13) LIFE DISPROVES GORBACHEV'S "UNIVERSAL HUMAN VALUES"
By Darrell Rankin
The last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is frequently trotted out by our corporate elite as a role model. It is a sad image because of the harm he inflicted on the working class of this world, especially the workers of his own country.
But our establishment loves Gorbachev for his record of concealing troubling matters from the minds of young people. You won't hear him talk about the festering sores of capitalism, about how to create good‑paying jobs, solve injustice to Aboriginal peoples, cut tuition, end poverty, or prevent war. But you will hear him say that youth have a great future if they work hard.
Gorbachev is used as an ideological tool to trump reality and history. A decade after he presided over the counter-revolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the average male life expectancy in Russia dropped to 57, by about 15 years. A rapacious class of entrepreneurs ‑ many former communists like Gorbachev ‑ looted Russia's public property.
Outside Russia, the capitalist world was triumphal. The new imperialist diktat was epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994. People with a lingering desire for social change were told "there is no alternative" and "history has ended." But today, people are shaking off this confusion.
The Arab Spring, the left's gains in Latin America, the European resistance to the financial oligarchy, a leap in strike actions, the Occupy movement, and the Quebec student strike are all signs that resistance is growing to global capitalism.
When Gorbachev surrendered to capitalist ideology, capitalists promised a "peace dividend," ending the heavy burden of the arms race. Instead we face a very shaky economic future and permanent, global war.
Capitalism's profiteering also threatens nature on a scale that could kill billions of people. Locked into an endless race to make more profit, our capitalist overlords are ignoring the warnings of scientists about the need to end militarism, tar sands development and reliance on fossil fuels, which all produce enormous profits for the one percent.
We are all doomed unless our guide is "best science," not fast money. Capitalism bears responsibility for the growing economic crisis, for militarism and war, and the impending environmental catastrophe.
So why did Gorbachev depart from Marxism? He was elected to the highest positions in the Soviet Union at a time of dramatic nuclear tensions. An enormous anti‑war movement forced U.S. President Reagan to hold summit meetings with Gorbachev, resulting in the 1987 US‑Soviet Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Yet this is when Gorbachev began to yield ideological ground, especially with his idea that universal values would now guide humanity's future. This ignored the rapacious appetite of U.S. military‑industrial corporations. Gorbachev followed a long line of ideological misleaders who argue that capitalism guided by "values" is no different than socialism, so socialism can be safely discarded.
In Gorbachev's words, "We are entering into a world of new dimensions, in which universal human values are acquiring the same meaning for all and in which human freedom and well‑being and the unique value of human life must become both the foundation and basis for universal security and the supreme criterion by which we measure progress." (Speech at the Second Summit of CSCE Heads of State or Government, Paris, Nov. 19-21, 1990. He first used the concept in a 1988 speech at the United Nations General Assembly.)
What do these fine words actually mean? Are freedom and human values consistent with the capitalist world we see today, which is in a state of permanent war and crises?
"Freedom" means different things to different people. Capitalists want the freedom to cut wages, but workers faced with such a demand view it as unreasonable. To capitalists, the freedom to make a private profit is the highest noble aim, but for socialists, this "freedom" is a threat to working people.
Gorbachev's view that capitalism and socialism would become a happy couple was nothing more than a regurgitation of the "convergence" theory advanced by bourgeois academics ‑ notably in the 1930s and 1970s ‑ to hide the growing failures of capitalism, and the success of socialism in creating a more fair society, defeating Hitler fascism or averting nuclear Armageddon.
The occasional capitalist embrace of "human rights" is a response to the successes of socialism and the working class. It is a way to hide capitalism's failures, like starting two world wars and the nuclear arms threat. For example, the defeat of Nazi Germany led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations' Charter. The massive strike wave in Canada in the 1970s (the greatest hurrah of the militant unionists who came out of the Depression and War) led to Trudeau's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Marxists were never fooled into thinking that "universal values" would give us peace and paradise as long as capitalism rules the roost. The two world systems never converged, but capitalism did gain a temporary upper hand, and the spectre of nuclear war has not been removed.
Despite Gorbachev, we are still in the historic epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and workers still have a world to win ‑ if we can prevent catastrophic new wars and environmental destruction.