By SJ Otto
Before the end of the cold war, 1991 or maybe 1992, there
were lots of communist and socialist parties all over the world. They fell into
two categories; those that were pro-Soviet Union and those that were
anti-Soviet Union . That might seem simple
enough, but the anti-Soviet Union parties seemed endless. There were lots of
them. But in the eyes of the US Union . If people only read
mainstream newspapers they would never know there were other communist parties
in the United States of
America
We can also say that communism in general was almost always
treated as if it were Soviet Union communism.
For a while there was a "Red China," an evil menace that was just as
bad as the evil Soviet Union . And by the end
of the 1970s China
It is hard to say when the Cold War actually ended. Did it
end when the Berlin Wall came down? Did it end when Boris Yeltsin (Борис Ельцин) stood down a pro-communist
coup? All we can really say for sure is that it ended.
This article looks at two things. The fist is how the end of
the cold war effected other communist and socialist movements that were not
directly supported or supportive of Soviet Communism. The other is how the fall
of the Soviet Union affected workers
everywhere.
There have been many democratic socialist parties, such as Socialist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America. There were also many Marxist-Leninist parties opposed to the Soviet Union. We can
safely say they were all against the Soviet Union
and most other communist parties.
Marxist-Leninist division took place in almost every
country where ML parties existed. For example, in Iran
Then there was the actual Communist
Party USA. That was the official Soviet Union
supported and supportive communist party. That was the communist party that
news organizations all referred to anytime someone wanted to speak of the pro-Soviet
communist party. The US Russia
Gus Hall was the leader of Communist Party USA. When he died
The
New York Times described him this way:
Gus Hall, the zealous lifelong
Communist who led the American branch of the party from the cold war through
political oblivion in the post-Soviet era, died on Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan Yonkers
The son of an impoverished Minnesota
He served eight years in prison
for his political views, ran for president four times and never apologized for
or wavered from the increasingly marginalized ideology he championed.
By the end of his life he had
become a lonely Communist stalwart in a post-Communist world. Those who sought
him out for interviews at party headquarters on West 23rd Street Manhattan East
Germany
........Mr. Hall was first
elected general secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A.
And from the Los Angeles Times
we see what most Americans saw when Hall Died:
Gus Hall, the lumberjack, iron
miner, steelworker and union organizer whose name became synonymous with the
American Communist Party, which he led for 40 years, has died at the age of 90.
The L.A. Times
don't even give the full name of his party and most news outlets didn't do that
either. None of these sources hint that there are any other communist people or
groups besides Communist Party USA.
There were a lot of communists here in the US , as myself, who did not like a lot of the
baggage the Soviet Union had. We didn't like
the lack of democracy, the lack of freedom of speech and the general lack of
political liberties that the Soviet Union just
didn't seem to have. There were other problems, mainly with imperialism. The
Soviet Union tried to oppose US Afghanistan , Hungary ,
Czechoslovakia Cuba Ethiopia Soviet
Union directly controlled the affairs of many Easter European
nations and sent in troops when its orders seemed to be slipping. It is easy to
see much of these actions as imperialism.
At first it appears that many communists and socialists are
in agreement with the US
mainstream politicians who constantly complain about Soviet expansionism and
the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union .[1] It
would be easy to mistakenly believe that these two political positions are
either the same or similar. That belief is wrong. All we have to do is look at
such leaders as Francisco Franco or Spain , Augusto Pinochet of Chile or the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah of Iran (حمدرضا پهلوی,), to see that political liberty is not the main goal
of the US US US and
long as these leaders supported the US US sheds crocodile tears for the people who are
denied freedoms in North
(Democratic People's Republic) Korea and Syria US is fine supporting the undemocratic regime of
Saudi
Arabia.
Since the fall of the
Cold War
That brings us to modern times. The Soviet
Union is gone. There are still a lot of Marxist-Leninist amd
socialist groups. There are Trotskyists all over Facebook. But are we better off
without the Soviet Union ? Is there more
democracy in the world? Is there more freedom in the world under the single
leadership of the US
Today the top 1 percent, or those $billionaires who own most
of the country’s wealth, are acting as if they suddenly have a green light to
go after all laws that support workers. Worker’s rights are under attack. What
we have to consider is that capitalism was threatened by the idea of a
communist revolution where workers would get everything and the ruling class
would cease
to exist. But with the Soviet Union gone, the
attitude seems to be that the whole idea of communism is dead. The capitalist
act and talk as if communism and all possibilities of communist revolution are
dead. That means the capitalists can do what they want. There are no
constraints. For example the $billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, are
out to destroy unions. They want to defang workers and leave them completely at
the mercy of their employers. Elisabeth
Garber-Paul, of Rolling
Stone reports:
"Really, what we would like
to see is to take the unions out at the knees, so they don't have the resources
to fight," says Scott Hagerstrom, the Michigan director of Americans for
Prosperity – a group heavily funded by the Kochs – in a damning clip from the
film. And it seems to sum up the Kochs' approach to unions: Americans for
Prosperity were integral to the 2011 union-busting fight in Wisconsin
And we only have to look as far as our President Donald
Trump, to see this attitude in action. In the past presidents have been
professional politicians that represent members of the ruling class. Now we
have a president who got rid of the
middle man, an actual $billionaire, a man who is actually part of the 1
percent, is now running the country. And it is like seeing a child take over
the candy store. Regulations to protect workers and consumers are being
plundered to let the capitalist class do what it wants, getting everything it
wants at the expense of the common worker. Just recently Trump appointed Mick
Mulvaney to the Consumer Protection Agency. Mulvaney has made it clear he plans to get rid
of as many rules as he can. This is a man who watches out for corporations, not
the consumer. For Trump and Mulvaney consumer protection is obsolete. They will
do what is best for the big banks and corporations—once again at the consumer’s
and working classes’ expense.
The results of all of this are fairly obvious. According to
Premilla Nadasen, of the Washington
Post:
“But since the 1970s, the safety
net has been diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have
been rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined.
The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor single
parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of assistance and
mandatory work requirements. Some states require fingerprinting or drug testing
of applicants, which effectively criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles
to getting on welfare are formidable, the benefits meager. The number of
families on welfare declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year.
The decline of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.
Instead, the shredding of the
safety net led to a rise in poverty. Forty million Americans live in poverty,
nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people
reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States
In addition to the reduction of
public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be
attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is
rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S.
As to how much the end of the cold war affects the actions
of $billionaires and the rest of the 1 percent is questionable. It can’t be
proven that the end of fear of a worker’s revolution has caused the greed and
oppression of America America
But there are those who believe the cold war did affect the
way the US
Not all aspects of the cultural
conflicts of the Cold War were negative. One of the worst blemishes on American
culture of the time was racial inequality. Despite being freed from slavery
approximately 80 years before the end of WWII, blacks were still second class
citizens in the South and discrimination was common in varying forms almost
everywhere. While change for blacks and other minorities came slowly, it did
eventually come. President Truman “noted that if the United States were to
offer the ‘peoples of the world’ a ‘choice of freedom or enslavement’ it must
‘correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy” (Foner 857).
Beginning in the early 1950s states began establishing fair employment
commissions, they passed laws banning discrimination, and black voter
registration began to rise….
……..President Johnson not only
disliked injustice, he understood the international repercussions that came
along with America United States
And it is no surprise that the Koch brothers have worked to
reverse these advances, made in response to the cold war. Again from Rolling Stone:
During the 2012 election, an
organization called True the Vote called itself a "citizen-led effort to
ensure free and fair elections." Their tactic? Placing mostly white
"poll-watchers" in polling places, many of them in minority areas,
which led to complaints of voter intimidation. The funding came from
Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. What's worse, ALEC, which counts roughly
20 percent of all state legislators as members, also drafted a model Voter ID
bill and used its ranks to disseminate it across the country. Now, 41 states
have introduced more than 180 such bills, which could mean that over 21 million
people could be denied their most basic right as a citizen. "The reason
that you target somebody's voting rights," Ben Jealous, the former head of
the NAACP, says… "is it makes it easier to take away the rest of their
rights.
So today we have rampant inequality, corruption at the top
and just plain greed at levels never seen since the 1930s. Most Americans, over
the last century, bought all the cold war fear mongering of “commies trying to
take away their freedom
and democracy.” What they didn’t notice was the fear their leaders had of a
society where people are equal. That terrified the ruling class way more than
any loss of freedom or democracy. Today such leaders behave as if there is
nothing to fear at all. And that isn’t so good for the rest of us.
To be Continued=>
[1] There are massive amounts of anti-communist propaganda
and literature that describes the extreme fear of US Politicians and pundits.
For just one example see:
How should the United States Confront Soviet Communist Expansionism?
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