DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

The contradictions inherent in the imperialist stage of capitalism exploded in the first inter-imperialist world war (1914-18). The outbreak of the war followed the end of a twenty-year period of accelerated capitalist economic growth, and the onset of a deep structural crisis characterised by stagnation of the world market, and a sharp decline in the average rate of profit.

Through the war, the Central European imperialist powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) sought to compensate for the onset of the crisis by redividing colonies and spheres of influence at the expense of the Anglo-French imperialists. However, the main outcome of the war was an acceleration of the general crisis of capitalism.

The economies of the defeated Central European powers were temporarily shattered, while those of the victorious Anglo-French powers were so weakened that they became financially dependent on United States imperialism — the only power to emerge economically stronger from the global conflagration. Meanwhile, the imperialist chain was broken at its weakest link by the first successful socialist revolution — the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Under the leadership of the Bolshevik party (later renamed the Communist Party) the Russian working class overthrew the unelected Social-Democratic government of Aleksandr Kerensky on November 7, 1917, transferring power to the popularly elected councils (soviets) of workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies that had arisen out of the mass revolutionary upsurge at the beginning of 1917. The new Soviet government immediately began to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state (army, police, judiciary) replacing it with a new workers' and peasants' army and elected people's courts. It mobilised the Russian masses to sweep away the semi-feudal relations in the countryside, to bring the big capitalist industries and banks under the control of the workers, and to end the oppression of the non-Russian nationalities by recognising their national rights, including their right to form independent nation-states.

The deprivations caused by the First World War, combined with the hope inspired by the Russian Revolution, sharpened the class struggle in the imperialist states, and this struggle erupted into open revolutionary mass action in a number of European countries, with a substantial part of the working class seeking to emulate the Bolshevik example. However, due to the counter-revolutionary role of the Social-Democratic parties and the inexperience of the newly formed Communist parties, these revolutionary struggles were unsuccessful, leaving the Russian Revolution isolated in the face of a hostile capitalist world.

For three years the newly formed Soviet workers' state had to defend itself against a civil war unleashed by the deposed capitalists and landlords, backed up by the intervention of the major imperialist powers. With the support of the majority of the workers and peasants, and assisted by a powerful antiwar movement in the West, the Bolsheviks won the civil war in Russia, but at a tremendous cost: An already backward economy was brought to the brink of collapse and large numbers of the most politically conscious workers were killed.

Lacking any aid from victorious revolutions in the more advanced countries, in order to rehabilitate the Russian economy the Bolsheviks were forced to partially restore capitalism through the ``New Economic Policy'' (permitting the private buying and selling of the peasants' surplus product, leasing of nationalised enterprises to private capital, introducing competition for profit within the state-owned industries). They were also forced to rely upon the administrative and technical skills of former tsarist officials and capitalist managers (who could only be induced to serve the Soviet state by being granted high salaries and privileged access to scarce consumer goods).

Owing to the overwhelming weight of the peasantry, the numerical and cultural weakness of the working class, and the absorption of most of its leading cadres into the state apparatus, the Communist party itself became increasingly bureaucratised. The authoritarian methods and petty-bourgeois outlook of the state bureaucracy were increasingly reflected by a section of the Communist party that grouped itself around Joseph Stalin, the head of the party's administrative apparatus. In the years following Lenin's death in 1924 the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated its control over the Communist party, strangling soviet and party democracy, imprisoning and eventually murdering the great majority of the leaders and cadres of the Bolshevik party who had served under Lenin.

The conservative and narrowly nationalistic outlook of the Stalinist bureaucracy was given expression in Stalin's theory that the construction of socialism could be completed in one country — the Soviet Union — without revolutionary victories in the more industrially developed imperialist countries.

Exploiting the prestige of the Russian Revolution and the theoretical weakness of most of the cadres of the newly formed Communist parties throughout the world, the bureaucracy in the USSR won acceptance of this theory and was able to impose its bureaucratic methods on the international Communist movement. In the eyes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the function of the foreign Communist parties was not to lead anti-capitalist revolutions but to act as auxiliary instruments for the bureaucracy's foreign policy goals by exerting pressure upon ``their own'' capitalist governments.

The revolutionary upsurge that swept central and eastern Europe between 1917 and 1923 found its clearest expression in the Russian Revolution. The ebb in the revolutionary mass movement after the failure of the German revolution in October 1923 found its expression in the victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR.

While capitalist rule was stabilised in Europe after 1923, the postwar upsurge of labour struggles blocked the attempts of the victorious imperialist powers to resolve capitalism's structural crisis by imposing a sharp in increase the rate of exploitation of wage labour. Consequently, in the two decades after the world war, the international capitalist system was paralysed by a prolonged economic depression. Rates of profit declined, the productive forces stagnated, and mass unemployment became permanent. World trade contracted as each imperialist power sought to defend itself from foreign competitors by erecting a wall of tariffs around its shrinking domestic market. The capitalist business cycle was marked by short-term speculative booms followed by slumps of increasing scope and depth (1921-23, 1929-33, 1937-39), in which social contradictions became explosive.

In the 1930s revolutionary situations emerged in a number of imperialist countries. However, the class-collaborationist policies of the Social-Democratic labour bureaucracy, and the opportunist policies imposed on the Communist movement by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, restricted the ability of the working class to fight the capitalist counter-offensive. As a result, serious defeats were inflicted on the workers' movement.

The most devastating of these defeats was the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933. The inability of the German working class to take decisive action to resolve the capitalist crisis — due to the paralysing misleadership of the Social-Democratic and Communist parties — led to demoralisation in the working class and to a loss of confidence in working-class leadership among the urban middle classes, which had been ruined by the 1929-33 economic slump. With the backing of the big capitalist monopolies, the German fascists were able to use anti-capitalist demagogy to mobilise desperate middle-class elements, and even some demoralised sections of the working class, to destroy all mass working-class organisation and resistance.

Through physical and psychological terror, Adolf Hitler's fascist regime atomised and demoralised the German working class to such an extent that any form of collective defence became impossible. The Nazis' prohibition on changing jobs even blocked workers' individual attempts to achieve modest improvements in their wages through job mobility. In these conditions, the German capitalist class was able to significantly increase the rate of exploitation of wage labour, more than doubling its collective profit within five years of the Nazi victory.

Having employed fascist totalitarianism to impose ``social peace'' and austerity at home, German imperialism was driven inexorably to wage war abroad for new markets, new sources of raw materials, and new fields for investment of its abundant profits. The Nazi regime sought to break the division of the world arising out of the First World War embodied in the Versailles treaty. The aim of the Nazis was the forcible reorganisation of Europe under the hegemony of German monopoly capital as a first step towards world domination. Central to this objective was the conquest and colonial subjugation of the peoples of the Soviet Union.

The Second World War, the most destructive in human history, arose out of sharpening inter-imperialist competition, but soon became the most titanic and fiercest class conflict the world has ever witnessed, pitting Nazi Germany and its allies against the bureaucratised Soviet workers' state and the working people of Nazi-dominated Europe. The inter-imperialist struggle between Germany and the Anglo-American powers was a secondary aspect of the war, with the US imperialists subordinating their own plans for war against the USSR to the immediate objective of securing Wall Street's economic and military hegemony within the capitalist world.

The Second World War climaxed the first stage of the general crisis of capitalism and opened its second stage. The victory of the Soviet Union over fascist Germany and militarist Japan, together with the weakening of the main European colonial powers (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium), dealt a major blow to the stability of the world imperialist system. This gave powerful impetus to the struggles of the oppressed nations of Asia and Africa to throw off colonial rule and imperialist exploitation. Capitalism in Europe faced imminent collapse under the combined pressures of economic chaos and mass insurgency.

In the face of the postwar social explosion, US imperialism, which had emerged from the war as the dominant capitalist power, launched a counter-offensive with three main goals:

1. To restabilise capitalism in Europe (the Marshall Plan).

2. To limit the anti-imperialist upsurge in the colonial world by accepting formal independence while maintaining imperialist economic and political domination (neo-colonialism).

3. To block new socialist revolutions and create the military and political conditions for destroying the USSR (the Cold War doctrine of ``containment and rollback of communism'').

This reactionary offensive met with mixed results:

• Aided by the class-collaborationist policies of the Stalinist labour leaders in Western Europe, Washington was able to block the revolutionary dynamic of the anti-fascist movement in Western Europe and stabilise capitalist rule there.
• Through covert operations, fostering of bourgeois nationalists, and use of economic and military pressure to force the European imperialist powers to make concessions, Washington limited the impact of the disintegration of the colonial system. During the first two decades after the Second World War, in most of the colonies imperialism successfully channelled the national liberation movement in neo-colonial directions.
• The overturns of capitalism in Eastern Europe under the military protection of the USSR, rapid recovery of the Soviet economy from the devastation wrought by the fascist invasion, the USSR's breaking of the United States' nuclear weapons monopoly, and the victory of the Chinese Revolution, forced Washington to postpone its plans to ``roll back communism.''

After the postwar collision of the forces of revolution and counter-revolution, capitalism found itself denied access to a third of the world's population. Nevertheless, world capitalism survived the massive postwar contraction of its market, and in fact the imperialist powers entered a prolonged period of economic expansion in which new contradictions were added to those characterising the first phase of imperialist, monopoly capitalism.