As a friend of the Great Russians,with the recent great tragedies in mind,I intervened just in time to prevent another nuclear stand-off and rebalance the Russian economy with my 'Spielplan' ("world plan") of July-August 1988. That plan led to a democratic revolution by trade unions and national democratic forces. The aim was to improve living standards by inculcating flexibility and competitiveness. The means was trade and commerce on the lines of a mixed economy and a democratic and part social revolution in politics and ownership.
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Contemporary opposition to change was not just in the East.
30.6.2021
Firstly,one thing must be pointed out.
The lie is given to those who claim world socialism is dead by no person more so than Karl Marx himself in his written explorations into political economy. Note his Foundations of Political Economy or Grundrisse of 1858 to 1859. That book was not published widely until 1968. In this work, Marx portrayed capitalism as a world system created by trade.
The widespread publication of Grundrisse (Foundations of Political Economy) launched what is misleadingly known as Unorthodox Trotskyism.
Neo-liberal types and political riff-raff who celebrated the 'triumph of democracy' should pay more attention to that work. They might think more soberly if they did and not go around spewing out dung like a muck spreader.
I will not try to quote verbatim from Marx's writings,rather from fading memory,namely that it is the world market that creates capitalism.
As everyone knows who has even the slightest knowledge of the Soviet Union, Russia was splendidly isolated from the world market in the 1980's.
For a great country like Russia,claiming as it did to be socialist-socialism surely is the doctrine of 'all in this together' and 'unity over difference'- that economic isolation was a sad reflection not so much on Soviet government but,more so,on its army's failure to decelerate militarily and the political obstinacy at all levels of the CPSU.
Managers could also be blamed for the consistent failure to appeal over the heads of political meddlers to Western business for industrial, commercial and technical partnerships with the aim of mutually beneficial trade.
The favoured battering ram of the Western media against the Soviet Union was central planning.
It is an incontrovertible fact,no matter how you approach world trade or the national economy or micro-economy, that there is always PLANNING,be it by monopoly, manager, chief executive or owner.
What must be also conceded is that planning is initiated by and subject to some type of market mechanism. Anyone who claims otherwise is not to be taken seriously in important economic and industrial matters and should be sent to the Funny Farm.
The theory of economic liberalism has ended up on the scrapheap of history where the Soviet Union ended up. Neither could deliver higher living standards or a better way of life.
The phenomenon of neoliberalism requires a study in political pathology and economic dystopia.
The contemporary background to my Marxist exposition on the Soviet Union was Thatcherism.
Let me sum it up, as I did to a bricklayer and to a hod-carrier in August 1986 on a London building site at St. Paul's Churchyard, "Everything it took you people 500 or 600 years to build up has been destroyed by Thatcher in 5 or 6 years."
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Can there be a modern scientific orientation for socialism and progress in the labour movement after the Fall?
Ideas not remotely connected to what Marx and Lenin wrote in actuality or said should be abandoned. Unless that is those ideas have democratic content and political traction. That other three-word slogan of mine commandeered by Thatcher, namely, Back to Basics could serve the left much better than throwing brickbats at the ghost of Marx and Lenin or the great unwashed does the Tories. (That other slogan she stole from me in 1983 was 'the resolute approach').
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Remembering my dated plea for change in the East and international rapprochement in the West of the summer of 1988,Marx's philosophical proposition,"The only constant is change" comes to mind.
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1.7.2021
Engels on revolution
Was it in his work Anti-Duhring (1878) that Engels wrote of revolution, or Marx in his articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
"....all competing parties must first come to power and wear themselves out and be destroyed before the working class gain the upper hand."
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I say to those in Russia who have a burning nostalgia for the past,"Is it not abundantly clear that the situation of an increasing number of people is immeasurably better under the mixed economy?"
To Westerners,I say,"The Russian economy is largely public,with what Perestroika tried to achieve,namely, industrial partnerships linked to Western firms and large scale private farming. There are joint ventures in many fields. Technology transfers could not be achieved in any other way than by the Russians dropping their guard".
The benefits of a gradual transition to a market economy and groundbreaking change?
Russia enjoys the honey of personal freedom,an end to arbitrary governance and much higher living standards.
Why so?
The interpenetration of former opposites led to a dramatic end to East-West tensions in the period after 1991,a real peace much better than the situation that prevailed between 1965 and 1983.
Regarding the Russian economy,as Gorbachev puts it in three simple words,"Perestroika continues today".
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The End of Communism?
For those who endeavour to lead others politically and put garbled nonsense about The Collapse of Communism in print,let them remember what Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring,
"When the further expansion of the means of production is no longer compatible with social relations,then a revolution comes on the order of the day for all classes".
Or,put more simply,post-Fall,Russian social development and international economic reciprocity continues at a much higher level in the mixed economy than the CPSU or the West could ever have imagined thirty years ago.
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The nationalist-socialist hangmen are gone or too old to influence events.
The desire for economic justice may have been what first brought Engels and Marx together in 1844. No one who wants a better standard of life or social equality should forget the lessons of the recent democratic upheavals in the East,be they conservative or communist.
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11.5.2022
For those in tiny groups of wayward individuals who think that they can speak with authority on everything under the sun,it must be brought to their attention that the monster which was created in the 1930's in the former countries of the Russian Empire expired over 30 years ago.
Irish republican socialism
Those of you who want long queues for medical treatment and lengthy delays in social provision should hand in your bandoleros.
Episodes of random violence and scurrilous accusations which you were well paid for represent neither democracy nor progress.
Progress remains the goal of all right-thinking people. Your Russia was a totalitarian idyll.
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17.8.2022
Change is cyclical. First a drift to the right,then a sharp turn to the left.
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8.2.2023
The enduring legacy of the Fall is that failure to deliver higher living standards leads to a loss of political authority by the state and political collapse.
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27.2.2023
Time for Change in the US
It seems to me that the United States is a society built on a fraud,a political fraud, namely holding out the prospect of Freedom and Democracy.
Its leader knows very well that he is a front man for business and financial interests and he also knows that he is someone who must paper over the growing cracks in his own society.
As Obama discovered,the US President cannot deliver the goods.
By Freedom and Democracy, people in the US mean higher living standards.
Statistical tables are probably misleading but it would appear that living standards have not improved since 1977.
The US Presidents are weavers of myths and spinners of illusions. America has been given over to the cause of the enrichment of a small number of people who have climbed up the greasy pole.
Every US President including Reagan has been a hoaxer and has helped to create the environment for the webs of deceit,one of which I wove in July-August 1988 about being "gay"," dressed in my little pink three-piece striped suit with my pink shirt and pink tie and pink hat,pink shoes and socks and pink boa" to which O' Riordain's cantorial 'reply' was,"I want to reach out and grab you".
My 'double bluff' being called,I exclaimed, "This is a stick-up,hand over the contents of the till..." and that took the 'drama' of that year on to the "What the f... is this f...ing thing? All I can see is something called cearc!".
To which 'O Riordain's' reply was,"That's all we've made from selling the ol' sh... the Russians have sent us since 1938".
That,in turn, led on to the 'basement dungeon scene' and the 'prisoner' and 'thumbscrews' sketch (Der Spielplan, July-August 1988.14 Fortfield Terrace, Upper Rathmines Road,Dublin 6).
O' Riordain was 'given' his trusty Sancho Panza,'Eugenie', his ready if curmudgeonly 'accomplice' in the pressired monologue about world affairs and "bringing the post-War settlement to an end" .
I remonstrated this,"You pair have been pussyfooting around one another for the past forty years and the world has run out of patience waiting for you to f... one another and you haven't done it yet so I'm calling the Cold War off and wrapping up Gorbachev's tent and heading home since it's safe to say,at this stage of proceedings,nothing is going to happen between you...."( Der Spielplan,July-August 1988).
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3.4.2023
Conspiracy theorists who see a CIA plot rather than a mediated set of ideas for Russian prosperity,peace and civility should remember a pamphlet of Lenin which was titled "One Step Forward,Two Steps Backward ".
To hurlers on the ditch in Ireland and America,the notion of change is illusory.
However,rapid progress can be achieved by root-and-branch reform.
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27.8.2023
Before he died, Gorbachev pointed to the political leadership which had been sustained by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the people who had derailed and sabotaged the restructuring of the economy.
Who were they?
Primarily Ligachev,Likhachev,Ryhkov and Velekhovsky.
Those people were the people Westerners referred to as apparatchiks.
Those were the people who like Marx's boyars of Wallachia, "lived in the interstices of society" namely between the Commission for State Security and the Praesidium of a mass socialist party. (That was a rare insight from Marx on problems of state and society.)
Many Soviet leaders highlighted the problems which were posed by their executive officers.
Lenin grasped the nettle in 1919 by pointing to the emerging bureaucracy while Stalin in the midst of Ukrainian collectivisation referred to technocrats or apparatchiks as "Dizzy with success".
The dilemma for all rulers and unpopular politicians is "getting it done". Therein,we have the key to modern times in the East and West.
My reply to conspiracy theorists regarding the end of the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union runs thus,"Putin is Gorbachev's only legitimate successor and is a vastly more erudite and decisive sort of person. He has learned the ways of the world and what makes for a sound businessman. If you didn't like Gorbachev as some press barons didn't,you won't like Putin. There is not a cigarette paper of difference between the two to use the contrary and twisted ('cam is casta') formulation."
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Those who want public property cannot ignore economic trends and international competition or the accumulation of that which dictates national prosperity,foreign currency reserves and advanced technique.
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How to explain the 'change' to numbskulls such as Western Communists and brazen thugs such as Stalinists whose hooliganism is a front for rapacious exploitation?
Best not to talk to them since most of them are dominatrixes or old men. If you are buttonholed,tell them that it was Lenin who pioneered part privatisation, state freehold with leaseholding employers.
Why did Lenin compromise with private interests to introduce franchises?
Because of labour unrest and an unmanageable workforce with unrealistic expectations largely created by Bolshevik agitation between 1915 and 1917.
If....
.....you don't like Gorbachev and Putin,then you wouldn't have liked Lenin.
Non sequi!
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What the 'world plan' was predicated on was the facts of state monopoly exploitation of labour, state accumulation of unearned income,the state as organiser of relations in production and the state playing god to the workers (otzovism,Lenin,1911-3).
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The KGB were the key movers and shakers in The Change. They knew of the relative decline in productivity and a country living on its dreams and the idolatry of Lenin and Stalin though the latter features were greatly overrated in the West.
State capitalism
Was it "a lot better than what we have now" as Lenin claimed in 1921?
Yes,a hundred times,yes!
In 1921!!!!
Russia was just as much a ruthless exploiter state as any other in 1988 because it had reverted to state capitalism i.e. nationalised trusts and its revolutionary enthusiasm had greatly dimmed.
It was ripe for change. Democratic change, not the chaos wished for by Marxists such as Tony Cliff and the Kathedersozialisten,the heads of faculities,in Western universities.
State socialism?
State socialism and state capitalism move along similar lines towards common ownership.
State capitalism in Russia after 1921 was how Lenin referred to the pending economic situation,a mixture of public and private ownership.
Later,Stalin came to power and adopted totalitarian economic methods of capital expansion.
In 1988,the party came to its all-but-final destination,one short step away that is from the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union.
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