Unity to strengthen ALBA
Leaders from ALBA member countries reiterate commitment to regional integration and solidarity
Author: GI news staff | informacion@granma.cu
march 7, 2017 10:03:16
ALBA IS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW AMERICA: PRESIDENT OF VENEZUELA NICOLÁS MADURO
Alba is the foundation for the construction of a new America, which is why we must tend and value it, stated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, March 5, upon inaugurating the 14th ALBA Extraordinary Summit in honor of Bolivarian leader Hugo Chávez, on the fourth anniversary of his passing.
Maduro recalled that the regional organization was born at a historic moment at the beginning of the 21st century, as a space to coordinate strategies in defense of progressive movements worldwide.
Alba emerged at a time when it seemed impossible, seemingly a dream of two greats that were Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, he stated.
Later the Venezuelan leader noted that the bloc is the result of the convergence of progressive political forces in the region and has proven that it is possible to place human beings at the center of our complex power structures.
“The decade of the 90s could be called the decade of social disaster across the entire continent,” he stated, going on to note that ALBA also gave way to Petrocaribe, an extraordinary and revolutionary project, stated Maduro.
Regarding late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, he noted that he was the child of Bolívar's ideas, and described his passing on March 5, 2013, as a devastating blow for the country.
Chávez must however be remembered with joy, fighting for happiness, with a an embrace of solidarity. If Chávez represented anything it was boundless joy and optimism, said Maduro.
He continued by noting that on March 5 four years ago, the right wing believed that the time to destabilize the Bolivarian Revolution had arrived.
Four years after his death, and the Bolivarian Revolution of a triumphant Chávez is still here and looking toward recovery; these are new times with new challenges, stated the Venezuelan President. He went on to explain that people around the world continue to love and defend Chávez, as well as Comandante Fidel Castro, whose ashes rest in a tomb in Santiago de Cuba, added Maduro.
With these two greats we will continue to face any situation. After almost 60 years of Revolution, it has cost heroic Cuba a great deal; cost the country a great deal to have an educated and conscious people. Here stands Cuba, undefeated and intact, making its way along its own path, he stated.
I can imagine Chávez saying to Fidel: We are not plowing the sea. We continue to reap the fruits of the good harvest planted by two great presidents, stated Maduro.
WE ARE FIDELISTAS AND CHAVISTAS: PRESIDENT OF BOLIVIA EVO MORALES
March 5 is a day to remember forever, as four years ago we cried and suffered, after hearing the news of the death of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales recalled.
However, four years later, March 5 is a day of “strengthening and reflection.” The best tribute we can pay to our brother Chávez, who taught us to stand up against imperialism, is unity, stated the Bolivian leader. “Latin America is anti-capitalist. We are Fidelistas and Chavistas.”
It is very important to defend basic services such as human rights, which is why we must oppose privatization, stated Morales.
The Andean leader then called to continue expanding ALBA-TCP, which has proved to be the “axis of hope” on our continent, as opposed to the “axis of evil” as some initially described it.
He also mentioned the situation in various capitalist countries where migrants are being attacked. “There are walls for immigrants, but there are no walls against military bases and interventions,” highlighted Morales.
“The people of the world will organize to speak out against these types of policies,” he noted.
At another moment during his speech, the Bolivian President recalled Cuba’s role in supporting revolutions in the region. “These changes we are seeing in Latin America are thanks to Cuba, thus I say: Thank you Raúl, thank you Fidel, we will always remember you.”
Four years after the death of Chávez, I must say that unity is the best and most important guarantee to continue the battle and the struggle.
CHAMPIONS IN REDUCING POVERTY: ECUADORAN FOREIGN MINISTER GUILLAUME LONG
We encountered Chávez in the late 1990s. It would have been extremely difficult for the people of the region to carry out the liberation processes currently unfolding across the continent, if it weren’t for the path he charted, stated Ecuador’s Foreign Minister.
We are the vanguard of the struggle against injustice on the continent, even though we are one of the most unequal regions on the planet, he noted.
ALBA member states have been champions in reducing poverty and we must continue fighting for true democracy which guarantees freedom for all, he stated.
Guillaume Long noted that his country has experienced two difficult years given economic troubles and the impact of severe natural events, but is on the road to recovery as all indicators show.
In this sense the Ecuadoran Foreign Minister explained the current situation regarding the country’s Presidential elections, noting that a dirty campaign to discredit President Rafael Correa is been waged by media outlets responding to the interests of the national oligarchy.
Ecuador has held democratic elections and after 10 years of government this is a very important achievement for us: electoral democracy is sacred.
WE CONTINUE TO BE COMMITTED TO INTEGRATION: PRIME MINISTER OF SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES RALPH GONSALVES
Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves repeated the call for unity among all peoples and nations which make up the Bolivarian Alliance for the People’s of Our America (ALBA), noting that Saint Vincent and the Grenadines remains firm in its commitment to the integration process.
He also emphasized the importance and reiterated his country’s support of the Summit’s final declaration which establishes the strengthening of the ALBA Bank and fund supporting migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.
During his remarks, Gonsalves paid tribute to Comandante Hugo Chávez, recalling the leader’s efforts to strengthen Latin American and Caribbean unity.
THE CHALLENGES OF THESE TIMES DEMAND UNITY: PRIME MINISTER OF SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS TIMOTHY HARRIS
This has been a very productive meeting, where various issues regarding ways to improve the lives of our peoples have been discussed, noted the Caribbean leader.
There are, without a doubt, opportunities to strengthen cooperation and collaboration within ALBA, which is why we must have efficient transport systems to make our economies more independent and solid, he stated.
Harris also noted the importance of Bolívar’s vision and the efforts of his disciple Chávez, while reaffirming his country’s commitment to supporting ALBA and Petrocaribe.
We offer our support to the government of Venezuela, and Cuba knows that it has many friends in Caricom (the Caribbean community market), and we have always had excellent relations with the people and government of Cuba. Cuba always goes above and beyond the call of duty, stated Prime Minister Harris.
The challenges of these times demand unity, but this unity must be cemented in the region, he concluded.
ALBA IS A SOLIDARITY PROJECT: HEAD OF ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA’S DELEGATION NICHOLAS MELFORD
The Caribbean representative noted that the question of cultural exchanges was among issues discussed during the Summit. He highlighted that now is an important moment in this regard, given that a large part of the history of Latin America has been presented through the lenses of U.S. corporate media.
Thus he called for the role of teleSUR English to be strengthened in order to reach English speaking Caribbean nations.
He went on to note that he had the opportunity to have his photograph taken with one of his personal heroes, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and commented that he was proud to participate in the same meeting as Cuban President Raúl Castro.
The principles of ALBA are important in moments of crisis. We must be proud that our leaders have sought to create a project that works in solidarity with the most humble.
ALBA - A KEY PIECE TO INTEGRATION: HEAD OF GRENADA’S DELEGATION OLIVER JOSEPH
ALBA has been a key piece to integration, stated Grenada’s representative, who also recalled that the bloc’s 14th Summit was held on the fourth anniversary of the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. “This is a tribute to him and to Fidel Castro.”
The principles of ALBA are enduring and the policies which led to its creation are also shared by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). I would like to applaud ALBA’s various cooperation initiatives with international organizations to reduce poverty in the region, he said, and highlighted the important role played by Petrocaribe in this regard.
ALBA is a mechanism which contributes to improving the quality of life of our peoples. We are happy that it is focused on social and human issues, stated Joseph, adding that “Grenada considers Cuba and Venezuela to be great friends.”
POLITICAL WILL IS NECESSARY: SPECIAL ENVOY SENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF SURINAME, WINSTON LACKIN
Lackin expressed his full support for the Declaration and thanked Venezuela for its assistance offered through Petrocaribe. Regarding the private meeting held prior to the Summit, the regional representative noted that a lack of political will on the part of governments can create obstacles to establishing cooperation projects.
He also noted that although all regional integration mechanisms are working toward this end, a lack of political will presents a threat to such initiatives.
ALBA’S LEADERSHIP IS EXEMPLARY: HEAD OF DOMINICA’S DELEGATION REGINALD AUSTRID
Austrid recalled that many forces wanted to destroy ALBA and Petrocaribe, and thanked Venezuela and Cuba for their support after Hurricane Erika hit the region, two years ago.
We are aware of the challenges facing Venezuela and all ALBA and Petrocaribe member states, but their leadership has been exemplary in these circumstances.
WE HAVE NOT GIVEN UP: PRESIDENT OF NICARAGUA DANIEL ORTEGA
Both Chávez and Fidel are the eternal Comandantes of Latin America. We can tell both of them that we have not given up, stated Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
These are times of crisis for the tyrannical model that has been imposed as part of neoliberal globalization, which seemed to be unstoppable and untouchable; and has now entered into crisis, Ortega noted.
The crisis is being caused by this very same model, which is why now is the time to create and grow, to continue strengthening the path being charted by ALBA and Petrocaribe, he said.
We do not oppose the market, but we must establish a fair market and trade mechanisms with a social commitment to our people.
We are not the ones erecting walls. These are times for Latin American and Caribbean integration, times to strengthen exchanges between our peoples, he stated, later praising the many achievements of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel and Raúl.
Also participating in the 14th Alba summit were representatives of social movements who presented a statement of support.
Showing posts with label fidel castro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fidel castro. Show all posts
Sunday, October 8, 2017
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Reposting an article by Steven Argue 2 years ago
Why the Russian Revolution is Still Important
by Steven Argue
by Steven Argue
Poster
of the counter-revolutionary and anti-Semitic White Army showing their
hatred of Jewish Communist leader Leon Trotsky. The U.S. backed White
Army committed mass murder against Jews and Communists; they murdered
100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone
The
First World War broke out in 1914. It was a showdown between the
capitalist imperialist governments of the world. They were fighting over
which groups of powerful capitalists would control the resources and
labor of the world for their own personal profit. Yet, it was the
working class and peasantry who were sent to fight and die. All total,
the capitalists in their inter-imperialist rivalry slaughtered millions
of
people. About 17 million people were murdered, including 7 million
civilians. Also, about 20 million people were wounded.
At the outbreak of the war Russia was a backward semi-feudal empire ruled by a Tsar where vicious repression, exploitation, and grinding poverty ruled over the lives of the working class and small peasantry. The Russian Orthodox Church taught hatred of the Jews and the Tsarist monarchy routinely helped whip-up pogroms that terrorized and murdered Jews. Likewise, the Russian Empire contained many nationalities whose national sovereignty and languages were outlawed. Lenin called it a prison house of nations. Women’s and homosexual rights were non-existent.
It was the victims of this system who the Tsar sent to the front lines to fight and die for his empire. Yet, all did not go as planned. As happened in a number of other front lines across Europe, the war broke down as soldiers on both sides refused to fight. The agitation of revolutionary socialists within the ranks of the different militaries played a major role in this happening. Many soldiers came to understand that whatever their nationality, they had more in common with each other than they did with the Tsar, Kaiser, King, or President who had sent them to kill each other. Hundreds of miles of Germany’s western front stopped fighting and had to be replaced with new soldiers on both sides in order to get people to start killing each other again. The Russian soldiers, however, took this resistance to the war a step further and went back to overthrow the government that had sent them to fight and die. The Russian Revolution was, in fact, the most successful anti-war movement in world history.
The Russian Revolution went through two stages in 1917. The first, led by the social democratic Mensheviks happened in February, so became called the February Revolution. Almost nothing really improved under the Mensheviks. They started the war back up with Germany, reinstated the shooting of deserters at the front, and, among other things, opposed a needed sweeping land reform for the poor peasantry and a socialization of industry needed for the working class and society as a whole. The Mensheviks, through a program that claimed it was too early for a socialist revolution in Russia, carried out backward pro-capitalist policies.
These Mensheviks, opposed to the leftist agenda of the Bolsheviks, almost lost power in August 1917 due to a rightwing military coup led by General Kornilov. At that point, the survival of the revolution depended, in part, on critical military support from the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks saw this as only a temporary alliance, seeing the critical need to defeat Kornilov, but they also used the situation to arm the working class both to fight against the far right and to prepare for the struggles to come against the Menshevik Kerensky government.
Through patiently winning the working class to their side and military preparations, the Bolsheviks led the workers and peasants to power in a second revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution. This was a revolution that fulfilled its promises. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky ended Russia's involvement in the inter-imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, brought about a sweeping land reform for the peasants, abolished capitalism and created a socialist system that was capable of turning one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of smashing Nazi Germany and rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions to provide everyone with a guaranteed job, housing, education, and health care, brought national rights to oppressed minorities forming republics of ethnic regions, legalizing their languages and providing education in those languages while also giving their economies special help through the planned economy, brought about big advances in women's rights and rights for homosexuals, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.
Naturally, workers around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Internationally the Russian Revolution helped produce a movement that broke away from the opportunist and pro-capitalist Social Democratic socialist parties who supported their own bourgeoisies in the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I and who murdered Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany for their revolutionary opposition to the war and capitalism.
In the United States an important Communist Party was formed out of a split from the reformist Socialist Party of America. That Communist Party, along with the Trotskyist movement that later split off from it, went on to become important leaders in the labor movement of the 1930s, including the ground breaking 1934 Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, and in the formation of the militant industrial CIO union, all of which forced the Roosevelt administration to make some big reforms in favor of the working class which included Social Security, a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, the 40 hour work week and overtime, the outlawing of child labor, and the Works Progress Administration which created two million jobs for the unemployed. The motivation of the ruling class to carry out these programs was to preserve the capitalist system in the face of mass working class and socialist resistance. Before there was militant communist leadership in the unions the working class was mostly just getting its ass kicked, as we are once again today for the same reasons of lacking militant communist leadership. All revolutionary communists and labor militants should study how the communist movement was able to lead strikes and win in the 1930s.
Lenin’s program for the liberation of oppressed nations and races also had a profound effect on the American socialist movement. Before the Russian Revolution, much of the American socialist movement was oblivious to the oppression of blacks. There was a so-called “color-blind” policy in the Socialist Party of America, summed up by Eugene Debs when he said “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.... The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color.” Even worse, other socialists like Victor Berger were openly racist. It was the inspiration of the October Russian Revolution and Lenin's program on special oppression that made American socialists see, in the newly established communist movement, that blacks were doubly exploited and oppressed and that a program of special demands was needed to address black oppression.
Of the role of the USSR, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon later wrote:
“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow – after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races – for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”
Before the movement against Jim Crow segregation had successes, one thinks of the semi-fascist rule of the KKK and Democrat Party in the south. Yet the Communist Party was able to organize a May Day celebration of 20,000 people in Montgomery Alabama in the 1930s. The opening lines of their flyer declared:
“The Birmingham bosses are trying to make slaves of us! They are taking the bread from our mouths! They cut our relief and starve us. They refuse to let us organize as we wish. They refuse to recognize our unions! They persecute and lynch the Negro people! They treat their dogs better than they do the workers!”
The Communist Party had grown in popularity in the south largely due to their struggles for Black freedom with many Blacks joining the party. One of the most famous of the struggles they led was that for Scottsboro Nine. This case, out of Scottsboro, Alabama, was an attempt to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law “justice”. As a result, the Scottsboro youths were not executed, but instead were given long prison sentences. The last defendant was not pardoned until 1976.
Likewise today, it is largely groups who draw our inspiration in part from the Russian Revolution and the early communist movement in America that have campaigned to abolish the racist death penalty and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a result, the movement to free Mumia has forced the state to back down on their attempts to murder him. He does, however, unjustly continue to sit in an American prison hell-hole.
Just as human rights are illusive in the United States, with the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, numerous unjustly charged and prosecuted occupy protesters, and many others, U.S. concerns internationally have nothing to do with human rights either. As Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, U.S. opposition to Castro and support for capitalist butchers like the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship that ruled Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, is based on the economic interests of U.S. imperialism:
“...while the media is most often used as a megaphone to amplify and project the voices of the wealthy and politically powerful, rarely does this same media honestly inform Americans of contemporary history. Because of this, millions of Americans lack the context through with to analyze and understand the basis for confrontations between states. They’re conditioned by the press to look at complex political and social issues through the lens of simplistic personalities. Therefore we speak of ‘Castro’s Cuba’ in the same breath as ‘Saddam’s Iraq’. This is silliness. Conflicts between states are not personal, they’re economic. The US supported a brutal Batista dictatorship there for almost a decade before Cuban rebels drove the regime out. The US, which loves to boast about its ‘human rights campaign’, has supported the most brutal butchers and dictators in the world. Why? Because dictators use their police and arm forces to oppress their own people, to insure that the US had free reign of the nation’s natural resources. Is there any other reason why the US would support butchers like Batista?” — Mumia Abu Jamal 5/2/03
The Cuban revolution, despite its problems, remains a living breathing revolution that must be defended from U.S. imperialism and internal counter-revolution. The Soviet Union, however, did not survive. As Rosa Luxemburg explained:
“It is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.... The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which, it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once.” — Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution” (1900)
Despite the destruction of the USSR, it is essential that revolutionaries learn from that experience just as Marx learned from the destruction of the Paris Commune. In the case of the Paris Commune, workers rose up and took control of their city in 1871, but were viciously attacked by the bourgeoisie. The working class revolution was slaughtered by the bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune was drowned in blood with 30,000 communards murdered in the initial attack and, of the 50,000 people imprisoned, many were executed. Marx saw this slaughter and understood that the workers’ revolution needs to form a workers’ government and army to smash the bourgeoisie and their government. If not, similar tragedies would be repeated.
These were lessons that the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky applied to the USSR. As Emma Goldman observed:
"The Russian experience had taught him [Shatov] that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counterrevolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking a frightful toll of human life. The [imperialist] intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of [White military chiefs] Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a
warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about.” — Emma Goldman quoted in Paul Avrich, “The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution” (1973)
It was from this devastation that the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution was born. The roots of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR laid in the invasion of 14 imperialist armies after the October Revolution, including the United States, who also encircled the USSR and blockaded it economically, while the imperialist backed pro-Tsarist White Army wrecked havoc on the economy by burning crops, destroying factories, and committing mass murder of communists and Jews (100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone).
Despite winning the war against the White Army and imperialist invaders, most of the best communists and other workers died in the war. Bureaucrats with little or no commitment to the goals of the revolution were relied on more and more for the administration of Soviet society as a result of those deaths. That bureaucracy was further corrupted by the economic devastation of war and imperialist blockade which encouraged bureaucrats to steal simply to survive and care for their children. Stalin’s conservative leadership had its social base amongst this bureaucracy which he granted privileges above the working class. And on their behalf, Stalin used repression against the working class to prevent the re-emergence of legitimate workers’ democracy.
The destruction of the Soviet Union started with Stalin’s bloody political counter-revolution against the party of Lenin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Stalin murdered all of the original leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Alexandra Kolantai, and murdered massive numbers of supporters of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition to Stalin. Stalin's political counter-revolution entrenched the power of a conservative and privileged bureaucracy. Some of the gains of the revolution were lost with that. . Abortion was banned. Gay and Lesbian rights, which had been won with the revolution, were overturned. The rights of some nationalities were stomped on as well, such as those of the Ossetians whose Republic was established under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, but was abolished and divided between the Russian and Georgian Republics under Stalin into north and south Ossetia.
Internationally, the USSR no longer played a consistent leading role for the working class because the bureaucracy preferred a policy of sabotaging revolutions in order to gain trade from capitalist countries. In the 1930s Stalin’s policies directly sabotaged the revolutions in Spain, Germany, and China contributed to the victories of the capitalist mass murderers Franco, Hitler, and Chiang Kai-shek.
But one of several gains of the October Revolution that remained was the socialist planned economy that gave the USSR the industrial and political strength to smash Nazi Germany, a capitalist country that brought mass murder to a level of industrial production never seen before or since. The USSR rebuilt after that Nazi invasion devastated the economy and left 30 million citizens of the USSR dead. They rebuilt with a socialist economy that guaranteed everyone a job, housing, education, and health care. It was the positive side of that planned socialist economy, copied in Eastern Europe after the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, that helped inspire the working class of Western Europe to fight for social progress that included some victories, like socialized health care.
Besides smashing Nazi Germany and liberating Europe from fascism, the USSR also lent important material support to the anti-imperialist revolution by doing things like giving the Vietnamese people military aid to defeat the U.S. occupation and U.S. imposed dictatorships that ultimately murdered three million Vietnamese people. Likewise, the USSR broke the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. Not only did the USSR participate in trade with Cuba, but they also gave Cuba fairer prices for their sugar than what was offered on the international capitalist market. In Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere, in a similar way as was done with economic planning within the USSR, the planned socialist economy of the USSR was used to help advance the traditionally poorer countries of the world.
Countries supported by the USSR also advanced women’s liberation while the United States almost always did the opposite. This included U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The USSR tried to defeat U.S. imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, an intervention where billions of U.S. dollars in military aid to the religious fanatics of the mujahideen left a million people dead, toppled a pro-woman government, and put the Taliban in power. The corporate owned media of the United States continues to lie about Afghanistan; peddling the lie that Soviet intervention was an “invasion” despite the fact that the government of Afghanistan (the pro-woman, pro-literacy PDPA government) begged the USSR to send troops to try to defeat the CIA funded religious fanatics of the mujahideen. Other imperialist lies are peddled as well, including the disgusting collection of lies in the Hollywood movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” which, among other things, peddled completely discredited lies about the USSR making bombs to look like toys to blow-up children when they picked them up. Meanwhile, with the continued disastrous intervention of the U.S. imperialists in Afghanistan, the Red Cross warned in 2002 against the U.S. use of brightly colored yellow cluster bombs that appeared to look like toys and were exploding when children picked them up. As usual, the U.S. imperialists are guilty of the crimes they falsely accuse others of committing.
Likewise, the planned economy of the USSR was used to better many of the traditionally oppressed and poorer regions of the USSR by giving them favored investment and lifting them up economically including in the traditionally Muslim regions. Those regions also benefited greatly from the pro-woman / secular policies of the USSR. Nowhere else in the traditionally Muslim world were women better off than in Soviet Central Asia. Women’s access to higher education sometimes regionally produced more woman doctors than men. Compare this to the hell the U.S. created in Afghanistan with the victory of its mujahideen forces where women were stripped of all rights.
Yet, the Soviet people suffered greatly from a lack of political rights as well. After Stalin, the GULAGS that Stalin established, death camps really, were ended. Yet, the left remained unable to express their opinions if they disagreed with the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats. This included labeling political opponents insane and locking them up in mental wards. The U.S. did the same thing with “uppity” women and homosexuals up until the 1960s.
In the time of Gorbachev, the fragility of the deformed workers' state in the USSR was a political question rooted in the privileges of the ruling bureaucracy and the repression the working class had suffered for so many decades. When Yeltsin carried out his disastrous capitalist counter-revolution he created a few wealthy capitalists. At the same time he eliminated guaranteed health care, education, and employment and caused life expectancy to drop by 10 years. Unfortunately, there was not a strong enough working class movement to stop him. This was due to decades of Stalinist repression. But Yeltsin's coup d'etat was a military operation that involved his sending out troops to shoot at protesters and those in the government opposed his coup. It was a counter-revolution led by bureaucrats who thought they could get rich under a capitalist system.
Legitimate Trotskyists opposed Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution as the disaster it was and instead advocated political revolution to defend the socialist planned economy while at the same time sweeping away the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and creating a workers democracy. In the United States we need to both sweep away the capitalist system and create a workers democracy to change a society where the government and economy are presently run strictly by and for the wealthy.
Stalin’s political legacy in the United States includes a fear of socialist revolution. No honest person can see his mass murder and repression attractive. Trotskyists and other left socialists who oppose Stalinism argue that we can have a much much better world if we fight for a system that has both the benefits of socialism and of workers’ democracy.
One of Stalin’s main organizational legacies in the United States is the Communist Party (CPUSA). Their support for the Democrats was Stalin’s policy. That policy, started by Stalin, went against the long proud history of the American working class movement in opposing both the Democrats and Republicans. It went against the policies of both the early Socialist Party and the Communist Party of the United States before Stalin. From Gorbachev to Stalin, that policy of supporting Democrats was never corrected in those many decades while the CPUSA dutifully followed the line given by Moscow. After Stalin’s death, the conservative and repressive bureaucratic caste that Stalin put in power in the USSR by murdering the original leaders of the Russian Revolution actually maintained most of Stalin’s policies, despite denouncing Stalin. That’s why Trotskyists continued to call them and their world followers “Stalinist”.
The Communist Party –USA in the 1980s quit running candidates in order to put their full support behind the Democrats. Politically, left parties like the Communist Party who give their support to the Democrats are only serving to give left cover to the enemies of the working class. Yes, the CPUSA is part of the workers movement and has done some good things, like lead the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. But decades of Stalinist leadership has turned them useless on most questions of labor. They even supported the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) bureaucracy attacks on the militant Hormel Meatpackers of Local P-9 in the 1980s while also supporting Democratic governor Rudy Perpich who sent out the National Guard against the workers.
The Democrats and Republicans are playing a giant game of good cop bad cop with the working class, with Obama being extremely bad but the Republican candidates scaring people into supporting Democrats. Both parties are working together and financed by the same capitalists. Both parties are the paid agents of Wall Street, the banks, oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, austerity, unemployment, repression, student debt, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on climate change. Without organization around a political program that directly challenges the Democrats and Republicans, power will remain in the hands of the capitalists and their two parties. Even “progressive” reforms will remain elusive without a real challenge to their power. It will take a revolutionary party with a Trotskyist program to build the leadership needed to overthrow this system. Likewise, it is likely to take the same to be powerful enough to win any meaningful reforms.
From the propaganda of the U.S. corporate media the lesson of the USSR is that that it “didn’t work” and that all revolutions are similarly doomed. Yet, the only healthy socialist revolution that ever degenerated into Stalinism was the USSR. Every other socialist revolution since has not degenerated, but was instead deformed form birth under Stalinist leadership and the command structure of a guerrilla army that was transformed into the government after taking power (south Vietnam (1975), Cuba (1959), north Vietnam (1954) China (1949), and Yugoslavia (1945)) or under the direct control of Stalin’s Red Army after defeating Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan (1945 - North Korea, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). Each of these revolutions was an improvement in overthrowing capitalist dictatorships, ending the exploitation and control of imperialist capitalist nations, implementing socialist economies, greatly improving women’s rights, and in general meeting human needs like health care, education, nutrition, employment, and housing. China, for instance, doubled life expectancy during Mao’s rule saving the lives of some 408 million people.
But these countries never had workers’ democracies. For instance, Ho Chi Minh murdered thousands of Trotskyists who were also being targeted by the French at the same time. Immediately after taking power, Mao rounded-up all of the known Trotskyists and their friends and families and put them in prison. This was pure Stalinism. No inference of healthy revolutions always degenerating can be drawn from these Stalinist led revolutions. These revolutions didn’t degenerate, they were deformed from birth.
Regarding the existing Stalinist deformed workers’ states of Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea, Trotskyists call for an end to imperialist economic blockades and for the defense of the socialist planned economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution, while at the same time supporting political revolution to overthrow the brutal Stalinist bureaucracies and their privileges in order to bring workers’ democracy. In fact, more and more, in the existing deformed workers states it will take a political revolution to defend what is left of the socialist planned economies from the privatization led by Stalinist bureaucrats.
Trotskyists defended (and defend) the gains of those revolutions from imperialist attacks, including opposing the U.S. economic blockades against North Korea and Cuba and denouncing threats of war against those countries. Still, under our program, Trotskyists support legitimate working class and student uprisings that could produce socialist systems with workers democracy. Historically this has included Trotskyist support for the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring, and the Tiananmen Square uprising of the 1980s. In each case the Stalinists oppressed legitimate working class demands. There are, in fact, rivers of blood between the positions of Trotskyists and Stalinists on those questions, just as there are rivers of blood in the millions of people Stalin murdered, largely to eliminate the Trotskyist left opposition to his rule. Yes, the imperialists have murdered more than the Stalinists, but there are still rivers of blood differentiating Trotskyism from Stalinism.
Stalinist groups in the United States, like the CP, PSL, and WWP, do not have a position in support of political revolution in the Stalinist controlled states. This is why they supported the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square and supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary even though neither uprising was pro-capitalist. Those working class and student uprisings represented hopes for truly socialist systems that would include workers’ democracy. Instead, the CP / PSL / WWP took the side of the Stalinist oppressors. That doesn’t speak well to their visions of socialism. Nor does it speak well to the position they would take if there were similar uprisings against the few remaining Stalinist governments today.
As opposed to Stalinist models, true workers’ democracy includes freedom to form political parties just as long as they don’t get foreign funding and don’t take up arms against the revolution, freedom of the workers’ controlled media, subsidies for any working class press or other media that meet a certain readership criteria, and authentic elections controlled by the working class majority.
Some other nominally “Trotskyist” groups like the ISO, SO, SWP, and Socialist Action have gone to the other end of the extreme, abandoning Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union (which legitimate Trotskyists have applied to other deformed workers states). Trotsky’s defense was clearly one against internal counter-revolution and imperialist attack. Yet all of those groups supported one or more of the following openly counter-revolutionary and imperialist backed movements including the U.S. funded woman hating mujahideen in Afghanistan, the pro-capitalist and CIA backed Solidarnosc movement in Poland that came to power and outlawed abortion and brought unemployment from zero to 50% by eliminating the socialist economy, and Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR that reduced life expectancy by 10 years. As these nominally Trotskyist groups moved away from defending living revolutions from capitalist counter-revolution and imperialist war, they have also in general abandoned advocacy of socialist revolution in the United States. Instead, they tend to see themselves much more as protest pressure groups that prefer anti-communist attempts at sounding legitimate in the court of bourgeois public opinion as opposed to telling the people the truth.
Yet, only socialist revolution will solve society’s problems and save the Earth from the environmental catastrophe of climate change. Study of the Russian Revolution and Paris Commune remain essential ingredients in learning how to make a revolution and in understanding the need to both avoid Stalinism and avoid support for capitalist counter-revolution against the existing deformed workers states.
End the U.S. Economic Blockades of North Korea and Cuba!
U.S. Hands off North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba! Reparations and apologies for U.S. war crimes against those countries!
For Political Revolutions in the Stalinist Deformed Workers States Defending the Socialist Planned Economies and Bringing Workers Democracy; For Socialist Revolutions against Capitalism and Imperialism to bring Socialism and Democracy to the Rest of the World!
For a New October Revolutions Across the Globe Including in the United States! Learn How it was Done, Study the October 1917 Russian Revolution!
For more on the Russian Revolution Read:
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/
At the outbreak of the war Russia was a backward semi-feudal empire ruled by a Tsar where vicious repression, exploitation, and grinding poverty ruled over the lives of the working class and small peasantry. The Russian Orthodox Church taught hatred of the Jews and the Tsarist monarchy routinely helped whip-up pogroms that terrorized and murdered Jews. Likewise, the Russian Empire contained many nationalities whose national sovereignty and languages were outlawed. Lenin called it a prison house of nations. Women’s and homosexual rights were non-existent.
It was the victims of this system who the Tsar sent to the front lines to fight and die for his empire. Yet, all did not go as planned. As happened in a number of other front lines across Europe, the war broke down as soldiers on both sides refused to fight. The agitation of revolutionary socialists within the ranks of the different militaries played a major role in this happening. Many soldiers came to understand that whatever their nationality, they had more in common with each other than they did with the Tsar, Kaiser, King, or President who had sent them to kill each other. Hundreds of miles of Germany’s western front stopped fighting and had to be replaced with new soldiers on both sides in order to get people to start killing each other again. The Russian soldiers, however, took this resistance to the war a step further and went back to overthrow the government that had sent them to fight and die. The Russian Revolution was, in fact, the most successful anti-war movement in world history.
The Russian Revolution went through two stages in 1917. The first, led by the social democratic Mensheviks happened in February, so became called the February Revolution. Almost nothing really improved under the Mensheviks. They started the war back up with Germany, reinstated the shooting of deserters at the front, and, among other things, opposed a needed sweeping land reform for the poor peasantry and a socialization of industry needed for the working class and society as a whole. The Mensheviks, through a program that claimed it was too early for a socialist revolution in Russia, carried out backward pro-capitalist policies.
These Mensheviks, opposed to the leftist agenda of the Bolsheviks, almost lost power in August 1917 due to a rightwing military coup led by General Kornilov. At that point, the survival of the revolution depended, in part, on critical military support from the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks saw this as only a temporary alliance, seeing the critical need to defeat Kornilov, but they also used the situation to arm the working class both to fight against the far right and to prepare for the struggles to come against the Menshevik Kerensky government.
Through patiently winning the working class to their side and military preparations, the Bolsheviks led the workers and peasants to power in a second revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution. This was a revolution that fulfilled its promises. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky ended Russia's involvement in the inter-imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, brought about a sweeping land reform for the peasants, abolished capitalism and created a socialist system that was capable of turning one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of smashing Nazi Germany and rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions to provide everyone with a guaranteed job, housing, education, and health care, brought national rights to oppressed minorities forming republics of ethnic regions, legalizing their languages and providing education in those languages while also giving their economies special help through the planned economy, brought about big advances in women's rights and rights for homosexuals, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.
Naturally, workers around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Internationally the Russian Revolution helped produce a movement that broke away from the opportunist and pro-capitalist Social Democratic socialist parties who supported their own bourgeoisies in the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I and who murdered Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany for their revolutionary opposition to the war and capitalism.
In the United States an important Communist Party was formed out of a split from the reformist Socialist Party of America. That Communist Party, along with the Trotskyist movement that later split off from it, went on to become important leaders in the labor movement of the 1930s, including the ground breaking 1934 Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, and in the formation of the militant industrial CIO union, all of which forced the Roosevelt administration to make some big reforms in favor of the working class which included Social Security, a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, the 40 hour work week and overtime, the outlawing of child labor, and the Works Progress Administration which created two million jobs for the unemployed. The motivation of the ruling class to carry out these programs was to preserve the capitalist system in the face of mass working class and socialist resistance. Before there was militant communist leadership in the unions the working class was mostly just getting its ass kicked, as we are once again today for the same reasons of lacking militant communist leadership. All revolutionary communists and labor militants should study how the communist movement was able to lead strikes and win in the 1930s.
Lenin’s program for the liberation of oppressed nations and races also had a profound effect on the American socialist movement. Before the Russian Revolution, much of the American socialist movement was oblivious to the oppression of blacks. There was a so-called “color-blind” policy in the Socialist Party of America, summed up by Eugene Debs when he said “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.... The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color.” Even worse, other socialists like Victor Berger were openly racist. It was the inspiration of the October Russian Revolution and Lenin's program on special oppression that made American socialists see, in the newly established communist movement, that blacks were doubly exploited and oppressed and that a program of special demands was needed to address black oppression.
Of the role of the USSR, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon later wrote:
“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow – after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races – for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”
Before the movement against Jim Crow segregation had successes, one thinks of the semi-fascist rule of the KKK and Democrat Party in the south. Yet the Communist Party was able to organize a May Day celebration of 20,000 people in Montgomery Alabama in the 1930s. The opening lines of their flyer declared:
“The Birmingham bosses are trying to make slaves of us! They are taking the bread from our mouths! They cut our relief and starve us. They refuse to let us organize as we wish. They refuse to recognize our unions! They persecute and lynch the Negro people! They treat their dogs better than they do the workers!”
The Communist Party had grown in popularity in the south largely due to their struggles for Black freedom with many Blacks joining the party. One of the most famous of the struggles they led was that for Scottsboro Nine. This case, out of Scottsboro, Alabama, was an attempt to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law “justice”. As a result, the Scottsboro youths were not executed, but instead were given long prison sentences. The last defendant was not pardoned until 1976.
Likewise today, it is largely groups who draw our inspiration in part from the Russian Revolution and the early communist movement in America that have campaigned to abolish the racist death penalty and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a result, the movement to free Mumia has forced the state to back down on their attempts to murder him. He does, however, unjustly continue to sit in an American prison hell-hole.
Just as human rights are illusive in the United States, with the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, numerous unjustly charged and prosecuted occupy protesters, and many others, U.S. concerns internationally have nothing to do with human rights either. As Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, U.S. opposition to Castro and support for capitalist butchers like the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship that ruled Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, is based on the economic interests of U.S. imperialism:
“...while the media is most often used as a megaphone to amplify and project the voices of the wealthy and politically powerful, rarely does this same media honestly inform Americans of contemporary history. Because of this, millions of Americans lack the context through with to analyze and understand the basis for confrontations between states. They’re conditioned by the press to look at complex political and social issues through the lens of simplistic personalities. Therefore we speak of ‘Castro’s Cuba’ in the same breath as ‘Saddam’s Iraq’. This is silliness. Conflicts between states are not personal, they’re economic. The US supported a brutal Batista dictatorship there for almost a decade before Cuban rebels drove the regime out. The US, which loves to boast about its ‘human rights campaign’, has supported the most brutal butchers and dictators in the world. Why? Because dictators use their police and arm forces to oppress their own people, to insure that the US had free reign of the nation’s natural resources. Is there any other reason why the US would support butchers like Batista?” — Mumia Abu Jamal 5/2/03
The Cuban revolution, despite its problems, remains a living breathing revolution that must be defended from U.S. imperialism and internal counter-revolution. The Soviet Union, however, did not survive. As Rosa Luxemburg explained:
“It is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.... The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which, it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once.” — Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution” (1900)
Despite the destruction of the USSR, it is essential that revolutionaries learn from that experience just as Marx learned from the destruction of the Paris Commune. In the case of the Paris Commune, workers rose up and took control of their city in 1871, but were viciously attacked by the bourgeoisie. The working class revolution was slaughtered by the bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune was drowned in blood with 30,000 communards murdered in the initial attack and, of the 50,000 people imprisoned, many were executed. Marx saw this slaughter and understood that the workers’ revolution needs to form a workers’ government and army to smash the bourgeoisie and their government. If not, similar tragedies would be repeated.
These were lessons that the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky applied to the USSR. As Emma Goldman observed:
"The Russian experience had taught him [Shatov] that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counterrevolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking a frightful toll of human life. The [imperialist] intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of [White military chiefs] Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a
warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about.” — Emma Goldman quoted in Paul Avrich, “The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution” (1973)
It was from this devastation that the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution was born. The roots of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR laid in the invasion of 14 imperialist armies after the October Revolution, including the United States, who also encircled the USSR and blockaded it economically, while the imperialist backed pro-Tsarist White Army wrecked havoc on the economy by burning crops, destroying factories, and committing mass murder of communists and Jews (100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone).
Despite winning the war against the White Army and imperialist invaders, most of the best communists and other workers died in the war. Bureaucrats with little or no commitment to the goals of the revolution were relied on more and more for the administration of Soviet society as a result of those deaths. That bureaucracy was further corrupted by the economic devastation of war and imperialist blockade which encouraged bureaucrats to steal simply to survive and care for their children. Stalin’s conservative leadership had its social base amongst this bureaucracy which he granted privileges above the working class. And on their behalf, Stalin used repression against the working class to prevent the re-emergence of legitimate workers’ democracy.
The destruction of the Soviet Union started with Stalin’s bloody political counter-revolution against the party of Lenin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Stalin murdered all of the original leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Alexandra Kolantai, and murdered massive numbers of supporters of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition to Stalin. Stalin's political counter-revolution entrenched the power of a conservative and privileged bureaucracy. Some of the gains of the revolution were lost with that. . Abortion was banned. Gay and Lesbian rights, which had been won with the revolution, were overturned. The rights of some nationalities were stomped on as well, such as those of the Ossetians whose Republic was established under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, but was abolished and divided between the Russian and Georgian Republics under Stalin into north and south Ossetia.
Internationally, the USSR no longer played a consistent leading role for the working class because the bureaucracy preferred a policy of sabotaging revolutions in order to gain trade from capitalist countries. In the 1930s Stalin’s policies directly sabotaged the revolutions in Spain, Germany, and China contributed to the victories of the capitalist mass murderers Franco, Hitler, and Chiang Kai-shek.
But one of several gains of the October Revolution that remained was the socialist planned economy that gave the USSR the industrial and political strength to smash Nazi Germany, a capitalist country that brought mass murder to a level of industrial production never seen before or since. The USSR rebuilt after that Nazi invasion devastated the economy and left 30 million citizens of the USSR dead. They rebuilt with a socialist economy that guaranteed everyone a job, housing, education, and health care. It was the positive side of that planned socialist economy, copied in Eastern Europe after the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, that helped inspire the working class of Western Europe to fight for social progress that included some victories, like socialized health care.
Besides smashing Nazi Germany and liberating Europe from fascism, the USSR also lent important material support to the anti-imperialist revolution by doing things like giving the Vietnamese people military aid to defeat the U.S. occupation and U.S. imposed dictatorships that ultimately murdered three million Vietnamese people. Likewise, the USSR broke the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. Not only did the USSR participate in trade with Cuba, but they also gave Cuba fairer prices for their sugar than what was offered on the international capitalist market. In Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere, in a similar way as was done with economic planning within the USSR, the planned socialist economy of the USSR was used to help advance the traditionally poorer countries of the world.
Countries supported by the USSR also advanced women’s liberation while the United States almost always did the opposite. This included U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The USSR tried to defeat U.S. imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, an intervention where billions of U.S. dollars in military aid to the religious fanatics of the mujahideen left a million people dead, toppled a pro-woman government, and put the Taliban in power. The corporate owned media of the United States continues to lie about Afghanistan; peddling the lie that Soviet intervention was an “invasion” despite the fact that the government of Afghanistan (the pro-woman, pro-literacy PDPA government) begged the USSR to send troops to try to defeat the CIA funded religious fanatics of the mujahideen. Other imperialist lies are peddled as well, including the disgusting collection of lies in the Hollywood movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” which, among other things, peddled completely discredited lies about the USSR making bombs to look like toys to blow-up children when they picked them up. Meanwhile, with the continued disastrous intervention of the U.S. imperialists in Afghanistan, the Red Cross warned in 2002 against the U.S. use of brightly colored yellow cluster bombs that appeared to look like toys and were exploding when children picked them up. As usual, the U.S. imperialists are guilty of the crimes they falsely accuse others of committing.
Likewise, the planned economy of the USSR was used to better many of the traditionally oppressed and poorer regions of the USSR by giving them favored investment and lifting them up economically including in the traditionally Muslim regions. Those regions also benefited greatly from the pro-woman / secular policies of the USSR. Nowhere else in the traditionally Muslim world were women better off than in Soviet Central Asia. Women’s access to higher education sometimes regionally produced more woman doctors than men. Compare this to the hell the U.S. created in Afghanistan with the victory of its mujahideen forces where women were stripped of all rights.
Yet, the Soviet people suffered greatly from a lack of political rights as well. After Stalin, the GULAGS that Stalin established, death camps really, were ended. Yet, the left remained unable to express their opinions if they disagreed with the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats. This included labeling political opponents insane and locking them up in mental wards. The U.S. did the same thing with “uppity” women and homosexuals up until the 1960s.
In the time of Gorbachev, the fragility of the deformed workers' state in the USSR was a political question rooted in the privileges of the ruling bureaucracy and the repression the working class had suffered for so many decades. When Yeltsin carried out his disastrous capitalist counter-revolution he created a few wealthy capitalists. At the same time he eliminated guaranteed health care, education, and employment and caused life expectancy to drop by 10 years. Unfortunately, there was not a strong enough working class movement to stop him. This was due to decades of Stalinist repression. But Yeltsin's coup d'etat was a military operation that involved his sending out troops to shoot at protesters and those in the government opposed his coup. It was a counter-revolution led by bureaucrats who thought they could get rich under a capitalist system.
Legitimate Trotskyists opposed Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution as the disaster it was and instead advocated political revolution to defend the socialist planned economy while at the same time sweeping away the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and creating a workers democracy. In the United States we need to both sweep away the capitalist system and create a workers democracy to change a society where the government and economy are presently run strictly by and for the wealthy.
Stalin’s political legacy in the United States includes a fear of socialist revolution. No honest person can see his mass murder and repression attractive. Trotskyists and other left socialists who oppose Stalinism argue that we can have a much much better world if we fight for a system that has both the benefits of socialism and of workers’ democracy.
One of Stalin’s main organizational legacies in the United States is the Communist Party (CPUSA). Their support for the Democrats was Stalin’s policy. That policy, started by Stalin, went against the long proud history of the American working class movement in opposing both the Democrats and Republicans. It went against the policies of both the early Socialist Party and the Communist Party of the United States before Stalin. From Gorbachev to Stalin, that policy of supporting Democrats was never corrected in those many decades while the CPUSA dutifully followed the line given by Moscow. After Stalin’s death, the conservative and repressive bureaucratic caste that Stalin put in power in the USSR by murdering the original leaders of the Russian Revolution actually maintained most of Stalin’s policies, despite denouncing Stalin. That’s why Trotskyists continued to call them and their world followers “Stalinist”.
The Communist Party –USA in the 1980s quit running candidates in order to put their full support behind the Democrats. Politically, left parties like the Communist Party who give their support to the Democrats are only serving to give left cover to the enemies of the working class. Yes, the CPUSA is part of the workers movement and has done some good things, like lead the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. But decades of Stalinist leadership has turned them useless on most questions of labor. They even supported the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) bureaucracy attacks on the militant Hormel Meatpackers of Local P-9 in the 1980s while also supporting Democratic governor Rudy Perpich who sent out the National Guard against the workers.
The Democrats and Republicans are playing a giant game of good cop bad cop with the working class, with Obama being extremely bad but the Republican candidates scaring people into supporting Democrats. Both parties are working together and financed by the same capitalists. Both parties are the paid agents of Wall Street, the banks, oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, austerity, unemployment, repression, student debt, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on climate change. Without organization around a political program that directly challenges the Democrats and Republicans, power will remain in the hands of the capitalists and their two parties. Even “progressive” reforms will remain elusive without a real challenge to their power. It will take a revolutionary party with a Trotskyist program to build the leadership needed to overthrow this system. Likewise, it is likely to take the same to be powerful enough to win any meaningful reforms.
From the propaganda of the U.S. corporate media the lesson of the USSR is that that it “didn’t work” and that all revolutions are similarly doomed. Yet, the only healthy socialist revolution that ever degenerated into Stalinism was the USSR. Every other socialist revolution since has not degenerated, but was instead deformed form birth under Stalinist leadership and the command structure of a guerrilla army that was transformed into the government after taking power (south Vietnam (1975), Cuba (1959), north Vietnam (1954) China (1949), and Yugoslavia (1945)) or under the direct control of Stalin’s Red Army after defeating Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan (1945 - North Korea, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). Each of these revolutions was an improvement in overthrowing capitalist dictatorships, ending the exploitation and control of imperialist capitalist nations, implementing socialist economies, greatly improving women’s rights, and in general meeting human needs like health care, education, nutrition, employment, and housing. China, for instance, doubled life expectancy during Mao’s rule saving the lives of some 408 million people.
But these countries never had workers’ democracies. For instance, Ho Chi Minh murdered thousands of Trotskyists who were also being targeted by the French at the same time. Immediately after taking power, Mao rounded-up all of the known Trotskyists and their friends and families and put them in prison. This was pure Stalinism. No inference of healthy revolutions always degenerating can be drawn from these Stalinist led revolutions. These revolutions didn’t degenerate, they were deformed from birth.
Regarding the existing Stalinist deformed workers’ states of Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea, Trotskyists call for an end to imperialist economic blockades and for the defense of the socialist planned economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution, while at the same time supporting political revolution to overthrow the brutal Stalinist bureaucracies and their privileges in order to bring workers’ democracy. In fact, more and more, in the existing deformed workers states it will take a political revolution to defend what is left of the socialist planned economies from the privatization led by Stalinist bureaucrats.
Trotskyists defended (and defend) the gains of those revolutions from imperialist attacks, including opposing the U.S. economic blockades against North Korea and Cuba and denouncing threats of war against those countries. Still, under our program, Trotskyists support legitimate working class and student uprisings that could produce socialist systems with workers democracy. Historically this has included Trotskyist support for the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring, and the Tiananmen Square uprising of the 1980s. In each case the Stalinists oppressed legitimate working class demands. There are, in fact, rivers of blood between the positions of Trotskyists and Stalinists on those questions, just as there are rivers of blood in the millions of people Stalin murdered, largely to eliminate the Trotskyist left opposition to his rule. Yes, the imperialists have murdered more than the Stalinists, but there are still rivers of blood differentiating Trotskyism from Stalinism.
Stalinist groups in the United States, like the CP, PSL, and WWP, do not have a position in support of political revolution in the Stalinist controlled states. This is why they supported the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square and supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary even though neither uprising was pro-capitalist. Those working class and student uprisings represented hopes for truly socialist systems that would include workers’ democracy. Instead, the CP / PSL / WWP took the side of the Stalinist oppressors. That doesn’t speak well to their visions of socialism. Nor does it speak well to the position they would take if there were similar uprisings against the few remaining Stalinist governments today.
As opposed to Stalinist models, true workers’ democracy includes freedom to form political parties just as long as they don’t get foreign funding and don’t take up arms against the revolution, freedom of the workers’ controlled media, subsidies for any working class press or other media that meet a certain readership criteria, and authentic elections controlled by the working class majority.
Some other nominally “Trotskyist” groups like the ISO, SO, SWP, and Socialist Action have gone to the other end of the extreme, abandoning Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union (which legitimate Trotskyists have applied to other deformed workers states). Trotsky’s defense was clearly one against internal counter-revolution and imperialist attack. Yet all of those groups supported one or more of the following openly counter-revolutionary and imperialist backed movements including the U.S. funded woman hating mujahideen in Afghanistan, the pro-capitalist and CIA backed Solidarnosc movement in Poland that came to power and outlawed abortion and brought unemployment from zero to 50% by eliminating the socialist economy, and Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR that reduced life expectancy by 10 years. As these nominally Trotskyist groups moved away from defending living revolutions from capitalist counter-revolution and imperialist war, they have also in general abandoned advocacy of socialist revolution in the United States. Instead, they tend to see themselves much more as protest pressure groups that prefer anti-communist attempts at sounding legitimate in the court of bourgeois public opinion as opposed to telling the people the truth.
Yet, only socialist revolution will solve society’s problems and save the Earth from the environmental catastrophe of climate change. Study of the Russian Revolution and Paris Commune remain essential ingredients in learning how to make a revolution and in understanding the need to both avoid Stalinism and avoid support for capitalist counter-revolution against the existing deformed workers states.
End the U.S. Economic Blockades of North Korea and Cuba!
U.S. Hands off North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba! Reparations and apologies for U.S. war crimes against those countries!
For Political Revolutions in the Stalinist Deformed Workers States Defending the Socialist Planned Economies and Bringing Workers Democracy; For Socialist Revolutions against Capitalism and Imperialism to bring Socialism and Democracy to the Rest of the World!
For a New October Revolutions Across the Globe Including in the United States! Learn How it was Done, Study the October 1917 Russian Revolution!
For more on the Russian Revolution Read:
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
Sunday, June 2, 2013
PolEco: Ecuadoran newly elected President Rafael Correa discusses independence from Neo-colonial Liberalism - from Granma International (Cuban Daily)
Correa calls for
second and definitive independence
• Cuba and Ecuador to expand cooperation  QUITO,
May 24.— Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa
highlighted his government’s social and economic
progress before the National Assembly during the
inaugural ceremony for his second term in office.
Correa, who was reelected in
February with 57.7% of the vote, stated in his
address of close to two hours that, still pending in
Ecuador, "is a second independence against poverty,
inequality, and exclusion; we are fighting and
advancing toward this second and definitive
independence, and the country is profoundly and
positively changing in the economic, political and
social contexts," the Xinhua news agency reports.
Before Correa was sworn in as
President of Ecuador for the period 2013-2017,
National Assembly leader Gabriela Rivadeneira,
stated, "We understand that there can be no talk of
genuine economic and political independence if there
is no parallel social justice; and there can be no
talk of a just and egalitarian society if the
homeland is shackled by neocolonialism."
Correa noted that, based on figures
published by the Economic Commission for Latin
America, Ecuador is one of three countries to have
most reduced poverty, "the greatest attack on rights,
human liberties and personal dignity."
Correa launched an attack on the double standards of the United States in the context of human rights, which he described as neocolonialism, and warned, "This dignified America is nobody’s back yard." The President reiterated his criticism of the functioning of the Organization of American States. "The headquarters of this mechanism is in the United States, the country which has imposed a criminal economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba, in contravention of the organization’s founding charter.
"This is the greatest violation of
international law and human rights," he stated,
adding that the same is true of the Malvinas Islands,
taken by force in the 19th century. "These are
British colonies, located more than 11,000
kilometers from the United Kingdom, but facing the
Argentine coast."
On the domestic front, Correa
emphasized advances made in the country with the
Citizens’ Revolution, which he has led since
assuming the Presidency in 2007. "We are no longer
controlled by finance capital, international
bureaucracies, oligarchies; the Ecuadorian people
are now in control here, that is the most important
change for us," he stated.
Rafael Correa swore his oath
together with Vice President Jorge Glas, in a
ceremony attended by Latin American and other heads
of state and government, as well as diplomatic
delegations and special guest.
CUBA CONFIRMS COMMITMENT TO EXPANDING COOPERATION WITH ECUADOR
Cuban First Vice President Miguel
Díaz-Canel expressed his country’s interest in
continuing to fortify friendship and solidarity
links with Ecuador and expand cooperation and
integration between the two governments and
countries.
In a statement to Prensa Latina,
Díaz-Canel conveyed "Martí greetings from Fidel and
Raúl Castro and the Cuban people," in the context of
President Rafael Correa’s new four-year term.
The Cuban Vice President emphasized that he had come to accompany President Correa, his government and the Ecuadoran people on the occasion of the swearing in and to support the Citizens’ Revolution in the name of the Cuban government and people. He highlighted Cuba’s alignment with Ecuador in all regional integration blocs, in a context of diversity, and stated that Cuba will make every effort to consolidate the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. This organization, he underlined, is the most important pro-integration forum, as it includes all 33 countries of the region. In this context, he commented, Ecuador will be of much support, given the prestige of its President and the Citizens’ Revolution. Cuba will continue to support Ecuador in its social and economic programs, Díaz-Canel noted, observing that there are many areas within which both countries can exchange experiences, technologies and organize joint projects.
He recalled that historically,
Ecuador has supported Cuba’s fundamental causes,
systematically supporting the country in confronting
the blockade, and in the cause of the liberation of
the Five.
"The swearing in of Correa and his Vice President guarantees the continuity of the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador and is a contribution to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), to integration, and to the example which we are building together," Díaz-Canel emphasized. | |
PolEco: This is how the US continuously destabilizes progressive socialist countries - from Granma International (Cuban Daily)
O U R A M E R I C A
Havana. May 30, 2013
Henrique Capriles: Provoking destabilization
Laura Bécquer Paseiro
Havana. May 30, 2013
Henrique Capriles: Provoking destabilization
Laura Bécquer Paseiro
AFTER failing in his attempt to provoke internal chaos in Venezuela, defeated right-wing presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski has turned his attention to the international arena. With a well devised and advised strategy, aided by the United States, he has undertaken a campaign beyond Venezuelan borders to delegitimize the legitimate government which won the last elections.
His method is a simple one. It is to destabilize national institutions and discredit the principal leaders of the Bolivarian process, in particular President Nicolás Maduro, with the backing of individuals such as Otto Reich and Roger Noriega.
His anything but innocent visit to Bogotá has provoked a storm which is threatening the positive climate of relations between Colombia and Venezuela, two nations with historical, economic and social ties.
Capriles stated that he began his tour to denounce the "fraudulent" popular will expressed at the April 14 elections. He went further than that, advising that he is still to meet with various other Latin American governments. "Colombia will not be the first nor last stop on this visit."
He packed his bags leaving aside accusations of his lack of governorship in the state of Miranda. Legislative Council President Aurora Morales stated May 30 that ignoring his responsibilities as governor "is placing Capriles beyond the Constitution," and recalled that the Miranda government lodged an appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice some weeks ago for clarification of the situation.
This tour of Capriles, one of the April 2002 coup leaders, is also threatening to affect the peace talks underway in Havana between the Juan Manuel Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Army of the People (FARC-EP), in which Venezuela is participating as an observer. In this way he is playing along with the Colombian paramilitary ultra –right which previously supported him and is prepared to do anything to avert an end to the conflict in that country, which has become a lucrative business
As part of the strategy, the corporate press is using these distractions to conceal other news. Little has been said of the visit by three Bolivarian government ministers to Bogotá to promote economic links, and far less of recent Colombian-Venezuelan cooperation in combating narcotics, with the extradition from Venezuela of three notorious drug traffickers.
Capriles and his allies have little concern about methods and far less for their consequences.
His method is a simple one. It is to destabilize national institutions and discredit the principal leaders of the Bolivarian process, in particular President Nicolás Maduro, with the backing of individuals such as Otto Reich and Roger Noriega.
His anything but innocent visit to Bogotá has provoked a storm which is threatening the positive climate of relations between Colombia and Venezuela, two nations with historical, economic and social ties.
Capriles stated that he began his tour to denounce the "fraudulent" popular will expressed at the April 14 elections. He went further than that, advising that he is still to meet with various other Latin American governments. "Colombia will not be the first nor last stop on this visit."
He packed his bags leaving aside accusations of his lack of governorship in the state of Miranda. Legislative Council President Aurora Morales stated May 30 that ignoring his responsibilities as governor "is placing Capriles beyond the Constitution," and recalled that the Miranda government lodged an appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice some weeks ago for clarification of the situation.
This tour of Capriles, one of the April 2002 coup leaders, is also threatening to affect the peace talks underway in Havana between the Juan Manuel Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Army of the People (FARC-EP), in which Venezuela is participating as an observer. In this way he is playing along with the Colombian paramilitary ultra –right which previously supported him and is prepared to do anything to avert an end to the conflict in that country, which has become a lucrative business
As part of the strategy, the corporate press is using these distractions to conceal other news. Little has been said of the visit by three Bolivarian government ministers to Bogotá to promote economic links, and far less of recent Colombian-Venezuelan cooperation in combating narcotics, with the extradition from Venezuela of three notorious drug traffickers.
Capriles and his allies have little concern about methods and far less for their consequences.
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