On the Fate of Communism
Bell, Daniel
Asked by the German periodical Die Zeit in August 1989 whether the opening of a MacDonald's franchise in Moscow signified "the end of Communism," Daniel Bell wrote the following reply. —EDS. To...
...A century and a half later, one can say that a specter is haunting communism, the specter of democracy...
...I have neither...
...What is the point of this tiresome tale...
...Socialism, in the classic sense, has not failed, for it was never tried...
...But when this obviously meant a cruel policy of "primitive accumulation," Lenin retreated, and the theory emerged later in the disguise, with Stalin, of "socialism in a single country...
...Lenin, whose first book was The Development of Capitalism in Russia, thought (given his Marxist schematism) that a Soviet Russia had first to pass through a stage of "state capitalism...
...It could only be "raw communism" (such as Pol Pot sought to instigate in Cambodia) or a bureaucratic despotism, complete with new elites and a privileged class, yet disguised by a quasireligion ("the march of History") as fashioned by a Georg Lukacs or by that "minstrel of the GPU" as Ruth Fischer called him, Bertolt Brecht (as a chilling instance, see his play Die Massnahme...
...it is the defeat of central planning and totalitarian state controls and the upsurge of democracy...
...What actually emerged could not be socialism in any classic sense of the term...
...Since 1975, we have seen country after country that had been authoritarian, or under military dictatorship, or under quasi-totalitarian rule, asserting a desire for free and democratic institutions, and in bureaucratic regimes, for civil society against the state...
...We shall return to this subject in a later issue...
...The mistake was to assume that utopia could come down from the mountain and assume human form...
...Therefore I shall have to respond as a drab sociologist...
...q Mandela We rejoice, with many others, over the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in a South African prison...
...His release is testimony to the persistent demand of the black majority for democratic rights...
...It is true that Trotsky (if not Lenin) thought that the Russian Revolution could set off a revolution in Germany, but all that it did was to split the German Social Democratic party into three, spark a brief and abortive Soviet Republic in Bavaria, and send the Russian army marching toward Warsaw, where it was defeated by Marshal Pilsudski...
...The Soviets got their revenge later by making the pact with the Nazis and annexing sections of Poland...
...the Philippines and Cambodia...
...In Asia, the revolutionary student elites combined with the peasant movements, linking nationalism and Marxist visions, as in China and Vietnam, to unite their disjointed lands against the colonial powers, and won...
...Ens...
...But the long march of building an industrial "socialism" in backward peasant societies has proved too dusty and tedious—a long march indeed...
...This is a profound truth, a succinct statement of the fact that the Bolshevik revolution, which posed the issue of socialism in the twentieth century in a cruel and misguided way, was the wrong revolution, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place...
...The rapidity of economic change, the new scales of markets and trade, and the technological leads of Japan, the United States and (if it works) a "United States of Europe" may make it difficult for the nation-state system of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East (with its compounding irrational hatreds) to compete against the continental economies now emerging...
...he always had Germany on his mind...
...The problem today is not the outmoded ideological controversies from the nineteenth century but the contradictory currents, centripetal and centrifugal, of a world economy, more and more interdependent, with national polities that are fragmenting...
...Uruguay, Argentina, Chile...
...188 • DISSENT...
...Poland, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and, for a brief shining moment, China, where the Statue (not Goddess) of Liberty, with its image derived from the United States, not France, stood as the symbol of the desire for freedom...
...Primary commodities are of lesser importance as technological substitution—for instance, fiber optics for copper—proceeds...
...definition of "socialism" is that it is the longest, most tortuous road from capitalism to capitalism...
...And yet, much of this may be too late...
...Although the South African government now seems ready to make some concessions, it is clear that the struggle for freedom in South Africa will be long and difficult...
...The sociological problem today is the creation of viable social and political entities that give people some control over their lives—in the polity, in the workplace, in the community—a civil society that is tolerant and pluralist...
...That has always been the function of utopia...
...But is that utopia as well...
...The issue is not capitalism versus socialism but the ability of democratic regimes to manage their economies so as to provide for growth, protect their environments, safeguard the welfare of the disadvantaged, and help other struggling countries to feed their people and find some viable path of development...
...A recent UN report stated that a basket of African exports is worth today one-half what it was ten years ago...
...To answer the question posed by Die Zeit directly would require the wit of a Karl Kraus or the mordant irony of a Franz Kafka...
...What is taking place now, however, is not the victory of capitalism per se...
...The Russian Revolution took place in a backward peasant country, barely beginning to develop industrially, and composed of more than a hundred different nationalities...
...From a historical vantage point, the most significant fact of the last quarter of the twentieth century is not the great power confrontations but the large number of civil wars, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, as well as the disintegrative threats of ethnic rivalries in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and other countries of Europe, as emerging nationalisms seek political autonomy...
...and if one omits oil from Nigeria, it is one-third...
...All of this was rejected by the Western socialist and democratic movements...
...It is that the "cunning of reason" has taken its revenge on those who placed that phrase on their banners as they set off on the march of History...
...In the West, the industrial proletariat, the "historic agency" of the universalist future, is rapidly withering away, and a new kind of SPRING • 1990 187 European Revolutions postindustrial order, based on new intellectual rather than machine technology, is emerging...
...Trotsky, more straightforward than the others, called at one point for "military socialism" while waiting, like Godot, for the world revolution...
...The current Soviet (or is it Hungarian, or Polish...
...But it did become the model for the murderous Baath parties of Iraq and Syria, the "Marxist" regimes of Ethiopia and Mozambique, nationalist and militarist regimes that needed the name of "socialism" to cloak their intellectual nakedness and to deceive the Sartre-ist intelligentsia of the West...
...It remains, like all ethical creeds, an ideal, a measure of potentiality and possibility, against reality...
...And the world has had to pay for it in this most cruel of centuries, where the wars of ideology (and the internal inquisitions) have been more devastating, and on a wider scale, than the wars of religion ever had been...
...The list is impressive, and almost no section of earth has been immune: Portugal, Greece, and Spain...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
