According to Mike Macnair's Anything but Marxism, in Weekly Worker 719, May 1st, 2008, people like myself are misguided souls for believing that the Soviet Union was in transition to socialism, a process that turned into its opposite when revisionism gained control of the communist party and socialist state under the banner of anti-stalinism.

 

Mike says that if this idea was true this leads to the question, 'why have the true revolutionaries, the stalinists, been so utterly incapable of organising an effective resistance to this take-over, given that "socialism" in their sense covered a large part of the globe and organised a large part of its population'.

 

Mike's attempted answer to this question is that these countries had no institutional safeguard against counterrevolution, and the working class had no independent organisation on which the anti-revisionists could base themselves. In this sense, he argues, the stalinists who opposed counterrevolution faced the same problem as the trotskyists. I think that idea is superficial because while the stalinists stood for exposing, fighting, and purging the revisionist counterrevolution within the soviet bureaucracy, the trotskyists outlined a struggle to "overthrow" the bureaucracy, an ultra-left position since bureaucracies, generally speaking, cannot be "overthrown".

 

I disagree with the view that there are institutional means to avoid counterrevolution, or that turning to the masses is a guarantee against capitalism returning to power in a country on the socialist road. Both approaches were tried in china, yet capitalism returned. The defeat of socialism in the 1980s and 1990s was an ideological defeat, the result of a prolonged ideological struggle waged by imperialism against socialism. The question we should ask is, what were the factors which enabled the capitalists to succeed in this struggle, temporarily.

 

In attempting to answer this question I would include the existence of a revisionist leadership in the Soviet Union; the long post-war boom after 1945; the threatening of the socialist countries with nuclear armageddon by the United States and Britain to which the Soviets had to respond by diverting valuable resources to the defence sector; and Reagan and Thatcher persuading the Saudis in the 1980s to increase their oil production to bring down prices from $30 a barrel to $10 a barrel, leading to the collapse of the Soviet economy which the revisionists had made dependent on oil exports.

 

These are some of the factors which help to explain the defeat of socialism. However, the imperialists had to provide an alternative that could compete with the idea of socialism, and this came to be known as consumer capitalism. Spurred on by an abundant supply of cheap oil and credit, consumer capitalism, and its latest expression in neo-liberal economics, was held up as the highest stage in human socio-political evolution, bringing about, in Francis Fukuyama's view, the end of history; in other words liberal capitalism had won the ideological struggle against all opposing trends and any opposition was regarded as reactionary, a view which among other things, ignored the fact that capitalism was an ecological disaster destroying the biosphere of the planet, a development which was intrinsic to the logic of this system.

 

The revisionist elements that had gained control of the leadership in the socialist countries could not offer any alternative to the allurements of consumer capitalism but rather sought to emulate it. Since many people on the left have an unarticulated understanding of socialism as a consumer society, it is easy to see how revisionism can take hold in certain quarters.

 

Social democracy sold out socialism in favour of consumer capitalism, a ship that floated on cheap oil and credit. Now with a credit crisis and the arriving of peak oil, rising food and fuel costs, the days of consumer capitalism and social democracy are numbered and will never return because cheap oil is unlikely to return. This crisis of capitalism is permanent. With the neo-liberal capitalist "utopia" increasingly in tatters, the left can confidently assert the need for an ecologically sustainable socialist society based on planned production for need to replace the nightmare to which capitalism is leading and soon to be visited on those in the imperialist countries where living standards will begin to plunge towards third-world levels as the consequences of peak oil become the dominant reality.

 

Tony Clark May 14th 2008