Towards 2000 – Prospects for Socialism
Socialist Outlook1990sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Socialism A sense of perspective Socialists rarely feel that they have nothing to do: most of them are furiously involved in the hurly-burly of practical politics.All too often, it seems, for too little reward in achieving socialist victories. It is therefore necessary to have a sense of perspective of where we are now and what the prospects are for socialist victory. In terms of the history of humanity we are not very far along the road. The human race is perhaps 5 million years old at most: if the planet survives we havesome tens of thousands of millions of years to go. But since none of us is going to be around that long, it is worth looking on a bit of a shorter scale.
Lenin said that the imperialist epoch- roughly this century - was the 'epoch of the transition to socialism'. But there was no exact timescale implicit in that idea. It took centuries for the transition from feudalism to capitalism: and it will clearly have taken tens of decades before capitalism is finally defeated Humanity always learns lessons practically before it learns them theoretically. In the twentieth century it has taken the long and bitter experience of Stalinism for the socialist movement to begin to internalise the necessity for democracy, as an integral - and not contingent - aspect of viable socialism.
The old Stalinist order in Eastern Europe, with all its ruthlessness and inhumanity, is in the process of crashing. In most cases this was because of the sustained semi-revolutionary mobilisation of the people. Let us not forget that the pivotal events in 1989, which isolated the regimes in Czechoslovakia and Romania and prepared the ground for their downfall, took place in the GDR and were led by the left.
In any case, the fall of the Stalinist regimes is a major victory for working people and the left everywhere. Those who long nostalgically for the days when they had the Berlin wall and a ruthless Stalinist oligarchy to give them comfort from the cold winds of capitalism really have missed the point of what socialism is about. But the question remains who will reap the rewards of this victory
in the long term. As we argued earlier on, the absence of any viable practical models of 'really existing democratic socialism' have made a socialist victory in Eastern Europe much more difficult in the short term. This means that Eastern Europe is the target of a massive imperialist offensive and that the outcome will be the result of a long struggle.
But in the long struggle for socialism which faces us, there are massive reasons for hope, massive obstacles to the stabilisation of imperialism, huge resources for victory. They lie in the giant social and political changes which have taken place in the last twenty years.
Social and political recomposition: we are the majority When Marx wrote Capital the working class was a tiny minority: today it is the majority. At least, it is a disputed point today (as opposed to 20 years ago) whether there are more workers or peasants in the world - and this is largely a matter of definition. This outcome is the result of the process of partial industrialisation in some third world countries, and the decline of the peasantry and the growth of urbanisation everywhere. Giant new concentrations of the working class have emerged in countries like Brazil, China (where 450 millionnow live in towns), South Korea and Southern Africa. The result is found in the giant trade union and political struggles which have emerged in those countries. Thus while Europe remains the centre of the most solidly organised working class in the world, its numerical domination has vanished: it is a tiny minority.
Politically, and this combines with the crisis of Stalinism, we have seen an eruption of new kinds of organisation outside the traditional Stalinist and social democratic framework. There are numerous examples; among the best known are the PT (Workers Party) in Brazil whose candidate for president won 32 million votes in 1989; the politico-military parties and mass peoples' front of the FMLN in El Salvador; the COSATU trade union federation in South Africa; the mass revolutionary organisations in the Philippines; the FSLN in Nicaragua; independent trade union groups in the Soviet Union; and in its early stages at least, Solidarnosc. These movements are very diverse and have different characteristics. But they are all part of a common trend towards the emergence of non-Stalinist class struggle movements - parties and
trade unions. This world-wide recomposition of left politics, outside the Stalinist and social democratic framework, creates immense possibilities for a new type of socialist politics internationally. The workers have not been defeated Over and above the ideological and directly political development of the international workers movement is the material relationship of forces.
First and foremost we have to note that despite everything which has happened since the late 1970s, in no major country have the workers been decisively defeated - as happened in Germany in 1933 for example.
The major organisational and political bastions of the working class are still intact, particularly in Western Europe. The worst defeats in recent years have perhaps been the collapse of trade unionism in Spain (but even there struggle is reviving and together with it the militant left; and the decline in trade union membership in the USA. But even so, there have not been the kind of historic defeats to compare with 1933, or even the British general strike. This is extremely important for the future development of the socialist movement.
The emergence of new fronts of struggle As we argued above, the anti-capitalist movement today is characterised by its diversity, by the addition to the militant socialist movement and the labour movement in general dozens of new movements, dozens of new fronts of struggle- against the destruction of the environment, against sexism, against racism, against specific aspects of imperialism, against the oppression of lesbians and gay men.
This richness is not a regrettable cause of difficulty, but an immense source of potential strength. As we have argued, it is not possible for these movements to be finally victorious outside the construction of socialism internationally. The main force for socialism, because of its numerical strength and central place in production, is the international working class and its organised movements. To take the working class forward, the left has to create a vision of socialism that will enable the diverse fronts of struggle to be united around a common centre - the struggle of the working class.
Organised Marxism The implication of everything we have written in this pamphlet is that Marxism remains the sole effective mechanism of understanding the world we live in and consciously acting upon it for socialism. Our account of twentieth century history has laid stress on the missed opportunities for socialist advance. It follows that socialists should not be neutral oragnostic on the main issues of strategy which face the organised workers movement. Socialism is not inevitable; there is no crisis the capitalist class cannot escape from if those they rule are prepared to pay the price. The main chances for socialist transformation arise when the capitalist system itself faces crisis and instability. But capitalising on these crises requires the prior existence of militant socialist forces based on Marxism - in Britain and internationally — able to win support in the working class. The working class, the poor peasants and agricultural workers, the shanty town dwellers, the racially and sexually oppressed - in other words the overwhelming majority - still have a world to win. Scepticism and demoralisation will do nothing to help them win it.