Masses, 32th year, n. 619 – Time of counter-reforms

Time of counter-reforms

Where’s the greatest problem?

Masses, 32^th year, n. 619 – September 11, 2020.

The reforms are characterized by expressing the development of the productive forces. They affect both the economic, social and political spheres. This is why they marked the liberal capitalism of the 19th century. Counter-reforms express the stagnation of productive forces and the decline in world capitalism. They are characteristic of monopoly capitalism, whose landmarks were raised in the early 20th century, the predominance of financial capital, therefore, of imperialism.
The two great world wars resulted from the clash of the productive forces with the relations of production, enclosed by the monopolies; contradiction that turns into a clash between those and national borders. The World War Idid not destroy part of the productive forces on a necessary scale, and did not accommodate conflicts between national borders. World War II would be fueled by the Great Depression, and by the need for a new and more complete sharing of the world. This time, the devastation was gigantic.
War technology and industry have taken a great leap forward in their destructive capacity. The atomic bomb test on Japan highlighted the nature of the “New World Order”, dictated by the United States. The proletarian revolution in Russia, which emerged in the bowels of the World War I, broke one of the links in the capitalist chain, and opened a period of transition to socialism.
The proletarian revolutions started to free the world productive forces from the regressive and barbaric obstacles of monopoly and imperialist domination. After the World War II, the revolution broke out in China. Another powerful link was broken. The previously defeated revolutions were opposed to the course of regional and world transformations. But the genuine revolutions in Russia and China rose as two pillars, with which imperialism would clash and act strategically to break them.
The nationalist, Stalinist revisionism, in the process of transition from capitalism to socialism, would be in charge of opening the flanks for capitalist restorationism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China were incorporated into the post-war New Order, in the form of predatory “peace”, of Potsdam and the “peaceful coexistence”, although contradictions did not allow it, and imperialism would not cease a second in its objective to enhance the restorationist forces.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the advancement of restoration in China ended the historic period of conquests, which were destroyed and turned backwards. There were countless stages of conflict and progress by the restorationist forces, led by the United States. Between the 1960s and the 1970s, the trends of disintegration of the post-war order took shape. World capitalism, rebuilt from the hecatomb, moves in the midst of the historical laws of its exhaustion, and shows the monopolistic obstacles that in the past made it impossible to continue the development of the productive forces, and which spawned the two great wars.
The framework of world reforms devised by the United States proved unsustainable, and served to hide the imperialist plunder of the semi-colonies, submitted to the new division of the world. It was not possible to modify the general orientation that monopoly capitalism cannot take reforms, so that for the bourgeoisie it remains only to impose counter-reforms on the working class and, in particular, on the semi-colonial countries, which must bear the greater weight of crises.
The liquidation of conquests of proletarian revolutions is part of the world counter-reforms. The setbacks of revolutionary transformations are directed against the working class and the others exploited, everywhere, both in the powers and in the semi-colonies. It turns out that the wide movement of counter-forms has only been possible, due to the worldwide disorganization of the proletariat and the crisis of revolutionary leadership, whose responsibility for counter-revolutionary Stalinism is in sight.
The fight against counter-reforms, as can be seen, requires assimilation, defense and application – in the particular conditions of the new stage of the disintegration of capitalism – of the programmatic, ideological, organizational, political and economic positions of the world working class. It is noticed that the class struggle tends to worsen, with the putrefaction of capitalism and the need of the bourgeoisie to unload it on the oppressed majority. Mandatorily, the exploited have to react and, thus, objectively poses the problem of revolutionary leadership. The Transition Program of the IV International brings these conditions together, it is sufficient that the class-conscious vanguard  express it, constituting the program in each country, and raising the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist