Perestroika and the new thinking
Mikhail Gorbachev
Collins (GB), £15; Harper & Row
(USA), $19.45. 1987.
AUNCHED in several languages at once, Gorbachev's book contains many pages of propaganda rehashing the current themes of the Soviet leaders. It does not, nor could it, offer innovations with respect to what the author has said on other occasions, especially over the past year. This does not detract from the fact that the book holds a definite interest, inasmuch as it represents a rather systematic exposition of the present political and economic choices of the Soviet bureaucracy.
In this sense, it makes it possible to get a clear idea of which elements are new, and on the other hand, what are the substantial elements of continuity. The new elements, especially with respect to the Brezhnev era, can be summed up as follows:
1) Recognition that the USSR has come to the brink of a crisis and that without a drastic change is condemned, at best, to prolonged
2) denunciation of the paralysis generated by the the absence of active participation by the masses, by the waste of acquired technical and cultural potential owing to exgovernmental and management procedures in general that make it impossible to oversee or criticize the
3) recognition of the reduction of the role of the soviets to an essentially formal one and, more generally, of the fact that "the workers were dispossessed of their constitutional right to direct involvement in the affairs of the state."
4) criticism of the bureaucratization of culture and the "ossification of social
5) criticism of the fusion of the party with the state apparatuses.
The objective of perestroika, Gorbachev explains, is overcoming this state of affairs.
It represents, in his own worlds, a real revolution, or more precisely, a revolution at once "from above" and "from below." It is not necessary here to recall what the lines are of the "revolution," which Gorbachev summarizes and clarifies repeatedly in his book. In so doing, he rehashes his previous statements and the decisions of the Central Committee of the CPSU, in particular the one adopted at the plenum in June. It enough to point out that even in the book Gorbachev stresses a combination of reform of the economic mechanisms and of the political ones, that is, "democratization of all aspects of society": "Democratization is the key to the restructuring."
It might be correctly noted that criticisms no less radical than Gorbachev's and no less significant reform projects have been put forward on several occasions and in some cases more vigorously and systematically in other bureaucraticized transitional societies (in Yugoslavia, in Poland, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in China in the first phase of the so-called cultural revolution). To some extent, this is true even for the USSR in Khruschev's time.
However, the essential point is that all this is happening in the USSR in a particularly concentrated form after a 20-year impasse, and that what has been set in motion, independently of the projects of Gorbachev and of the leading group around him, is an unparalleled dynamic of political, social and cultural radicalization. For all these reasons, it would a grave error to underestimate what is taking place in the USSR.
However, Gorbachev's book is also significant because it it highlights the essential elements of continuity. First all in his criticism of the existing situation and the counterproductive mechanisms, he misses the fundamental thing. He does not expose the basic fact that the brake on economic development is constituted by a privileged social layer, which precisely in order to defend its privileges —— and the political power that guarantees them — has imposed an authoritarian regime. Even he, it is true, is forced to denounce certain privileges. But they are, you might say, illicit privileges,
BOOK REVIEW acquired on the fringes of the system and in contradiction to the norms of the bureau-
"Privileges established by the state, on quantitative and qualitative bases of socially useful work" are defended by Gorbachev, as they were by his predecessors. And it is no accident that the theme of a struggle against "leveling" (Stalin attacked so-called petty-bourgeois egalitarianism) reappears in the book and in other statements.
There is more. Even in his book, in which innovation is ostentatiously played up, Gorbachev justifies and substantially approves of decisions made by the bureaucracy over the last 60 years. He makes only very partial criticisms of forced collectivization and the methods of industrialization in Stalin's time. He reaffirms the correctness of the Yalta and Potsdam accords (that is, compromising with the imperialists in order to divide up the world in spheres of influence). In the last analysis, he presents the bureaucratization imposed on the East European states in the 1940s and 1950s as an "objective necessity." He expresses, overall, a positive assessment of the the fall 1964 plenum that ousted Khrushchev and inaugurated Brezhnevite "normalization." He reaffirms, without any innovations, the bureaucracy's traditional policy on The second part of the book, which deals with international politics, starts off from two observations that no one could seriously challenge. One is the historical change represented by the existence of nuclear arms, which can destroy life on earth. The other is the growing global "interdependence. hitch is that from this premise he does not draw the conclusion that the fight against imperialism and capitalism is more necessary than ever. To the contrary, he further develops the traditional bureaucratic conception of coexistence. Now, even the Khruschevite idea of a peaceful competition between the two world systems that would ultimately lead to the victory of socialism has been abandoned. Peaceful coexistence, that is, survival of capitalism, is projected for an indefinitely long historical period
For example, for the Middle East, Gorbachev looks to a solution that would respect the interests of everyone - the Arabs, the State of Israel, the United States and so on. For Latin America, he pledges "not to exploit and still less to foment anti-American attitudes. " More generally, he says that he in no way wants to break the ties between the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and other regions of the third world to the "economies of America and Western Europe." Nicaragua is alluded to only indirectly, and Cuba is passed over completely.
On the international level, therefore, perestroika promises very little good! * 27 February 8, 1988 • International Viewpoint