"The crisis of socialism"
Debate in the Soviet press
In the weeks since Gorbachev's ascension to the general has not been much attention to his overtures to China.
secretaryship of the Soviet Communist Party, These have, however, been a prominent feature of the international press has been filled with speculation statements of the new leadership.
omist for example thought that the biggest question The following article, on the other hand, points up the basic impasse of the bureaucratic dictatorship and concessions to market economics, involving juicy deals
USSR about the politics he might follow.
was whether he could
"do a Deng,
The British Econ-
" that is, make shows that in the face of accumulating problems an for imperialist companies, that the Deng regime has implicitly political debate is developing within the institutions of the bureaucracy itself.
The main story in Der Spiegel last week was going suppression of the dissident movement, which about talks between West German chancellor Helmut was the achievement of Andropov, who is generally
Kohl and Gorbachev.
regarded as the model and pioneer for the Gorbachev
The speculation about Gorbachev's leadership has leadership, has not, therefore, managed to keep the so far essentially around two questions, market-economy reforms in the USSR and what line awkward questions he will take in the arms limitations negotiations. There bureaucracy itself.
Before becoming general secretary of
Union, Mikhael Gorbachev at an ideological conference compared the exertion needed to shift from extensive to intensive economic development, and overcome the USSR's scientific and technical lag, with the effort made in the 1930s to industrialize the country. There is, in fact, a real danger, unless something is done in the field of the advanced technologies in particular and, more generally, to try to get the country out of the economic stagnation in which it has been mired in recent years (1), of seeing the technological gap between the USSR and the West widen, with all that that implies.
The implications of the USSR lagging behind the West are not simply economic problems but affect the base of the regime itself and its legitimacy in the eyes of the Soviet citizens.
A Hungarian economist, who also makes a very lucid analysis of the economic crisis in Eastern
Europe, notes quite correctly: "In the case of the socialist countries, it must not be forgotten that growth always been a crucial question throughout the sixty years that have gone by since the creation of the first socialist
"Partly because of the need to eliminate the previous underdevelopment and partly because it was essential to demonstrate the superiority of the new social order, a high rate of growth has always been a major - if not the major - factor for legitimizing the new social system central and eastern Europe." (2)
In the case of the Soviet Union, it is clear that the steady improvement in the living standards of the population over the three decades following the Second as well as a great mobility, have played an important role
International Viewpoint 8 April 1985 in the relative social calm this country has enjoyed by comparison with its neigh-
This does not mean, far from it, that a halt of this steady process will automatically lead in the short term to an open social crisis. But the fact remains that signs of tension have been accumulating over the last years in the face of waste, corruption, privilege for some and scarcity for the majority, as well as tightening work discipline.
The extremely favourable accorded Andropov's anticorruption campaign is one indication of
More fundamentally, the regime's inability to forge values with which the young people and workers can identify has been more and more reinforcing the feeling of alienation from the system that exists among these layers of
For a long time now, have been worried about the "negative" tendencies operating among the youth. In its July 7, 1984, issue, Prauda stressed that these negative tendencies were proof that the Komsomol [Communist Youth]
"major failures" their task of political and moral educ
In its own way, the avalanche of criticism directed at young people indicates the extent of this problem. They are accused of immorality and a tolerant attitude toward abuses", , of "apoliticalness, passivity, and indifference". Alcoholism is said to be growing among them at an alarming rate, as well as a "spirit of conssumerism, apolitical, immoral, and uncritical imitation of Western fashions, individualism and trivial amusements."!
How can such a situation be remedied? In a speech to the Komsomol on May 28, 1984, Chernenko offered his recipe. In order to make the youth into citizens "worthy of Soviet society," it was nec-
The thoroughfrom coming up, even in the essary to "rally them round the old guard" and reinforce patriotic and military education." That, no doubt, is really an exciting prospect for young people who are chasing after Michael Jackson posters and trying to buy them at any price!
Bolstering patriotic and military education was also what Chernenko asked from writers and artists in general at the opening of the congress that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Writers Union. He appealed to his audience to center works around a "positive socialist hero." It is hardly likely that in this way he provided any answer to the persistent malaise that exists in creative cultural circles as a result of the censorship and the drain from their ranks that it
The going into exile of such figures as the film maker Tarkovski or the theatrical producer Liubimov, responsible for some of the USSR's greatcultural achievements, could only
As for "positive socialist heros," a lot of people wonder who they might be in the USSR of today. This question was suggested by the discussion opened up by the weekly Literarnaia Gazeta on the "values" that should be promoted in literary works. The debate was between contributors who thought that "the problem of values and in part the problem of the nature of moral ideas has not only not been solved but has not even been posed by our philosophers," and others who thought that in this field, as in all others,. Marx, Engels and Lenin solved every-
To be sure, a slight improvement was regisbut it was not maintained in 1984, and cereals production is reaching disast-
"The Eastern European Economic Situation and the Prospects of Foreign
New Hungarian Quarterly, No 975, Autumn 1984. p 61.
revealed the exist- tion." Of those who deny the existence
More significant, perhaps, is the unease the Soviet leaders have been showing for some time about the attitude of the workers. It is more than obvious that the workers who are supposed to be in power in the USSR, no longer identity with the
Prompting this uneasiness on the part of the leaders, we find the admission that they have no idea what the workers are
Indeed in the Soviet Union how could the workers express what is on their minds? But rather than set up organs of workers' democracy, the leaders have preferred to turn to Mr Gallup, the inventor of public opinion polls.
A specialist explained: "Public opinion is a barometer ... Often it gives a timely warning of contradictions and conflicts engendered by the evolution of social life, by the growing complexity of social relation...." (4) Plenum of the Central Committee decided to set up a center for studying public opinion. The first results of such studies have not been very encouraging for the leaders, tending to show total alienation of the workers from the system.
The same thing is shown by the letters regularly at the offices of Soviet newspapers and magazines. Referring to the letters sent to the magazine Sovetskaia Kul'tura, N. Rimaskevskaia expressed concern at the fact that most of indicated that their writers regarded Soviet society as deeply divided between "them" and "us" , and that they pointed up the lack of equality in this
"Them," are the privileged, who do not do much, but get the lion's share of the consumer durables (cars, TVs, etc.) "Us," are the masses of working people, of whom many wonder why they should try to work more and earn more, when they cannot get what they want. (5)
The Soviet leaders' sudden concern about public opinion was obviously aroused by the Polish events. But it has grown more acute at a time when the tightening of labor discipline is threatening to increase tensions in the factories.
Faced with such mounting problems in the economic, political, social and ideological fields, the Soviet leaders have been totally incapable of offering the bold answers needed to solve them. So, their sery lives ore, veermer they a eve the servatives" or stick. And the boldest action they are capable of is patchwork reforms of economic management.
Nonetheless, there are people in the USSR who are trying to work out an overall analysis of the crisis of their society and the means for remedying it. Many of them belong to economics and sociology institutes. And the fact that the debate they have initiated has been able to make its way into the official magazines is undoubtedly a sign that they are posing questions that are also being raised at a higher level.
The publication in the West of a report by a Novosibirsk sociologist,
18
Tatiana Zaslavskaia, ence of a reformist current among Soviet intellectuals and researchers. (6) T Zaslavskaia developed a detailed analysis of the causes of the economic crisis and the reform that was needed, but in particular, she stressed the social dimensions of such reform, the need to mobilize the initiative of the masses and to put an end to bur eaucratic centralization.
Zaslavskaia's report, which was presented an official conference, was never published. But that is not true of the writings of other advocates of reforms, who, as we will see, develop their thinking on a more theoretical level. Debate opens up
The debate that opened up two years ago in the columns of the magazine Voprosy Filosofii ("Philosophical Questions") and Voprosy Istorii ("Historical Questions") is taking up the underlying causes of the difficulties and crises arising in the "socialist countries". This debate was initiated by members of the Economics institute for the World Socialist
The objective at the start was to analyse the causes of the Polish crisis, and in this respect, already their conclusions go well beyond the official explanation of an American plot or even errors by leaders. Subsequently, they extended their analyses to the "socialist societies" as a
The debate was opened in Voprosy Filosofii by a long article by A. P. Butenko on the contradictions at work in Soviet
Basing himself on an article by Fedoseev, he rejected the idea that these contradictions were essentially of a
"It is impossible, as historic experience shows, to rule out the possibility that in special circumstances - as a consequence of an accumulation over a long period of serious deficiencies in the bodies responsible for economic cultural construction and in the direction of cultural affairs, etc. - that non-antagonistic features of antagonistic contradictions." (7)
For Butenko, the fact that Poland has stumbled constantly from crisis to crisis is not just because of the errors of the leaders but is rather "the social consequence of a lack of understanding of the real contradictions of the new social order." Those who accept the existence of contradictions in socialism, he continued, generally stress their non-antagonistic character. But, "if you study the historical experience of all the socialist countries, it is hard to agree with this."
In Butenko's view, the fundamental contradiction in the socialist system is only a variant of the more general contradiction between the productive forces and the relationships of production, more precisely between "the growing productive forces of the socialist society and the actual system of relationships of producof this contradiction, he asks what do you do when the socialist relationships of production have ceased to promote the development of the productive forces. (8)
In the magazine Novoe *d Vremia, A. Butenko pointed out, in reference to Poland, what this "actual system" of the relationships of production means: "for example, the ownership of the means of production by the entire people is replaced by ownership by a group; planning, by uncontrolled development; democratic centralism, by bureaucratic centralism of anarchie decentralization.
deformation is introduced when in practice the two-way between leaders and the led, that is, from the bottom up and from the top down, is reduced simply to commands replace workers' power by the functioning of a single state apparatus acting in the name of the workers, but not in their interests, are incompatible with scientific socialism." (9)
In the columns of Voprosy Filosofi, both advocates and adversaries of the ideas put forward by A. Butenko expressed their views. All agreed about the need to carry the analysis at work in the socialist societies further than has been done up till now. But Butenko's critics put their stress on the non-antagonistic character of these contradictions and on the responsibility of the imperialists for the "crises of socialism"
This debate has had echoes in other countries in Eastern Europe, in Hungary and Poland in particular, where the director of the United Polish Workers Party's Institute for the Fundamental Problems of Marxism-Leninism, Wiatr, maintains views similar to those of Butenko. He explains, on the one hand, that the errors committed by the Polish leadership flow from the very nature of the political system of a country distinguished by an excessive centralization of power. On the other, he says that the sources of the crisis lay in the abandonment of the "Polish model of socialism" imposition at the end of the 1940s of the "Soviet ideological model" as the basis for building socialism in Poland. Under the title "On the Theoretical Conceptions of a Certain Polish Philosopher, article in the columns of Voprosy Filosofi took Wiatr severely to task.
For the first position, see, for example. A. Gulyga, "Chelovecheskoe v Chelovechestve"', Literaturnaia Gazeta No 11, 1984. For the second, see, B. Slavin, "Gde Iskat'Idealy?, Idem. December 9, 1984. 4. R Safarov. "Obshchestvennoe Mnenie - Izuchenie i Deisvennost", Prauda, January 25, 1981. 5. N. Rimaskevskaia, "Mir Liudei i Mir Veshchei." Sovetskaia Kul tura, September 29. 1984. 6. Long extracts from this report were pubished in the Paris magazine 'Alternative, No 26, March-April 1984. 7. P. Fedoseev, "Dialektia Obshchevestvennoi Zhizni", Problemi Mira i Sotsialisma, No 9, 1981. 8. A. Butenko, "Razvitiia Sotsialisma Kak Obshchevestvennogo Stroia", Voprosy Filosofii, No 10, 1982. 9. A. Butenko, "Forms and Deformations of Socialism", Temps Nouveaux No 6, 1982.
International Viewpoint 8 April 1985
A. Butenko counterattacked, using more explicit arguments, Filosofii, he focussed on the notion of "antagonistic" "non-antagonistic" contradictions. (10) The quote given below is worth citing in full:
"When you analyze the contradictions inherent in a socialist society, remely important to identify the relationships between contradictions and inter-
For example, when we talk about negative phenomena such as bureaucrary, formalism, conservatism and localism and about the way they obstruct socialist development, and the contradictions that flow from this, it is obvious that we are not just talking about an impersonal excrescence on the social organism, but about real individuals who are the embodiment of these social evils. Who are they? Where do they come from? Are the evils in question (to say nothing evils, such as parasitism, speculation etc.) antagonistic or non-antagonistic to the progress of socialism?....
"Under some conditions, in particular in the case of deformations of socialism, the non-antagonistic contradictions inthe historic development of socialism may become transformed into assume the antagonistic contradictions. only non-antagonistic contradictions can exist under socialism is based essentially on the arguments that since there are no exploiters or exploited, no longer any classes with mutually opposing interests, there can be no social antagonisms under socialism.
"This argument is correct in general but it holds only when non-antagonistie contradictions cannot develop in a direction that leads to the interests of the social groups and forces hind these contradictions diverging more and more widely. However, as the history of actually existing socialism shows, such
Non-antagonistic contradictions can develop in such a way that a profound change may occur in the interests of the opposing social forces in what at the start was only a non-antagonistic contradiction. Let us consider, for example, the problem of the leaders and the led in a socialist society. These interests are contradictory, even if they are not antagonistic.
"However, if the leaders become more remote from the led and begin to take advantage of their position to further their egoistic group interests to the detriment of society and of the workers, these egoistic group interests and the workers' interests can become mutually exclusive, and then they may take on the character of an antagonistic contradiction. It must be stressed that the problem here is not one of a 'residual antagonism' or of "vestiges of capitalism'.
"This sort of backsliding, of regression, can not only occur but has occurred under socialism .....So, if you consider the of the contradictions that may arise in a socialist society, it is necessary to analyze the process in the course of which the changes take place, not only International Viewpoint 8 April 1985 from the standpoint of the contradictions and the means of resolving them but also from the standpoint of the forces that lie behind these contradictions." (11)
When, in her detailed study of the of the Soviet economic crisis, Zaslavskaia started to put names and addresses on these concepts, it is not surprising that the Soviet authorities took
• Voprosy Istorii, the debate was opened by an article from E. A. Ambartsumov, the director of a department of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System. He had already shown his heterorthodoxy in the debate that unfolded in the 1960s on reform. (12)
In his article entitled "Lenin's Analysis of the Causes of the 1921 Crisis and the Means for Getting Out of It" sumov drew a parallel between the present economic and social situation and the one that existed at the start of the 1920s. And he proposed the introduction of a
Ambartsumov also started off from an analysis of the Polish crisis and went on to extend his thinking to all the "socialist
The Soviet literature, explained, "has not up till now been able to offer a general theory of the causes of crises under socialism" And he listed these crises - East Germany in 1953, Czechslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1970
According to Ambartsumov, crises arose when the leaders lost contact with the led, when "contradictions, even conflicts, emerged between the revolutionary government and its policy and the vital interests of certain sectors of the working masses, leading to deeply rooted expressions of discontent"
At the same time, pointed to the domestic causes of these crises, stressing that "the counter-revolutionary forces cannot whip up popular discontent unless causes of discontent exist in the country concerned itself and are neglected by the leadership"
Then Ambartsumov went on to recall that the reason for the NEP was the need to make concessions to the peasantry in order to win their support for the Bolshevik government, that this represented the first "crisis of socialism." In his view, the lessons of the NEP period have to be considered valid for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe today. (13)
A new interest in the NEP period is neither an isolated nor a new phenomenon. (14) These ideas were already expressed in the debate in the 1960s on the economic reform. (15) They reflect the tendency of certain economists to seek in the history of their own country and in the intense debates that have taken place in the past, in particular in the ideas of Bukharin, answers to the questions they
More significant, perhaps, than these references to the NEP's economic meas ures (in fact, the question of how much validity they would have would require a study in itself) is the parallel that Ambardraws between the social situation then and the one today, that is, the leaders losing contact with whole sectors of the toiling masses. (Given the sociological transformations that the USSR has undergone, this cannot refer today to the peasantry alone.)
The old hard-liners, who habitually express themselves in the magazine Kommunist, went on a rampage against Ambartsumov, rejecting his analyses and his proposals. (16) And they also attacked the magazine Voprosy Istorii for not having exercised the necessary editorial control. More concerted measures were
In a November 1984 issue, Kommunist informed its readers that Voprosy Istori had recognised the correctness of its critafter a meeting of historical review's editorial committee, in which "eminent" historians and representatives of the History Department of the Academy of Sciences had participated. Voprosy Istorii had promised to publish an article "in accordance with the line."
It might be asked, what is the line? The fact that this debate could be carried on for more than two years on this level indicates the existence of disagreements within the Soviet leadership itself on the questions at issue. debate has gone on at the top levels seems to be confirmed by the publication of two articles in the April 1984 Kommunist that stress the harm done to the party by factional struggles. One was signed by the conservative Bugaev, the other by Shikin, who is known for his reformist inclinations. Stopping this debate was one of the last actions of the Chernenko leadership. But the burning questions that it raised are no less urgent today. 10. Voprosy Filofosii No 12, December 1983 11. A. Butenko, "Eshche Raz o Protivorechiiakh Sotsialisma, Voprosy Filosofit, No 2, 1984. 12. Cf. Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debate, Pluto Press. London 1975. 13. E. A. Ambartsumov, "Analiz V. I. Leninym Prichin Krizisa 1921 i Putei Vykhoda iz Nego" Voprosy Istorii No 4, 1984. 14. Cf. Zenovia Sochor, "NEP Revisited: Current Soviet Interest in Alternative Development" in Soviet Union, No 9, Part 2,1982, pp 189-211 15. Cf. Moshe Lewin, Op. Cit. 16. See Bugaev, "Strannaia pozitsia," Kommunist No 14, September 1984.
19