The elections will be the first multiparty elections to take place in the Soviet Union and respect for their outcome will show not only the attitude of the reformist CPSU leadership to the national question, but also to any expression of the popular will that falls outside a certain framework. It seems likely that the new legitimacy will turn out to be, not the embodiment of the principle of self7 thwarting it. * determination, but a new means of perestroika year. LIVIO MAITAN
G ORBACHEV has to face a
very difficult situation within the USSR. He is under attack from opposite directions from the conservatives, who have not laid down their arms; and from those who reproach him for not adopting more boldly and more rapidly the measures necessary for transition to a market economy on a large scale.
At the same time, the Communist parties of Easter Europe are proving one after another incapable of mastering the crisis situations in their countries and of offering, to say nothing of coming up with any long-range, medium or even short-term perspectives. All this forced Gorbachev to reformulate his own ideology to establish at least a few firm points to hold on to.
There Is no alternative says
Gorbachev
The primary argument he puts forward in defense of perestroika is that it is the only possible solution. There are not, according to him, any "alternative conceptions." At most, one can talk about "two points of view that stand out today most clearly." The first is that of the defenders of the "commandadministrative system." The second is that of those economists and intellectuals who "start from the supposition that the past has totally discredited the option of October and propose "the capitalization of the society."
Both "points of view" are unacceptable to Gorbachev and all those who reject the perspective of capitalist restoration - which would end the domination of the bureaucracy as a privileged caste — but who at the same time realize that any retreat or new "stagnation" could only aggravate the crisis further and finally provoke real social and political explosions. 1
In the second place, Gorbachev tries to play down the present crisis by placing it in a broader historic perspective. After all, he writes, "the seven decades since the revolution are a historically short time for the formation of a full-fledged new society." Perestroika itself has to be seen "as a long stretch on the historic road of socialism," and "the renewal of socialism underway is a process that will last more than decades and extend into the twenty-first century." Overcoming structural contradictions, such as the division between town and country and the "class differences" between workers and peasants, can only be conceived of as a long-term objective.
The authority of the Marxist
Classics Thirdly, appealing to the authority of the classics, Gorbachev responds to the criticisms that he has not sufficiently clarified his economic conceptions and more generally his project for society. "The founders of Marxism never troubled themselves to invent the concrete forms and mechanisms for building the new society," he writes. They limited themselves to putting forward "a general theoretical model of the tendencies of social development."
In a positive form, Gorbachev relaunches the conceptions already expressed in his book, while including, as I said, some new elements. He now rejects as "unacceptable" the definition of perestroika as a "revolution from above." This definition would imply a division of society into a
"summit" that decides and a "base that applies the ideas, directives and orders of the summit." But the aim of perestroika is to build a "truly democratic and self-managed" society, in which bureaucratic centralism would be replaced by democratic centralism, that is, "formal centralism" would be replaced by "real and effective centralism."
Such a society would give value to the freedoms traditionally presented as "formal," that is, the democratic gains that form part of the "values of human society," and combine the potentialities of "direct democracy" with the mechanisms of representative democracy.
### Economic competition between systems
Regarding economics, the article explains that it is necessary to change the conception of the nature of the economic competition between capitalism and socialism held by his predecessors. "What takes on a decisive importance is not the qualitative growth of production or the amount of products per capita (although in some sectors, agriculture for example, such an objective is not removed from the agenda) but an economy of resources, the technological level, a guarantee of information."
Gorbachev goes on to stress again the need to set new priorities. In particular, he reaffirms the choice of reconverting defense plants and increasing the percentage of consumer goods in overall production." Still more significant, he explains that it is necessary - and not only for the USSR - to leave behind "the old model of industrialization that absorbs enormous natural resources and consumes materials and enery, quantities
It is above all in the historical analysis of Soviet society that Gorbachev has something new in store for us. In his 1987 book, he still justified to a considerable extent the decisions made over the six decades, and notably made only a very partial criticism of forced collectivization and the type of industrialization imposed in the Stalin era. He begins his recent article by saying:
"At the outset, we thought that the problem was essentially and only to correct certain deformations of the social organism, to perfect the system created in the previous decades, which overall had held up. Today, we start out from the need to from the economic foundations to the superstructure."
Historical continuity of bureaucratic system
This has led him to denounce, in his own way of course, the historical continuity of the bureaucratic system. While he still accords an "enormous value" to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, he immediately adds that despite the corrections made in that era, the "mecha-
"fundamentally unchanged." It changed still less in the Brezhnev era. In fact, the article puts in question the euphemism for this period that he himself invented, "the era of stag.
Thus, there has been an evolution in Gorbachev's analysis and criticism of Stalinism. They are taking on broader dimensions. It is possible that future changes will lead him to make further
USSR readjustments. But it should be noted, in any case, that he has not evolved substantially on two fundamental points. First of all, as regards the party, the article stresses the new tasks that his must accomplish and the necessary seperation between its functions and those of the state. But despite everything that has happened in the other East European countries and in the USSR itself, he maintains the idea of a "single-party system." [Subsequently he made further concessions on this, notably at the February 1990 CPSU plenum — see
Secondly, the article puts forward an absolutely correct criterion — which we have always thought to be self-evident — that "we cannot do without a genuine analysis of the realities of life, of the present state of the society, of its driving forces and its contradictions." But he does not draw any conclusions from this in assessment of the bureaucracy, which is still not analyzed and exposed as a social layer deriving privileges from its monopoly of political power. The definition of perestroika as a "revolution" remains, therefore, a metaphor, without any real
As a corollary of this "lack," which in reality is an indicator of the nature of the Gorbachev leading group itself, the crucial phase in the rise of Stalinism continues to be presented in a fundamentally false way.
### Revolution in advanced countries Gorbachev notes that Lenin and the Bolsheviks relied on a victory of the revolution in countries more advanced than the USSR, and he says correctly that, even if such revolutions did not take place, power could not be relinquished.
However, he does not make the slightest allusion to the debate over socialism in one country and its real content. He gives a false explanation when he says that "Stalinism adroitly took advantage of the revolutionary impatience of the masses, of the utopian and leveling tendencies characteristic of any mass movement, of the vanguard's aspiration to achieve the desired aim as soon as possible." In fact, it was the weariness engendered by the vicissitudes of the civil war and the defeats in Europe that favored the rise of Stalin and his bureaucracy (who, moreover, far from advocating leveling, condemned "petty-bourgeois egalitarianism"). More generally, the struggle waged by Trotsky and the
PERESTROIKAPITALISM
Left Opposition is completely ignored.
In reality, Gorbachev seems to endorse, if only implicitly, an interpretation that is not new, and which now has many cham1. In opposition to those who question the historical value of the October revolution, Gorbachev correctly puts forward the argument that "the concrete altemative was not a bourgeois democratic republic, but an anarchic uprising and a bloody dictatorship of the milislar regimes, he costablish of a reactionary and antipop- 11 ular regime."
International Viewpoint #179 • February 26, 1990
USSR pions. The alternative to the choices imposed by Stalin, according to this view, was prolonging the NEP (in which the free market played a big role) indefinitely, on the basis of the suggestions sketched by Lenin in his January 1923 notes on cooperatives. A serious debate on this question would no doubt be interesting. Both those who defend this idea seem to forget that after a certain time the NEP underwent an extremely grave crisis that threatened the very bases of post-revolutionary society. Trotsky's analysis of this cannot simply be wiped off the ledger. Those who do not agree with it should take the trouble to offer the most concrete arguments possible. But as a general rule they make no effort whatever to do so.
NEP experience has little relevance today
In the second place, whatever judgment should be made of the situation in the 1920s, the USSR today is structurally different, and any reference to the problems of the NEP years would have very little relevance. Similar considerations apply to Lenin's celebrated notes, which however do furnish some very valuable indications as regards the approach to the peasant question. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that Lenin advocated cooperatives not as a form of privatization but rather as a form of peasant self-management. In the context of maintaining state (or collective ownership), they were to counterbalance what had become the excessive weight of the private sector.
Coming to another important subject, Gorbachev develops further his analysis on the situation of capitalism and his definition of an overall strategic perspective. Here some quotations are necessary. Gorbachev explains first that "Marx underesdevelopment of capitalism, which managed to absorb the gains of the technological and scientific revolution and to set up economic and social structures able to assure its vitality and build a relatively high level of welfare for the majority of the population in the developed capitalist
Capitalism is even supposed to have succeeded in playing a leading role in the "cultural perestroika" that he has carried out "on the basis of advanced technologies and economy of raw materials and energy." Finally, as a result of the internationalization of production and the transnationalization of the economy, its structure has changed markedly, just as "the nature of capitalist ownership has profoundly changed."
It is understandable that after decades of stereotyped descriptions of capitalism that corresponded very little to reality, Gorbachev feels the need to draw a more realistic picture. But, to use a well-known , expression, he bends the stick too far in i the other direction. He forgets, for example, that the internationalization of the economy" reflects a tendency of capitalism that Marx analyzed perfectly well, and that all the changes that have occurred in the forms of ownership have in no way diminished the fundamental reality of private ownership of the means of production or the mechanisms of the
When Gorbachev speaks of the "selfdevelopment of capitalism," he uses a euphemism that enables him, among other things, to slide over the fact that in the 1930s capitalism went through a crisis that it managed to get out of only thanks to the Second World War and to say nothing about the concrete preconditions of the prolonged boom of the 1950s and
Moreover, the Soviet chief is at least a little offhand in talking about the relatively high level of welfare of the majority of the population of the industrialized countries, when over the last decade they have been experiencing a prolonged tion, which has involved mass unemployment, impoverishment of large sections of the working class and other poor strata, and a constant erosion of the social gains of the previous decades, as well as attacks on democratic institutions.
What is more, in alluding to the worsening of "world problems," Gorbachev does not say a single word about the tragedy of the underdeveloped countries, which in development" of capitalism and its inherent mechanisms. The fact that such a problem is barely taken up in an essay that pretends to be a broad overview speaks volumes about the seriousness of Gorbachev's approach.
Abandonment of
Khrushchev's conceptions
In fact, he is much less interested in developing a rigorous analysis than in justifying his political projects. These consist, at bottom, of abandoning definitively even Khrushchev's conception of coexistence and economic competition. In his view, it is necessary to reject any "head-on opposition of the two contemporary social systems, which is totally metaphysdesigned to achieve a more organic integration in the worldwide process of economic development." It has understood that what is needed is "not to "oppose others' but to try to solve the economic problems together with them."
We certainly are not going to defend the traditional Stalinist or post-Stalinism conception of the conflict between capitalism and Socialism, a "campist" view that replaces the contention of social forces with one of states or blocs of states. We are convinced that "the two systems" cannot function entirely independently of each other, and that there is an inevitable interaction, if only through the world market. This, by the way, is why we reject the utopia of "Socialism in one country."
However, the conclusion that Trotsky drew from this during the famous debate of the 1920s and that revolutionary Marxists draw from it today is that overthrowing capitalism as a worldwide system is the essential precondition for building a real socialist society. To the contrary, Gorbachev thinks that the "two systems" must become more and more integrated and together achieve "the common objectives of all humanity." It goes without saying that such a perspective cannot be put forward without obfuscating the nature of capitalism itself. That is what explains Gorbachev's approach.
Finally, the article comes back to the
"socialism takes many forms, like life itself." This is an almost banal notion, which as such could not be challenged by anyone. But once again, you have to see what conclusions are drawn from this. For Gorbachev, this is an opportunity to relaunch his opening to the social
"From this standpoint [that is, from the standpoint of the manifold forms of socialism], we also take up the experience of the social democracy. We consider and judge appropriately its contribution to developing the values of socialism, to carrying through partial reforms that have favored increasing the welfare and social guarantees of working people in many capitalist countries of the West. We are examining with interest the rich, but not unequivocal experience accumulated by the social democracy, and we are trying to use what suits the conditions of our society."
Social democratic parties achieve important gains
It is of course indisputable that the social democratic parties have helped to achieve important gains for the working class. But it is hard to claim that their experience, and in particular their political practice, in recent decades can offer useful indications for taking up the problems of a post-capitalist transitional phase. In fact, the social democratic parties do not even pose such questions, for the very simple reason that their outlook is to manage the capitalist system in a reformist way. They do not advocate overthrowing it, even in their programmatic documents that make projections into the far future.? Gorbachev seems to have forgotten all this. It is a lapse of memory that confirms that an anticapitalist strategy, including in the industrialized countries, is hardly within his range of concerns. * 2. This is the case, for example, of the new programmatic document adopted by the Socialist Intemational at its last congress. (Analysis of this document will appear in the spring 1990 issue of International Marxist Review.)