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I originally wrote a slightly shorter version of this for the Progressive
Sociology Network, but based on Elson's recent comments, I thought it might be
relevant here also. This was written before I read Elson's comments and I
wasn't referring to Elson's points in particular. As always, apologies in
advance for those who read it on PSN..... pstevens asked: "What were the two
(serious socialist experiments)? I referred to.
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In all these things, it is not easy to draw
lines As a biologist friend of mine told me, in nature there is no such thing as
"genetics", "biochemistry", "biophysics", and "molecular biology." There
is just what nature is and does, and we create the boundaries as ways of trying
to understand particular processes. I see "socialism" as a
political-economic system. "Government ownership" is not the essence of
socialism, at least not in any Marxist sense. In Marx' sense, socialism was
meant as a stepping stone to communism and presumably had some of the seeds of
communism embedded in it -- namely, expropriation of the wealth of the biggest
business and a planned economy that would do away with the chaos of crisis of
overproduction.
(Favorite examples of liberal socialists, like
Sweden, are not socialist in a Marxist sense. Sweden, sweet, peaceful,
utopian-modelled Sweden, makes a lot of its wealth selling weapons all over the
world; the prosperity of the Swedes, like the rest of Western Europe and the
U.S., comes from the fruits of imperialist exploitation of workers in other
parts of the world.)
BUT equally important with the planned economy
and expropriation of the wealthy, socialism would require a political-economic
system where decisions were made that served the interests of the great majority
(this implies protecting "minorities" hopefully by doing away with "minority"
status), including the push towards egalitarianism and the political empowerment
of the great majority of people (WHICH IS NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH FORMAL ELECTIONS,
HOWEVER. Formal elections are often a camouflage to hide the control by an
elite, and conversely, one can have the empowerment of the masses without the
kinds of formalistic elections held in the U.S. or India, for example, although
developing the institutions and processes to guarantee that empowerment is an
enormous challenge.) The problem with calling for more "democracy" is that
it begs the question of how it will be enforced. To simply declare that the
leadership should be "democratic" does not ensure that. One or another group
WILL consolidate power. If those who are unselfishly committed to communism
relinquish power to those who favor exploitation, how does that serve the
interests of the people?
Admittedly, having a group that consolidates
power can facilitate the concentration of power by a "red bourgeoisie" who will
use that power to oppress others. But it was not "lack of formal democracy" that
led to the demise of the USSR. Arguing for formal electoral democracy will not
guarantee genuine "power to the people" since control of the military will
still be decisive in the short term. The only "guarantee" is to develop
heightened sensitivity on the part of the working class to be ultra-skeptical of
any kinds of rationalizations for privilege for any group, and in particular, to
hold the leadership up to higher standards than anyone else, rather than making
leadership be an opportunity for privilege. Even this is no guarantee, but
general liberal comments about "being more democratic" will guarantee nothing
and can actually MASK corruption. In the end, it is only the consciousness of
the masses that will prevent the re-emergence of privilege and capitalism, and
the responsibility of the leadership is to nurture that consciousness, first and
foremost, as well as set an example by living those principles.
The problem, which should be analysed in more
depth elsewhere, is not simple elitism. This Weberian-Pareto-human nature
theory locates the collapse of socialism in the structures of the human brain as
expressed either through "human nature" or in some kind of essential process
that inevitably develops when humans organize together (bureaucracy, etc.)
rather than as something LEARNED through the social/political/economic relations
that exist in the society. It wasn't lack of democracy, per se, it was
lack of communist economic and social relations (by which I mean empowering
the masses also.) I think that there wasn't ENOUGH communism in the USSR &
China. Lenin and others reluctantly supported the policy that paid engineers
more than trash collectors, and maintained commodity production. The hope was
that the efficiency of the system would provide such abundance that the gap
between the more and less wealthy would eventually disappear, especially when
combined with education of the society, especially youth, with communist
(unselfish) morality. In fact, what happened was that in addition to
engineers, it was also generals, and party leaders who were given special
privileges. Their children were sent to "better" schools. Selfish, individual
material incentives existed side-by-side with communist unselfish ("This is good
for the whole society/world") types of incentives. Combined with nationalism,
intensified by the Nazi assult and magnified by the probable disproportionate
self-sacrificing deaths of the MOST unselfish forces during the war against the
Nazis -- and it becomes clear that all these processes towards collapse were
seriously developing before the 1950's. Neither Stalin's policies nor Lenin's
should be exempted from evaluation and sharp criticism, but it sinks into the
depths of folklore and HBO bourgeois pop-psychology to try to explain the
collapse of the USSR as based on the personalities of these people. In any case,
Kruschev was clearly the first Soviet leader to openly, proudly, and without
shame embrace major aspects of capitalist development and stratification, but as
I said at the beginning, the lines between what we call "qualitative difference"
must be understood in the context of the growing developments that preceeded
that change.
I'd say that the USSR and China, each for a
number of years, did seem to be the "socialist half-way steps" on the road to
communism with struggles going on inside those countries and inside those
communist parties, but that the state capitalist forces were securely
consolidated in the USSR by the 1950's, and in China by the late 1960's. The
overall standard of living did improve dramatically, but I don't think that is
the main point. The ability to mobilize the Soviet people to destroy
the Nazi military (no---it wasn't Schindler or the Private Ryans) was
also very, very important, although there were elements of nationalism combined
with unselfish communism in that effort. The crucial change would be the
development of political-economic institutions and processes that would move the
country further towards a classless society, and while there were important
steps in that direction as well, the old "habits" as Lenin called them, of
capitalist relations were not sufficiently overcome and eventually triumphed.
There is a false debate between "world
revolution" versus "socialism in one country." Obviously the leadership of
the USSR in the 1920's--1940's would have supported "world revolution", and they
understood the enormous difficulties of trying to maintain socialism in one
country against the capitalist world! Sometimes a victory is won in one
place and has to be consolidated before a revolution can move forward. On the
other hand, there were destructive, Russian-nationalist ideas and policies that
did undermine the development of genuine internationalist communist
consciousness.
Eastern Europe was mainly controlled by the
Red Army or its local allies. Important reformist aspects of socialism were
instituted to the short term betterment of the people, but there was no serious
empowerment, and by the 1950's there was the same embracing of stratification in
those places -- whether the small capitalist/cooperative/syndialism of
Yugoslavia (which also survived in part because the US government wanted to use
it against the USSR) or at the opposite extreme, the coronation of a new royal
family posing as communists in Rumania. Cuba is a more complex case.
Castro (and especially Che) did overthrow capitalism and did try to establish
steps towards communism. But early on, Cuba became so utterly tied to the
corrupt USSR that it became an anomaly -- supporting the neo-imperialism of the
USSR's invasion of rebellious Czechoslovakia (whose rebellion itself was
led by pro-CIA rebels!) and gradually abandoning socialism in favor of more
capitalist economic relations. In foreign policy, it moved far away from
revolution. In some ways its relationship to the USSR was similar to
Israel's connection to the U.S. ONLY IN THE SENSE that the USSR saw it as an
important political-military outpost and was willing to spend extra money to
raise the standard of living there. In some ways its relationship to the USSR
also tied it to the capitalist economy as the economy still remained largely
sugar-based, creating a dependency on world capitalist market forces.
In any case, I think the notion of "socialism"
even in its best sense, is flawed because it requires that the most committed to
egalitarianism forces -- the leadership, the "party" (whatever specific ways
that would function which is also an important, unresolved question)--- that
these forces would be publicly embracing the inequality that justifies
capitalism. Maybe this sounds utopian, but I guess I think it is utopian to
believe that we can inject or nurture large elements of capitalism in a society
that has been struggling against capitalist exploitation, thereby justifying
capitalist consciousness in the society, and somehow believe that these
capitalist elements will be overcome and the productive forces of abundance will
automatically lead to a classless society.
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Well, that's one way of looking at it -- at
odds, I suppose with the liberal interpretation, the Weberian "anti-democracy"
thesis, the liberal-socialist interpretation, the trotskyist (weberian?)
interpretation, and even the "Lenin/Stalin/Mao should never be contradicted"
interpretation. It remains to others, especially genuine Marxists in the Eastern
European countries (& China) to do the serious research to examine more
deeply how these processes developed. I hope this thesis can stimulate
more constructive analysis of these developments.
Alan Spector
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----- Original Message -----
From: pstevens
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 1999 4:18 AM
Subject: RE: Why socialism failed...human nature or
social/political/economic relations? I
think that Alan Spector makes a good point about the long-term attempts of
capitalism to establish and entrench "itself" vis-a-vis feudalism. Perhaps I
have missed something somewhere in terms of his saying that "there have only
been two serious socialist experiments", i.e. what were the
"two?"
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