By សតិវ អតុ
Before the end of the cold war, 1991 or maybe 1992, there
were lots of communist parties all over the world. They fell into two categories;
those that were pro-Soviet Union and those that were anti-Soviet Union . That might seem simple enough, but the anti-Soviet
Union parties seemed endless. There were lots of them. They usually had at
least one important theoretician. Some had more than that. But in the eyes of
the US
press there was just one "Communist Party." In almost all news
magazines and newspapers there was just that one "Communist Party."
It was pro-Soviet Union . If people only read
mainstream newspapers they would never know there were other communist parties
in the United States of
America .
We can also say that communism in general was almost always
treated as if it were Soviet Union communism.
For a while there was a "Red China," an evil menace that was just as
bad as the evil Soviet Union . And by the end
of the 1970s China
became the "good communist country." They were OK.
It is hard to say when the Cold War actually ended. Did it
end when the Berlin Wall came down? Did it end when Boris Yeltsin (Борис Ельцин) stood down a pro-communist
coup? All we can really say for sure is that it ended.
This article looks at two things. The fist is how the end of
the cold war effected other communist and socialist movements that were not
directly supported or supportive of Soviet Communism. The other is how the fall
of the Soviet Union affected workers everywhere.
So we can start with other communist parties, especially
here in the US .
By the 1970s we had an era where there were several "new communist
parties." Most of these were pro-China or just plain pro-Mao Zedong (毛泽东),
often referred to as Mao Zedong thought. But there were other theoretical
leaders including Joseph Stalin (Иосиф
Виссарионович Сталин/ იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე სტალინი), Enver Hoxha,
Jean-Paul
Sartre,
Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. There were also groups inspired by Leon Trotsky (Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий), such as Spartacist League and the Socialist Workers Party, even though not everyone considered the latter groups as part of new communism. Most new communist parties were inspired by Mao, such as the Communist Workers Party and Revolution Communist Party. The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) was the official pro-China government party. It eventually broke with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and other similar parties overChina 's persecution of the Gang of Four, including
Mao's widow Jiang Qing (江青). Some parties, as the Sojourner
Truth Organization drew inspiration from the 1960s new left or western style
Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci as much as or more so than Mao or Stalin.
Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. There were also groups inspired by Leon Trotsky (Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий), such as Spartacist League and the Socialist Workers Party, even though not everyone considered the latter groups as part of new communism. Most new communist parties were inspired by Mao, such as the Communist Workers Party and Revolution Communist Party. The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) was the official pro-China government party. It eventually broke with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and other similar parties over
There have also been many democratic socialist parties, such
as Socialist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America. We can
safely say they were all against the Soviet Union
and most other communist parties.
Such Marxist-Leninist division took place in almost every
country where ML parties existed. For example, in Iran Peykar was a Maoist
party that resembled the US RCP. Their pro-Soviet party was called the Tudeh Party.
Most of the above parties mentioned above no longer exists.
Revolution Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party (no longer Trotskyite) and
Spartacist League are some of the few of such Marxist organizations left from
the New Communist era. Most have folded.
Then there was the actual Communist
Party USA. That was the official Soviet Union
supported and supportive communist party. That was the communist party that
news organizations all referred to anytime someone wanted to speak of the
pro-Soviet communist party. The US
mainstream press was not interested in covering or even acknowledging the
existence of other communist parties or tendencies. They all wanted the
American public to believe that there was only one kind of communism and that
communism was exemplified by the Soviet Union, which was often simply referred
to as Russia .
Gus Hall was the leader of Communist Party USA. When he died
The
New York Times described him this way:
Gus Hall, the zealous lifelong
Communist who led the American branch of the party from the cold war through
political oblivion in the post-Soviet era, died on Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan Yonkers
The son of an impoverished Minnesota
He served eight years in prison
for his political views, ran for president four times and never apologized for
or wavered from the increasingly marginalized ideology he championed.
By the end of his life he had
become a lonely Communist stalwart in a post-Communist world. Those who sought
him out for interviews at party headquarters on West 23rd Street Manhattan East
Germany
........Mr. Hall was first
elected general secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A.
And from the Los Angeles Times
we see what most Americans saw when Hall Died:
Gus Hall, the lumberjack, iron
miner, steelworker and union organizer whose name became synonymous with the
American Communist Party, which he led for 40 years, has died at the age of 90.
The L.A. Times
don't even give the full name of his party and most news outlets didn't do that
either. None of these sources hint that there are any other communist people or
groups besides Communist Party USA.
There were a lot of communists here in the US , as myself, who did not like a lot of the
baggage the Soviet Union had. We didn't like
the lack of democracy, the lack of freedom of speech and the general lack of
political liberties that the Soviet Union just
didn't seem to have. There were other problems, mainly with imperialism. The
Soviet Union tried to oppose US
imperialism, but its own actions were imperialistic. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan , Hungary ,
Czechoslovakia
and sent troops to other parts of its alleged empire. The Soviet Union tried to
put nuclear missiles in Cuba .
It gave extensive military hardware to many nations in Africa and it had
military bases in such countries as Ethiopia . The Soviet
Union directly controlled the affairs of many Easter European
nations and sent in troops when its orders seemed to be slipping. It is easy to
see much of these actions as imperialism.
One of the important points to make about all these
"other communists and their parties" was their rejection of the
limits of democracy of the Soviet Union .
Raymond Lotta, in his review of Bob Avakian's (Chairman and leader of the RCP)
book, Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than
Than? wrote:
Avakian wrote this text against an
international backdrop of intensifying rivalry between the U.S.-led imperialist
and Soviet-led social-imperialist blocs. The U.S.
And:
"The stakes are high.
"Because the horrors of the world are inextricably bound up with
capitalism-imperialism, with its
global economics based on exploitation and oppression, with its state power and
politics that enforce and reinforce all of this, and with its ideology that
legitimizes and rationalizes the system that is responsible for all the
unnecessary misery and suffering in this world. Put differently, the issues
addressed in this book have everything to do with whether the world stays the
way it is…or whether humanity will transform it through communist revolution
that
opens up whole new vistas of
freedom."
Other new communist parties also had their own ideas of
communist democracy. As with the RCP, most of these new communist parities
rejected the rigid dictatorship of the Soviet Union
and wanted a more democratic form of communism. Soviet imperialism was also
rejected by many of these communist parties. Notice that Avakian refers to the
Soviets as "Soviet-led social-imperialist."
At first it appears that these communists are in agreement
with the US mainstream
politicians who constantly complain about Soviet expansionism and the lack of
freedom in the Soviet Union .[1] It
would be easy to mistakenly believe that these two political positions are
either the same or similar. That belief is wrong. All we have to do is look at
such leaders as Francisco Franco or Spain , Augusto Pinochet of Chile or the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah of Iran (حمدرضا پهلوی,), to see
that political liberty is not the main goal of the US . The main goal is capitalism. Each of these
leaders defended the free-enterprise system and the US empire. Each of these leaders
replaced democratically elected leaders. Curtailment of freedom was perfectly
acceptable to the US and
long as these leaders supported the US and its interests abroad. That
interest always included free enterprise and the international capitalist
class. Support of such leaders goes back for more than a century. Today the US sheds crocodile tears for the people who are
denied freedoms in North
(Democratic People's Republic) Korea and Syria . And yet the US is fine supporting the undemocratic regime of
Saudi
Arabia.
Since the fall of the
Cold War
That brings us to modern times. The Soviet
Union is gone. There are still a lot of Marxist-Leninist groups,
Maoist and non-Maoist. There are Trotskyists all over Facebook. But are we
better off without the Soviet Union ? Is there
more democracy in the world? Is there more freedom in the world under the
single leadership of the US
than having two competing empires? The answer to all of that is NO!
Today the top 1 percent, or those $billionaires who own most
of the country’s wealth, are acting as if they suddenly have a green light to
go after all laws that support workers. Worker’s rights are under attack. What
we have to consider is that capitalism was threatened by the idea of a
communist revolution where workers would get everything and the ruling class
would cease
to exist. But with the Soviet Union gone, the
attitude seems to be that the whole idea of communism is dead. The capitalist
act and talk as if communism and all possibilities of communist revolution are
dead. That means the capitalists can do what they want. There are no
constraints. For example the $billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, are
out to destroy unions. They want to defang workers and leave them completely at
the mercy of their employers. Elisabeth
Garber-Paul, of Rolling
Stone reports:
"Really, what we would like
to see is to take the unions out at the knees, so they don't have the resources
to fight," says Scott Hagerstrom, the Michigan director of Americans for
Prosperity – a group heavily funded by the Kochs – in a damning clip from the
film. And it seems to sum up the Kochs' approach to unions: Americans for
Prosperity were integral to the 2011 union-busting fight in Wisconsin
And we only have to look as far as our President Donald
Trump, to see this attitude in action. In the past presidents have been
professional politicians that represent members of the ruling class. Now we
have a president who got rid of the
middle man, an actual $billionaire, a man who is actually part of the 1
percent, is now running the country. And it is like seeing a child take over the
candy store. Regulations to protect workers and consumers are being plundered
to let the capitalist class do what it wants, getting everything it wants at
the expense of the common worker. Just recently Trump appointed Mick
Mulvaney to the Consumer Protection Agency. Mulvaney has made it clear he plans to get rid
of as many rules as he can. This is a man who watches out for corporations, not
the consumer. For Trump and Mulvaney consumer protection is obsolete. They will
do what is best for the big banks and corporations—once again at the consumer’s
and working classes’ expense.
The results of all of this are fairly obvious. According to
Premilla Nadasen, of the Washington
Post:
“But since the 1970s, the safety
net has been diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have
been rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined.
The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor single
parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of assistance and
mandatory work requirements. Some states require fingerprinting or drug testing
of applicants, which effectively criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles
to getting on welfare are formidable, the benefits meager. The number of
families on welfare declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year.
The decline of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.
Instead, the shredding of the
safety net led to a rise in poverty. Forty million Americans live in poverty,
nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people
reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States
In addition to the reduction of
public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be
attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is
rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S.
As to how much the end of the cold war affects the actions
of $billionaires and the rest of the 1 percent is questionable. It can’t be
proven that the end of fear of a worker’s revolution has caused the greed and
oppression of America ’s
ruling class today. But they do act as if there is now NO DANGER in pulling out
all the stops to make America
a paradise for them and near slavery for those at the bottom.
But there are those who believe the cold war did affect the
way the US
treated its citizens. For example from Shad's
Blog:
Not all aspects of the cultural
conflicts of the Cold War were negative. One of the worst blemishes on American
culture of the time was racial inequality. Despite being freed from slavery
approximately 80 years before the end of WWII, blacks were still second class
citizens in the South and discrimination was common in varying forms almost
everywhere. While change for blacks and other minorities came slowly, it did
eventually come. President Truman “noted that if the United States were to
offer the ‘peoples of the world’ a ‘choice of freedom or enslavement’ it must
‘correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy” (Foner 857).
Beginning in the early 1950s states began establishing fair employment
commissions, they passed laws banning discrimination, and black voter
registration began to rise….
……..President Johnson not only
disliked injustice, he understood the international repercussions that came
along with America United States
And it is no surprise that the Koch brothers have worked to
reverse these advances, made in response to the cold war. Again from Rolling Stone:
During the 2012 election, an
organization called True the Vote called itself a "citizen-led effort to
ensure free and fair elections." Their tactic? Placing mostly white
"poll-watchers" in polling places, many of them in minority areas,
which led to complaints of voter intimidation. The funding came from
Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. What's worse, ALEC, which counts roughly
20 percent of all state legislators as members, also drafted a model Voter ID
bill and used its ranks to disseminate it across the country. Now, 41 states
have introduced more than 180 such bills, which could mean that over 21 million
people could be denied their most basic right as a citizen. "The reason
that you target somebody's voting rights," Ben Jealous, the former head of
the NAACP, says… "is it makes it easier to take away the rest of their
rights.
So today we have rampant inequality, corruption at the top
and just plain greed at levels never seen since the 1930s. Most Americans, over
the last century, bought all the cold war fear mongering of “commies trying to
take away their freedom
and democracy.” What they didn’t notice was the fear their leaders had of a
society where people are equal. That terrified the ruling class way more than
any loss of freedom or democracy. Today such leaders behave as if there is
nothing to fear at all. And that isn’t so good for the rest of us.
To be Continued=>
[1] There are massive amounts of anti-communist propaganda
and literature that describes the extreme fear of US Politicians and pundits.
For just one example see:
How should the United States Confront Soviet Communist Expansionism?
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