Masters of Discourse by Israel Shamir

Author:Israel Shamir
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Published: 2008-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

Our Happy Bygone Days

“We lived in a communist paradise and weren’t aware of it.” I have heard this sentence from many ex-citizens of the exUSSR, from Russians and Tajiks, from Ukrainians and Balts, and I agree with them wholeheartedly: my birthplace, Soviet Russia was a land of spiritual and educated men who loved their work, were proud of their country, despised money, were hospitable and kind. Stephen Gowans’ Hail the Reds has eloquently eulogized the lost paradise:

Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, the Soviet Union managed to create one of the great achievements of human history: a great industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of wealth, income, education and opportunity; a society in which health care and education through university were free; where rent, utilities and public transportation were subsidized, inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous, and child care was subsidized. The Communists produced social security more robust than provided even by Scandinavian-style social democracy, but achieved with fewer resources and a lower level of development. Soviet socialism was, and remains, a model for humanity – of what can be achieved outside the confines and contradictions of capitalism.9

Over thirteen years ago Soviet Communism was done in, and Anglo-American Liberalism won its third great victory of the century. These were hard years for the Russians

– life expectancy dropped drastically, industry collapsed, and the great achievements of Soviet days were reversed.

1 www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/reds.html

But life of an ordinary man became much worse in the victorious West as well – the moneyed classes lost all fear of a worker’s revolt. The social gains that had been won over the years thanks to this fear were taken back, step by step, as Russia was beaten back down into a middle-sized country of little importance.

Gowans documents our great fall from grace, and highlights the anti-progressive efforts of the ‘gleeful’ Howard Zinn and the other Western leftists who provided the left flank of the anticommunist Cold War front. Howard Zinn is not alone in his refusal to admit collaboration with the enemy. British Trotskyite Alan Woods has now published a verbose tripartite article1 – a response to my Celia in the Woods2 – and he betrays a Zinn-like glee at the fall of what he calls ‘Stalinism’.

Woods mentions that Trotsky “always stood for the unconditional defense of the USSR against imperialism and capitalism.” Yet Woods rejects the advice of his own guru and stands against the USSR. For him, Russian communism is nothing but ‘Stalinism’, and the fall of the Soviet state proves it. He gleefully offers these rhetorical challenges:

…if we accept what you say, that the Soviet Union was a socialist paradise, then how come it collapsed? …if there was a genuine workers’ democracy in the USSR, why did the Soviet workers not fight to defend the old regime? How does it happen that after over half a century of what Israel Shamir calls socialism, they could re-establish capitalism without a civil war?

I intend to answer these questions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.