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Title: Revolution of ’89 Author: Noam Chomsky Date: January 29, 1990 Language: en Topics: 1989, eastern europe, state socialism, revolution Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/19900129/ Notes: From The Nation, January 29, 1990
Throughout modern history, popular forces motivated by radical
democratic ideals have sought to combat structures of hierarchy and
domination. Sometimes they succeed in expanding the realm of freedom and
justice before being brought to heel. Often they are simply crushed.
October 1917 provides an example with renewed relevance for today. The
Bolshevik coup eliminated working-class and other popular organizations
and imposed harsh state rule. The total destruction of nascent socialist
elements has since been interpreted as a victory for socialism. For the
West, the purpose was to defame socialism; for the Bolsheviks, to
extract what gain they could from the moral force of the hopes they were
demolishing. Authentic socialist ideals have been unable to withstand
this two-pronged assault.
The past decade in Central America illustrates the standard pattern. The
proliferation of unions, peasant associations and other popular
organizations threatened to provide the basis for democracy and social
reform. This prospect elicited a violent response, with slaughter,
torture and general misery, leaving societies “affected by terror and
panic,” “collective intimidation and generalized fear” and “internalized
acceptance of the terror,” in the words of the Salvadoran church. Early
efforts in Nicaragua to direct resources to the poor majority led
Washington to initiate economic and ideological warfare, and outright
terrorism, to punish these transgressions by reducing life to the zero
grade. Such actions are considered a success insofar as the challenge to
U.S. power and privilege is rebuffed and the targets are properly
chosen. Killing priests is not clever but peasant organizers, union
leaders and human rights activists are fair game.
Remarkably, recent events in Eastern Europe depart from the norm. As the
fragile tyrannies collapse under a popular uprising, Moscow is not only
refraining from intervention but even encouraging these developments
alongside significant internal changes. The contrast to Central America
and other U.S. domains could hardly be more dramatic.
The striking asymmetry is highlighted by the U.S. reaction to Moscow’s
moves. There is little thought that the United States might relax its
grip over its own domains, or act to mitigate the horrors that prevail
there. Rather, the question is how best to exploit the retraction of
Soviet power to achieve U.S. designs. The test of Gorbachev’s “new
thinking” is his willingness to withdraw support from those whom the
United States seeks to crush. Only if Gorbachev permits us to have our
way will he prove his good faith. As recent events in Panama reveal, the
United States continues to claim the right to achieve its ends by
violence, on pretexts so transparently absurd that refutation is hardly
necessary.
This pattern prevails worldwide. Thus in the Middle East, for almost
twenty years Washington has blocked a broad international consensus on a
diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the current
version, the official “peace process” is restricted to the
Baker-Shamir-Peres plan, with its “basic premise” that there can be no
“additional Palestinian state” between Israel and Jordan and no change
in the status of the territories “other than in accordance with the
basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government,” which rules out any
meaningful Palestinian rights. The New York Times observes that “with
the exception of the United States, not one nation has endorsed the
plan,” though Moscow is now trying to become a “team player,” abandoning
its “policy of confrontation” and its “radical positions”–that is, its
advocacy of a two-state settlement that recognizes the national rights
of Israel and the Palestinians. In short, the world is out of step, and
unless the Soviet Union becomes a “team player” by joining us off the
spectrum of world opinion and adopting our rejectionist stance, it is
plainly not serious about detente.
The U.S. response to the events in Eastern Europe should be seen in a
broader context. Since the 1950s both superpowers have been declining in
their capacity to coerce and control. The Vietnam War, in particular,
harmed the U.S. economy while benefiting its major rivals, Europe and
Japan. As has long been observed, a new global order has been taking
shape, with three major blocs: one dominated by the United States,
another by Japan, and the third a European system dominated by Germany.
Western Europe is reconstructing traditional quasi-colonial relations
with the East, and Japan is likely to follow suit. Such developments
could make the United States a second-class power. It is not surprising
that the prospects arouse deep concern.
In the mid-1940s, U.S. planners were ambivalent about unification of
Europe. In the circumstances of the postwar world, it was feared that
the Russians had the advantage in the political game; this advantage had
to be canceled, with West Germany “walled off” from Soviet influence, in
George Kennan’s phrase.
Meanwhile, labor and other popular forces were undermined and the
traditional order largely restored. The British Foreign Office favored
the partition of Germany to bar Soviet influences, viewing “economic and
ideological infiltration” from the East as “something very like
aggression.” Eisenhower also regarded “Soviet political aggression” as
the real danger, and saw NATO as a barrier against this threat.
Stalin’s 1952 proposal to unify Germany with free elections was flatly
rejected because of his condition that a reunited Germany not join a
U.S.-run military alliance, a sine qua non for any Soviet leadership.
Had this and later initiatives been pursued, there might have been no
Berlin wall and no Soviet invasions of East Berlin, Budapest and Prague.
Currently the United States looks askance at moves toward European
integration that might strengthen its major rivals on the world scene
while undermining the U.S. influence that results from East-West
confrontation and the pact system.
Detente raises further problems here. What John Kennedy called the
“monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” has been regularly invoked to
mobilize support for intervention abroad and state industrial management
at home. Now these policies are jeopardized as the threat loses its
credibility.
The policies have deep institutional roots. The crucial planning
document, N.S.C. 68, written just before the Korean War, warned of “a
decline in economic activity of serious proportions” without a
government stimulus through military spending. One function of the
Pentagon system has been to insure that the public provides the costs of
R&D and a state-guaranteed market for advanced industry while profits
accrue to the private sector, a gift to the corporate manager. Thus,
business has always been troubled by what The Wall Street Journal calls
“the unsettling specter of peace,” and it grasps at the hope that a
capital-intensive and high-tech military will still provide, as Gen.
Edward Meyer assured, “a big business out there for industry.”
Despite the inefficiency and costs, such devices will not be easy to
replace. It has long been taken for granted that large-scale government
intervention is essential to maintain private economic power, but
nonmilitary forms, however feasible in narrow economic terms, have
unwelcome side effects. They tend to interfere with managerial
prerogatives. organize new constituencies, redistribute income and in
other ways foster democracy and reform, thus conflicting with the basic
goals of social policy designed by the privileged. Military Keynesianism
has none of those defects.
The “economic miracles” of the First World depart still further from
pure capitalist principles, notably Japan and the “Four Tigers” on its
periphery (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong), with economies
coordinated by the state and industrial-financial conglomerates. Their
successes are hardly a tribute to capitalism or democracy. Here, the
sectors that remain competitive are those that feed from the public
trough: high-tech industry and capital-intensive agriculture, as well as
pharmaceuticals and others. Free enterprise is a suitable theme for
rousing oratory, but only so long as the handout from Washington is
secure. To be sure, capitalist doctrines will do just fine for the
former colonies–and now, it is hoped, Eastern Europe–to facilitate their
own exploitation.
As for democratic forms, at best they are limited under the constraints
imposed by private command of resources and investment decisions, and in
recent years the lack of substantive content has become a virtual
cliche.
The United States sought to construct a global system in which other
industrial powers pursue “regional interests” within the overall
framework of order managed from Washington, as Henry Kissinger
admonished the European allies. Meanwhile the Third World is to “fulfill
its function” as a market and source of raw materials and cheap labor.
Every effort will be made to direct Eastern Europe on the same course.
High-level planning documents frankly identify the major threat to U.S.
interests as “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular
pressures rather than the needs of investors. These concerns underlie
persistent U.S. subversion and intervention on the pretext of Soviet
threats, the correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations
and the extreme hostility to democracy unless power remains securely in
the hands of business, oligarchy and military elements that respect U.S.
priorities. Gorbachev’s initiatives provide only the occasion for
tactical adjustments; policy and its roots are unchallenged, and
virtually excluded from discussion within the ideological system.
With the decline of U.S. power and the diversification of the
international order, however, traditional goals become more difficult to
achieve. Further problems arise from internal dissidence and the loss of
the Soviet threat as an instrument of population control. It is natural
that the U.S. reaction to Gorbachev’s moves and the European
accommodation to them should be halting and uncertain.
Since the latter days of the Indochina war, U.S. elites have undertaken
intensive efforts to increase corporate profits, weaken unions and the
welfare system, temper the “crisis of democracy” by restoring public
apathy, and strengthen state-corporate linkages. They have also sought
to solidify the U.S.-controlled bloc, incorporating Canada and viable
sectors of Latin America while maintaining traditional domains
elsewhere. But the world is increasingly out of control as well as out
of step.
Soviet military expenditures began to level off in the mid-1970s —
contrary to what was claimed to justify the Carter-Reagan military
buildup and attack on social programs–and are declining as Gorbachev
attempts to rescue the stagnant command economy. While Reagan
Administration militancy may have hindered these developments, it did
not stop them, and by the mid-1980s Washington was compelled to reduce
its aggressiveness, hysterical rhetoric and military growth as the costs
of Reaganite economic mismanagement became unacceptable. Fortuitously,
both superpowers, for independent reasons, are on a path away from
confrontation.
With Bolshevism disintegrating, capitalism long abandoned and state
capitalist democracy in decline, there are prospects for the revival of
libertarian socialist and radical democratic ideals that had languished,
including popular control of the workplace and investment decisions,
and, correspondingly, the entrenchment of political democracy as
constraints imposed by private power are reduced. These and other
emerging possibilities are still remote, but are no less exciting than
the dramatic events unfolding in Eastern Europe.