This is the seventh part in our series of articles on some of the basic politics of Socialist Labour for discussion by its members.
There are two fundamental reasons why socialism has to be international. Both rise from the nature of the existing global economic system, capitalism. One of capitalism’s historic achievements has been the formation of a world market. If we think about our own everyday lives, it is immediately apparent that we depend on the products of the world.
We wake in the morning in bedding made of cotton, or some mixture of fibres from across the globe. The same with the floor tiles or rug onto which we step when we get out of bed. The coffee or tea we drink with our breakfast may come from South America or Asia. Our mobile phone and television were probably made in China and we may use a South African network like MTN. The bus or car we travel to work in was probably made in Japan or Germany.
To get through a single day, we use the products of the labour of workers across the world. True, some of these goods could be produced locally. But it is also the case that our lives are immensely enriched by our material interdependence with the whole world. The idea of relying purely on local resources is deeply reactionary.
For the first time in history capitalism has created a genuinely world society, where all our lives are entwined together in a common history and a common fate. Many of us followed the US elections and celebrated with the defeat of Trump. We may spend our Saturday afternoons watching our favourite European football teams. Materially, socialism will build on that achievement, extending and developing our mutual solidarity with working people in every corner of the globe.
The second point is less good. Capitalism has made a world system, but has always done so by the most brutal means. The making of a world market was achieved by conquest, robbery, piracy, enslavement, threats, bribery and even compulsory drug-trafficking.
Ferocious exploitation and equally ferocious competition, often in warlike form, have marked world capitalism from its birth to the present. Under capitalism world inequalities have deepened despite all the talk of wealth ‘trickling down’ to the poor. These realities of world capitalism give the question of socialism in one country an urgent sharpness.
As bitter experience has shown time and again over the past century, even quite mild and non-socialist popular movements meet with bitter resistance from the world capitalist class. US capital mobilised to overthrow the moderate democratic government in Iran in the 1950s, and the British and French invaded Egypt when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956. The US backed a bloody military coup in Chile against a reformist socialist government in 1973
Cuba has been under a US economic blockade for decades and France supported the assassination of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. The US and Britain supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa and are still backing the racist regime in Israel. The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO place pressure on any government that attempts even the mildest of reforms. They encouraged the ending of fuel subsidies and privatisation of NEPA.
If ‘moderate’ governments provoke foreign economic and military interventions, just think how the capitalist class would respond to genuine socialism!
The fate of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is sufficient evidence. Faced with the first workers’ republic in the world, the world’s capitalist powers sent soldiers and guns to back the supporters of the previous regime in a civil war that continued for years. Terrified that ‘Bolshevism’ would spread, they used every means they could to isolate and defeat socialism.
The costs to the infant socialist state were immense. Although the Bolsheviks eventually won militarily, the pressures of the civil war effectively drowned the popular democratic institutions.
The very working class that had led the move to socialism shrank in size. The cities became depopulated. There was a terrifying death toll, not just from bullets, but also from hunger and the diseases brought by the famine conditions.
Only one thing could have saved the socialist government – the spread of the socialism to other countries. This was not a utopian dream. The end of the First World War initiated the greatest wave of working class insurgency ever seen in Europe.
New communist parties inspired by Russian socialism were created overnight. They lacked, however, the clarity needed to seize the opportunities of the time. The Bolsheviks knew socialism could only succeed if it spread. That was why they devoted so much energy to forming a new Communist International. Its key purpose was to unite all the best militants across the world, and above all in Europe, around clear socialist principles and strategies.
For half a decade, everything was in the balance. The revival of soviet democracy in Russia was still a real possibility, but needed aid from abroad. There were titanic labour battles in Germany, Italy, France, Britain, but the young communist forces were insufficient.
The social democratic parties worked to contain working class militancy, siding with conservatism rather than the left. Workers across Europe suffered immense defeats. Russia remained isolated, and the tendencies to ‘degeneration’ of socialism strengthened.
It was in the process of the decay of the Russian Revolution that Stalin put forward his proposal for ‘socialism in one country’. It was a signal, not of victory, but of the defeat of socialism.