Progress & the Proletariat: On the Dynamics of Social Revolution
Kohák, Erazim V.
Communism has been the ideology of the industrial proletariat. The industrial proletariat is technologically obsolete. History and Historical Dialectic Our motto is the basic fact behind...
...Theirs was a regimented, tightly controlled world by virtue of the economic process that produced it...
...Social structures were to become prevodni pdky—transmission belts passing decisions of the central committee to all levels of national life...
...The Proletariat: Class and Ideology Concrete, empirical definitions of the proletariat are devilishly hard to come by...
...Together with the privileges of power, the proletariat inherited the predicaments of change...
...Its categories cease to describe reality...
...The basic point of Czechoslovak experience is finally that a proletarian revolution is possible, but that it does not constitute progress...
...They have retained their faith in unqualified victories if only that victory could go to the right side...
...For the first time in 20 years, the Czechoslovak working class had not only an aimless discontent, but also an alternative thoroughly suited to its needs...
...The basis of modern production is no longer large-scale organization of muscle power, but rather its replacement with increasingly sophisticated technology...
...He has imposed rigorous censorship, carried out purges, reverted to "proletarian" economic policy, restored the powers of the police, and generally recreated the paraphernalia of "proletarian" dictatorship...
...The PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT humane and ethical ideals of the bourgeois model may be perennial, but the model itself is not...
...The new freedom to admit the obvious broke the ideological spell...
...The most profound impact of the proletarian revolution, however, was economic and structural...
...The short-range hope is that even the present regime, under the pressure from the east as well as from its own economy, might realize that the cost of repression along its western borders far exceeds any benefits...
...In part, this was because Czechoslovakia was too technologically advanced...
...Marx is no exception...
...It did not include only ministries, municipal governments, and factory managerships, but literally every position of social responsibility down to secretaryships of philatelic clubs...
...If counterrevolution means the displacement of the "proletarian" apparatus from power, the reading is accurate...
...Within 18 months of the VF, the entire society on all levels was ruled entirely by men who by birth, education, experience, and party allegiance were hammer-and-sickle proletarians...
...The moment it loses this ability, the moment it begins to dictate what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable ideals, men, or economic practices, it becomes regressive, antisocial, and ultimately antisocialistic...
...The party had one other asset—people...
...As any dominant class which has outlived its economic justification, the proletariat, by now less than a majority even within the working class, has tenaciously defended its vested interests...
...The Czechoslovak reform of 1968 was, fundamentally, profoundly socialist in these two senses...
...According to party figures, less than one-quarter of executive personnel met the minimum technical qualifications for their positions—even though those qualifications were set by the apparatus itself...
...The chief outward sign was the proletarization of social contact, of language, dress, literature, entertainment, and all aspects of daily life...
...It has to be democratic because, as Mill recognized more clearly than Marx, ERAZIM V. KOHAK all restrictions on freedom, whether in the name of a class or an ideology, are counterproductive and infinitely wasteful...
...For the other 92 percent, the occupation crystallized opinion...
...Informed sources place the number at somewhere around 8 percent...
...But most of all, such socialism would be scientific, pragmatic, and nonideological...
...But it is a far cry from such socialism to socialism as a true faith, as an ideology which dictates a life-style and justifies a privileged ruling class...
...Instead, they function as vague, emotive justification of social relations long surpassed by the realities of the productive process...
...Even people who lived through the last 20 years, risking and enduring jail, endless harassment, endless deprivation, and still hoping, have now had enough...
...Today, Czechs and Slovaks simply cannot be persuaded to support the old regime...
...Their conclusion was basically that if the gap could not be bridged by superficial changes, a return to repression was the better alternative...
...The party had given them power to impose proletarian ideology on the society— now they were determined to use that power against any attempt to modernize that ideology...
...The new rulers distrusted all signs of individuality or complexity...
...Under large-scale production, which by its very size becomes independent of consumer control and at the same time must become monopolistic to sustain the long-range investments required by a communications satellite or a supersonic transport, the idea of an individual owner is an anachronism...
...But the Soviet script misses the crucial difference...
...While as a social philosopher he recognized the central role of the dialectic in social progress, as a social prophet he proposes to resolve its contradictions by a victory of the proletariat...
...The people are utterly, profoundly disgusted...
...The VF took place in a social vacuum...
...Communism, embodying the life-style and ideology of the proletariat, has become obsolete together with the bourgeois/proletarian mode of production...
...Loyalty was the substitute for freedom, and its chief virtues were discipline, solidarity, toil, equality, enthusiasm— but definitely not freedom...
...They cannot afford a neighbor who would be both socialist and democratic...
...Altogether he gives the impression of a man determined to control the present without qualification and at any cost, but not of a man determined to make the future impossible...
...Peasants cultivating small private plots were vilified as kulaks, but they supplied a vast percentage of available foodstuffs...
...It has been social as well...
...There is no opposition, since there is no alternative...
...The workers were finally quiescent in part because they could not speak, but in part also because they saw no alternative and assumed that any economic reform would inevitably leave the oppressive proletarian life-style unaltered...
...The spring of 1968 will live in Czech history as a heroic era...
...In the technological stage, it is the dialectic of the technician on all skill levels, geared and oriented primarily to the technological productive process, and of the yet unnamed class of men whose basic orientation is humane and social rather than technological and productive...
...He does bear down hard on the present—given the reality of Soviet tanks, this may be inevitable...
...The function of the bourgeois was essentially administrative rather than technological or productive...
...The crowded jails began to discharge their inmates, providing a flow of highly trained manpower...
...Ironically, this might well be ERAZIM V. KOHAK the best alternative—though not an attractive one—left to the Czechoslovak people...
...Nor was it the work of some small group of agents, reminiscent of the proletarian vanguard...
...it was life-style which the revolution sought to change...
...And they did...
...It also produced a period of socioeconomic stagnation which has left its marks on Eastern Europe to this day...
...Its members were displaced in large numbers, placed in unskilled jobs to undergo proletarization...
...Social progress has been most rapid in those countries and periods in which no such victory came about...
...Social prophets, again including Marx, have insisted that the unqualified stagnation following unqualified victories was not due to the victory as such, but rather to the fact that the victory had gone to the wrong side...
...For once, unqualified victory had gone to the "right" side...
...It must be replaced, but it cannot be replaced by a return to the bourgeois-bureaucratic model...
...They had more than that: for the first PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT time in 20 years, they also had a chance to speak out in their own name...
...He has banned one journal after another, but so far has not hanged any journalists...
...Internally, the development was held in check by two factors...
...It could have...
...As a result, though the Czechoslovak Communist party accepted the "proletarian" model, it was never quite reduced to it...
...But while the Czechs detest Husak, he remains preferable to the hard-line alternative...
...Marx himself witnessed only two of these three stages, but his analysis is applicable to all of them...
...2) Social revolution is inevitable...
...It means judging ideas not by whether they are true and helpful, but by whether they are "socialist...
...In Czech, the word for "to buy," kupovati, has virtually disappeared...
...Whatever its justification 50 years ago, today it is strictly the mystified ideology of an outdated ruling class supporting itself in power by reliance on the army and the police...
...In the manufacturing stage, it is the familiar dialectic of the industrial proletariat and the bourgeois administrator...
...Since ideology depends ultimately on technology, technology is to remain at the stage of development that justified the ideology...
...Something of its ferocity may well be due to the recognition that, like all economically surpassed ruling classes, the "proletariat" is fighting a losing battle...
...It might realize that a neutralized central Europe would insure Soviet security far less expensively and far more effectively than a restive empire...
...It is little consolation that the bourgeois-bureaucratic ideology and life-style have become equally obsolete...
...While the limited personal experiences produced discontent and desire for particular reforms, the panoramic view of the proletarian era brought about a determination to replace the entire model...
...It may not have been effective, but it was within the competence of "proletarian" managers and justified both their ideology and life-style...
...Especially in service industries it can be grossly inappropriate and inefficient...
...Marx understood that position and had predicted its consequences...
...Throughout, the watchword was to be lidovy, literally meaning "of or like the people," but in effect interpreted to mean "approximating the life-style of the industrial proletariat in the era of mass manufacture...
...There the proletarian model is obsolescent rather than obsolete, and Soviet leadership remains committed to it...
...Its central principle was not technological sophistication, but rather large-scale organization of muscle power...
...They knew the high costs and low return of incompetent management, and they were thoroughly disenchanted...
...The proletarian revolution creates a proletarian society...
...Marx is reported to have said that he had never become a Marxist...
...In an increasingly technological age, muscular exertion assumed the place of honor...
...It is a tribute to the skill, ingenuity, and tenacity of the Czechoslovak working class —and of the young men who a decade later were to become leaders of reform—that in spite of the obsolete model the economy did not collapse altogether...
...The unqualified victory of the Catholic-feudal class and ideology in Eastern Europe after the Thirty Years' War effectively eliminated the peasants as a social force for some five generations...
...As a result, there was much opposition but little resistance...
...The hammer-wielding proletarian is an economic anachronism and constitutes a rapidly shrinking remnant within the working class in any industrially mature society...
...Men like Kolder, Indra or Bilak, though originally interested in ad hoc reforms, were staggered by the extent of the discrepancy between the ideology and reality...
...They, after all, saw it at closest range...
...It made the point that the proletarian model has not only a low internal capacity for change, but also a high capacity for resisting change...
...But he appears to be keeping some possibilities open for the future...
...The hard lesson of the occupation is that the Communist ideology is not only incapable of fostering social progress beyond proletarization of a society, but is infinitely capable of preventing such progress...
...It freed the press, and it presented a socialist-democratic alternative...
...The deafening propaganda barrage was muted, the stifling isolation of Czech intellectual life from the world and from the pre-Communist past began to ease...
...Yet what followed was hardly unqualified progress...
...The economic ideas of the new rulers again reflected factory experience...
...The overall impact of the proletarization of the power apparatus was to transform the society on the model of a 19th-century factory...
...At the same time, he cannot help being depressed by the utter inability and unwillingness of the system to capitalize on those qualities...
...After-hours repairmen were equally vilified, but they provided the missing maintenance...
...The present regime of Gustav Husak walks a precarious tightrope between these alternatives...
...But what the revolution lacked in color it made up in thoroughness...
...The Czechoslovak counterrevolution was not the work of the long obsolete bourgeois-bureaucratic remnants...
...But it has low internal capacity for change, objectively because its central feature is domination and control, subjectively because of its quasi-religious status in the world of the 19th-century factory...
...It demands that the Czechs deny everything they know to be true, good, and worthwhile, that they contort themselves to fit Moscow's model, and smile while doing it...
...Eastern Europe has stagnated, whether in terms of its own potential or in comparison with neighbors such as Austria...
...But the entire system is so hopelessly irrelevant and unreal that it cannot win any support, either...
...Not simply because it is democratic rather than autocratic, but because it is a sober, pragmatic theory rather than an ideology...
...Ideology is a reflection of social ideals and modes of production at a given time...
...The old apathy has returned...
...It included economists, technicians, and intellectuals who were acutely aware that the proletarian-repressive model was hopelessly obsolete, and who were capable of producing a new, socialistdemocratic model...
...They saw the hopeless inefficiency of "proletarian" production, they provided the wasted, ill-used muscle power, and bore the consequences of ideological regimentation of economic management...
...Though the proletariat had functioned as a progressive force within a dialectic, it became stagnant and even regressive once it became the sole, unhindered, and unqualified master...
...The Counterrevolution According to the official Soviet version, the developments in Czechoslovakia after 1960 constitute a counterrevolution...
...A rather small minority simply found the cost too great...
...Throughout the society, wherever social decisions are made, proletarian cadres replaced the incumbents...
...The intensity and unanimity of public opinion made even the Soviets hesitate...
...Each class generates its characteristic ideology and life-style...
...Czechoslovak government, Communist party, and everyone with access to a blank wall and a piece of chalk vehemently denied that they had either re quested or needed help...
...Finally, the repressive apparatus has been restored to its unlimited, arbitrary power...
...The second alternative is outright regression, making the old model stick, at all human and economic cost...
...Nonetheless, it was to be a party in control...
...It was not a counterrevolution...
...The situation has become normal, as the Soviets understand normality...
...It was a new revolution, far more advanced than the proletarian and pseudo-proletarian revolutions with which underdeveloped peoples try to forge their way into the twentieth century and become hopelessly fixated on 1920...
...Its emphasis is on freedom rather than on control...
...The proletarian model becomes obsolete with technological progress...
...The life and hope of a nation are being sacrificed to maintain an ideology which is too obsolete to contribute to human progress...
...Like feudal and bourgeois ruling classes, it has used its ideology as mystification, attributing to it a transcendental, eternal validity...
...But while the reform trend found little support in the party hierarchy, it found overwhelming support among the people at large, and, before the occupation, this still mattered...
...Men who have lived through that era remember most of all the enthusiasm—the perennial, compulsory enthusiasm, the perennial speeches and marches played over public -pddress systems, the byzantine adulation of all things Soviet, the constant superlatives...
...Ideology can retard but not reverse technology...
...The Occupation Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia came as a tragic anticlimax of the Czechoslovak story...
...One of the most carefully nurtured myths of the occupation regime is that the workers had supported the proletarian-repressive model and then were suddenly and only momentarily swayed by mass communications media in 1968...
...It alone had the power, the freedom, and the infrastructure necessary for national leadership...
...It has become too clear that the proletarian-repressive ideology has simply no support whatsoever, either among the people or in Czechoslovak economic reality...
...History and Historical Dialectic Our motto is the basic fact behind the travail of Eastern Europe today...
...Within the agrarian stage, it is the dialectic of the tiller of the land and the land owner/ manager...
...The ideology they came to defend is utterly unreal...
...For better or for worse, only the party had both the prerequisites and opportunities for offering a live alternative to the obsolete proletarian ideology...
...For these men, more than a model was at stake...
...They are invariably corrected quite rapidly, and immediately appear in another sector...
...It was also an apparatus, a body of "proletarian" administrators, accustomed to the privileges of their positions and hopelessly ill-suited for a modern, technological society...
...Freedom is finally the only valid program, all else is instrumental...
...The reasons were economic, but the results were necessarily also political and ideological...
...Nor was there a point in effort—wages were not differentiated, and in any case, advancement was entirely contingent on the decision of the kadrovak, the personnel supervisor who made it on the basis of "cadre profile"— ancestry, political allegiance, even "proletarian" manner...
...Here the people at large and the party leadership underwent analogous change...
...The ideology of the proletariat reflected the entirely different world of large-scale manufacture...
...He has carried out purges, but their victims have generally gone to other employment rather than jail...
...The remnants of prewar parties played no role in it...
...Technological progress contributes to making ideological tyranny obsolete...
...It was the work of virtually the entire Czechoslovak people, and its foundations were Marxist rather than Sombartian, social and economical rather than political...
...Each stage contains within itself a dialectic of the primary and marginal components of the productive process...
...Yet in spite of this, a large majority of Czechs and Slovaks have retained a perspective on socialism as a relevant social ideal, as a synonym for freedom, bread, and justice in an industrial society...
...The workers, especially, were vehemently ready for reform...
...Social philosophers—Marx foremost among them—have regularly recognized that it is precisely the dialectic that makes social progress possible...
...Finally, the VF was a genuine revolution, and not simply a case of the proletariat assuming increasing social significance...
...5) Ideological panaceas are counterproductive as blueprints for social existence...
...Its basic principle was not technology but large-scale deployment of enthusiastic unskilled muscle power...
...It has made ideological orthodoxy, attested by party membership, virtually the sole criterion for possession of power—including technological power—in society...
...If your load grows too heavy, share it with us, we will help you bear it,/ If your road is thorny and hard, walk it and we shall walk it with you./ But never leave the road marked by the milestones/ freedom, honor and truth./ On any other road, you will walk alone...
...One speaker, who had welcomed the invasion, told me that "as long as we control jobs, we can count on having 10 percent of the people with us...
...But the same change took place throughout the society, in trade unions, in clubs, children's organizations, in schools...
...One was the Soviet Union...
...But that "proletariat" had little to do with the Czechoslovak working class, the Communist party, or the Czechoslovak people...
...Its normative image of society, imagined rather than remembered, took a high degree of independence for granted...
...It defies translation, but a rough paraphrase would be, "That socialism, it would be great, if you could only knock off all the idiocy...
...The proletariat was the class of men who had nothing to lose but their chains and nothing to sell but their muscles...
...But it proved incapable of moving beyond that, and its life-style and ideology proved both narrow and inflexible...
...At a time when modern production created greater and greater need ERAZIM V. KOHAK for high technical qualification, the proletarian party did its best to eliminate the technical and humane intelligentsia as a significant factor...
...Yet, after a fashion, it kept on producing...
...On a worldwide scale, this is paralleled by the close association between socialism and the Soviet ideology...
...Their craft skills had become obsolete...
...To this day, a visitor to Czechoslovakia cannot help being tremendously impressed by the ingenuity and capability of Czech workers...
...Similarly, modern democracy assumes as its remote model the freedom that technology demands—freedom of movement for men, PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT ideas, and goods, freedom of affluence, freedom from ideological preoccupation...
...The party's mentors may have been Marx and Lenin, but its model was Tomas Bata, the Czech prewar industrialist...
...It can recognize that in a technologically mature society consumption is a more significant indicator than production— crudely, that shelves must be stocked with the goods consumers want to buy rather than goods that factories see fit to produce...
...Numerical estimates are hard to make...
...The workers were wholly apathetic to any economic reform that would leave the ideology and life-style unchanged, but they were eager for a change that would affect them...
...Czechoslovakia had all the prerequisites for creating a genuinely socialist-democratic state...
...The fact remains that the life-style of the modem working class as well as its emerging ideology are increasingly geared to technological sophistication...
...In Czechoslovakia, Soviet ideology is regressive, as Chinese or Cuban ideology would be in the United States...
...It requires a socialist-democratic model...
...But whatever the reason, the fact remains that throughout Eastern Europe Communist parties, committed to a proletarian ideology and proletarian life-style, found themselves in the sole possession of power...
...Czechs began to travel, read, and, still within limits, even speak...
...One of the basic prerequisites for reform was a greater freedom of expression, but with it came also the recognition of other choices beside the two obsolete ideologies of the manufacturing era, the bourgeois-bureaucratic and the proletarian...
...Ideologically, Husak has yielded almost without reservation to Soviet demands...
...Husak is willing to implement the program because Soviet tanks leave no alternative...
...Yet both models are obsolete, a new model is needed...
...If they can, they emigrate...
...The main lines of this program are clear...
...But even outsiders are aware of the incredible stress of shock-work, voluntary brigades, and mass projects...
...In the last instance, the obsolete ruling class must be replaced, whether by gradual generational change or by a revolutionary upheaval...
...Not surprisingly: as Marx points out, when a class becomes economically obsolete, its ideology undergoes mystification...
...Differences which developed within the leadership hinged primarily on individual estimates of how much reality the situation— and especially the Russians—would bear...
...The Idiocy of Ideology The idiocy to which my beer-mate referred has a very concrete meaning for the men and women for whom socialism is a daily reality rather than a theoretical topic for cocktail parties or midnight bull sessions...
...The hard-liners actually believe in it...
...But the life-style and social function of the proletariat, as Marx recognized long ago, is the nadir of dehumanization in the course of industrial development...
...It was one of those rare historical moments when ideological model, economic realities, and popular life-style were completely in harmony...
...They waited for eight months before implementing their program, and even then they turned to a realistic politician like Husak rather than eager cadres like Kolder, Indra —or their recent convert Strougal...
...The new freedom had one other effect...
...The leadership, too, had entered the new era with ideas of piecemeal reform...
...Not surprisingly, its first victim was personal freedom and internal democracy...
...Such a regime might realize that a more viable alternative, though different from Soviet life style, is far more to the Soviet's own advantage...
...But for the world, the Czechoslovak tragedy might serve to make some facts clear: (1) An economically less advanced nation cannot serve as model or mentor for a more advanced one...
...Another 30-year postponement may be just too much...
...To be sure, they envisaged a thoroughly reformed party, geared to the realities of modern technological production, utilizing far more flexible and humane means of control...
...To translate the perennial to the present effectively, it must be capable of changing with modes of production...
...The few men who favor it are the most cordially despised and isolated individuals in the country today...
...It is this combination which makes it undesirable even as a transitional model for the manufacturing stage of industrial development...
...The Soviets depend on force, and on the claim that the only alternative is the equally obsolete bourgeoisbureaucratic one...
...Not that they were insignificant...
...In a technologically mature society, the proletarian life-style and ideology are as alien and irrelevant to the vast majority of the working class and to the economic process itself as the bourgeois-bureaucratic lifestyle and ideology were alien and irrelevant to the proletariat of the twenties...
...It is an instance of an economically obsolete ruling class and ideology defending a privileged position by reliance on the state apparatus...
...Virtually every Czech and Slovak had a chance to compare the slogans with the realities of his personal situation...
...It simply is not synonymous with social progress...
...Socialist idiocy is no less idiotic and no less criminal for claiming to be "socialist...
...But the present dilemma is an international version of the Czechoslovak internal predicament...
...By far the surest instrument of social progress is technological progress coupled with a clear recognition that its justification is human well-being—and with the freedom in which social structures can develop...
...The technological component was minimal, while the productive component was organized muscle power...
...Today the contrast is startling...
...It is essentially an attempt to return to the ideological dream world in which the "proletarian" cadres are still heroes rather than anachronisms...
...Socialism as a socioeconomic theory must be democratic because modern technology requires freedom of movement of ideas, men, and goods...
...The Marxists were amazed...
...The dialectic of the two divergent life-styles and ideologies, reflecting diverse functions within essentially the same basic mode of production, keeps the social structure fluid and so provides the possibility of change and progress...
...Its dialectical opposite, whether Polish aristocracy, Hungarian landowners or Czech bourgeoisie, ceased to exist as an effective social force...
...The model was geared exclusively to proletarization, not to production...
...The Soviet Union is industrially far less advanced than Czechoslovakia...
...At the same time, there was the constant undertone of horror—men who disappeared, things which filled minds but could not be mentioned, and the perennial suspicion that someone lacks in enthusiasm...
...For 30 years the Czechs and Slovaks survived, sustained by the hope that became reality under Dubcek...
...The instinctive Czech reaction to each new repressive measure justified in the same old ideological terms is simply "You've got to be kidding...
...the party intelligentsia went far beyond him...
...The most important consideration in either of the alternatives is to maintain the freedom and flexibility that makes change possible...
...Its symbol is the "narrow profile," official euphemism for shortage...
...The VF did not coincide with the socioeconomic transition from capitalism to socialism...
...Something else has returned to "normal...
...But while other progressive classes invariably suffered defeat or won only qualified victories (and, so the thesis goes, could achieve only qualified progress), the proletariat and its ideology won an unqualified victory in Eastern Europe...
...It requires free movement of men, ideas, and materials as well as rational planning...
...Socialism in its best sense is precisely a pragmatic program—linked to the perennial ideal of freedom, bread, and justice in an industrial society...
...Both American and Soviet foreign policy have been hampered by inability to see this...
...The Soviets have chosen to fight technology with ideology, but in the long run technology must prevail...
...Ideological idiocy is precisely building a "socialist" state rather than a just, happy, and prosperous one...
...But they were also intensely aware of the need for technological process and were willing to accept its social prerequisites and consequences...
...Outside the party there were also talented, dedicated individuals, but they had no outlet for their ideas or efforts...
...Both foreign policies have interpreted all deviations from their respective models not as progress, but as a swing in the direction of the other model...
...The theoreticians who spearheaded it, men like Goldstucker, Sik, or Selucky, were without exception socialists and idealists...
...Dubcek spoke only of a "socialism with a human face...
...Its sole advantage over the proletarian-repressive model is its greater internal capacity for change...
...Their only reservation was that ultimate political control must remain in the hands of the party...
...The Social Democrats had always a broadly working-class rather than narrowly proletarian social foundation, and their orientation was always democratic socialist rather than autocratically communist...
...The men on the assembly line supported them...
...Anything that destroys the social dialectic and replaces it with a monopolistic program is in principle regressive...
...Here the basic data are quite simple...
...In essence, it is the worldwide development from agrarian to manufacturing and most recently to technological economy...
...The public opinion survey published in the last issue of Reporter before it was suppressed would make a figure of about 7-8 percent seem more probable...
...The Czechs and Slovaks stared at the Soviet tanks—and Soviet proclamations— in utter disbelief...
...The men who led it were interested in economic rather than social reform...
...The VF was a pure seizure of unqualified power by a proletarian party in the name of proletarian ideology and life-style...
...Anything which restricts that freedom and flexibility, whether in the name of free enterprise or of "socialism"—or, for that matter, any other "radical" or "reactionary" slogan —is in principle regressive...
...Ironically, their most successful economic venture was prison manufacture...
...Doubt—or even ability to doubt, attested by foreign travel or relatives abroad —became treason...
...The people were even willing to forgive the horror of the past...
...The result was a pure class rule...
...Positively, it calls for calm, steady, purposeful work in spite of frustrations and provocations...
...Monopoly of power has reverted to a small, tightly controlled apparatus, justified by a monopolistic ideology and supported by army, bureaucracy, and police...
...In part, it was due to the fact that, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe was still at a manufacturing stage of industrial development...
...Makeshift expedients can keep a country functioning, but they cannot bring about progress...
...Like all obsolete ideological ERAZIM V. KOHAK models, it becomes a brake on further development...
...It is worth quoting, at least in part: "If you grow tired, rest your head on our laps,/ If you grow weary, lean on the arm of your people...
...The intensity and unanimity of feeling, stifled and undiminished a year later, would be hard to describe...
...By the mid-sixties, even the much (and justly) maligned President Novotny was aware of this...
...Himself a former political prisoner, he seems to wish to avoid opening new accounts which the future would have to settle...
...The new society was to be as simple as a well-organized factory...
...For all these reasons, the party produced a new generation of leaders far more up-todate in their grasp of the realities of a technologically mature society...
...Czechoslovakia: Proletarian Revolution in a Test Tube The Proletarian Revolution The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, locally known as the "Victorious February" (VF), is a classic instance of a proletarian revolution pure and simple...
...Communism has been the ideology of the industrial proletariat...
...Again like the factory, it reduces the role of imagination and with it capacity for change...
...Rather, it creates a society ideally suited for mass manufacture, with all its advantages and limitations...
...Czechoslovakia was far ahead of Austria in 1948...
...Even under the ideological screen, a great deal had been known already...
...Accordingly, they have pro ERAZIM V. KOHAK fessed to be able to distinguish a "progressive" and "regressive" class and ideology within each stage of economic development...
...Ideologies bind together the twin guidelines of progress, the perennial ideals of freedom and security and the pragmatic, scientific theories of production and consumption...
...The peak of the party apparatus as well as broad popu ERAZIM V. KOHAK lar masses were quite aware of the untenability of the old proletarian-repressive model and prepared to accept the political consequences of its replacement...
...If we want to continue to learn from him, we cannot afford to become Marxists, either...
...He has given the police far-reaching arbitrary powers, but so far has used them sparingly, repressively rather than vindictively...
...But that may be overly optimistic...
...Socialism was no longer at issue...
...Eastern Europe: The Proletariat in Power Postwar political development in Eastern Europe, owing at least as much to Sombart as to Marx, placed the manufacturing proletariat in power...
...Nor can the Czechoslovak economy—technology has progressed too far...
...In Czechoslovak usage, it is usual to qualify the term as "socialism with a human face" or more frequently as "democratic socialism...
...The country made do...
...In part, it was due to Soviet needs and preferences...
...And, like other ruling classes before it, the proletariat has resorted to repression to preserve its privileged position, interestingly enough aiming its efforts as much and more against the new technical intelligentsia as against the remnants of the old bourgeoisie...
...Confident that the socialist-democratic model fitted both economic realities and popular preference, they were prepared to trust the leading position of the party to popular support rather than a control apparatus...
...Here social supervision, planning, and coordination are essential...
...The only force capable of generating programs was in fact the Communist party...
...Not surprisingly, he too is cordially disliked within the country...
...They even came to accept the idea of living with an uncensored press...
...Its value as a partner in a social dialectic is clear, but as a dominant ideology it accomplishes change at a very high current cost, and makes future progress far more difficult...
...Socialism is also relevant in a second sense, as the foundation of socioeconomic theory in an industrially mature society...
...It must defend itself against it, at whatever the cost...
...As production and consumption become increasingly social, so must the forms of direction...
...The role of the worker in the productive process, regardless of skill level, is primarily that of a technician whose chief asset is his technological qualification...
...It is hard to place exactly the multiplicity of the reform spectrum, but Smrkovsky, Kriegel, and possibly even Dubcek, the hesitant hero, leaned toward this view...
...A month after the occupation, a popular weekly printed a poem addressed to Alexander Dubcek, whom the nation loved with an intensity impossible to grasp in a saner world...
...Proletarian economic policy reoriented the entire economy to an earlier stage of extensive, technologically primitive mode of production...
...The logic of the bourgeoisbureaucratic democracy reflected the independence and variety of small-scale craft production...
...The liberalizing process since 1960 meant essentially a gradual restriction of the arbitrary, absolute power of "proletarian" cadres and gradual replacement of ideological considerations with practical ones...
...Correspondingly, the ideology and life-style of the industrial workers was essentially proletarian, the ideology of hammer-wielding masses, and its hero figure was the proletarian, the industrial mass-man whose crucial contribution to the productive process was muscle power...
...The dominant role in society inevitably falls to the class that is central to a given mode of production, and the remnants of the manufacturing proletariat simply are not that...
...But he is alone, and any government which the Soviets choose to impose will be equally alone...
...It could not convince the workers that the proletarianrepressive model was viable, but it did convince them that the only alternative was the equally obsolete bourgeois-bureaucratic model...
...The Soviets made the revolution possible, but Czechs carried it out, and Czech initiative gave it its deep, traumatic impact on society...
...Unfortunately, the Soviets are in dead earnest...
...I don't think Marx would have been...
...Not surprisingly, the ideology of the bourgeoisie was essentially bourgeois-bureaucratic, and its hero-figure the bureaucrat...
...It was primarily an intra-party process, supported by the people at large but led by the party...
...Their disenchantment was less than visible, in part because the repressive apparatus barred the workers, traditionally less verbal than, for instance, journalists, from public expression...
...Today, its sig nificance is largely evocative...
...It means destroying concrete human lives and ideals for the sake of ideological abstractions...
...Few people realize that the highly successful Czechoslovak exhibit at the Brussels World's Fair was designed by prisoners at the Technological Institutes of the Ministry of Interior, or that the Jablonec crystal necklaces were strung together by political prisoners...
...The long-range hope is that a less obsolete regime in the Soviet Union will realize that the policy of maintaining an ideology by force is inevitably a dead-end, counterproductive while possible and disastrous when reaching the limits of possibility...
...The role of the bourgeoisie in the economic process was basically one of socializing the productive masses, organizing labor in large-scale units...
...In the last stages of its economic viability, the proletariat became literally a ruling class, dominating entire societies and enforcing its will through direct control not only of the industry, but also of the state machinery of police, bureaucracy, and armed forces...
...The matrix comes straight out of Marx...
...However, in their role as social prophets and reformers, they have equally regularly adopted a far more partial viewpoint...
...The industrial proletariat is technologically obsolete...
...In this stage of industrial development the proletariat played a crucial role...
...For such men, class ideology was often the only basis of personal identity...
...They served as a national conscience, a mute reminder of the perennial ideals of justice, freedom, and democracy...
...The proletariat did impose its ideology and life-style on society...
...It has striven to make ideology rather than efficiency the proper standard of economic practice...
...But ideological agitation also played a role...
...For the Czech regime, the situation is more difficult...
...Only a minority of the leadership was willing to accept the full truth—that the very idea of control was itself obsolete...
...The press and radio are PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT again strictly controlled and project an image of the world in which ideology alone matters and any admission that both modes of production and social relations have progressed beyond the twenties is treason...
...The basic fact of modern industrial development, however, is precisely that, as an PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT economic factor, this industrial proletariat has become obsolete...
...but their significance was historical rather than programmatic...
...It refers to ideology elevated to the level of a dogma with its accompanying rites...
...Enthusiastic support became the norm...
...That transition had taken place several years earlier, for largely economic reasons...
...if they cannot, they withdraw into themselves...
...Gradually, the men at the peak of the party hierarchy attempted to reduce the high cost and waste of the proletarianrepressive model...
...After 30 years of precisely that, it may be too much to ask...
...It was too profound for that...
...Nomen omen: the etymology of "manufacture" is literally "producing by hand...
...Not only work morale, but the entire national morale has sunk to an ultimate low...
...But for all of that, the Victorious February was a domestic proletarian revolution...
...This is the world image that the proletarian revolution made normative...
...It was a world of masses rather than individuals, of men stripped of the independence of individual craftsmanship but not yet endowed with the freedom of the technician...
...In principle, their realization requires suppression of alternatives, and violence is both self-defeating and self-perpetuating...
...This is the basic point about the Czechoslovak "counterrevolution...
...It has been replaced by shaneti—"to hunt for, to forage...
...He has even inched close to the Soviet demand that the government justify the occupation...
...By and large, the people justified their confidence...
...The Relevance of Socialism The position of socialism in Czechoslovakia is complicated by the fact that for 20 years the word was used as a name for the proletarianrepressive ideology and life style...
...But it revealed for the first time the full scope of what had happened in the fifties...
...Yet the Soviet occupation did restore the "proletariat" to power...
...A proletarian revolution does not abolish it—rather, it entrenches it as a norm...
...They were willing to dissociate the party from the discredited proletarian-repressive apparatus, and trust the new leadership and the new party...
...It can recognize, for instance, that socialization of production has not progressed equally in all branches of production, and that socialization of control is not equally appropriate in all instances...
...Their places were taken by men who deserved reward—proletarians who had served the party well...
...Their programs, however, had long become obsolete, even if the ideals they embodied were not...
...The sole qualification required was proletarian origin and party membership...
...The exuberance, vitality, and enthusiasm it released defy all description...
...Similarly, first cautious steps were taken to provide the prerequisites for a modern, technological economy...
...But technological production requires more...
...Finally, like the factory, it creates prerequisites for effective social control, and with them an infinite possibility for resisting change...
...Ingenuity and hard work cannot make up for the inherent limitations of the "proletarian" economic model...
...But in principle the process in which both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat found their economic justification was technologically quite primitive...
...In spite of the Soviet purges in the fifties, in spite of executions and mass arrests, the CP never became a purely "proletarian" party...
...Nor did the Victorious February coincide with the Soviet take-over...
...All that remained was the brute power of their bodies, and that was all that interested a manufacturing industry whose organization was modern but whose technology remained essentially one of the hammer and the sickle...
...The difference is significant...
...The extent of the process is hard to imagine...
...It seems likely that even the Soviets realize that the repercussions of such a course would make it hopelessly counterproductive...
...The hammerand-sickle proletariat was not that significant a segment of its working class...
...Whatever hinders them is reactionary, even if it does so in the name of "socialist" ideology of another industrial era or in the name of a "socialist" elite— whether proletarian or intellectual...
...In principle, Husak's program calls for acceptance of the consequences of the occupation, but if possible, without aggravating them...
...Psychologically, however, this may not be a workable alternative...
...It remains to his credit that he has walked his road without demanding vengeance...
...Their entire position, their stature and income, all the benefits of power hinged on the role that class origin and political orthodoxy would play in personnel policies...
...The "proletarian" remnants cannot absorb the rising ERAZIM V. KOHAK technological class because the manufacturing ideology of solidarity, equality, and control is in principle incompatible with the free movement of men, ideas, and goods demanded by modern technology...
...The verdict of one of them with whom I drank a beer in a fourth-class tavern a month ago summed it up succinctly: "Ten socialismus by byl desne fain, kdyby se pri nem nemuselo vecne blbnout...
...It, too, became aware of the inevitable need for a basic restructuring of society...
...The second factor was internal...
...The men with red armbands who patrolled the streets of Prague may have been Russianarmed, but they were Czechs...
...Unable to generate new programs under the restrictions of the proletarian era when doubt was treason, they were totally unequipped to provide new direction...
...A society can look for models in technologically more advanced societies, but ultimately must allow a suitable model to grow within its own conditions...
...But that model was not just an idea...
...The "proletariat" is the narrow bureaucracy which seized power in 1948 and which today defends nothing but its own privileges...
...The technical intelligentsia was viewed with profound distrust, as parasitic on muscular exertion...
...The press revealed little that was essentially new...
...To be sure, progress is continuous, and even the manufacturing stage contained within itself seeds of a later technological era...
...Workers were urged to greater exertion and rewarded for it with positions in technical management...
...Something on this order has happened to the concept "proletariat...
...Nor has the stagnation been only economic...
...The only viable alternative, politically and economically, is the Dubcek model, whether with or without Dubcek...
...Proletarian Revolution and Social Progress The Hard Facts For the Czechs and the Slovaks, the aftermath of proletarian revolution is tragic in its absurdity...
...Husak is walking alone, totally isolated from his people...
...Thirty years after the war, the country has become a land of worn, hard-working people and a worn, shabby economy...
...Official Soviet justification of the occupation is that it was necessary to defend proletarian rule...
...They have insisted that the cure for all social ills is the unqualified victory of one of the conflicting (and complimentary) life-styles and ideologies over the other...
...This is not surprising...
...He is a highly competent politician...
...This is purely and entirely a myth...
...Yet the mystification of proletarian ideology is of sufficently recent vintage that we can still see and remember the reality to which the word once corresponded...
...The bourgeoisbureaucratic ideology had become obsolete, a technological one was barely beginning to take shape...
...People can survive, but the nation may disintegrate...
...The moment they claim ultimate validity, the moment they become true faiths, the moment they no longer serve men but demand that men serve them, they become what my companion termed "blbnuti"—idiocy...
...They had not simply become the leading force in society—they were the only force...
...Ways were found, at enormous costs, of sustaining production in agriculture, manufacture, and services...
...Like the factory on which it is modeled, it produces a certain rough-and-ready equality...
...They must remain entirely flexible, working hypotheses...
...Its watchwords are technology rather than exertion, large-scale production rather than tightly controlled distribution, free and free-wheeling movement of ideas, men, and materials rather than rigid solidarity and strict supervision...
...But with or without qualifications, the socialist ideal remains valid...
...In part, probably in greater part than we realize, it was also because the CP had absorbed the Czechoslovak Social Democracy...
...Like the factory, it drastically reduces the complexity of society...
...Not simply on a national level...
...Yet the Soviets have categorically shut off this alternative...
...Consistently, wages were equalized to a point at which there was little point in seeking technical qualification...
...History, by and large, has borne out social philosophers rather than social prophets...
...First cautious steps were taken to revise the worst judicial monstrosities of the fifties and to rehabilitate those Communists who had been persecuted for dissent...
...In turn, life-style reflects far more directly the assumptions of a man's customary life-world...
...The obsoleteness of the "proletarian" PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT power apparatus had simply become too obvious...
...For the Soviets, this may well appear desirable—it makes the colony easier to govern...
...Economically, all reform has been halted...
...From its perspective, any departure from proletarian ideology and lifestyle in the direction of the twentieth century is suspect, and the Czechs had to tread warily, constantly reassuring Moscow that progress is not treason...
...It is adopting economic politics not because they fill human needs, but because they are abstractly "socialist...
...3) The Czechoslovak experience made just that point: the proletarian model is in fact every bit as obsolete as the bourgeoisbureaucratic one...
...In effect it presented the necessary alternative, a socialist-democratic social ideology and life-style...
...The coming of the Dubcek regime changed precisely these two conditions...
...Soviet help, material and moral, did make the coup possible...
...There the change was due to reasons of state: the Soviets demanded clear channels of command and the party, lacking majority support, could not afford democracy...
...Whatever serves these ideals is socialist...
...A prison most approximates a 19th-century factory...
...They were Communists, determined to maintain the party's grip on society...
...Its lifestyle was proletarian...
...That, too, is obsolete...
...The overall result was that the Czechoslovaks worked increasingly harder to less and less effect...
...The majority of the leadership, including the present first secretary Gustav Husak, his current hard-line opponent Lubomir Strougal, Prime Minister Cernik, and possibly a number of others, like Cestmir Cisar, were prepared to go ahead with the reform...
...The apparat, well entrenched in factories, spoke in their name, even though it spoke only for itself...
...To them, the untenability of the proletarianrepressive model had become particularly clear, especially on the level of ideology and life-style...
...The industrial proletariat and its ideology, communism, were supposed to be the "progressive" class and ideology...
...The full truth about the proletarian era became broadly known...
...The press and the radio became a forum for public opinion, and that opinion overwhelmingly supported the reform...
...An entire system of semilegal markets and services sprang into being...
...Plans and programs may indicate the direction of a society's development, but its internal functioning is far more directly affected by its life-style...
...Again ironically, against the Soviets work is the most effective form of sabotage...
...It may have lacked some of the more colorful trimings, like barricades, public hangings, and firing squads—those came later...
...So were the men who crowded Staromestske Square to listen to Gottwald, and the men who formed action committees and seized power throughout the society, on significant as well as trivial levels...
...In turn, it did give the Soviets effective final say in Czechoslovak affairs, and the show-trials of Czech Communist leaders in 1952 made it clear that the Soviets had no scruples about taking advantage of the situation...
...It was progress in the sense in which the Catholization of Bohemia after 1628 was progress...
...4) Even in less advanced countries the value of a "proletarian" revolution is dubious...
...In face of an utterly unacceptable and utterly unavoidable alternative, the nation is defending itself in the only way it can—it has simply gone away...
...It was a synthesis of the bourgeois and the proletarian theses in a socialist democracy...
...Once a country has advanced beyond the mass-manufacture stage, a "proletarian" revolution represents regression, not progress...
Vol. 16 • November 1969 • No. 6
