by Praful Bidwai

The collapse of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago abruptly brought to a close what the historian Eric Hobsbawm famously called the “Short 20th Century”—short both because it began late, with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and because the historic epoch it marked ended a decade before the century’s close. Humanity’s greatest success in overthrowing capitalism in one country, and making its working people arbiters of their own fate by creating new modes of organisation of society and economy and a novel state form, ended in catastrophe as the USSR disintegrated and international socialism effectively ceased to exist.

Was the collapse of socialism inevitable? Frankly, in a sense, it was—not because socialism (or another collectivist alternative to capitalism) is by itself unviable, but because it was confined to one country, and that too a backward one, after the European Revolution failed. The Soviet system, isolated, subjected to multiple privations, and forced into curtailing democratic rights, soon degenerated into bureaucratised socialism which couldn’t coexist with the Soviets (workers’ and peasants’ councils), the heart of the new state form.

Its degeneration produced Stalinism, which purged the once-democratic Communist party of its entire revolutionary leadership, ossified state structures, subjugated the international working-class movement to the narrow dictates of “socialism in one country”, and visited untold cruelties upon the Soviet people. Stalin’s successors failed to reform the system and guarantee civil-political rights to the population. It nevertheless survived despite poor legitimacy because it generated growth and instituted a modicum of social and economic rights. It also became a bulwark against Nazism and fascism and emerged half-victorious in World War-II.

Although this degraded “actually-existing” socialism couldn’t become a model for the international working-class movement, its very existence forced post-War capitalism to “civilise” itself through a rudimentary welfare state and concessions to the working people. Thus began the “Golden Age of Capitalism” (1945-73), which generated democratisation and relative mass prosperity in the West on an unprecedented scale. The Soviet Bloc also provided a political-military counterweight to Western domination—albeit at an enormous expense to itself.

Meanwhile, waves of discontent broke out in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the USSR and East Germany. When I first visited Moscow and East Berlin in the mid-1970s, the rot in the system had become starkly apparent; it could only be held together by harsh surveillance and repression. Gorbachev’s reforms were a last-ditch move to rescue the system: they only strengthened the opposition, which clamoured for democratisation and freedom from oppressive bureaucracy, and was lured by the promise of economic opportunity.

The West’s Cold War victory was meant to create universal peace, a liberal-democratic order, and prosperity for all through capitalism and economic opportunity. Nothing of the sort happened, even in Europe. NATO expanded Eastwards, creating new insecurities and divisions. The US is more militarised than before, and is provoking a new Cold War. Why, as I discovered last week while in Berlin, even German reunification remains fraught with persistent 33-percent East-West income-differentials and widespread prejudice against East Germans. A recent survey says 4 out of 10 Berliners don’t feel at home in a united Berlin; 52 percent would consider leaving it for a good job elsewhere.

Global capitalism, now unchallenged by socialism or the “emerging powers”, has become even more predatory in its corporatist-neoliberal avatar, dispossessing and impoverishing people, horrendously increasing wealth and income disparities, privatising natural resources, destroying climate balances, and dismantling what’s left of the welfare state. Capitalism has proved utterly bankrupt especially since the Great Recession. This only reinforces the case for a socialism that’s democratic, internationalist, not centrally-planned, and amenable to popular control.

Bidwai is a writer and columnist based in Delhi.