*On The 20th Anniversary Of The Fall Of The Berlin Wall - The Defeated Fight To Save Socialism- The International Communist League View

Click on title to link to "Workers Vanguard" two-part article published in September 2003, "Why We Fought To Defend The Soviet Union" that is germane to the comments that I have made below about the defeat of that struggle of which the fall of the Berlin Wall is something of a symbol.

Commentary/Discussion Issue

Random reflections on the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in the struggle for the world socialist revolution.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that had previously physically separated the two parts of Germany, an event that had significance for all political tendencies in the world, capitalist and anti-capitalist alike. Needless to say the various imperial states, chief among them the main anti-communist adversary the United States, but others as well, ‘democratic’ or otherwise, hailed the event as the beginning of the end of communism as they knew it- what has since been loudly trumpeted as the “death of communism”. Those capitalist opponents have since that time reveled, for the most part successfully, in that triumph.

For most of the Western left, following in the footsteps of their social-democratic forbears whose track record in helping to preserve capitalism speak for itself, this event was treated like “manna” from heaven. However, this attitude also included the vast majority of organizations that called themselves revolutionary as this demolition was heralded as the beginning of the newer, better struggle for socialism minus its Stalinist drag. Twenty years out we can take stock of those predictions and predilections and also make some comments on the significance of fall of the Wall and the fate of that much ballyhooed renewed socialist struggle with a “human” face.

The great Bolshevik organizer of victory and high Soviet official in the early days, Leon Trotsky, whom we can safely assign the role of the leading anti-Stalinist of his day and who paid with his head for that opposition, spent the last few years of his life, including his last major political struggle of his career calling for the defense of the Soviet state. Now Trotsky was not some mushy-headed sentimentalist (although I am sure as a revolutionary leader of the first workers state and a high ex-Soviet official that he held sentimental attachments to what he helped create) who, in hindsight was compelled to defend his creation. Rather, he argued, strenuously, in the famous fight over defense of the Soviet Union that broke out most dramatically in the American Socialist Workers party at the beginning of World War II and chronicled in his book, “In Defense Of Marxism”, that the overthrow of capitalist economic relations and the centralized planning, warts and all, made defense of those property forms a matter of revolutionary duty. No, more than that, of revolutionary necessity. That “little” proposition had been the wedge issue dividing revolutionaries and reformists then, and has since


This issue is where leftists of all persuasions went off the rails in the post-World II period when the Soviet Union, as an adjunct to victory in that war, created workers states that reflected their notion of property forms in their “sphere of influence”. And no more so than in the DDR. That factor in holding off Western imperialism was the first causality in the struggle against it. To deny the place of the workers state as a factor, distorted by Stalinist degeneration as in the Soviet Union or by deformation as in the East European states, in world revolutionary strategy ultimately led to incorrect (to say the least) analysis of the nature of world politics. Rather than seeing the demise of the Soviet Union and the other states of East Europe, especially the DDR as a world historic defeat for the international working class there was, and frankly still is, an assumption that starting over from scratch (pre-1917) was more important that preserving the gains at hand. Some of the more somber types who held that position now know better, others never will.

I mentioned above the key role of Leon Trotsky in the 1930s as the leading pro- Communist anti-Stalinist recognized even by his adversaries, grudgingly or not, as a heroic figure fighting in that struggle. While this is not the time to drag up old controversies one of the reasons that he was unsuccessful in defeating Stalin was the too quick tendency of various leftists, including those starch social –democratic types mentioned above to fall all over Stalin at that time, especially when the Communist International put its strategy of the ‘popular front’ in full motion. In short, to worship the accomplished fact of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union.

Well, there is nothing that can be done about that now; however, all these latter day professions of undying anti-Stalinism that animated Western ‘socialist’ theory and practice in the 1980s cannot cover for the fact that this “knee jerk” reaction, reflecting petty bourgeois sentiment in the West, can only be characterized as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My friends that is never a good policy. The assumption that once the deformed and degenerate workers states were off the political map that the newly created neo-capitalist states (as they have been called although a quick look at the situations there in the post- Soviet period makes them look an awful lot like the old-fashioned kind of capitalist states with all the economic and political tendencies that go with them) would be fertile ground for social- democratic propaganda and in the international working class of the old capitalist states as well has proved groundless. Rather, as the last twenty years have painfully demonstrated, the ‘lessons’ drawn by the working classes have been to dismiss socialist solutions, at least over the short haul, from their day to day struggles. While this decline in class consciousness can be directly laid to the foul doorstep of Stalinism the international social democracy and its horde of leftist hangers-on also share responsibility.


Finally, this above-mentioned decline in socialist class consciousness in the international working class is not only part and parcel of the demise of Stalinism but has hard strategic implications today when the world economic situation for the first time in a long time shows very clearly the desperate need for international centralized planning to push humankind forward. Although there is more to be heard from working people as this crisis remains unabated today the response (or rather non-response) to the decline in their living standards has either taken the path of passive acceptance, individual action or no political reaction at all. That, my friends, is what we should be taking away from the fall of the Berlin Wall. While others rejoice or have fond memories of this graphic example of capitalist restoration and we, for now, have to put up with it as a continuing symbol that impedes our struggle. But take heart,-to paraphrase something the old anti- Stalinist fighter Trotsky wrote in his lonely struggle against Stalin. Stalinism rising again–never. Communism rising again- forever. Forward to new Octobers!