World 'leaders' in short supply

We are told by the media that the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen. But what does the term “leader” mean in this context?

An event organised by A World to Win at the Whitechapel Gallery in London looked at the lessons of the revolutions of 1989 that brought down the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe. One key point made, was that without the leadership offered by Mikhail Gorbachev and the group around him, events could not have happened in the way that they did.

Maintaining the status quo of bureaucratic power and the one-party state was not their priority; nor did they believe it was the only route open to them. The hopeless war in Afghanistan, the crisis in the economy and the civil corruption represented by the Chernobyl disaster were straws in the wind that Gorbachev understood. As a result, he created a break in the Stalinist wall, through which the masses of Eastern Europe poured.

Is this the type of leader that is present in Copenhagen where, it has been suggested, the future of the planet is being decided? Clearly not. The maintenance of the capitalist status quo is their be-all and end-all. They have watched it descend into economic chaos, on a global scale, and yet they are determined to carry on.

Their sole commitment is not to democracy, or “the people” or the earth’s environment, but to the global corporations and the fossilised perspective that they represent the only possible economic form available to humanity.

Capitalism - by its nature - must eventually process the whole substance of the eco-system, into profit. It is an anti-evolutionary system, dragging nature backwards from abundant, evolving life to the brink of no-life, as the latest update of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species shows.

The list reveals that 21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12% of all known birds and 32% of all known gymnosperms (conifers and cycads) are threatened with extinction. Sea shellfish and molluscs are threatened by the increased acidification of the seas, with serious impacts higher up the marine food chain. Data from the conservation organisation BirdLife shows that over 400 bird species have already suffered climate-driven impacts.

“The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting,” says Jane Smart, Director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group. “January sees the launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. The latest analysis of the IUCN Red List shows the 2010 target to reduce biodiversity loss will not be met. It’s time for governments to start getting serious about saving species and make sure it’s high on their agendas for next year, as we’re rapidly running out of time.”

Outside the official conference in Copenhagen there are many people who recognise these realities. One the emerging figures of the Conference is Di-Aping, a Sudanese diplomat who said: "We will not walk out of the talks at this late hour, because we will not allow the failure of Copenhagen. But we will not sign an inequitable deal; we will not accept a deal that condemns 80% of the world population to further suffering and injustice."

Let’s see if he means it, if any of these leaders – including those for whose countries climate change represents a threat to their very existence – have the courage to walk away from a dirty political deal, as these African delegates and campaigners demanded.

Is there is any chance of a break down of the “business-as-usual” consensus inside the conference, which would greatly help those of us trying to break the status quo outside? We shall see. But with it, or without it, we must seek answers to climate change outside of the existing capitalist structures because they are the problem and not the solution.
Penny Cole
Environment editor

The power of the 'velvet revolution' lives on

On this day 20 years ago, 100,000 people gathered in Prague to demand political freedoms denied them for 40 years by the country’s Stalinist dictatorship. It was the first mobilisation in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution”, which brought students, cultural workers and factory workers together in an unstoppable mass movement.

Coming hard on the heels of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Stalinist regimes in Hungary and Poland, the revolution in Czechoslovakia ended on December 29 with playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel, jailed many times by the regime, installed as president.

Alexander Dubcek, the former Communist Party leader of the Prague Spring of 1968, which was suppressed by Soviet tanks, was made Speaker of the country’s Parliament. On this occasion, the Red Army was confined to barracks on the orders of the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, making the Velvet Revolution not only possible but relatively peaceful.

This decision was bound up with Gorbachev’s attempts to democratise the Soviet Union itself through the process of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) which had been going in earnest since 1987 to the dismay of the hard-line Stalinists who still retained many levers of power within the state and party bureaucracy.

Now the media has one simple shorthand characterisation of the revolutions of 1989. They amounted to, we are informed, “the fall/end of Communism”. That was the tenor, for example, of John Simpson report for the BBC this week. Historian Timothy Garton Ash says more or less the same thing in The Guardian.

The rest of the media parrots the same “official” line, which is remarkably how the regimes of Eastern Europe used to function. This superficial reading of history naturally enough reinforces the status quo in Britain and other capitalist countries. If 1989 was truly “the end of communism”, then that “proves” that there is no sustainable, alternative to capitalism. All attempts to replace capitalism will inevitably end in dictatorship. So don’t even bother. It’s as simple as that. Or is it?

Of course the regime in Prague was a dictatorship. Parachuted into power as the Red Army swept the Nazis out of the country, it purged the country of political opponents and in 1952 staged the notorious Slansky show, dramatised in the 1970 film L'Aveu ("The Confession"), directed by Constantinos Costa-Gavras.

To characterise the regime as “communist” is, however, nonsense, even if that is how it described itself. For Karl Marx, who had something to say on the matter, the communist period of history was classless and, above all, a society without a state. Here was a free association of self-governing people, a society so advanced that everyone’s needs could be met by releasing the productive forces from the grip of private property. The Communist Manifesto insists: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Does this sound anything like the Czechoslovakia of 1989? Or East Germany? To ask the question is to answer it.

The origin of the East European dictatorships lay in a deal cut between Stalin and Roosevelt to allocate “spheres of influence” after World War II. The USSR had by the early 1930s become a totalitarian dictatorship. What took place was a counter-revolution, in essence an anti-communist, destructive process in which the leaders of the 1917 Revolution themselves were consumed. Over a period, political power was assumed by an all-powerful bureaucracy. Millions and millions perished in the purges and in repelling the Nazis. The most coherent explanation of Stalinism’s origins remains Trotsky’s, outlined in his book The Revolution Betrayed.

In the end, neither the Soviet Union nor the Eastern Europe buffer states reached the level of socialism, let alone communism. The economies were far less productive than the advanced capitalist countries and the standard of living remained low. The rule of Stalinist bureaucracies proved incompatible with historical progress and democracy and that is what Gorbachev addressed.

In August 1991, the Stalinist old guard staged a short-lived military coup in Moscow and precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union itself by the end of the year. Stalinism’s demise led to the imposition of brutal market capitalist economies – the Czech republic is now viewed by the corporations as a source of cheaper labour – and the rule of the oligarchs in Russia under a Putin dictatorship in which Stalin is flavour of the month.

In 1989, the irresistible power of the masses when they embarked on profound change proved decisive. Rather than seeing these events as “the end of communism”, we should acknowledge them as a significant milestone in the revolutionary history of the modern world which should inspire us to deal with our own oppressive dictatorship of capitalists and bankers. Come and discuss these issues at our Whitechapel Art Gallery event on December 2.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Taking inspiration from 1989

The amazing sequence of events that marked the year 1989 which culminated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on November 8 continues to stimulate debate in its 20th anniversary year.

From the moment in March when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Hungarian leader, Karoly Grosz, that the Brezhnev doctrine of military intervention was now dead, to the rapid and violent downfall of Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December, the speed of events was breathtaking.

Much less well-known is how that historic moment was only made possible by a decision of the Hungarian Communist Party. Early in October it razed down the barbed wire fence that separated Hungary from Austria and refugees from the German Democratic Republic poured through. On October 20, the now renamed Hungarian Socialist Party also agreed to amend its constitution to end its own domination and introduce a multiparty political system.

The meaning and outcome of that year still provokes debate, but what stands out above all is that for the first time since the revolutionary period around 1917, millions of people actually made history. One documentary film maker, has described the mass movements of twenty years ago as a “miracle”.

And indeed, there still is a truly triumphant, awe-inspiring quality to the huge demonstrations and flows of ordinary people in so many countries. Not only were the numbers involved unprecedented, but so was the way momentum built up from country to country. The disenfranchised were suddenly transformed into the empowered, it’s been said of the movement that within a few months led to the tearing down of the Wall. This was truly people’s power in action.

Since that time, the people who experienced the downfall of decades-old Stalinist regimes have seen monumental changes, for better and for worse. Entire countries like the Soviet Union have been broken up and new ones formed. Old hierarchies have vanished. And, last but not least, a new and mostly brutal capitalist economic order has replaced the state-dominated bureaucratic systems which fossilised leaders and their opposite numbers in the West liked to describe as “socialist”.

Gorbachev, the man who gave the greatest impulse to the break-up of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and east Europe, did not set out to destroy the “socialised” aspects of his country – nor indeed its East European satellites. He simply believed that “we [the Soviet leadership] had no right to interfere in the affairs of our ‘satellites’, to defend and preserve some and punish and ‘excommunicate’ others without reckoning with the people’s will... Those who still blame Gorbachev,” he has written in his memoirs, “are in effect, lacking in respect for their own people, who have gained freedom and made use of it as best they could”.

As one writer has noted in relation to the courage of those who gathered in Leipzig 20 years ago, under the searchlights and cameras of the brutal Stasi secret police, tearing down the curtain was not just the work of movements and ideas; it happened because “courageous men and women resisted apathy and fear”.

The world is undoubtedly deeply changed today. It appears to many that the revolutionary movements of that kind are truly “last century” and could never happen again. But what characterised every single one of these people’s uprisings was that they were largely unforeseen and no one could anticipate either their speed or their outcome.

We live in a world transformed, not only by the political revolutions of 1989, but also by an ongoing communications revolution combined with unemployment and homelessness as economic meltdown continues. The ravages of global warming are present and imminent.

The year 1989 was a year of political, rather than social, revolution. It freed people from the rule of repressive Stalinist bureaucracies. The fact that the outcome – capitalism – did not fulfil the aspirations of those who made the change possible is no one’s fault. It leaves the challenge of making a new step forward to today’s generations.

The need for ending capitalism is greater than ever. What is needed, then as now, is the creation of organisations, networks and movements with the vision and courage to go where no one has gone before in making the revolution of the 21st century.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
20 October 2009