Not all the experimentation with the market is caused by post-Soviet dire necessity or heightened Western pressure. “Two revolutionary classes, two lines” is a general phenomenon. In China, the concessions to the market have been extreme and the future of socialism may be in doubt. According to a 1994 essay by the Harriman Institute’s Rajan Menon,
China’s strategy of reform may well fail. It is hard to imagine that rampant capitalism, which is what is occurring however much the Chinese Communist Party may shy away from this term for ideological reasons, the increasing autonomy of the coastal regions, and the exposure of Chinese intellectuals to corrosive ideas from abroad can coexist indefinitely.645
In July 2001, the head of the Chinese Communist Party called for allowing capitalists into the CPC. Though a section of the national bourgeoisie participated in the Chinese Revolution and won a role in the governance of the early People’s Republic of China, the new attitude towards a new class of capitalists was a wholly different matter. China is essentially pursuing “a gigantic and expanded NEP,”646 and sooner or later the political and economic contradictions of the policy will force a choice, as it did in the USSR in 1928-29. Which side will win remains anyone’s guess. The political outcome of this struggle in the ruling Communist Party of the most populous country on earth is certain to be one of the most momentous of the 21st century.
After 1991, capitalist restoration in the USSR meant a depression and the coming of an era of gangster capitalism. Nevertheless, capitalist restoration in Russia and the other parts of the former USSR remains unstable. Transnational finance is keeping post-Soviet Russia a hobbled, dependent resource-extraction zone, even at the risk of nuclear accident, ethnic warfare, and state disintegration. Scholars from many viewpoints have noted the American government does not seem overly apprehensive.647 The contrast with the late 1940s, when a worried U.S. ruling class footed much of the bill for the Marshall Plan to stabilize West European capitalism, could not be plainer.
Erstwhile Gorbachev supporters debate what the post-Soviet system is, and what its prospects are. As in the classic horror film, Rosemary’s Baby, the post-Soviet newborn is hideous, if it is a baby at all, and those who have seen it certainly deny that it is theirs! Some opine that the wretched little creature will not live long. Economist David Kotz648 says post-Soviet Russian capitalism is not true capitalism at all, but a “non-capitalist predatory/extractive system” emerging from the previous “state socialist” system. Others, such as Roy Medvedev, say the capitalist revolution is “doomed” in Russia.649
Admittedly, the system in today’s Russia is uniquely parasitic, deformed, and weak. The Eastern European socialist states have evidently made the transition back to capitalism, with plenty of problems,650 but not with the extreme social evils seen in the former USSR. Just as socialism has proven reversible, so is neo-capitalism. If the contradictions of Russian capitalism remain acute, imperialism remains recklessly aloof, and the Russian left can unite around a realistic strategy, socialist restoration might re-emerge on the agenda. In spite of everything, in Russia political parties favoring socialism have more support than any other single party.
Many have anguished over the question: why was the Soviet socialist system so fragile? Without an understanding of the growth of forces opposing socialism from within, the system seemed stronger than it actually was, and its unforeseen fall was therefore all the more shocking and puzzling. A similar question, from another standpoint, is posed as a comparison: if U.S. capitalism survived a Herbert Hoover who in 1929 presided over an economic crash leading to 40 percent mass unemployment, and a decade–long depression, as well as the defeat of his long-ruling Republican Party, and yet U.S. capitalism recovered, grew and thrived after World War II, why could Soviet socialism not survive a Gorbachev?
The answer is: the subjective factor is vastly more important in socialism than in capitalism. This is both a strength and vulnerability. A qualitative difference between socialism and capitalism is captured in the saying “capitalism grows; socialism is built.” At the risk of a tedious simile, the two systems are like a river raft and an airplane. With capitalism—the river raft—the pole man who steers the raft merely has to avoid shoals, rapids and waterfalls. Mostly, the flow of the current down river controls the pace and direction of the raft. It is a simple and mostly automatic system. Only loose supervision is required. Big blunders are usually not fatal.
An airplane—socialism—is a far superior mode of transportation. Its range, its freedom of direction and maneuver, and its speed far exceed that of the river raft. But the airplane requires conscious application of the laws of physics and aerodynamics, forethought, planning, science, training, ground crews, radar, and so on. It is a complex system requiring a massive social division of labor. Managing the system—its piloting, the subjective aspect of its steering—is far more crucial to the safe operation of this mode of transportation than is the case with the river raft. Big blunders in piloting a plane, though rare, are often fatal. There is a smaller margin for error. The fact that airplanes sometimes crash does not prove the superiority of the river raft. It is only an argument for better-engineered, better-piloted, safer airplanes.
The laws of socialist construction differ from the laws of capitalist development. Capitalism’s laws operate blindly, without consciousness, like the law of gravity that sends the river raft down stream, no matter what the pole man is doing. But socialism’s laws, while objective, require an airplane whose designers consciously master and use the laws governing such forces as gravity, thrust, lift and drag, and a pilot skillful in the technique and grounded in the underlying science.
Therefore a Gorbachev leadership could do far more damage to socialism than an even more blundering Hoover did to U.S. capitalism. As a Soviet scholar said, the economic laws of socialism “cease to be a spontaneously, anarchically operating force and are consciously applied by society in its self-interest.” Ignoring the economic laws of socialism “leads to… the emergence of difficulties and disproportions and imbalance in the economy, and weakens coordination of the actions and comradely co-operation of social groups and bodies of workers.”651
As opportunism developed within the Soviet Union, imperialism discovered a formula to promote its interests: from afar encourage those selfsame opportunist trends in the Communist leadership of the USSR. Czechoslovakian events in 1968, and the accumulation of problems in Yugoslavia suggested the formula, but would it work in the USSR where the new system’s roots seemingly had sunk so deep? For a long time, the old system’s main thinkers understood in principle how the new system could be destroyed. An architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote prophetically in 1947:
If…anything is ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.652
It was a lesson that the enemies of socialism in the 21st century are still trying to apply in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. They could not defeat Soviet socialism by intervening in its civil war, a Nazi invasion, the arms race, subversion, and economic warfare. They could not directly penetrate the leadership. From the outside, however, they did all in their power to encourage opportunist policies. In time, on their own, some Communist leaders drank the poisoned chalice of revisionism.