July 17 — Now that the 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party is over and Gorbachev has consolidated his power and reshaped the Politburo, the question is raised whether he is in a position to go full steam ahead with his anti-socialist reforms.
If he continues on this course, won't it logically and inevitably lead to a full restoration of capitalism? Wouldn't it in fact constitute the thoroughgoing capitalist overturn which has long been the haunting nightmare of communist revolutionaries all over the world?
It is necessary to consider this question in the light of theory as well as historical experience.
First, it is necessary to clarify the distinction between a political revolution (or counterrevolution) and a social revolution. The two are often considered interchangeable. But there is a fundamental difference between them.
A political revolution, in the Marxist sense, refers to changes, however deepgoing and fundamental they may be, in the superstructure of the social system. A social revolution on the other hand, is one which fundamentally alters the class relations.
Changes in the superstructure, however significant, are merely of a political character. On the broadest scope, they are changes in the form of the state — the state being the representative of the ruling class within the social structure.
For example, the social structure of capitalism, which is based upon the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, and whose state is that of the capitalist ruling class, can undergo any number of political revolutions. The form of the state can range from that of a monarchy to a military dictatorship, a Bonapartist regime, a more democratic bourgeois republic or a fascist regime.
While changes in the form of the state can disturb class relationships in the social structure, they have never fundamentally altered these relationships. They cannot, for example, overturn the ruling class and install the working class as the governing body over society.
Indeed, if one views the historical development of the capitalist system, there has been a rich variety of different forms of state rule. But none of them have fundamentally altered the relationship between the classes, between exploiter and exploited, between the oppressor and the oppressed.
At times the working class and the oppressed masses have been able to obtain significant concessions. And at other times, they have been forced to surrender them.
But in all these state forms there is one constant (if we as Marxists may employ that term): the class structure has remained fundamentally unaltered, regardless of what party has held office or what form of state has prevailed.
The revolution of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, as best expressed during the French Revolution, overthrew the rule of the feudal lords, changing the relationship between the peasants and the landlords, and between the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords. It was a real revolution in the sense that it fundamentally altered the class relationships that had existed under feudalism.
The French Revolution, more than any other, cut down the feudal institutions root and branch (to use Engels's terminology), and installed a new class as the ruling class: the bourgeoisie. While the peasantry may have remained impoverished and beholden to the merchants and the usurers, it no longer was subject to the kind of enslavement to the landlords that had existed under feudalism.
Attempts at counterrevolution — the overthrow, for instance, of the Commune of Paris, the eventual dissolution of the Committees for Public Safety (the "eyes and ears of the Revolution"), and the attempt to bring back the Bourbons and establish a royalist regime — could not restore feudalism. The feudal regime in France had exhausted its historic possibilities and was overtaken by capitalist relations.
Contemporary France has run the gamut of different forms of the rule of the bourgeoisie, going from far right governments to the Popular Front of the 1930s. But no form of state in France, however reactionary, could restore feudalism; and no form of state, however democratic and progressive (such as the Popular Front was often thought to be), even came close to fundamentally altering the relations between the exploiter and the exploited, between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The Popular Front leadership confined its program to preventing a fascist form of state and preserving and strengthening political democracy, but within the framework of the bourgeois social system.
In Portugal, the dictatorship of Salazar was as totalitarian as any fascist regime could be. And it seemed to bolster the church hierarchy's feudal privileges (as the Franco fascist regime also did in Spain). Notwithstanding its partiality to the landlords, the Salazar regime didn't even try to restore the old feudal system. It turned out to be an instrument of U.S.-British monopoly capitalism, even while in league with the landlords.
In Spain, however one may explain the failure of the Spanish revolution as a proletarian revolution, one cannot overlook that the Republican government (the Spanish form of the Popular Front) did not alter the fundamental relations between the classes.
It is true that in a time of great danger to the Republic, a considerable number of the bourgeoisie deserted to the Franco regime. But that didn't signify that the Popular Front was fundamentally altering the social relations — the class relations — between the working class and the bourgeoisie. What it did do was reduce and attempt to abolish the significant privileges of the landlords and greatly increase the rights of the workers. It promised a democratic form of government, and attempted to institute one within the framework of the class rule of the bourgeoisie (although that may not have been the outlook of the working class).
How interesting that in the Baltic areas which are veering away from the Soviet Union and toward the imperialist orbit, the bourgeois organizations call themselves popular fronts! They well understand the class significance of the popular fronts in Europe.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is the product of a proletarian revolution which ushered in an era of the broadest and most profound democracy ever known — democracy for the workers and the peasants. And it proudly proclaimed itself to be a dictatorship (meaning the rule of) the workers and the peasants. They not only abolished the privileges of the landlords and the capitalists, but expropriated their property, laying the basis for a new social system, a new class structure.
During Lenin's time the workers' and peasants' state had a Soviet form, the most democratic form yet seen. The Soviet was the parliamentary institution of the workers, the peasants, the soldiers, and all the exploited and down-trodden strata of society. It was a particular form of state that conformed to the interests of the workers and peasants as much as was possible while constantly under siege by imperialist intervention and foreign-supported counterrevolution.
It was replaced by a succession of undemocratic, repressive forms of state, which in fact annulled the rights and freedoms of the workers and the peasants. But nonetheless the USSR did not revert back to the old class structure. The expropriated classes never came back to power again.
During the period of the Stalin regime, precisely because of the annulment of the rights of the workers and peasants, and the repressive form of the new state as against the socialist democratic state that had existed under Lenin, the question of whether a counterrevolution had taken place was debated in many socialist and communist organizations and among workers and progressives.
Some thought that a full-scale counterrevolution had taken place. They made no differentiation between a political counterrevolution and a social one. Indeed, the repression seemed so overwhelming at the time that many considered it must reflect a change in more than the mere form of state. But in reality the Stalin regime ushered in a new form of state, anti-democratic and repressive, while retaining the basic class structures. Collectivization, with all its harshness and drawbacks, strengthened the class alliance between the workers and the peasants.
Whatever one may say about the character of the Stalin regime, the changes it ushered in were mostly in the superstructure — although it did at the same time foster social inequality. No social counterrevolution took place.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to this view came during the 1960s when none other than the Chinese leadership under Mao Zedong abandoned their conception of the USSR as a workers' and socialist state, and introduced the concept that the Khrushchev leadership (which followed on the heels of the Stalin regime) constituted a full-scale social counterrevolution. Capitalism had been fully restored, according to them. This view was abandoned by the subsequent Chinese leadership, and has not been revived to this day.
The Khrushchev regime was generally recognized in working class circles as a more liberal, albeit bourgeois, form of the "communist" state. Translated into Marxist terminology, the Khrushchev regime, even in its most liberal period — that is, liberal to the neobourgeois strata in Soviet society — was just an alteration in the form of the workers' state. But the essential ingredient — being a state of the workers and peasants, even though in a deformed and mutilated condition — was retained, with attempts to lessen the bureaucratic deformations.
The historical significance of the Gorbachev regime is that it has attempted to revive the liberalism of the Khrushchev regime — that is, liberal to the bourgeois elements within the political as well as the social structure of the USSR. At the beginning it attempted to identify with the Khrushchev liberalization, asserting again and again that this time around the liberal reforms would not be reversed. By reforms they meant greater democratic rights in politics and Libermanism in the economic field (strengthening the autonomy and independence of the state enterprises, making concessions to the managerial groups, widing and deepening material incentives). "We will make our reforms irreversible," Gorbachev asserted again and again — unlike what happened after the Khrushchev era.
The Gorbachev regime is an attempt to impose a bourgeois democratic form of state on the social structure of the USSR. The political content of his "democratization" has opened up vast and significant inroads into the class structure of the USSR, and has thus raised the haunting specter of a full-scale counterrevolution in the sociological sense of the term.
The political form of the state which he is promoting has such profound economic consequences that, if carried to their logical conclusions, they would completely liquidate the USSR as a workers' state. But however significant the inroads made into the class structure of the USSR, and the reinvigoration of the bourgeois strata, they are nevertheless a long way from overturning the social system of the USSR and replacing it with the rule of the bourgeoisie through the political mediation of the Gorbachev administration.
What is happening in the USSR, devastating as it may be to the workers and peasants, is still largely in the framework of the superstructure, and is not sufficient to alter the class structure, the social system. The latter is still in irreconcilable contradiction to the introduction of private property in the means of production.
It is true that a fundamental prop of the Soviet social system — the monopoly of foreign trade — has been deeply affected, as we have written earlier, but it has not been totally abolished.
As such bourgeois-oriented economists of the USSR as Gavril Popov continually remind us, merely having a free capitalist market without the introduction of private property in the means of production makes the Gorbachev anti-socialist reforms impractical in the end.
Theoretically — and according to the present political orientation of the Gorbachev regime — the tendency is to continue with the dismantling of the planned economy. But it is important to remember that abolition of the planned economy, in and of itself, would not destroy the class character of the Soviet regime as a workers' state. It would restore the period of the New Economic Policy, albeit a NEP grown to monstrous proportions and tending to swallow up the rest of society.
But in order to restore capitalism it is necessary and indispensable to abolish the public ownership of the means of production. And that is a long way off, notwithstanding the encroachments already discussed.
The restoration of the capitalist market, especially if it continues to broaden and deepen, will inevitably awaken the resistance of the broad working class. What must not be lost in the massive propaganda barrage of the imperialist press is that the upheaval in the Soviet Union has mainly engaged the urban petit bourgeois elements, especially in Moscow, Leningrad and other urban centers. With the exception of the coal miners, the manifold working class of the USSR — the majority of the population — has remained passive. It has not entered the arena of struggle.
This is what distinguishes the USSR in many ways from the situation in Eastern Europe. For example, massive counterrevolutionary rebellions took place in Poland and Hungary as long ago as 1956 — 34 years ago! Gorbachev-type reforms, anti-socialist in character of course, took place shortly thereafter during the Khrushchev era. For almost 35 years, the decollectivization of agriculture and its return to substantially private farming added to the momentum, slow as it was, to the restoration of capitalism in both Poland and Hungary. Both governments became so heavily indebted to the imperialist banks that they lost their economic sovereignty years ago.
In addition, one has to bear in mind that social transformation in both countries came not as the result of a socialist revolution, as in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, but in large part because of Soviet military assistance in defeating the Nazi invaders, followed by Soviet efforts to prevent the countries in Eastern Europe from becoming military bases of the allied imperialists, particularly of the U.S.
The anti-socialist experiments of the Gorbachev regime have gone far indeed. How does the working class view them?
We can look at the coal miners' strike of a year ago. The leadership was captured by bourgeois elements precisely because of the gross neglect by the Party and the government over a period of many years. Hence the program that the miners adopted closely approximates what the Gorbachev regime has offered in the way of decentralizing the national economy and dismantling state planning.
The miners eagerly grasped the opportunity to run their own mines and sell coal, even abroad. But what happened next? Selling coal abroad has amounted to "selling coals to Newcastle," i.e., to a glutted market.
A miner in the city of Berezovsky in Siberia, Anatoly Yerenchenko, told a New York Times interviewer recently, "Nothing has changed." The Chernigovsky mine is still in the hands of the administrators, who were the favored beneficiaries during the Khrushchev regime and even more so under Gorbachev. The administrators got a raise in pay, but not the workers.
And their relation to the state is still substantially the same. They look to the state for their paychecks. It is still the state that sets the quotas for the production and purchase of coal.
So even in this dramatic attempt to restore capitalism in this Siberian mining area, nothing of a fundamental character has happened. The wage rates are about the same, and the pay increases have been mostly to the administrators, to the managers, who are the chief beneficiaries throughout the whole country of the anti-socialist reforms.
The power of the administrators, that is, the managerial stratum, grew out of the erosion and ultimate liquidation of what was originally conceived of as a tripartite leadership. In the Lenin period, the trade unions, the management and the Party each had their own separate functions and responsibilities in the running of industry, while developing reciprocal relations in order to coordinate production in accordance with both the plans of the government and the welfare of the workers.
It is theoretically possible that under the Gorbachev reforms the mine administrators could eventually become the owners. But that assumes a long and enduring period of passivity from the working class — an utterly unlikely development.
We should not leave out of consideration that Gorbachev's bourgeois measures were also calculated to appease the imperialist bourgeoisie, to win their cooperation, taking for good coin their promises that the Cold War is ending. Is it?
Right on the heels of the 28th Congress of the Communist Party, the U.S. Energy Department (an arm of the Pentagon) announced a "master plan for future production of nuclear weapons." (Washington Post, July 15.) The front-page headline reads: "DOE plans for production of nuclear arms until 2050 — Watkins seeks fully modernized complex."
This plan is called Complex 21. Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee that Complex 21 is "my vision of a fully modernized nuclear weapons complex." It calls for "revitalizing the existing network of factories and reactors." To what end? "So the military can make new bombs through at least the middle of the next century." And this, says the Washington Post, comes from department officials and government documents.
"Despite improving U.S.-Soviet relations and the prospect of deep negotiated cuts in super-power arsenals, the Department of Energy has based its research and spending plans on 'a requirement for nuclear weapons as far as we can see.' "
And how far is that? According to Energy Secretary Watkins, Complex 21 is "to be in operation about the year 2050, and to support the nation's strategic deterrent until the middle of the century." It is part of a plan to continue to manufacture many new weapons with "improved" — so-called safer — designs, that would replace those being retired or withdrawn as obsolete.
Many of the Communist leaders whom Gorbachev won over before and during the Party Congress supported him on the assumption that he convinced the U.S. to end the Cold War, and that the Pentagon would pull in its horns and really begin the process of demilitarization. Now comes this!
It's no wonder that such an impressive array of Soviet generals and top naval officers were in the "conservative" grouping at the congress.
The tendency to dismantle if not sabotage the socialist gains of the past will be outstripped by rising resistance from the working class. The workers have still not experienced the full weight and impact of the bourgeois reforms. Still less have they understood what is happening because of the monopoly on the mass media and press by the Gorbachev grouping.
The mass media and press, touted by the imperialist press as becoming more democratic, are in reality house organs and propagandists of the Gorbachev political tendency. They virtually exclude revolutionary Marxist criticism of perestroika in general and of the so-called modernization schemes, which raise the specter of unemployment ever more forcefully as these schemes progress.
Gorbachev may believe that his plans are irreversible, as did Khrushchev. Gorbachev will suffer the same fate, but this time around it will be because of a true revival of revolutionary socialist democracy — a democracy which Marxists have stood for since before the October Revolution and which existed in practice on a statewide level during the Lenin period.
Last updated: 23 March 2018