In these times when socialism has suffered such tragic defeats, when a petty-bourgeois tidal wave has swept over many Communist Parties of the world, particularly the parties formerly presiding over socialist construction. In these times when the dominant political motion Jiaild Wide is capitulation to the might of the trans- nationals, the banks and monopolies. It is particularly crucial for those who hold fast to the interests of the working class, to the poor and the oppressed, to proudly reaffirm their commitment to socialism, and to its theoretical compass, Marxism-Leninism.
There is no denying that the experience of socialist construction requires much stock-taking, serious analysis, and not apologetics. But such a reexamination, if it is conducted from a working class perspective, begins with an understanding that socialism was not a failure.
For socialism was decisive in saving the world from the unimaginable slaughter of a third world war; saved the world from the horror of Fascism triumphant; was instrumental in the victories of national liberation and decolonization; and has demonstrated, among other things, that it is possible, even in poor, undeveloped countries, to provide work for all, health care for all, decent education for all, and function without an exploiter class even in an incompletely achieved socialism, even in a somewhat derailed socialism.
It is heartening that the South African Communist Party, through Joe Slovo, proclaims that “the future belongs to socialism” and proclaims the Party’s continued adherence to Marxism. We appreciate the Party’s continued championing of socialist internationalism, its resolute struggle against imperialism and neocolonialism, and its reaffirmation that “class struggle remains the motor of history.
In particular, we support the Party’s criticism of a number of negative trends surfacing in the Soviet Union under the guise of “new thinking,” including, as you state, the “abandonment of the critique of capitalism and the defense of socialism,” the discovery of a supposed contradiction between working class and “universal” human values, the discovery of a supposed contradiction between the social revolution or anti-imperialist struggle and the movement for peace, and the projection of “national reconciliation” as the highest good which, as you point out, is extremely damaging to class and national liberation struggles.
We agree with your astute observation that the impetus for these and other departures from Marxism-Leninism comes from the dissatisfied middle strata in socialist society who compare their lot with the living standards of the middle classes of Europe and the US. These strata indeed chafe at the “egalitarian” ideals of socialism and yearn for the personal enrichment they believe capitalism will provide them.
And we emphatically agree with Joe Slovo that the “unprecedented offensive by capitalist ideologues against socialism has indeed been met by a unilateral disarmament.” We would suggest, however, that “unilateral” is a gratuitous qualification here, for there are no circumstances that would justify abandonment of our ideology, whether it be unilateral or reciprocal. For that ideology is not only a vital armor against enemy attacks, but an indispensable positive tool for making revolution and for the entire period of constructing a mature socialist society.
Appraising the asi Debacle
Having said all this, we find, nevertheless, that there are a number of propositions laid out by Joe Slovo in his pamphlet, “Has Socialism Failed?” that are rather disturbing. In connection with the upheavals in Eastern Europe, Slovo asks a number of loaded questions, the net effect of which is to justify not only the surrender of power by the Communist Parties, but their surrender of socialism as well, when confronted by a temporarily disoriented public opinion.
First, Slovo asks:
“Have we the right to conclude that the enemies of a discredited Party leadership are the same as the enemies of socialism?”
Of course, the answer is no, not necessarily. One has to evaluate the direction from which criticism of a Party leadership is coming and whose interests that criticism is serving. And in so doing, it is particularly important to go behind the rhetoric, which under cover of popular and attractive slogans, usually of an abstract nature, can mask the very concrete interests of the class enemy.
Slovo continues: “If the type of socialism which the people have experienced has been rubbished in their eyes and they begin to question it, are they necessarily questioning socialism or are they rejecting its perversion?”
As real life has shown, when the shortcomings of a badly managed socialism, of whatever type, combine with the destructive work of imperialism, the people at this juncture of history do not move toward an improved or purified socialism but back to capitalism.
(Incidentally, does not the imperialist’s ceaseless campaign of propaganda warfare, sabotage. economic blockade, subversion, war threats and actual warfare in the case of socialist countries of the Third World, does not this all show that the bourgeoisie is fully aware that if left in peace, socialism would prove its inherent superiority as a social system?)
Slovo continues: “What gives a Communist Party (or any other party for that matter) the moral or political right to impose its hegemony or to maintain it in the face of popular rejection?”
The real question is: Does a Communist or other revolutionary party have a right, in fact a duty, to struggle against popular disorientation, to gain time to correct mistakes, to deal with the problems causing popular dissatisfaction, to strengthen its ties with the popular masses? We maintain that no revolutionary party has a right to hand power back to the enemies of the people except when, as in the case of any principled surrender, the odds are hopeless and further struggle would prejudice the most rapid possible future recovery of the socialist forces.
And Slovo goes on, in the same vein: “Who has appointed us to impose and defend at all costs our versions of socialism even if the overwhelming majority have become disillusioned with it?”
We have already answered that. But we would further remind Slovo of the profound dictum of the Roman patrician Cicero, who seems to have had a firmer grasp of what democracy is all about than certain Eastern European Communist leaders. Said Cicero: “Salus populi suprema lex.” The well-being of the people is the supreme law. Not vox populi, but salus populi. Not the voice of the people but their fundamental interests. Of course, we do not mean to imply here that we ignore the will of the people. Ultimately, socialism cannot be built against the wishes of the majority. But when the German masses, out of the desperation of the Great Depression and the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, fell under the spell of Nazism, and when by the late 1930s the German people in their great majority — including the working class — had been won to Nazi aims, would it not have been an unforgivable betrayal had the German Communists thrown up their hands and said, “Well, the people have spoken. Who appointed us to fight against the people’s wishes?”
Slovo’s questions have been leading us to his astonishing conclusion that the crumbling of socialism in East Europe were “transformations…revolutionary in scope.” (We would say counter-revolutionary in scop And in reverential tones he continues:. “Is there another example in human history in which those in power have responded to the inevitable with such a civilized, pacific resignation?”
Let us grant for the moment that the surrender of power was inescapable — something that has by no means been proved as yet to the satisfaction of many Communists. But the question is how should a Communist political army surrender? Should it do so, as happened in the majority of cases in East Europe, in shameful striking of the colors, apostasy and self-denunciation?
Bourgeois Democracy Rehabilitated
The assault against socialism in East Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and elsewhere, is conducted under slogans about democracy. Engels in his time had warned with astonishing foresight: “Our sole adversary on the day of the (revolutionary) crisis will be the whole of the reaction which will group around pure democracy.” And this has been the precise course of history. Wherever the working class has taken power, a coalition of forces from the ultra-Left through the democratic socialists,” all the way across to the ultra-Right, formed a united opposition under the slogans of democracy. And where these forces have succeeded in overthrowing working-class power, the aftermath of the “democratic” revolution has been a regime of repression, not infrequently accompanied by a ghastly bloodbath and torture. In such a denouement the Right finds nothing to criticize, while the “Left” expresses shock at “unfortunate excesses,” and bemoans the unanticipated consequences of its democratic fantasies.
No, there is no quarrel with criticism of the deficiencies of socialist democracy. The fatal mistake of Communist Parties has been ignoring the injunction of Lenin, the supreme democrat of the 20th century — that socialism cannot be built for people by a revolutionary vanguard, but must be built with the assistance of the revolutionary vanguard by the people themselves.
But socialism has nothing to learn from bourgeois democracy, which today is merely a perversion of democracy. For although bourgeois democracy reflects, as Slovo points out, concessions to the militant struggles of working people and other democratic forces, its essence is that it represents a means for keeping the people in chains. Naturally, such criticism of bourgeois democracy does not mean that we fail to defend it when threatened by Fascist barbarism, but that is not because we do not see that bourgeois democracy keeps us in chains, but only that we prefer its looser chains to the chains of Fascism, which prevent the blood from circulating and which are a torture.
Tragically, the middle class elements in the socialist countries, whom Joe Slovo identified in his pamphlet, have joined the world bourgeoisie’s “pro- democracy” disorientation campaign. And the masses, quite frankly, have become confused. The fruits of this campaign in East Europe are there for all to see. The “victory of democracy” there has brought in its wake a wave of national chauvinism, reaching occasionally murderous proportions, anti-Semitism, the selling off of the people’s patrimony, the emergence of unemployment, skyrocketing prices of the basic necessities, national capitulation to Western finance capital — and even the zombies from East European monarchies are rising from their graves.
Trashing Lenin
In the Soviet union, as in East Europe, the campaign around democracy is being used as a club to smash socialism. But in the Soviet Union, resistance is much more stubborn, for socialism has much deeper roots. The authority of Lenin presents a formidable obstacle to bourgeois ideology. For Lenin was a master at piercing the meretricious essence of democratic platitudes.
Lenin waged a devastatingly effective struggle against the deceptions and self-deceptions of bourgeois democracy. And he rescued that most important Marxist idea — the dictatorship of the proletariat — from its attempted burial by opportunistic Social-Democracy of his day, demonstrating that the dictatorship of the working class, rather than being the antithesis of democracy is, in this epoch, its highest expression.
And because Lenin’s authority could not be immediately challenged in a frontal, open manner, “new thinking” with its admiration for bourgeois democracy began by chipping away at the foundation of Lenin’s teachings while at the same time invoking his name, pretending to represent a “genuine, purified, non-dogmatic” Leninism. But the hypocritical mask is now being discarded, and Lenin’s legacy is being increasingly subjected to a campaign of denigration and defamation.
So it is particularly disappointing that has added his bit to the growing campaign within the socialist countries and within a number of Communist Parties in the capitalist world against Lenin and the early Bolsheviks.
Slovo in his pamphlet challenges some of Lenin’s fundamental teachings. It is therefore necessary for him to first try to knock him off his pedestal, to show Lenin’s fallibility. Before discussing the examples cited by Slovo in his pamphlet, we should like to cite an exchange between Slovo and Ken Gill, a British trade union leader, published in the Fourth Quarter 1989 issue of the African Communist.
Slovo states that “The earlier Leninist concept that it is impossible to escape imperialist war requires qualification in the light of changing realities and the concept that the tendency toward war inherent in imperialism can be inhibited….”
To begin with, the ability to inhibit imperialism’s tendency to war is not a new concept and was put forth as a possibility by Lenin. More than that, this assessment represented a fundamental component of Soviet foreign policy under Lenin and was the basis for the Soviet Government’s flexible struggle for peaceful coexistence, which counted quite a number of foreign policy victories.
In his pamphlet, Slovo admits that Lenin accurately predicted the outbreak of the Second World War, the inability of imperialism to find a peaceful resolution to its contradictions. But predicting world wars was not the essence of Lenin’s thinking on imperialism, even though, we might point out, his correct prediction stood in sharp contrast to the bourgeois and the social democrats and reformists of one stripe or another who confidently predicted that wars had become obsolete, that the League of Nations, or arms limitation agreements, or Munich- type arrangements would ensure eternal, or at least peace “in our time.”
The inevitability of world war no longer obtained after World War II, not because the nature of imperialism had changed, but because political forces had arisen capable of staying imperialism’s war lust, because imperialism could not launch a world war without self-destructing at the same time.
But the essence of Lenin’s views on imperialism, insofar as war was concerned, was that imperialism is inherently aggressive, bellicose, piratical, predatory — and this continues to accurately describe it to this day, even though Lenin is now three generations removed from us. Meanwhile, the up-to-date, sparklingly new thinking of Gorbachev and his colleagues who see imperialism as increasingly adopting “universal human values,” “converging” with the socialist system, who see a world where neocolonialism and exploitative imperialist relations no longer exist, are utterly removed from contemporary reality.
Of course, this “new thinking” is really the old nonsense typical of the pap that has been offered by Right-wing Social Democracy for the past 100 years.
Slovo asserts in his pamphlet that Lenin believed capitalism was about to collapse worldwide in the post-October period, and further, that this projection was “based on the incorrect premise that capitalist relations of production constituted an obstacle to the further all-round development of the forces of production.” The truth is that it was absolutely contrary to Lenin’s understanding of the revolutionary process to suggest that capitalism would “collapse” because of objective conditions alone. Lenin clearly spelled out that a revolution takes place only when the subjective as well as the objective conditions were ripe.
Moreover, while it is indeed true that capitalist relations of production have for a long time constituted an obstacle to the all-round development of the productive forces, this process has been shown by Lenin not to be a straight line development but a complex phenomenon, not a sudden point of crisis for the capitalist system but a feature of its chronic illness. But this chronic illness is not what produces a revolutionary situation. Only an analysis of the very concrete economic conditions and the specific conditions of the class struggle in a given country can provide the material for making predictions. And of course Lenin pointed out again and again that it is not possible to pinpoint the outbreak of revolutions.
Slovo claims that Lenin’s belief in the “imminence of global socialist transformation…undoubtedly infected much of the earlier thinking about the perspectives of socialist construction in the Soviet Union.”
Lenin’s discernment of social revolution breaking out in a number of countries was no pipe dream. Social revolution did indeed break out in a series of countries, and revolutionary upsurges spread panic in the ranks of the ruling classes. That the revolutions failed except in what would come to constitute the Soviet Union can in large measure be attributed to the betrayal of Social Democracy which, at the moment of truth, chose to support their own bourgeoisie and help in the disorientation and suppression of the working class.
Lenin, rather than being the prisoner of illusions, quickly grasped the fact that Soviet Russia would be surrounded by a hostile capitalist world for a prolonged period, and his policy of astutely playing upon inter-imperialist contradictions helped buy time for socialist construction.
The real purpose of these attempted demonstrations of Lenin’s errors becomes clear in Slovo’s criticism of what is really fundamental to Leninism: its defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard role of the Party.
The need for the dictatorship of the working class follows from the Marxist-Leninist conception of the nature of the state, its role as the representative of the interests of the dominant class, its historic role as an instrument of violence against the submerged and exploited classes. In this connection, Marxism-Leninism develops at length an attack on the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois illusions that deny the bourgeois state’s real function and that exalt bourgeois democracy.
Slovo now finds this analysis “oversimplified.” According to Slovo there was an “underestimation of the historic achievements of working class struggle in imposing and defending aspects of a real democratic culture on the capitalist state, a culture which should not disappear but rather needs to be expanded under true socialism.”
Once again we must differ on a number of grounds. Lenin certainly did not underestimate the importance of the fight for democracy in capitalist society and taught that such a struggle was inseparable from the struggle for socialism, taught the working class to use every opportunity to extend the terrain, to expand the space in its struggle against the capitalist class.
At the same time, Lenin saw the tenuous nature of democratic rights under capitalism, the reality that whenever the bourgeoisie feels threatened, it strips away those rights. Lenin showed that the bourgeoisie preferred to rule with a velvet glove so long as the political consciousness of the masses remained backward, but that it was always ready to drown in blood any popular movement that posed a serious challenge to its authority.
Victimized by incessant disinformation, daily inoculated with the virus of the ideology of rugged individualism, incited to jingoism, racism, and when necessary whipped into a suitable state of war fever, the masses are kept in a state of backwardness in capitalist society. And when, despite everything, the masses begin to find their way, then they discover the thousands of roadblocks not only to the implementation but even the expression of their wishes.
Lenin demonstrated the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and spent much of his life in weaning the masses from their baleful illusions.
What has changed since Lenin’s time? Only that the concentration and power of capital has grown exponentially, that a still smaller handful of monopolies exercise near-total control over the state, the media, the educational institutions, science and technology, the culture, both popular and “highbrow,” that acceptable bounds of dissent grow ever narrower and the forms of censorship ever subtler.
And so socialist democracy represents something quite different from the simple “expansion” of bourgeois democracy that Slovo talks about. For bourgeois democracy is essentially a sham, and socialism has nothing to do with expanding a sham. Socialist democracy represents something qualitatively new, represents real democracy, for under socialist democracy the suffocating, utterly cruel, death-dealing, conscienceless, repressive power of exploitative wealth is lifted from the people, the teeth removed from the vampire that keeps the people weakened, half-conscious, sickly from its perpetual bloodletting.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Just as Lenin had to rescue the revolutionary heart of Marx’s teachings from the oblivion to which the Right-wing opportunists had attempted to consign it, and particularly the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so once again Communist Parties have seen fit to abandon it in the name of democracy. In my own country, in a recent TV interview, when challenged to show how (to the bourgeoisie’s satisfaction) the CPUSA had not become fossilized, Gus Hall bragged about the Party’s being one of the pioneers in eliminating the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat from its program.
The tragic loss of power of the Sandinistas is an extremely instructive example of what can happen to a social revolution when its leadership adopts bourgeois democratic values. There is no doubt that the Sandinistas felt compelled to make a number of concessions to US imperialism because of the pressure of military aggression through the Contras and economic aggression through the embargo. We are not in a position to judge to what extent those pressures were irresistible. But the problem is that the necessity to bend to those pressures, if necessity there was, was presented by the Sandinista leadership as a virtue. Thus, Daniel Ortega expressed particular pride about the meticulousness and fairness of the elections, about the opposition’s access to the airwaves, its freedom to organize and agitate, its freedom to receive millions of dollars from the US official and private reactionary circles. He called it the freest election in Nicaraguan history.
In truth, it was one of the most coerced elections anywhere at any time. The people were presented with the choice of social injustice or death, social injustice or starvation.
We admit the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” sounds forbidding. We see no problem in expressing that concept differently. But the real question is does the working class have the right, in fact the duty to prevent the bloodsuckers from returning to power, from reestablishing modern-day slavery? Are there any democratic values superior to this duty?
Whoever answers yes to this question, whatever they may believe themselves to be, are surely no revolutionaries.
In his pamphlet, Slovo says that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was dealt with “rather thinly” by Marx. But we find the following theoretical generalization by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program not thin, but incredibly rich:
“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”Slovo says that Engels “claimed” that the Commune, basing himself on Marx’s study, was indeed the dictator- ship of the proletariat. Marx had before the time of the Commune come to the conclusion that the state machine could not simply be taken over but had to be smashed, and that the working class had to establish a new type of proletarian power to suppress the resistance of the oppressors and to prevent capitalist restoration. In the Paris Commune Marx saw the embodiment of working class power of the future. And in his Civil War in France.
he analyzes in detail the Commune’s strengths and weaknesses from this perspective. Of course, Marx was riot in the business of laying out the specifics of the future socialist society. As a matter of fact, he ridiculed just such attempts by the utopian socialists. Marx was not in the business of setting up schemes, but attempted to trace the real movement of the class struggle and the underlying development of society’s economic base.
Next we are told that Lenin “envisaged” that working-class power would be based on the kind of democracy of the Commune. Lenin did more than envisage. He saw with his own eyes the spontaneous creation by the masses of bodies of Soviets — first in 1905, and then again in 1917. And more than any political figure of his time he grasped their significance and identified these as the type of organs of power appropriate for and necessary to socialist construction and the working class dictatorship, drawing attention to the remarkable similarity of organization and measures taken spontaneously by the Commune and the Soviets.
But to go on, Slovo says that Lenin did not address in any detail the nature of established socialist society, including fundamental questions such as the relationship between the Party, state, people’s elected representatives, social organizations, etc. One is utterly perplexed with these assertions. For addressing these problems was precisely the content of Lenin’s work in government. Not only did he write on these problems, but as head of the Soviet Government he had to work out practical solutions. True, Lenin and his colleagues had in many respects to proceed by trial and error, to experiment, but certain principles were laid down and followed, including maximum accountability of officials and bureaucrats, creation of special control bodies to assure such accountability, direct participation of the people in administration, especially the working class, democratic centralism, strengthening the role of mass organizations, especially the trade unions, to protect the people’s interests, even under a friendly government, collective leadership and individual responsibility, a working body of the Soviet type rather than a parliament with professional politicians, the subordination of all considerations to maintaining working class rule, the leading role of the working class in socialist construction, the vanguard role of the Party in socialist construction and the importance of strengthening its proletarian composition, and on and on.
The Single-Party State
The world bourgeoisie has always directed its most ferocious attacks against the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party. Since the rise of Bolshevism, the world bourgeoisie’s ideological and political representatives — on the “Left” as well as the Right — have concentrated their fire on the “dictatorship of the Party,” of which Lenin was supposedly the leading advocate. The world bourgeoisie has correctly understood that the Communist Parties are the principal obstacle to their plans. In this connection, they take a number of tacks, but the one most consistently pursued is promoting the notion of political “pluralism,” and defining as inherently undemocratic the single-party state. One finds a similar view in Joe Slovo’s pamphlet.
Slovo begins his discussion of this question with a recapitulation of a particular episode in Soviet revolutionary history. unfortunately, that recapitulation is inaccurate and misleading. Slovo says that in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks shared power with other political and social tendencies, including the Mensheviks and a section of the Left Social-Revolutionaries, Actually, the Mensheviks had already joined the camp of counter-revolution by the time of the storming of the Winter Palace.
No offer of power sharing was made to them.
As for the Left Social-Revolutionaries, they were indeed invited to share governmental power, and briefly did so. But then, violently disagreeing with the terms of peace with Germany, they quit the Government and attempted to provoke renewal of hostilities by assassinating the German ambassador. Failing to rekindle the war, they attempted an armed uprising against Soviet Power.
The fact is that every political party ganged up against the Bolsheviks, allied themselves with the foreign interventionists, with the Tsarist White guard generals and that included the so-called parties on the Left, the Mensheviks, the Social-Revolutionaries, the Cadets. All those parties participated in sabotage, assassinations, armed attacks against the revolution. It was not the choice of the Bolsheviks that they were alone in defending the working class and the peasants, that every other party had shown their true colors as enemies of the people, enemies of democracy.
Now Slovo dredges up again the matter of the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, in which the Bolsheviks received less than a third of the popular vote. Here we have again (only in veiled form) the charge that .the Bolsheviks, constituting allegedly only a minority of the population, seized power and established a dictatorship.
Anyone at all familiar with the miracle of the victory of Soviet power, after four years of the intervention of fourteen foreign armies and the utterly devastating civil war with its foreign-financed, well-armed, well-supplied armies of the Whites, which followed on the heels of the holocaust of World War I, where the Bolsheviks had to preside over mass hunger, with industry and transportation in a state of collapse, lacking everything but a people with a burning will for peace, land and bread, a people possessed of extraordinary revolutionary zeal and an extraordinary political organization — anyone at all aware of these conditions understands that the victory of the Bolsheviks was inconceivable without the support and not even the passive but the active support of the overwhelming majority of the population.
That’s No. 1.
No. 2, Slovo has apparently forgotten the specifics of the Russian Revolution, forgotten, for example, that when the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held, the Social-Revolutionaries were still united, but that shortly thereafter the SR’s split, and that the delegates chosen to the Assembly no longer represented the thinking of their peasant constituency in that regard. And Slovo forgets that after the election but before the convening of the Constituent Assembly, the Social-Revolutionary Party renounced the heart of its land program, which was to take the land from the landlords and distribute it free of charge to the peasants — the essential reason for their popularity — and now proposed to force the peasants to pay dearly for the land, the best of which would not be made available to them under any circumstances.
Furthermore, the months after the election but before the convening of the Constituent Assembly saw a deepening of the revolutionary process, a rapid movement of the masses to the Left, as the liberal and non-Bolshevik parties which pretended to a left orientation increasingly discredited themselves in the eyes of the workers and peasants, allying themselves increasingly with counter-revolution, with reaction, with imperialism, with war, and with the privileged orders.
The elections to the various Soviets just prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly revealed a meteoric rise in Bolshevik influence, reaching the point where they commanded the allegiance of the absolute majority of the population.
And so when the Constituent Assembly gathered, the question was put: Did it or did it not recognize Soviet power, a power which had been endorsed by the majority of the population? It did not. It was dispersed, remembered only in treatises of professional Sovietologists
and…
Slovo says he will not address the question of whether the Bolsheviks were justified in taking a monopoly of state power during the extraordinary period of both internal and external assault on the gains of the revolution. The impression is left that it is a debatable point. But what Lenin and the Bolsheviks taught – and it is to our peril not to learn the lesson – is that the revolution is the supreme interest, is the supreme democracy, and that it is criminal to sacrifice the people’s interests to democratic mechanisms of a purely formal character, that counter-revolution can never be democratic, that revolutionaries are duty-bound to pursue democracy in its essence, no matter how loudly the bourgeoisie of one stripe or another may bellow.
“There may be moments in the life of a revolution which justify a postponement of full democratic processes,” says Slovo. This is not the correct way to pose the problem. For socialist revolution and democracy are never at odds. The truth is that democratic processes take on different forms, and that those forms
take on different contents in different circumstances. Thus, in time of war, defense of democracy may take the form of perfection of a military structure, the coming to the fore of instant and unquestioning obedience to orders.
Conversely, creating mechanisms that permit counter-revolution to organize, to influence public opinion, and to seize power, however attractive these mechanisms may appear in terms of promotion of pluralism, freedom of speech and assembly, etc., and other measures of a supposedly inherently democratic nature, is fundamentally undemocratic. For democracy cannot be separated from the interests of the masses. The nature of various processes, of various forms cannot be separated from the real, practical result of those processes and forms. And any process or form which contradicts the interests of the people is thus inherently undemocratic, in whatever seductive garb it may be bedecked.
Now, Lenin did not make a single-party state the sine qua non of socialist construction. A single-party state or a multi-party state is not something whose appropriateness can be predetermined. It depends on the concrete historical circumstances. It depends on whose interests a given party champions and the attitude of the strata represented by a given party to socialism and to democracy. And it depends on the balance of forces, the degree to which the working class must make concessions to other classes.
A single party may be democratic or undemocratic. To state, as Slovo does, that one can “perhaps conclude that promoting real democracy under a one-party system is not just difficult but in the long run impossible” is ahistorical and unMarxist. Does sharing power with frankly counter-revolutionary parties, anti-democratic parties, strengthen democracy, or doesn’t it rather weaken democracy? So the question of a party system in socialist society cannot find an answer in the abstract.
Gorbachev, Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
We have mentioned Joe Slovo’s quite justified criticisms of “new thinking.” Amazingly, despite all those criticisms and despite all the negative phenomena accumulating in the Soviet Union, the man presiding over all this is not only not held to account, but receives great accolades from Slovo.
For example, Slovo writes, “Socialism certainly produced a Stalin or a Ceaucescu, but it also produced a Lenin and a Gorbachev.” And further, “Socialism without democracy was retained until Gorbachev’s intervention.” Evidently, it is not only in the United States that one can speak of a teflon president.
According to Slovo, Gorbachev is being unjustly blamed for the current Soviet difficulties. “The pace of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost are, either directly or indirectly, blamed for the ‘collapse’ of Communist political hegemony in countries like Poland, Hungary, the GDR and Czechoslovakia.” (Why the quotation marks around “collapse”? Is there some dispute about this?)
But Slovo continues:
“To blame perestroika and glasnost for the ailments of socialism is like blaming the diagnosis and the prescription for the illness. Indeed, the only way to ensure the future of socialism is to grasp the nettle with the political courage of Gorbachev.”
And finally, “When socialism as a world system comes into its own again…the ‘Gorbachev revolution’ will have played a seminal role.” There are also others cheering Gorbachev’s courage — people like Margaret Thatcher and George Bush and Helmut Kohl. Their praise of Gorbachev almost matches Slovo’s in effusiveness. And their political support is quite real, not merely rhetorical. But somehow Communist admirers of Gorbachev do not trouble themselves with this obvious question: Why are the leading representatives of imperialism cheering Gorbachev’s efforts to save socialism from its illness, people
representing the very same forces which have expended so much blood and treasure in attempting to strangle it?
The answer to this question does not require a high level of theoretical expertise, only a little class instinct. No, it is not the pace of glasnost and perestroika that worries some of us who remain faithful to socialism. It is their direction. We would urge those who support socialism but admire Gorbachev to ask themselves some other questions, as well.
For example, we have been told that through the process of glasnost and perestroika, led and controlled by Gorbachev, the masses are supposedly given a real opportunity to voice their long-suppressed views. We are told that now, in contrast to the previous rigid uniformity, there is an open and free exchange of views and clash of opinion. And so, we ask, why is it that the organs of public opinion, the journals, the broadcast media, the newspapers, have overwhelmingly, if not totally, become the vehicles for middle-class elements who have been engaged in a prolonged and ever shriller campaign of discrediting the history of socialist construction, of prettifying imperialism, of pouring contempt at Marxist-Leninist theory, at notions of class struggle?
How has glasnost allowed the working people’s voices to be heard? How has glasnost empowered the masses of working people?
We have the example of new-thinking-style “free elections”– multi-candidates, Western-style election campaigns, and the beginnings of the organization of new political parties. In all this, Western “experts” are brought in and consulted from all sides. The initial results of all this has been a sharp repudiation of official Communist candidates. The Party is evidently held in low repute today, for a variety of reasons. But the question is who have been the beneficiaries of this Gorbachev-initiated process? Has it been the forces committed to a return to Leninist principles, of which Gorbachev spoke in earlier days? Has it been the forces committed to “more socialism, better socialism,” as Gorbachev promised?
No. What we see is the rise of an “opposition” bloc, a rather motley group without a real program, united mainly in their common loathing for 70 years of socialism, in their contempt for Marxism-Leninism, in their contempt for a politics that bases itself on the working class, and anxious to restore capitalism as soon as possible.
And it is to Gorbachev, first and foremost, that they owe their rising power.
In the meantime, the working class of the Soviet Union are far less empowered than ever, and in fact condemned by Gorbachev for their “egalitarian instincts,” their “laziness,” their “parasitism.”
The picture is drawn of Gorbachev, the “centrist,” buffeted by the old dogmatists, the bureaucrats and those entrenched in the Party apparatus, on the one hand, and the forces hell bent for capitalist restoration, on the other. But the real secret of Gorbachev’s centrism is this: Astute politician that he is, Gorbachev recognizes the need to proceed to capitalism with caution, for too precipitous a course threatens to arouse the working people to organize and to counterattack, thus ruining his whole project. Vitaly Tretyakov, one of the leaders of the “reform” forces has captured the very essence of Gorbachev, his “patented ability to compromise between what he is today and what he will be tomorrow.” Observe just how Gorbachev’s rhetoric has been contradicted by his practice. Gorbachev came to power and consolidated it on a program of democratization, on bringing the masses actively into the process of socialist construction, from which they had been excluded to a greater or lesser degree both under Stalin and after Stalin’s death. Reviving the Soviets was put forward as one of the means for achieving this, and correctly identified as representing a return to Lenin’s ideas on the role of the Soviets. But the practice? Institution of an all-powerful presidency, an institution fought even by bourgeois democrats in the West as representing a monarchical principle.
In the case of the United States, it was established by the Founding Fathers to act as a check against popular “passions.” But the Soviet presidency goes far beyond the powers of the US institution. It follows more closely the Gaullist, far more autocratic model. It is worthy of reflection that among Gorbachev’s strongest supporters, admirers of glasnost and democratization, there are many calling for his assumption of dictatorial powers.
How did Gorbachev become president? By the votes of the Communist Party apparatus. He could not have done so without the Party. At the same time, by having himself made president, he has created the means to free himself from collegial control, from Party control — and in fact has threatened to resign from the Party leadership if his policies were not carried out. But should he ever resign, he would continue to serve as president. Now wasn’t it his original recommendation that the heads of Soviets on each level should also be First Secretaries of the Party on each level?
In other words, what we have is a series of maneuvers, in no way motivated by principle, but simply dictated by the exigencies of maintaining and enhancing his personal power.
Gorbachev in earlier days constantly appealed to the masses to take up perestroika as their own, to mount a revolution “from the bottom up” to match that which was taking place “from the top down.” When the miners went on strike in Siberia, he claimed to be delighted. This was what he had been talking about, he said, workers’ initiative, but…don’t do it again! And subsequently, laws were passed making such actions quite Gorbachev watched the overthrow of Communist Parties in Eastern Europe with equanimity. He has watched the crumbling of socialism in Eastern Europe with equal philosophical stoicism. “The people have spoken. It is the people’s will” has been his response.
But the same standard does not apply when he is confronted with the overwhelming desire of the peoples of the Baltic countries for independence or the growing separatist movements in other Soviet republics. Of course, these movements, along with the “pro-democracy” movements in Eastern Europe, are reactionary at bottom, led by forces demanding a return to capitalism. But in these cases there is no Gorbachev talk of the “will of the people.”
The point is that Gorbachev is moved not by the criterion of the defense of working class interests, but by simple Great Russian considerations. Obviously, Gorbachev cannot be blamed entirely for the whirlwind of national chauvinism which is racing through the Soviet Union. Obviously, there are deep roots to the phenomenon. But we suggest that the year-in, year-out campaign of denigration of socialist construction, of Soviet history, of socialist internationalism, the repudiation of class analysis, the repudiation of working class based political behavior — all this has played a major role in fueling chauvinist currents. And Gorbachev has presided over this negative, demoralizing campaign, encouraged and protected it, a campaign which has contributed not only to serious political disorientation in the Soviet Union, but in Eastern Europe, and indeed, among progressive forces worldwide. No, it is not the pace of change that is the problem. It is the direction.
We would cite Gorbachev’s handling of the very real problems in Soviet agriculture, its continued inability to adequately supply the population. In his analysis of the agricultural situation, Gorbachev points out a truly startling fact: One-quarter of Soviet produce never reaches the market, never reaches the Soviet consumer. It rots in the fields. Now, if what was produced did reach the consumer, there would be no shortage.
And what has been the cause of this problem? Lack of adequate storage facilities, lack of an adequate infrastructure, of an adequate transportation system, of adequate roads, creation of which even in the West has always been a state responsibility. And what does Gorbachev propose as a solution? Private leasing of land, breaking up the collective farms, family inheritance of the land. Meanwhile, the New York Times (!) reports that the collective farms of Czechoslovakia are extremely successful, as are those in several other Eastern European countries, that they match the efficiency of the best in Western agriculture and that the collective farmers do not wish the farms privatized.
No, it is not the pace, but the direction of Gorbachev’s reforms that we oppose.
We must ask how is it possible that a movement launched to free the Soviet masses from the repressive constraints of “Stalinist” institutions has liberated only the forces of counter-revolution? One is reminded of the days of the Tsar, when the masses — and even the enlightened intelligentsia, were certain that their “little father” was on their side, loved them, wanted to protect them, but unfortunately, seemed always to be surrounded by evil advisers. In this case, the Soviet masses have little love for Gorbachev. His main base of popularity seems to be divided between the imperialist circles and Communist Party leaders abroad.
“New Thinking” and Soviet South African Policy
Sisters and brothers of the South African Communist Party, “new thinking” is betraying the national liberation movement around the world. It denies the existence of neocolonialism. It deprecates anti-imperialist struggle. It denies that foreign policy serves specific class interests. It denies the class domination of the state. It opposes socialist internationalism.
A case in point is Soviet foreign policy’s new orientation toward South Africa. In the September 1988 issue of International Affairs, official journal of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Boris Asoyan, Deputy Head of the Second African Department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, examines the situation in South Africa and puts forward an analysis which in a number of respects is indistinguishable from the racist regime’s official propaganda.
Asoyan dwells at length on the “grave differences among various Black political groupings and the “virtual civil war between Black South Africans,” as in Pietermaritzburg, which Asoyan asserts “would inevitably grow to nationwide proportions if the Black majority comes to power.” And Asoyan continues, “Many opinion polls conducted among Whites and Blacks have shown that such an outcome is a real, and almost the main, threat looming large in South Africa.” The situation in Pietermaritzburg is described in chilling detail, but Asoyan omits any discussion of the racist regime’s instigation and encouragement of this fratricide.
“Fanaticism and uncompromisingness,” says Asoyan, “reign in the African districts, and any deviation from the adopted political line of today is regarded as betrayal to be immediately punished with shocking cruelty. Meanwhile, those who collaborate with the authorities or just avoid being active in the struggle are labeled ‘sellouts’ and may face a mob trial.”
Then comes a description of the “mob trial,” and the burning alive of the victims, the “necklace,” etc, and other “atrocities.”
In a concluding section, Asoyan sets forth his understanding of what the revolutionary struggle in South Africa is all about. “Most of the opponents of apartheid want justice for all and a fair share of the common pie.”
One would assume that Asoyan would be removed from responsibility for African affairs after writing this drivel. But he is now the spokesperson for Soviet policy on South Africa.
The South African comrades are in the best position to evaluate whether Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev has contributed to the strengthening or weakening of their liberation movement. But we were shocked to read in an article by Phineas Malinga, appearing in the African Communist for the First Quarter of 1990 the following, in connection with the evolution of the situation in Namibia.
“The Namibian negotiations were one of the products of a change in the atmosphere of world politics. Thanks to a series of initiatives by the Soviet Union, substantial progress has been made in the direction of world peace. It is the policy of the Soviet Union to seek solutions to regional conflicts and that policy has met with a response from other governments, none of whom can insulate themselves from the worldwide popular demand for peace.”
It is highly instructive that praise for the foreign policy of “new thinking” inevitably is accompanied by varnishing of and fostering illusions in imperialist policy. What is the real reason that the South African Government (with the acquiescence of the imperialist powers, and especially the United States), has conceded Namibian independence? If it is due to the new international political Atmosphere engendered by Soviet initiatives, then why does imperialism continue to support the brutal wars waged by the Contras in Afghanistan, Kampuchia, Angola, Mozambique? Why has it invaded Panama and is now stepping up its menacing of Cuba?
It is clear that the initiatives of the Soviet Union have in no way led to regional peace, but in general only to one-sided concessions which have fueled imperialist arrogance.
The winning of Namibian independence was correctly explained by Nelson Mandela as representing the fruit of the victory on the ground of the Cuban and Angolan forces at Cuito-Cuanavale. That battle convinced South Africa and its imperialist backers that there was a shift in the balance of power against South Africa and that political moves had to be made in recognition of that reality. Moreover, as Fidel revealed, the joint Cuban-Angolan operation was undertaken in spite of opposition from the Soviet Union.
Joe Slovo writes that humanity is poised to enter an unprecedented era of peace and civilized international relations.”‘ In our opinion, the world has entered uncharted, perilous waters. Imperialism is more arrogant than ever, and the counterweight of the socialist camp is no longer there to act as a consistent force for peace, no longer serves as a shield against imperialist threats and depredations against the Third World.
In sum, we return to Joe Slovo’s admonition that socialists must not ideologically disarm. Unfortunately, in Slovo’s pamphlet, we see the beginnings of precisely such a process.
