Ebrahim Harvey
MY REVOLUTION
Something big, historic and numbing has happened to socialists and activists the world over. Since the dramatic collapse of the Soviet empire and other Eastern European Stalinist regimes in 1989, many have turned away from political and community involvement and toward themselves, friends and families.
So pervasive is this inward trend that anybody who was involved during the 1970s and 1980s in political, labour and community struggles in this country, and other parts of the world, will tell you, if they are honest, that a massive wave of demoralisation, much of which still exists, followed the collapse of the “communist” regimes.
That some will say that these were Stalinist regimes and not genuinely socialist is a moot point. The impact on the left was devastating, nonetheless. Why?
These regimes, particularly the Soviet Union, presented, with all its own bureaucratic horrors, a powerful pole of attraction towards which, to a greater or lesser extent, all on the left gravitated. It also provided a very powerful adversary to imperialism which served to keep it in check. It did not matter whether some described the Soviet state as Stalinist, state capitalist or a deformed workers’ state. Its demise led to despair and demoralisation for the left the world over. Analysis aside, this demise was of great historic importance. Some described is as “earth-shattering”, which was not an exaggeration. It was no less shocking for those who had foreseen the impending demise.
Till today the real depth and historical meaning of those events have not been fully told. In fact it was so numbing that many did not have the ability, courage and energy to seriously examine what and how it happened. There were several reported suicides of people, young and old, who committed their lives to socialism and had seen their dreams of a socialist world go up in flames with the cataclysmic events all across Eastern Europe. Many did not understand that these events did not mean that socialism was dead and that it may in fact have cleaned the slate for genuine socialism to emerge.
Thus began the slide into a yawning abyss of despair for socialists all over the world, which was deepened by the perception that the demise of socialism was due to the triumph of liberal capitalism over it. Some writers, way out of their depth, referred not only to the end of socialism but also to “the end of history” and “the end of ideology” to capture this historic moment.
Activists in many parts of the world, in fact, never fully recovered from this despair. Aside from political withdrawal the psychological and emotional consequences were traumatic, the scars of which are still visible today. A deep loss of faith in socialism and the future afflicted many activists and ordinary people.
The demise of the Stalinist regimes roughly coincided with the emergence of globalisation. In fact this demise seemed to spur on globalisation, which fed frenziedly from the supposed triumph of capitalist market forces over socialism. The collapse opened the floodgates of globalisation, roaring at the “failure of communism” and the “success of capitalist liberal democracy”.
But what many fail to realise is that before these events unfolded across Eastern Europe the socialist movement was not strong. Socialism was already then on the defensive in most countries, worsened by the capitalist boom of the 1980s in most of the advanced industrial countries. It was the growing economic crisis in Russia and Eastern Europe during the same period which laid the basis for the overthrow of the Stalinist regimes. But, in spite of all this, their collapse was an incalculable loss for the socialist movement. It greatly strengthened the hand of imperialism which ran roughshod over the globe, as globalisation has made evident.
This false capitalist triumphalism fuelled the demoralisation, cynicism and scepticism of many on the left and was the basis for the emergence of either complete withdrawal and/or the pursuit of private pleasures, surrounded by the trappings and lifestyle of typical middle-class mediocrity which served as a substitute for mass organisation, mass struggles and mass meetings.
A fatalistic “live and let live” and “make the best of a bad situation” prevailed. Overnight, bright and dedicated activists became apolitical and detached from the masses they were organically tied to, and, in extreme cases, seemed to worship. Is our mortality a drop in the ocean of history, an unspoken but deep reason why we now take the line of least resistance and live for ourselves?
The cultural climate of globalisation eschews politics in general and revolutionary politics in particular, praises mediocrity, individualism, the inward turn and pursuit of private pleasures. As Alex Callinicos put it at the start of the 1990s: “For the middle class the good life consists of the yuppie social comedies of thirtysomething and sex, lies and videotape, and cultivating the pleasures and anxieties of personal relationships.” From building the revolution we went to tend to our pools and gardens.
Today some of these people are trying to claw their way back and rekindle the values and ideas for which they were before prepared to die. We are surrounded by so much shallowness, mediocrity and poverty, against which we strongly strove before, that there is an urgent need for an outward turn and going back to our roots.
Today there are many reasons to feel optimistic about the future.
Unlike what propagandists and apologists for capitalism want us to believe, this system has been a disastrous failure all over the world. Poverty, unemployment, starvation and death oozes out of the pores of capitalist society and bear eloquent but cruel testimony to this failure.
In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe many people, in the face of their lot having worsened since the advent of capitalism, openly say that as bad as the previous regimes were they were better off then. Most yearn for that past when they were oppressed but had a job, home, free health care and education and food, even though all this often did not add up to much. Today, under capitalism, they have nothing.
The global movement of civil society against globalisation is on the ascendency, gaining strength and inspiration from each battle. And so it is time for the left who went into hibernation, retreated to the margins of society or took refuge in diversion to roll up their sleeves, dust off the books and take to the streets.