October 30, 2012

To Marxists, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, provides a sad spectacle every time our corporate elite trot him out as role model for young impressionable minds. It is a sad image because of the harm he inflicted on the working class of this world, especially the workers of his own country.

Yet there is no denying the genuine love of our local establishment in Winnipeg for Gorbachev. He is loved because of his established record of concealing troubling matters from the minds of our young. You won’t hear him talk much about the festering sores of capitalism, about how to create good-paying jobs, solve injustice to Aboriginal peoples, end tuition, end poverty, or prevent war, but you will hear him say that youth have a great future if they work hard.*

Gorbachev is being used as an ideological tool to trump reality and actual history.

Not more than a decade after Russia’s counter-revolution, the average male life expectancy dropped to 57 years, a decline of close to 15 years. A rapacious class of entrepreneurs – many former communists like Gorbachev – looted Soviet Russia’s public property, creating misery and early death for their fellow citizens.

Outside Russia, the capitalist world was triumphal and arrogant. The world fell under imperialist diktat, epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1993. People with a lingering desire for social change were told “there is no alternative” and “history has ended.” It has taken two decades for people to emerge on a global scale from the confusion caused in large part by Gorbachev’s surrender to capitalist ideology.

The reawakening of dread about the future offered by the “development” of world capitalism is reflected in popular movements such as the Arab Spring, the left’s gains in Latin America, the European resistance to the financial oligarchy, a leap in strike action by Asian workers, and the occupy movement in our own back yard.

When Gorbachev surrendered to capitalist ideology more than twenty years ago, capitalists promised humanity an end to the heavy burden of the arms race, a “peace dividend.” They promised stability and a rosy future for workers. Neither promise has been kept. Instead working people face a very shaky economic future and the threat of permanent, global war. Furthermore, capitalism’s heedless profiteering threatens nature on a scale that could result in the loss of billions of people.

Locked into an endless race to make more profit, our capitalist overlords are ignoring the warnings of our best scientists about the need to develop realistic alternatives that put nature ahead of private profit. These alternatives include an end to militarism, oil sands development and reliance on fossil fuels, yet these enterprises all produce enormous profits for the one percent.

We are all doomed unless our guide is “best science,” not the best practice to make some fast money. As much as the apologists may try, capitalism will not evade political responsibility for the growing economic crisis, more militarism and war, and environmental catastrophe.

So why did Gorbachev depart from Marxism? Gorbachev was elected to the highest positions in the Soviet Union at a time of dramatic nuclear war tensions. An enormous anti-war movement developed to demand nuclear disarmament, which even U.S. president Reagan began to accept in 1987 with the US-Soviet Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Reagan realized that his party would lose the election because even in the United States a growing number of people realized imperialism was the source of the nuclear war danger. He started holding summits with Gorbachev. Yet this is precisely when Gorbachev began to yield ideological ground, especially with his idea that universal values would now guide humanity’s future.

Gorbachev blessed U.S. imperialism with the grace of being guided by universal values and not the rapacious appetite of the military-industrial corporations. This was of great assistance to Reagan’s successor, the first George Bush, but it produced not one disarmament treaty.

More importantly, in Russia itself the idea that capitalism was no longer such a dangerous and corrupt social system was the greatest assistance to people, often in powerful positions, who ended up betraying socialism in 1991. Gorbachev merely followed a long line of people who try to confuse people that socialism is no different than capitalism with a human face.

In Gorbachev’s words, “We are entering into a world of new dimensions, in which universal human values are acquiring the same meaning for all and in which human freedom and well-being and the unique value of human life must become both the foundation and basis for universal security and the supreme criterion by which we measure progress.”**

These are fine-sounding words, but what do they actually mean? Are ideas of freedom and human values consistent with the capitalist world we see today, which is in a state of permanent war and other crises? Can socialism compete with capitalism using only such concepts, or did the Soviet Union also have to rely on tanks and artillery to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War?

“Freedom” can mean different things to different people; for example, in today’s capitalist world, for the Nazis in the 1940s, and for socialists. Workers faced with a demand for a wage freeze would view it as unreasonable, while the capitalist believes the freeze is common sense. To capitalists today, the freedom to make a private profit is the highest noble aim, but for socialists this is just silly and a growing health risk.

So Gorbachev’s idea was never rooted in reality. It was an attempt to impose his mind on reality. Reality won, as it often does when you forget that social classes tend to bury ideas that may harm their interests – for as long as they are able. As Harper’s arrest of more than 1,000 people at the 2010 G8 summit shows, working people will need more than just noble ideas to win their freedom.

Gorbachev ended up becoming a liberal, not a Marxist. His view that capitalism and socialism would become a happy couple was nothing more than a regurgitated “convergence” theory advanced by bourgeois academics, notably since the 1930s and 1970s as a way to hide capitalism’s growing failures and the success of Soviet policies that actually were creating a more fair society, while defeating the fascists.

A better way to understand capitalists’ occasional embrace of “human rights” is to realize that they are a response by capitalism to the successes of socialism and the working class, or a way to hide capitalism’s failures, like starting two world wars. For example, the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter. The massive strike wave in Canada in the 1970s (the greatest hurrah of the militant unionists who came out of the Depression and War) led to Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Another example is the Liberal Party’s 1919 promise to establish medicare in Canada, soon after the Russian revolution created medicare in that country.

Today, as their profit-making meets larger impasses, capitalists are rapidly losing their enchantment with human values. The rise of fascist and far-right political forces across the capitalist world shows this to be true. This may embarrass Gorbachev, but it is supremely dangerous for working people.

The two world systems never converged, but capitalism gained the temporary upper hand. Universal values have done nothing to remove the spectre of nuclear war from humanity’s future. Marxists were never fooled into thinking that these universal values would give us peace and paradise as long as capitalism ruled the roost.

Gorbachev’s universal values have never refuted Marxism’s understanding that we are in the historic epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and that workers still have a world to win, at least for a while.

Darrell Rankin
Manitoba office, Communist Party of Canada
(204) 586-7824