The destruction of the Ukraine, broken up by Russia's Czar-Putin, now in a battle with the previously sleepy, creepy NATO, is the fresh signal of the end of the Western's global monopoly. Germany is arming. NATO is expanding all over Europe (again) and the US/Biden has told us it's genocide. What is true is that tens of thousands have been killed. What is also true that the Yemen or even Syria have been faced with and are still facing, slaughter or 'genocide, but with faces of colour'. Regardless of the disgusting response of these particular unconsidered 'genocides', the military convulsion in and with the West remains a shift of the West's future. The core of the West is rotten, frightened and getting armed up. Putin smelt it first.
We can return to this after some thoughts about the past and future of the meaning of socialism.
V. I. Lenin spent his final thoughts focussed on three main items. The first was the developing success of state capitalism in Soviet Russia - particularly the new, partial ownership, of the land, of light industry and, in his own words, more in hope than any immediate success, the heavy industry yet to come. The New Economic Policy, or NEP nevertheless had born fruits from 1921 onwards. It started after the years of wars and famine. Capitalist initiatives, allowing profit and partial-shared ownership, drove the economic engine of the new, desperate, yet to be achieved, socialist economy.
Lenin placed the NEP at the centre of his final speeches to the fourth congress of the Communist International and the Plenary Session of the Moscow Soviet. Lenin told his followers,'True, the sum have obtained so far barely exceeds twenty-million gold rubles; but, at any rate, the sum is available and it is earmarked exclusively for the purpose of reviving our heavy industry.'
After Lenin's increasing decline of his health, his notes still made the central role of NEP's future, but different concerns then emerged. He made a series of attacks on the revolutionary Russia's new state. 'We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants ... and by exercising the greatest economy, remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations.' 'We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree... We must banish for it all the traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from the tsarist Russia, from its bureaucratic capitalist state machine.' 'Only by thoroughly purging our government machine, by reducing to the utmost everything that is not absolutely essential in it shall we be certain of being able to keep going.' 'The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something ... for the building of a really new state apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet, etc. No, we are ridiculously deficient of such an apparatus, and even of the elements of it ...'
Then, thirdly, there was Lenin's focus on the Soviet Russian Communist Party and of the fate of communism's future in general.
It is well known that Lenin seriously criticised Stalin's leading secretary role and preferred Trotsky. The notes were written under Lenin's increasing alarm that the Russian CP might split. (And Lenin's words on this were released in 1956.) Lenin's comments on Stalin had a much wider aspect than simply preferring Trotsky. More historically significant, Lenin was insistent over two requirements that for him were crucial for any hope for genuine socialism in Russia's future. First because socialism, a socialist state, had not yet developed in Soviet Russia it required new, deep, reforms, even potential further revolutions. Overcoming (at least in part) the current weaknesses of the state and party meant the need for a Workers and Peasants Inspection. This would supposedly have the highest role (over both party and state) building a proper State and reforming the Party. But WPI was playing no such role. The actual politics of a vast, sprawling state apparatus was increasingly dominated by the party secretary Stalin - as Lenin himself discovered.
Associated with Lenin's call for the WPI was his demand that the Party organisation should now be opened and expanded. Contrary, there should be the reduction of the constant bureaucratic expansion of the State. The increased numbers with different experiences in the Party membership and its wider leadership would thereby be learning how a socialist state might properly develop. And larger numbers would also be more likely to prevent any single Party domination, that centralised particular cliques clashing for possible total power over all. To that event, the widening of the Communist Party, the power that was supposed to be allowed to the WPI, also allowed Lenin to be calling for the Communist Party to be amalgamated with the Soviets, implying, in effect in necessary, the combination of an alternative State with a wider alternative regime
Finally was his last essay that Lenin wrote over the future of communism.
Being Lenin, his approach was absolutely concrete at the same time as his astonishing analysis of global trends. His view was that the defeat of Germany, resulting from the first war that covered most of the whole world, ultimately threw back the West's social and economic apparent victory against Germany. It was the German defeat in its widest sense that began to break the West's imperialism and the possibilities that could build socialism if not in Germany but primarily in the underdeveloped countries.
The failure of socialism in the West in the early 1920s was centred by socialism's defeat in the most developed country, Germany. This requires major consideration itself. But for the purpose of this article, the point of Lenin's view was that his understanding that a successful revolution after 1922 was now most likely to be dominated by the fight with a weaker Western imperialism rather than the main capitalist countries themselves, thereby creating the new revolutions from the underdeveloped nations. This was the combined and uneven process, they faced much more difficulty developing a new socialism compared with developed countries. Initiatives such as NEP and the particular character of politics, alongside an underdeveloped economy, required a completely different, complex, character which pushed for a type of socialism, similar to the early USSR.
The new 20th century led by Czar Stalin had other ideas. He decided by 1928/9 that China would be immensely better for the right wing anti-socialist Kuomingtan to win China from their Royalty. Stalin argued for clear stages (except for Russia) and offered a lot of support accordingly. Lenin's view of those fighting revolution to defeat imperialism was exactly the opposite. The fight against imperialism was the new reality of socialist possibilities. However with Lenin away, Stalin followed his ideas. The Kuomingtan wiped out the socialists in the Chinese cities and were defeated by China's Royalty.
Stalin's real role, which essentially succeeded from 1925 to 28, was the overthrow of the Russian revolution itself, let alone the spread of a genuine socialist society. The Stalinist counter Russian revolution was the spread and defined victory of the solid, untouchable bureaucratic State, combined with Stalin's mass murders and his gulag slavery.
Lenin once said that socialist revolution for under-developed nations would be relatively easy to win but it would be desperately hard to establish the socialism that was meant to follow; and vice versa. Lenin himself considered the daily realities of Soviet Russia, the 1917 revolution and did not believe that the Soviet Russian Revolution had resulted in any sense a socialist society. Particularly in the case of the Russian State. He defined it, in 1922 and 3 as opposed to socialism in its bureaucratic, 'capitalist' nature. His fears of his understanding were rapidly confirmed.
Conditions for socialism today?
Turning to the prospects of socialism; Western imperialism continues to decline mainly through its failure of imperialism. But the 20th century, would-be socialisms have also failed as an alternative - to western capitalism and, increasingly in the 21st century, to the other Continents. The Soviet Union destroyed itself by 1928. As a socialist society and as the chances of socialism that Lenin began to open up and that Trotsky tried to develop, were smashed by the Stalin Party/State. Stalin played no real socialism except the new Czar's insisting on the name.
On the other hand the defeats over Western imperialism and the successes of some revolutions have highly developed China, Vietnam and partially Cuba etc. Those mentioned present themselves as socialist but, with the partial exception of Cuba, are, in reality, bureaucratic state capitalist countries. Those traditional countries, now modern states, are dominated by a Party that is organically attached to State politics, which prevents any possibility of providing the leadership of society, that could be led by the majority of working class and peasants. State capitalism has become the engine of development.
The expansion of state capitalism is the main consequence of successful revolutions (if not socialist societies) and the defeats, partial and total, of Western imperialism. The enormous progress of the use of state capitalist type nations certainly defined a genuine great leap forward in their development. (Mao's 'great leap forward' that ultimately killed millions in the 1950s and 60s and achieved only poison until the later Chinese leadership turned to the use of organised state capitalism.) But, again, these forward movements of state capitalism, developed out of Western imperialism, still did not create an alternative society led by and in charge of the large majority working class.
Social democratic type western 'socialisms' have also collapsed in the large majority in Western Europe. No western living socialism, despite titles, provides any actual, genuine socialist success in the West. As the revolutions in the 1960s and 70s that were being fought in countries battling with imperialism and that seemed to succeed, had wide support from youth in the West. But, as the effects of the post revolutions were revealed, they were nevertheless largely rejected in the West as models for their own societies.
We are however at a potential new road. As the West declines more each year and its inequality and poverty increases, so a new large-scale, mass-action potentially rises. It carries a serious potential and social reaction larger than the major crises in capitalism in the 1930s. Something huge will have to cover the new space.
As western imperialism hollows out, the failure to totally dominate the globe evokes new, marginal class leaders that are opening new tests in society, sometimes both militarily and economically. These are using the crises of western imperialism to provoke problems of the people because the traditional political and economic rulers were still trying to suggest that all that was remains fine, while the West gets worse. The growing scattered employment, of the self-paid workers, of the unemployed and over-employed, can hear a voice in that new leadership. It creates a version of an apparent success in a ritual past, based on a crooked notion of security and the danger of different peoples and centred on the sovereignty of nationalism. In a nutshell, this coming rock-solid cloud across the West favours what was believed to be the gains of the traditional imperialism, now somehow blown away by the rise of the newly developed nations.
The significant importance of this theme in the West is not so much the likelyhood of a vast change of the working-class deciding for fascism, it is a new leadership that offers an untrue past in order to run a society installed above the people and for permanent pretence of a would-be security. It is another sign that the previous socialism no longer offers a different society and that there is an enormous hole in the future.
New socialism?
The failing and insecure sections in western society show the stark reality that there is no other type of society or civilisation available, other than a decaying and increasingly dangerous capitalism. Traditional versions of so called socialism have become unaccepted, or impossible, or an historic failure. Yet no other genuine system of societies applies.
Socialism in the West will have to change. The current context reveals the direct opposite of traditional notions of western security. A large part of western nations, and probably a majority of the young, already do not accept current futures as they have been rolling out from their past leaders. The capitalist, Tzar-led Russia has demonstrated the West's future in his battle at the weak margin of NATO and which grabs the Ukraine's coal and oil, duly named a wider Russia. Small wars in marginal countries will follow.
Meanwhile the US is close to political chaos, despite its slogans and dollars sent to Ukraine. Biden's desperate goal is to keep the Russia war on as far as he can, while he can try to break up the Republican Party (and Trump's Russian friend) that are heading for States and race wars at home. Connected in the background is the international fight about nukes that are starting again, more dangerous than ever. More of the new raft of the holocausts are surfacing in human society.
Ecological activity is equally deadly and immense, and closer, increasing as studies and events show the coming destruction on the planet and the particular, global responses to the mass movement across the earth. The western people will very soon face the centre of that movement.
The West is now facing a drastic drop of money and resources especially among the lowest classes and simultaneously aware of the continuing rise of the wealthy. Millions are aware of what is an international failure of capitalism. This is a battle that will inevitably be fought socially, politically and on the streets.
Who and what is socialist?
Lenin had to see imperialist owned, underdeveloped nations as the possible future for revolutions, given the failure of Germany (and other developed nations) after WW1. Now we see the breaking-up of the developed, but decaying imperialist nations, under the condition of wars, external and internal, facing nukes and climate disaster, and poverty, much of which can and will destroy humanity. The new socialism (the only alternative to any coherent system) has to fight in every pocket of possibility and their struggles, but understanding the global background that defines the international aspect of our lives. Socialism is the defence against our present systems, against the background grinding our lives with a vile capitalism and that transfigures the systems and the ordinary people who now change our lives.
Young people in the West are huge in numbers in the respect of interest in internationalism, of global activity and hostile to war in general. The working classes and all those in poverty will see the word capitalism now as the critical end for change. The creation to build vast movements that join up together into a current charter, underlining the great and common changes that are needed to live and to build a new way.
And how does that happen? We need the main focus on the real dangers, a different democracy now, right away, wherever we can set it up, and new different states in a new international. How can this be organised? When we make action. When we throw down the classes who rule and the racists and sexists are fought to a finish. When we organise to discuss at doors, build our way to speak and question in the crowd, act on the beginnings of collective chosen decisions and present and work on real democracy, the peoples decisions here and now and the connections across the nations. Action and movement needed now to let people see what can be what is next in the world.