This article was written 5 years ago by Alicia Sagra when the fall of the Berlin wall completed 20 years. Whe believe that it remains relevant today, on the 25th anniversary of its fall.
On November 9 [2009] it is celebrated the 20th anniversary of an event that shocked the world: the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, it was officially announced at a press conference that from midnight, East Germans could cross any borders of East Germany (GDR), including the Berlin Wall, without requiring them special permits.
Quickly the news was spread on both sides of the divided city, long before midnight, and thousands of Berliners had gathered on both sides of the wall. At the expected time, East Berliners began to go through the checkpoint. Scenes full of emotion were abundant: hugs from family and friends who had been separated for a long time, crying faces reflecting disbelief, toast with champagne or beer, gifts to welcome visitors, flowers on the windshields of cars crossing the border and the rifles of the soldiers guarding checkpoints. After that, the scenes that swept the world of thousands of youngsters throwing down the wall with hammers.
An important national demand was achieved. It existed since the August 13, 1961, when the leaders of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) ordered the building of a concrete wall 166 miles long and four feet high to split the city of Berlin.
It was not a concession of authorities
The fall of the Wall was the culmination of a revolutionary process that had been developed and was manifested in various degrees: increasing flights and attempts of flights from East Germany, some people trying to cross the Wall, but the majority going to Hungary, where the May 2 Hungarian soldiers had begun to break down the borders with Austria. By that route, 15,000 East Germans had gone to West Germany until mid-September.
From October big marches in various cities in East Germany started to happen. It started in Leipzig, but week after week the marches were widespread in the different cities and with increasing number of demonstrators. On October 18, President Honecker, who had tried to respond with repression, was stripped of all his offices and replaced by Egon Krenz, the former head of security. Krenz attempted to appease the protesters, but failed. On 23 October 200,000 protested and on November 6 the number had risen to nearly 500,000.
Given this unstoppable situation, the entire GDR Ministers cabinet resigns on November 7. Two days after the Berlin Wall would be destroyed.
It was not an isolated phenomenon
Conversely, the fall of the Wall was the symbol of an impressive revolutionary process against totalitarian single-party regimes in Eastern Europe, which were crumbling as house of cards one by one.
In Poland, after lots of strikes against unsustainable living conditions, the leaders of the Solidarity trade union (which had been outlawed seven years earlier) and the government negotiated constitutional changes, a new trade union legislation and free elections. In July 1989 the Solidarity candidates have a major win in the Senate and the House; and in August Tadeuz Mazowiecki, editor of Solidarity’s newspaper, becomes the Prime Minister of Poland.
In Czechoslovakia, on August 21, 1989 thousands of protesters took to the streets on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Warsaw Pact. In mid-November a meeting of students marched on Wenceslas Square to express their dissatisfaction with the current system.
The riot police brutally attacked, but over the next few days, thousands of people gathered in the square to protest repression and to demand free elections and the ouster of the president. The Communist Party had to cede power to a majority that did not belong to the party. In the new cabinet formed in December there were 11 non-communist representatives. Besides the formation of opposition parties was legalized.
In Hungary, the process began earlier. Already in 1988 the prime minister János Kádár had been ousted and replaced by Karoly Grosz. In May 1989 the government ordered the military to dismantle the fence marking the border with Austria, a fact that catalyzed the German process. On 10 June the Hungarian Communist Party and the opposition signed an agreement that marked the transition of Hungary to the multiparty system.
All these facts were products of massive demonstrations, but had a non-violent nature, so they were given the name (which initially applied only to Czechoslovakia) of “velvet revolutions”. But there was a different case.
In Romania, since 1972, President Nicolae Ceausescu came to rule with an iron fist. He wouldn’t brook no opposition, neither in the country nor inside the party. His immediate family, his wife and son had key positions in government and the cases of corruption in which they were involved were widely known.
In mid-December 1989 protests against the government occurred. Ceausescu gives the order to suppress, which is not respected by the soldiers, many of whom change sides. The Romanian people got out the streets in crowds to celebrate the victory. But the special forces who remained loyal to the government conducted a bloody crackdown on 21 December in Bucharest and other cities.
This caused a violent backlash of mass movement which had the support of a section of the army. Heavy clashes occurred until, on 23 December, the President and his wife are arrested, accused of abuse of authority and the murder of 60,000 Romanians. Two days later they were executed. An interim government of the National Salvation Front took over, consisting of former members of the Communist Party who had opposed Ceausescu and dissident intellectuals and professionals.
The whole process against one-party regimes culminated in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet regime in the ex-USSR.
The nature of these mobilizations
From these facts, the propagandists of imperialism launched a major campaign on the “failure of socialism and the supremacy of capitalism.” This was reaffirmed by the attitude of the Communist parties, who mourned the fall of these regimes and spoke of a “terrible world defeat.”
The IWL, from the outset, took an opposite position: those regimes were not overturned by imperialism, but by mass mobilizations fighting for their conditions of life. Therefore, their falls were impregnated with a highly revolutionary character, leading to the destruction of the world center of Stalinism, which had become a stranglehold on the working class and the mass movement around the world.
But among the Trotskyist organizations, which generally agreed with a common position, a debate was opened (even within the IWL of the time) on the implications of these processes. What was predominant? The destruction of the Stalinist apparatus or the restoration of capitalism that occurred in these deformed workers’ states?
What conclusions do we draw?
The processes of the East of Europe opened considerable controversy in the working class and the left. After 20 years, in the midst of the global crisis of capitalism, we have a better historical perspective to resume the debate. Many organizations were hit by those big events. This was the case of communist parties in many countries that saw the fall, one after the other, of their political and often material backers.
But also many Trotskyist organizations. An extreme example was the so-called United Secretariat (USec) which concluded that the fall of the Wall erased the division between revolutionaries and reformists, drew from their program the struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and became part of bourgeois governments.
Others, like the MST (Socialist Workers Movement, from Argentina), although not being so explicit, reached conclusions that took them to the same path. According to them, the major changes of 89-91 forced them to be more “flexible”, to leave “orthodoxy.” Now they build parties with the reformists, as the Brazilian PSOL, and even with representatives of the bourgeoisie (as they tried to do in Argentina with the Catholic Peronist Mario Cafiero) and support bourgeois governments as in Venezuela. And behind them there are a whole bunch of different organizations that gradually began to change their objectives, the rationale of militancy.
The electoral activity became central. The logic of the elections prevailed over the logic of the struggles . The unity to fight became secondary. It doesn’t matter if the fight is won or not, if the class is strengthened or weakened, the key is how the party apparatus is strengthened and as often appears on TV.
There always have been organizations that work by this logic, but after the East process, it became widespread. The explanation is that, with varying degrees of consciousness, these sectors abandoned the prospect of revolution. Some because they think it is no longer necessary, others because they think they can’t and give up the struggle for power. All of them are dedicated to “building power” within capitalism or propagandize socialism for an indefinite future.
Either way, these organizations were hit by the “opportunistic wave” fueled by the imperialist campaign that socialism has died. The IWL-FI was not free from this “wave”, yet we were almost destroyed by it. And our reconstruction was possible largely because we were able to advance an interpretation of those facts, which led us not to reject, but to check the total validity of Trotskyism and the perspective of socialist revolution.
Restoration and revolution
Martín Hernández gives an interpretation of those facts in his book The verdict of history:
“The lack of clarity on the different times of the so-called ‘process of the East’ has been, and remains, a source of enormous confusion. (…) And inevitably arises the question from the standpoint of the interests of the working class: what has occurred in Eastern Europe is positive or negative? This type of question usually implies the confusion of believing that the demonstrations against the bureaucracy were the motive for finally destroying the remainder of the workers states. Something like ‘throwing the child out with the bath water.’ But it was not what happened (…)
“Looking at events from the historical point of view, we can see that over the decades there have been many attempts to topple the bureaucracy. Those attempts were defeated, the bureaucracy was not driven out from power and this led to the restoration of capitalism. This, no doubt, was extremely negative. It is, in itself, the maximum expression of the crisis of the revolutionary leadership. If history had stopped there, we would be likely before one of the greatest defeats of the world proletariat in history. But History did not stop there. After the capitalist restoration and the return of the bourgeois class to power, the masses went to the streets and toppled its agents and therefore the dictatorial Stalinists regimes of single party. And this is clearly positive. (…)
“The collapse of the Stalinist apparatus is a huge victory for the world working class, as great as the defeat of fascism during the Second World War. The lack of a revolutionary leadership made that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes gave rise to bourgeois democratic regimes instead of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. But this can’t lead us to say that we are facing a defeat. (…)
“But why there is an opposite opinion among principled Trotskyist organizations? Because they part from the misconception that the masses threw down a bureaucratic dictatorship of the proletariat and placed a bourgeois democratic regime, and that is not so. The masses toppled bourgeois dictatorships [that existed since the middle 80’s] and that was an enormous victory but, due to the lack of a revolution leadership, the bourgeoisie and its agents ultimately imposed bourgeois democratic regimes.”
From his research, Martin Hernandez concludes that Trotsky’s ideas favorably passed the verdict of history and that the East events, far from departing from the revolutionary perspective, offer more favorable conditions for the working class and the masses. The destruction of the Stalinist apparatus opens more opportunities for progress in the resolution of the revolutionary crisis of the leadership, from which ultimately everything depends.
