LONG TAKE: I Have Never Shirked From My Principles
In university, I wrote my senior dissertation on a Leningrad chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva, author of the scandalous 1988 letter titled 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles.' Published in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, Andreyeva criticized Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms as destabilizing the country and leading it down a road to its own destruction.
Andreyeva was not an anti-reform conservative, as she was labelled by her political opponents, but a convinced Marxist-Leninist who warned against throwing the baby out with the bath water in attempting to fix the soviet economic and social problems of the late 20th century.
Gorbachev, the apparent champion of freedom and openness, accused Andreyeva of conspiring with an imaginary 'anti-reform bloc' within the Communist Party. Her letter was removed, a coordinated assault against her person and ideas was launched in the media, and party members accused of conspiring her were political-neutralized.
Many liberals at the time even claimed that if Nina Andreyeva had not existed, she would have had to have been invented.
It's been many years since 1988 and the history of socialism has been more than thoroughly attacked unfairly, with few left in the Western infosphere to actually set the record straight.
And yet, I also have refused to shirk from my long-held Marxist principles.
We live in a world in which monopolist corporations exploit labor to extract profitat a rate we have never before seen. Real wages are in decline, jobs in the West have in large part become meaningless parts of an enormous corporate bureaucracy, hustle culture has attempted to rationalize the confiscation of every last drop of freedom we have in our personal lives, and all the actually productive jobs have been outsourced to the periphery where hyper-exploitation of labor is the norm.
What we have witnessed following the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc is not that socialism doesn't work, but that Marx was right about capitalism...
It is a system that will continue to monopolize, centralize, exploit, and devour everything until an alternative system stops it in its tracks.
I believe that the only alterative is socialism. An imperfect socialism that exists in the real world and has problems. Problems, however, can be overcome if they are not endemic to a system based in the exploitation of the vast majority of people to the benefit of a select few.
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