http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/russia_and_the_left_from_statism_to_civil_society
Legacy
of Statism
Though
commentators turn their eyes to autocrats past, no period is so
influential and yet so difficult to integrate into a general narrative as that of the Russian
Federation's immediate predecessor, the Soviet Union. As Soviet life grows historically
more distant, so it appears incommensurably simpler. One
manifestation of this is nostalgia for the bygone era. Another, of
western descent, is a feeling that the nationalist behemoth of the
Putin era bears little relation to the progressive rationalism of,
say, the Khrushchev years. Yet even this apparently straightforward
rationalism is prone to misinterpretation.
The
deformation of the USSR had both structural and voluntarist causes,
both rooted in the initial phase of the post-revolutionary era (from
roughly 1917 to, say, Trotsky's expulsion). On the voluntarist side
can be put the philosophical and doctrinal composition of the
Bolshevik Party, the rapid development of which, during 1917, led
almost inexorably away from revolutionary principle and towards
something like "pure practice" (or in other words, "what
Lenin says goes"). Though extraordinarily strategically
adaptable, Bolshevism became increasingly narrowly focused on
securing the Party's interest within the Russian domestic sphere.
Paradoxically, their political flexibility and skill came at the cost
of theoretical myopia. On the other hand were the efforts of the
Allied Powers to "strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib"
(according to Churchill), by the singular means of invasion. No
matter that the Bolsheviks, in line with their declared opposition to
the war, had already withdrawn.
At the
structural level the Russian economy was deeply unsuited to the
strain of social transformation needed to further the goals of the
Revolution. Russia was broke from the War and deeply in need of
modernisation anyway. Add to this a profound nationalist reaction and
ever increasing global economic instability and you have the makings
of a catastrophe.
This
instability not only created the conditions for the October
Revolution, but also drove its protagonists in the harshest of
directions, distorting the project of socialist transformation from
the outset. Bolshevik ideology always contained the seeds of
grotesque distortions of socialist practice; the situation of the
world economy, and of Russia in particular, after the end of the
First World War practically guaranteed them. In the long run
Churchill's desire was met. Shorn of the ability to experiment with
new economic and social institutions by global instability, and
finding it necessary to impose harsh labour controls in the face of
continuing unrest, the Soviet Union became just another, particularly
volatile reflection of tendencies within global capitalism.
A
Fulcrum of Volatility
Take
this description of the capitalist world economy in the 1980s:
...the
technologies and operating procedures of most modern corporations;
the forms of labour-market control defended by many labour movements;
the instruments of macroeconomic control developed by bureaucrats and
economists in the welfare states; and the rules of international
monetary and trading systems established immediately after World War
II - all must be modified, even discarded, if the chronic economic
diseases of our times are to be cured.1
If
we except the reference to independent labour movement activities
(and, initially perhaps, to global financial governance) it's quite
possible to extend this description to the post-War USSR and the
whole of the Socialist bloc. In many ways these were the most radical
expressions of the meeting of administered capitalism (the Taylorist
division of labour; 'scientific' managerialism; macroeconomic
controls overseen by centralized bureaucracy, and so on) with welfare
state redistributive government. It was this set of characteristics
that eventually made the USSR so vulnerable when the post-War Golden
Age came to an end and the new regime of "flexible
specialisation" kicked in.
Following
the oil shocks of the 1970s, which were themselves partly the result
of the breakdown of the old monetary order of the Gold Standard
through which the
dollar bankrolled Europe and Japan and managed prices,
western Europe cut its oil consumption by 40%. The USSR only managed
cutbacks of 20%.2
Continuing to rely on increasingly volatile markets where other, more
adaptable economies could drive demand in different directions, the
institutional rigidities built into the Bloc economies meant they
amplified the contradictions of the world market. "By the early
1980s Eastern Europe was in an acute energy crisis. This in turn
produced shortages of food and manufactured goods."3
The only exceptions were those, like Hungary, who plunged further
into debt to sustain domestic consumption.
Incapable
of political reform, and being prised open by the increasingly
volatile global economy, the USSR and the rest of the Soviet bloc
began to regionalise, fragment, and slowly to combust. Capital
shrugged off its Post-War baggage, and was in the process of
shrugging off 'really existing socialism'.
Realignments
The
weekend that Gorbachev resigned as party leader, and plumes of smoke
began rising from party archives across the country, I was at a
conference about anti-corporate environmental strategies in Los
Angeles... I didn't hear the Soviet Union or the collapse of
communism mentioned once... The Soviet Union's disintegration, the
end to what electrified it all three quarters of a century ago,
didn't seize the imagination of those conference-goers and,
suffocated by the ecstasies of the corporate press, they wanted to
talk about anything else.
Alexander
Cockburn, 'Radical as Reality'4
Socialism
is a living creature which can live without coercion or distortion.
Communist
Party official, 19895
In
Russia today around 100 billionaires own 30 per cent of all assets.
Washington
Times,
22/11/12
Following
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after nearly forty years of
energetic denunciations of Stalinism, the western contingent of the
radical Left (or what remained of it barring defectors) fell somewhat
quiet on the topic of communism. 'Goodbye
to All That'
was Eric Hobsbawm's dismissal. Two of America's most prominent
Marxist economists, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, confessed their
impatience
with the old guard's persistent apologism.
The feeling of shaking off old burdens - in this they resembled
capitalism itself - was almost audible.
In
the mid-80s Noam Chomsky insisted on a radical
contradiction between the Soviet Union and socialism.
The association of one with the other was a simple coup of propaganda
(for both sides). Old Trots like Ernest Mandel permitted the
description "deformed worker's state" and, a
la
the old man, insisted that backwards countries never could have
produced socialism anyway.6
Susan Woodward suggested that, beneath the surface, communist and
non-communist systems shared a common inheritance: they were
attempted "rational approaches to the material world and its
development."7
Even
as some former dissidents have moved to the Left (realizing the
rosiness of Europe's welfare states was only ever for the few and has
been buckling of late), it is rare to find a satisfactory account of
what 'really existing socialism' was and how it got that way. The
Hungarian dissident and philosopher G.M.Tamas offers this
description:
"A system of state capitalism" in which "commodity
production, wage labour, money and the separation of the producers
from the means of production" still predominated. In other
words, it was just another, more poorly designed capitalism.
On
their 1990 visit to the Soviet Union Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
reported on the flourishing, for the first time since the early
1920s, of genuine soviet democracy. A civil society group called the
Popular Front, having secured a 20% presence in the Soviets, was
organising the restoration of churches in the industrial city of
Yaroslavl. This loose compendium of social movements, a sort of
hastily assembled Big Society thrusting itself into the socialist
state apparatus, operated, as the authors say, entirely "in the
spirit of Perestroika". While in Moscow laws overriding the
Soviets and reducing the newly-acquired powers of the independent
unions were being quietly passed, workers in the industrial
hinterlands were creating a novel form of freedom. As the state
turned towards the interests of capital, however, this novelty became
increasingly restricted.
At the time of Panitch
and Gindin's visit, Yeltsin had already been elected President of the
Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Gorbachev's, and by
extension the Soviet Union's, days were numbered. The streak of
liberalism introduced by Gorbachev's cadre of reformers was about to
be overwhelmed by decentralizing, nationalist forces far beyond their
control. In the absence of a state concerned with regulating the
atmosphere in which worker's democratic freedoms were explored, the
whole experiment was to be quickly stubbed out. The story of mass
unemployment and impoverishment that followed is by now a familiar
one. To conclude, then, with the reflections of female auto plant
workers in Yaroslavl in 1990, on the recent pro-union changes,
shortlived though they were, and the swelling optimism of the newly
assertive worker's movement:
Woman
I: Before the change, almost all decisions were made by the
administration. Now there must be consultation with the trade union
committee and the workers have a much greater say.
Woman
4: Control by [Government] Ministries is still there, and this limits
managers' power and workers' collectives' power. So the enterprises
must become free of the Ministries first of all, and then the
workers' collective councils will really become strong. 8
