Only in a few rare cases have US leaders treated leftist governments or forces in a “friendly” fashion: Yugoslavia as a buffer state during the Cold War, the Khmer Rouge killers (if they could be considered leftist) against the socialist government in Cambodia during the 1980s, and China and Vietnam today as they allow business investments in their “enterprise zones.” In such instances Washington’s support has been dictated by temporary expediencies or the promise, as in the case of China and Vietnam, that the countries are moving toward a capitalist system.
In the period after World War II, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations and put forth a Marshall Plan for Western Europe, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced social benefits for the working classes of various countries. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of communist parties in European elections and in the control of trade unions, especially in France and Italy.1
But today with the communist nations having disappeared, there is no need to make concessions to workers in Western Europe. There being no competing lure, Third World peoples—and working populations everywhere—are subjected to the rollback of benefits and wages that had been won through years of democratic struggle.
One can judge the intentions of policymakers by what they do to countries drawn into the Western orbit. For decades we were told that the Cold War was a contest between freedom and an expansionist communism, with nothing said about the expansionist interests of global capitalism. But immediately after communism was overthrown in the USSR and Eastern Europe, US rulers began intimating that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former “captive nations”—namely free markets.2 Of what use was political democracy, the free marketeers seemed to be saying, if it allowed the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? To the US globalists, a country’s political system weighed less than the kind of economic system it had.
Getting rid of communism, it became clear, meant getting rid of public ownership of industry and most of the public sector in general, reducing the social wage to as close to zero as possible, and installing an untrammeled free market economy.
Throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, post-communism “reforms” and newly installed private-market governments brought high unemployment and a severe decline in the standard of living, specifically as follows:
There was a massive transfer of public capital into the coffers of private owners amounting to over a trillion dollars. Contrary to a common view propagated on both the Left and Right, the new Russian oligarchs were not former Communist Party commissars who merely shifted from public to private control but mafia-style private groups unconnected to the government, appearing on the national scene in unprecedented numbers. “Without exception,” notes James Petras, “the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics—assassinations, massive theft . .. of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts.”4 A kleptocracy in progress.
Throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this process of privatization by plunder and intimidation, described in the western press as “reforms,” brought severe economic recession and a high rate of unemployment, along with a dramatic drop in educational and literacy standards; serious deterioration in health care and all other public services; skyrocketing infant mortality; and a sharp increase in crime, suicide, homelessness, beggary, prostitution, and drug addiction—all resulting in plummeting life expectancy rates.5 In 2010, twenty years after the installment of free market capitalism in Eastern Europe, these distressing conditions were as bad as ever. Countries like Latvia (having experienced full employment under communism) still suffered about 20 percent unemployment, and those were only the official figures, which tend to understate the real situation by leaving all sorts of down-and-out cohorts uncounted.6
In former communist countries like Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, crypto-fascist and anti-Semitic organizations surfaced. Leftist dissidents were jailed, their parties outlawed, their publications silenced, and their labor unions banned. Laws were passed in some of the countries prohibiting criticisms of capitalism, the advocacy of socialism, and the propagation of “class hatred.”7
One of the former communist nations, Belarus, failed to convert fully to the free market paradise. Belarus was ruled by freely elected President Alexander Lukashenko, who dared to kick out the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank and refused to privatize and deregulate the entire economy, preferring to pursue policies on behalf of low-income people, rural workers, and the elderly. The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), which includes the United States and some fifty other nations, has the self-appointed task of overseeing the transformation away from socialism in former communist nations. The OSCE succeeded in organizing the splintered opposition to Lukashenko into a single voting bloc that favored the free market. In 2001 the New York Times admitted that the CIA also was working with the Belarussian opposition.8