When the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed it, ended in 1921, the new workers’ state was facing exhuasting conditions. It was largely destroyed, 4.5 million killed by 17 invading capitalist countries, with a raging famine. Millions of homeless people wandered the land, and starvation was rampant. The worldwide typhus epidemic of 1919 had killed tens of thousands.
Seven years of war and invasion by Imperial Germany, then Poland, and all the Allied countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, and Japan, had created a culture of violence. Crime — robbery, murder, gangs — was everywhere. Armed bands from Poland raided border areas, robbed, raped, and killed, then fled back across the border. Industry and agriculture were almost at a standstill.
The Bolsheviks’ task was to build socialism with the traumatized people in this devastated country. They had no blueprint, for it had never been done. No communist theorist — neither Marx and Engels, nor Lenin, nor any other — had ever thought the first workers’ state would look anything like this.
In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks debated the best course of action to build the new society. Communists then believed that communism could only come in an industrialized country. The party leadership knew that the advanced capitalist countries would attack the USSR as soon as possible. Their position — that the USSR could and must quickly industrialize by itself — won over the vast majority of rank-and-file Bolsheviks.1
Led by Stalin, the mainly working-class Bolshevik Party took the country on to a great “leap into the unknown.” By the mid-‘30s, collectivization was almost complete, and the USSR was becoming a major industrial power. Nothing like this had ever been accomplished before in world history!
During the 1930s, Oppositionist leaders conspired to try to overthrow Stalin and the Party leadership. Some also conspired with German and Japanese fascists. Additionally, fascist organizers infiltrated into every European country and Russia.
The Soviet leadership found out about these plots and tried and executed the guilty. But two successive heads of the political police were involved in these plots too. The second, Nikolai Ezhov, had his men arrest, torture, and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet workers and Party members to cover up his own plot, and to sow dissatisfaction. This too was eventually uncovered, but not until huge damage had been done.2
Workers’ power was thought to be guaranteed as long as the communist party was in charge. In fact, capitalist ideas and practices turned the Bolshevik Party into its opposite. At Stalin’s death in March 1953 the communist movement appeared stronger than ever. Yet within three years the new head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, had pushed the country towards capitalism, while attacking Stalin as a monstrous murderer and egomaniac. How could this happen?
All other socialists and communists, along with the Soviet leadership, believed there had to be an intermediate stage called “socialism” between capitalism and real communism. It would preserve many capitalist features: wage inequalities, inequalities between countryside and city; between workers and managers, the uneducated and the educated, nationalisms of various kinds, and so on. In industry, science, technology, art and literature, it meant preserving many capitalist ways of doing things, though with pro-worker reforms.
No human undertaking can ever be free of error, and the Bolsheviks made lots of mistakes. The basic reason is: They were the first! Never before had a communist movement seized and held power, then tried to build socialism/communism in any country, much less one that was not industrialized to begin with and, moreover, hugely destroyed by World War, a Civil War, foreign invasion, epidemic and famine.
The Bolsheviks then led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II. After losing over 20 million lives and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure in the war, the USSR rebuilt in record time. The socialist USSR built nuclear weapons through the political commitment of its scientists.
The history of the USSR is an invaluable “textbook” for all workers! We must study the Soviet experience (and that of the other great 20th century communist revolution, the Chinese) to learn essential lessons about what Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks did right, and what they did wrong, so we can do it right next time and win a communist world!
1 The plan was:
• Collectivize agriculture, so the collective farms could give up all their surplus to fund the industrialization drive;
• Build whole cities of industry overnight, making the huge investments of industrializing a gigantic country within a few years instead of the decades it had taken the capitalist countries;
• Mechanize the new collective farms with tractors and farm equipment, making them even more productive;
• Build a large modern army with advanced weapons, able to defeat the armies of the capitalist countries that the USSR knew would attack, probably soon;
• Delay the attack as long as possible through diplomacy, trying to play off the capitalist countries against one another.
2 For one version of these events see Grover Furr, “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform (two parts) at http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/2005.html. For another, see The Great Conspiracy by Sayers and Kahn.
The civil war in Syria has U.S. rulers in a quandry. They are targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad in line with their perpetual need to secure Middle East oil and gas. Only by limiting arch rival China’s access to energy for its growing economy and military can the U.S. bosses maintain their imperialist advantage.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are concerned that a Syrian invasion could repeat their fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan — especially in light of U.S. workers’ skepticism and lack of support for the next war for profit. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and other U.S. presidents, told Bloomberg Television that military involvement in Syria would risk “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
Last August Obama warned Syria it would be crossing “a red line” and inviting U.S. intervention if it used chemical weapons. Amid recent reports that both Assad and his Syrian opposition may have used poison gas (New York Times, 5/6/13), Obama must choose between unpopular military force and a loss of credibility. A lead front-page Times article (5/5/13) said Obama was “reluctant to become entangled in another war in the Middle East, and, well aware that most Americans oppose military action, the president has deliberately not explained what his ‘red line’ actually is.”
Israeli rulers, acting as front men for the U.S., have twice launched air strikes on Syria’s Iranian-supplied missiles, setting their own red line to stop shipments to Israeli enemy Hezbollah, as well as exposing Syria’s weak air defense.
Obama’s promised intervention has his defenders in the liberal media and think tanks claiming that his worries stem from a rare diplomatic mistake on his part. “Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria,” reads the Times’ May 5 top headline. An op-ed article in the same issue by Brookings Institution director Daniel Byman blames Obama’s lack of planning: “In the Syrian case, the red line on chemical weapons appears to have been issued without a decision as to how we might respond to a Syrian breach.”
Obama’s ‘Blunder’ Or
Service to Finance Capitalists?
But Obama didn’t blunder into his Syrian dilemma. He is boxed in by his subservience to U.S. finance capital. In particular, Obama must protect the interests of ExxonMobil and other energy companies in competition with Chinese and Russian capitalists, who regard Syria as a toehold for their own imperialist interests.
ExxonMobil has hired James Jeffrey, formerly U.S. ambassador to occupied Iraq, to help negotiate huge oil deals with Baghdad (Reuters, 2/8/13). Without acknowledging his Exxon paymasters, Jeffrey wrote an April 27 article for the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy entitled “Intervention Escalation.” In it, he identified U.S. imperialism’s main global foes in Syria: “Iran, Russia, and China have deep stakes in the preservation of the Assad regime.” Then he highlighted U.S. bosses’ temporary opportunity: “The power balance in Syria’s immediate neighborhood is so tipped in favor of the United States and its friends that there is little China and Russia (or Iran) could do to counter the United States directly.”
In short, the diminished “potential for a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian backlash should not deter Washington from taking necessary military action in Syria,” Jeffrey asserted. Alluding to his Exxon bosses’ hold on Iraqi and Saudi oil fields, he said, “Middle Eastern stability is a key U.S. interest...as is living up to our red line threat on chemical weapons use.”
According to the Exxon mouthpiece, the U.S. war machine is very capable of cashing obama’s check for Syria. He referred to an April 17 report in the Los Angeles Times:
The Pentagon is sending about 200 troops to Jordan, the vanguard of a potential U.S. military force of 20,000 or more that could be deployed if the Obama administration decides to intervene in Syria to secure chemical weapons arsenals or to prevent the 2-year-old civil war from spilling into neighboring nations.
Limits of Military Power
Obama may strike Syria soon. If he doesn’t, it will mean that the U.S. bosses’ longer-term strategists have prevailed. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., an influential policy analysis firm that counts the Pentagon and much of the Fortune 500 as clients, warns on Syria:
Many things are beyond the military power of the United States....You cannot stop a civil war by adding another faction to the war unless that faction brings overwhelming power to bear. The United States has a great deal of power, but not overwhelming power, and overwhelming power’s use means overwhelming casualties. And you cannot transform the political culture of a country from the outside unless you are prepared to devastate it as was done with Germany and Japan.
Regardless of the bosses’ timetable for an attack on Syria, the international working class must prepare for more Middle East oil wars — and potential world wars — as imperialist rivals fight it out for the maximum profits they need to survive. To that end, we must build an international communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. PLP’s sole aim is to organize the destruction of capitalism — with its profits, racism, sexism, mass poverty and unemployment — and to establish a communist society run by and for the working class. This means winning millions of workers, youth and soldiers to communist revolution.
CHICAGO, March 27 — PLP marched with teachers, students, parents and workers to stop school closings and the layoffs of 2,000 teachers. We brought a message that only communism can give our children a real future.
In late March, the Chicago School Board announced that 61 schools would be closed before the opening of the 2013-2014 school year. Most are located in black and Latino neighborhoods of the South and West sides of the city. These racist attacks will hurt black, white, Asian and Latino working-class students. When confronted about these racist closings, the Chicago school CEO stated: “It’s not racist to close schools in those neighborhoods.”
PLP has repeatedly warned of the coming wars to decide which imperialists will control the world. The U.S. ruling class will use its state power to mobilize the population for war. Squeezed by imperialist rivalries, the bosses are only interested in educating black, Latino and white working-class youth for this purpose.
U.S. rulers are trying to seize the opportunity created by the right-wing “education reform movement.” The
reformers have successfully mobilized some parents and others to attack unionized public school teachers, demanded the use of standardized tests for data-driven evaluations of teachers, and popularized the call for more charter schools and corporate privatizing of education. They are calling on state governments to institute a “common core curriculum,” which will emphasize regimentation and loyalty to the state.
Under capitalism, co-locations create smaller schools inside old school buildings, dividing students, parents, and teachers from one another and weakening their ability to organize. School closings are the order of the day for thousands of black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and white working-class children nationwide. These attacks will continue because the bosses need working-class youth to be the foot soldiers in their continuing wars, as well as low-paid workers or part of the reserve pool of unemployed workers. We will continue to bring the message of communist revolution to students, workers and soldiers in Chicago and all over the world. Capitalism is a rotten system that will be destroyed by the masses led by the PLP.
AL-ARAQEEB, April 20 — A group of Jewish women and a PL’er met with the women of this “unrecognized” Bedouin village to show solidarity with their struggle against the government’s moves to uproot them and steal their land. Most outsiders talk only with the men here, but we needed to hear the village’s women as well. The meeting was initiated by the “Unrecognized Village Team” of the broad left Tarabut movement.
Last week, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel likes to present itself, demolished Al-Araqeeb for the 49th time since the summer of 2010. This vicious policy exposes Israel as a racist state that serves Israeli and U.S. capitalists, never the working-class residents of Israel-Palestine.
Under the colonialist Prawer Plan, the Israeli government can evict Bedouins who live in “unrecognized villages” and grab their land. In these villages, the state denies the residents water, electricity, telephone, medical and educational services. All of these communities are Bedouin; no Jewish settlement goes unrecognized by the Israeli bosses. The government routinely funds the moshavim and kibbutzim, the individually or collectively owned farms settled by Jews. One government ploy is to grab Bedouin land by planting Jewish National Fund (JNF) forests on it. Every dollar people give to this Zionist organization is a dollar for theft and demolition.
In 2000, the Israeli rulers established the Ministry for the Development of the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine) and the Galilee (northern Israel-Palestine). Under Shimon Peres (now president of Israel and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize), the Ministry created Givot Bar, a settlement exclusively for wealthy Jews, on lands belonging to Al-Araqeeb.
The Bedouin residents of Al-Araqeeb hold legal title to 115 acres. The village once had a population of nearly six hundred, and none were unemployed. As in East Jerusalem, they paid taxes to the government and got nothing in return. This is the bosses’ method to pressure residents to leave for “planned” towns, the Israeli equivalent of reservations for Native Americans.
In July 2010, the village was demolished for the first time. The Israeli rulers’ media described this act of state terror as though it were a wartime operation in the occupied West Bank. Later, during the winter, the village was demolished five times in a single week. The cops ordered residents to move to a nearby cemetery to smooth the way for the land grab.
In protest, residents are holding a protest vigil. They are struggling to hang on to their ancestral land despite the violence of the U.S. real estate tycoons and the Israeli government at their service. It is important to note that the Bedouins are fighting the state’s racist, divide-and-conquer policy, not Jewish workers.
The destruction of Al-Araqeeb is part of an accelerated plan of evictions and theft of Bedouin lands in southern Israel-Palestine. Last year, the state ratified the “Law for the Management of the Bedouin Settlement of the Negev,” which expands the Prawer Plan. Its goal is to evict 30,000 Bedouin workers from their lands and force them into “planned” towns where the unemployment rate ranges up to nearly 50 percent and crime and drugs abound. Objections filed by Bedouin groups and Amnesty International failed to turn back this racist law.
Billionaire Ronald Lauder, heir to the U.S. Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, is the biggest donor to the JNF and president of the World Jewish Congress. While he fattens his profits, his servants in the JNF, the Israeli police and the Israel Lands Administration destroy Bedouin crops and evict Bedouin workers to clear their lands for luxury Jewish settlements.
The Progressive Labor Party has joined this fight against the Israeli state and U.S. real estate moguls. We fight for working-class rule, where each and every worker, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, creed or sex, will have equal rights. Under communism, all workers Bedouin, Jewish, and Arab alike — will share in the bounty produced by society.
