In this edition of Socialist Review we celebrate two anniversaries: twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and ten years since the Battle of Seattle.

The Russian Revolution was a historic victory - ending the stalemate of the First World War and offering for the first time in history the possibility of a classless society but the hopes of the Russian people rested almost entirely on the highly industrialised Germany. As revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin stressed, "Without a revolution in Germany, we are doomed". But although the German working class rose up again and again between 1918 and 1919, the revolutionary party was too weak and the reformist Social-democratic Party too committed to capitalism. The failure of the German revolution strengthened counter-revolutionary reaction within Russia. With the death of Lenin, Josef Stalin became the mouthpiece of an emerging bureaucratic elite. His policy, 'socialism in one country', made the success of revolutionary movements secondary to Russian power. Misled by Stalin, the German Communist Party failed utterly to stop Hitler and a descent into fascist barbarity and war. The triumph of the Nazis in Germany in turn allowed the Russian bureaucratic ruling class to cement its control with state terror.

State capitalism

The great lie of the twentieth century was that the Soviet Union was a socialist state. As Karl Marx wrote in 1847: “We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality.”
Equally important, if socialism was to represent a new society of freedom, then it had to be achieved through a process in which people liberated themselves. Unlike the utopian socialists who looked to an elite to change things for the masses, Marx argued that the masses had to free themselves. Freedom could not be conquered for and handed over to the working masses. The working class, whether in the East or West, in the advanced economies or third world, has continued to be the most powerful single social force in the twentieth century. But time and again, misleadership by social-democratic parliamentary reformists like Labour or Stalinist “communism” ensured the defeat of working class power.

End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War resulted in an orgy of triumphalism from the right. The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposedly the death of socialism. Historian Francis Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim the "end of history"! For many on the left, the demise of Stalinism resulted in disorientation. For working people in the former Soviet Bloc countries though, the promises of freedom and prosperity that came with the end of communism were empty. For most people living in Russia and Eastern Europe, quality of life fell in the years following the fall of the Wall.

The Battle of Seattle

The anti-WTO protests in Seattle marked a turning point, spawning a wave of similar protests at major capitalist meetings, like the G7/G8 in Genoa. Activists were no longer on the defensive, but actively demanding progressive change in how capitalists were treating the third world and the environment.. This movement was possible, in part, because since the end of the Cold War, opposition to starvation or environmental destruction could not be suppressed as ‘communist subversion’ in the West or ‘capitalist propaganda’ in the East. On the crest of this wave, leftist forces grew around the world. One of those was the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. But it is not enough for socialists to sit around and wait for the massive waves of struggle that do spread through the world like wildfire every so often. Success or failure depends on the hard slog of building and holding together political organizations in the dark days when the bosses are on the offensive.

Life in the struggle

British socialist Chris Harman knew this, and worked consistently to build the Socialist Workers Party – even through Thatcher’s era of mass unemployment and the betrayals of the Blair Labour government. Harman joined the Socialist Workers Party when it was a small student organization in the 1960s and quickly proved his leadership ability in the upturn in 1968. His book about this era - The Fire Last Time – told the story of that momentous year in modern history, from the millions-strong French general strike to the struggle against the invasion of Vietnam. Harman made major contributions to economics, such as his last book Zombie Capitalism, but his theoretical work was never academic, it always aimed to arm working people with ideas that can win. An internationalist to the end, Harman died while attending a conference organized by the rapidly growing Egyptian socialist movement.

Hero of the Ghetto

This issue also celebrates the life of Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Under Nazi occupation, a ghetto was created as a holding pen for Jews destined for the death camps. In a desperate struggle against overwhelming odds, a ragged army fought tooth and nail against the Nazis. Defeat was inevitable but their stand inspired armed resistance against the Nazis throughout occupied Europe. After the war, Edelman neither fled to the US or Israel nor made his peace with Stalinism. He remained in Poland and was a member of the Solidarity trade union that brought down the Polish police state. Always opposed to Zionism, in recent years Edelman hailed the Palestinian resistance, the victims of Israeli oppression, as his comrades in arms. The challenges of today are no less momentous than the tumultuous times that Harman and Edelman lived through. Within New Zealand, real wages and living standards have been stagnating or declining for more than two decades. Internationally, unnecessary poverty and war still blights the lives of millions. On a global scale, climate change could usher in an era of resource wars and plummeting living standards or it could be the catalyst for positive political change. To meet these challenges we need the vision, self-sacrifice and energy epitomised by the lives of Harman and Edelman. The struggle continues!

International Socialists