Just a couple of weeks ago, we saw the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. This was part of a wave of revolutions across the continent of Europe, with strikes, demonstrations and social movements turning against State Capitalist regimes, and subsequently overthrowing them. This culminated in one of the most critical images of the 20th century, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
There are many lessons to be learnt from this event. One of the first has been the decline in all groups on the revolutionary left of politics in England except for the Socialist Workers Party. All other groups stressed, to varying degrees, how damaging the waves of revolutions were for the left, and how they would damage the working class. This was born out of their analysis, largely of the Soviet Union being either a Workers State, or a Degenerated Workers state. In both instances, this mistaken analysis led them to believe that the regimes in the Eastern Bloc were structurally more progressive and advantageous for Workers than the capitalist West. Given this analysis, it makes sense, that they would therefore defend the regimes ahead of the mass of workers who fought to overthrow them.
In the SWP, our analysis of Russia as a State Capitalist country, extorting a surplus value from the workers in the USSR, allowed us to celebrate the wave of Revolutions based on the understanding of socialism as “The self emancipation of the working class” as Marx defined it…..
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This is the first in a series of longer articles that will be posted to this blog by the resistance. If you would like to contribute, get in touch!
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