Russia: The Fire Next Time?
Kohák, Erazim V.
THEY'RE RIOTING in Africa, they're starving in Spain—as the Kingston Trio used to sing—but in Russia they're "building socialism." There may be occasional tremors on the fringes of Comrade...
...Rigid orthodoxy and autocratic social structures are incompatible both with the flexibility and initiative required by a complex economy and with the psychology of a prosperous society...
...Ideologues like Mikhail Suslov knowingly dismiss the "cultural revolution" as an infantile disease, pardonable if directed by a leadership loyal to Moscow, otherwise heretical—but structurally irrelevant to the problems of presentday Soviet society...
...The nineteenth-century factory, with its massing of labor in the sector of production, is seen as the definitive socioeconomic model of the new society...
...At the same time, it must impoverish them economically...
...For a great many Russians, Communism remains a symbol of hope and the Party the bearer, albeit currently faltering, of that hope...
...The first challenge, which pits the formative passions of the Revolution against the bureaucratic stagnation of the Soviet state, is the more spectacular...
...Postindustrial development simply does not fit the traditional Leninist matrix...
...But precisely because the Soviet regime is so completely suited to the needs of the stage of early industrialization, it is ill equipped RUSSIA: THE FIRE NEXT TIME...
...In the first place, RUSSIA: THE FIRE NEXT TIME...
...The Soviets have built up an efficient political and economic machine...
...But the people of the Soviet Union have paid a high price for creating the economic prerequisites of a humane, prosperous society, and Czechoslovakia has demonstrated a way of making use of those prerequisites which is not a reversion from an obsolete Communism to an equally obsolete capitalism...
...His decision to embark on a relatively liberal course as well as the support he received suggests that not only Soviet intellectuals but even some Party officials see liberalization of the regime as a necessary first step...
...it requires socialization of basic services, whether medicine, old-age pensions, or education...
...When the Soviet Union, under Stalin's leadership, tackled the tasks of industrialization in earnest, total autocratic control, exceeding even that of the nineteenth-century "captains of industry," appeared a highly useful tool...
...For years it had been represented by Leon Trotsky, a oneman museum of Revolutionary Russia...
...Not without rhetoric, not without strife, but basically without social trauma: democracy may not have always assured that dissent would be effective, but it did guarantee it a certain legitimacy and so the possibility of an effective role under new conditions...
...There is considerable evidence that a sizable portion of Soviet opinion believes in that possibility—the increasing volume of internal dissent, the evident ambivalence toward the occupation of Czechoslovakia, ERAZIM V. KOHAK the increasing readiness of Soviet citizens to treat their Constitution as a binding document, not simply as a smokescreen for arbitrary power...
...Cuba and more recently China have declared themselves the most prominent exponents of vintage "revolutionary" Communism...
...Whatever its ultimate fruits, the process itself is one that a society can survive only by heavy reliance on opiates, whether divine, chemical, or dialectical...
...It is these needs which make the first stage so utterly brutal...
...While the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat—or rule of robber barons in the name of democracy— was the social counterpart of the first, industrial revolution, the counterpart of the second, technological revolution might more plausibly be socialist democracy: social organization and planning, responsible to a society of free men...
...And they are too rigid to survive the democratization required by a maturing society...
...But the real substantive challenge comes from economic and technological development which suggests that the industrial revolution—and, by implication, the proletarian revolution— constitute only one step in social development, and a transitional one at that, rather than the birth of the new eon...
...A revolutionary upheaval on the Chinese pattern is hardly a live option for the Soviets...
...Domestically it would require dismantling the elaborate control apparatus, once justified by the needs of forced industrialization but obsolete today...
...This is what made the system so timely in the industrial era— and makes it so utterly obsolete in the technological era...
...This Revolution can be consummated, internalized, exported—but it cannot develop further...
...For eight months, Czechoslovakia seemed well on the way toward making the transition...
...Quite the contrary...
...The Soviet Union's place as the most advanced country of the Third World is rapidly being preempted by China...
...After all, the regime that ERAZIM V. KOHAK has ruled Russia for the last 50 years, though by no means socialist, did eliminate private ownership of the means of production and did create an extensive framework of social services that is capable of receiving socialist content...
...Today its banner has been taken up by Third World movements, whose home conditions seem to approximate those of Russia in 1917 and so lend some credibility to the old slogans...
...NDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT in the last 30 years, however, has tended to reverse rather than emphasize the objective traits of early industrialization...
...Their quarrel is not with Marxism...
...Almarik's question finally boils down to the second alternative: is the Soviet Union capable of a Czechoslovak-style democratization...
...Yet Soviet ideologues reserve their most uncompromising attacks not for the Chinese, but for the voices that suggest socialism must become democratic...
...There is a moral in Soviet experience for the Third World, though a different moral than its leaders, bent on rapid industrialization, choose to draw...
...it has no powerful spokesmen—even its most explicit eruption, in the Czechoslovak reforms of 1968, was muted and, thanks to the Soviet army, short-lived...
...Subsequent scientific and technological development, no matter how extensive, is officially devoid of social significance...
...An early industrial worker could feel comfortable under Party discipline because it mirrored closely his daily work experience...
...The old ruling class has become economically obsolete, and is main taining itself in power solely through a mystifying ideology and the repressive apparatus of the state (Party), bureaucracy, army, and police...
...Quite the contrary...
...For as Marx pointed out, ideological rigidity can retard technological advance but cannot arrest it...
...Nor does classical Communist theory allow room for progress on the other side of the Revolution...
...The Revolution made no attempt to preserve either the form or substance of "bourgeois" democracy or civil rights...
...It is an uninspiring program—and an unrealistic one as well...
...Early industrial economy remains technologically quite primitive...
...Khrushchev is hardly a social democrat: he rose to prominence under Stalin, within a Stalinist system...
...These differences can still be grossly disproportionate, but as differences among participants they signify problems to be solved rather than battles to be won...
...The official thesis holds that the fundamental outlines of socialist society have been formulated once and for all by the industrial revolution and its social counterpart, the proletarian revolution...
...The Soviet revolution placed total power, unhindered by "hypocritical" constitutional or humane considerations, in the hands of the Communists and enabled them to create a social system geared exclusively to the needs of early industrialization...
...This one-revolution model of history is only marginally challenged by the Third World revolutionaries and Western romantics who insist on revolutionary enthusiasm as a permanent feature of the new order rather than as an understandable need in early stages of the revolution...
...For once the great watershed between individual and social production has been reached, subsequent development can only be quantitative...
...Spectacular the Chinese challenge to the Soviet Union may be, but it is also largely irrelevant...
...Only the industrial revolution brings about a significant transformation, creating for the first time a class of social producers—Feuerbach's Gesamtmensch, the commune-istand pitting it against the very principle of individual ownership, as well as against the actual owners...
...Industrialization is a stage of radical dehumanization, requiring a generation of spiritually and economically impoverished mass men...
...The result is a revolutionary situation that may for the moment lack sociological counterparts —that is, the actual opportunity for an upheaval—but is historically real...
...Nor was there anything in the initial task of modernization and industrialization which would encourage the growth of democracy...
...In Eastern Europe, however, liberalization would in all likelihood have a far more profound effect...
...They can revert to harsh, repressive control, but only at the cost of social and economic stagnation which in the long run seriously weakens their competitive ability abroad and stability at home...
...The same is true of economic growth: such growth does not strengthen the regime, •but makes its internal conflict more acute...
...Precisely because the revisionists are Marxists, they consider economic change socially significant...
...Objectively, the society must extort suffi cient capital for initial industrial investment, and must volatilize its social structures to render men readily deployable en masse, as flexible, interchangeable blocks of "socialized" factory labor...
...It is not surprising that the present leadership has so far avoided that decision and has sought to maintain the status quo...
...Marxist analysis can hardly claim to do that...
...The script comes straight out of Karl Marx: the real basis of the society, its modes and means of production, have changed drastically...
...But an analysis of the relation between the modes and means of production and the forms of social organization suggests that the Soviet Union, more than any other country, is ripe for a social revolution...
...With rising technological complexity and the rising cost of labor, a different set of virtues is required—high skill levels, ability to function responsibly with minimal supervision, ability to make decisions and exercise initiative...
...C C ONTRARY TO THEORETICAL EXPECTATION, managers of state power are proving less flexible and more powerful than the managers of economic power...
...While the rudimentary structure of Chinese economy could survive the cultural revolution, the highly complex Soviet structure would be set back several generations...
...There may be occasional tremors on the fringes of Comrade Brezhnev's "socialist commonwealth," requiring the firm hand of the Soviet army, but the Russian heartland stands solid as the Rock of Magnitogorsk...
...The capital required for initial industrial investment must be withdrawn, from an economy already marked by scarcity...
...The choice facing the Soviets today is hardly easy...
...Its productive principle is the regimentation—" socialization"—of labor...
...Democracy and civil liberty in the period of early industrialization seem artificial constructs...
...Not the old-fashioned revolution with sailors firing at government offices and revolutionary cavalry sweeping down upon decadent defenders of the old order...
...The surface stability of the Soviet Union in a turbulent world covers over a fundamental revolutionary situation...
...In the West, the forms of democracy, which radicals repeatedly and with considerable justification saw as hypocritical, did survive the age of the robber barons...
...Shoring up the obsolete political system by the repressive power of the state does not solve the problem— it accentuates the conflict...
...with technological maturity industry begins to generate capital internally...
...It no longer requires drastic impoverishment—quite the contrary, it requires affluent consumers...
...Theoretically at least, this transition should have proved less problematic for the Soviet Union than for the West...
...Ideologically it is less clearly defined than Trotskyism or Maoism...
...The Soviet Union today appears anything but revolutionary...
...The worker in the technological era lacks that experience...
...The role he performed is taken over by machines...
...Paradoxically, Eastern Europe may well be a crucial factor in the decision of Khrushchev's successors to revert to a hard domestic policy...
...THEY'RE RIOTING in Africa, they're starving in Spain—as the Kingston Trio used to sing—but in Russia they're "building socialism...
...The Soviet Union is not a semifeudal, agricultural country, in spite of its backwardness and the feudal traits of the Soviet system...
...Industrialization must alienate men from traditional social supports, deprive them of social ties, make them radically individual, radically alone—and so, susceptible to being welded into a mass...
...It requires social ism in the sense of social supervision over economic planning of production and distribution...
...The successful reversal of "liberalization" and then the reconquest of Czechoslovakia provide evidence that the Soviet regime can cope with virtually any challenge...
...Unfortunately the lesson comes too late for the Soviet Union...
...The traditional Russian principles of social cohesion have been samoderzhavi i pravoslavi—autocracy and orthodoxy—and these the Revolution took over wholesale...
...There are only two alternatives: a regression to a primitive revolutionary pattern with some Russian equivalent of the Chinese cultural revolution or a democratization along Czechoslovak lines...
...In a society as industrially mature as the one that 50 years of enforced modernization has created in Russia, there sim RUSSIA: THE FIRE NEXT TIME...
...Internationally it would mean that the Soviet Union would move from the status of the most developed country of the Third World to that of the least developed Western one...
...The men who ruled Russia in the name of Marx and Lenin had structurally a great deal in common with Tomas Bata and Henry Ford I. Here, precisely, is the rub...
...This thesis is now being challenged, not by "imperialists" abroad or "reactionaries" at home—the former are more interested in trading technology than contesting ideologies, the latter recall their pre-Soviet Golden Age in old folks' homes...
...Even in capitalist countries, in spite of institutional inertia, class differentiations are increasingly replaced by differences of rewards among men who are basically participants—that is, differences among earned incomes...
...Domestically the Party would in all likelihood be strengthened by liberalization...
...A parallel reversal takes place in the demands made on labor...
...All is preparation, a story of evolving forms of individual ownership in which rulers change but the principle of rule remains constant...
...Intellectually, the shift requires a change from philosophies of reconciliation, emphasizing stoic stability and spiritual compensations in the face of temporal ills, to philosophies of discontent, struggle, and achievement, whether in the form of Western pragmatism or Communist revolution...
...The official thesis is being challenged by Marxists, first by those who echo the passions of Communism's revolutionary past, second by those who confront Communism with a vision of its promised humanist future...
...ply exists no basis for a mass revolutionary crusade of aroused peasantry against a handful of semifeudal lords...
...A sociological analysis seems to confirm this impression...
...In the long run it only weakens the regime and multiplies opportunities for an upheaval...
...To safeguard social justice under conditions of technological complexity does indeed require socialism, even more than early industrialization—but in a rather different sense than that of the egalitarian phalanx of the nineteenth-century factory, or Trotsky's brigades of socialist labor, or Castro's charming anachronism, the cane-cutting brigades...
...Soviet planners are caught in a bind between the need to modernize the economy and the need to preserve an obsolete economic structure that justifies the traditional Soviet ideology...
...Hence the decision, the promise of the future is more of the same...
...The Party controls all public communication, and the Politburo controls the Party...
...The official prospect is more of the same—and under the same management...
...to cope with the problems of industrially mature society...
...It pacifies consciences with its faith that ultimately the Communist society will more than compensate for the suffering of the transitional era...
...Soviet state ideology is based on the thesis that the Revolution which triumphed in 1917 is one and definitive, defining "socialism" for all time...
...Yet I submit that the Soviet Union is ripe for a fundamental social revolution...
...Human labor increasingly shifts from mechanical to control tasks, and from the highly socialized secondary sector into the far more individualized tertiary sector of distribution and service...
...An autocratic regime does accurately reflect the brutal, dehumanizing conditions of early industrialization...
...When Engels declared in the 1870s that military technology had reached its qualitative peak with the development of the dreadnought and the rapid-firing gun and could thereafter ERAZIM V. KOHAK change only quantitatively, he was postulating the paradigm of a world view...
...It recognizes only one cataclysmic transformation— the industrial revolution with its sociopolitical counterpart, the proletarian revolution...
...S S TAGNATION, THE ALTERNATIVE CHOSEN by the XXIVth Congress, does not solve the problem...
...The Marxist humanists remind the Russians that the Revolution had once promised freedom and justice— and that with the completion of basic industrialization, the promise has come due...
...Pauperization, which in the age of industrialization was an economic necessity, now becomes an anachronism...
...IT IS HARD TO PREDICT the future...
...Industrialization is a brutal process, which lends itself readily to totalitarian rule and fanatic ideology...
...It enshrines the realities of its time as eternal verities...
...The stable internal structure precludes that...
...Or, as the XXIVth Congress of the Soviet Communist party recently affirmed, the only legitimate social aspiration after the Revolution is for more of the same...
...All that is possible, and careful sociological analysis might be able to determine which course is probable...
...The challenge of liberalizing "revisionism" is far more serious...
...The mass man of the early factory, whose chief virtues were discipline, endurance, and "socialization," becomes obsolete in principle...
...The "scientific-technological" revolution, central to the intellectual ferment in the Soviet Union and its client states, simply may not exist, and if it does it must not be used to justify a social counterpart, the socialist-democratic revolution...
...But industrialization is a means, not an end, and unless a society consciously strives to preserve at least some formal counterparts of democracy and freedom, its industrialization becomes self-defeating, incapable of being used as the basis for a humane society and incapable even of progress beyond its early stages...
...I do not wish to fall prey to the same error...
...Soviet technology is placing increasing strain on the rigid ideological structure...
...The ultimate goal, the social or commune-ist man, is essentially a man capable of surviving under the conditions of early industrialization, which Marxism regarded as objectively definitive and susceptible only to ideological compensations...
...The institutions of the early industrial/proletarian revolution are too obsolete to generate the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm, whether police-inspired on Stalin's model or mass-inspired a la Mao Tse-tung...
...Once the confrontation on the Elbe has been defused, a relaxation of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe might become acceptable, freeing the Soviet leadership to carry out urgent domestic reforms...
...There is also the hopeful possibility that the Soviets and the West will succeed in creating a cordon sanitaire, perhaps completing the belt of Scandinavia to the north and Yugoslavia and Austria to the south by demilitarization of central Europe, that is, of the two German states and the western part of Czechoslovakia...
...They can embark on a course of liberalization which would for a time strengthen the Party domestically, but critically weaken the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe...
...Classical Marxist theory, formulated under nineteenth-century conditions, reflects the conditions and limitations of the industrial proletariat...
...Once these two changes have taken place, all further changes are reactionary by definition...
...Here the heritage of harsh alien rule and memories of such events as the suppression of the Berlin uprising in 1953, the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the Czechoslovak reform in 1968 have created an explosive potential that makes even limited liberalization a high-risk policy...
...Today it is the orthodox "Leninists" who appear willing to carry the logic of their own position only to the half-way point of an industrializing dictatorship in the name of the proletariat—but are unwilling and/or unable to follow it through to socialist democracy...
...The reversal is not surprising...
...By shrinking from the consequences of Khrushchev's liberalization and reverting to rigid autocratic control, Soviet leaders may well have made sure that that revolution would take the form of a traumatic upheaval rather than an organic evolution...
...Almarik's question, Will the Soviet Union survive to 1985?, is really a question about the direction of Soviet development—China or Czechoslovakia...
...Objectively, the old eon ends and the new begins with the socialization of labor in the factory: the proletarian revolution is only the inevitable sociopolitical reflection of economic reality...
...It is possible that the Soviets will embark on a course of harshly repressive re-Stalinization, triggering a violent response that would shake the state to its very foundations...
...But at the same time a technologically mature society requires a broad range of individual initiative, free movement of men and information, and, most of all, freedom of imagination...
...There was, in any case, little to preserve...
...The entire development from the rise of private property to the industrial revolution, which Engels traces in Origins of the Family, represents for it no fundamental change...
...This is what makes it seem so "natural"—though it is by no means obvious that it is desirable or helpful to have the regime simply mirror rather than interact with the thrust of the economic process...
...But it can, rather confidently, make a different claim: Soviet society today faces a conflict between a stagnant social system and the dynamics of economic development...
...On a theoretical level, this recognition calls for a multirevolution model of history, based specifically on what revisionist intellectuals have described as the "scientifictechnological revolution...
...Marxism-Leninism does not worry about the agonizing task of sustaining human values under conditions which discourage their survival...
...But the Czechoslovak experiment ended in a Soviet occupation once it became obvious that while democracy poses no threat to socialism, it does pose a threat to the autocratic power of the official guardians of the Revolution...
...The phalanx mentality of "intensified class struggle" becomes as obsolete as the marginal classes of owners and owned, capitalists and proletariat...
...With the coming of the technological revolution and the creation of a real basis for genuine democracy, they are capable of acquiring new content and significance...
...From this perspective, the traditional "industrial revolution" appears as a transitional stage, centered on a basic reorientation of society, from a strategy of survival in the face of inevitable scarcity to an active strategy of creating sufficient productive capacity to abolish that scarcity...
...Traditionally, the Communists have accused social democrats of accepting only half a revolution...
...The Chinese remind the Russians that they, too, had once been populist revolutionaries—true, but irrelevant in an industrialized country...
...The decisions of the Soviet leadership since the fall of Khrushchev reflect a conviction that the transition into the twentieth century is too costly, both at home and abroad...
...It is possible that the Soviets will maintain the status quo, sinking gradually to the status of the sick man of the Neva—though the dynamics of Soviet technology make this unlikely...
...The author of Khrushchev Remembers, who might well be Nikita Sergeyevich himself, evidently spoke for many of his countrymen when he wrote that the Soviet Union has created the prerequisites of socialism, that it is time to remove the fetters and realize those possibilities...
...Formally this used to be described as "socialism in one country," prac tically it means that the Revolution is the private property of the Soviet apparat...
...This is why Marxist-Leninist ideology seems so appealing to societies entering on early industrialization...
...In the Soviet Union, however, a transition from the industrial to the technological era —and with it the transition from economic autocracy to social democracy—is inevitably traumatic...
...The transition from the industrializing age to the technological age—and with it from the age of the irresponsible mighty and the disciplined proletariat to the era of social democracy—is the most pressing task of the industrially mature countries...
...N SPITE OF ITS RHETORICAL EMPHASIS On ' the dynamics of history, Leninism is a profoundly static world view...
...The system that resulted was not simply a product of Stalin's lust for power: it was also a hypostatization of all the autocratic, regimenting and dehumanizing elements of the process of industrialization...
...East European revisionists of Dubcek's or Djilas's stamp simply acknowledge, along entirely Marxist lines, the social consequences of economic change...
...To Moscow this is pure heresy...
...Socialist" and "Communist" stages become entirely formal, entailing no changes in the institutional framework of the Revolution— in fact, the official transition of the Soviet Union to the "socialist" stage was accompanied by no visible changes...
...Read in Marxist terms, the basic revisionist recognition, from Bernstein to Djilas, is that in a technologically mature, potentially prosperous society concerned with building a humane social context rather than simply multiplying productive capacity, the entire elaborate apparatus of autocratic control becomes retrogressive together with its ideological justification...
...Marxist analysis has traditionally suffered from a tendency to do so with little regard for the empirical data of the present, solely on the basis of ideological deductions...
Vol. 18 • October 1971 • No. 5
