Kassioun Editorial 1078: Socialism… Again!

This statement constitutes a qualitative leap in the official Russian discourse, although in fact it is a continuation and accumulation within a related context that definitely did not start with this statement. We can recall Putin’s previous statements that “capitalism, with its dominant liberal model, is going through a deep crisis”.

If Putin’s new statement is the first official statement being said in this manner about socialism in post-Soviet Russia, the atmosphere of public debate had reached the same place a while back.

As only one illustrative example, the Vice President of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, Dr. Konstantin Sivkov clearly expressed that Russia, in the context of its confrontation with the West, will be forced to turn towards socialism, and has no other way to last. He even went to the conclusion that Russia’s leaders themselves would not be able to remain, if they did not go this way. This means that the issue is not governed by the people who run the process, as much as it is governed by the objective law of the ongoing battle.

The essence of the matter is still related to Lenin’s statement, which today is re-establishing its validity once again, that “the peoples, in the framework of their national struggle against imperialism, will turn against capitalism in their countries”. This is the saying that the People’s Will Party expressed in its 2013 draft program: “The peoples of the BRICS countries, for example, and in the framework of their national struggle to defend their territorial integrity and national interests in the face of imperialism, which is governed by the expansion of war and exploitation, are gradually turning against capitalism itself as a socioeconomic system. This is in line with the interest of the peoples of the third world, whose national struggle against the imperialist West and against Zionism is increasingly integrated with their socioeconomic struggle”.

It has become clear that ending Russia from the outside is not possible whatever the means used. Therefore, targeting it from inside, and through the economic and cultural aspects, becomes the main means of action. This cannot be addressed without directly controlling the wealth of the major plunderers, and without a significant amount of centralizing strategic wealth and industries under the control of the state. Additionally, certainly there is no way to address it without a radical redistribution of wealth internally for the benefit of the vast majority of people. Whatever these measures may be called, whether socialism or any other name, their essence will remain the same.

The global struggle over a new world order, an alternative to the prevailing one, is more complex and deeper than the replacement of some states by others, and some powers for others within the framework of a “transference of global power”. The existing crisis-ridden world order, i.e., capitalism, no longer sees its continuation (and this is what its theorists say publicly, including Klaus Schwab), except through famines, wars, and epidemics of unprecedented scale, leading to the “liquidation” of several billion people around the world, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Some might have, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, raised the question about whether socialism has a future. Thus, the question that was and remains valid is whether capitalism has a future. The global elite’s answer is “yes”, through mass destruction, through the killing of billions of people, and through further destruction of nature.

The question that is being practically answered these days, is not about the future of capitalism, for that is settled, but about what the next socialism is like, the socialism of the twenty-first century, and how it can avoid the past mistakes and build on the past positives, as the only way to rid humanity of the glum fate it is experiencing, the darkest that capitalism promises.

(النسخة العربية)