[PRWC Party Documents] Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism, January 15, 1992

Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism

III. The Process of Capitalist Restoration

The Third and Final Stage: The Gorbachov Regime, 1985-91

Basahin sa Pilipino Basahon sa Hiligaynon

Armando Liwanag, Chairman, Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines

January 15, 1992

The Gorbachov regime from 1985 to 1991 marked the third and final stage in the anti-Marxist and antisocialist revisionist counterrevolution to restore capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship.

It involved the prior dissolution of the ruling revisionist parties and regimes in Eastern Europe, the absorption of East Germany by West Germany and finally the banning and dispossession of the CPSU and the disintegration of the Soviet Union no less, after a dubious coup attempt by Gorbachov's appointees in the highest state and party positions next only to his.

The counterrevolution was carried out in a relatively peaceful manner. After all, the degeneration from socialism to capitalism proceeded for 38 years. Within the last six years, the corrupt bureaucrats masquerading as communists were ready to peel off their masks, declare themselves as excommunists and even anticommunists overnight and cooperate with the longstanding anticommunists among the intelligentsia and the aggrieved broad masses of the people in setting up regimes that were openly bourgeois and antisocialist.

Because they were manipulated and directed by the big bourgeoisie and the anticommunist intelligentsia, the mass uprisings in Eastern Europe in 1989 cannot be simply and totally described as democratic although it is also undeniable that the broad masses of the people, including the working class and the intelligentsia, were truly aggrieved and did rise up. The far bigger mass actions that put Mussolini and Hitler into power or the lynch mobs unleashed by the Indonesian fascists to massacre the communists in 1965 do not make a fascist movement democratic. In determining the character of a mass movement, we take into account not only the magnitude of mass participation but also the kind of class leadership involved. Otherwise, the periodic electoral rallies of the bourgeois reactionary parties which exclude the workers and peasants from power or even the Edsa mass uprising cum military mutiny in 1986 would be considered totally democratic, without the necessary qualifications regarding the class leadership involved.

It is possible for nonviolent mass uprisings to arise and succeed when their objective is not to really effect a fundamental change of the exploitative social system, when one set of bureaucrats is simply replaced by another set and when the incumbent set of bureaucrats does not mind the change of administration. It was only in Romania where there was bloodshed because it was not completely within the reorganizing that had been done by the Gorbachovites in 1987 to 1989 in Eastern Europe. Ceaucescu resisted change as did Honecker to a lesser extent. In the dissolution of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, the anticommunist combination of Gorbachov and Yeltsin simply issued the decrees and did not even bother to conjure any semblance of popular demand in the form of huge mass uprisings.

As the last revisionist ruler of the Soviet Union, Gorbachov could accelerate the destruction of the CPSU and the Soviet Union because of the previous work of Khrushchov and Brezhnev. What he did in the main in his brief regime was to engage in a systematic campaign of deception. He described his regime as being engaged in socialist renewal and at the same time encouraged the forces of capitalist restoration to do their work under the slogans of democracy and economic reform.

From time to time, he paid lip service to Marxism-Leninism and socialism and made frequent protestations that he was a convinced communist. But in the end he came out openly as an anticommunist. In his final message as President of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, he used the language of the imperialists in the Cold War to describe his principal achievement, which is "giving freedom" to the people from "totalitarianism" and "civilizing" what he implied as the "uncivilized" Soviet state and people.

In laying the ideological premises of his regime, Gorbachov went back to the strident anti-Stalinism of Khrushchov and described the Brezhnev period as an interruption of the work initiated by Khrushchov. He rehabilitated Bukharin and put him up as a source of wisdom for "economic reforms".

It became the fashion for Gorbachov and his colleagues at various levels of the CPSU and the state to describe themselves as "liberal communists" and to attack_under the guise of being completely anti-Stalin and depicting Stalin as being worse than Hitler_the entire course of Soviet history. They put forward propositions in abstract supraclass, universalistic, humanistic and ahistorical terms and drew from social democracy and bourgeois liberalism in order to denigrate, deviate from and attack Marxist-Leninist theory and the proletarian revolutionary standpoint.

Gorbachov and his colleagues systematically adopted barefaced anticommunist "advisers" and placed the anticommunists in the various branches of government, the Congress of People's Deputies, the institutes and mass media in order to churn out a constant stream of anticommunist propaganda. Gorbachov himself took the lead in ridiculing the proletarian revolutionary stand as outdated and Marxism-Leninism as having no monopoly of the truth and won the adulation of the officials, ideologues and publicists of the United States and other capitalist countries as he used the language of social democracy and bourgeois liberalism and ultimately U.S. Cold War terminology.