Government with endangering world peace by bringing a large portion of Eastern Europe under the orbit of Communism. In this matter Mr. Attlee said the following: "We can and we wish to have the friendliest relations with the people of Russia, and we can have the friendliest relations with a Communist State, but we are not prepared to accept Communism. We are resolutely opposed to the Communist way of life and the Police State.” (Daily Herald, January 24th).

When one looks closely at this conflict one is at once struck by strange contradictions arising within it. We are told by the C.P. that the ultimate aim of Russia is Communism and that this objective is almost reached. The social system in Russia, says the C.P., is Socialism—the prelude to Communism.

Now if Socialism is a prelude to Communism why is a Socialist organisation opposed to a Communist one? How can Mr. Attlee, who claims to be a Socialist, say that he is opposed to "the Communist way of life” ? And why does the Labour Party, which does not hesitate to call itself a Socialist organisation, object to the growth of Communism in Eastern Europe?

Going a little deeper we may ask the question: “How can a Communist organisation explain the fact that, although it claims to be out for the emancipation of the working class, it does nothing toward the necessary preliminary explaining Socialism either from its platforms or through its daily organ The Daily Worker?

Much of this mystery can be cleared by recognising that Communism and Socialism are one and the same thing, and that Russia’s social system is not Socialism but State Capitalism. Moreover, the Labour Party and the Communist Party, by their very actions, show that they are working in the interests of Capitalism.

But, if these parties are both supporting Capitalist interests, why are they opposed to each other? The answer is clear. The feature that reveals Capitalism in Russia is the buying and selling of labour power. It is true that many features of Capitalism, as administered in other countries, are absent in Russia. Commodities are not dumped upon the market by individual firms, but are allocated according to a Government plan. Foreign trade, too, is planned by the Government—not left to private importers and exporters. Agriculture is not the work of independent farmers, but of Government-controlled collective farms.

Irrespective of this, however, one dominant feature remains. The vast majority of Russia’s people, because they do not own the means of production and distribution, are forced to sell their labour power for wages or salaries. In common with the wage slaves, of other countries they, as a class, can live no other way under Capitalism.

We find, then, that wage slavery, the very thing that proves the existence of Capitalism, is a characteristic of the Russian economy.

Now, wherever it operates, Capitalism cannot remain static. Competition between Capitalist groups accelerates the need for each group to produce huge masses of commodities that can be profitably sold at competitive prices. Having secured these commodities there comes to the capitalists of each country the need to sell them. Competition for markets, fields of exploitation, and trade routes is rife and the rival competitors find that friction between themselves becomes ever more serious.

It is in this framework of exploitation and competition that Russia, with her growing industrial and agricultural capacity, finds herself thrown into conflict with America—the country most likely to endanger her future Capitalist development.

America’s vast resources and advancement in war weapons, however, are sufficient, should war break out, to tax or even overcome the strength of Russia—if she were alone.

The motive behind Russia’s annexation of Eastern European countries now begins to show itself. She is gathering strength for a possible war not only against America, but any rival power.

The Labour Party is right, therefore, when it suggests that the C.P. is working against Socialism. This, however, does not show that the Labour Party, in contrast is working for Socialism.

It is an unfortunate fact that the majority of workers still believe that Capitalism can be run in the interests of the workers, and it was in the hope that this would be done that a Labour Government was voted to power.

Despite the efforts of the Government, however, we have in the last two years seen a gradual increase in the cost of living, a greater shortage of goods, attempts to “peg” wages, and an ever-increasing friction between nations. We have seen that, Labour Government or no Labour Government, Capitalism will go its own sweet way.

The nationalisation programme, heralded as "a Socialist measure,” has been carried out, but profits are still derived from the nationalised industries—and you cannot have profits or dividends without the exploitation of the workers. Thus the Labour Government is doing no more than administering Capitalism.

Working, as it is, for British Capitalism, it sees in Russia’s recent expansion the growing strength of a rival Capitalist power. It is this that has incurred the wrath of the Labour Government, and prompted Ernest Bevin’s plea for a union of the Western European nations.

A final note upon the Communist Party. The manner in which this organisation so glibly refers to the Soviet-dictated countries as ”new Democracies” shows the depth of deception to which the C.P. will sink in order to gain support for Russian Imperialism.

Socialist knowledge can fortify the workers against the propaganda of political fakers. Gain that knowledge and you can no longer be misled by supporters of Capitalism posing as Socialists. 

F. W. Hawkins

Slings and Arrows: Time off for Apes! (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the May 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time off for Apes!

So often is man's inhumanity commented upon by critics of the present social system, that it becomes a pleasure—if not a duty—to bring to our readers' attention an incident which will show that the milk of human kindness runs warm in the veins of one man and a great man at that!

We all know that during the late war the efforts of every politician and military leader were devoted to finding the quickest, most efficient and. of course, the cheapest method of killing the greatest number of people in the shortest space of time. The Germans developed flying bombs, rockets, and human incinerators. The Allies added atom bombs. During this destruction and loss of life appeared a light “no bigger than a man’s hand," but nevertheless, still offering hope to suffering humanity. Who was the man who thus illuminated the world, who, while making wonderful speeches and organising battle-fronts where thousands lost their lives, still found time to perform an act of mercy ? None other than Mr. Churchill

The story about to be unfolded will touch the hearts and minds of our readers and if there is a dry eye left when this has been read, there must be harder hearts than we thought possible. On the Rock of Gibraltar depends, to some extent, the safe keeping of sea routes and strategic points for the British Commonwealth. Legend has it that if a certain species inhabiting the Rock were to become extinct, British ownership of Gibraltar would come to an end. In 1943, while Mr. Churchill was convalescing in Morocco after a severe illness, news was brought to him of a startling fall in the population of Gibraltar. In spite of his convalescence, Mr. Churchill was not disposed to view the matter with equanimity. In wartime falls of population were to be expected. But our gallant leader was not to be daunted. He went into action immediately. One can only imagine, for history has not yet recorded, the rolling prose, the fine sounding sentences, with which Mr. Churchill addressed himself to the problem. Within a short time and due to his exertions the situation was rapidly transformed, and readers will be relieved to learn that this species is now flourishing again on the Rock of Gibraltar, and Mr. Churchill is personally informed of any "happy event" that occurs there.

It is good to know that our Mr. Churchill, bowed down, as he was, with cares of State, could take time off to save life—even if it was only that of monkeys! 

* * *

Time off for Mourning

When King George VI passed away, and again on the recent death of Queen Mary, journalists, politicians and the like assured us that it would be in line with the wishes of Their Majesties for us to go on working as usual. It is true, however, that in the case of King George we were expected and, indeed, allowed to take two minutes off to stand in silence on the day of the funeral. We cannot complain. No employer likes giving time off and even though Kings and great men pass away life must go on. But all this takes place in capitalist Britain, and that is all one should reasonably expect

In other lands, however, we are told that “Socialism" exists under a label marked “People’s Democracy." In these lands things are vastly different, as they should be, since Socialism is not Capitalism. When a great man passes “over” in Russia or Czechoslovakia, the obsequies and public mourning are on a much vaster scale. The body of the departed “Father," or, if in a smaller “People’s Democracy," “little father," is embalmed so that not only this, but succeeding generations may gaze upon and contemplate the glory that has departed. If in capitalist London the queue to see the lying-in-state stretches for two miles, in the “Land of Socialism” they stretch for ten. If in capitalist Britain the dead ruler is laid to rest and then almost forgotten, in Russia he is embalmed, canonised, and almost turned into a God . . . But this is not all. In the “land of Socialism" poets compose odes of love and praise to the qualities of the dead man, while in Britain Mr. Pollitt tells us that our eyes are “ dimmed with tears,” and Mr. Campbell in the Daily Worker, rebukes the British Press for not observing the decencies expected when the great ones pass into the Great Beyond.

But of all the distinctions that mark off life here from life in the People’s democracies, one stands out most prominent of all. True that when Stalin and later Gottwald died, we were told that they would have wished the workers to go on working. And so far, it would appear to be no different from capitalist Britain. But, and here is the great distinction, in Moscow and in all the villages and towns of Russia and the “people's democracies" from East Germany to China and Mongolia, every worker was allowed to take time off for mourning to the tune of five minutes. How different from those greedy capitalists of the Western world, who only allowed us two minutes. It's almost worth emigrating for.

* * *

Profound thought dept.

“Raise level of honesty and we can smash crime, says Fyfe” (headline, Evening Standard, 14/3/53). Who would ever have thought of it ? Such genius must obviously be preserved and applied in other spheres. For example, “Raise level of health and smash disease, says Health Minister"; "Raise level of bank balance and smash overdraft, says Bank Manager.” The permutations are inexhaustible and no prizes are offered for any submitted to us.

* * *

“Enough, no more!”

Since the accession to the throne of Queen Elizabeth not a newspaper has been published without some mention of the Queen, her husband, her children and the rest of the Royal Family. Journalists have tripped over each other in their efforts to boost circulation by publishing highly-coloured stories of Royal doings. The articles are written in such obsequiously nauseating terms that one can only turn from them in disgust. No effort is spared to convince everybody that the Queen is the repository of every human virtue, that she smiles, is sad, has dignity and poise, and yet is modern and even advanced. We are told that this will be a new and glorious Elizabethan Era for Great Britain. Playwrights will become Shakespeares, musicians Purcells, and adventurers Drakes or Raleighs.

It would appear, if these scribblers are to be believed, that the Queen has no faults whatsoever. We are not disposed to dispute that assertion. As we are not personally acquainted with Her Majesty we are unable to pass judgment. But now that this publicity is reaching its zenith with the approach of the Coronation, is it too much to ask that it should come to an end ?

So that these Fleet Street hacks may be assured that their message has reached us all we hereby declare that we believe every word they tell us about the Royal Family, that we accept every tale of the indomitable courage with which Her Majesty faces her duties, and that we believe that under the inspiration of the Queen this country will become Glorious again. Having issued that declaration, we hope that these inane drivellings will cease and that journalists will now devote themselves to other and more serious matters, that is, provided always that they are capable of anything other than Society chit-chat

* * *

Threat or Promise?

The Sunday Pictorial (5/4/53) tells us that American scientists are far advanced in experiments which, if successful, will enable men to live for ever. " What could this mean in everyday language?" asks the Pictorial, and proceeds to tell us. “It would mean that outstanding men like Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower could still be conducting affairs on either side of the Atlantic in the year A.D. 2953.” Cripes!

Here at last is what we Socialists have been looking for. Here at last is the short cut to Socialism that we all want. War, poverty, hunger and all the other evils of capitalism do not constitute so telling an indictment as the threat that Eisenhower and Churchill might still be in control in a thousand years' time.

If mankind will not rouse themselves for their own sakes, surely they will hear the cry of generations yet unborn and establish Socialism before it is too late.

S. A.

The 50th Anniversary of the Warsaw Pact (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

This month marks the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Warsaw Pact, the political and military alliance of the so called ‘socialist’ countries in Eastern Europe. Signed on 14 May 1955 it bound together in a ‘defensive alliance’ Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Albania. East Germany joined in 1956, while Albania started distancing itself from 1962 onward and withdrew altogether in 1968.

The Russian government claimed that the Warsaw Pact was established as a response to the incorporation of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1955. In practice, however, it acted as a facade for maintaining political and military control over East European countries ‘liberated’ from German occupation and a cloak for intervention in the affairs of its ‘allies’ (in effect its satellites), as occurred in Hungary and Poland in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Norman Lowe points out that for many writing during the ‘Cold War’ era, NATO was “the West’s self-defence against communist aggression” (Mastering British History, p.529). But while there was great tension and antagonism after the war the notion that Russia was waiting for the opportunity to invade Western Europe, an action that would have achieved nothing short of total self-annihilation, must be viewed with scepticism.

President Eisenhower, for example, consistently held the view that the Russia posed no military threat to Western Europe. Instead, he saw NATO’s primary role as to ‘harden’ European people in their opposition to ‘communism’ and “to corral its allies and to head off neutralism, as well as deter the Russians” (Frank Costigliola, Kennedy’s Quest for Victory, p. 244).

In 1999, the Guardian reviewed newly declassified British government documents including a 1968 Foreign Office joint intelligence committee analysis. Its summary of the analysis states: “Russia had no intention of launching a military attack on the West at the height of the Cold War and in stark contrast to what Western politicians and military leaders were saying in public about the ‘Soviet threat'” (1 January 1999). But if the Russian military threat didn’t really exist what was the basis of the ‘Cold War?’

An important pre-condition for the perpetuation of capitalist class dominance is the unconditional ‘obedience’ of ordinary working people. In a non-authoritarian society perhaps the most effective way of sustaining obedience is by inducing fear of a perceived external threat that intimidates ordinary people into giving unquestioning support to their governments in return for protection from the apparent threat. Western governments conceived the ‘International Communist Conspiracy’ and the ‘Cold War’ as elaborate fairy tales, grossly exaggerating the threat of Russian military intentions to instil fear and intimidate Western public opinion.

These fairy tales have their origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power and established state capitalism masquerading as ‘socialism.’ This event made conflict between Russia and western capitalism inevitable and within months of this seizure of power fifteen countries invaded Russia in what was hailed as a heroic mission inspired by a desire to secure self-determination for the Russian people. But on examination the motive behind this invasion had little to do with altruism, being instead driven by pure self-interest epitomised in three principal concerns. Firstly, the revolution had rendered a vast area – in excess of 15 percent of the world’s landmass – ‘off limits’ to Western capitalist expansion. Second, the new Russian State represented a dangerous example of an alternative to free market capitalism that threatened to inspire people to engage in struggles to establish ‘communism’ in other countries. Thirdly, the new Russian regime practising state capitalism would inevitably challenge free market capitalism in future spheres of influence.

Free market capitalism

The United States emerged from the Second World War as most powerful nation in the history of the planet and set about shaping a world in which capitalism and particularly US capitalism could flourish unhindered. The US State Department and Council of Foreign Relations constructed an image of the post-war world that comprised the regions “strategically important for world control” to be subordinated to the needs of free market capitalism. Each region was assigned a role with emphasis placed on Middle Eastern oil and on the economically underdeveloped countries to be permanently assigned the role of a source of raw materials, cheap expendable labour and markets. Vital to this vision was that post-war reconstruction should install foreign governments willing to embrace the ‘right’ business philosophy; a requirement that brought Western capitalism into conflict with the state-controlled capitalism of Russia and its newly-conquered Eastern Europe territories.

An expanded Russian Empire represented an unacceptable challenge to western capitalism and its plan for hegemony. The annexation of Eastern European countries barred free access of capitalist powers to whole regions expected to provide raw materials, investment opportunities, markets and cheap labour in precisely the same way as the 1917 Russian Revolution had frustrated earlier intentions to exploit pre-revolutionary Russia itself. State capitalism was an unacceptable constraint on capitalism’s free development, fostering an unwillingness to co-operate or complement capitalism in the established industrial countries. Its centralised  ‘command economy’ was incompatible with western and particularly US plans to construct a global model based on private investment and ‘free markets’ dominated by corporations. Free market capitalism prefers a stable, unrestricted world where countries are ‘open’ to the free movement of capital and conditions conducive to unfettered worker exploitation and the maximisation of profits.

The threat of ‘communism’

The existence of a ‘Soviet Bloc,’ claiming to be the ideological antithesis of capitalism was an anathema to the capitalist West. The source of concern lay not in Russian military strength, but rather the fear that working people might be seduced by the propaganda appeal of ‘communism’ and attempt to establish Russian-style state capitalism in other countries that would exclude Western capitalism and remove further territorial from their control. As US strategic planner George Kennan put it in October 1947: “It is not Russian military power that threatens us, it is Russian political power” (Strategies of Containment, pp.356-57). The ideological underpinning for a perpetual conflict was expressed by the United States National Security Council in its resolution 68, which constructed a vision of a world divided into two diametrically opposing forces representing ‘absolute evil’ on the one side and ‘absolute good’ on the other. ‘Communism,’ it asserted, was unimaginably evil, intent on world domination and must be everywhere challenged to defend the ‘free world’. The US was given responsibility for leading this struggle, thereby granting itself the absolute right to defend or advance the interests of free market capitalism anywhere in the world under the pretext that any intervention would be another phase in the struggle to prevent the ‘cancerous spread of communism.’

The ultimate objective of western governments was to force Russia and its satellites to return to their economically underdeveloped status, leaving vast new territories, raw material and cheap labour ripe for exploitation. But until this could be achieved the struggle for economic domination would continue in the undeveloped countries and the need to combat the evil of ‘communism’ would serve as a justification for action against any movement that might gain control over large masses of people, as happened in Vietnam. Such movements are dangerous to western capitalism if they are indicative of a preference for capitalist development independent of western control.

Limiting western aggression

Russia also represented one further challenge to free market capitalism. As well as excluding the ‘free market’ from its territories, Russia, like its western counterparts, seized every opportunity to exploit potential targets regularly using Warsaw Pact countries to offer support to targets of US subversion. These Russian ventures imposed unacceptable limits on Western aspirations in undeveloped countries, attracting widespread condemnation from Western politicians and media and excellent propaganda to sway public opinion against ‘communism’ and to reinforce the belief that US ‘protection’ was necessary to combat the Russian menace.

Essentially, the ‘Cold War,’ of which the Warsaw Pact and NATO were the visible symbols, set the parameters on a system of joint global management. The myth of the ‘Cold War’ enabled each of the two capitalist superpowers to control its real enemy – its own working people – by intimidating it with news of the transgressions of the other and as a justification for repression in its own sphere of control. But beneath the ideological rhetoric there was also a tacit understanding that each should be left to control its own sphere of influence. So while free market capitalism led by the United States would wage war and expand into what became known as the ‘Third World’, the Russians would maintain control over its East European satellites. This accounts for the West’s refusal to assist the people of Hungary and Poland in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and explains why the Russians made no great effort to aid Vietnam or to assist the emerging nationalist groups that challenged US domination in Latin America. Despite the rhetoric, the alleged ‘war’ between the two power blocs was theatre, orchestrated to control public opinion.

Though the reasons for the final collapse of the Russia are complex, it was evident that by 1980 internal problems and economic stagnation were heightening and control over the Eastern European countries was rapidly dwindling. When the rotten edifice of Russian authoritarianism started collapsing in Eastern Europe in 1989 the facade of the Warsaw Pact shattered and officially dissolved in Prague on 1 July 1991.

The ‘Cold War’ ended in a perhaps inevitable victory of free market capitalism over state controlled capitalism. But while the ‘Cold War’ ceased to be a valid pretext, Western capitalism has been quick to discover new pretexts, of which the ‘war on terror’ is simply the latest, for a continuation of policies that are nothing more than an expression of its institutional needs. So though the justifications have changed the real struggle, driven by capitalist class interest, to secure the free movement of capital and unrestricted access to markets and raw materials continues unabated with working people everywhere the undisputed victims.

Steve Trott