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