The Tragedy of the Former Workers' State Continues

February 7, 2023 - Today, America's North Atlantic Treaty Organization is feverishly widening its reach and using the conflict centered in the Donbas as a pretext for stationing yet more missiles and weapons in Europe. Washington and its militarist allies are entertaining vain hopes. The failure of yet another string of attempt by the U.S. administration to seek a solution to the Donbas crisis which would suit its interests by escalating the hostilities again confirmed this. 

NATO was created by U.S. imperialism after the Second World War both to subjugate the peoples of Western Europe and to encircle the then-socialist USSR and the newly formed states of People's Democracy. Together with the European Union, NATO remains the backbone of U.S. domination in Western Europe. The global, "protective" military umbrella of U.S. imperialism is a chain around the necks of the European peoples as well as the peoples of all the countries suffering from U.S. neo-colonial domination.

NATO's hopes have long been linked with the intention to impose America's NATO domination over the formerly socialist world. And in particular, to do this by foiling all of their sovereign efforts to reach accord about which post-Perestroika reforms would be capable of solving the unique, complex, and unprecedented problems of the peoples of the region. 

It is therefore hardly surprising that the main thrust of the U.S. administration and the government in Kiev is now concentrated on massive arms transfers and working night and day to fan the flames of the regional problems. This is the typical global mode of operation of the U.S. government. The goal of U.S. imperialism's military adventurism in Europe is to insure its control over a greater extent of the region.

Beyond the region, the post-Perestroika era in world history has ushered in a period of disequilibrium and realignment. Right from the start, the so-called "new world order," which was advertised by Washington as a new era of "peace and prosperity," was immediately marked by continuous U.S. wars, including its on-going wars in the Arab world, its militarization of the Persian Gulf, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the incitement to war in the Balkans, the extension of the Pentagon's "war on terror" to the four ends of the earth, etc. and so forth.

But within the region there was also a tragedy. By the time of Gorbachev, the Soviet economy had been a capitalist one for many decades. The Khrushchevite revisionists, the trojan horse of world imperialism that seized power in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and its descendants – Breshnev, Andropov and Gorbachev – progressively destroyed the socialist system which was once being built in the USSR. They re-imposed the yoke of capitalist exploitation on the working class. By the time of Gorbachev, capitalist ownership was already re-established to include: 1) the classic type of capitalist private enterprise, which since the time of Khrushchev has played a major role in the sphere of agricultural production and the service sector. Perestroika was when most of the remaining productive forces based on cooperation by the population were restructured in order to maximize the profits of the bourgeois owners - including in manufacturing, intellectual, and professional sectors; 2) foreign capitalist ownership, through which more than 500 multinational corporations, such as Monsanto Chemicals, Occidental Petroleum, Pierre Cardin, Fiat, and others shared, along with the "Soviet" capitalists in the ownership of the means of production and exploitation of the labor of the local workers; and 3) state monopoly capitalism in which the formerly socialist state property had, both in practice and in law, been transformed into the personal capitalist property of a handful of people who had secured key administrative assignments or positions as Party bureaucrats. 

Between the end of Perestroika and the turn of the century, claims were made not only to the effect that the workers movement was liquidated, but even to the effect that the working class had disappeared from those regions. America's NATO bloc began to look upon its role as a means to prevent the workers from getting re-organized. Over the last decade the situation began deteriorating rapidly as a result of increasingly coercive measures by the NATO bloc designed to foment ethnic rivalry and to accelerate the imperialist penetration of the region by Western capital.al.

On a world scale, the tragic consequences of the Krushchevite revisionists' betrayal continue. U.S. imperialism remains at the center of the problem – instigating and unleashing terror through local wars which in turn have repeatedly prepared the ground for the bipartisan Washington aggressors to unleash future wars on a wider scale. 

For our part, the Workers Party, USA, calls for a democratic foreign policy in the U.S. in which the people are the decisive force. The program is for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops stationed abroad, the withdrawal of the U.S. from all aggressive military pacts and alliances – such as NATO and the U.S.-Japan treaty – an end to the militarization of the U.S. society and an end to U.S. interference and intervention against other countries in any form, including economic, diplomatic, political, and military.​