Posted by Thomas W. Warner on February 21, 19101 at 14:15:34:
ãSaying No To Powerä was given to me by a long time leftist friend from California ö signed by Bill Mandel ö but without comment on the contents of the book. It is a thick book, so my wife and I took it to Mexico where we have no pressing demands on our time and this is a place where we can read. In addition to Mandelâs autobiography, we had a documentary about Zapatismo by John Ross and a weighty one on the cosmos by Carl Sagan.
ãSaying No to Powerä was particularly compelling because my life had paralleled that of Mandel in many (though far less newsworthy) ways. We even knew some of the same people. Forinstance, Clinton and Jenny Jenks were St. Louis habituŽs at one time and my first partner, Gloria Martin, (who later co-founded Radical Women) was good friends with them ö and I had met them too. And of course, we were all affected by the same crises of the left in all of their manifestations from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the assault on the Soviet parliament by Yeltsin and all of ãglasnost and peristroikaä and the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as the Smith Act trials and the HUAC tours and the CP underground and the advent of the National Guardian and the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace and the Civil Rights struggles with M.L.King and Malcolm X and the massive resistance to the Viet Nam war and well, the whole section of the century that was our lives as caring and active intervenors against capitalist war and for human and civil rights and for labor rights and against corporate greed.
I admire him for continuing to be in the struggle against the execution of Mumia and against the bombing and invasions of Iraq and Yugoslavia by an un-challenged set of rulers in Washington and Wall Street and the Pentagon. And it is good that he still opposes the punishing and inhumane blockades that have been put around the countries with regimes that will not say ãuncleä to the global bully that the U.S. has become ö even more than ever before.
But I MUST take exception to his analysis of the world situation and his new found understanding that ãsocialism is not an ideal to be struggled for because it will not work without a marketä ö a loose translation.
Nothing can be further from reality! Whatever caused the demise of the USSR, it was NOT the absence of a market economy.
As a matter of fact, the way that I see it, it was precisely because the USSR operated as independent of the global market economy as it could, with the decisive portions of the world being governed by it ö and thus the absolute influence of the world market in determining the prices of everything from gold to soft and hard wheat and corn and pig bellies and sugar and the rest. Still, and despite this, the USSR was able to take a economic and industrial machine that is virtually worthless in the profit/market driven world from the 1920s to the 1980s and use this backward equipment to become the second greatest producer of material goods on the face of the earth. She (the USSR) was able to produce probably the most literate and educated populace on the face of the planet ö with the highest maternal survival rates and the highest survival rates of newborns and without unemployment and with guaranteed daycare and maternal leave. And She would garner most of the medals at the Olympic games as well. Now this productive (under a socially planned economy) system of factories is WORTHLESS! Because it is the market that determines its value. And because it is a decade or two out of date, it canât compete in an open market economy ö and no capitalist wants it either ö because in a market economy, it is worthless.
Fortunately, the progressive and labor and ecology movements have begun to attack the institution of the market economy at its roots. Here in Seattle, where the most powerful coalition of these forces coalesced in November of 1999, the slogan under which everyone could unite was ãFair Trade ö Not Free Tradeä. Certainly there were many currents and tendencies united there. There were whale hugging vegetarians locked arm in arm with Native American whale hunter/eaters and China phobe union bureaucrats side by side with avid Maoists. Anarchists and pacifists and members of alternative lifestyle collectives and grizzled old leftists had one thing in common. The ãmarketä was not fair and needed to be struggled against and the corporations running WTO were not going to proceed with the marketâs ãbottom lineä being the final arbiter of the fate of the world.
The slogans ãPeoples needs ö not corporate greedä and many more along the same line will bring back the socialism that Reagan and his Republicans and their Democrat cohorts managed to quell in the USSR after 70 years of a successful planned economy and publicly held national wealth.
Was the USSR a utopia? No! Were there inequities between those who toiled and those who had the strings of power? Yes! But not nearly as stark as in the rest of the world. Was there male chauvinism and anti-Semitism and racism still present in the populace? You bet! But nowhere on earth was there so much talk about the problem. Did the USSR put its narrow interests before that of the world struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism and the global class struggle. I think so, but look at the amount that was being complained about. Armed aid to Nicaragua and Cuba and the Palestinians and the Cubans and the Viet Namese and many more. Economic aid ö without the venomous profit strings that Wall Street levels for hydro electricity in Egypt and aid to India and lots more. Moreover, the presence of a powerful anti-capitalist bastion that gave the Third World some bargaining power in dealing with the Big Powers of capital ö that was worth a lot in the global balance.
No, Bill, the market is not the panacea that will solve the problems of the earthâs people. Quite to the contrary. In fact, the market is the driving force that creates the greenhouse gasses at a rate that will inundate Manhattan and possibly create such rapid climate change that the biosphere may be unable to support homo-sapien. This does not take into account the millions of tons of air borne and water borne pollutants ö many of which are understood ö but many which are being developed newly each hour and dumped into the bio-mix untested.
The big question is, in my mind, why didnât the Soviet workers fight harder to retain what was theirs? Why did they allow the same party hacks that were basking in the privileges that had become a fixture of the USSR, to take the whole thing? Without a fight? I think that that is where the answer to the demise of the USSR lies. The workers state did not have enough hands on worker power to prevent the corruption and so when the same bureaucrats moved to take the whole thing, they had no history of power management that would cause them to intervene on their own behalf.
Now the same persons who called themselves Communist Party leaders and enjoyed modest privilege under workers rule, now own many of the plants outright and what used to be called corruption is now just good business practice.
I think that Bill should have spent more time with the nice ladies and their friends who were bringing soup to the striking miners who were encamped outside the Kremlin. He said that they were from the leftist Communist Party and were struggling against the demise of the gains of the workers under Lenin and Trotsky and Bukharin and the Old Bolsheviks ö as well as the decades of Stalin. Instead Bill spent a lot of time with the bureaucrats who had arranged his visit and were a part of the attempt to turn a silk purse into a sows ear.