Let the walls come tumbling down (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

How much longer are you willing to sit around and let a tiny minority divide us?

According to the Bible, 1400 years before our saviour arrived on Earth, the walls of Jericho came tumbling down; demolished by the buglers of the Israelite army marching around the city walls blowing their trumpets. No mention is made of any aural damage.

Walls, have had several roles in society since their inception. Several thousand years ago our ancestors would have built rudimentary walls for shelter against the elements, and these eventually evolved in to the walls of communal living spaces.

With the emergence of private property walls began to assume a new role in society: the defence of landed property. Kings, queens, emperors and a motley assortment of nobles laid claim to the land through divine approbation and conquest. What had once been held in common ownership gradually came to belong to a tiny minority that enforced their ownership through coercion.

Fortress and City walls were not enough for some rulers. The threat of losing the property that had been stolen from the majority led to the construction of fortifications of immense proportions. The Great Wall of China was under construction from the 5th century BC up until the 16th century to protect the Chinese Emperors from a northern threat to their borders. Nowadays, it is a major tourist trap. However, it is doubtful whether the tourist guides reveal that ‘it is estimated that over one million workers died building the wall’ [wikipedia.org].

Medieval walled cities had become commonplace, but walls also served another purpose for those in power, and that was for imprisonment. Dungeons were often used to hold prisoners prior to execution or transportation. And, there was also debtors' prison, where the debtor was imprisoned until the debt was repaid. But it wasn't until the 19th century that the modern prison system took root, beginning in Britain, when incarceration was viewed as a punishment in its own right. Walls could now be seen to confine members of society as well as repel them.

The Berlin Wall demonstrates how capitalist states can contain and control their populations. The construction of the ‘Wall of shame’, as the West Berlin state dubbed it, began on the 13th of August 1961. The state capitalist élite of East Germany declared that it was erected as a defence against fascists who were conspiring to impede the ‘will of the people’ from the building of a socialist state – which is a contradiction in terms. Its real function was to prevent the mass emigration of East German workers to the private capitalist workshops of the West. However, by 1989 the economic decline of the Russian empire led to a change in policy by their ruling élite, and access to Russian coercion was to be denied to the puppet states. It was this that brought about the tumbling of the Berlin Wall.

Amid the rejoicing some people in power were not as jubilant as the East Berliners, and millions elsewhere. Margaret Thatcher, wary of a united Germany, was reported to have pleaded with President Gorbachev ‘not to let the Berlin Wall fall’, and to ‘do what he could to prevent it happening’ (The Hindu, Sep 15 2009). Similarly, the French President, François Mitterand warned Mrs Thatcher that a unification of Germany could lead to them making ‘more ground than Adolf Hitler had’, and ‘that Europe would have to bear the consequences’ (London Times, 10 September 2009). Both quotes offer an insight into how the competitive nature of capitalism affects the thinking of its leaders, and directly works against the overwhelming majorities’ hopes, dreams and desires of living in a humane world.

Israel's ruling élite ordered the construction of their wall in 1994, and duly baptised it the 'Separation Barrier'. You would have thought that the Israeli's might have recalled the wall that the Nazi's imprisoned 400,000 Jews behind in what became known as the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’ prior to their elimination, but evidently memories are short, and propaganda long. The justification for its construction is that it has been built to protect Israeli's from Palestinian suicide bomb attacks. Opponents regard the wall as a means to further annex Palestinian land, and that security is just a subterfuge. The wall also violates international law as laid down by the International Court of Justice. However, ‘justice’ under capitalism inevitably pans out as ‘might is right’, especially when the US is your Godfather.

The establishment of an Israeli state was the goal of Zionism and its founder Theodor Herzl’s entry in his 1895 diary reveals the thoughts of a ‘righteous’ man:

“We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly” (Righteous victims, p. 21-22).

The Israeli 'settlers', are also opposed to the barrier, but their opposition is because it appears to relinquish the Jewish claim to the 'Land of Israel'. This is the land that God promised to the descendants of Abraham. This is a biblical deal struck between God and the Jewish ‘people’ some 3500 years ago. It is also the ideological engine of Zionism, and the Likud party’s rationale for the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Voltaire once wrote that ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’, and like the ancient mariner, Jonah, who was supposedly swallowed by a whale, millions of people swallow the Bible’s fairy tales as literal truths. And this suits the powerful; if it didn't the Bible, and all of the other ‘holy books’ would have been consigned to the fiction shelf of the Children's Library a long, long time ago. Within the Bible’s pages we have a superman walking on water, and feeding four thousand people with a shopping bag of groceries. The Red Sea opening up to allow the 'chosen people' to cross, but the 'all loving' God deciding in his infinite wisdom to drown the pursuing Egyptians. There's a man whose hair is the secret of his immense strength. A midget slaying a giant. Talking snakes, talking bushes, a dead man coming to life, and the useful trick of turning water into wine. Pages and pages of fantasy. But, in the hands of religious fanatics, and conniving élites these tall tales create intense misery for millions of people. And the 'Separation Barrier' is a symbol of that suffering.

Another 'separation barrier' has been constructed in the 'land of the free'. This 1951 mile long wall acts as a ragged border between the United States and Mexico. The justification from the US side about why they have erected this wall is that it is to deter drug smugglers and prevent illegal immigration. On neither count can the US authorities claim any success. The US is awash with drugs, as is the rest of capitalist society, and the answer to drug abuse does not reside in the construction of a wall.

The US Border Patrol in 2005 apprehended 1.2 million people trying to cross over from Mexico, and by their own estimates they only catch 1 in 4. In a country where it is estimated that 40 percent of the population live below the poverty line, it does not take a George Bush to understand what it is that drives these people to leave their homes and families for an uncertain future in a hostile country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), like every other trade agreement is always constructed to benefit the few to the detriment of the many. Contrary to the rhetoric of the capitalist media, NAFTA had a predictable effect on the Mexican people. The peso crashed soon after the NAFTA was passed, and those already struggling were pushed further in to penury. Economic migration became inevitable as this Oxfam report underscores:

“NAFTA has created dramatic economic dislocations in Mexico. These economic impacts, among other factors, are leading Mexicans to migrate…For example; imports of U.S. corn have severely affected the local Mexican agricultural sector. NAFTA arrangements have helped increase the imports from 3 million metric tons in 1994 to more than 5 million metric tons in 2002. Also, the brief rise in outsourced U.S. manufacturing that helped the Mexican economy has ceased as these factories have now moved to Asia” (OXFAM; USDA, Nadal, 2002).

Even the walls that once gave us a feeling of security is undermined by capitalism as the debt incurred on the commodity that people have been persuaded to call their homes, has been transformed in to four walls of anxiety through the threat of unemployment, or just a few upward ticks in interest rates. The question is how much longer are you willing to sit around and watch a tiny minority dominate your life? Why not help us to bring the walls of capitalism tumbling down? We are asking you, as Shelley, once did to:

“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few.”

Andy Matthews

Constructing Division (2019)

The Wood for the Trees Column from the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Donald Trump and his supporters probably think of themselves as political innovators finding solutions to capitalism’s intractable problems with ‘Trump’s Wall’ being an example of dealing with the perceived Gordian Knot of ‘border security’. Part of the populist mandate is to respond to capitalism’s periodic crises by blaming foreigners for economic hardships. For this reason immigration is a convenient scapegoat and sometimes promises made during elections have to be seen as being acted upon once power is achieved; not that the more astute members of the political establishment believe necessarily in the effectiveness of any of their manifesto policies but not to implement at least some of them would injure the public image so carefully created by their PR department. Donald’s affection for his wall seems to be an example of this – together with the tax cuts for the super-rich this is another populist policy that his ego demands must be seen to be implemented. That it represents any kind of political innovation is found to be, as with most reactionary answers to practical political questions, historically without foundation.

One of the earliest examples of such a political edifice is, of course, known as ‘The Great Wall of China’. Started in 220 BC during the reign of the first emperor of China this famous structure was rebuilt time and again until 1644 AD. At its apogee the 20 ft. high wall stretched for an amazing 5,500 miles. Built as a defence against the marauding steppe tribes it also served as a border control that regulated taxation from those who traded on both sides of the wall. As such it represented a statement of power for the empire combined with a flourishing source of income for the emperor. The same was true, on a much more modest scale, of the wall attributed to the Roman Emperor Hadrian in England. Begun in 122 AD its walls were clad in a white plaster that made it prominent for miles and it too represented both a statement of power combined with the facility of border taxation. Not conceived of as primarily an absolute defence against any concerted invasion (whose army could have, presumably, used boats to circumvent it) it did at least end the casual raids of plunder by the Pictish tribes. It also represented the ‘limits’ of the Roman Empire in the northwest together with the Black Sea in the east, the river Danube in the north and the Sahara in the south. Although the preceding examples are located in what is called ‘the ancient world’ the implication to some minds that the world has always been divided by borders must be corrected by historical perspective; our species has existed for some 250,000 years and the construction of defensive barriers is only found, at first in cities, in very restricted parts of the world some 10,000 years ago. The ‘Neolithic revolution’ enabled an agricultural surplus to be created which in turn needed to be protected from raiding nomads by the new ruling classes who owned it – hence fortification.

What do the walls of the modern era represent? The two most depressing examples were the Berlin Wall and the present wall in Gaza. After the Second World War Germany was divided by the victorious allies into two zones of east and west. The Russians took the eastern sector but agreed to western access to the capital of Berlin. This proved to be a centre for those wishing to escape to the west and in response Stalin built a fortified border that included the infamous wall in Berlin. When the Russian empire fell the destruction of the wall became a symbol of ‘freedom’ for those oppressed by the one-party state of East Germany. Completed in 1996 the wall that separates the Palestinian Gaza Strip from Israel is also an echo of the Second World War and what happened to the Jews. After that war a militant group of Zionists agitated and fought for a Jewish state to be set up in what they claimed as their ancient biblical homeland. Not surprisingly those Palestinians who had been there for hundreds of years objected to the confiscation of their homes and have fought a guerrilla war with the Israelis ever since. The wall represents this unresolved conflict and for some Israelis is an uncomfortable reminder of their predecessors’ own incarceration behind a wall in the Warsaw ghetto built by the Nazis in the 1940s. Our last example of a political wall is much less notorious on the world stage but was a contemporary of the Warsaw wall and was to be found in a small town called Cutteslowe in Oxfordshire, England. Nine feet tall and topped with spikes two walls were built to separate a private housing estate from the nearby council dwellings. An embarrassment to a country supposedly fighting for freedom and justice one of them was ‘accidentally’ demolished by a tank during war exercises – it was rebuilt only to be brought down, this time officially, in 1959.

Walls and the borders they guard are only made possible by the illusion of a divided world. Some of them pretend to be mere extensions of the natural barriers that have given rise to the multiplicity of human cultures; this is one of the great lies of nationalism which masks the real economic motives of ruling classes and the political ignorance of those who actually construct them. The great paradox is that we live in an integrated world economy which makes the nation state an anachronism that is only sustained by the propaganda of those who need the excuse of the ‘foreign’ threat when capitalism experiences one of its inevitable economic cataclysms. That elements within ruling classes are also trapped in their own nationalistic ideology is very evident in the Brexit fiasco. The unintended threat that leaving the EU poses to one of England’s last colonies (Northern Ireland) in terms of its border with the rest of the island is yet another example of how little some of the propagandists of the ruling class understand the political reality of the twenty-first century. As fast as capitalism is integrating the world economically it is tearing it apart politically – a contradiction that can only be resolved by global socialism.

Wez.

The German Question (1990)

From the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 9 November last year, that hated symbol of political repression, the Berlin Wall, was opened up for the first time in 28 years. The scenes of joy and celebration as thousands passed without hindrance through the concrete scar that had divided the city were truly emotional. The impossible, it seemed, had happened but how and why?

During the last two years thousands of East Germans have voted with their feet— 330,000 in 1989—leaving a country that failed.to meet their economic expectations. Despite official claims of economic growth and greater prosperity the workers remained unconvinced and many questions unanswered:

Why is good quality meat often not available? Why are clothes so expensive? Why are housing conditions still so poor? Why are there still shortages of a thousand and one little things from needles to biros? Why are supplies of bananas, oranges, lemons and other important fruit still so very inadequate? Why are there still so many slum schools and hospitals? Yes, and why after all these years should the GDR worker still find it difficult to buy his own version of a Volkswagen compared with the West German, French, Italian or British worker? (David Childs, The GDR: Moscow’s German Ally, p.162).

This lack of economic success was difficult for the authorities to deal with as people in East Germany had access to West German television. East Germans could see the “consumer society” of their West German neighbours and wanted to share in it—though when they got there they found themselves the latest victims of the Wohnungsnotstand (housing crisis), having to live in caravans, in prefabricated housing and even on specially equipped ships (Hamburger Morgenpost, 7 October).

Fall of Honecker

The mounting pressure of refugees leaving for the West, coupled with the reluctance of the East German “Communist” Party, the SED, to adopt political reform, forced the protest on to the streets. Mass demonstrations took place in Leipzig, East Berlin and other cities demanding free speech and human rights and an end to the old-style leadership. Many opposition groups were formed to articulate these demands, the most notable being “New Forum”.

The SED was now confronted by pressure from two directions. Internally from mass demonstrations and fleeing refugees and externally from the joint Russian policies of glasnost and perestroika.There can be no doubt that when Gorbachev visited Erich Honecker (then leader of the SED) in October 1989 to mark the 40th anniversary of the “German Democratic Republic”, he brought with him some harsh criticism. Two weeks later, Honecker was toppled from power and replaced by Egon Krenz. However, Krenz was not the ideal choice to instill mass support and trust from the population. It was widely known that he had congratulated the Chinese “Communist” leadership after the massacre of students in Peking. So even though Krenz lifted the travel restrictions, which in turn led to the opening of the Wall, he had no credibility and was too closely associated with the old guard to win respect and quell the unrest. Krenz was soon replaced by Hans Modrow, the SED leader from Dresden who is being championed as a “reformer”.

Modrow has formed a new government, hoping to win back the confidence of the population. Several top Party officials including Erich Honecker were arrested and faced a corruption investigation. Honecker has since been released but it is obvious that he was a man with aspirations to be a English country gentleman:

Mr Erich Honecker, the now disgraced former leader, had at his disposal an annual sum of £2.1 million for luxury goods supplied by a special supermarket in the village of Wandlitz, near Berlin where he and other politburo members lived. A keen hunter, Mr Honecker employed a staff of 22 at his hunting estate north of Berlin where the deer were fed on hundreds of tons of imported corn. (Guardian, 14 December).

Several changes have taken place since the Wall was opened. Along with the drive against corruption, the hated secret police—the Stasi—have been disbanded and the Party has adopted a new name to match its new image SED-DS (“Socialist Unity Party of Germany—Democratic Socialism”). However, the most important changes have been the exclusion from the constitution of the SED’s “leading role” in society and the announcement of new elections in May.

These changes look impressive on paper, but it should be remembered that the SED still holds the reins of power. Out of 27 government posts, the SED have 16. All the important ministerial positions—defence, finance, internal security, education, economic planning, foreign affairs, home affairs—are held by SED members. As yet no real tangible change has taken place and much will depend on how the opposition can mobilise popular discontent and eliminate its political differences, if they are to be successful in the May elections.

German reunification?

Whoever governs in East Germany after May, a gradual move towards political pluralism and economic reform is probable given the pattern in other East European countries. Economic reform will entail relaxing state control and introducing elements of the free market. Western capitalism will be eager to exploit the cheap resources and labour that exist in Eastern Europe. No doubt part of the West’s enthusiasm for recent developments has something to do with the prospect of a large exploitable East Europe becoming available.

Since the opening of the Wall, there has been much speculation about the eventual re-unification of Germany. Opinion in East Germany itself seems to be divided, according to a report in the Guardian (19 December):

Participants in East Germany’s round table talks made an urgent appeal yesterday to the governments in Bonn and East Berlin not to endanger stability in Europe by moving into premature talks on German reunification. The joint appeal by government parties, opposition groups and Church representatives came on the eve of a meeting in Dresden today between Chancellor Kohl and the East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow; Dr Kohl's first meeting with East Germany’s new leadership is expected to attract pro-reunification demonstrations; while opponents to unity have announced protest marches in Dresden and Berlin.

Moreover, in West Germany a recent opinion poll carried out by Der Spiegel magazine (20 November) indicated that only 27 per cent of those asked thought that reunification would be possible in the near future.

Obviously here we are entering the world of speculation, but the author’s guess is that reunification in terms of a single unitary state, joint armed forces and single currency is for the moment unlikely. For such a prospect would entail great changes to the political and military map of Europe and poses many unanswered questions. What would be the position of a unified Germany vis-à-vis the existing miIitary/political blocs of Europe? Would a unified Germany accept demilitarisation and adopt a neutral status? Would a reunified Germany be part of the EEC or COMECON or perhaps of both? The questions are endless The most likely short-term outcome is the development of a “community” of the two German states, with increased economic and cultural ties together with freer movement across the borders. But one thing is certain: whether there is one or two German states, German workers will still face the same social problems and economic insecurities that world capitalism produces.

Workers can change history

The recent developments in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe substantiate the long-held socialist argument that the so-called communist countries of Eastern Europe have in fact nothing to do with socialism. What exists in Eastern Europe is state capitalism. Workers in these countries are exploited by the state which functions as a capitalist. The “communist” parties with their control of the state machinery constitute the exploiting and ruling class and any challenge to their political monopoly has been hitherto ruthlessly crushed. Despite the official rhetoric that East Germany is a “Workers’ State”, the workers themselves know that the system does not function in their interests. They have experienced the economic exploitation and deprivation, while the Leninist vanguard who claim to represent them live in luxury country houses, drive expensive western cars and enjoy a standard of living that most workers there can only dream about.

All this demonstrates more clearly than ever that workers, both East and West, share a common experience. Whether we live under state or private capitalism we will never truly be free until we liberate ourselves from capitalism itself. The common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources—-socialism—remains the only answer to the problems we experience as workers. The events have shown that things do change. Workers can change history. What seems impossible today can be reality tomorrow. Old certainties, as well as the Berlin Wall, can fall—why not capitalism?

Steve Dowsett

A visit to eastern Europe (1970)

From the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

When socialists visit so-called socialist countries it can be a particularly nauseating experience, because socialists proceed with their eyes open and with a background of understanding. What they sec is a variety of capitalism, which more correctly might be designated as fascism. One should not forget that the Nazis called themselves socialists (National Socialist German Workers Party) The label on the bottle does not always denote the medicine inside.

I have several times been to the so-called “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”, but have never seen anything remotely resembling socialism there.

The workers of Yugoslavia arc paid wages, and there is at present much unemployment— just as in other capitalist countries. Money is used as a means of exchange because there is buying and selling — a fundamental of capitalism. This may be new to non-socialists, but indicates to us the true nature of the economy.

Outside the trade union hall in Belgrade, I watched hundreds of workers trying to get into the hall to see an important chess match. At that moment, an enormous car came along — a veritable palace on wheels, and a sort of combination of a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac. One should appreciate that the average car in Yugoslavia is well below the standard here. I concluded that this car must be that of President Tito. When it pulled up I noticed the Soviet flag flying on the bonnet, and out stepped the Russian chess team, immaculately clad just like film stars. The Yugoslavs beamed at them as if they were from Mars.

When the chess tournament started there was the usual speeches from the platform by the local mayor and other dignitaries, who proudly welcomed the Russians (and others) to the “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”, and one speech after the other kept referring to the “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia”.

I once asked a railway official (who was both interpreter and guide) where 1 could see any signs of socialism in Yugoslavia. “Yes”, he said, as if pleased with my simple question. “Just come with me”. He took me to the square outside the station which was decorated with Russian and Yugoslav flags, following some agreement between those countries at that time. “There”, he said proudly, “that’s positive signs of socialism”. When I told him that flag waving (as socialists saw it) was a sign of jingoism or patriotism, he failed to appreciate my standpoint.

The German Democratic Republic

The crossing of the East German territory when travelling to Berlin by plane presents no difficulties, for one flies straight in. But when going by train, one has to traverse the Eastern zone, known by the false name of “German Democratic Republic”, for no democracy exists there.

In 1946 when the G.D.R. was formed, the Communist Party received only 20 per cent of the vote which gave them power; and in 1953 Russian tanks faced and butchered a mass of hostile workers during an uprising. There can scarcely be anything democratic after that affair.

When the train stops at the West German frontier, the passport authorities quickly walked through the corridors, and their work was finished in a few minutes. Then the train goes on through two or three miles of no-man’s land to the Eastern frontier. The passport inspection is quite another thing here. 1 counted no less than twenty-four officials who swarmed into the train or played a part in the inspection. Two soldiers with rifles were standing at each end of the train, and I noticed a policeman with a large Alsatian dog standing on the line near the end of the train. Then he let the dog off the lease, and the dog went under the train from end to end, for obvious reasons.

Four other officials climbed on top of the train and opened the vents and covers where the water for the toilets is taken in, walking the whole length of the train to perform this task.

The delay caused by this thorough search took up about an hour, and the train was nearly empty. Reports have it that three or four hours delay are not unusual.

From West Berlin foreigners (but not West Berliners) can visit East Berlin by special coach. Passport details, and the amount of money one has, are all checked and entered on a large form which has to be signed before one is allowed to board the coach.

“Check Point Charlie” is a special entry point on the Berlin wall. The wall itself is about ten feet high, with concrete blocks and barbed wire to decorate it realistically. There are notices of mines, and soldiers arc patrolling it on the Eastern side; while on the Western side is an electrified wire fence in case one has managed to beat the other obstacles. The atmosphere of the concentration camp dominates everything ; and I began to wonder, as a socialist, what 1 had let myself in for.

At “Check Point Charlie” everybody had to descend from the coach and line up with “permit disc” bearing a letter and number (and in numerical order — like in army or prison), while the East German guards checked every detail of passports, visas, and the form which had been signed in the Western zone. This took about an hour, and frequently visitors are sent back because their passports are not in order for the East section. When one has scaled all these hurdles, you re-board the coach and are permitted to go through from “Capitalist Berlin to Socialist Berlin”.

East Berlin, which remained far behind West in re-building, has now surged forwards and there is a mass of buildings completed, and many still being built. The Russians pillaged all they could lay their hands upon, and Fast Germany suffered as a result. While the West was receiving Marshall Aid, East Berlin was being ransacked and made to pay for the war. No wonder the East Germans wanted to escape to the West.

The coach stopped only once during its three hours in East Berlin, and that was in the middle of a park where there was no possibility of contacting anybody. The real purpose of this stop was for toilet requirements, although the official guide made it appear that the purpose was to visit an enormous war memorial, guarded by Russian soldiers. The Russians evidently knew that if they did not guard their monuments in Hast Berlin, the workers would soon demolish them.

We were several times warned that cameras and newspapers must not be taken into East Berlin — so democratic is their regime.

With all the propaganda and security of this police state, there was absolutely nothing remotely resembling socialism— only a nauseating hypocrisy.

Horace Jarvis

The end of Fukuyama (1990)

From the December 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

A wise and confident-looking face gazes at us from beneath an article in the Guardian (7 September). The face is that of Francis Fukuyama, a consultant to the US State Department and the Rand Corporation. The article is his defence of his own essay 'The End of History', published last December. 

Fukuyama starts by complaining that he has been misunderstood. Critics have pointed to such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as evidence that he is wrong and history is not over. He explains that what he thinks is over is not "history" but merely "the history of ideas" and that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of "communism" in Eastern Europe only back up his main argument that "liberal democracy is the only legitimate ideology left in the world". 

This type of thinking is not new. During the 1930s fascist and communist parties were convinced that "decadent democracy" was finished and would be replaced by their own creed. Fukuyama is as wrong now as they were then, but at least Hitler only gave the Third Reich a thousand years while he sees liberal democracy lasting for ever.

Ideology and war

We are also informed that the triumph of liberal democracy has been accompanied by "the victory of market principles, of market organisation" and that these two factors will lead to the creation of more and more liberal democracies practising free-market and free-trade economies and all living in harmony. The proof is that 

in the 200 or so years that modem liberal democracies have existed there is not one single instance of one liberal democracy lighting another.

According to Fukuyama the conflict between nations during most of this century 

was due to existence of serious ideological cleavages among the great powers, between liberalism on the one hand and fascism and communism on the other.

If Fukuyama's article in the Guardian had appeared on April 1st then it would have been taken for a joke, but he is serious. He actually believes that different political ideas are what produced World War Two, the Cold War, Korea, and so on. That these events were connected with the disputes between national ruling groups over such matters as control of markets, spheres of influence and vital raw materials has completely eluded him. 

For example, would America and Japan have gone to war if Japan hadn't threatened American interests in the Pacific? Of course not, their different political systems didn't matter one bit. Liberal democracies and dictatorships can co-exist very well so long as their interests do not seriously clash. Look at how Britain could for decades happily describe fascist Portugal as "our oldest ally". 

But even if the liberal democracies haven't fought one another this is only because they didn't need to, having agreed to carve up the world among themselves. Britain, France and the USA industrialised early and needed markets and raw materials for their mighty industries. The first two between them grabbed most of Africa and large parts of Asia while Central and South America were left to the USA. 

This carve-up, and not ideological squabbles, also explains why from 1939 to 1945 the big liberal democracies engaged in war with dictatorships, or to be more accurate, those which felt strong enough to muscle in on them. Italy and Japan were late to industrialise and thus to colonise, while Germany had lost its colonies and markets through defeat in World War One, so each of them had considerable ground to make up. The only way open to them, once diplomacy and threats had failed, was by military means. 

Is liberal democracy secure? 

What has also eluded Fukuyama is the glaring evidence that many nations cannot simply become, or even remain, liberal democracies just because they wish to. This depends on whether or not it is acceptable to the powerful liberal democracies, especially the USA. Remember the fate of Chile, Latin America's oldest liberal democracy, in 1973 when it offended US capitalism. True the US Marines were not sent in to crush it but the local military were. 

Nor are free-trade policies open to all, as Fukuyama supposes. These same powerful liberal democracies often ensure that the exports of under-developed countries are faced with the very trade barriers which they claim to oppose. Chile's Minister of Finance has welcomed George Bush's plan for a free-trade zone covering the entire Western Hemisphere but added

Unfortunately, many countries of the world—including the US—do not always reflect in their actions the free-trade gospel they preach. (The Wall Street Journal 14 September). 

So Fukuyama's vision of the future is of liberal democracies, including the great powers, settling down to "peaceful" competition. Yes, they may well fight with undemocratic countries but will make only economic war on one another. Great power status will depend, he says, not on the ability to move armed forces around the world but on remaining competitive by growing and innovating. The main threat a united, liberal democratic Germany will pose

will take the form of precision machine tools and high-quality Mercedes rather than Panzers.

Isn't that reassuring! But wait, what will be the response of the USA or some other great power if, say, Germany and/or Japan become too competitive? Will they simply accept a disastrous loss of markets and power with a philosophic shrug? History shows that free-trade is something nations support only when it is to their advantage. And what will be the response of the populace in those great powers should mass unemployment and falling living standards come in the wake of economic defeat? Dictatorships can certainly become liberal democracies but the reverse can just as easily happen in a situation such as this. 

Fukuyama's view of the world is a naive and simplistic one as it ignores the Marxist view that capitalism, because of its never ending need for expansion and capitaI accumulation, is rooted in conflict. In the last resort the way for nations to settle their irreconcilable differences must be through armed force or at least the threat of it. This applies no matter what form of government or economics happens to be in vogue. 

The history of ideas has not ended but is, and must be, a continuing process. Ideologies will persist and the old ideas which Fukuyama thinks are dead will probably come round again just as, incidentally, long-discarded free-market economics have done. Indeed only three days after his own article appeared there were two others in the Guardian arguing for more regulation in banking and more government spending! 

In whatever way future events unfold we can be sure that Francis Fukuyama's wise and confident expression will be replaced by one of pained bewilderment as his unsound theory is exposed. We are even surer that far from Marx's socialist idea having been ended, its day has still to come. 

Vic Vanni

The fall of “communism” : Why so peaceful? (2009)

From the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

In late 1989 and early 1990, in the space of a few months, the “communist” regimes in a string of East European countries fell from power. They were soon followed by the “Soviet” regime in Russia itself, which collapsed in the wake of a failed coup in August 1991.

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, symbolising the collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe.

In late 1989 and early 1990, in the space of a few months, the “communist” regimes in a string of East European countries fell from power. They were soon followed by the “Soviet” regime in Russia itself, which collapsed in the wake of a failed coup in August 1991.

Almost everywhere the change occurred more or less peacefully. This seemed especially remarkable in light of the history of these regimes, which in the past had made ruthless use of violence to suppress opposition. In Russia three anti-coup protestors were killed while trying to halt and disable a tank. There was one major case of violent transition – Romania, where Ceausescu’s dictatorship was overthrown in December 1989 at the cost of about 1,100 dead and several thousand wounded.
In Poland and Hungary, the ruling parties had already agreed to give up their power monopoly in 1988, when they entered negotiations with opposition forces to plan the details of the transition. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, they were not quite so willing to give way, but nor were they willing to do what was necessary to retain power – that is, crush the rising wave of popular protest by force.

A lack of will
The crucial immediate cause of the demise of the “communist” regimes was the fact that – except in Romania – they did not even make a serious attempt at violent suppression of opposition forces. They lacked the will to do so.

Consider, for instance, what happened at the Berlin Wall on 9 November, 1989. In response to a confusing announcement that the regulations for through passage were to be relaxed, a crowd gathered and started pushing their way past the guards. The guards, heavily outnumbered, frantically telephoned various officials to ask whether they should use their firearms, but no one was willing to give them instructions. So they did nothing.

Even the coup plotters in Russia never gave the troops under their command orders to shoot into the crowds that were blocking their way. They too were reluctant to shed large amounts of blood, and that may well have been their undoing.

Why were all these “communist” officials so deficient in ruthlessness? In a few cases, including that of Gorbachev, humanitarian scruples or squeamishness may have played a part. For most of them, however, the main reason was probably a loss of inner confidence in the future of the state-capitalist system. They sensed that its transformation was inevitable. And accepting the inevitable was greatly eased for many of them by the expectation of doing no less well for themselves under private capitalism.

Nomenklatura capitalism
Historically, whether the transition from one type of class society to another is predominantly violent or peaceful has always depended on the ability of members of the old ruling class to adapt themselves to the new socio-economic relations and merge smoothly into the new ruling class. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, for instance, the British aristocrats merged into the rising capitalist class, while their French counterparts had to be overthrown in a violent upheaval.

In most cases, the transition from state to private capitalism has been closer to the “British” model. Many (though by no means all) “communist” bureaucrats, both in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, welcomed the privatisation of capital because they saw the opportunity to exploit their official positions to establish themselves as private capitalists.

This applied especially to top managers in the state ministries in charge of potentially lucrative industries like oil and gas, which could be – and were – reorganised as private (or mixed state-private) capitalist corporations. Lower-level managers and specialists were able to siphon off resources for private businesses now legalised under the guise of “cooperatives.” Quite a few Communist Youth League officials also found ways to set up in business.

Far from all the “new” private capitalists were former members of the party-state “nomenklatura” (bureaucracy). In particular, quite a few emerged from the criminal underworld. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of “nomenklatura capitalism” was widespread enough to disillusion many activists of the “anti-communist” revolution, who concluded that there had been no real “revolution” at all.

Between Moscow and Brussels
In the East European countries another factor was at work. For sudden and unexpected as the “velvet revolutions” may have appeared at the time, the conditions that made them possible had developed gradually over the previous decade or so.

Above all, Eastern Europe was no longer strictly within the sphere of Soviet influence. Soviet troops were being withdrawn from the region. The “Brezhnev doctrine”, which had justified military intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, was dead. Hard-line East European leaders could no longer count on economic or military backing from Moscow: Gorbachev had made that clear to them. Lacking confidence in their own strength and accustomed to dependence on the Kremlin, they were not likely to act decisively on their own.

Moreover, a number of the East European countries (especially Poland) were deeply in debt – to the tune of over $100 billion – to Western creditors, making them vulnerable to Western pressure. Their economic ties were increasingly with Western Europe rather than with the Soviet Union or one another. Close economic ties had developed between East and West Germany. Hungary was already seeking to join the EEC.

Thus, in terms of great power alignments, Eastern Europe in 1989 was a “grey zone” between Moscow and Brussels, in the middle of a process of reorientation from east to west. At some point this external shift was likely to trigger a corresponding internal change from state to private capitalism. Awareness of this reality weakened the resolve of “communist” leaders to struggle against the tide.

The counter-example of Romania
It is helpful to compare the cases of peaceful transition with the clear counter-example of Romania. Here the army, police and special security forces (Securitate) were ordered to disperse protesting crowds by force – and did so. As the popular rising escalated, however, the defence minister decided at a certain point to thwart Ceausescu’s orders and back his rival Iliescu. This split the army and security forces into opposing factions, which then fought one another until the capture, “trial” and execution of Ceausescu finally decided the issue.

In contrast to the collective leaderships of the other East European regimes, Ceausescu exercised a strict personal dictatorship. Thus, the views of a broader power elite, many of whom might have accepted the transition to private capitalism, carried little weight. And Ceausescu himself was certainly not lacking in self-confidence or ruthlessness.

Moreover, he was largely independent of outside powers. He had broken Romania’s ties of dependence on the Soviet Union long before. Nor was he vulnerable to Western pressure: although he accepted loans from the West in the 1970s, he repaid them in full in the 1980s by exporting consumer goods (thereby exacerbating domestic shortages and discontent).

Would orders have been obeyed?
The “post-communist” transition was peaceful (except in Romania) because leaders did not try to retain power by force. But would they have succeeded had they tried? Would their orders have been obeyed?

It is impossible to be sure, but I think the answer is probably – yes, on the whole. Even a highly unpopular regime – and few can have been so deeply hated as Ceausescu’s – can crush an unarmed (or even lightly armed) populace so long as it has at its disposal disciplined armed forces equipped with modern weaponry. This is confirmed by recent experience in Iran and Honduras. As we have seen, the guards at the Berlin Wall were prepared to use their firearms if ordered to do so.

The likely outcome is harder to predict in the case of Russia during the attempted coup of August 1991. Soldiers and commanders were unsure what to do, but that was because with the president (Gorbachev) removed from the picture it was difficult to tell who constituted the legitimate authority – the plotters’ emergency committee, Yeltsin, or perhaps neither? (This created the possibility of civil war, as in Romania.) However, the duty to obey orders that clearly did come from a legitimate authority was never in question.

Implications for the transition to socialism
What implications does this have for the transition to socialism?

We might hope that when conditions are ripe the capitalist class will cede power as readily as the “communist” regimes did in most of Eastern Europe. If so, all the better. But there is reason to suspect that it might not happen that way.

In some respects, the transition from capitalism to socialism may be more difficult than past transitions from one type of class society to another. Members of the ruling class in one class society, be they British aristocrats or Russian bureaucrats, may accept the transition to a different class society in the expectation of being able to convert their privileges into a new form, but they can hardly hope to retain privileged status in a classless society.

In the World Socialist Movement, we consider it essential to aim at a peaceful transition to socialism. This is not only because we shrink from the prospect of bloodshed, though there is no shame in that. Above all, we reckon that in any violent confrontation with the capitalist state the working class faces the near-certainty of defeat and massacre – and the odds grow steadily worse as military technology advances.

It would be unnecessarily risky to count on all of the soldiers defecting to the side of the revolution. Special precautions will surely be taken to insulate the armed forces from the contagion of socialist ideas and bolster their discipline – that is, their readiness to obey orders.

Under these circumstances, it is a foolhardy and dangerous anachronism to conceive of the socialist revolution in terms of a popular uprising. Of course, a popular movement is essential, but that movement must constitute itself as the legitimate authority in society through the democratic capture of the state. Even then it is conceivable that some people will try to take violent action against the socialist majority, but it will be much easier to thwart such people – if necessary, by using the armed forces against them.

Stefan

The Crumbling Empire (1989)

From the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you heard the cheers from East Berlin
Where the wage slaves think they're freed?
Yes, free’ to join NATO and the IMF
And go where accountants lead 

The Leninist fraud has been exposed
State capitalism's been a big flop
So out with food queues and in with dole queues
And let rouble millionaires rise to the top 

In starved and Polluted Poland
There's a new band but an old tune being played
Last year's prisoners are now the bosses
And ruthless so that debts can be paid 

The hypocrites sing of Liberty
At last, Communism's out for the count
But the Kremlin has as much to do with communism
As the Vatican with the Sermon on the Mount 

Yes, the workers have shown they can change things
Loud sighs come from Lenin’s tomb
A spectre is haunting state capitalism
Let it spread to all other markets soon 

So it’s bye-bye to the Bolshevik bootboys
The gulags are all up for sale
Hurrah for Big Mac and Burger King,
The Glasnost Building Society and the Daily Mail.

The Russian Empire is falling to pieces. The Berlin Wall has collapsed into the hated memory that all dividing borders deserve; in Poland the Communist Party has ignominiously lost power; in Hungary the Communists are so unpopular that they have had to change their name to disguise themselves; the Baltic states are seeking independence from centralised cultural dictatorship; the hated Bulgarian dictator, Zhivkov, has been forced to resign after thirty-five years in unelected control: even in Moscow crowds of workers have demonstrated outside the hated KGB headquarters. What once tried to sell itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat has been seen as a detested prison, enslaving the workers of Eastern Europe.

Socialists are pleased to see the demise of empires: not just the Russian one — there is an American Empire as well, as British foreign policy has all too clearly reflected in recent decades. We are told that what is happening in Eastern Europe is the death of socialism. What ignorant nonsense! Eastern Europe has never been socialist. (It has not even described itself as communist, claiming that it was leading up to such a future stage.) It has suited defenders of Western, mainly private capitalism, to label these police states as socialism. What better way of showing socialism as something to be avoided and resisted? There have been foolish Leftists and pseudo-communists who have made themselves ridiculous by trying to defend the East European states in the name of socialism. The Socialist Party rejected such nonsense from the start. Not once have we given credence to the claim that there are “socialist countries'' in Eastern Europe - or in China, Cuba, Tanzania or anywhere else. These are state-capitalist nations. Socialists oppose them.

Opposed as we are to these phoney "socialist states", we are not for even half a moment going to indulge in the mockery of logic which says that states which oppose these dictatorships are The Free World. There is no such thing as a free capitalist world. Capitalism is inherently unfree. Just as the Polish "Communists" used force to defeat the Silesian miners, so did the British Tories in their fight with the mine workers. In West Germany, where neo-Nazi politicians rise to power on the basis of widespread poverty and frustration, there is precious little freedom for the unemployed or homeless — less still if you are a Turkish "guest-worker'' or a citizenless gypsy. How dare those who preside over the profit system in the Western nations call themselves the defenders of freedom! If what they offer is freedom, then the workers need to become unfree. As the opening lines of this article suggest, freedom means more than the chance to eat fast-food and join the queue for the dole — just like the “liberated" Western wage slaves.

There will be no freedom until wage slavery has been abolished. There can be no cheering over breaches in the Berlin Wall until all national barriers are torn down. There is no future for the working class in a re-unified Germany, any more than there is in a divided one. If the rapid changes of recent weeks demonstrate one thing it is that what once seemed unlikely — impossible, utopian — can happen.

Steve Coleman

Is this the end of Socialism? (1994)

From the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The demise of national 
state capitalism as a 
credible political
 programme doesn’t affect 
the case for genuine
 socialism.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the American political thinker Francis Fukuyama proclaimed "the end of history". History, he argued, had now come to an end with the establishment over most of the world of a society based on a free market and liberal democracy. Apparently, this was the goal towards which we humans had been travelling ever since we first came down from the trees.

That a money-grubbing rat race run by businessmen and career politicians was the rational society to which some 19th century philosophers had thought History (with a capital H) was heading was never really a serious proposition. How could a society where some are privileged while others are deprived, and geared to making profits rather than meeting needs, even be considered as a possible rational society?

Deepest slump

Unfortunately for Fukuyama, at about the same time that the Berlin Wall came down the world capitalist economy entered its third, and deepest, slump in the relatively short twenty-year period since the long post-war boom came to an end in the early 1970s. Factories were closed, machinery was scrapped, food was dumped, millions more workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Not because people’s needs for what these workers could produce had been met. but because the rate of profit had fallen. The supposedly rational market economy had once again created the irrational situation of poverty amidst potential plenty, of idle factories and workers alongside unmet needs even for basics like housing, food and health care.

In Russia the achievement of Fukuyama’s "end of history" has brought about the emergence as a serious contender for political power of a Hitler-type demagogue. As in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s the aggravated failure of the market economy to deliver what it promised has led to people blaming not capitalism but the liberal democracy that Fukuyama sees as its ideal political framework.

Apologists

Fukuyama’s "end of history" claim was an expression of the triumphalism of capitalism's intellectual apologists over what they saw as the defeat of socialism, their main ideological enemy. But it wasn’t. What had been defeated was not real socialism but a version of capitalism in which the state was all-powerful. Totalitarian state capitalism not socialism. Unfortunately, two generations of propaganda, by opponents and supporters alike, has misled many into identifying socialism with the old regime in Russia. As a result there is a widespread popular misconception that the collapse of totalitarian state capitalism in Russia represented the collapse of socialism.

The mistaken idea that socialism had collapsed was reinforced by parties in the West such as the Labour Party abandoning their paper commitment to achieving a state-run economy by democratic and constitutional means rather than the dictatorial ones used in Russia. They gave up proposing this even in theory as an alternative to the market economy and in fact accept the Fukuyama thesis that there is no rational alternative to the market. With the collapse of totalitarian "socialism" in Russia and of democratic ’’socialism" in the West no wonder the ideologists of capitalism felt so self satisfied and triumphalist.

There has indeed been a shift of opinion but the shift has been against the project of a state-run national economy as a solution to the problems created by capitalism. Which, if it had not been perceived as the rejection of socialism, we could wholeheartedly welcome. Since, for us, a state-run economy has never been the goal, has never been what we meant by socialism nor what we have seen as the alternative to capitalism. In fact, far from being an alternative to capitalism it was in our view merely a different, and not particularly desirable, way of running capitalism.

We have always held that socialism could not be established just within the framework of a single state, but only on a world basis. This was not because "socialism in one country" was necessarily a bad aim in itself, but because the development of a world economy under capitalism had made it a practical impossibility. Once capitalism had become an economic system dominating the whole world — as it did in the age of imperialism that culminated in the significantly named first world war — then the only kind of socialism that was possible was a world socialism.

Even within the context of world socialism we did not see a role for states, certainly not as coercive political institutions but not in the economic sphere either. There would indeed be a need for administrative and decision-making bodies at what today is called the national level, but these would not be "states” in the sense of a body exerting coercive political authority over a territory and its inhabitants. They would not be institutions ruling over people with the coercive force to impose their own will, but would be part of the institutional structure that would allow people to participate on an equal basis in the democratic running of their common affairs including the production and distribution of wealth. In short, genuine democratic control would replace rule by states.

The association of a state-run national economy with the idea of socialism has been one of the greatest illusions of the 20th century. Despite the protests of genuine Socialists like ourselves the word socialism came to be used to describe what was a real enough development in the capitalist economy: the increasing role of states in its operation at national level. The correct term for this would have been "state capitalism".

Now further developments within the world capitalist economy (the emergence since the last world war of a global manufacturing system dependent on the world market both for its inputs and its sales) are to a certain extent reversing this trend by limiting the scope for the state direction of the economy, and people are talking about the "end” or the “decline” or the "irrelevance” of socialism.

Genuine Socialism

But this demise of national state capitalism as a credible political programme doesn’t affect the case for genuine socialism. It does not mean that all we are left with, as the way of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services, is private enterprise, free market capitalism. Socialism — real socialism — is still on the agenda and, as a classless community of free and equal men and women cooperating to produce what they need on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive resources, has a much better claim to being the rational society the 19th century philosophers hoped would be the goal which human history was moving towards.

Adam Buick

New World disorder (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Worlders have pointed to
 developments in the Middle
 East and South Africa as
 examples of a more stable and
 democratic world, but 30
 nations remain in the throes of
 war, and many more conflicts 
are threatening to erupt, as
 John Bissett reports.

At present, 30 nations are in the throes of war and experts have pointed to a further 15 potential flashpoints, from Cuba to North Korea. Where, then, is the New World Order we were promised three years ago when the Berlin Wall crumbled and “Communism" was extinguished in eastern Europe?

President Bush believed the collapse of "Communism" (ie, the Russian state capitalist bloc) would make the world a safer place. Capitalism could step in and fill the political and economic vacuum and the world would look to the US as a mentor, for guidance towards democracy and stability. Money previously spent on arms would be used for social programmes such as health and education. Confidence and security would prevail. Or so some thought.

Such a notion of the New World Order is a fraud and only a new World Order in the sense of a change in power relationships among the mighty.

New Worlders have pointed to developments in the Middle East and South Africa as examples of a more stable and democratic world. Recent steps to create peace and democracy in the Middle East and South Africa, however, are hardly examples of a new international trend. The end of the Cold War simply meant that Israel could no longer bully its neighbours, safe in the knowledge that the US was watching from the sidelines like the proverbial big brother. Neither could the PLO and its allies count on Soviet support. A similar situation had existed in South Africa with Soviet satellites backing and ANC and South African Communist Party and sponsoring the "frontline states" in their war of attrition with the apartheid machine. The absence of superpower support, more than any other factor, has forced old enemies to the negotiating table.

The end of the Cold War, far from bringing the prospect of peace to the Middle East, has brought the continuing threat of catastrophe. For the end of the Cold War made possible the Gulf War. which in turn resulted in the regeneration of arms stockpiling.

The Independent on Sunday (14 November) reported that "current sales of weapons to the Middle East mainly the Arab Gulf Stales — are running at $415 million a day". When the Gulf War ended the US received S28 billions worth of arms contracts from Gulf States. This year alone Kuwait is buying 236 US MIA2 Abrams tanks, and the United Arab Emirates is buying $3.5 billions worth of Leclerc tanks. In January this year, John Major clinched the "A1 Yamanah 2" arms deal, providing the Saudis with 48 Tornado aircraft. This was followed by a deal with Oman for 48 Challenger tanks.

Unstable as ever

If anything, the Middle East is as volatile now as it ever was during the Cold War years, with no superpowers forcing a stalemate and with the globo-cops unsure what side to take should the "Warriors of Allah", the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, rekindle old hatreds.

Since the Cold War ended, 18 new countries, some with a nuclear capacity, have been added to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’s annual assessment The Military Balance. The New World Disorder is a global phenomenon that has left all but a few nations unscathed. In Russia, the rise of the autocrat Boris Yeltsin and the new privation and austerity facing the people of the former Soviet Union is as much the fault of the West as the "Communists” who bequeathed the political and economic void.

Much was promised the Russian people by Western capitalists. Investment would pour into the former Soviet Union and businesses would be falling over one another to establish new markets there - or so the projection ran. Sums of money have indeed been given or lent to the old Soviet Union, but in such tiny amounts (a mere fraction of what was originally promised) that their effectiveness has been greatly limited. And when one considers that they were given on condition the old state capitalist bureaucrats adhered to Western economic approaches — clearly failing in capitalist nations  — the reason for the Russian mess becomes more clear.

The "New World Order" promises little to fledgling nations striving to survive in today’s hostile capitalist climate, and even less for those nations that thought the new order would bring peace and financial stability. The Cold War at least offered something of a global insurance policy against catastrophe. It was a system that prevented regional wars from getting out of hand. And though most of us were scared silly at the idea of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, the closest we ever really came to Armageddon was at the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the Cold War. the superpowers at least had a token respect for each others’ spheres of influences, but Western capitalism still harboured a desire to make the world its market.

Reagan stepped up the arms race in the 1980s in the full knowledge that this would cripple the Soviet economy. No sooner would Russian leaders attempt to redirect their state capitalist economy towards the manufacture of more consumer goods than the demands of the arms race rechannelled spending in the direction of military production.

The victory in the Cold War was what the US wanted and what they got. Now they have deprived themselves of their global role as standard bearers of capitalism. The end of "Communism" has meant the end of the US justification for global leadership. This was forecast by Georgy Arbatov in his office at Moscow’s old US and Canada Institute back in 1986:

"We are going to do the worst thing we can to America we are going to take away their enemy".

The collapse of “Communism" certainly has harmed the US arms industry, even if it can boast huge profits. In 1982 the Pentagon listed 118,000 US firms providing products to the Defence Department. Since the Berlin Wall came down this had dropped to 36,000.

New enemies please

Martin Walker writing in the Guardian (27 July 1992), described the New World Order as a "phrase looking around vaguely for a policy". Now the old enemies have left the international stage, the US is confused, unsure of its role, and of how to confront the problems of the current world malaise. There are new problems now, with new dimensions. New conflicts could escalate overnight with outside interference. In the old Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union, for instance, nationalism is taking a form few in the West could have prophesied in 1989.

Part of the US frustration regarding its role in the New World Order is a result of its relationship with the UN and commitment to UN peacekeeping forces. Washington is basically unwilling to place its forces under non-US UN command. Chapter VII of the UN Charter stipulates that the use of force should be controlled by a military committee made up from the five permanent members of the Security Council all with the right to veto decisions. One US diplomat summed up the US attitude succinctly: "Can you imagine our guys being told how to fight by a Chinese General" (New Internationalist, October 1992).

Neither is the US in a hurry to contribute its share of finances towards UN peacekeeping missions. At present the US is in debt to the UN for $1 billion an assessment based on a formula that reflects UN members’ wealth and size. If the end of the Cold War has given the US a headache, it is giving the UN a huge migraine. In 1987, peacekeeping missions cost the UN a mere S364 million. The figure for 1992/3 is estimated at $36,200 million. The UN is currently so short of funds that it can only foresee financing missions for several more months.

Rather than send US troops to Bosnia under some foreign UN general, which might increase the US UN contributions. President Clinton believes a lot of bother would be saved if the Bosnians were armed and the Serbs bombed. When the US led UN peacekeeping forces found themselves at loggerheads with Haiti’s upstarts, Clinton offered the 8,000 strong Haitian army a $50 million bribe to restore democracy and save the US further embarrassment on the international stage.

Intellectual laxatives

The US and the UN (the terms are interchangeable) seem to be going nowhere fast, having been frustrated in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia and Haiti. Their peacekeepers kill, their financial advisers spread economic havoc and their think tanks are desperate for intellectual laxatives. We are left with an image of an organization lacking all credibility. Any pretensions the UN had of being an agent for world peace were shattered in the wake of the Gulf War when the Security Council ruled that food and medical supplies to Iraq be intercepted, in direct contravention of the Geneva convention and the UN Charter itself.

In today’s international climate, countries that can pay their way can expect US friendship and support. Those who are becoming a burden to the West are having to solve their own problems. The US is neither prepared to spend the money or sacrifice the lives that the direct confrontation of problems might demand — look, for instance, at Bosnia.

Just as the US and the UN are lapsing into global incompetence, so too is the World Bank that profit seeking organization that milks the "Third World” under the guise of humanitarian economic aid.

In 1991, Mexico went all out and serviced $16 billions worth of old international debt. The same year, the World Bank lent $16.4 billion to struggling nations, 37.5 percent of which went on projects deemed a failure by the World Bank’s own staff.

At present "Third World" debt is running at 1.3 trillion dollars. African nations are now taking out new loans just to service the interest off old debts, so health and education programmes are sliding down the list of government priorities. This year. World Bank projects have been responsible for the displacement of 2,153,000 people on three continents. This figure is nothing compared to those displaced as a direct result of the end of the Cold War. In 1972, the world had 2.5 million refugees. At December 1992 this figure stood at 19 million.

Most generous

Ironically, the most generous host countries are proving to be the most impoverished (ranked according to ratio of GNP per capita): Malawi. Pakistan, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Algeria. Malawi, with a population of only eight million, is presently caring for one million refugees. Meanwhile, the US coastguard is intercepting flotillas of Haitian refugees off the Florida coast.

So much, then, for Bush’s "New World Order". But there again, few of us were fooled in the first place. There was, however, one person who swallowed the idea hook, line and sinker, who can remarkably still regurgitate it. The newly-inaugurated Clinton said at the beginning of 1993, that his job was to "develop an approach . . . to the post Cold War World that is a good place for freedom and democracy and market reforms." (Guardian, 15 January).

John Bissett

Germany reunites (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The East German state circus, traditionally one of the most revered in the world, has been closed down. What animals can be sold will be; the rest are to be killed. The market has come to town and the unprofitable circus must go. Into the fertile area of East German magazine sales has come the West German and American porn industry. There are profits there, you see. Ah, the sickly smell of free-market "liberation’’.

If you read the British press it all seems so simple. East German Communism has been swept away. The free marketeers have come from the West to make life good. Germany is to be unified. The Germans are to be the most prosperous of Europeans. Hurrah for capitalism! The reality is different. There never was communism in East Germany, but state capitalism, ruled over by a class of party bosses who ran East German exploitation for their own ends.

State capitalism, not socialism of any description. has failed utterly and now East Germany is to be integrated into the rest of the private-capitalist world. Germany is being unified, but it is still divided between those who own its resources—the capitalists—and those who produce its wealth—the workers. These two classes, whose interests are diametrically opposed to one another, can never be united, except in terms of a national illusion. As for prosperity coming to Germany, there are plenty of workers who will tell a different tale—particularly the more that they are exposed to the harshness of the unregulated market.

Massive unemployment

East German workers face massive unemployment. In the past their jobs, which were often state-subsidised in order to maintain the appearance of full employment, produced goods for the East German national market. Now that market is being saturated by West German capitalist outfits which can sell higher quality commodities than East Germany is able to make. Of the 8000 East German firms, which are due to be privatised in October, the vast majority cannot compete on the open market with their West German rivals. In particular, food, textiles and mechanical engineering firms are going bust.

According to Creditreform, a West German credit-rating company which is now active in the East, there will be two million workers unemployed in East Germany after the October privatisation. The "good news" is that new jobs—just under a million—will emerge by the end of 1991 in new services, notably financial institutions and hotels (Rheinischer Merkur, 15 June). Even if this promised light at the end of the dark tunnel of unemployment proves to be a correct prediction, who wants to move from producing useful wealth to taking jobs counting money in banks or insurance houses, or waiting on tourists? Is that what liberation means? And it should be noted that even if the most optimistic forecasts come true, there will still be over a million unemployed East Germans by the end of next year.

East German workers with jobs are discovering something else: that they are expected to pay West German prices for goods and services, but the capitalists investing in East Germany are only willing to pay old East German wages. So. we see the disgusting contradiction of East German stores with shelves full of hitherto unobtainable commodities, but all that the East German wage slaves can afford to do is look at them longingly.

They were fed the lie that once the Berlin Wall came down they would enjoy access to all the goodies which they had spent years seeing advertised on West German television. Well, the Wall is down, but poverty persists. Is it any wonder that the German press has reported a major increase in petty crime in East Germany? The capitalist explanation is that the East German workers have yet to understand the ethos of private property relations and are recovering from years of state-capitalist frustration. The fact is that they are angry, particularly the young East Germans who were promised a market which would liberate them; they have been offered unemployment or low wages, and commodities which they are too poor to buy. Such is capitalist "freedom".

Struggle against new bosses

Workers who were out in the streets last year to bring down the Honecker dictatorship are now having to struggle against their new bosses. Workers in the East German shoe and leather industry have called nationwide token strikes to draw attention to their plight. More than half a million jobs are at stake in that industry and all that "liberation" offers them is a future job in a hotel or a bank.

The striking workers will be defeated. The hypocritical German capitalists, who showed such theatrical concern for their struggle when it was fought against the old state-capitalist elite, could not care less what becomes of the workers now that they have their grubby hands on the united German shoe industry. At the end of last year the German press was celebrating the struggle for freedom being waged by the newly-formed Free Federation of German Trades Unions, an umbrella organisation of East German non-state unions. The same union called for an increase in net pay of 50 percent as from 1 July this year. The same newspapers who were cheering them on less than a year ago are now denouncing their "impertinent" demands.

The East German workers were right to overthrow the anti-democratic state- capitalist dictatorship of the Communist Party. They were more than right: they were heroic in taking on a force which we now know was planning to put down the rebel workers in the same way as the Chinese dictators did at Tiananmen Square. But the victory of last winter was a battle won. not a war ended. The East German workers had better realise that the owners of the Earth, be they private or state capitalists, Eastern or Western, will oppress and exploit them until they are dispossessed of their ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. The class war goes on. Experience will teach this to the East German workers—as it did to the many Polish workers who recently organised a massive rail strike against their new oppressors in the Solidarity government—but a period of temporary enchantment with the wonders of the illusory free market is bound to occur.

Housing crisis

East German wage slaves who have voted to be led by Kohl and his team of market-lovers. and the other workers conned by the reformist promise of welfare capitalism offered by the SPD, need only peep over the border to Hamburg where their fellow workers, long-standing members of a "free" capitalist nation, face a major housing crisis.

The Hamburg Abendblat (27 April) reports that rents in Hamburg have increased from early 1989 to early 1990 by an average of 33 percent. This figure is second only to Stuttgart where the rent per square metre has gone up 39 percent in the past year. The German housing problem has led to widespread opposition to the granting of housing to East German workers wanting to settle in the more prosperous Western sector. So. after years of waiting for the Wall to come down. East German workers are now being told not to compete with their Western counterparts for cheap or subsidised housing. The new Wall is made of poverty and fear.

The Guardian (27 July) referred to the West German housing crisis as “a political battlefield . . . a social scandal in a land of conspicuous prosperity: the squeezing out of the housing market of tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of citizens". The West German Housing Minister. Gerda Hasselfedt, estimates that one in four East German homes are “uninhabitable" and three in four “need to be totally renovated". If new homes are not to be built, and old ones improved, by the state, then who will take on the task?

Private property developers and landlords certainly have no interest to gain in building houses and doing up old ones for the benefit of poor people. On the contrary, with an excess of supply over demand their economic interest is to push up the rents and interest rates on mortgages. As ever, the housing problem is not about an inability to produce houses—last year there was a 14.7 percent increase in German house-building, mainly at the more expensive end of the market. It is about the inability of workers who need homes to pay for them at prices that will bring profits to capitalists.

The housing crisis has also given rise to a wave of anti-immigrant feeling amongst the least enlightened workers. Where Turkish “guest workers" were once tolerated, German racists are saying that that it is bad enough having to compete with other Germans without having to put up with "foreigners". In the riotous celebrations following the German football victory in the World Cup:

East Berlin and Hamburg . . . witnessed bloody battles between police and young right-wing extremists, as well as attacks on Vietnamese, Turks and other foreigners . . . In Cologne a group set on a young Turkish taxi driver trapped in the delirious crowd, trying to overturn his car and lynch him. Police again used tear gas and batons to help him escape . . . (Guardian, 10 July).

The government has responded to this rise in racist insecurity by passing an Aliens Law which is designed to frighten away non-German workers wanting to settle there.

Germany is set to be the new European superpower. If you have millions of Deutschmarks invested in the Bundesbank you may be in for some sharp rises in profits. But most readers of this journal do not. Neither do the West German workers struggling to pay high rents. The hundreds of thousands of East Germans who are being thrown on the scrap heap of the unemployed do not. Nor do those who will have to face cuts in German welfare services which will have to be made so that taxes can be kept down so that German capitalists have money to invest in the East. In East Germany the circus is closing down and the lions are being given a fatal jab; for the wage slaves of Germany the future offers little in the way of either bread or circuses.

Steve Coleman