Does socialism have a future?

TWENTY-five years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Responding to a relaxation of travel restrictions, East Germans flocked to it, and were joined by West Berliners in tearing it down. The authorities had no will to stop them.

With other uprisings in Europe's socialist countries, the Wall's fall precipitated a cataclysm in the entire Soviet bloc, leading to the USSR's disintegration. World Communism collapsed, and the capitalist West emerged victorious in the Cold War.  

Was the collapse of “actually existing socialism” inevitable? A Stalin or Deng Xiaoping might have prevented it by using brute force, as in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), or Tiananmen Square (1989).

But that would only have postponed the moment of reckoning. In the prevailing situation, neither force, nor half-hearted reforms -- like Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) -- could have pacified protesters.  

“Actually existing socialism” was long in crisis thanks to lack of civil and political rights, severe shortages of consumer goods, and a dysfunctional, bureaucratically-planned economy.

Mis-planning often led to gluts of grain or vegetables left to rot in the fields for lack of transportation; production of unmatched pairs of socks; or rewarding managers of aircraft or lift/elevator factories in proportion to the steel consumed (when it should be minimised!)

Even in highly-industrialised East Germany, such anomalies were visible in 1976-77 when I first visited East Berlin -- dilapidated, in contrast to the shining (if subsidised) jewel that West Berlin was. The Dollar-Mark market-exchange rate was twice the official one.

A poor Third Worlder like me got countless offers for my old US-branded jeans, five times higher than the price of brand-new ones!

In reality, the social-political implosion of 1989-90 was the result of long-festering structural factors. The USSR got bureaucratised because the Revolution of 1917 remained confined to a backward country after the European working-class movement, despite its awesome strength, didn't win power.

The Bolsheviks overthrew Czarism and capitalism, and made working people arbiters of their fate by creating a new state based on Soviets (workers' and peasants' councils).  

However, the Soviet system -- subjected to privations, and forced into curtailing democratic rights -- soon degenerated. Stalinism purged the once-democratic Communist party of its revolutionary leadership, subjugated the world working-class movement to “socialism in one country,” subverting revolutionary possibilities, and greatly brutalised the Soviet people.

The USSR triumphed during World War-II against Nazism and fascism. As the War's part-victor, it exported its brand of socialism to Central-Eastern Europe. These parasitic regimes remained subservient to the USSR.

Stalin's successors failed to reform the system, despite generating some growth. But the system's unpopularity hollowed out all its progressive content under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and others.

True, the USSR offered a political-military counterweight to Western domination, without which the world would have been worse-off. But this meant military overspending, which undermined popular welfare.

Although Soviet-style socialism, based on statism and regimentation, couldn't become a model for the international working-class movement, its very existence forced post-War capitalism to create a rudimentary welfare state. The “Golden Age of Capitalism” (1945-75) spread democratisation and mass prosperity in the West, building the base for today's living standards.

Soon, alternatives towards greater freedom became visible to the Soviet public, with the lure of comparatively higher living standards. It was now willing to embrace capitalism, albeit of a degraded, criminalised variety.

South Asian Communists never had a structural explanation for the crisis going back to the 1920s. They blamed “revisionism” and Gorbachev's “errors.” They refused to re-examine the ideological premises, political doctrines, and organisational principles of the Soviet model, the sole version of socialism they knew.

The Indian Left was lucky to grow for two decades despite this -- because of domestic factors. Now it's in decline, which will be accelerated by its failure to evolve an independent conception of socialism based on contemporary reality.

Capitalism's triumph didn't deliver liberal democracy and prosperity to the former socialist states. It promoted a plutocracy which looted public wealth while the majority was deprived of social security, education and housing. NATO and the European Union expanded Eastwards, fomenting “colour” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.

As I discovered last fortnight in Berlin, even German reunification remains incomplete. East Germany's per-capita GDP is still one-third less than the West's. A survey says four out of 10 Berliners don't feel at home; 52% would consider leaving Berlin for a good job elsewhere.

Globally, corporatist-neoliberal capitalism, unchallenged by socialism or “the emerging powers,” has become super-predatory. It's dispossessing people, increasing income disparities, destroying natural resources, and dismantling the welfare state.

Capitalism has proved utterly bankrupt since the Great Recession of 2008. It cannot solve the problems of poverty, inequality within and between nations, climate change, militarism, democracy's erosion, or social discrimination.

This reinforces the case for socialism. But to be viable, socialism must be robustly democratic, internationalist, participatory, not limited to centralised planning, and amenable to popular control.

There's much to learn from Latin America's recent radical politics, including grassroots democracy. Evolving its own socialist model is a tall order for our Left. But such socialism has a bright future.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.