First Published: The New Voice, Vol. VII, No. 24, November 27, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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In the pending arrival of a third world war, it is important to understand the character of the main antagonists so as to decide what stand the U.S. working class should take on the issue.
Some workers and intellectuals are sympathetic to the Soviet Union because of the tremendous role the Soviet people played in crushing Nazism in World War II. What many do not realize is that the Soviet Union is no longer a socialist country, run by the workers and peasants. With the advent of Khruschev, the Soviet Union ceased to be a socialist power. It became a revisionist, capitalist power, currently bent on precipitating world war through colonial conquest.
Various domestic developments in the Soviet Union attest to the restoration of capitalism. For example, it is a socialist principle that everyone shall have the right to a job, and “he who does not work, neither shall he eat.” In the Soviet Union there are an estimated six million unemployed. The unemployment is caused in part by the “streamlining of production” following the 1965 reforms, announced by Kosygin, whereby Soviet enterprises were placed on a “profit index,” that is, profits became the principal motive for their existence. Since the new Soviet capitalists pretend that the Soviet Union is still a socialist country, they do not admit the existence of an unemployment problem, so unemployment benefits do not exist!
Another manifestation of the unemployment problem is the reappearance of prostitutes walking the streets. Alcoholism, which underwent a marked decline in socialist Russia, is today on the increase.
In a genuine socialist society it is the workers who run things, who make the decisions. Under socialism there is an enthusiasm for work that does not exist under capitalism. The enthusiasm for productive labor exists because workers are not exploited under socialism. The workers’ productive efforts go toward building a better society for all instead of lining the pockets of a few.
From the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 through World War II, the Soviet workers performed tremendous feats of production, taking the country from semi-feudal backwardness to an industrial power capable of producing the tanks, guns and planes necessary for overcoming the Nazi onslaught. When the Soviet Union was socialist, workers used to work voluntarily on the weekends, and they would strive to increase their own production through technological innovation, as reflected by the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930’s.
Soviet workers today express their feelings for the new system through absenteeism, strikes, protest meetings and demonstrations. As a result, productivity has declined markedly in the last 15 years. Further, the more work has become an oppressive burden, the more workers have responded by moving around from job to job in the hope of finding a “good job.”
In any socialist system, the workers’ health and well-being should be of paramount importance. Yet Soviet workers suffer the same fate as workers suffer in any capitalist country, because Soviet enterprises attempt to extract maximum profits. According to reports from Moscow published by western news agencies, workers who report safety hazards and other shortcomings in Soviet workplaces are fired. One worker said he had been fired for refusing to send workers into unsafe coal mining shafts. Soviet workers must carry a “character” booklet with them when applying for work. In the rush to restore capitalism, the revisionists even attacked the free medical services and suggested that medical care be pay-as-you-go.
In Soviet foreign trade, too, is a definite capitalist accent, report in the April 17, Newsweek said:
Certainly there is nothing ferocious or crude about George Schukin. Like a host of businessmen in New York, Schukin wears elegant pinstripe suits, lives in a luxury apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side and enjoys a cordial rapport with such fellow executives as banking mogul David Rockefeller. In Lenin’s and Stalin’s time, the very idea of a Communist businessman’ would have seemed a bit absurd. But to Schukin, deputy president of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade Council and a former executive with Amtorg, the largest Soviet corporation in America, that pairing of words is completely natural.
He is not alone, Scores of highly skilled Soviet entrepreneurs are trotting around the globe building and directing mammoth multinational corporations that look and operate just like the Western variety...
Lenin and Stalin led spartan personal lives befitting national leaders dedicated to serving the workers and peasants. Brezhnev and his cohorts live like Western capitalists, with personal estates, servants, holiday homes, fancy cars and other privileges, while the majority of Soviet workers struggle to make ends meet.
The Soviet people are not blind, neither are they fools. They realize that what they have is no longer socialism and are taking steps to fight their new rulers. The new Soviet tsars are in the midst of a tremendous military buildup and consider war as one means of stifling dissent at home. Soviet workers have no more love of war and suffering than workers of any other land. Just as the first two world wars concluded in major revolutionary upheavals, let the workers of all lands vow to take a third world war into socialist revolution, thus putting a final end to war.