16 between the CPSU (Soviet CP and other special relationship
International Viewpoint #168 • July 31, 1989 communist parties. The international communist movement is dead. Gorbachev envisages a relationship between a range of political forces and traditions. His vision is pluralistic.... Gorbachev is the sequel to Eurocommunism .... Gorbachev, like Eurocommunism, further erases the distinctive character of communist parties and serves to emphasize discontinuity in the communist tradition".
Social-democratization of the CPGB
Erasing the distinctive character of European communism is something Martin Jacques and the CPGB know a thing or two about. Indeed, the CPGB preempted many of its European counterparts in affirming a gradualist, parliamentary road to socialism as long ago as 1951.! What the advent of Eurocommunism made possible was an open fight within the CPGB by a group, including Jacques, who wanted to take this process further. Instigated in 1975 around a series of revisions to the British Road to Socialism (the CPGB's programme), this fight has resulted in two organizational splits in the party? and a thorough social democratization of what now remains of the CPGB. En route, Jacques and his co-thinkers have shed many of the basic theoretical positions of
The "new order" and the "appeal of Thatcherism"
The starting point of this analysis is that society is in transition to a new phase of development. While the exact shape of this "new order" is not pre-determined, its outline is already clear. The economy will have at its core information technology and micro-electronics. The workforce will be fundamentally reorganized around this new technology: the "new order" will be about flexibility, team working and service-sector work. There will be a core of full-time workers and a growing number of part-time service-sector workers.
Women will make up half the workforce by the 1990s, but they will be mainly confined to low-skill, low-wage occupations.
In the "old order", mass consumption was linked to mass production. In the "new order", new divisions within the workforce and more flexible production are producing increasingly segmented consumption, and more diverse forms of social life. Innovation, product differentiation and quality have become more important for the way companies organize and for the way they compete. Internationally, the power of the nation state is in decline with the rise of international financial markets, and the power of global companies.
Thatcherism's appeal is that it has recognized these changes and it is the only force "which appears to have a strategy to modernize the economy". The decay of the "old order" has "culminated in a structural crisis for the post-war social-democratic project....Its economic managerialism was incapable of tackling Britain's deeper economic malaise - low productivity growth and failing competiliveness. Its political structures were unable to contain mounting social conflict 1. See "Open warfare in the CPB" by Mick Archer in TV 69, February 11, 1985. 2. In July 1977 a split took place in the CPGB, leading to the formation of the New Communist Party (NCP). More recently, the wing of the party organized around its daily paper, the Moming Star, "re-established" themselves as the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) at a congress on the weekend of April 23/24, 1988.
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BRITAIN CPGB: Facing up to "new times"
3. The concept of "Fordism" and the analytical method underlying the CPB's analysis of post-Fordism claim as their antecedent Gramsci's essay, "Americanism and Fordism". See
Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971.
4. In fairess to the CPGB it has to be said that these formulations, which appeared in "Facing Up to the Future" subsequently disappeared from its "Manifesto for New Times" after three of the eight party members responsible for drawing up the first document disassociated themselves from its "failure to recognize the centrality of the class struggle in capitalist Britain today". See the letter from Marian Darke, Bill Innes and Monty Johnstone in Marxism
S. The con, ip of global ya pe in to Pried alons on Deceabc 1, 19h speeches of 17
Gorbachev, in particular his speech to the United Nations on December 7, 1988.
over the distribution of failing growth. Its paternalism left it unable to respond to aspirations of greater choice and more flexible state services. Its social conservatism tried to muffle a range of social upheavals, from feminism to punk, which were irrepressible".
Thatcherism has embarked on a "conservative modernization" of British sociely. At the centre of its political drive is a combination of individualism and authoritarianism. Its individualism, drawing on right-wing, libertarian ideas, reveres flexibility, efficiency, sufficiency, as opposed to rigidity, waste and lack of choice exemplified by national and local state provision.
The left has to move onto this new terrain. It has to provide a common reference point for a progressive social coalition as it did in the 1930s around the popular fronts. "Most of the left's imagery, programme, forms of struggle, resonate with the ideas of the old order or "Fordism" _ standardization, scale, homogeneity, mass consumption, mass housing, all within a national economy. In future, the left's imagery, programmes and struggles will have to flow from the new order or "post-Fordism" — flexibility, diversity, differentiation, decentralization, internationalization". In short, the New Times: "reforging individualism"!
THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES STUART HALL
Marxism
Today
left must provide an alternative vision of a progressive restructuring of
"socialist modernization".
To succeed in this, the left has to construct an alliance of social forces made up of diverse class and social interests.
"Class in modern capitalism is not the product of a single polarization between a ruling class, which owns the means of production, and a working class of wage labourers. Class is produced by the intersection of different kinds of exploitation, which produce different class positions within the workforce.
"Contradictory class locations" increasing
"The working class is that class which has no productive assets to counter capitalist exploitation at work. But the develcapitalism produced a great swathe of wage earners and the self-employed, who control some kind of productive asset — skills, knowledge, organization power over production
— as part of the means of production.
They are both exploited and exploiters.
An increasing number of people in modern capitalism occupy these 'contradictory class locations'. And this complexity has increased with the new divisions created by the transition to the "new
The programme for the "new order" advanced by the left has to therefore take these developments on board. Its twin themes should be democracy and modemization. It should "expand decentralization, diversity and choice, but within a reinvigorated culture of collective responsibility....
It must be economically
N modernizing, embracing the revolution. It must be modernizing, fashioning new forms of social welfare to match workers and families. It must be politically modernizing to reform Britain's political structures to match a more plural, diverse society in which there is a strong desire for greater decentraliza-
Today, October 1988.
BRITAIN tion of state power. It must be internationally modernizing Rather than attempt to resurrect the power of the nation-state, it must seek international alliances to exert control over the international setting for democratic modernization in Britain".
However, as both documents make clear, what is being discussed here is not a gramme for a distinctive development of society towards socialism in which the principles that guide socialist struggle can extend their influence.
"Those principles are, at root, about a democratic, pluralistic, self-managing socialism in which people take responsibility for the forces which shape their lives. It must be a socialism which lives and grows with people's everyday lives. For socialism is not centrally about a party, or the state, but about empowering people to take control of their lives."
The CPGB's analysis is about more than contemporary British society. As the Manifesto for New Times states, one of its central characteristics "is the globalization of production, power and politics"", and it is within this framework that the CPGB approaches the advent of glasnost, perestroika and Gorbachev.
The Russian revolution of 1917, the manifesto states, "...bequeathed a tarnished socialism, a socialism in which the individual and civil society have been subordinated to the state and the party. We reject the models of the authoritarian Eastern European socialist states, which are riven with inefficiency, corruption, inequality, centralized control, repression and environmental despoliation.
"A worldwide process of radical renewal"
"The aim of perestroika is to confront this legacy and completely renovate Soviet society. It is creating the first opportunity for communists and socialist across the world to talk the same language, to heal the disastrous rifts and estrangements caused by Stalinism, the cold war and later the period of stagnation under Brezhnev. With perestroika, the Soviet communists are part of a worldwide process of radical renewal."
So New Times — or the economic, social and political processes underlying it — is seen as a major contributory factor to this radical renewal in the Soviet Union July 31, 1989 • #168 International Viewpoint
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MEANING MES
BRITAIN itself. As the epochal changes associated with this transition to a new phase of development impinge on the Eastern European economies, they too are faced either with moving onto the new terrain or with stagnation and eventual collapse.
As Monty Johnstone explained in the November 1987 issue of Marxism Today: "The new law on state enterprises (due to come into operation in January 1988)... provides for a new economic structure to replace the old highly centralized administrative system developed under Stalin. That model, under which the Soviet Union became industrialized, fought the war and reconstructed after it, has long been recognized to be bureaucratic, unwieldy, wasteful and totally unsuited to the modern, sophisticated, consumeroriented conomy that the Soviet Union wants to become, with much greater responsiveness to the market." accounts, then, is not socialism as such but a particular variant of it containing clements the CPGB sees as common to the post-war communist tradition in Eastern Europe and the post-war social-democratic tradition in the Western European states — namely its economic manacharacter; and its lack of flexibility.
### Rehabilitating market mechanisms East and West
So, at the level of the economy, the CPGB favours rehabilitating market mechanisms East and West. In the July 1988 issue of Marxism Today, space was given over to reprinting substantial extracts from an article by Fedor Burlatsky that originally appeared in the Soviet literary magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta in April of that year. In it, Burlatsky states that the Soviet Union has always had two 18 International Viewpoint #168 • July 31, 1989 models of socialism that in practice competed with one another: war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). The former, he argues, reflected quasianarchist views about the possibility of a "leap" into socialism expressed through "orders, force, depriving peasants of their produce and the elimination of the normal exchange of the products of their labour". The latter, on the other hand, "was based on a commodity economy where different types of enterprise competed with each other — state, cooperative, private — and where the peasants freely sold their produce on the market and bought manufactured goods in return".
"An era of technological revolution"
In Burlatsky's view, the crisis in the USSR is a crisis of this first model of
"This form is approaching its end, it is showing its lack of effectiveness in an era of technological revolution. In extreme situations, especially during the civil and the great patriotic wars, centralism and state coercion played their part in the mobilization of any move forward in economic, social and cultural life. And it has to change in a slow and well-thought out manner, into a new form which could be called 'public, self-managing social-
Thus, for the CPGB the impact of New Times heralds a growing convergence of East and West as both social systems edge their way towards a new international settlement. As the Manifesto for New Times explains, the progressive politics of the 1990s can only succeed if it breaks the demarcation lines which separated the components of the post-war settlement. Indeed, the manifesto identifies four principal forces behind the major international realignment which it says is taking place: globalization of economic relations; a growing recognition of the new global challenges facing humanity, especially the danger of total human destruction through nuclear holocaust or environmental and ecological catastrophe; the break-up of the bi-polar, superpower world of the cold war; and the acceleration of Europeanization. In each case, perestroika and glasnost are viewed as integral to the developments that are taking place.
Firstly, the globalization of economic relations has undermined the notion of two separate, competing international economies. The 1990s will see an increasing interaction between the two, demand-
La restructuring of agencies, and new forms of cooperation and joint venture. "The opening of the
Soviet economy to greater international investment and trade will lead to a lowering of other barriers which divide Europe.
This could open an alternative focus for political alliances.... The USSR is likely to enter the International Monetary Fund
(IMP), and, along with India and China, could become a focus for a new progressive international alliance, which could regenerate the United Nations (UN) and other international institutions."
Secondly, the global challenges facing humanity necessitate a new international environmental settlement which involve the Soviet Union and lead to "new and increased importance for democratically controlled and representative agencies: a transformation in the UN, World
Bank and IMF".
Multilateralism: "A genuine route to disarmament"
Thirdly, Gorbachev's foreign policy initiatives have accelerated the break-up of the old binary blocs. "The Soviet Union has abandoned its military and hegemonic ambitions in the Third World. It intends to allow the East European countries, which are key to the Eastern bloc, to go their own way. Meanwhile, Gorbachev has created the momentum for a process of 6. It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that Burlatsky regards Stalin's methods to have been inevitable. In the article cited he states:
"The point is that at the very inception of the movement for emancipation there was a struggle between two tendencies: the social democratic one (in our case, Bolshevism), and war communism. The latter was very Strong in our party. It commanded a firm base in a backward consciousness and in the authoritarianpatriarchal political culture of the masses. Almost half of the members of the politburo of the party central committee were at one time or another close to left communist ideas. In this context, special attention needs to be given to the work of Bukharin and other leaders who understood the meaning of Lenin's political legacy, and the new approach to socialism. For behind this lies the question of whether there was an altemative to Stalin's methods of industrialization, collectivization and the consolidation of the industrial and military might of our country."
The idea that Bukharin could have provided such an altemative has been suggested by, among others, Tarig Ali in his book Revolution from above: Where is the Soviet Union going?
nuclear disarmament, and made the first moves to open up the Soviet Union's relations with the Far East. The Soviet Union is looking outwards, to integrate itself the international economy. In parallel, Gorbachev is promoting a new internationalism of cooperation, development and humanism, building on concepts advanced by some developing countries, peace movements aligned governments."
One of the obvious consequences of this, the manifesto goes on to say, is that Gorbachev's initiatives on nuclear arms have opened up multilateralism as a genune route to disarmament. Or, as Martin Jacques puts it in an article in the April 1989 Marxism Today, "What is needed is a new disarmament initiative from the Left which combines unilateral, bilateral and multilateral measures".
An alternative European defence strategy
Finally, Europeanization holds out the hope of a new international settlement based on a unified Europe, East and West. "The great artificial closure of the iron curtain could be brought down to allow the creation of a Europe which includes Prague as naturally as it includes Paris." Here again, a new dimension would be added to the left's disarmament policy. "US bases, for instance, will probably only be removed through developing an alternative European defence strategy, which does not rely on the United States.
The idea of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika being an integral part of a global political realignment is not shared by all British communists, however - least of all by the old Stalinist wing of the CPGB which split from the party and is now organized separately in the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). It is this organization that now controls what was the party's daily newspaper, the Morning Star. While little real analysis of the developments in the Soviet Union have appeared in the Morning Star's pages, the CPB has given space to the official statements of the Soviet leadership, up to and including its public criticisms of Stalin's "crimes". However, in the first issue of its theoretical journal, Communist Review, it did attempt to situate these developments in the context of what had gone before.
In an article entitled "Revolutionary Renewal" by John Hoffman, the author asked the poignant question: "Why not glasnost in 1917?" The answer is a convoluted one, but it illustrates the steps taken to marry recent developments with a sympathetic defence of Stalin's role. At the heart of their solution to this riddle is a series of novel conclusions concerning state power in post-revolutionary society.
According to the CPB, civil war, counter-revolution and foreign intervention "...made a much greater degree of concentrated state power necessary than the
Bolsheviks had anticipated or indeed thought desirable)". Moreover, it was this that led Lenin in the second edition of State and Revolution published in 1918 to declare the simple idea of a workers' state as an abstraction and to refer to the Soviet Union at that time as a workers' state "with a bureaucratic twist". But, author goes on to explain, seems to me, makes this point not (as his critics suppose) because some kind of perversion of an original ideal' is tragically underway, but because the painful years the revolution have made it clear that all states are relatively authori[Emphasis in original.] In other words, "What is true in the immediate aftermath of 1917 is also true of the decades which follow the revolution. Harsh concentrations of power are essential if the new order is to survive: conditions, in a word. are scarcely ripe for implementing policies of glasnost and perestroika."
True, Hoffman continues, the NEP represented a tactical retreat from this. But the crucial question that it couldn't answer was how to industrialize. It was this question that Stalin tackled head-on, in a manner which "...brought out the best and the worst in this complex political leader". Stalin was correct to push for the construction of heavy industry quickly as possible and, as Gorbachev explained, it was here that he made his 'incontestable contribution to the struggle for socialism".
But Stalin's formidable capacity organize and his powerful political will had its dark side too — his rigidity and dogmatism. Centralization was extended to all sectors of the economy, including agriculture. The authoritarianism of the period generated "uncritical and idealized conceptions of the state". Yet, "These phenomena, though alien to socialism (that is, deeply harmful to its progress), occur nevertheless within the framework of socialism. They express in a particularly stark and tragic form the contradictory character of the socialist state."
"One form of subjectivism spawns another"
How this situation persisted for three decades after Stalin's death is explained. Rigidity and dogmatism, it seems, produced their opposite: form of subjectivism spawns another. Radical conservatism provokes radical utopianism; dogmatic pro-statism engenders voluntaristic anti-statism." Between Stalin's death and glasnost the pendulum has simply swung to and fro.
Glasnost, then, broke this vicious circle, but that should not be taken to mean that what we are witnessing is the emergence of democracy in the USSR for the first time. Rather, as Lenin explained, "democracy, viewed dialectically, is a transitional form of the state". What we have seen in
BRITAIN the USSR is the political process becoming increasingly social in character as the concentrated coercion of the state is dissolved into the public self-government of a communist society.
In summary then: "Glasnost and perestroika renew, develop and extend Soviet democracy; they do not create it. The USSR has always been democratic, even, it has to be said, during the Stalin period. What the Stalinist form of socialist policy demonstrates is not the absence of democracy, rather the historic (and tragic) consequences liable to flow from situations in Which the working class is a relatively weak and immature ruling class, a ruling class unable to exert any direct control over its own state."
### Discontinuity versus revolutionary renewal
So, for the two wings of British communism, Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika represent polar opposites.
as stated earlier, emphasizes discontinuity in the communist tradition, whereas for the CPB, Gorbachev is part of a revolutionary renewal. But for both wings the organizational consequence of the twists and turns of the Soviet bureaucracy has been a steady haemorrhaging of party members such that, today, their combined forces number less than 10,000.8 Nor has the process of fragmentation inside the CPGB exhausted itself yet. As the letters pages of the party's monthly discussion bulletin News and Views attests, there is yet more to come
Will this mean the denouement of the CPGB itself, a further erosion of its distinctive character, as Martin Jacques puts it himself? Certainly, if New Times is anything to go by this is an option the CPGB contemplates (some would say hopes for) itself. "Finally, it is almost certain that this sort of realignment will require significant changes in the contours of party political opposition. That could in principle mean the creation of an entirely new progressive socialist party for the new times, incorporating a range of existing parties. The reality is that it will probably involve some form of federation or strategic alliance between the opposition parties: Labour, the Social and Liberal Democrats, the nationalists and the Greens. If such an historic realignment is required no opposition party will be able to escape its responsibilities and consequences, that includes the Communist Party." * 7. This lesson has not been lost on the newly-formed CPB. In the reports to their first congress long-time Stalinist Derek Robinson explained that the would be based on democratic centralism that was "incompatible with any form of factionalism or fac tional-type activity". 8. The membership of the CPB was 8,542 in July 1988, down from 10,350 in July 1987. The membershịp of the CPB at the time of its founding congress 19 (April 1988) was 1,591. July 31, 1989 • #168 International Viewpoint