But on Other Terms

...Deutscher argues that bureaucracy and a strong differentiation in incomes developed in the Soviet Union because this was the only way in which Russia, given the initial poverty of the economy, could develop her resources...

...But is he really prepared to argue that Russian national income will in the foreseeable future rise to such levels of abundance that differential access to the pool of wealth will lose its importance...

...234 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 Mr...

...An institution may indeed have arisen out of a special set of circumstances, but history provides only too many cases in which a phenomenon has continued to exist long after it has outlived its initial raison d'etre...

...Of the Russian working class it may well be said what Thomas Carlyle once said of America: "She will have her own agony, and her own victory, but on other terms than she is yet aware of...

...Who could deny that the English worker at the end of the century was a very different man from the English worker at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution...

...They are not meant to be read in this way...

...Nevertheless, I am forced to reject the extremely simplified view of Deutscher which seems to rest on the premise that a working class can one day rise unstained, unsullied, unaffected by its recent history and triumphantly take over the helm of a socialist society...

...That is why democracy, apart from any general humanitarian reasons, is literally indispensable for the achievement of socialism...

...Hence, he seems to argue, we can also expect that the Russian working class will have developed in analogous ways within the womb of Stalinist society...

...Deutscher still follows this mode of analysis...

...Deutscher that the Soviet Union has experienced a "vast educational progress" in the Stalinist period...

...Talking of "educational progress" in this connection seems to me to exhibit, again, a curiously 19th Century mode of thought...

...The rate of expansion of, say, the Manchurian economy under Japanese occupation was perhaps even more rapid than the advance of the Russian economy in the corresponding period, many "backward countries" have been moving toward industrializa tion during the past several decades, yet we fail to note any corresponding increase in self-awareness of the masses...

...Now, I submit that clinging to the 19th Century Marxist analysis in this respect, exhibits a disregard of what, to this writer at least, is one of the most important correctives or modulations which the 20th Century has forced us to make: THERE IS NO REASON TO ASSUME ANY KIND OF AUTOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN A HIGHER LEVEL OF INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND "GENERAL CIVILIZATION...

...In a statified economy, economic factors lose much of their autonomy...

...Deutscher's view that needs discussion here...

...The dominance of the Russian oligarchy may be ended in various ways but it will not be terminated by its self-immolation on the altar of democracy...

...True, the more refined Marxist theorists were wont to remark that Marx had made a difference between "Klasse fuer sich" and "Klasse an sich," i.e., that he had stressed that classes would become history-making entities not automatically but only if and when they had become conscious of themselves...

...Deutscher's analysis, though it also makes for a certain attractive facility, is its underlying assumption that the bourgeois and socialist transformations of society can be seen as basically comparable...

...Yet in the practical day to day thinking of Marxist parties it generally was assumed that given a higher development of productive forces there would also follow a higher development of proletarian class consciousness...

...It is only through realistic assessment of the staggering tasks with which socialism is faced today in Russia and in the world at large that we are enabled to avoid a facile optimism which can turn only too easily into deep despair if things "don't pay off" immediately...

...Deutscher, in addition, seems to believe that in Russian society economic and political developments proceed in an uncorrelated manner...

...If one equates culture with literacy he is undoubtedly right, but if, as one must see, culture as intimately connected with human freedom, rationality and spontaneity, then, Russian culture is today less developed than it was before the revolution...

...Even if every son of a worker can attain positions in the NKVD, a society terrorized by the NKVD is still a totalitarian and not a democratic society...

...It isn't as if by increasing the educational level there is simply removed a veil that has heretofore prevented one from recognizing reality...

...These analysts, I think, failed in the crucial task of analyzing, namely in discovering in which areas of social, economic and political life, the Soviet structure does indeed exhibit strains, tensions, crisis symptoms, that would allow one to predict the direction of possible changes...

...Furthermore, even while sacrificing honorary rights and prerogatives they demanded the redemption of their more valuable feudal dues...

...Indeed, have not large areas of the world experienced unprecedented industrial "progress" in recent decades without corresponding cultural "progress" or, to be more specific, without a corresponding development of working class awareness and consciousness...

...But this fact in itself proves very little...

...But with socialism things are entirely different...

...The working class is property-less under capitalism...

...it may very well be that in the course of the "vast educational process" the masses of Russian workers and peasants have been farther removed from an understanding of the reality in which they live...

...taxes and seignorial dues are done away with...

...union officers who have attained special powers to deal with strike emergencies are known to maintain these powers long after the emergency is over...

...Deutscher dreams...

...Wasn't it indeed apparent that the development of social awareness, of cultural and political consciousness, in short, of cultivation which had taken place in Europe during the 19th Century was indeed rendered possible only on the basis of a rise in the development of the productive capacities of European industrialism...

...Marxists criticized capitalism for hampering the development of productive forces, yet they never dreamed of denying that it was this development which had been the necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, cause of the rise of the modern Labor Movement...

...Quite apart from the larger difficulty of talking of progress in culture in the same sense that one talks of progress in technology (by what measuring stick Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 235 does one judge whether culture is "more advanced" in the 20th than it was in the 18th Century or in the Fifth Century BC...

...The growth of the economy will in part be determined by the policies of the ruling strata...

...Yet have we not reason to learn from recent totalitarian developments, both inside and outside Russia, that literacy, far from necessarily favoring democratic trends may, on the contrary, be a precondition for the reign of the totalitarian elite...

...Deutscher is misled in part by a traditional method of analysis by which all of us who have been raised in a Marxist tradition have at times been affected, but which needs serious reconsideration if we are to understand Russian society—in fact all contemporary societies...

...Deutscher argues there is no evidence as yet which impels him to conclude that there exists a Russian ruling class...

...I see no reason to expect the Russian ruling class to behave contrary to historic precedent...

...bourgeois relations of production existed before any bourgeois state...

...Everything now depends, not upon any private ownership of the means of production by one or another class, but upon who "owns" or controls the state...

...Now Mr...

...Here at least is an effort to deal with Russian affairs in terms of social and economic trends rather than personality traits and devilish essences...

...in perpetuating the economic development...

...But genesis can never account for persistence...

...There is reason to believe that a population that has been subjected for decades to intellectual rape by the most refined methods of mass propaganda is unlikely to respond tomorrow with full-blown capacities for democratic self-government...

...11 There is still another aspect of Mr...

...Politics, both foreign and domestic, necessarily primes economics in Russian society...

...Deutscher's article provides so welcome a relief from the tedious speculations, prophecies, and ritualistic expressions of horror which nowadays pass for analysis of Russian society in the pages of American publications, that one is tempted to relax into unqualified assent...

...To assume that a working class that has been effectively prevented from acquiring an independent awareness, that, for decades, has been effectively removed from any type of autonomous activity, can without a period of lengthy preparation, act in a politically democratic and autonomous way—is perhaps a tribute to one's socialist beliefs but not to rigor of analysis...

...He adduces as evidence the fact that individual members of this group have again and again been purged, eliminated, cast out, degraded...

...Surely, one cannot believe that so sophisticated an analyst can be that naive...

...I know that Mr...

...It is with this fact that Mr...

...One of the central difficulties in Mr...

...Only under these conditions could awareness be assumed to go together with economic development...

...YET THE CRUCIAL FACT ABOUT INDUSTRIALIZATION IN RUSSIA IS PRECISELY THAT IT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED AT THE PRICE OF A COMPLETE ELIMINATION OF SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION...

...he counts most of all on a "reform from 238 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 above...

...The bourgeoisie could develop socio-economic forms before achieving political power...

...In fact there is no historical precedent known to this writer in which a ruling class has voluntarily given up its privileges, except under the extreme duress of actual or threatening revolutionary development...

...236 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 Rationality is not a tap that can be turned on at will...

...Since the arts of mass propaganda cannot be fully utilized in an illiterate population, illiteracy will be combated by totalitarian with at least as much fervor as by democratic regimes...

...I have been recently engaging in several bouts with "Russian specialists" who, in a sort of inverted admiration for the Stalinist regime, have accepted that vision of the monolithic structure of Russian society which Russian apologists are wont to create...

...Indeed, the 19th Century assumed that increasing literacy would ipso facto bring in its wake an increasing ability to participate in democratic process...

...We learn from Mr...

...The socialist tradition is practically non-existent in Russia today since the great bulk of the Russian working class, peasants only ten or twenty years ago, has never been allowed to come into contact with it...

...A related point needs still to be mentioned: Mr...

...But what were the realities, as distinct from the legend, of August 4? The evening, Kropotkin writes, "had at first begun with panic, not with enthusiasm...

...I am not prepared to argue, at present, this view of past history—though I disagree with it in important respects...

...Marx once observed that if open access to privileged position would be the only test for the degree of democratization of a society, the Society of Jesus would have to be considered a most democratic institution...

...An "educational progress" which makes millions able to read, but only the approved books, an "educational progress" based on indoctrination, fosters distorted images of reality which make it more rather than less difficult to understand the world in which one finds oneself...

...The type of planning that is adequate to the maintenance of bureaucratic power is precisely a kind of planning that hampers that full development of economic forces of which Mr...

...It is at this point that a more general observation needs to be made...

...Deutscher reasons from the analogy of the great French Revolution: long before this revolution took place the bourgeoisie had already developed its political and social consciousness within the womb of the old society...

...In other words, even if it should be proved that there still exists free access to Summer...

...What is more important in our context, however, would 240 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 seem the assumption that since an institution developed under one set of conditions, removal of these conditions will also undermine this institution...

...The writer does indeed believe that there are a number of serious and deep-going tensions and crisis symptoms in the Soviet Union, he rejects the facile assumption of a monolithic Russian society, which serves so well the purpose of the advocates of the Cold and Not-So-Cold-War, but he also feels it necessary to reject some of the over-optimistic conclusions that seem to stem from Mr...

...In essence, it would seem to me, Mr...

...What is essential is not that the incumbency of various privileged positions in Russian society is apt to change rather rapidly, but the fact that the structure of the society is rigidly stratified and highly differentiated...

...His case rests on the assertion that "the privileged minority in the USSR has no absolute interest...

...such an equation of industrial and cultural advances, such an assumption that technological pro gress must necessarily bring—even if through a few detours of history— greater human progress seems to me to ignore much of the evidence of recent history...

...I thus do not at all believe that Russian society is simply a homogeneous, equilibrated and well-adjusted structure...

...He apparently expects that at some point soon a Russian Duke d'Aiguillon or a Russian Viscount de Noailles will stand up demanding the abolition of the privileges of the bureaucracy and that the Russian equivalent of the Bishops of Nancy and of Chartres will demand the abolition of the tithes...

...They didn't commit suicide, but shrewdly adapted themselves to the realities of a revolutionary situation and tried to save as much from it as they possibly could...

...The laws are powerless, the magistrates are without authority...

...Once private property is abolished, once there is one or another form of collective or public ownership, the determination of economic power depends upon the control of political power...

...Deutscher's analysis...

...If most of the goods in Russia were "free goods" as, say, water is in the Eastern part of the United States, no competitive struggle over it would be likely to arise, but does one seriously need to discuss this alternative...

...To cite only one fact: the reintroduction of fees for studying in secondary schools and universities has led to increasing proportions of sons of bureaucrats and decreasing proportions of sons of workers and peasants attending these schools...

...Deutscher believes that the level of Russian cultural development is today considerably higher than it was in Tzarist days...

...No sector of social life in Russia, least of all the economic sector, is free from the influence of political power...

...Bureaucratic power may originally be considered by the incumbents as purely instrumental, but in its exercise what was an instrumental value becomes a terminal value...

...There is no point here in going into a discussion of What Marx Really Meant, but it seems to me that throughout the greatest part of its history the Marxist movement has had a tendency to assume that an increase in productivity and economic production would of necessity lead to an increase of the social and cultural level, of class awareness and consciousness among the masses of the population...

...1954 • DISSENT • 239 top positions in Soviet society this would in no way prove its democratic character...

...Deutscher hopes for some kind of reenactment of that famous night of August 4, 1789 when the French clergy and the nobility, priest and noble lords, or so at least the democratic legend has it, renounced upon the altar of the country their privileges and prerogatives...

...Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 241...

...They are culturally more isolated, more incapable of acquiring political knowledge, more incapable of learning about the socialist tradition than were the Russian workers at the turn of the century...

...Economic forces, he feels, will expand on their own and they will finally force political factors to adjust themselves to the economic trend...

...This again, I submit is a 19th Century view...

...Deutscher does not seem to expect that a fundamental democratization of Russian society will come about through a political revolution, through mass-activity...

...Nobility and clergy acted only after they were presented with the frightening evidence of a spreading peasant jacquerie...

...But this analogy cannot possibly hold true...

...We are therefore forced to recognize, I submit, that the 20th Century has evidenced a disjunction between tech nological development and working class awareness...

...He assumes that "the higher level of industrial and general civilization favors a gradual democratization of Soviet political life"— though he admits that temporary relapses into Stalinism are possible...

...In Stalinist society any kind of autonomous development of organization or consciousness is impossible...

...and it remains property-less under socialism...

...The 19th Century belief that increasing class consciousness would more or less automatically follow in the wake of further industrial development rested on the tacit premise that further industrialization would allow wider and wider possibilities of organization, propaganda and socialist agitation...

...To the mass of Russian workers socialism simply means the present regime...

...Yet, despite the brilliance and persuasiveness of his thesis, I am not convinced by much of it...

...and the working class, or more generally, the large mass of the population, cannot even approach control of the statified industries unless there exists political democracy...

...The untutored matter-of-fact common sense of the pre-Soviet Russian peasant clearly prevented him from understanding many of the crucial facts about the world in which he lived, but it can be doubted whether the world-view that the average Komsomol has acquired in the Russian schools is not considerably less realistic in crucial respects...

...Space prevents detailed discussion here, yet so much can be confidently asserted, a bureaucratic group is not likely to abdicate its power, rights and privileges as long as it isn't forced to do so...

...111 The preceding pages may seem to have been written in a spirit of utter pessimism as to perspectives of internal change in the Soviet Union...

...A Committee of Inquiry had just reported that "on all sides chateaux are burnt...

...He expects the privileged minority, and he will pardon me if I put his expectations in a somewhat crude way, he expects the privileged minority to commit suicide, to abolish its own privileges...

...Measures taken in times of war emergencies have a deplorable tendency to continue in peacetime...

...This belief could clearly be vindicated by pointing to the realities of 19th Century Europe...

...This leads me to a related point...

...I Mr...

...To expect that the members of the bureaucracy will voluntarily forego the differential advantages which accrue to them and to their children from their position, to expect them to forego transmitting skills, connections and differential educational opportunities, seems, to me, unrealistic indeed...

...Deutscher claims that as Russian society increases its wealth and the general level of living also increases, the differential privileges may no longer be sought after as eagerly in the future...

...Deutscher, it would seem to me, does not adequately come to grips...

...And later, bourgeois relations of production could continue to exist under a Bonapartist dictator who might cut the bourgeois off from immediate political power...

...This, however, is not really so...

...But further, and more importantly, all recent students of Russian social structure have pointed to many tendencies making for the reduction of social mobility in the Soviet Union...

...This is not the place to discuss the classical description of bureaucracy by Max Weber and its complement by Robert Michels, but surely a modern analyst cannot afford to simply ignore the evidence that has accumulated in support of great parts of their thesis...

...The bourgeoisie could develop its economic power and property forms within the structure of an absolutist society, but the Russian Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 237 working class is effectively barred from that kind of political organization which alone would allow it to develop its potentialities...