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.