The new Cold War

By Rob Gowland

Or perhaps the heading should more correctly be “The Renewed Cold War”, for the original Cold War against the USSR never really ended. How could it? After all, it was simply a manifestation of the class war between capital and labour, between bosses and workers. And that won’t end until we have Socialism and do away with exploiting classes once and for all.
    The Soviet Union, a workers’ state, embodied all that the boss class loathed, so big business everywhere rejoiced when gullible Gorby succeeded in his plan to become General Secretary of the CPSU and then to show the Soviet people that capitalism and Socialism were essentially the same (he didn’t believe what the Communists said about capitalism and anyway capitalist politicians everywhere loudly proclaimed that they were in favour of peace, so that was surely true, for they wouldn’t lie, right?).
    Gorbachov abolished the Soviet Union and to his evident surprise he was subsequently spurned by Russians of all political persuasions. The Cold War was temporarily suspended, or more accurately diverted, to be focused on those former parts of the USSR that refused to accept the overthrow of Socialism. Such as Moldova and Belarus.
    Despite winning the civil war that the capitalist West inflicted on Moldova, the Communists there were only allowed 10 years in which to keep the country out of the clutches of NATO before it was subjected to one of a series of very well prepared ‘colour revolutions’ that swept the region.
    These combined some genuine grievances with racist populism and the usual airy-fairy glib demands of the typical capitalist ‘pro-democracy’ campaign. The campaigners were often imported from as far afield as Israel and Chechnya, anywhere where anti-Russian sentiment could be stirred up. As soon as the Communists were forced out of office, Moldova became staunchly embedded within NATO, as always intended.
    Imperialism’s intelligence agencies have become highly adept at managing these “popular counter-revolutions”, backed up by a constant barrage of propaganda to the effect that bourgeois democracy is the only form of democracy: any other sort is false or fake, “like they had in the Socialist countries”.
    Today, another ‘colour revolution’ is being attempted in Belarus, a former part of the USSR that opted to retain the Soviet system. For this act of defiance, it was hit with hyper-inflation, but has managed to maintain its economic independence and its Soviet-style social system in the face of capitalist hostility. The Communist Party of Belarus actively supports President Lukashenko. We should all join the campaign around the slogan “Hands off Belarus”.
    Make no mistake, the present ‘pro-democracy’ campaign against Belarus, like the similar campaign in Hong Kong, has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with clawing back territory, markets and resources for capitalism.
    The pundits of capitalism are well aware that today their favoured exploitative system is very much on the back foot. The economic and industrial superiority they used to enjoy has evaporated. That they enjoyed it was thanks in large part to not being invaded in the Second World War plus the huge profits to be made catering to capitalism’s unending stream of ‘small wars’. Instead, to their dismay, their former superiority has passed to the mixed economy of China.
    Any hopes that imperialists (and certain Trotskyists) held that China was “going down the capitalist road” were dealt a severe blow at the recent Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) where Xi Jinping reminded delegates that “what we are building is Socialism with Chinese characteristics, not some other ism”.
    Whilst some European imperialists are eager to grab whatever share they can of China’s economic and financial good fortune, US imperialism is deeply divided. The ruling elite, behind President Trump – a billionaire property developer – apparently believe that they can solve their problems with China and its ally Russia by resorting to the same bully boy tactics they use against small and powerless countries.
    Neither People's China nor Russia, however, is small or powerless. US war-hawks such as Mike Pompeo must have nightmares full of Chinese warships and Russian ultra-sonic missiles, amidst the very real prospect of Chinese companies taking over all America’s traditional markets.
    Trump is essentially a fascist, and as we know ‘fascism means war’. His main capitalist rivals, those backing the Democrats, are in many ways almost as reactionary but they believe bourgeois democracy provides a less troublesome climate for capitalist exploitation than fascism.
    The Trump administration, however, is in the driving seat at present and is pushing hard to initiate a trade war against both China and Russia, but especially China, being the main economic threat. As part of this campaign, it has also initiated a propaganda blitz, to convince people in Western countries that China is their enemy.
    Western governments are busy discovering Chinese plots to interfere in their internal affairs or simply to spy on them. To convince people that this is truly terrifying, Britain’s Tory government has actually set back the country’s development of a fifth-generation mobile phone network, in order to exclude Chinese tech giant Huawei from participating in its roll out!
    Capitalist pundits credit the problems caused by the Cold War with bringing about the overthrow of Socialism in the USSR. That is far too simplistic for what was in fact a complex amalgam of ideological, economic and subjective factors. Yet they clearly hope that by reverting to the worst tactics of the Cold War against the USSR, they will prevent the combined resources of China and Russia from burying them.
    With the massive ‘Belt and Road’ initiative well under way, and the focus of world trade inevitably shifting to the East, the ‘American century’ has already become a hollow mockery. This stepped up Cold War will not save it.

Hands off Belarus!

THE GREEDY EYES of Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism are now focused on Belarus. They’re dying to get their hands on the former Soviet republic to use its land as another NATO front against the Russian Federation and to strip it bare of its natural resources. Their willing tools call themselves as “freedom fighters” and “democrats”, whilst others pose as “socialists” and “revolutionaries” for the “human rights” gang and the phony Trots inside and outside the Labour Party.
     In reality they despise the working people of Belarus, who still enjoy many of the benefits won in the old days through Soviet power. Their bogus “National Strike Committee”, which is calling for a general strike to bring down the Lukashenko government, doesn’t have any industrial workers on its board and it only calls for strikes in the state-owned enterprises. They picket major plants with supporters drawn from their petty-bourgeois ranks. They try, but so far have failed, to win workers over with their usual lies of the “paradise” that supposedly exists over the border in the European Union. Needless to say, they never call for industrial action against private or foreign-owned enterprises.
     The Belarusian communists and their supporters have been holding mass rallies of their own in support of the Lukashenko government. At the same time, they are backing rank-and-file People’s Committees who are calling on workers to strike for higher pay in the private and foreign-owned enterprises and demand their nationalisation.
     The opposition wants to cosy up to the EU and US-led imperialism, cut the health service, privatise the very large public sector and end the alliance with Russia. We saw what happened when this agenda was implemented in Ukraine after the legitimate government was overthrown by fascist gangs in 2014. Belarusian communists are determined to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in their own country. We have a duty to counter the lies of the bourgeois media and those of their stooges within the labour movement who pose as socialists. All over the world communists are rallying to defend Belarusian independence. We must join them now! 

 Twist and Shout

BORIS JOHNSON did another U-turn last weekend, reversing his government’s defence of the ludicrous mathematical formula – the Ofqual algorithm – to assess A-level grades in the absence of exams due to closure of schools during the coronavirus lock-down. Last week the Tories defended the exam regulator’s “robust” algorithm that disproportionately affected those in more deprived state schools and slashed the grades of hundreds of thousands of students in England.
     Teaching unions protested. Students took to the streets in noisy protests. Labour leader Keir Starmer denounced the Government’s “unprecedented and chaotic” handling of the situation, while the regional governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland refused to implement the changes. Johnson can live with that. What did bother him was the anger of thousands of Tory parents angered at the way that their children’s university application had been jeopardised by the jobsworths at the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual), who may originally have thought that their scheme would only penalise working-class students. No-one can blame Johnson for changing his mind.     The Prime Minister’s decision to allow teachers’ assessments to be used instead of the downgraded results shows that the Prime Minister does heed protests – not least when they come from his own Tory heartlands. While Boris clearly has no firm opinion on any major matters of state, he could save himself a lot of grief if he stopped listening to the likes of Dominic Cummings and carried out proper consultations with the professional bodies, administrators, and teaching and student unions in the arena of education.

Stand by Belarus

The imperialists and their media gurus are now bleating about Belarus in the wake of the presidential election that gave Alexander Lukashenko a thumping majority in the poll last weekend. The people of Belarus have chosen their president fair and square, no matter what the reactionary opposition leader and her supporters say.

They may have imagined that plunging the country into ‘Maidan’ style chaos was the first step towards regime change, but they didn’t bargain for the massive support given to Lukashenko at the ballot box or the robust response of the police and security forces in sweeping the mob off the streets.

Lukashenko is the former collective farm manager turned politician who rose from the ranks of the old Belarus communist movement as an outspoken opponent of graft and corruption to win the presidential elections against all odds in 1994, to lead his country along the path of non-alignment and social progress.

Western diplomatic and economic isolation has backfired and attempts to unseat him by bourgeois and phoney ‘communist’ parties funded by imperialism have all failed. This is because Lukashenko enjoys immense popularity amongst the Belarusians who have been spared the mass unemployment, privatisation and collapse of education and the health service that was the fate of the rest of the former Soviet Union when it took the capitalist road. This is why the Communist Party of Belarus supports his efforts to preserve the country’s Soviet heritage and social structure.

Belarus is a “state of the people” that operates a mixed economy, which they call “market socialism” or “social orientation”. Although the public sector, in one form or another, still dominates the economy, there are joint ventures with western companies and those of the Third World.

The High Technology Park, the Chinese Great Stone industrial park and the other free economic zones offer tax benefits and further privileges to foreign investors, whilst the local self-employed and expanding private sector caters for some of the needs of the consumer industry.

But this is not enough for Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism. Though Lukashenko perhaps unwisely welcomed the American foreign minister to Minsk in February following a row with the Kremlin over Russian oil supplies, his government has consistently rejected calls from Washington and the European Union to dump the Russians and throw in his lot with the Western alliance.

Now the imperialists show their true face in calling the elections in Belarus “unfair” and “not independent”, giving full support to their pawn Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who is calling for Lukashenko’s overthrow from her new base in Natoland Lithuania.

The bourgeois lie-machine, along with the ‘human rights’ gang and the phony Trots inside and outside the Labour Party, have launched yet another of their bogus ‘solidarity’ campaigns to drum up support for imperialist sanctions and possible imperialist intervention against the Belarusian government.

We’ve seen what regime change means in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine. We’ve seen what the imperialists and their lackeys have done in their attempt to overthrow the popular front government in Syria.

Communists, therefore, have a crucial role in helping to build genuine solidarity with the Belarusian people to counter the lies and disinformation coming from the imperialist camp.

 

The Last Soviet Republic

by Andy Brooks

The Last Soviet Republic – Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus by Stewart Parker, pbk, 248 pp, Trafford Publishing, Oxford. £9.99

THE FORMER Soviet republic of Belarus is an unlikely candidate for the “axis of evil”. But this small landlocked republic, wedged between the might of the European Union and Putin’s Russia, has been branded by US imperialism as an “outpost of tyranny” for daring to defend most of the gains of the Soviet era and for refusing to kow-tow to the dictates of Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism.
Imperialist venom targets one man – Alexander Lukashenko – who rose from the ranks of the old Belarus communist movement as a principled opponent of graft and corruption to win the presidential elections against all odds in 1994 to lead his country along the path of non-alignment and social progress.
Western diplomatic and economic isolation has backfired and attempts to unseat him by bourgeois and phoney “communist” parties funded by imperialism have all failed.
This is because Lukashenko enjoys immense popularity amongst the Belarusians who have been spared the mass unemployment, privatisation and collapse of education and the health service that was the fate of the rest of the former Soviet Union when it took the capitalist road.
This book by Stewart Parker explains why. There are no oligarchs in Lukashenko’s Belarus. There’s virtually full employment and no one has to emigrate to Western Europe to find work. Over 90 per cent of the farms are still collectivised and most of the country’s industry remains in public hands. Health and education are still a priority in Belarus and the state guarantees low-cost food and housing.
When the counter-revolution succeeded in Moscow in 1991 Lukashenko was the only deputy in the Belarusian parliament to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He opposed the turncoat communists and bourgeois nationalists who came out of the woodwork to dominate the country in the early 1990s.
His record as a collective farm manager and his “clean hands” in the old Belarus communist party and parliament won the trust of working people who comprise the vast majority of the nine million or so Belarusians who live in this land-locked oasis of social justice in Europe.
Last November 80 communist and workers’ parties from over 60 countries, including the New Communist Party of Britain, attended the 9th international communist conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to discuss the relevance of the Russian revolution in the 21st century.
Many of those delegates felt they were stepping back in time when they toured the factories, farms and schools of Belarus. Lenin and the Bolsheviks are still honoured and the socialist sector is still largely intact. But Belarus isn’t in a time-warp nor are its economists trying to create a nostalgia theme-park for those hankering for the “good old days”.
Belarus is a “state of the people” that operates a mixed economy which they call “market socialism” or “social orientation”. Though not on the Chinese scale there are joint ventures with countries like Turkey and the Third World and there is a small self-employed and private sector which caters for some of the needs of the consumer industry.
Belarus bore the brunt of the Nazi invasion during the Second World War and it took the Belarusian people years to recover from devastation. The collapse of the Soviet Union could have led to economic chaos, and for a brief period it did when the tools of imperialism were in charge.
But Parker shows in some detail how the Lukashenko government has worked to rein in hyper-inflation and deal with its energy problems to ensure a secure and decent way of life for the millions of workers and farmers in the country.
And he also explains how genuine mass democracy works in this former Soviet republic and how its government defends the country’s independence; maintains a strategic relationship with Russia – its biggest trading partner – and demonstrates its solidarity with struggling people all over the world.
Though the author is clearly sympathetic to modern Belarus he is not a communist and this shows in his work. His off-hand description of the people’s democracies of eastern Europe as “puppets” and “satellites” of the Soviet Union is simplistic to put it mildly.
He barely mentions the Communist Party of Belarus (KPB) whose eight MPs support Lukashenko’s independent bloc in the House of Representatives or indeed how the other pro-government parties relate to the independent bloc.
But it is an easily readable and important book, essential for any understanding of what is happening in eastern Europe today. It’s well-worth buying or ordering from your local library.