Communism is Dead - Long Live Communism!
As usual, neither revolution nor counter-revolution. From the much-heralded change of government in Russia—ending seventy years of single-party rule—and the long-delayed admission of capitalism, even the democrats themselves should have expected something less farcical. The vulgarity—quintessentially bourgeois in style—of the ousted national-communists and the incoming “unmentionables” permeates the entire charade of the “failed coup”: from “good guy” Gorbachev heading off for a week at the seaside, to top state officials staging a palace coup without arresting a single opponent or cutting a single phone line, to democrats who neither want nor are able to truly purge the old personnel and the old command economy, or mobilize the working classes (beyond a few Moscow intellectuals). It was all destined to culminate in the big rock concert in Manezh Square. Throughout, there was the constant support and blessing of the “Pope of Freedom,” Mr. Bush. Beneath it all lay the continuity of the State, the police, the army, and the banks—institutions that never lost control of public order or the subjugated classes, despite the dizzying succession of “democratic” backsides replacing “bureaucratic” ones in the seats of power.
Russian capital—a network of financial interests on a continental scale, admittedly strangled by the falling rate of profit (though no more so than its “rich” Western and Eastern competitors), and embodied in a thriving bourgeois class of entrepreneurs, merchants, and rentiers now in full bloom and emancipated from the protection of the State that built and emulated it—is now casting aside a vast caste of officials bred and entrenched within the CPSU: a caste that is bloated, greedy, and inefficient. The Russian bourgeoisie claims it wants to break free from the “conservative” party-state—the very entity that, until recently, served to provide it with an economic, political, and ideological backbone, and to maintain its empire both at home and abroad. This apparatus—now clearly in retreat, having lost the Afghan war, seen Europe slip from its grasp, and abandoned its Iraqi ally—remains deeply entrenched within the governing boards of factories, *kolkhozy*, and *sovkhozy*, resisting the onset of a restructuring process that is bound to affect generals and petty bosses alike. The proclaimed expropriation of the CPSU’s movable and immovable assets would be a significant economic event, as would the dismissal of all those handsomely paid and well-fed officials.
Yet the democrats—who are, in effect, all former national-communists—cannot move beyond mere appearances: Russia is not just Moscow and Leningrad (or rather, St. Petersburg!); it is perhaps easier to retake the Smolny than to replace the leadership of even the humblest kolkhoz… Kolkhozy and sovkhozy can only be captured through a genuine revolution. The bourgeoisie can only storm them from the outside—by starving them out through the low prices of a reformed market—but this would require decades and a massive social upheaval, particularly when a fifth of the population is still engaged in agriculture.
For the rest, the changing of personnel in the corridors of the Kremlin and the republican parliaments—and the changing colors of flags—offers no new prospects regarding the spiraling crisis of Russian late capitalism, itself part of the global crisis at the close of the century. The difficulty lies not in adopting a free-market reform program—something common to all parties, after all—but in implementing it. You cannot eat democracy—a fact well known at the Gdańsk shipyards and perhaps already in the mines of the Donbas—even if it intoxicates more than vodka.
The nationalist undertones—Great Russian on one side, separatist on the other—do not herald a consensual breakup of the Empire; rather, they serve as demagogic fodder for the petty bourgeoisie—loathsome everywhere and always—which knows no other ideals. The bourgeoisie now has but one historical project: reaction; in doing so, it disavows its own grand national past. Only an imperialist war alters the borders established by the previous one. The case of Germany proves the rule. The global imperialist order is indeed fraught with enormous tensions ready to explode, yet it is also paralyzed by countless cross-vetoes. The Russian-American joint world condominium serves the USA first and foremost, with the Russians acting as their seconds against their true rivals: Germany and Japan. The Baltic Republics—with populations of two, three, or four million—will never be truly independent; like Ukraine, Belarus, and the Asian republics, they remain embedded in the same economic fabric and sheltered by the same army’s nuclear umbrella.
The true and ultimate problem facing Russian imperialism is finding its bearings within the global arena of economic, diplomatic, and military forces. Various postures are conceivable for the Russian bear, ranging from licking the honey of American freedom to seeking treatment within the “Common European Home“; …one might discover even more common homes in Asia tomorrow…
We deny just as strongly that “communism”—that deceptive, fake national communism—could be resurrected tomorrow for anti-proletarian ends, as we do that “democracy” has triumphed today: within the chromosomes of capital, the democratic and peaceful gene is recessive, while the fascist and warmongering one is dominant. Who might play the Duce—this or that charlatan—matters not at all. What triumphed in Moscow this August was not peace and freedom; rather, milestones were marked on the path toward war and oppression between states.
It is only against the proletariat that the bourgeoisies obscenely hail the death of Communism—the true Communism, the one that is ours. So much the better: one less counterfeit. That Communism—as the exploited of the entire world (including Russia, where they instinctively refused to side with either bourgeois camp) remember and understand so well—yes, our Communism was defeated, not today, but back in the mid-1920s. It will do better next time. And there will be a next time!
The liquidators have been liquidated
In light of the ‘confessions’ made this August, we are forced, us ‘natural republicans’ to paraphrase the hateful monarchist motto ‘The king is dead. Long live the king!’ and plainly say: ‘Communism is dead. Long live Communism.’
It won’t be easy for Russian opportunism to admit that the fiction of ‘building’ communism (as though it were just another example of grim neo-classical Stalinist architecture) has exploded; it is a pretence that has been kept up for almost 70 years with the collusion and active support of the capitalist ‘enemy’ of the entire world.
The Moscow method has been able to immobilize the working class on a global scale and act as the perfect deterrent to any attempt at revolutionary revival. The strike of the English miners in 1926; the bloody struggles of the proletarians of Shanghai; the attempted revolt of Berlin workers in 1953; all the attempts at proletarian revolt in Eastern Europe, right up to the recent events in Poland which were bloodily repressed by the Russian bourgeoisie in power, all were perfectly justified by the relations of forces and the status quo between the powers that came about after the defeat of the world revolution (which wasn’t simply the Russian revolution) in the years between 1922 and 1926.
Not a word has been said by the Muscovites, or their faithless cronies elsewhere, about the fact that one ‘Left’ fought a lone battle from the very first congresses of the International to defend the position that ‘Russian Communism’ was a theoretical heresy destined to lead to defeat in practice.
We asserted in the past that when the Russian myth had collapsed, as was bound to happen, we shouldn’t expect an honest recognition of our foresight, but rather, if anything, oppression or silence. And so it was. But it isn’t that which rankles. We don’t keep going now, and we haven’t kept going in the past, through those post-mortem rehabilitations which are so much to the taste of opportunities swines. We anticipate, and know, that an entire historical cycle must come to a close for communism to arise again as an urgent necessity. The mise en scène of Socialism in one country came to an end, as is happening to its ‘downfall’ today, together with every corollary that can claim historical descent from so monstrous a thesis. Thus ‘the national roads to socialism’ have degenerated into conflicts, which, though apparently ethnic and racist, are in fact nothing other than the expressions of struggles within the bourgeois class camouflaged in the most horrible and cannibalistic way. We need only see the Croatians, Slovenians and Serbians slaughtering each other; they who were once united together in the allegedly ‘most human of socialisms’ that of the ‘Titoist heresy’.
But take note! Don’t you believe that the Gorbachovites, and their Russian opponents and successors, will altogether dispense playing their three-cornered game. Like all those with a weakness for quotations, they are masters at digging around for suitable passages: ‘…we have radically changed our point of view on socialism to that of Lenin in 1921 at the time of the NEP.’ For Gorbachov the Lenin of the NEP was correct, that is, a free market, but there is not a single word … pardon us… to make it dialectical! In fact, Lenin’s policy was due to his awareness of the fact that in 1921 in Russia, after the revolution and ‘war communism’ (practiced also by bourgeois governments…) the conditions weren’t there to ‘construct’ socialism; exactly the opposite position to the one codified by the Marxist-Leninists à la Stalin.
But that’s how it is: even without being linguists, everyone understands that those scoundrels quote, as they say, “out of context”. And that would be the least of it: we’ll also have to draw the—nominalistic—conclusions from it.
Gorbachev had already had to hint at the possibility of reverting to the party’s name as it was until 1919: the Russian Social Democratic Party. But he had also had to add that “too many men have invested (perfect tense, ‘New Course’ style) their lives in the struggle for communism for the name to be changed lightly. We will need to hold extensive consultations not only at the top but also at the grassroots level of the Party, and it is very likely that, given the circumstances, the name will not be changed”.
Of course! It’s not as if a little game played by Base and Summit could change a substance that doesn’t exist—in the sense that, with the exception of the glorious incipit of 1917, there has never been a thing as Communism in Russia! Except for the Name, which isn’t, in turn… nominalistic!
Their final word is this: ‘The crisis can be overcome and be followed by a new, revitalised idea of socialism.’
Ever since 1921-24, the history of the CPSU has been far rockier than is commonly known in the West; and it can’t be easy to plainly tell the Russian proletariat, for 70 years prostrated by fake socialism, that it has unfortunately all been a mistake… They are going to have to find a way to sugar the pill; otherwise, as the powerful strikes of the Donbass and the Kuzbass show, even the ‘democrats’ could be toppled.
USA-led Western capital is aware and worried about it. Testing the water with a loan here, a loan there, it proposes the following time-schedule: 1) First of all, Russia and its satellites to be opened up to commercial capital so that commodities and technology can be easily exported 2) next, all going well (meaning without the wars that are menacing the Balkanization of the entire east) a heftier dose of financial capital will be forthcoming.
This operation, we dare say, is certainly not going to be painless, since the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself as an economic, political and military system are only ever patched up by way of declarations of bankruptcy, and severe ones at that. And the bankruptcy trustees, headed by the U.S.A. won’t be there out of love for Gorby and Yeltsin, it is their own supremacy they are concerned about, both today and tomorrow.
Meanwhile, as the saying goes, one thing leads to another. Will Russia’s formerly state-run capitalism be able to compete with the most aggressive Western capital without resorting to arms? This is the question, this is the hurdle to be got over after the momentary intoxication into which the bourgeoisie and opportunism in general, extremist or not, keep the proletariat and the propertyless in general.
Thus we say, if Communism is dead, Long live Communism!