NEHRU’S INDIA
Before he met Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was an Englishman in Indian clothing. After studying at home under a series of English governesses and tutors, he was sent to school in England at the age of fifteen. Known to his English friends as “Joe Nehru,” he attended Harrow and Cambridge, where he earned a degree in natural sciences, with a minor in actresses and social life, and then read for the bar at the Inns of Court in London. He spent his vacations traveling in Europe. In 1912 Nehru returned to India, with little enthusiasm, to practice law with his father, the prominent barrister Motilal Nehru.
Motilal Nehru was already active in the Indian nationalist movement and a leader in the Indian National Congress, which at the time was fighting for dominion status within the British Empire. Jawaharlal Nehru joined his father as a Congress member in 1918, with the same lack of enthusiasm that he brought to the practice of law.
Involvement in the Independence Movement
In 1919 Jawaharlal Nehru overheard General R.H. Dyer boasting about the recent massacre of Indian protesters at Jallianwala Bagh, in which Dyer ordered Gurkha soldiers to fire on thousands of Indians gathered for a religious observance in a public park. Outraged, Nehru became seriously involved in the independence movement: touring rural India, organizing nationalist volunteers, and making public speeches. Under Gandhi’s influence, Nehru abandoned his Westernized lifestyle and began wearing clothes made from khadi (homespun cotton cloth), studying the Bhagavad Gita, and practicing yoga.
When India achieved independence from Great Britain in 1947, Nehru became the first prime minister and minister for external affairs, a dual position he held until his death in 1964.
Nehru believed that the answers to India’s problems lay in socialist economic theory, but he didn’t let his socialist convictions affect his foreign policy decisions. Instead of picking sides in the Cold War, he chose “positive neutrality” and served as a key spokesperson for the unaligned countries of Asia and Africa. On the domestic front he committed India to a policy of industrialization, reorganization of its states on a linguistic basis, and the development of a casteless, secular state.
Indira Gandhi
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Nehru’s daughter, Indira, became prime minister two years after her father’s death, using her married name, Gandhi. (Her husband was no relation to Mohandas.) Between them, Indira and her son, Rajiv, held the position of prime minister for twenty years between 1966 and 1989.
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Nehru and Gandhi agreed that poverty was India’s greatest challenge after independence, but they disagreed on the solution. Gandhi, like many of the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, believed the solution was self-sufficiency at the level of the village commune: shared labor and wealth, and a spinning wheel in every hut. Nehru looked for national self-sufficiency, based on “tractors and big machinery.”
Under Nehru’s leadership, India adopted a mixture of Fabian-style central planning and free enterprise to rebuild the country’s ravaged economy. The government instituted a series of five-year plans intended to build India’s production capabilities and improve agricultural yields. It also launched several major campaigns against rural poverty.
NASSER’S EGYPT
The son of a village post office clerk, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) led his first demonstrations protesting British influence over Egypt’s government and economy when he was sixteen. After graduating from secondary school, Nasser spent several months as a law student before he gave in and took the easiest path to upward mobility—the army. He entered the Egyptian Royal Military Academy in 1936, graduating as a second lieutenant.
Revolution and Reform
On July 23, 1952, following a breakdown of law and order in Cairo, Nasser and eighty-nine other Free Officers carried out a bloodless coup against King Farouk, who spent the rest of his life in exile in Monaco. A year later Nasser emerged as the unquestioned leader of Egypt.
With his new government in place, Nasser began a program of reforms based on what he described as “Arab socialism,” which was derived from a rejection of imperialism rather than class struggle. He believed that state ownership or control of the means of production and redistribution of income were necessary to make Egypt strong.
Criticism of Arab Socialism
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Nasser’s “Arab socialism” drew complaints from devout Muslims and Marxists alike. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood accused Nasser of camouflaging a secular policy with Islamic language. Marxists claimed that since “Arab socialism” wasn’t based on the concept of class struggle, it wasn’t socialism at all.
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Agrarian Reforms
Nasser’s first major reforms were agrarian. Beginning with King Farouk’s extensive personal holdings, large estates were broken up and distributed to peasant families. The law in 1953 limited land ownership to 200 feddans per family. Subsequent legislation further limited ownership to 100 and later 50 feddans. Along with land redistribution, Nasser’s government introduced state-controlled agricultural cooperatives to provide farmers with credit, fertilizer, and seeds, began a program to reclaim land from the desert, and extended labor laws to cover agricultural workers.
The controversial nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 was only the first step in a program designed to bring the economy under centralized government control. In 1960 and 1961 banks and major industries were nationalized, and direct government control was imposed on important sectors of the economy, including insurance and transportation. Only retail businesses and housing were left in private hands.
The creation of a centralized economy was accompanied by the implementation of social reforms. Nasser’s government introduced new protections for labor, and extended public health services and a system of industrial profit sharing that funded insurance and welfare services.
The National Charter
In 1962 Nasser submitted a document called The National Charter to the National Congress of the short-lived United Arab Republic. In ten short chapters he outlined the ideological foundation of Arab socialism. The charter begins with a list of the six principles that led to the 1952 revolution:
1. To end imperialism
2. To end the system of feudal landlords
3. To end the domination of capital over the government
4. To establish a basis of social justice
5. To build a powerful national army
6. To establish a sound democratic system
It ends with a call for Arab unity.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
Glasnost and Perestroika
In early August 1980 workers across Poland went on strike to protest rising food prices. In Gdańsk some 17,000 workers at the Lenin Shipyard staged a strike and barricaded themselves inside. By mid-August the strike was losing steam. Shipyard director Klemens Gniech assured strikers that he would negotiate for their demands if they went back to work. It was tempting, even though Gniech had not kept his promises in the past.
The strike gained new life when electrician Lech Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard wall, jumped onto a bulldozer, and urged the striking workers on. The reinvigorated strikers elected Wałęsa as the head of a strike committee to negotiate with management.
Lech Wałęsa
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Lech Wałęsa (1943–) began work at the Lenin Shipyard as an electrician in 1967. He emerged as a union activist during anti-government protests in 1976, and consequently lost his job. For the next four years he earned a living doing temporary jobs and worked with other activists to organize free, noncommunist trade unions.
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Three days later the strikers’ demands were met. When other strikers in the city asked Wałęsa to continue his strike out of solidarity, he agreed. Wałęsa established the Interfactory Strike Committee, which united industrial workers in the Gdańsk area into a single bargaining unit. Within a week the committee had presented the Polish gov
ernment with a list of demands that included the right to strike and form free unions and declared a general strike. On August 31 the Gdańsk strikers and the Polish government signed an agreement that granted free and independent unions the right to strike, and also provided greater freedom of religions and political expression.
THE INDEPENDENT SELF-GOVERNING TRADE UNION SOLIDARITY
Throughout 1981 the communist government of Wojciech Jaruzelski was faced with a series of controlled strikes by the independent trade union Solidarity, in conjunction with demands for economic reforms, free elections, and the involvement of trade unions at the highest level of decision-making. Both Wałęsa and Jaruzelski were pressured into extreme positions: Wałęsa by more militant unionists, and Jaruzelski by the Soviet Union. On December 13 Jaruzelski declared martial law. Solidarity was declared illegal and its leaders, included Wałęsa, were arrested. On October 8, 1982, the Polish parliament officially dissolved the union. Solidarity continued to operate underground.
Nobel Prize
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Lech Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. Still operating underground, Solidarity members were heartened by the award. The Polish government was less enthusiastic. Fearing that Wałęsa would not be able to return to Poland if he left, his wife traveled to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf.
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In 1988 collapsing economic conditions set off a new wave of labor unrest in Poland. With no support from the USSR, demands that the government recognize Solidarity forced Jaruzelski to negotiate. In April 1989 the Polish government agreed to legalize Solidarity and allow it to participate in elections. In the free elections held that June, Solidarity candidates won ninety-nine out of one hundred seats in the newly formed Polish Senate, and all of the 161 seats that opposition candidates were allowed to contest in the lower house. In August longtime Solidarity supporter Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first noncommunist head of government in the Eastern Bloc.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV OPENS THE DOOR
Born into a peasant family in the Stavropol territory of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–) joined the Young Communist League as soon as he was old enough to become a member. He spent several years driving a combine on a state farm before he enrolled in law school at Moscow University and became a member of the Communist Party. After he graduated in 1955, Gorbachev gained the attention of high-ranking Soviet officials, in part because of his work as the head of the Stavropol region’s agricultural department and in part because several popular hot water spas were located in the region. In 1971 he was elected to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. He became a full member of the Politburo in 1980.
As a forty-nine-year-old among the eighty-somethings in the Politburo, Gorbachev became one of its most active and visible members. In the mid-1980s three general secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) died in quick succession. Following Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), who served as general secretary from 1977 to 1982, Yuri Andropov (1914–1984) held the office for fifteen months. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985), died after only eleven months. On March 11, 1985, the Politburo elected its youngest member, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the post.
Gorbachev’s primary goal was to rescue the stagnant Soviet economy. At first he tried the timeworn Soviet method of calling for rapid modernization of technology and greater worker productivity. It was not enough. As Gorbachev described the problem, “The very system was dying away; its sluggish senile blood no longer contained any vital juices.”
USSR, Not Russia
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The USSR was often referred to as Russia. In fact, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, informally known as the Soviet Union, was a federation of fifteen Soviet republics that were created out of the remains of the Russian empire in 1917. Russia was the dominant republic within the federation.
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In 1986 Gorbachev decided to try something new. He introduced two major economic and political policies: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
Implementing the new policy of glasnost, Gorbachev relaxed previous restrictions on freedom of speech and the press. He released thousands of political prisoners, including dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov.
Under the new policy of perestroika, Gorbachev took steps to untangle the government’s legislative and executive branches from the CPSU. “We need democracy like air,” he announced. In December 1988 a new bicameral parliament called the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies was elected in a contested election, with multiple candidates and secret ballots. Dissidents of all kinds replaced long-standing party officials, including Sakharov, who was elected as the representative of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1989 the new Congress elected a new Supreme Soviet from its ranks, with Gorbachev as chairman. Similar legislatures were established in each of the Soviet republics.
In March 1990 Gorbachev took further steps to transfer political power from the CPSU to elected government institutions. Under pressure from him, the Congress of People’s Deputies elected him to the newly created post of the president of the USSR and abolished the Communist Party’s constitutional monopoly on political power in the Soviet Union.
THE COLLAPSE OF SOVIET COMMUNISM
At the same time that Gorbachev was introducing political reforms into the USSR, he was encouraging reform in the Soviet-bloc countries of Eastern Europe.
In an ironic reversal of the domino theory (the idea that when one allied state collapses, others will follow), the communist states of Eastern and Central Europe fell one by one and were replaced by noncommunist states. In September 1989 Poland convened its first noncommunist government since 1948. A week later the communist regime in Hungary began talks with its opposition. Massive demonstrations on both sides of the Berlin Wall brought about the collapse of the East German government in October. By the end of 1990 there were noncommunist governments in power in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Hungary.
The decentralization of the USSR’s political system and the example of new, noncommunist governments throughout Eastern Europe led to the rise of ethnic and nationalist independence movements in the member states of the Soviet Union. In 1991 Gorbachev proposed a referendum on whether to hold the Soviet Union together. Six of the fifteen republics refused to participate. The Russian Republic agreed to participate but added a second question to the referendum, asking whether Russia should establish its own presidency. Russian voters said “yes” to both proposals. Three months later Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation, and a treaty for a new union between the republics was under negotiation.
Faced with the end of the USSR, Communist Party hardliners rebelled. In August 1991 a group of senior CPSU officials broke into Gorbachev’s vacation home and placed him under house arrest. They demanded that he declare a state of emergency. When he refused, they issued a decree in the name of the State Committee on the State of Emergency. The days of compliant obedience to party decrees were over. Hundreds of thousands of citizens poured into the streets to defend the government, led by Yeltsin, who stood on top of a tank and denounced the “right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état.” Faced with resistance, not to mention the shock of being called “right-wing” after a lifetime in the Communist Party, the coup leaders retreated.
Gorbachev resigned as the first and only president of the USSR on December 25, 1991. On December 26 the Supreme Soviet, which had ruled the USSR since 1917, dissolved itself.
SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS IN THE US
From De Leon to Debs
Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) was born in Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles. After being educated in England and Germany, he came to America in 1874. While a student and later a teacher at Columbia University, he was converted to socialism through the writings of Edward Bellamy.
In 1890 De Leon joined the Socialist Labor Party, which had replaced the First International in 1877. He wrote the party’s first formal plat
form, calling for the replacement of the capitalist state with a workers’ democracy and a socialist reorganization of the economy. In 1891 he ran as the Socialist Labor Party’s candidate for governor of New York, winning only 13,000 votes.
De Leon was one of the chief propagandists for socialism in the American labor movement. He argued for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the United States, claiming that since America was the most developed country, it was “ripe for the execution of Marxian revolutionary tactics.” The only thing missing was a fully developed proletariat class consciousness.
Since American society was ready for revolution, De Leon believed, reform was not only unnecessary; it was counterproductive. Instead, the socialist party should concentrate on transforming American labor into a class capable of its own liberation by providing them with “the proper knowledge.” Since forming trade unions was an instinctive act on the part of the worker, a result of the small amount of class consciousness already present in the proletariat, the natural vehicle for working-class education was the trade unions. Once the socialists won control of the state, the party would dissolve, leaving the administration of production in the hands of the industrial unions.
In 1895 De Leon founded the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. The organization’s founding documents declared that the “methods and spirit of labor organization are absolutely impotent to resist the aggressions of concentrated capital.” American labor apparently disagreed. De Leon’s Alliance had only 13,000 members at its height compared to more than one million members in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at the same time.
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