EUROCOMMUNISM AND "THE RUSSIAN QUESTION"

...REALITY: No new federal bureaucracy is proposed under national health insurance...

...At best, Carrillo treats Soviet society as a very primitive development toward what a socialist society should be...

...This, historically, has been referred to as the "Russian question...

...The most formal statement by CP leadership is Santiago Carrillo's Communism and the State...

...At the very least, what happens as a consequence of a break with the Soviets and the insistence that there is no world center of the movement is that the leaderships of the invidividual parties are now thrown on their own resources...

...They simply granted the possibility that on the road to such a "socialism," different strategies would be appropriate in different countries, while still rejecting the notion of pluralism and "bourgeois democracy...

...By this point, for some Eurocommunist theorists, the "progressive" or socialist character of the Soviet state is so platonically attenuated that it becomes politically almost irrelevant...

...The real point of this seemingly abstract debate is that a fatal step has been taken, away from the notion that Soviet society is socialist...

...Rather, the question was urgently posed in the Italian, the British, and the then exiled Spanish party: What are the structural characteristics of a society that creates such a result...

...For this is what is now comes into question: Are not those states and bureaucracies backward or retrogressive, given the possibilities of those societies...

...The major change is the development of a massive new working class...

...A longer version will appear in Telos...

...But one point of view seems clearly excluded: the traditional Communist view that the Soviet Union is a socialist society, representing a desirable model for other parties...

...How one analyzes the nature of the Soviet Union ultimately has drastic organizational consequences...

...One does not need agitational pamphlets to draw the contrast between the social reality and the claims of the apologists for those regimes...

...Therefore, working-class unrest, wildcat strikes, and dissent is systematically endemic, and for the West European Communist parties that dissent seems far more attractive or tolerable than much of the dissent in the intelligentsia, the oppressed national groups, and the middle class...

...The Western parties, almost without exception, broke with the Soviets on that question, and continued their support for the Dubeek wing...

...What is left for the West European Communists, therefore, is the notion that the Soviet model might have been appropriate at a certain historical stage for societies as backward as the U.S.S.R., but that in terms of world socialist perspectives, the extension of Soviet "socialism" to the advanced West European societies would be a reactionary step backward...

...This follows the views of a Polish sociologist, Weselowski, that in capitalist society there is a ruling class that does not govern directly...

...The Prague spring temporarily offered an ideological respite...

...Breaking with the Soviets on this matter opened a Pandora's box...

...Among the most articulate were the British Communists, who organized an intense internal debate and even published a journal called Socialist Europe: Communist Journal of Soviet and East European Studies—a journal that explicitly focuses on the nature of the Soviet Union and East European societies...

...In the decade between the Hungarian revolution and the Prague spring, the "Russian question" began to emerge within the parties...

...MYTH: Patients will not have freedom of choice, but will be assigned to doctors, thereby depersonalizing the doctor-patient relationship to fit an assembly-line concept of medicine...

...In the Polish strikes in Gdansk of 1975, this is exactly what happened...

...As a consequence, one could discuss the specific problems of those societies without, as yet, making a complex break from Moscow...

...To put it in Marxist terminology, this is arguing that an extension of the power of the bureaucratic leadership of the Soviet Union over parts or the whole of Western Europe would not be an advance to socialism...

...In other parties, the debate is less organized, but both Italian and French Communists have published, with and without the party's imprimatur, historical works on the Stalin period (e.g., Ellerstein's history) that are radically revisionist...

...Where the intellectual and ethnic dissenters are concerned, the matter is more complicated...

...If the Soviet Union is not a socialist society, and if parties that defended the Soviet and East European societies have erred on so fundamental a question, what is to justify the continued separate existence of Communist parties competing with Socialist and labor parties...

...As the Western CPs become more enmeshed in coalitions with Socialists and more committed to making structural transformations in their own societies, they may well for a period have a position analogous to that of the Socialist parties—generalized opposition to the Soviet model without a clear analysis of what that model represents...

...If the basic task that this bureaucratic "socialism" was to carry out was primitive accumulation and rapid modernization, is it not now an obstacle within societies that are no longer underdeveloped...

...In practice, this view amounted to the notion that between the two colossi the Soviets were the lesser evil...

...What remains is a historic tradition, an ambivalent gift, and the notion that the Communists are somewhat more coherent and consistent than the Socialists...

...MYTH: National health insurance costs too much...

...The Italian, French, and Spanish Communists, as well as the small parties, have, for example, supported the strikers' committees in Poland...

...One-third of the poor-10 million Americans—are excluded from Medicaid...

...Carrillo defines the Soviet Union as being in an intermediate phase between a capitalist and a "genuine" socialist state, in the same way as the absolute monarchies were an intermediate phase between feudalism and parliamentary democracy...

...This has permitted such ambivalent developments as the French Communist support for the French nuclear deterrent, and the Italian Communists' statements that it is easier to conceive of development of a "mature socialism" within NATO than out of it...

...Potential critics operate under far better conditions than when they not only had to attack the local leadership but also face the wrath of Moscow...

...While the analogy is somewhat vague, it asserts the "historically progressive" character of the Soviet Union but denies it the characteristic of a socialist state...

...Abandoning the term "dictatorship of the proletariat," as the French and Spanish CPs have done, or allowing it to fall into disuse, as have other parties...

...In addition, Medicare and Medicaid require the completion of claims forms...

...The tie with the Soviet Union not only linked the CPs with a successful regime in power—no mean asset— but the imprimatur from Moscow, the exclusive "franchise" as the local agent of a 326 world revolutionary movement, fortified the various party leaderships against potential internal challenge...

...The Communist party's raison d'être must be called into question once the so-called Russian question is taken seriously...

...Myth and Reality of National Health Insurance Here are some excerpts from a piece by Max W. Fine, director of the Committeefor National Health Insurance, which appeared in Viewpoint, a quarterly publication of the Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO...

...This view is of course close to the traditional Trotskyist analysis...

...The Soviet Union remained some kind of a socialist state, progressive vis -a-vis American imperialism, and playing a generally acceptable role in the Third World with its support of liberation movements...

...MYTH: Government can't administer another big program...

...The Western party leaderships developed a holding action following the invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...After all, the Soviets themselves no longer expected the kind of loyalty that was previously taken for granted...

...These struggles in turn deserve the political support of Western Communists...

...The ruling stratum's definition of working-class interests may be wrong, exceedingly abstract or long-range, and of course is subject to internal power struggles...

...It did have that function, but it also served an organizationally indispensable role of sanctioning the maintenance of a distinct Communist party in every country regardless of the character or strength of the competing Socialist parties...

...Johnson and other British Communists, joined in this by Carrillo and some of the Italian and French theorists, seem to be saying: (1) The Soviet society is vestigially socialist because of its collective property relations...

...If Czechoslovakia could produce a "socialism with a human face"—a state that was socialist in its economic character and in which the Communist party retained dominance, but within a system that was democratic and pluralist...

...NHI will consolidate a multiplicity of health care programs already run by government (in Canada, for example, administrative costs of NHI in Canada are only 2.3 percent of benefit costs—only one-sixth as great as the 13.8 percent for administrative costs of all private health insurance plans in the U.S...

...East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union itself are now advanced societies, relatively highly industrialized, with a massive proletariat that is excluded from any kind of state or social power...

...Yet, it was a state whose interests could very well conflict with those of other socialist states, and in no sense a model for the advanced industrial West...

...Whatever the virtues and vices of the West European parties, their organizational independence from the Soviet party is now a fact...

...At least 10 million elderly desperately need improvements under Medicare, which currently pays only 38 percent of the total health care costs of the elderly...

...REALITY: According to an Aug...

...It is, above all, a class that has repeatedly been told that its demands are legitimate...

...we can't afford it...

...MYTH: We don't need national health insurance...

...But like most "facts" in politics, it has to be thought of in dynamic terms...

...Health expenditures account for 88 percent of the gross national product and for many years have been rising much faster than other living costs...

...REALITY: This is the unkindest cut of all.Consider the following facts: + Health care is now the nation's third largest industry, costing the American people $162 billion or $730 per person last year...

...what then is the difference between such parties and the Socialist parties...

...Within this framework, it is 328 necessary to attack violations of freedom of speech, workers' rights, and attacks on individual dissidents as a general policy of defending democratic rights—while holding that in foreign policy, at least compared to the United States, the Soviet Union may pursue a progressive policy...

...private health insurance is already covering 90 percent of the population and Medicare and Medicaid take care of the rest...

...A major problem today is that most doctors are specialists and only 35 percent specialize in primary care (general practitioners, pediatricians, internists, or OB.GYN's...

...MYTH: Doctors will be burdened with bureaucratic red tape and with endless forms...

...3) The consequence of this is that the working class does not receive concrete benefits from this society, but, on the contrary, in terms of living standards, working conditions and distribution of power, there is a persistent and growing gap between it and the leadership stratum...

...A fair summary would be to say that the parties' consensus was that the Soviet Union was a socialist state, one, however, capable of gross errors to be explained either by the cult of personality around Stalin, or by the isolation and backwardness of Russia...

...But even in those groups there are Marxists dissenters (e.g., Roy Medvedev), so that the CPs in the West can go beyond mere support of the rights of the dissenters and can solidarize themselves with their political program...

...REALITY: National health insurance will relieve doctors of much of their present paper chase...

...By evolving as far as they have, the Western Communists now face an increasingly urgent debate on the nature of the Soviet society itself...

...The Health Insurance Association of America claims 90 percent are covered, but similar coverage claims for the elderly were made by the industry group in opposing Medicare, and they were proved to be overstated...

...4) Progressive working-class and socialist struggles from below are possible that would be directed against the bureaucratic stratum (class, caste, or whatever...

...The difficulty the parties in the West faced, however, was that once they 327 committed themselves to a pluralist vision of a socialist society, it became increasingly difficult to maintain internal monolithicism...

...With no changes in the present system, health costs are doubling every five years and are projected to increase to $322.8 billion, or$3,590 for a family of four, by 1983...

...What kind of "socialism" is it, indeed, that has to be imposed by force on an advanced working class that had already abolished capitalism...

...The polycentrist line was now taken to its logical conclusion, which stressed the peculiarities of the Soviet and East European states as so exceptional and so basically irrelevant to the Western experience that in the advanced countries there would have to be distinct roads to socialism...

...This makes it very difficult for such a party, unless it moves away from Marxism, to develop an agnostic view about societies that call themselves "socialist...

...They were reluctantly prepared to concede the validity of alternate roads to socialism, although stressing in all of their polemics the universal applicability of their model...

...This was an uneasy compromise at best, and it is possible to follow the consequent Communist debate in some detail...

...The question becomes more urgent as the West European Communist parties shed some of the practices and phraseology of the past...

...Let us recapitulate...

...2) However, this socialist society whose property relations represent the "interests" of the working class, is ruled by a bureaucratic leadership that has little or no relationship to the working class itself, and a great deal of subjective autonomy in decision-making...

...Today, there are over 1,200 health-insuring organizations selling well over 25,000 different types of policies, each with differing benefits and provisions...

...Experts associated with the Committee for NHI Insurance have developed facts and figures to prove that NHI will save Americans billions of dollars each year...

...This meant, willy-nilly, raising the question of the "class character of the Soviet state...

...Under national health insurance, a single claim form will cut down the paperwork burden...

...His position is that the Soviet Union is a workers' state in which the workers do not rule and where the political bureaucracy plays a role analogous to that of a power elite in a capitalist society...

...For this class, the gap between the prosperous new middle strata and the blue-collar manuals is increasingly visible and intolerable...

...Monty Johnson, a British Communist theorist, comes up with a different theory also likely to provoke horror among Soviet ideologues...

...Marchais, Carrillo, and Berlinguer cannot call on the Soviet party to sanction their leadership but must maintain it through their own capabilities and bureaucratic resources...

...This "interest" is often very imperfectly understood, and gross violations of immediate working-class rights can and do take place...

...The link between the Soviet Union and the West European CPs was always a more complex matter than merely the subordination of the latter to the needs of the former...

...A temporary solution is to maintain a generalized critique of the Soviet society, which could permit a number of competing theoretical views to exist within the party...

...22, 1978, report from the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 47.4 million Americans (22.7 percent of the population) with no private health insurance in 1975...

...bureaucrats can't run the programs they already have...

...opening up the party to internal discussion and permitting internal and external criticism, as is more or less the case with most of them—all this creates parties increasingly hard to distinguish from the Socialist parties, or, at least, the left wings of those parties...

...329 The working class of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, no matter how cynical about the ruling parties, exists in societies that base their claim to legitimacy on Marxist ideology...

...If the model of socialism for which these Communist parties claim to be struggling is sui generis, that is, unrelated to the Soviet and East European practice, This is a short version of a paper presented at the Conference on "Eurocommunism: Ideological and Theoretical Foundations" held at the Graduate School, CUNY, in October 1978...

...It's no longer a question of "cults of personality" or "mistakes...

...Johnson makes the point that there is a bureaucratic stratum that rules in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but because of the nationalized property relations it still rules in the ultimate interests of the working class...

...Federal expenditures for health care were $13.6 billion in 1968, are estimated at$58.7 billion in 1978 and are projected to carren completely out of control to $89.3 billion in 1983...

...The reality is that we can't afford not to have national health insurance.Only a properly constructed NHI program provides the leverage to control healthcare costs without impairment of quality...

...Changing realities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union make likely further critique of those systems based on classical concepts of Marxism...

...Today the position of some Eurocommunist theorists begins to approach that of substantial elements within the Socialist parties...

...For the organizational emancipation of these parties has not been paralleled by an equivalent ideological emancipation...

...A point refuting such a solution is the fact that the Communist parties, unlike the Socialist parties, do pay formal attention to ideology...

...This permits a Western Communist party to defend the collectivized property relations, while supporting collective struggles of the working class against the ruling bureaucratic stratum...

...The fundamental "message" remains clear—a socialist society is one characterized by the political, economic, and social hegemony of the proletariat...

...This now is a working class whose links with the peasantry have been attenuated or broken, which has produced a second generation of workers for whom the rapid social mobility characteristic of the early years of those systems is irrelevant...

...It is thus possible for the power elite, a much smaller group that makes the state's concrete decisions, to acquire considerable autonomy...

...This explains both the enormous popularity of the Dubdek experiment in the Western parties and the consequent sharp reaction to the Warsaw Pact invasion...

...if, further, such a development would be tolerated within the Eastern bloc, then one could consider the violations of democracy and socialist norms that had taken place in the previous decades as an early, crude stage of a system that had an internal potential for self-regeneration and could evolve toward a society acceptable to Western Marxists...

...One central problem, which arises both on practical and basic theoretical grounds, lies in the relationships between the Communist parties of Western Europe and the Soviet party, and between the vision of "socialism" advanced by the Western CPs and the Soviet model...

...Following the debates on the Czech events, the Western Communists have stated that they are opposed to the forcible extension of Soviet power, and that they regard it as the duty of Communists to defend the national independence of their own societies...

...After all, the Socialist parties, while opposing the Soviet social and political system, have not developed a theoretical model of what those societies are...

...REALITY: Under national health insurance, every person will by free to choose his or her own physician...