Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

7. Conclusions and Implications

Do we mean to say that, had Gorbachev and his associates not come to power, the Soviet Union would have hobbled along, and might have continued to muddle through without overt instability? That is the only possible conclusion. Alexander Dallin606

What do these two men [Gorbachev and Khrushchev] have in common? In the first place, their personal qualities: vigor, a reforming disposition, and an intuitive sense of democracy. They were both born in villages, Gorbachev, moreover, in the Cossack region that had retained its yearning for the Russian tradition of communities of free men who had escaped serfdom. Furthermore, they both represented the social democratic trend in the party, out of which emerged such figures as Bukharin, Rykov, Rudzutak and Voznesensky. This social democratic trend never died despite the Stalinist massacres…. This initial social democratism, fortified by the expectations of the people and the demands of the economy, lived on. And it is precisely this that explains such apparently inexplicable phenomena as Khrushchev’s accession to power after Stalin and Gorbachev’s after Brezhnev. Fedor Burlatsky607

Two opposing tendencies existed in the CPSU—proletarian and petty bourgeois, democratic and bureaucratic. Two wings, corresponding to the two tendencies, then developed in the CPSU. In the course of the ensuing continual political struggle between them, a political line was shaped in practice. Without taking this into account, it is impossible to understand such contradictions in Soviet history as that between the mass creative enthusiasm and the repression of the 1930s and 1940s. Only by keeping these conditions in mind can one reach an objective assessment of such Party and state leaders as Stalin and Molotov, Khrushchev and Malenkov, Brezhnev and Kosygin. Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 1997.608

What caused the Soviet collapse? Our thesis is that the economic problems, external pressure, and political and ideological stagnation challenging the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, alone or together, did not produce the Soviet collapse. Instead, it was triggered by the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies. In 1987 Gorbachev turned his back on the reform course initiated by Yuri Andropov, the path Gorbachev himself had followed for two years. He took up new policies that replicated in an extreme way the Khrushchev policies of 1953-64 and even further back, the ideas espoused by Bukharin in the 1920s. Gorbachev’s about-face was made possible by the growth of the second economy that provided a social basis for anti-socialist consciousness. Gorbachev’s revisionism routed its opponents and went on to discard essential tenets of Marxism-Leninism: class struggle, the leading role of the Party, international solidarity, and the primacy of collective ownership and planning. Soviet foreign policy retreats and the evisceration of the CPSU soon resulted. The latter process occurred with the Party’s surrender of the mass media, the unraveling of central planning mechanisms and resulting economic decline, and the end of the Party’s role in harmonizing the constituent nations of the USSR. Mass discontent enabled the Yeltsin anti-Communist “democrats” to capture control of the giant Russian Republic, and to begin to impose capitalism there. Separatists won out in the non-Russian republics. The USSR fell apart.

Several major American writers, including ones highly critical of Soviet socialism, have come to conclusions resembling, in part, the thesis advanced here. For example, Jerry Hough, a Brookings Institution scholar, wrote,

The revolution was not caused by the State’s poor economic performance, nationalist pressures from the Union republics, popular discontent over the lack of freedom or consumer goods, or the very effort to liberalize a dictatorial regime.…the key to the outcome is to be found at the top of the political system or ‘the state.’ …The problem was not the weakness of the state as such, but the weakness of the state of mind of those running the state.609

The Soviet collapse was not inevitable. No basis exists for the conclusion trumpeted in the corporate media that Soviet socialism was doomed from the start, that all socialist states are doomed, that in the end Marx was wrong and human history ends with “liberal capitalism.”610

Gorbachev’s policies may not have been inevitable but they were no accident either. Powerful internal and external forces sustained the revisionism that came to power with Gorbachev. Those forces—the internal legal and illegal private enterprise and its associated corruption, the external aggressiveness and militarism of the United States, as well as a resurgent free market ideology—had grown stronger in the decades before 1985; soon Gorbachev would unleash the internal forces and accommodate the external ones. The Gorbachev program after 1986, above all its core commitment to reducing the influence of the CPSU, reflected Gorbachev’s determination to learn from what he saw as Khrushchev’s failure to deal decisively with his opponents in the Party.

Though Gorbachev’s revisionism had a long gestation in CPSU politics and in Soviet society, the Soviet collapse was not foreordained. There were many points in the previous thirty-five years where developments could have headed in another direction. The strongest argument for this belief is that the CPSU had defeated the opportunism of Nikolai Bukharin in the late 1920s, when its class roots were also strong, when an immense peasant majority surrounded the working-class state. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union, no longer encircled and invaded, could have entered a less repressive post-Stalin era without making Khrushchev’s many blunders of theory and policy. Such critics of the Khrushchev policies as Viacheslav Molotov offered an alternative political course. Those critics were defeated. In the politically stagnant second half of the Brezhnev era, the leaders might have carried on a better fight against growing negative trends, in particular the second economy and corruption. Yuri Andropov, had he lived to evaluate the results of his first reforms, might have sharpened his analysis and made the reform process deeper and broader. Even in the perestroika era, the problematic direction policies took after 1986 was not a certainty, either in the leadership as a whole, or in Gorbachev’s own mind. That the tendency that Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev represented kept re-asserting itself and finally won, bears witness to its stubborn material roots, no longer in the peasant outlook so tenacious in the first revolutionary decades but in the spreading commercialism and crime of the second economy.

The entire history of Soviet socialism shows that the class struggle, the struggle to abolish classes, does not end with the seizure of state power and does not end after seventy years of building socialism, although in truth the USSR actually had far less than seven decades to build socialism, since it had to devote so much time to preparing for wars, fighting wars, and recovering from them. Indeed the whole idea that the class struggle is over in a world still dominated by capitalism and imperialism, or within the socialist state, is itself a manifestation of the class struggle at an ideological level. Succumbing to that idea is one of the gravest threats to building socialism.

At times, as in 1928-1929 when the Soviet state embarked on rapid collectivization and industrialization, the class struggle intensified. Even when class relations in the countryside were altered at great human cost by these events, an old class outlook stubbornly survived, and beginning in the 1950s with the renewed growth611 of the second economy, it experienced a rebirth.

Gorbachev and his circle understood this. They consciously targeted certain social groups to support their political line. In 1989 an American writer listed these groups: “many of the most entrepreneurial city and village dwellers,” “capable workers,” peasants, managers, scientists, technicians, teachers, and artists, “idealistic junior officials” and “democratic minded members of the party’s rank and file.”612 Most of the categories represented people at some distance from material production.

Building socialism is difficult. It remains difficult after a socialist revolution demonstrates that it can handle the basic tasks: seizing and holding state power, defending itself from imperialism, supporting anti-imperialist struggles abroad, industrializing and building up the working class, providing the basic necessities of life, including education and culture for all, developing science and technology, and lifting up oppressed nationalities and promoting national equality.

Is it possible for socialism to meet these challenges? One does not have to be a misty-eyed idealist to answer in the affirmative. Both the path outlined by Andropov and the path followed by the surviving socialist states—none of them flawless—prove if nothing else that the Gorbachev debacle was neither the inevitable outcome nor the only path for dealing with socialism’s challenges.

In many ways the most disturbing aspect of the Soviet collapse was not that Gorbachev’s opportunism arose within the Soviet Communist Party. What was disturbing was that the Communist Party proved unable to thwart Gorbachev’s opportunism as it had thwarted that of his forerunners. Why was the CPSU less able to deal with Gorbachev in 1987 and 1988 than with Khrushchev in 1964, or Bukharin in 1929? In part, the Party lacked the vigilance and will to suppress the second economy and attendant Party and government corruption. The Party became too lax about its membership, opening its door too widely, particularly to non-workers. Democratic centralism had deteriorated. Ties between the Party and the working class through the trade unions, soviets and other mechanisms ossified. Criticism and self-criticism withered. Collective leadership weakened. Party unity and defending the leader’s line evidently became the supreme virtues. Ideological development waned. The ideological mistakes of Khrushchev, and the divergence of ideology from reality in many areas persisted. In many respects ideology became complacent, formalized, and ritualistic. As a result, ideology repelled many of the best and brightest. Many top leaders were insufficiently alert to the meaning and danger of opportunism. In short, the Party itself needed reform.

Contrary to an idea widely propagated in the early 1990s by anti-Communists, the collapse of the Soviet Union showed most conclusively not that socialism based on a vanguard party, state and collective ownership of property and a central plan was doomed but that trying to improve an existing socialist society by following a social reformist Third Way was catastrophic. The “Third Way” led straight to Russian robber baron capitalism and submission to imperialism. The perestroika story 1985-91, far from bolstering the case for social reformism, further discredited it.

Our main task was a narrow one: to determine the causation of the Soviet collapse. We believe, however, that our thesis carries far-reaching implications for wider questions of Marxist theory and the future of socialism. We offer the following reflections—brief, in some cases polemical—in the hope they will stimulate further thinking, research and debate.

These wider questions bear on opportunism as a Marxist-Leninist political category, the relative strength of the two systems, the central plan versus the market, the theory of the revolutionary party, historical inevitability, socialism in one country, and certain persistent evasions about the history of twentieth century socialism.

The Soviet collapse does not diminish historical materialism. Historical materialism explains the concrete processes in the USSR in 1985-91. It shows the material roots of counterrevolution, without resort to a flawed “bureaucracy theory.” The recent declaration by Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo, that “even now we lack a theory for conflict within a socialist society” is mistaken.613 Major political conflict springs from class interests. The Soviet counterrevolution occurred because the policies of Gorbachev set in motion a process by which social groups with a material and ideological stake in private property and the free market eventually overpowered and displaced the formerly dominant socialist economic relations, that is, the planned, publicly owned, “first” economy.

In 1989-91 the Communist Party of the United States debated whether the Soviet collapse resulted from ”human error” or “systemic” weaknesses. The former viewpoint blamed bad leaders, while the latter blamed deep-seated problems of the Soviet system. Both insights contained truth, but not in equal measure. Those who stressed human error had a better, though not a conclusive argument. Gorbachev’s blundering, vacillating, and ultimately pro-capitalist leadership provided the decisive cause of the collapse. Yet the proponents of “systemic” were right to seek a deep-seated cause. Many of them, however, mistakenly located it in democratic deficiencies rather than material interests. Supported by facts unknown in 1991, our explanatory framework transcends the way these earlier disputants placed the question.

The stakes for the present and the future are huge in the Soviet collapse—both its consequences and its interpretation—for democratic struggles, for the possibility of building socialism, for the Communist movement, and for the future of humanity. The end of Soviet socialism meant a setback for the remaining socialist countries, for the oppressed of the underdeveloped world, and for the working class everywhere. Soviet working people suffered the cruelest consequences, as Stephen F. Cohen wrote several years ago in The Nation,

Nearly a decade later Russia is affected by the worst economic depression in modern history, corruption so extensive that capital flight exceeds all foreign loans and investment, and a demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. The result has been massive human tragedy. Among other calamities some 75 percent of Russians now live below or barely above the poverty line; 50-80 percent of school-age children are classified as having a physical or mental defect, and male life expectancy has plunged to less than sixty years. And ominously a fully nuclearized country and its devices of mass destruction have, for the first time in history, been seriously destabilized, the Kursk submarine disaster in August being yet another example.614

If the century just ended is a guide to the present one, socialist revolutions will face many of the challenges similar to those faced in the Soviet Union. They will likely be victorious first in countries where class struggle and the national liberation struggle intersect. Where twentieth century socialism has so far survived, in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, the overlay of class and national contradictions that led to revolution helps to sustain the commitment to socialism. If so, socialist states will come into being with support not only from the workers but also from peasants and other middle strata. Therefore the same or kindred political conditions and problems as those arising in the Soviet Union are likely to recur in new revolutions. Imperialism will continue to attack, its ideologues invoking “democracy” and the bogeyman of “Stalinism” at every step. Lenin said, “The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of socialist revolution.”615 The Soviet experience extended these tasks.

Our analysis implies that socialism’s adherents must re-emphasize right opportunism as a crucial category for Marxist-Leninist political thought. It was so in the days when Marx and Engels criticized the Gotha Program, when Lenin castigated the Second International, and when the CPSU majority defeated Bukharin. Communists define right opportunism in essence as an unnecessary and unprincipled retreat under the pressure of a class adversary. In any struggle retreats are sometimes necessary, so the question of necessity always hinges on the actual balance of forces and a realistic assessment of conditions, on whether a retreat lays the groundwork for a later advance or whether it is just an easy way out. Communists call a theoretical justification of unnecessary retreat, revisionism. In the context of building socialism, right opportunism usually takes the form of an accommodation (rather than struggle) with capitalism, domestic and foreign. It also sometimes appears as an advocacy of “respecting realities” rather than struggling to change them, a one-sidedly evolutionary approach to building socialism, and a yielding to objective circumstances. It seeks a quick and easy route to socialism, by the path of least resistance. This habit of thought tends to overestimate the automatic, spontaneous nature of the process of creating the new system, and to overemphasize the buildup of productive forces as key to socialism’s development while downplaying the need to perfect the relations of production, that is, the struggle to eliminate classes. Under Khrushchev, the explicit theoretical denial of opportunism in socialist construction began.616 Unlike his two predecessors, the Soviet leader assumed no social basis for opportunism existed in developing socialism. This denial found expression in Khrushchev’s notions that the working class state had become the “state of the whole people” and the Communist Party the “party of the whole people.” Gorbachev’s betrayal showed the folly of Khrushchev’s optimism.

Ever since the Popular Front of the 1930s, Marxists in the capitalist world have been trying to find common ground with social reformists. While that policy of seeking unity in action with center forces, especially with masses of people influenced by social democracy, is altogether correct, it is not enough. As an ideology, social democracy remains an insidious and influential ideological competitor of revolutionary Marxism in the working class movement. There must be an unceasing ideological struggle against it, side by side with a tireless search for practical forms of left-center struggle against the right.

In the early 1990s the initial assessments of the Soviet collapse by Communist parties around the world tended to fall into two explanatory frameworks, though some were eclectic. The first group blamed the collapse on the shortcomings of Soviet democracy. The second group blamed the demise on opportunism. The first view sometimes echoed the very “anti-Stalinist” language of the Gorbachev leadership, a vocabulary shared by social democratic and liberal writers.

Democracy in the USSR could have been more advanced in 1985 than it actually was, but that is no reason to identify “lack of democracy” as the main cause of the end of the Soviet Union. Many observers have little understanding of the actual features of socialist democracy.617 If the word “democracy” means the empowerment of working people, then the Soviet Union had democratic features that surpassed any capitalist society. The Soviet state had a greater percentage of workers involved in the Party and government than was the case with parties and governments in capitalist countries. The extent of income equality,618 the extent of free education, health care and other social services, guarantees of employment, the early retirement age, the lack of inflation, the subsidies for housing, food, and other basics, and so forth, made it obvious that this was a society run in the interests of working people. The epic efforts to build socialist industry and agriculture and defend the country during World War II could not have occurred without active popular participation. Thirty-five million people were involved in the soviets.619 Soviet trade unions had powers over such things as production goals, dismissals, and their own schools and vacation resorts that few, if any, trade unions in capitalist countries could claim. Unless there is enormous pressure from below, capitalist states never challenge corporate property. Advocates of the superiority of Western democracy ignore class exploitation, focus on process not substance, and give credit for capitalist democracy to capital, not its real defender and promoter, the modern working class. They compare capitalist democracy’s achievements to its past, but, asymmetrically, compare socialist democracy’s achievements to an imagined ideal.

Those who defend the notion that democratic shortcomings caused the collapse, that is, were its necessary and sufficient condition, cannot be right if the words “cause” and “collapse” retain their commonsense meanings. The betrayal of the Soviet Union consisted of the overthrow of socialism and the splintering of the Union state. This resulted directly from five concrete processes: Party liquidation, the media handover to anti-socialist forces, privatizing and marketizing the planned, publicly owned economy, unleashing separatism, and surrendering to U.S. imperialism. Amorphous, abstract shortcomings in socialist democracy did not “cause” these policies. The Gorbachev leadership of the CPSU initiated all of them as conscious political choices.

The “lack of democracy” theory survives in part because of the reluctance of some to carry out a concrete analysis. This reluctance involves implicit denial of the importance of the Soviet collapse, an implicit denial that it poses a major theoretical challenge to Marxism. This distancing is self-defeating and intellectually dishonest. Evading the subject leaves unchallenged the prevailing bourgeois explanations of the demise of the Soviet Union. This evasion leads to a self-righteous complacency that says: “The Soviet Union had deep problems of practice; it was bureaucratic and undemocratic. That was then. This is now. We won’t be bureaucratic and undemocratic.” This is about as far away from historical materialism as one can get.

After several major international conferences of Communist and workers parties, little unity of analysis has developed. One can still hear, “The Soviet comrades will deal with it.” In contrast, Marx wrote The Civil War in France a few months after the fall of the Paris Commune. Lenin analyzed the August 1914 collapse of the Second International immediately.

Gus Hall, head of the CPUSA, expressed public skepticism about the direction of perestroika early on. Before 1987, though he had criticized socialist countries on occasion,620 he sometimes implied that public criticism was inappropriate.621 In winter 1987, however, in a World Marxist Review article generally positive about perestroika, the CPUSA leader cautioned that opportunism usually asserts itself in the guise of deeper appreciation for the “new.”

It is important to keep in mind that most errors, most of history’s attempts to revise the science of Marxism-Leninism and most of the policies and acts of capitulation to the pressures of the exploiting class have been justified by arguments about the “new.” Throughout the history of the working-class movement, the “something new” concepts have been used to bypass, cover up, or eliminate the concept of the class struggle.622

Hall went on to question “new thinking’s” subordination of class to universal human values. In 1988 and 1989, while still supportive of perestroika, his criticisms grew more forceful and detailed. As Eastern Europe fell apart in late 1989, and as the USSR’s crisis became terminal in 1990 and 1991, his public criticism of the policy of the Soviet leaders grew sharper still, though tempered by the hope that the saner heads would prevail.

Yet even Gus Hall, a dogged opponent of opportunism, did not see the conflicting approaches to socialist construction in the Soviet Union, or the material roots of the latter in the growing second economy. Until 1989 the CPUSA as well as other Communists underestimated the possibility of socialism ending and the Soviet Union fragmenting. This was probably due to the great ideological weight of the Soviet Communist Party in the world movement, and to the difficulty of understanding a complex society other than one’s own. Nevertheless, in contrast, many social democratic writers did discern the two trends in Soviet politics, and some bourgeois economists perceived the growth of the second economy.

A clear analysis of the Soviet Union was also undoubtedly hindered by the difficulty of sorting out legitimate criticism from the mass of generalized hostility directed the Soviet Union’s way. The Chinese Communists did condemn “Khrushchev revisionism” in 1956-64. Their polemics, however, struck many as crude, dogmatic, and self-serving. The Chinese policy erratically veered from left to right, and included Mao’s de facto anti-Soviet alliance with the U.S. For anyone with a shred of sympathy for the Soviet Union, the Chinese criticism increasingly lacked credibility. On the other end of the spectrum, the Eurocommunists merely echoed the hoary criticisms of the social democrats.

Among many friends of the Soviet Union an un-examined assumption grew that, after Stalin, the USSR was perfecting socialism. Khrushchev was better than Stalin. Gorbachev was better than Brezhnev. With the rare exceptions of Isaac Deutscher and Ken Cameron, few attempted to deal with the Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev periods in a critical but balanced way. Particularly in the case of Stalin, Soviet supporters gave up the effort of an overall assessment, perhaps because of its inherent difficulty, perhaps because such an effort could have no possible payoff, or perhaps because of an assumption that Soviet progress would make Stalin a historical anomaly of diminishing importance. The enemies of the Soviet Union readily filled this vacuum with shelves of books portraying Stalin as a monster or a madman. These caricatures in turn influenced the views of Communists whose only knowledge of the Stalin period was second hand.

The Soviet demise gave a new lease to the idea of “market socialism,” or at least the idea that the jury is still out on the proper role of the market in the political economy of socialism. As in other times, literature on “market socialism” has come into vogue as socialists of all stripes search for answers to the economic disasters of 1985-91. Most of this literature is naively utopian, a lineal descendant of the petty bourgeois socialism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon demolished by Karl Marx. Most versions of “market socialism” contain contradictory theoretical constructs that evade the question of whether labor markets and labor exploitation will exist under market socialism. If so, how is “market socialism” socialism at all?623

During perestroika, market socialism served as a halfway house, briefly useful for justifying to the Soviet public the goal of “reforming” and “perfecting” socialism. As a slogan, it proved effective. By the end of his tenure, when economic “reform” had produced something almost indistinguishable from capitalist restoration, Gorbachev dropped the pretence of “socialism.” He advanced the goal of establishing a “regulated market economy,” something resembling Western Europe or Scandinavia.

Given the actual history of market socialism under Gorbachev, it would seem that the real lesson of the Soviet collapse leads in the opposite direction, to the conclusion that socialism requires central planning, public ownership, and restricted markets. The question ought not to be debated dogmatically by assembling quotations from classical texts. Rather, the most promising approach, as Marxist economist David Laibman has advised, involves studying the relevant practical experience of socialist construction since 1917.624 The question of the market enters the discussion in three ways: the economic crises of the Gorbachev era; the long-term decline of the Soviet growth rate; and the role of markets in socialist and communist construction. A brief examination of each raises considerable doubts about the desirability of market socialism.

Economic discontent for millions of Soviet people in the Gorbachev era arose not from the central planning system but from its dismantling. In 1985, the economy, still centrally planned, delivered the highest living standards in Soviet history.625 For decades the Soviet economy had grown faster than the U.S. economy, though by the 1980s, it was not closing the gap as fast as before, and the nature of the race was changing. As frontrunner, the U.S. had made important qualitative transitions to new industries. Nonetheless, growing at a respectable 3.2 percent a year in the early 1980s, the Soviet economy was—slowly—catching up with the U.S. economy in many ways.626

As for the long-term decline of Soviet growth rates, too many have uncritically accepted the notion that the market can impart dynamism to socialism, and that a wider use of markets could have accelerated Soviet growth rates. Even cautious proponents of markets within the context of a dominant central plan, have to explain the following awkward facts. In the final three and a half decades of the USSR’s existence, the more market relations and other reforms were introduced—officially and legally in several reform waves (Khrushchev, Kosygin and Gorbachev), and quietly, steadily, and often illegally through the spreading second economy—the more the long-term economic growth rates came down. Even some bourgeois economists admit the downward impact of the second economy.627 The fastest Soviet growth rates ever achieved came in 1929-53 when the Soviet leadership firmly upheld central planning and suppressed the market relations formerly tolerated in the NEP of 1921-29. It was easy to see why the economic reform that Khrushchev and Gorbachev advocated would lower growth rates. Less investment in heavy industry, more stress on consumer goods, more wage leveling,628 all would tend to lower growth. Growth would also slacken due to decentralization that led to wasteful competition and disrupted the coordination between enterprises. Clearly from 1985 to 1991 “the magic of the market” was nowhere in evidence. The more commodity-money relations expanded, the more perestroika failed. In 1992 when Yeltsin fully imposed “shock therapy,” the Soviet economy went into a catastrophic slump, from which it has not yet recovered. Since 1991, market relations remain associated with negative or low growth rates. Indeed, 20th century planned economies, as a rule, grew significantly faster than market economies.629

“The seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production, and therewith the domination of the product over the producer,” wrote Engels.630 Engels may have misjudged how quickly and automatically the latter would flow from the former, but clearly the founders of scientific socialism envisaged communism—the historical stage after socialism—as a society with no market. The forecast of a communist society where, in conditions of superabundance, free human beings would collectively organize production according to a plan and organize distribution according to need rather through the blind workings of an impersonal and cruel market has been central to the Marxist understanding of social emancipation. Marxists criticized commodity production for causing producers to lose control of their product. In the Marxist view, a great advantage of the planned economy in its socialist and communist stages was that the producers step by step regained control over the product of their own labor. In the end, under communism, conscious human beings, not blind, anarchic market forces, would fully determine the character and pace of economic development.

Until Khrushchev, the Soviet Union took the struggle to restrict the role of the market seriously. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the postwar recovery from Nazi invasion was complete, a theoretical discussion with big practical implications arose among Soviet leaders and economists. It was prompted by the positions of Gosplan chief, Nicolai Voznesensky, who argued for broader use of market relations, and by preparations for a long-overdue Soviet textbook on political economy. Stalin, summing up the various debates, took the position that the laws of socialist construction were objective, that the actions of people could not transform the economic laws of socialism, but human action could restrict the sphere of operation of those economic laws. He held that commodity production existed under socialism “for a certain period, without leading to capitalism, bearing in mind that in our country commodity production is not so boundless and all-embracing as it is under capitalist conditions, being confined within strict bounds.” He opposed the selling of the machine tractor stations to the collective farms for various practical reasons and because it would expand the sphere of commodity production, a step backward from the already attained level of the industrialization of agriculture. In his view, commodity production in the USSR economy was confined to the sphere of personal consumption, and, pointing to the potential development of “product exchanges,” he declared the rudiments of a non-commodity economy existed in 1952 and could be developed.631

The Soviet debate in 1952 was a fight over long-term socialist strategy. Stalin’s view on commodity-money relations and the law of value under socialism signified this: If the nature of a commodity under socialism can be “transformed,” in other words, if there can be “socialist commodities,” then some in the CPSU leadership could logically argue for wholeheartedly expanding markets under socialism, which meant giving up the policy of keeping markets within strict bounds as socialism developed. Stalin rejected this path.

Then came Khrushchev. After 1953, a shift to pro-market political thinking occurred, and doctrinal shifts632 in economic theory ratified them. An obvious conundrum arose, however. Those favoring expanded use of market relations in socialism discarded a major element of Marxist theory, namely that the admittedly distant historical stage after socialism, full communism, would have no market. The founders of Marxism forecast that full communism meant no market. How can maximum use of the market in the socialist stage be followed immediately by its complete absence in the next stage? One example of the evasion of this problem is in a 1969 work Categories and Laws of the Political Economy of Communism, by A.M. Rumyantsev, an economist who had been close to Khrushchev. He buried in a long paragraph the notion that the use of “commodity-money relations” (markets) “accelerates the advance to full communism,” and that in some unexplained way, socialism “grows over into full communism,” while admitting “widespread theoretical discussion” of this “most complex problem” of the political economy of socialism in its “modern stage of development.”633 The pro-market turn in theory persisted long after Khrushchev. A late-Brezhnev-era textbook, Political Economy: Socialism (1977) stated in little more than one paragraph that commodity-money relations would “wither away” in the communist stage. How this withering would occur, the text leaves unexplained. Anders Aslund634 noted that in the 1960s there were two main camps of Soviet economists, the “commoditeers,” and the “non-commoditeers,” in other words, those for or against the expanded use of “commodity-money relations,” that is, markets. At least a decade before 1985, a number of Soviet research institutes and other corners of academia were occupied by social scientists who found Paul Samuelson more beguiling than Karl Marx.635 One of these was Tatyana Zaslavskaya,636 whose mentor was V. G. Venzher, the economist whose idea to sell the machine tractor stations to the collective farms was rejected by Stalin.637 Zaslavskaya was an early influence on the Gorbachev pro-market reforms and his supporter almost to the end. There was remarkable continuity in the two competing streams of Soviet economic thought.

Yuri Andropov acknowledged that his path of economic reform still had unsolved problems of theory and practice. He complained, for example, of the lack of an adequate theory of how to speed up labor productivity growth and a clear method to set prices under central planning.638 He considered his approach a better way forward than the Bukharinist ideology “which leans toward anarcho-syndicalism, the splitting of society into rival corporations independent of each other.” American political scientist Michael Parenti vividly described the many unsolved problems of designing incentives for innovation in Soviet industry. Innovation sometimes threatened the careers of managers and often failed to reward them for taking risks. Pressure to fulfill the plan’s production goals created disincentives for experimentation and even for the introduction of better technology, while sometimes creating incentives to cut quality. Well-run factories that met or exceeded the plan were sometimes punished with greater workloads, and so forth.639 These were stubborn, difficult problems of planning and management to be sure, but hardly insoluble.

The Soviet counterrevolution has implications for the remaining socialist states. Since 1991, the four surviving socialist states,640 China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea, have been under imperialist pressure to make concessions to the market, to submit to capitalist world economic institutions (WTO, IMF, World Bank), and to create special zones for Western corporate investment within their borders, on penalty of being refused Western loans, access to Western markets, and technology transfers. All four countries have had to maneuver in conditions of economic warfare spearheaded by the U.S. To a large degree because there is a gun held to their heads, these states in varying degrees have made concessions to the market and private enterprise. This poses a real danger, for a key lesson of the Soviet collapse is that market relations must be held to a minimum.

Agriculture may be the great exception to the general rule that in the first stage of socialism, the socialist state works to restrict the market over time. Unlike the Soviet Union, which did not have the luxury of moving slowly toward socialist relations in the countryside, other socialist states, after rushing to collectivize agriculture, have pulled back. In China, after the reforms re-privatized agriculture in 1978, well before the end of the USSR, farm output vastly increased.641 Later reforms in Chinese foreign trade and industry speeded up growth more moderately than in agriculture, and with harmful social, political and economic effects.642 In socialist Cuba, agricultural reforms came about in quite different circumstances—the end of Soviet trade and subsidies in 1989-91. This required drastic measures to achieve the self-sufficiency of the island and adapt to the grave crisis. In one measure to increase output, workers at state farms became co-operative owners. Since the reform, output has increased substantially.643 In today’s Cuba too, some interpret the Special Period not as a forced, perilous, emergency backward step, but as a welcome, sound, long-term development course. To their credit the top Cuban economic and planning authorities, although willing to allow free debate, seem fully cognizant of the historic parallels.644

Not all the experimentation with the market is caused by post-Soviet dire necessity or heightened Western pressure. “Two revolutionary classes, two lines” is a general phenomenon. In China, the concessions to the market have been extreme and the future of socialism may be in doubt. According to a 1994 essay by the Harriman Institute’s Rajan Menon,

China’s strategy of reform may well fail. It is hard to imagine that rampant capitalism, which is what is occurring however much the Chinese Communist Party may shy away from this term for ideological reasons, the increasing autonomy of the coastal regions, and the exposure of Chinese intellectuals to corrosive ideas from abroad can coexist indefinitely.645

In July 2001, the head of the Chinese Communist Party called for allowing capitalists into the CPC. Though a section of the national bourgeoisie participated in the Chinese Revolution and won a role in the governance of the early People’s Republic of China, the new attitude towards a new class of capitalists was a wholly different matter. China is essentially pursuing “a gigantic and expanded NEP,”646 and sooner or later the political and economic contradictions of the policy will force a choice, as it did in the USSR in 1928-29. Which side will win remains anyone’s guess. The political outcome of this struggle in the ruling Communist Party of the most populous country on earth is certain to be one of the most momentous of the 21st century.

After 1991, capitalist restoration in the USSR meant a depression and the coming of an era of gangster capitalism. Nevertheless, capitalist restoration in Russia and the other parts of the former USSR remains unstable. Transnational finance is keeping post-Soviet Russia a hobbled, dependent resource-extraction zone, even at the risk of nuclear accident, ethnic warfare, and state disintegration. Scholars from many viewpoints have noted the American government does not seem overly apprehensive.647 The contrast with the late 1940s, when a worried U.S. ruling class footed much of the bill for the Marshall Plan to stabilize West European capitalism, could not be plainer.

Erstwhile Gorbachev supporters debate what the post-Soviet system is, and what its prospects are. As in the classic horror film, Rosemary’s Baby, the post-Soviet newborn is hideous, if it is a baby at all, and those who have seen it certainly deny that it is theirs! Some opine that the wretched little creature will not live long. Economist David Kotz648 says post-Soviet Russian capitalism is not true capitalism at all, but a “non-capitalist predatory/extractive system” emerging from the previous “state socialist” system. Others, such as Roy Medvedev, say the capitalist revolution is “doomed” in Russia.649

Admittedly, the system in today’s Russia is uniquely parasitic, deformed, and weak. The Eastern European socialist states have evidently made the transition back to capitalism, with plenty of problems,650 but not with the extreme social evils seen in the former USSR. Just as socialism has proven reversible, so is neo-capitalism. If the contradictions of Russian capitalism remain acute, imperialism remains recklessly aloof, and the Russian left can unite around a realistic strategy, socialist restoration might re-emerge on the agenda. In spite of everything, in Russia political parties favoring socialism have more support than any other single party.

Many have anguished over the question: why was the Soviet socialist system so fragile? Without an understanding of the growth of forces opposing socialism from within, the system seemed stronger than it actually was, and its unforeseen fall was therefore all the more shocking and puzzling. A similar question, from another standpoint, is posed as a comparison: if U.S. capitalism survived a Herbert Hoover who in 1929 presided over an economic crash leading to 40 percent mass unemployment, and a decade–long depression, as well as the defeat of his long-ruling Republican Party, and yet U.S. capitalism recovered, grew and thrived after World War II, why could Soviet socialism not survive a Gorbachev?

The answer is: the subjective factor is vastly more important in socialism than in capitalism. This is both a strength and vulnerability. A qualitative difference between socialism and capitalism is captured in the saying “capitalism grows; socialism is built.” At the risk of a tedious simile, the two systems are like a river raft and an airplane. With capitalism—the river raft—the pole man who steers the raft merely has to avoid shoals, rapids and waterfalls. Mostly, the flow of the current down river controls the pace and direction of the raft. It is a simple and mostly automatic system. Only loose supervision is required. Big blunders are usually not fatal.

An airplane—socialism—is a far superior mode of transportation. Its range, its freedom of direction and maneuver, and its speed far exceed that of the river raft. But the airplane requires conscious application of the laws of physics and aerodynamics, forethought, planning, science, training, ground crews, radar, and so on. It is a complex system requiring a massive social division of labor. Managing the system—its piloting, the subjective aspect of its steering—is far more crucial to the safe operation of this mode of transportation than is the case with the river raft. Big blunders in piloting a plane, though rare, are often fatal. There is a smaller margin for error. The fact that airplanes sometimes crash does not prove the superiority of the river raft. It is only an argument for better-engineered, better-piloted, safer airplanes.

The laws of socialist construction differ from the laws of capitalist development. Capitalism’s laws operate blindly, without consciousness, like the law of gravity that sends the river raft down stream, no matter what the pole man is doing. But socialism’s laws, while objective, require an airplane whose designers consciously master and use the laws governing such forces as gravity, thrust, lift and drag, and a pilot skillful in the technique and grounded in the underlying science.

Therefore a Gorbachev leadership could do far more damage to socialism than an even more blundering Hoover did to U.S. capitalism. As a Soviet scholar said, the economic laws of socialism “cease to be a spontaneously, anarchically operating force and are consciously applied by society in its self-interest.” Ignoring the economic laws of socialism “leads to… the emergence of difficulties and disproportions and imbalance in the economy, and weakens coordination of the actions and comradely co-operation of social groups and bodies of workers.”651

As opportunism developed within the Soviet Union, imperialism discovered a formula to promote its interests: from afar encourage those selfsame opportunist trends in the Communist leadership of the USSR. Czechoslovakian events in 1968, and the accumulation of problems in Yugoslavia suggested the formula, but would it work in the USSR where the new system’s roots seemingly had sunk so deep? For a long time, the old system’s main thinkers understood in principle how the new system could be destroyed. An architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote prophetically in 1947:

If…anything is ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.652

It was a lesson that the enemies of socialism in the 21st century are still trying to apply in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. They could not defeat Soviet socialism by intervening in its civil war, a Nazi invasion, the arms race, subversion, and economic warfare. They could not directly penetrate the leadership. From the outside, however, they did all in their power to encourage opportunist policies. In time, on their own, some Communist leaders drank the poisoned chalice of revisionism.

Can anything guarantee that opportunism never succeeds again? One safeguard might involve strictly limiting legal private enterprise and enforcing the law against illegal private enterprise and thus preventing associated corruption of the Party and the government. As for Party standards, it is hard to imagine higher ones than the ones that Lenin set. The lesson is probably not in the search for higher party standards or the invention of altogether new norms, but in the maintenance of those standards. Also, as Bahman Azad rightly observed, a policy of frank international Communist criticism might have helped expose the negative trends in Soviet socialism, and mobilized action against them.653 By muting public criticism of the Soviet Union, the left committed a grave, if understandable, mistake.

In part, Gorbachev framed his program as completion of the “anti-Stalinist” agenda interrupted by Khrushchev’s removal. By the end of his rule, Gorbachev was freely using traditional anti-Communist terms of abuse such as “Stalinism,” “totalitarianism,” and “command economy.” Stigmatizing the past with borrowed invective paralyzed rational, honest debate about the past and present realities of the Soviet Union. In the future, supporters of socialism must come to terms with the Stalin era. In Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Kenneth Neill Cameron wrote,

A few months ago I had lunch with a leading academic Marxist and faculty colleague. When I told him I had just finished a book on Stalin he said “Stalin! My God, every time I talk about socialism, some student brings up Stalin – and then, what can one say?” One can say quite a lot.654

Cameron’s book was a start. At first even Gorbachev called for an all-sided view of the Stalin years. He said:

To remain faithful to historical truth we must see both Stalin’s incontestable contribution to the struggle for socialism and to the defense of its gains, and the gross political errors and abuses committed by him and those around him for which our people paid a heavy price and which had grave consequences for the life of our society.655

A balanced historical view of Stalin must include an assessment of not just the repression but the circumstances of it. As Hans Holz said, this means the recognition that “the despotic aspects of Soviet socialism”656 occurred in the period of its encirclement. Historian Herbert Aptheker enumerated some of the aspects of this encirclement:

…the hostility, boycott, economic warfare, systematic sabotage, military assaults, creating and bolstering Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, the tardiness and weakness of two-front assistance to the USSR and then after victory the rejection of any decent relationships between the triumphant but shattered Soviet Union and the victorious Western powers. When one writes “shattered” Soviet Union one has in mind the devastation of everything in its European territory, the loss of about 25 million dead and the serious wounding of some 40 million of its citizens.657

The gaps in knowledge of the Stalin era remain enormous. The fact that bourgeois historians cannot agree on whether Stalin’s victims numbered 5, 20 or 100 million shows the abysmal state of historical understanding.658 Using new information obtained since 1991, Michael Parenti has pointed out that post-Soviet scholars have made a promising start on an honest accounting.659 Some historians are retreating from the wildly exaggerated claims of Cold War polemics.660 Now that the Soviet archives are opened, the calumnies of rabidly anti-Soviet authors661 will not be the last word on Soviet history.

The Soviet tragedy renders farcical the claim of one historian that “the 20th century will go down in history as the century of the greatest in world transformations—the socialist revolution.”662 Twentieth century history proved not so rectilinear. Yet historical materialism has an explanatory power great enough to survive the Soviet reversal. Anthony Coughlan wrote:

People in the socialist tradition should above all be able to think historically. When did capitalism begin? Was it 15th century Venice? 16th century Geneva? 17th century Holland or 18th century England? If it took capitalism centuries to develop—and it is still in full spate in many parts of the world—is it not naïve to expect socialism to spring full-grown from the womb of history in our particular century? Moreover, as capitalism developed in a zigzag way, with periods of setback as well as advance, should not a historical perspective lead one to expect a long period of complex interaction between capitalism and socialism around the world before one gives way to the other?663

The Soviet experience demands a reconsideration of the idea of “socialism in one country.” Socialism in one country involved a basic decision to try to hold on and build a new society, although many external and internal conditions militated against it. It was a calculated and reasonable risk, for a revolution in Soviet Russia had its advantages, namely, a huge territory, a large population, and geographical remoteness. Marx probably would have approved the gamble. He once wrote: “World history would be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on the condition of infallibly favorable chances.”664 In any case it is doubtful that the eventual demise of the USSR invalidated the attempt to build it in one country. Socialism develops country by country because capitalism develops unevenly. Simultaneous revolution in all remaining capitalist countries is impossible. As Lenin observed, “History has not been kind enough to give us socialist revolution everywhere.” Uneven development meant that capitalism broke at its weakest link in 1917. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, uneven development of the world economy is more extreme than ever. For example, the ratio of average incomes in the world’s twenty richest countries compared to the world’s twenty poorest has risen from twenty to one in 1960s to forty to one in the new century.665 Since these are national aggregates, if anything this indicator understates the extreme inequality in the world. Thus the likelihood of revolutions in isolated countries remains, and revolutionaries in the 21st century will face a challenge similar to those in the last, having to build socialism alone or almost alone in the cauldron of imperialist pressures.

The breakup of the USSR as a socialist multinational federation underlines the importance of the national question. Marx himself underestimated the national question in one or more respects. Moreover, contrary to the expectations of some internationalists of old, and contrary to the claim of today’s globalists, nationalism remains a growing phenomenon. Compared to 1945 when only about 40 flags flew outside the UN building, today more than 190 fly. Ethnic and national strife is likewise rising, often fomented by the transnational corporations (TNCs). As the TNCs, with their free trade and globalization ideology, assault national sovereignty and development, partisans of workers must be the best champions of the democratic right of nations to self-determination.

New forms of the national question are arising. Multinational federal states are under stress in many parts of the world, to mention a few: India, Britain, Canada, the Russian Federation, and Spain. The colonial legacy remains. Africa and the Mideast have ridiculous borders drawn by departing colonialists and bearing little or no relation to national or economic units. Many former socialist states, independent before 1989-91, are now prostrate semi-colonies. National feeling in those lands is on the rise. World domination by the USA as the sole global military power is accentuating the national question of all other states. Supra-national integration in the form of the European Union, NAFTA, and other schemes has become a main aim of transnational finance capital. The national question is producing unusual alignments where divergent political forces find themselves in common battle against the TNCs, although, of course, from different class positions and with different motives. For example, not long ago in the USA, the trade unions and Texas billionaire Ross Perot were at the same time opponents of NAFTA. In Britain, Communists and many conservatives, at loggerheads on almost everything else, oppose the EU.

Since the former Soviet and East European states had few or no native big capitalists of the traditional kind, restoring capitalism has meant putting them in hock to foreigners. Consequently, new national democratic demands have entered the programs of Communist Parties and other progressive parties in erstwhile socialist states. There is the possibility of organizing the defense of the nation-state and national independence as part of a campaign to reverse capitalist restoration.

We cannot leave this writing without sharing the impact of this study upon us. We came away with a renewed sense of awe at accomplishments of the seventy-year socialist experiment when, as Tom Paine said of an earlier revolution, workers “had it in their power to begin the world over again.” We came away, also, with a deep sense of the great possibilities lost. The betrayal swept away an attempt at human liberation, which sustained the hopes of millions of working and oppressed people in the 20th century, a noble venture for which so many Soviet people made such staggering sacrifices and from which so many Soviets and non-Soviets reaped lasting benefits.

Nobody can undo the grim facts. Only the peoples in the former Soviet Union and the other former socialist states can decide whether and when socialism will return. It is unlikely the winners of 1991 will have the last word. In 1815 at the Congress of Vienna that restored Europe’s kings to their thrones, the Austrian aristocrat Clemens von Metternich thought that he had done away with “liberty, equality and fraternity.” A little more than a century later, more republican tricolors flew over European and world capitals than ever before. The contradictions that gave birth to 1917 are still growing and will give birth to new attempts at working class emancipation. Learning the lessons of the dismantling of the Soviet Union is the best way both to honor its memory and to ensure that such a calamity never happens again.