The United States ruling class has lost the Cold War, we said. What the bourgeois press and spokespeople were initially hailing as the U.S. victory in the Cold War was in fact ordained to become an enormous new burden for world capitalism. The capitalists in Germany and some other European countries who were greedily investing in Central and Eastern Europe and in Russia, in order to consolidate their supposed great victory, were "live ones," we said. They were suckers — nothing like the salvation they were reaching for would come out of this profit-seeking lurch to the east.¹

The imperialist rulers face an enormous problem in attempting to reestablish the capitalist system in the former Soviet Union and other workers states, we said. There is no capitalist class in these states, and it takes a long time for historic classes to be created. It takes a long time for a bourgeoisie to consolidate ownership of banking, industrial, and landed capital, and for bourgeois values, legal systems, and money and credit networks to become dominant, let alone stable. A rising exploiting class can only accomplish this through accumulating capital, entrenching its own power, and imposing on a propertyless proletariat the social relations that go along with that power. But every serious step in this direction involves massive assaults on the working class that will meet resistance and threaten social stability, we explained.

Every other political current, not only in the world bourgeoisie but throughout the workers movement, said that the fall of the east German Stalinist regime would lead to a great economic burst forward for German capitalism. We said no. German finance capital would become a dysfunctional boa constrictor: the west would swallow the east whole but would find the indigestion worse than the meal. Unemployment and social differentiation would increase in the west. Class tensions and political polarization would increase in Germany, and the myth of a coming conflictless "united Europe" would be further undermined.²

Moreover, what was opening up as a result of the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was the possibility, for the first time in half a century or more, of collaboration between workers in these countries and workers facing similar assaults on their rights and living conditions in other countries. About a week ago, I watched on the TV news a mass demonstration in Germany of metalworkers and their supporters from other unions. All the workers there — from the western and eastern parts of Germany, from Sweden and other countries who had come to show their solidarity — were above all protesting one thing: the decision by the German government and employers to renege on the public promises to bring together the living standards, wages, and working conditions of workers in the two parts of the country. That kind of Germany-wide working-class action could now begin to happen again, after more than sixty years. It will take time, but it is now possible.

All this sounds less surprising today. But just two years ago when we insisted on this perspective, it sounded wild to almost everybody else. Even other fighters we knew — capable, committed revolutionists and communists from Cuba, South Africa, and elsewhere — thought this view was literally nonsense. What will become today's common sense among a growing layer was then still seen as outrageous.

Attempts by imperialism and national bourgeoisies to strengthen the domination of capital in each part of the world are deepening the crisis in all of them. If you want to watch this process unfold in a single country, watch Germany. It is like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a massive animal that it cannot digest. The German rulers will not be able to restore their prior, more stable conditions without struggles that have unforeseen consequences for them. And the workers, east and west, now have much better conditions to uproot capitalism in Germany as a whole —something much more difficult so long as Stalinism was able to disorient so many in both halves of the country.

The decades are now behind us when Stalinism alone guaranteed that the odds against any revolutionary workers struggle succeeding were very high — or, that if it did succeed, from the outset the odds were high that it would be corroded from within and ultimately overthrown. The working class still confronts a multitude of challenges. But the enormous obstacle of Stalinism as we know it is behind us, even though its political legacy and miseducation are not.

For most of this century, the word communist has been used primarily by those who largely monopolized speaking for the workers movement and who put an equal sign between communism and Stalinism. The Stalinists portrayed the bureaucratic caste of Mother Russia as the wave of the future and the salvation of humanity. They used the vocabulary of communism to cast the red glow of the history of revolutionary workers struggles on themselves and their lodestar.

Others in the workers movement — the social democrats, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, various centrist currents and sects — also identified Stalinism with communism, in order to cover up their own collaboration with the capitalists, with the imperialists, at home and abroad....

Now, workers in countries where the road to communism was seemingly blocked for so long by mammoth statues of Lenin and Marx, and by giant mausoleums with mummies under glass, have the chance to discover communism as they gain class-struggle experience and meet embattled workers from other countries. And as they find their way back to the unvarnished Lenin, Marx, and Engels, they will need neither embalmed bodies nor grotesque statuary.

Some workers in eastern Germany will find out the truth about the German revolution of 1918–19 for the first time at a demonstration in Berlin, where they will meet workers from Britain who have brought with them the Pathfinder book in English that tells the story.³ Things like that, seemingly paradoxical but delightful to revolutionists, become possible now, and they will happen more and more in coming years.

¹Imperialist investment in Russia, minuscule relative to capital flows to Asia and Latin America throughout the 1990s, virtually collapsed following the Yeltsin government's default in August 1998 on some $40 billion in domestic debt. Coming on top of the credit and currency crisis in Asia, Moscow's default sent shockwaves through the holders of some $150 billion in Russia's foreign debt. Apparently in hopes of buffering a panic ever more costly to imperialist creditors, Standard and Poor's — one of the Wall Street firms that assigns ratings of creditworthiness to various countries and corporations — invented a new category in February 1999 just for Russia: "Selective Default"!

Between 1991 and 1997, $9 billion in foreign investment in plant and equipment flowed into Russia, compared to $160 billion to Latin America over that same period, and $181 billion to China alone. Overall foreign direct investment into the Central and Eastern European workers states (including Russia) during these same years totaled a little more than $50 billion. At the same time, there was an estimated $150 billion in capital flight from Russia between 1991 and the end of 1998.

The world capitalist crisis whose manifestations spread from Asia in 1997 to Latin America and beyond resulted in a sharp decline of more than $100 billion in imperialist capital flows to the Third World and European workers states as a whole in 1998.

² As of the end of 1998, the German imperialist government had poured some $625 billion into the eastern half of the country since 1990. With two-thirds of industrial workers in eastern Germany having been turned out of their jobs over that period, most of Bonn's funding goes to social transfer payments, not investment in infrastructure or plant and equipment. In early 1999, the official unemployment rate in the eastern half of Germany was still nearly 20 percent, and over 11 percent for Germany as a whole — the highest level since the early 1930s — and living standards in the east remained well below the national average.

By 1998 large-scale discontent coming out of rising class tensions was propelling a leftward shift in bourgeois politics in Germany, as in most of Europe and North America, resulting in the election in September of a Social Democratic Party–Green Party coalition government, with Gerhard Schröder as the new chancellor. The Christian Democratic Union–Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) coalition, headed by Helmut Kohl — the self-proclaimed "father" of German unification —was swept from office for the first time in sixteen years.

At the same time, the accelerating social crisis fueled ongoing political polarization, as registered by the CDU's successful state election campaign in Hesse in February 1999 on a rightist platform targeting the rights of Germany's 7 million immigrants. Only hours after this electoral setback, the Social Democrats said they were reconsidering proposed legislation granting dual citizenship rights for the first time to some immigrants. The Greens followed suit, saying they too were ready to compromise further on immigrants' rights; the Greens had previously watered down their call for shutting down nuclear power plants in Germany. In addition, the government coalition has announced its readiness to dispatch 2,000 combat troops to Kosova in Yugoslavia as part of any NATO "peacekeeping" force.

³The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents, 1918–1919 (New York: Pathfinder, 1986). Part of Pathfinder's series, The Communist International in Lenin's Time.  
 
 
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