The future of communism
AT THE start of December 1989, the West German weekly, Die
Zeit brought together 25 experts to ponder that fashionable topic: the end of Communism.! The participants could be grouped together into three categories. The large majority
COMMUNISM Estate" is not the product of some "doctrine" nor of the efforts of "subversive agitators" (or "hidden ringleaders"). The same goes for the class struggle of their adversaries, the bourgeoisie of all shades.
These class struggles result from the were right-wing social democrats or left-wing or centre-lett liberals from both East and West, who support Gorbachev's reforms and are fervent partisans of the market economy -
"humanized" by dose of state intervention. The main representatives of this current were the leaders of the (West)
German Socialist Party (SPD), Brandt, Schmidt and Bahr; the
West German president von Welszäcker; a leader of the
Swedish social democrats; the main ideologist of
Solidarnosc, Bronislav Geremek; one of the leaders of the
Italian Communist Party (PCI), Segre; Ralf Dahrendorf, a former director of the London School of Economics; the
Hungarian ambassador in Bonn; and the Soviet economists
Bogomolov and Shmeliov.
ERNEST MANDEL
HE SECOND category was of
T those who were sceptical about
Gorbachev, including the director of Le Monde, André Fontaine, or unashamed partisans of capitalist restoration, like Henry Kissinger, the
American banker George Soros and one of the heads of the Deutsche Bank. 2
The third category consisted of three participants who were basically hostile to capitalism; the doyen of East Germany's
Marxist historians, Jürgen Kuczynski; the director of the Soviet weekly, Ogonyok,
Viktor Korotich, and the West German left Social Democrat, Irving Fischer.
The transcripts of the debates amount to some 200 pages of a paperback book.
Only one of those taking part, Professor
Jürgen Kuczynski, confidently affirmed, with conviction and passion, a faith in the future of Communism. Everybody else was of the opinion that Communism was finished. But one thing that is scarcely credible: in all these 200 pages, not a single mention by anybody of the working class or the workers movement today!
Even Jürgen Kuczynski, author of many works on the history of the situation of the workers in many countries, managed the feat of defending the future of Communism without referring even once, to the working class, to the workers struggle or the workers movement.
Anybody the slightest bit educated knows that Communism is not the product of the October revolution or the Cuban revolution. It was born as a current within the modern workers movement, rising up against capitalism. The first Communist organization, Gracchus Babeuf's Society of Equals dates from 1796, not from 1917. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, not 1958.
The experts assembled in Hamburg were certainly aware of this elementary truth, from which a conclusion clearly flows: one cannot deal with the subject of Communism by referring only or above all to what is happening in the USSR, Eastern Europe or China. It is also necessary to look at what is happening and will happen in the capitalist countries, whether the imperialist metropolises or the countries of the so-called Third World.
But these politicians and ideologues are wholly taken up with their search for a consensus with the bourgeoisie, a consensus that can only be built on the maintenance of a reformed capitalism. Thus they have to try to make out that the future of Communism can be divorced from the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism and the dynamic of workers' struggles and the workers movement.3 Anybody who pointed out that such a divorce is absurd would have certainly broken the consensus at the Hamburg round-table. They would have been accused of risking "destabilization".
However such an accusation is based on a misunderstanding that dates from the French Revolution. The modern proletarian class struggle, or that of its immediate predecessor, the "Fourth inevitable and irrepressible conflicts of interest embodied in the given social and economic conditions. It is the reality of the class struggle that gave rise to the theory of class struggle and not the other way round. Hitler pursued the bourgeois class struggle
Foaming with rage, Hitler railed against the "Jewish Marxist" theory of the class struggle. But when he suppressed the trade unions and all workers organizations; when he imprisoned and murdered their militants, when he proclaimed that the bosses had to be sole masters in the enterprises in the name of the "leadership principle" (Führerprinzip), he was in practise conducting an implacable and terrorist class struggle against the wage earners and in favour of the capitalists.
Mrs. Thatcher sincerely detests the doctrine of the class struggle. But she wages the bourgeois class struggle with every breath, 24 hours out of 24, even if her methods are far less violent than Hitler's.
The real subversive forces are not agitators calling for revolution. The real destabilizing actions are such things as enterprise closures; the sacking of workers; the speeding up of the work process; periodic attacks on wages; the growth of social inequality to the point where it provokes a revolt; the hellish misery of the "Third World"; the death each year of 16 million children from hunger and curable diseases and the denial of a minimum of dignity and elementary rights to 100s of millions of human beings. The social forces that cause these things do not do so out of innate malice or blindness. They do it because the logic of capitalist society leads them to act in this way, under the threat of losing their fortune and possibilities for increasing it, that is to say, for 1. Previous fashionable topics have been Reagan's "Evil Empire" and "totalitarianism that is spreading constantly and which nothing can destroy." Not much is left of all this now. 2. The American press has made a lot of noise about an article by an unknown author, signing themselves X. The letter proposes as an alternative to the Reagan/ Bush line of "partial detente" with the USSR, a policy of fundamental distrust of Gorbachev, the pursuit of the Cold War and accelerated growth in armaments. 3. The representative of the Swedish Social Democracy explicitly stated that: "It is necessary to give capitalDecember 29, 19. All the references are to Die Zel, 13 December 29, 1989.