Workers World, Vol. 19, No. 42
October 26 – Almost on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, the Carter administration is in the throes of fashioning a new approach in its relationship to the USSR. Whether this will turn out to be merely an exercise in State Department international public relations or whether there is any real substance to it, only time will tell.
If an agreement is consummated – on that is more than of an episodic character – even one that involves one or more serious issues such as nuclear arms and normalization of trade and commerce, the character of the relations between the USSR and the U.S. will nevertheless remain fundamentally unchanged. Periods of war, truce, and so-called cooperation have marked the 60-year relationship between imperialism and the Soviet Union. IN the course of these many decades, heavy blows have been inflicted on both, but the basic characters of their irreconcilable social systems remain fundamentally the same.
Thus, any new agreement that emerges from the negotiations apparently now in progress should be viewed in the light of the entire preceding historical period.
Joint statement on the Middle East
At the moment, there are certain signs, visible to all, which indicate that the Carter administration is assuming a new posture toward the Soviet Union which – real or fake – ought to be critically examined. The first sign, unquestionably, is the joint statement of the U.S. and the USSR on the Mideast, signed earlier this month. Washington did not necessarily have to have the Soviet signature on this statement, innocuous though it may turn out to be in the end. True, the USSR is co-chair with the U.S. for the convening of a Geneva Conference. But the issuance of this communique over the joint signatures of the U.S. and the USSR was calculated to convey the impression of collaboration, of “working together,” so to speak.
Of course, this conference may never take place and the Palestinians, hopefully, may be in a position to resume their long hoped-for offensive to win the crucial battlefield victory, which no conference by itself can ever ensure. From a revolutionary point of view, the USSR might have declined to sign the joint communique on the grounds that it doesn’t adequately cover the restoration of the full rights of the Palestinians. Nor does it cover the other area of struggle, the recovery of all the land occupied by the Israeli regime.
But matters being what they are in the Middle East, with reaction in the saddle in most of the vital areas, and considering the conservative character of the Soviet leadership, the joint communique all-in-all does indicate in some small respect an aspect of “give” on the part of the U.S.
Arms limitation agreement signaled
The second sign that negotiations between Washington and the Soviet Union may be coming unfrozen once again is the daily predictions in the capitalist press of an imminent breakthrough in the SALT negotiations. Whatever the nature of the ultimate new agreement that emerges on nuclear arms, one thing is certain – neither the Pentagon nor the Soviet Union is likely to make any concessions that will put either one of them in an inferior position.
If we are to believe the more serious among the capitalist press, the Soviet Union has achieved so-called rough equivalence in the nuclear arms field with the U.S. This is a hard-won victory of the Soviet Union, secured by the high state of Soviet military technology, which in turn is rooted in the advanced socialist methods of centralized planning and coordination.
It is freedom from the incurable problems plaguing the military-industrial complex of the U.S. in its drive for extortionate super-profits which has enabled Soviet military technology to emerge from the abysmal backwardness inherited from the Czarist regime.
A country which lost 20 million people in the last world war and perhaps as many during the period of the first world war, revolution, civil war, and intervention – all due to the existence and preponderance of the world system of capitalist imperialism – is not likely to allow a military or civilian leadership to surrender advantages gained through so many years of struggle.
Especially not to the very enemy responsible for the initiation and continuance of the race of horrendous military weapons in the first place.
Lower profile in the ‘human rights’ campaign
A third sign that the Carter administration is in the throes of developing a new approach to the USSR is that it has lowered the pitch of its infamous “human rights” campaign (really an anti-Soviet campaign), although it has by no means surrendered it. This new posture, emphasis, or mere probing, however variously the capitalist press defines it, is nevertheless a departure from the high, or should we say, low moral posture of “hanging tough” which the Carter administration assumed immediately after the inauguration.
This new approach by Carter is by no means a voluntary act. It has been brought about by the force of compelling circumstances. It is the result of a sharp deterioration in the international position of U.S. imperialism since Carter took office last January. The worldwide capitalist economic crisis which the Carter administration hoped would soon go away by itself, has demonstrated a stubbornness and intractability only comparable to that of the 1930s.
Under severe pressure form conflicting groupings in the capitalist establishment “to do something more” for each of them (and against each other), the Carter administration finds itself careening backward and forward, handing out huge amounts of tax breaks, tax incentives, and carrying out downright Treasury raids – all to no avail, as the economy remains perilously stagnant.
In the meantime Carter has assured the wrath not only of the official leadership of the Black and Latin people, but of the broad mass of the oppressed and the working class as a whole. Nowhere is the failure of the Carter administration more visible than in the mounting figures of plant closings and rising unemployment – especially in steel.
This crisis has radically altered the nature of the relationship between the U.S. and its imperialist allies, who see themselves as victims of Carter’s policy of dumping the effects of the capitalist crisis on their shoulders. Defensively, they seek new arrangements among themselves to combat U.S. economic aggression. But the allies, in turn, conspire with the U.S. to dump the effects of the crisis on the less developed and underdeveloped countries at a time when U.S. diplomacy is engaged in the promise of more aid.
Thus, both political and economic factors, abroad and at home, have militated against “aggressively challenging” the USSR “by peaceable means” (subversion) at this particular historical moment.
Deteriorating U.S. world position
Without resorting to naked military force, which now would find overwhelming mass opposition by the American workers and oppressed people, the tough Carter rhetoric to the USSR and the rest of the world is in and of itself inadequate and somewhat self-defeating. Hence the huge increases in arms production and unprecedented amounts of investment in sophisticated military weapons, such as the neutron bomb and others still on the drawing boards. These remain the basic but not the only threat in the U.S. arsenal.
Arms production as a short-term economic stimulant may, depending upon varying circumstances, be effective. But from a long-range point of view it has a devastating effect on the economy as a whole, in which the military-industrial complex milks the country without any letup.
The most dramatic example of the deterioration of the international position of the U.S. came to the fore when the Carter strategy in southern Africa collapsed completely only yesterday. The demagogy with which the White House launched the Mondale and Young missions to South Africa has now proved totally bankrupt. The violently racist regime of Vorster has imposed on the Black people of South Africa – upon Azania – a brutal fascist dictatorship which rivals that of Hitler and Mussolini.
In doing so it has unmasked the Carter demagogy. It has, in so many words, challenged the administration to put up or shut up. Thus far, there has merely been a squeak from the State Department, a cosmetic move to recall the ambassador from Pretoria and, as one aid unwillingly revealed, “maybe only for a few days.”
Even the much-publicized move by Carter to agree in the UN to an arms embargo has little meaning and is deceptive. The main exporters of arms to South Africa in the last few years have been France, West Germany, and Israel, not the U.S. – but this is probably by secret agreement. Also, there has been a voluntary ban in effect for several years now, but it has not been abided by.
The U.S. is trying to shift whatever burdens the sanctions entail onto its imperialist allies.
Some in the U.S. are proposing a ban on exports to South Africa. This is one-sided, because it’s not so much exports as imports from South Africa that are vital to its economy.
Finally, the whole matter of sanctions is both a ruse and the medium for inhibiting the growth and development of an independent, aggressive struggle against the Vorster regime, free of dependence on the imperialists.
There are no less than 400 U.S. corporations in South Africa, including the very biggest, with virtually billions at stake. It is not necessary to ask where their sympathies really lie. What is their perspective?
As one Black African country after another took the rostrum at the UN to nail the hated Vorster regime and demand action, it was very plain that only the USSR and its socialist allies, the oppressed people, and the world working class can really be of assistance in liberating the African people from the yoke of imperialism.
The Carter delegation at the UN looked like Sad Sacks during the entire session. The U.S. delegation was consulting, not with the Black African countries, but with the imperialist allies whose stake in the imperialist booty in Africa is as real as the U.S. part is substantial. What the Black members of the U.S. delegation would have undoubtedly liked to have seen was for Carter himself to have made one of those really denunciatory statements attacking the Vorster regime and to have invited some of the outstanding Black liberation leaders of South Africa to the White House and get himself photographed with them in solidarity against the Vorster regime. But this didn’t happen.
Now the real war in southern Africa is about to be opened. The “moderates” in the Pretoria government upon whom the imperialists have banked have become subdued, and this paves the way for a revolutionary struggle which will not surrender to Vorster’s threats of genocide. On the one hand, Washington, at best, will push or unseat the Vorster regime only to install a neo-colonialist regime to suit its own interests. On the other hand, the liberation forces are fighting for complete destruction of the imperialist hold on Africa.
Indeed, the Carter administration faces a most serious crisis in South Africa. It should not be wondered at that they are now viewing the Soviet Union with more apprehension than ever. One can only hope that the socialist countries, particularly the USSR, will not be cajoled into passivity by the new Carter posture and will render what is necessary to the liberation struggle in southern Africa, as in Angola.
If in southern Africa the U.S. faces its most dramatic crisis, its fortunes in southern Asia are no less on the wane. Indeed, it seemed only a few months ago that Carter and his entourage were riding the wave of euphoria with the electoral victory which ousted the Gandhi regime in India and installed the Janata party. What some on the left mistakenly viewed as a victory for democracy was in reality what the CIA and the capitalist establishment as a whole knew to be a triumph of reaction. And while the vanquished Gandhi forces were themselves reactionary, the new group is decidedly more pro-U.S. in its diplomatic stance.
Now this victory is in the process of becoming a liability.
The virtue of reaction, as seen through imperialist eyes, is that it “establishes order”; that is, it stabilizes the exploitation of the workers and peasants by the possessing classes. The subjugated masses, stunned as a result of a political debacle, thus become passive, atomized, and apolitical.
But not unpredictably, this new regime of blatant reaction, more unbridled in its character as a repressive, anti-working class force than the Gandhi regime, has opened up a “Pandora’s box” of economic chaos. A resurgence among the workers and also the peasants is now in progress. It is fueled, not merely by the failure to carry out lofty promises, but by a ravaging economic crisis which had been delayed somewhat in earlier years and which is now taking on a crueler and more devastating aspect in India than was expected at the beginning of the world economic crisis.
Thus the Janata administration is itself in need of help from the U.S., instead of rendering the kind of “help” which the multinational corporations themselves need so badly after patiently waiting for the opportunity that the Janata party would afford them.
As we showed in a previous article, the euphoria which the Carter administration basked in in early March has completely evaporated.
Especially painful is the sight of the new Prime Minister of India, with whom Carter had been secretly exchanging messages ever since his election, choosing to visit the USSR and consult first with Brezhnev, rather than Carter. A sharp diplomatic “tilt” by the new Indian government was supposed to be toward Washington, not Moscow.
However, it is not sentimentality or political affinity to the socialist system of the USSR which has prompted the Indian Prime Minister to go to Moscow first. Indeed, in his very toast at the diplomatic reception in the Kremlin, Prime Minister Desai took the undiplomatic road of bringing up an “internal affair” – denouncing the former Gandhi regime.
It was well calculated. It was in reality a plea to the Soviet leadership not to entertain any ideas of helping to revive a Gandhi coalition with CP help and various friends in the bourgeois parties. Brezhnev did not reply, but it indicates how fearful the new Indian regime is of the tremendous mass discontent and the potential of the masses to conduct a protracted struggle and topple the regime.
Such is the disastrous economic and political situation which the Janata regime faces. It explains in part why the Prime Minister went to Moscow first and not Washington. But should help not be forthcoming, the next phase many be a Washington-engineered changeover as took place in Pakistan, unless new administrators of the capitalist government in India are able to hold the masses in tow and tilt both diplomatically and economically to the U.S.
If the subcontinent (and this by the way includes the new regimes in Pakistan and Sri Lanka) is a disappointing liability to the Carter administration, it simply demonstrates that the very victories which imperialism is able to garner at great human and economic loss turn into its ultimate defeat. Like the Pinochet regime in Chile, the victories on the subcontinent are not in reality life-sustaining instruments for imperialism, but millstones around the neck of the North American colossus.
Even in the Middle East, where the U.S. retains a vast and fabulous empire, it is its very instability which has made it look once again in the direction of the USSR.
These are only some of the international developments which help to explain the basis for any attempt at a new U.S. approach toward the USSR, should it ever become a reality.
However, the international situation is not the only factory. The USSR itself has shown no inclination to surrender that which it needs and must have if it is to become a thriving, developing socialist state. Carter’s belligerent strategy, symbolized earlier by such hardline policies as the refusal to negotiate a new SALT agreement and by his contemptuous disregard of the one signed by Nixon and the USSR, has passed the high watermark. Unfortunately for the Carter administration, the USSR leadership did not wilt under the infamous “human rights” assault, or accede to the flagrant demand to reduce the Soviet military position to inferiority in relation to the U.S.
From all this it follows that a new stratagem, a new approach, based upon the same organic and congenital tendencies of U.S. imperialism – namely aggressiveness and unbridled expansion for super-profits – must be fashioned in order to shore up the waning forces of American finance capital.
To do this the capitalist establishment has hoisted an old and well-worn theme. But to give it more credibility, it was advanced by a respected name in the capitalist establishment. It may be only a trial balloon.
It made its appearance first in the New York Times magazine section on Sept. 25, a bare two weeks before the joint Mideast statement. It’s in the form of an article by one Samuel Pisar with the brave title “Let’s Put Détente Back on the Rails.”
Pisar is the author of “Coexistence and Commerce” and has served as an advisor to the State Department and to congressional committees. But he is much more than that. He’s an insider from the “business community.” He was an advisor during the Kennedy administration on matters pertaining to the USSR and also served in such a capacity during the Johnson, and to some extent, the Nixon administrations. He has dealt extensively with Soviet leaders over the years on matters of a commercial and trade nature.
He is no Kremlinologist from bourgeois academia. He represents those big business interests who are for establishing channels which would open up broad avenues for commerce and trade between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The basis for his thesis is that the economies of the USSR and the U.S. are complementary. The former has vast natural resources and abundant raw materials, such as gas and oil, which Western imperialism badly needs. And the USSR needs sophisticated technology and machinery, as well as consumer goods, which the West, and particularly the U.S., can supply. Thus a two-way trade on the basis of a continuous and more or less permanent nature cannot but lay the basis for lasting coexistence between the U.S. and the USSR.
This theme, a crude form of economic determinism, is a favorite in bourgeois circles – only here it is stated more persuasively, for the bourgeoisie, and more authoritatively.
Of course, the current Soviet leadership has fought long and hard for precisely such a development. Indeed, the USSR has for the past six decades tried to break not merely the military but the economic blockade which still exists against it. This economic blockade, notwithstanding the fact that the USSR has become a so-called super-power, is still in force against the USSR and other socialist countries.
Washington to this day has undermined trade, for instance, with its new strategic ally, the People’s Republic of China, by failing to extend full diplomatic relations so that China’s ships could at least visit the U.S. ports without fear that their cargoes could be confiscated by alleged U.S. creditors, who may do this with impunity as long as no diplomatic relations exist between the two countries. The same goes for Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos, Cuba, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Ethiopia is partially on this list, depending on how the Revolution finally ends up.
Only those Eastern European countries which have moved in a rightward direction both economically and diplomatically are not altogether discriminated against when it comes to trade with the U.S. The so-called Most Favored Nation clause is a vicious measure, not merely calculated to discriminate against and halt trade with the socialist countries, but to continue economic warfare and undermine the socialist countries.
It goes without saying that the Soviet Union would be for the elimination of these restrictions and in favor of opening wide channels for commerce and industry. The fact, however, that in the 60 years of its existence no leader of the USSR has been able to persuade the imperialists of the advantages to both sides indicates that more is involved than mere narrow economic interests.
Nevertheless, the thesis of coexistence has always been justified in the Soviet Union and in the United States in that it would be good for both sides. Part of the Pisar thesis is that normalization of trade and commerce between the socialist and capitalist states, particularly the Soviet Union, should have taken place immediately after the Cold War and particularly during the Kennedy administration.
What then stopped it?
According to his thesis, it was the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Kennedy assassination. But why didn’t the Johnson administration undertake normalization of relations based on the concept of opening the channels of trade and commerce? The author skips this and only vaguely mentions, as though in passing, Vietnam. He says a second start in normalization was made by Nixon but that Watergate changed the situation and détente was sabotaged.
He does not explain the origins of the Bay of Pigs disaster for the U.S. It was not the result of some thoughtless individual or a presidential aberration. The Bay of Pigs was a more or less inevitable development, given the U.S. reaction to a socialist revolution 90 miles from its shore.
The Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy by ruling class elements who were dissatisfied at the result of the Missile Crisis settlement, the overthrow of the Diem regime, and the failure (at that time) to aggressively pursue the Vietnam war.
The attempt by the Nixon administration to normalize relations with the USSR and also China was sabotaged, as he himself admits, by the very same liberal forces who were previously for so-called détente and coexistence, in combination with the ultra-right. He doesn’t explain why this happened.
These can scarcely be regarded as mistakes. Cuba, Vietnam, the sabotage of normalization with the USSR and China – so-called détente – all arose not out of accidental factors but out of organic needs and propensities which lead imperialism into blind and devastating positions.
An interesting aspect of the Pisar thesis, important for revolutionary workers and Marxists in general who have observed the evolution of the USSR, lies in its second part. Pisar condemns Carter’s crusade to challenge the USSR on the question of “human rights” so openly and brazenly and denounces it because it is a failure. He says, “The only challenge that promises to liberalize [that is, bourgeoisify – SM] the Soviet regime is one of constructive dialogue with its less fanatical elements.”
IN reality, as an editorial in the Times answering him observes on the same day, he condemns the opponents of détente because they have not only “jeopardized détente with the Soviet Union and arms control and trade” but because – please get this – it “jeopardized the emergence of a moderate new Soviet class with a stake in international constraint.”
This is fundamental. Pisar tries to justify to the bourgeoisie his advocacy of détente, trade, and commerce because it would promote “a moderate new Soviet class with a stake in international restraint” (our emphasis). What Pisar’s thesis amounts to, then, is that he too is for the overthrow of the Soviet Union as a socialist state and for the development of an entrenched bourgeois possessing class, except that he believes it cannot be done by the Carterite method any more than by that of John Foster Dulles or by the armed intervention of Woodrow Wilson.
Cultivating, assisting, and promoting the development of a new managerial class, of a new bourgeois class – that is the aim of the coexisting, peace-loving imperialist bourgeoisie. Those who wish to rattle the nuclear saber, or maybe even use it, are perhaps in another camp. More often than not it is hard to distinguish who in the imperialist camp really stands for what in relation to the USSR and the other socialist countries.
One of the most illuminating admissions came straight out of Nixon’s mouth during the Frost TV interview in answer to a question about whether Kissinger was the soft-liner in foreign policy and Nixon the hard-liner. He said it was bunk, it was a convenient way to play the game. Eisenhower, he added, played the same game with John Foster Dulles, the latter appearing as the hard-liner and Eisenhower as the more soft-hearted, peace-loving one. It was a ruse, a deliberate ploy.
Pisar tries to make the same sort of a ploy when he casts Brzezinski as “representing one tendency” and “Cyrus Vance the other” tendency. But the lie to this was given rather quickly when Brzezinski on Oct. 19 made what was built up as an unusual, rare public appearance and gave his blessing to the current negotiations with the USSR, to the point where it is utterly impossible to distinguish Vance from Brzezinski, aside from the personal backgrounds.
The key point for revolutionaries in this Pisar thesis is his allusion to the sabotage of the effort at détente which he says cut short “the emergence of a liberalized,” that is, bourgeois, regime in the USSR. As always happens in these factional struggles in the ruling class, much more credit is given to one or another grouping in the struggle against the USSR.
For a considerable period of time it did appear that the neo-bourgeois stratum of the Soviet bureaucracy might be getting the upper hand and might embark upon a course of dismantling the socialized economy, “liberalizing” it, as the bourgeoisie would call it. The bourgeoisie cheered the efforts of the Libermans and of all the economic “liberals,” of the “young, eager, innovative, technical intelligentsia” upon whom it showered so much applause, who in fact were orienting toward decentralizing the socialist economy.
Needless to say, the international bourgeoisie was vigorously promoting and continues to promote, not only the “cause of the liberalizers” but also by overt and covert means the most vocal counter-revolutionary elements among them.
During this period, we noted the growing neo-bourgeois tendency in the Soviet economy and the blatant efforts of the so-called dissidents to gain the upper hand.
But it was a combination of the realization of the growing danger to the bureaucracy itself and its fear of the proletariat and the collectivized peasantry that ultimately made the Soviet bureaucracy clamp down on both the economic liberalizers and the so-called political dissidents, especially the most vocal and rabidly reactionary.
Of course, this was a setback for imperialism, but not because the liberal bourgeoisie here failed to push vigorously its version of détente and its goal of commercial and trade intercourse. It was due principally, so far as the U.S. and international bourgeoisie were concerned, to the fact that once the imperialist found a wide opening to the USSR in the form of the liberalizers, their very effort to promote them awoke the bureaucracy to the mortal danger it faced. It clamped down hard on them and made it possible for the USSR to continue the further development and strengthening of the socialist economy, to the chagrin of the imperialists and their supporters.
It should be noted that as late as 1969, in a discussion between Charles Bettelheim and Paul Sweezy in the Monthly Review of March of that year, Sweezy wrote, “It seems to me that the present phase of development in the Soviet Union can best be interpreted as one in which the bureaucratic elements under the leadership of Brezhnev and Kosygin are attempting to stem the further advance of the new managerial elite. For reasons already indicated, I doubt that they can succeed – though of course they may slow down or even halt the process for quite a few years.”
Having recognized that the Soviet leadership was trying to stem the tide of the neo-bourgeois elements, of the same elements that the imperialist bourgeoisie was trying to promote, Sweezy, like an ivory tower observer of the class struggle, confines himself to a passive defeat of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state.
Instead of seeing it as a living struggle, as in many ways a life-and-death struggle, and taking sides in this struggle against the neo-bourgeois elements (while not necessarily becoming champions of the Kosygin and Brezhnev leadership), or at least awaiting the outcome of the struggle, Sweezy in effect threw in the towel. He ultimately came to a conclusion contrary to what real life has shown: that the liberalizers were defeated, that the counter-revolutionary dissidents were dispersed, that the socialized economy was put back on the rails of socialist development. No, he concluded that the enemy had won, that the bourgeoisie had triumphed, and that the USSR had become an exploitative society.
And how did he come to that conclusion? Was it on the basis of a dispassionate analysis of the economic processes in the USSR?
Not at all. That’s not how he and hundreds and thousands of others were “converted” to the theory that the USSR had become an exploitative society or a capitalist state. They arrived at that conclusion as a result of excessive zeal for Maoist doctrine in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which was at its height at the time, a time when the Chinese leadership unfortunately poured out the most violent invective against the USSR and abruptly changed its position on the class character of the USSR, pushing the entire Maoist movement abroad as well as its periphery into the swampland of social-imperialist theory.
Bettelheim, the chief theoretician of Maoist abroad, recently resigned as the Chairman of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Society because of his utter disgust and disillusionment at the suppression of the revolutionary left-wing of the Chinese CP and at the course which the Chinese leadership is pursuing at the present time. This is precisely the course they so vehemently condemned the Khrushchev regime for having promoted.
Sweezy never seems to have taken note of the fact that the liberalizers were set back on their heels. But the bourgeoisie has. They no longer see the same hope for “liberal” tendencies in the Soviet economy they saw in earlier years. Gone and forgotten are the Libermans and their ilk. And the Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs, Amalriks, and Bukovskys see a perspective only in help from the West.
It should be added that while Sweezy does not agree with Bettelheim that there is a capitalist state in the USSR, he nevertheless believes that it has become an exploitative society. Here again he does not follow through to the end.
Assuming, but not conceding, this to be true, Sweezy fails to answer the question of whether this “exploitative society” in the USSR is on a higher economic rung, has a higher mode of production, one which eliminates unemployment and is not based on the profit motive, which he admits is absent in the USSR. If this “exploitative society” can eliminate unemployment, abolish ownership of the means of production by private individuals, aid national liberation movements abroad, and eliminate the profit motive as the driving force of the system, does that not in fact make it a superior, more progressive social system than capitalism?
Last updated: 11 May 2026