Socialism was never tried

  Twenty years ago this month the Berlin Wall came down, symbolising the end of the division of Europe into Western and Russian spheres of influence. Russia had lost the Cold War and its rulers under Gorbachev had decided they would no longer prop up the puppet regimes Russia had set up in Eastern Europe in accordance with the carve-up that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had agreed when they had met in Yalta in February 1945.

  From this point of view, it symbolised a shift in imperialist power politics. Worse was to come for Russia when, two years later, the so-called “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” broke up into its constituent republics, reducing the size of Russia to the smallest it had been for centuries.

  There was some benefit for the people of the countries concerned. The limited political democracy which had existed in Western Europe was extended to them, allowing workers to organise in trade unions that were not part of the state machine as they had been and people to get together to express and disseminate differing political views, including socialist ones. The ending of the one-party dictatorships there was clearly a welcome development.

  We had hoped for more. After all, we had long denounced the claim that these countries were “the socialist countries” in which the working class ruled, and we had been proved right.  With them out of the way it should have been easier to propagate socialist ideas. Unfortunately, the opposite conclusion prevailed: that they had in fact been socialist countries and that their collapse represented the failure of socialism.

  Socialism, it was said, had been tried and failed and was now out-dated and irrelevant. Pro-capitalist intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama even triumphantly proclaimed the “end of history” – that human evolution had come to a peaceful and harmonious end with the universal establishment of a market economy and governments deriving their legitimacy from elections.

  A hard time followed for socialists, and for anyone calling themselves socialist. In fact many of these dropped the pretence and argued that now the only choice was between different “models” of capitalism. We denied this and asserted that socialism was still relevant. What had failed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not socialism, but a form of capitalism where it was the state that had presided over the exploitation of the wage-working class and the accumulation of capital out of profits. It was this state-capitalist system that had failed, not socialism.

  The fall of the Wall did not bring peace and harmony. Capitalism has continued to produce wars and economic crises, compounded by the threat of global warming. The general deprivation and alienation it creates has continued. The common ownership and democratic control of productive forces, with production directly for use and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, remains the only framework within which can be solved the problems facing the working class in particular and humanity in general.

Introducing -The Socialist Party


The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain. It is made up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid of the profit system and establish real socialism.

  Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about the kind of society that we are advocating in this journal.

 We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism.
We are not a reformist party with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.

  We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other informative material.

  We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings and demos; run educational conferences; host internet discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and contest elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish as well as English.

  The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement which you will be able to bring us.

  The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers.

  So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you understand the case for socialism.

Contents
Features


  • The fall of “communism”: Why so peaceful?   
    • Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, symbolising the collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe.
     
  • The Myth of Soviet “Socialism” 
    • Vladimir Sirotin from Russia explains how that country was never socialist.

  • Workers State? Pull the other one 
    • How could anyone have seriously argued that the workers ruled in Russia?

  • Joining the killing machine 
    • The campaign to win the young to war has come a long way from the ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster with the pointing finger of Kitchener used in the ‘First Great War’.

  • Afghanistan – lying about dying
    •  The pressure to misinterpret the deaths, as the bodies come back, as
    nobly purifying is a cynically orchestrated propaganda exercise intended
    to justify the war.
    Regulars
    Editorial
    Socialism was never tried

    Letters

     Contact Details
    Meetings

     Cooking the Books 1
    Out of control

    Cooking the Books 2
    Free is cheaper?

    Cartoons
    The Irate Itinerant

    Free Lunch


    Pathfinders
    Gullibility travels
    Material World

    Pieces Together

    Tiny Tips

    Book Reviews
    Che Guevara; Voodoo Histories;
    Trouble with Capitalism; Enough

    50 Years Ago
    The Darwin Centenary

    Greasy Pole
    TV Debates

    Voice from the Back
    Hunger Amidst Plenty; A
    Horrendous Future; Hypocricy In
    The City and more.







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    Socialist Standard Online edition                              November 2009