[antiwar-van] AFTER COMMUNISM- Michael Parenti

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Global Rollback

AFTER COMMUNISM

By Michael Parenti

 From Covert Action Quarterly, Number 72, Spring 2002, pp 41-44.

Lately we have been hearing a great deal about "blowback." But the real
menace we face today is global rollback. The goal of conservative rulers
around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in
Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public 
services, and common living standards around the world.

In this rabidly anticommunist plutocratic culture, many left 
intellectuals have learned to mouth denunciations of the demon Soviets, 
thereby hoping to give proof of their own political virtue and 
acceptability. For decades they have been fighting the ghost of Josef 
Stalin, flashing their anticommunist credentials in tireless diatribes 
or elaborately casual asides, doing fearless battle against imaginary 
hordes of "doctrinaire" Marxist-Leninists at home and abroad.

The downfall of socialist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe caused much rejoicing not only in U.S. ruling circles but among
those who claim to inhabit the Left. Here now was a window of 
opportunity, a new beginning, they said. Freed forever from the stigma 
of "Stalinism," the US Left supposedly would grow in legitimacy and 
influence. Taken by these notions, they seemed not to have noticed how 
the destruction of socialism has shifted the center of political 
gravity in a drastically reactionary direction. Some of us did not join 
the chorus of liberals, libertarians, leftists, conservatives and 
reactionaries who hailed the establishment of monopoly 
capitalist "democracy" in Eastern Europe. We feared that it was a 
historic defeat for the people of the world. And now we are beginning 
to see evils coming to full bloom that the Communists and their allies 
had been holding back. 

In some ways. the twentieth century was a period of retreat for Big
Capital. In 1900, the United States and most other capitalist nations 
were part of the "Third World" well before the term had been invented. 
Within the industrialized nations could be found widespread poverty, 
high unemployment rates, low wages, child labor, 12-hour workdays, six- 
and seven day work weeks, malnutrition, and the diseases of poverty 
such as tuberculosis and typhoid. In addition, there were no public 
services, occupational safety regulations, consumer protections, or 
environmental safeguards to speak of. Only after decades of struggle, 
mostly in the 1930s and again in the aftermath of World War II, did we 
see dramatic advances in the conditions of those who had to work for a 
living. 1

THREAT OF A GOOD EXAMPLE

One of the things that helped workers win concessions was "the threat of
communism." The pressure of being in competition with socialist nations
for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad helped to set limits 
on how thoroughly Western leaders dared to mistreat their own working
populations. A social contract of a sort was put in place, and despite 
many bitter struggles and setbacks, working people made historic gains 
in wages, benefits, and public services.

In the late 1940s and 1950s the U.S. ruling class took great pains to
demonstrate that workers under U.S. capitalism enjoyed a higher living
standard than their opposite numbers chafing under the "yoke of
communism." Statistics were rolled out showing that Soviet proletarians 
had to toil many more hours than our workers to buy various durable-use 
consumer goods.
Comparisons were never made in regard to medical care, rent, housing,
education, transportation, and other services that are relatively
expensive in capitalist countries but heavily subsidized in socialist 
ones. The point is, the gains made by working people in the West should 
be seen in the context of capitalism's world competition with communism.

That competition also helped the civil rights struggle. During the 1950s
and 1960s, when US leaders were said to be competing with Moscow for the
hearts and minds of nonwhites in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it was
considered imperative that we rid ourselves of Jim Crow and grant 
equality to people of color in the US. Many of the arguments made 
against segregation were couched in just that opportunistic rhetoric: 
not racial equality for justice's sake but because it would improve 
America's image in the Cold War.

With the overthrow of socialism in 1989-91, transnational corporate
capitalism now seemed to have its grip on the entire globe. Yet an
impatient plaint soon could be detected in conservative publications. It
went something like this: "If everywhere socialism is being rolled back 
by the free market, why is there no rollback here in the United States? 
Why do we have to continue tolerating all sorts of collectivist 
regulations and services?" By 1992, it became clear to many 
conservatives that now was the time to cast off all restraint and sock 
it to the employee class. The competition for their hearts and minds 
was over. Having scored a total victory, Big Capital would be able to 
write its own reactionary ticket at home and abroad. There would be no 
more accommodation, not with blue-collar workers, nor even white-collar 
professionals or middle management.

Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling classes 
have ever wanted -- and that is everything: all the choice lands, 
forests, game, herds, harvests, mineral deposits and precious metals of 
the earth; all the wealth, riches, and profitable returns; all the 
productive facilities, gainful inventiveness, and technologies; all the 
surplus value produced by human labor; all the control positions of the 
state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, 
privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law with none of 
its constraints; all the services, comforts, luxuries, and advantages 
of civil society with none of the taxes and costs. Every ruling class 
has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens.

Instead of worrying about lowering unemployment, as during the Cold War,
the plutocrats who preside over this country now seek to sustain a
sufficiently high level of joblessness in order to weaken unions, curb
workers, and maximize profits. What we are witnessing is the Third
Worldization of the United States, the downgrading of a relatively
prosperous population. Corporate circles see no reason why millions of
working people should enjoy a middle-class living standard, with home
ownership, surplus income, and secure long-term employment. They also 
see no reason why the middle class itself should be as large as it is.

As the haves would have it, people must work harder ("maximize
productivity") and lower their expectations. The more they get, the more
they will demand, until we will end up with a social democracy-or worse.
It's time to return to nineteenth-century standards, the kind that
currently obtain throughout the Third World, the kind that characterized
America itself in 1900-specifically, an unorganized working populace 
that toils for a bare subsistence without benefits, protections, or
entitlements; a mass of underemployed, desperate poor who help to 
depress wages and serve as a target for the misplaced resentment of 
those just above them; a small, shrinking middle class that hangs on by 
its bleeding fingers; and a tiny, obscenely rich, tax-free owning class 
that has it all.

For the haves, deregulation, privatization, and rollback are the order 
of the day. "Capitalism with a human face" has become capitalism in your
face. While commentators announce "the end of class struggle" and 
even "the end of history," in fact, U.S. politico-economic elites are 
waging class war more determinedly than ever.

SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH WORLDS

The collapse of socialism has abetted a reactionary rollback not only in
the United States but throughout much of Western Europe, Scandinavia,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Rollback also has accelerated the
current economic collapse in many Third World countries. During the Cold
War era, U.S. policymakers sought to ensure the economic growth and
stability of anticommunist regimes. But Third World development began to
threaten U.S. corporate profitability. By the late 1970s, governments in
Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, and other nations were closing off
key sectors of their economies to U.S. investment. In addition, exports 
from these countries were competing for overseas markets with U.S. 
firms, and for markets within the United States itself. At the same 
time, growing numbers of Third World leaders were calling for more 
coordinated efforts to control their own communication and media 
systems, their own resources, markets, air space, and seabeds.

By the 1980s, U.S. policymakers were rejecting the view that a more
prosperous, economically independent Third World would serve the 
interests of U.S. capitalism. And once there no longer was a competing 
socialist world to which Third World leaders might threaten to turn, 
the United States felt freer than ever to undo any kind of autonomous 
development in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

One rollback weapon is the debt. In order to meet payments and receive 
new credits from the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary 
Fund (IMF), Third World governments have had to agree to 
merciless "structural adjustment programs," including reductions in 
social programs, cuts in wages, the elimination of import controls, the 
removal of restrictions on foreign investments, the privatization of 
state enterprises, and the elimination of domestic food production in 
favor of high-profit export crops.

Such measures are ostensibly designed to curb inflation, increase 
exports, and strengthen the fiscal condition of the debtor nation.  By 
consuming less and producing more, debtors supposedly will be better 
able to pay off their debts. In fact, these structural adjustments work 
wonderfully for the transnational corporations by depressing wages, 
intensifying the level of exploitation, and boosting profit rates. They 
also leave the economies and peoples of these various countries 
measurably worse off.  Domestic production loses out to foreign 
investors.   There is a general deindustrialization as state 
enterprises fall by the wayside or are handed over to private owners to 
be milked for profits. Many small farmers lose their subsidies and 
import protections and are driven off the land. No wonder that, as 
western investment in the Third World increases, do does poverty and 
misery.

In time, Third World countries like the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico
slip deeper in the desperately absolute destitution of what has been 
called the "Fourth World," already inhabited by countries like Haiti, 
the Congo and Afghanistan. Thus, malnutrition in Mexico City has 
increased sixfold. As many as one-fifth of Mexico's ninety million 
people are now considered "severely undernourished," while the 
incidence of cholera, dengue, and other diseases related to 
malnutrition is nearly ten times higher than in 1990. The Mexican 
public health system that had begun to improve markedly in recent years 
is now at the point of complete collapse, with overcrowded,
underfinanced, and understaffed hospitals no longer able to provide 
basic medicines.

As a further blow, the industrial nations began making substantial cuts 
in nonmilitary foreign aid to poor countries. These include sharp 
reductions in funds for education, environmental protection, family 
planning, and health programs. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, "With 
the decline of the Soviet threat, aid levels fell off." 2    Measured 
as a percentage of gross national product, the United States gives the 
least foreign assistance of all industrialized nations, less than .02 
percent.

To make things worse, popular resistance movements that might challenge
the takeover of their countries by western global investors no longer 
have the benefit of material support from socialist countries. Nelson 
Mandela frequently spoke of the "essential aid" that the African 
National Congress had received from the Soviet Union. Today, rather 
than aiding anti-imperialist rebellions, the former socialist countries 
join NATO and send armed units to participate in US-inspired military 
interventions. 

This represents a serious loss for popular forces and a real gain for
repressive plutocracy.

Reformist governments are being further undermined by the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and other "free trade" 
agreements that are neither free nor have much to do with trade, 
allowing transnational corporations to bypass whatever democratic 
sovereignty might exist within individual nations. Not only are Third 
World economies now more successfully penetrated but the governments 
and peoples themselves are being marginalized by the whole process of 
economic globalization in what amounts to a global coup d'etat by the 
transnational corporate powers. 

Under the guise of abolishing "restraints of trade," "unfair 
competition," and "lost market opportunities," corporate-dominated 
trade councils are wiping out Third World import protections, public 
services, local industries, and local decision-making.

Finally, it should not go unmentioned that nowhere has global rollback
been more thorough than in the former socialist countries themselves. 
The "Second World" of socialist nations has fallen into Third and 
Fourth World depths. In the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, 
Poland, Latvia, and elsewhere, the capitalist paradise has brought 
massive privatization and deindustrialization, the defunding of public 
services, rampant inflation, and dramatic increases in poverty, hunger, 
unemployment, illiteracy, homelessness, crime, prostitution, disease, 
alcoholism, suicide, and depopulation- along with the emergence of 
small self-enriched coteries of gangster capitalists.

Reformist governments are attacked not only economically but, if need 
be, militarily, as has been the fate of more than a dozen nations in 
the last decade or so. In some cases, they are subjected to 
dismemberment as with Yugoslavia or complete absorption as with East 
Germany and South Yemen. Yugoslavia's relatively prosperous industrial 
base  -- with an economy that was three-fourths publicly owned -- could 
no longer be tolerated to compete with western capitalist production. 
Secession and war accomplished the goal of breaking up Yugoslavia into 
small rightwing client states under the economic suzerainty of 
transnational corporations.

SUPERPOWER UNLIMITED

The overthrow of the Soviet Union has given the world's only remaining
superpower a completely free hand to pursue its diplomacy by violent
diktat. The record of US international violence just in the last decade 
is greater than anything that any socialist nation has ever perpetrated 
in its entire history. US forces or proxy mercenary forces wreaked 
massive death and destruction upon Iraq, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, 
El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Libya, and other countries. In the 
span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, 
Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same 
time, the US national security state was involved in proxy wars in 
Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other 
places. And US forces occupied Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and 
Afghanistan, and were deployed across the globe at some 300 major 
overseas bases all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, 
counter-terrorism, and humanitarianism.

Again we might note the connection between the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the arrogance and brutality with which the United States has 
pursued its international agenda throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. 
Earlier dreams of a US global hegemony -- an "American Century" -- were 
frustrated by the constraints imposed by a competing superpower. But 
today, policymakers in Washington and in academic think tanks all over 
the country are declaring that the United States has a historically 
unprecedented opportunity to establish through the use of its 
unanswerable military and economic power a position of world dominance. 
Third World economic nationalism will no longer be tolerated in the New 
World Order. US "leadership" can now remove all barriers to the 
reorganization of the global economy on the basis of market principles, 
as interpreted and dominated by the giant transnational corporations.

Given all this, maybe it is time that certain personages on the Left put
aside their anticommunism and acknowledge the magnitude of the loss that
has been sustained and the real dangers we face with the downfall of
Eastern European socialism. The life chances of hundreds of millions of
people throughout the world have been seriously and irreparably damaged.
It is time to see that our real and urgent enemy is not Stalin (who
incidentally is dead) but the Western "democratic" leaders who are 
running the cruelest scam in history, pursuing policies of concerted 
rapacity, creating a world totally free for maximizing profits 
irrespective of the human and environmental costs. With the fall of 
socialism, we have global rollback, the creation of more wealth for the 
few and more poverty for the many, the creation of powerlessness by the 
powerful  -- a cycle that cannot be effectively opposed by those who 
remain mired in the class collaborationist rhetoric of anticommunism.

NOTES

1. See the discussion "Toward 1893" in Michael Parenti, Against Empire
(San
Francisco: City Lights, 1995), pp. 168-74.

2. Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1995.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Parenti's most recent books are The Terrorism Trap (City 
Lights),
To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso), History as Mystery
(City Lights), and the 7th edition of Democracy for the Few (Wadsworth).



-- 
Macdonald Stainsby

check the "ten point platform" of Tao at: http://new.tao.ca 

"`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your 
`order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear 
ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass 
of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" 

-Rosa Luxemburg, 1918.