A People’s History of the World
Page 73
In Chile the parliamentary Socialist Party was the beneficiary of the new militancy. One of its leaders, Salvador Allende, was elected president in 1970, and the right-wing majority in parliament agreed to him assuming office in return for a constitutional guarantee that he would not disturb the military chain of command. Important US business interests were not happy at this, and two years into Allende’s term of office they were joined by major sections of the Chilean ruling class. There was an attempt to drive him from office in the autumn of 1972 through a ‘bosses’ strike’ spearheaded by lorry owners. It was thwarted by workers seizing their factories and setting up cordones – similar to the workers’ councils of 1917 and 1956 – to link the factories. An attempted coup in June 1973 failed due to splits in the armed forces and massive street protests. But the Communist Party and main sectors of the Socialist Party told people to wind down the cordones and trust in the ‘constitutional’ traditions of the army. Allende brought generals, including Augusto Pinochet, into his government, believing this would placate the right and maintain order. In September Pinochet staged a coup, bombarded Allende in the presidential palace and murdered thousands of worker activists. While the workers’ movement was being lulled to sleep in Europe by its own leaders, it was drowned in blood in southern Latin America.
The flame lit in 1968 was to flare up one more time in Europe. Portugal had been a dictatorship with fascist characteristics since the late 1920s. But by the mid-1970s it was losing the war to control its African colonies. In April 1974 a coup overthrew the dictator Caetano, replacing him with a conservative general, Spínola, who was backed by the country’s major monopolies and committed to a negotiated settlement to the wars.
The collapse of the dictatorship unleashed a wave of struggle. The great shipyards of Lisnave and Setnave were occupied. Bakers, postal workers and airport workers struck. Many of the army captains who had taken the risk of organising the coup were much more radical than Spínola and wanted an immediate end to the wars, while Spínola wanted to drag them out until the liberation movements agreed peace terms which would protect Portuguese business interests. The only properly organised underground party was the Communist Party. Its leaders made a deal with Spínola to end the strikes (earning the distrust of some of the most powerful groups of workers in the Lisbon area), joined the government and attempted to infiltrate middle-class supporters into positions of influence in the armed forces and the media. Its aim was to lift itself up by balancing between the workers and the generals until it could establish a regime along the lines of those in eastern Europe after the war.
It was a manoeuvre that could not possibly work. The Communist Party could not stop the militancy of the Lisbon workers and disaffection in the armed forces leading to the growth of forces to its left any more than it could it calm the panic within Western capitalism at the revolutionary events on its doorstep.
Two unsuccessful attempts at right-wing coups led to Spínola losing office, and to a further radicalisation among workers and within the ranks of the army. Backed by the CIA and the social democratic governments of western Europe, the right organised a series of near-risings in rural northern Portugal. The army captains who exercised effective military power swung from one political option to another. Then, in November 1975, a senior officer with social democrat backing succeeded in provoking some of the left-wing officers into a half-hearted attempt to take power, and used it as an excuse to march several hundred disciplined troops on Lisbon to disarm the disaffected regiments. The Communist Party, which had appeared so powerful only a few weeks earlier – when an officer close to it held the premiership – made no attempt to organise working-class resistance. A revolution which had deeply worried the leaders of capitalism in Europe and America in the summer of 1975 accepted defeat in the autumn with barely a murmur.
A hard rain
The long boom came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 1973, as Western economies went into recession simultaneously for the first time since the 1930s and unemployment doubled. This was enough to produce panic in government and business circles everywhere. Mainstream economists had never been able to explain how the slump of the 1930s had happened, and none of them could be sure they were not facing a similar situation.
In the 1950s and 1960s they had convinced themselves that slumps were no longer possible because they could apply the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes. Business cycles were a thing of the past, the author of the world’s best-selling economic textbook, Nobel prizewinner Paul Samuelson, had assured them in 1970. But when they tried to apply Keynesian remedies to the recession they did not work. The only effect was to increase inflation while leaving unemployment untouched. By 1976 they had abandoned such methods amid panic about the danger of escalating inflation. Economists and political journalists switched overnight to a belief in the completely ‘free’ market, unconstrained by state intervention – a theory previously preached only by a few isolated prophets such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Such a mass conversion of intellectuals had not been seen since the days when theologians changed their ‘beliefs’ on the say-so of princes.
The popularity of the prophets of the free market could not, however, restore unemployment levels to those of the long boom. Nor could it prevent another recession at the beginning of the 1980s, doubling unemployment again and affecting even wider areas of the world than that of 1974–76.
One popular explanation for the crises of 1974–76 and 1980–82 blamed the sudden increases in the price of oil after the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973 and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war of 1980. But a fresh crisis broke at the beginning of the 1990s, at a time of falling oil prices. Another explanation claimed that the crisis of 1974–76 resulted from the impact of rising wages on profits. But this could not explain the later crises, since wages in the world’s single most important economy, the US, fell steadily after the mid-1970s. 297
Something more fundamental in the system had changed, turning the ‘golden age’ into a ‘leaden age’. The US had been able to afford massive arms spending at the time of the Korean War, absorbing perhaps 20 per cent of its total output and equal to half the surplus available for investment. This had provided markets for its own industries and for exports from states such as Japan, which spent very little on arms. But by the time of the Vietnam War competition from such countries meant the US could not afford its old level of military output. It still produced massive quantities of weaponry, but the proportion of output this absorbed was probably about a third of that at the time of the Korean War. This was simply not enough to ward off recurrent and deepening world recessions, even if they were not yet on the scale of the 1930s slump. 298
This did not bring all economic growth to an end in the advanced countries. But growth was much slower and more uneven than previously, and the cycle of boom and slump had returned with a vengeance. Average output per head in the 1980s grew at less than half the rate of the early 1960s. Unemployment reached levels virtually unimaginable in the long boom, commonly staying above 10 per cent for years at a time, and rising close to 20 per cent in places such as Ireland and Spain. Lower rates in the US in the late 1980s and late 1990s were driven by welfare cuts which forced people to take jobs at poverty wages – the poorest 10 per cent earning 25 per cent less than the equivalent group in Britain. 299
Generalised job insecurity became a feature everywhere. By the 1990s mainstream politicians were deriding the idea that people could have ‘jobs for life’. Yet that phrase had summed up what most people took for granted through the long boom. Of course, people changed jobs as some industries grew and others contracted. But except in a few ‘declining industries’, workers usually did so voluntarily, responding to the pull of better prospects, not the push of redundancy. Now the push became the norm, and opinion polls suggested fear of it weighed on the minds of about half the working population.
Capitalism is a more dynamic form of class society than any before in history. Its dynamis
m, its ever changing character, is as typical of a slump as of a boom. Some firms go out of business while others prosper at their expense. Some industries contract while others expand. Even in the worst slump there would be growth sectors – such as pawnbrokers buying up the goods of the most desperate and security services protecting the wealth of the rich.
The dynamism remained in the ‘leaden age’, but instead of offering the mass of people improved lives, as in the long boom, it threatened to snatch what they had achieved in the past. Whole industries disappeared, and towns were reduced to wastelands. Welfare benefits were cut to the levels of 50 years earlier – or even abolished in some US states. Meanwhile, a new brand of hard right politicians known as ‘Thatcherites’ or ‘neo-liberals’ toasted the unleashing of ‘enterprise’, and found an echo among a layer of social democratic politicians who treated a return to the orthodoxies of nineteenth-century politics as evidence of ‘modernity’.
The shift to the right had its impact on sections of the radical left, demoralised by the defeats of the mid-1970s – and in some cases by learning the truth about China and the bloody regime established by the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Some drew the conclusion that the whole revolutionary enterprise had been misconceived. Some believed they had been too severe in their criticism of parliamentary reformism. Some simply concluded that the class struggle was a thing of the past.
In fact there were some very big and sometimes violent class confrontations in the 1980s, as workers tried to prevent the disappearance of jobs in old-established industries – the struggles by steel workers in France and Belgium, the year-long strike of over 150,000 miners in Britain and a strike of similar length by 5,000 British print workers, a five-day general strike in Denmark, public sector strikes in Holland and British Columbia, and a one-day general strike in Spain.
But, by and large, these struggles were defeated, and one legacy of defeat was a growing belief that ‘old-fashioned’ methods of class struggle could not win. This led a layer of working-class activists to place their hopes once more in the promises of parliamentary politicians. It also encouraged left-wing intellectuals to question further the very notions of class and class struggle. They embraced an intellectual fashion called ‘postmodernism’, which claimed any interpretation of reality was as valid as any other, that there was no objective basis for notions such as class, and that any attempt to change the way society operates would be ‘totalitarian’, since it involved trying to impose a total conception of the world on others. Postmodernists rejected notions of struggling to change society just as the dangerous instability of society became ever more pronounced.
The crisis of state capitalism
More governments fell from power in 1989–90 than at any time in Europe since 1917–18 and, before that, 1848. The Eastern bloc was suddenly no more, and by 1991 the pillar which had supported it, the USSR, had crumbled as well. Despite postmodernist and ‘post-Marxist’ claims that such things were no longer possible, they had been pulled down by a combination of economic crisis and class struggle. If some on the left did not see this, it was because of their own illusions, not material realities. For the entire period since 1968 had been marked by deepening crises and repeated upsurges of struggle in the Eastern bloc.
The Russian occupation had succeeded in ‘normalising’ the situation in Czechoslovakia in 1968–69. But events in neighbouring Poland soon showed how widespread and deep the malaise had become. The regime had managed to crush the student movement of 1968, and attempted to use the police in a similar way against thousands of workers who occupied the giant shipyards in Gdansk (Danzig before the war) and Szczecin (Stettin) in 1970–71 in protest at price rises. The police killed a large number of workers. But solidarity strikes elsewhere forced out the regime’s head, Gomulka, and his successor, Gierek, withdrew the price increases. He borrowed from Western banks, the economy boomed, and Western journalists wrote of a ‘Polish miracle’. But increasing integration with Western markets meant that Poland was hit by the crisis in those markets in the mid-1970s. The government again tried to raise prices and launched police attacks on protesters.
The regime was not able to bury the memory of the workers’ actions this time, as it had after 1956–57 and 1970–71. Amid a sense of deepening crisis a group of intellectuals defied harassment and established a Workers’ Defence Committee and an underground paper, Robotnik (‘Worker’), with some 20,000 readers. The once-totalitarian regime remained in power, but it could no longer impose totalitarianism.
Its weakness eventually showed in the summer of 1980. A renewed attempt to impose price increases led to further strikes and the occupation of the Gdansk shipyards. A movement grew out of the occupation that recalled the Hungarian workers’ councils of 1956. But it had a life of 16 months, not three or four weeks.
The movement proclaimed itself an independent trade union, Solidarność (Solidarity). But in the year and a quarter of its legal existence it was something more than a trade union. Established by a conference of delegates from 3,500 factories and soon claiming ten million members, it represented an alternative power to that of the government. It became the focus for the aspirations of everyone sick of the old society, its very existence a challenge to the regime. Yet its leaders committed themselves deliberately to avoid overthrowing the government. They accepted the view of sympathetic intellectuals that they should aim at a ‘self-limiting revolution’. They made an assumption very similar to that of the Allende government in Chile: if the workers’ movement promised it would not threaten the state, the state would tolerate the workers’ movement. As a consequence, Solidarność suffered a fate similar to the Chilean movement. In mid-December 1981 the military leader Jaruzelski declared martial law, jammed the country’s telecommunications systems, arrested the entire Solidarność leadership and used troops against workers who resisted. Confused and demoralised, the workers’ organisations were broken. 300
However, the breaking of the Polish workers’ movement could not remove the underlying forces which had given rise to it. Rates of economic growth in the Eastern bloc were now no higher than in the bigger Western economies. What is more, the Reagan government in the US was embarking on a new arms build-up (with the stationing of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe) which the Russian government wanted to match. But the resources simply did not exist to meet the demands this put on the economy. The state capitalist regimes had to reform or risk class confrontation and internal collapse.
Russia’s ruler in the early 1980s, Andropov, had first-hand knowledge of the challenge a workers’ movement could pose. He had been Russian ambassador in Hungary in 1956 and head of the KGB during the rise of Solidarność in 1980–81. He wanted to prevent the possibility of a similar challenge arising in the USSR itself and began promoting people he thought would reform Russia. Foremost among these was Mikhail Gorbachev.
When Gorbachev took over as head of the USSR in 1985 he seemed all-powerful – and, when he spoke in 1987 and 1988 about the need for openness ( glasnost ) and reform, he seemed popular, too. But when he lost power in 1991 he had a popularity rating close to zero. His call for reform had created confusion in the police apparatus of the USSR and raised people’s hopes so that they began to challenge the exploitation and oppression of the previous 60 years. But his commitment to do no more than restructure the state capitalist organisation of production prevented him finding the resources necessary to satisfy those hopes. By the end of the decade the economic stagnation of the early 1980s had become economic contraction.
The spring of 1988 saw the first mass protests since the 1920s which were not immediately crushed by the police – first in Armenia and then in the Baltic states, movements of minority nationalities demanding greater rights. Gorbachev did not have the strength to repress them as his predecessors would have done. But he did not have the means to buy them off either. Vicious but incomplete repression gave way to half-hearted concessions. It was the classic formula by which regimes h
ave often helped ignite revolt.
Gorbachev made moves to stabilise his position by reliance on conservative forces in the summer of 1989 and the spring of l991. On each occasion he was stopped in his tracks by huge miners’ strikes which came close to shutting off the country’s energy supplies. In particular, the strike of summer 1989 showed more than a passing resemblance to the first great workers’ protests in Poland. Gorbachev had to make concessions to the various opposition movements if the whole regime was not to risk being engulfed from below, and as he did so his own power to control events evaporated.
The impact was devastating for the regimes installed in eastern Europe 45 years earlier. The various rulers had lost their ultimate fallback position in the face of revolt – the threat of Russian intervention. Already, a year earlier, the hard man of Poland, Jaruzelski, had settled a series of miners’ strikes by agreeing to negotiate with the leaders of Solidarność – although the underground organisation was a shadow of what it had been in 1980–81. In the summer of 1989 Kádár’s successors in Hungary agreed on similar ‘round table’ negotiations with the country’s considerably weaker dissident groups.
In September and October a wave of demonstrations swept East Germany, and its government conceded negotiations and began to demolish the Berlin Wall which cut it off from West Germany as a token of its sincerity. Later in November it was the turn of Husák in Czechoslovakia to fall, amid enormous street demonstrations and a one-hour general strike. Bulgaria followed suit. An attempt by Romania’s dictator to resist the wave of change by shooting down demonstrators led to a spontaneous uprising in the capital, Bucharest, and his execution by a firing squad under the command of his own generals. In six months the political map of half of Europe had been redrawn. The only Stalinist regime left in eastern Europe was Albania, and this collapsed early in 1991 after a general strike.