Capitalism Has Not Won, Socialism Is Not Dead
Avineri, Shlomo
The fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union raise the question of whether conclusions may now be drawn in the historic argument over the...
...At least from the Yugoslav example it may be This article first appeared in September 1991 in the Israeli labor daily Davar and is translated here with the permission of its author, a distinguished political analyst and author of many books in political thought...
...What the observer will find there in fact is the reawakening of the national consciousness, ethnic conflicts and intolerance that characterized these societies before the communist takeover (and it is in this context that one must understand the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe...
...As such, one may say of today's capitalism, in contrast with the rampant capitalism of the nineteenth century, that it is beginning to show signs of being a "capitalism with a human face...
...The original sin was the decision by Lenin, in the winter of 1917-18, to disperse by force the first Constituent Assembly chosen in Russia by free elections...
...It is likely that Lenin's retreat to the NEP (New Economic Policy) regime, which contained harbingers of a market economy, is evidence that he recognized this dilemma, but his death put an end to that option...
...and education was the preserve of narrow social classes, in the absence of public financing for education...
...What collapsed there was not and could not have been socialism...
...Trade unions were outlawed, since workers' organizations were seen as contradicting the principle of free choice and freedom of contractual association...
...Thus, for example, we see the social legislation that Bismarck initiated in united Germany after 1871, in the course of a bitter political struggle against the socialists...
...Then as now there was complete disregard for the actual socioeconomic reality and a deep faith, made up in equal parts of mysticism and ignorance, that systems can be imposed and overturned by an act of legislation and administrative dictate...
...Lenin and his comrades adhered faithfully to this approach—first in the revolution of 1905, and afterward during the February 1917 revolution...
...In short, from the socialist viewpoint there was no chance of actualizing socialism in the conditions of the Soviet Union...
...For this reason he opposed Lassalle when he entertained the possibility of a direct transition in Germany from the Bismarck regime to socialism: such a transition would create "Prussian socialism...
...According to Marx's theory, it is impossible to create socialism without the prior economic, social, and conceptual foundation involved in a capitalist system...
...To assume that it is possible to create a market economy in the Soviet Union within five hundred days, after seventy-five years of a Soviet regime, and after four hundred years of czarism, is sheer fantasy...
...The gradual extension of the right to vote, which was difficult to oppose on grounds of liberal principle, gave the socialist movement considerable political weight...
...As has been noted in the past, Peter the Great would have felt comfortable in Stalin's Kremlin...
...strikes were seen as acts of rebellion, and their activists were punished accordingly...
...The experience resembles the Leninist fallacy of trying to establish socialism in the Soviet Union by fiat, without the necessary social and economic conditions...
...In a debate with the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen, Moses Hess reacted to the possibility of a socialist revolution in Russia, without a capitalist, parliamentary transitional stage, as a recipe for the establishment of a "new Byzantium...
...Anyone observing postcommunist Eastern Europe would be hard-pressed to find proof of the unambiguous triumph of capitalism or the success of democracy...
...Socialism never foresaw its imposition through an army of occupation...
...there were no provisions for insurance in the face of unemployment, illness, disability, or old age...
...The result was necessarily something resembling collectivist czarism, as the Soviet revolution, while destroying the czarist regime, adopted many of its cardinal features—centralized government, an appointments procedure controlled from the top ("democratic centralism" and nomeklatura), political police, exile to Siberia, lack of a representative system, repression of national minorities, a unique Russian national role (Stalin's "socialism in one country"), and finally the transformation of the peasantry into serfs and the state ("collectivization of agriculture...
...What is important is the fact that Western capitalism has indeed undergone a far-reaching social transformation...
...The horror unfolding in Yugoslavia suggests that forty-five years of communism have not swept away the nationalist enmities that turned the Balkans into the snakepit of the nineteenth century...
...Severe economic crises, such as in 1929, as well as the two world wars, expanded the need for state intervention in the economy and led to a reduction in the alienation of workers from the overall fabric of society...
...learned that the alternative to communism is not necessarily democracy and capitalism...
...Has the communist collapse proved that the socialist idea is fundamentally flawed, that in the final analysis capitalism has demonstrated its efficiency and superiority...
...The fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union raise the question of whether conclusions may now be drawn in the historic argument over the nature of the capitalist system...
...The tendency to focus on the charisma of populist leaders like Lech Walesa and Boris Yeltsin is reminiscent more of Peronist phenomena than of democracy...
...this is a system that cannot ignore the hardships of broad social classes, because it is based on universal suffrage...
...principles of human rights serve as its beacon, and as such there is significant restriction on the rights of private property, which is no longer a sacred trust, but must be balanced with other societal rights...
...In the terrible crisis of 1917 Lenin and his comrades changed their theme and were drawn with messianic haste toward a shortcut from czarism to socialism...
...The process of "privatization," too, is extremely complicated, and creates ample opportunities for the activities of established bureaucracies that now find themselves freed from central oversight and are forging quasi-feudal islands of authoritarian control over economic resources...
...There is something vaguely Bolshevik in the faith that capitalism can be created in the Soviet Union via some law or presidential ukase...
...Part of the structural social changes that Western industrial capitalism has adopted were accepted under pressure from the labor movement and socialist criticism, joined for humanitarian reasons by liberal critics who were not socialists (particularly in the areas of women's and children's labor and minimum conditions of social legislation...
...and (3) What is the character of the Western capitalist system today and what is its relationship to the capitalism of the nineteenth century, which was the object of the socialist critique—not only of Marx, but also of such socialist theoreticians as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and others...
...Nor is it clear that there will be a single alternative...
...there were no legal limits on the number of work days in the week or of working hours in the day...
...Likewise within the borders of the Soviet Union...
...Varying shades of gray characterize the flight of the owl of Minerva, wisdom's bird, when it comes to deliver the judgment of history...
...The complex disintegration of the communist regimes shows that it is still difficult to foretell the nature of what will follow the centralized Soviet system...
...The fact that so many good people were swept up in the ideological maelstrom of communist messianism only shows that human frailty sometimes does not spare even the finest intellects...
...This is undoubtedly what is accepted now in the West, and its clearest ideological expression was offered two years ago in Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History," which was (briefly) canonized as the new testament of American conservatism...
...Part of the changes were accepted as a preventive defense strategy, in order to divide sectors of the working class from revolutionary movements through improvement of their living conditions...
...The Stalinist repressions, the Gulag, and the terrors of totalitarianism, were a natural outcome of the fatal decision by Lenin to try and impose socialism on a precapitalist society...
...And yet, an evaluation of the developments in the Soviet Union and the nations of the former Warsaw Pact requires the utmost caution, since the process is still underway...
...In Lenin's view, the revolution coming in Russia would be a bourgeois democratic revolution, and only in that setting would the industrial development be possible that would permit the rise of a proletariat, which would be followed by the victory of socialist revolution...
...It is safe to assume that if capitalism had not undergone this transformation, it would indeed have collapsed as its socialist critics predicted...
...No longer were the workers lacking in political representation, and the various governments and parties were obliged to compete for workers' votes...
...It was in these countries that the socialist doctrine was supposed to have been actualized—and clearly the radical Marxist prediction did not come to pass...
...Socialism constitutes, in the Marxian view, the dialectical antithesis of capitalism, and as such it is necessarily built on the foundations of capitalism and the institutional arrangements connected with it: civil society, advanced industrial economy, a strong bourgeoisie, representative government, freedom of the press, and a strong working class...
...this is also a system whose social values are far from being based on uncompromising, unbridled competition (and thus it is no coincidence that Milton Friedman was more accepted by the political architects in Pinochet's Chile than he is in many quarters of Western 10 • DISSENT After the Fall Europe...
...it could also be nationalistic regimes competing against each other in murderous extremism...
...It was neither the personality of Stalin nor his particular policies that made the Soviet regime what it became...
...It is likely that the Russia or Poland of the year 2000 will resemble Argentina or Brazil more than Great Britain or the Netherlands...
...2) Is the capitalist system now on the ascendant everywhere...
...WINTER • 1992 • 7 After the Fall All of these are elements of capitalism, and for all that Marx was skeptical of this system's ability to resolve its internal contradictions, he still saw the factors constituting that system as the building blocks from which socialism would arise...
...This is undoubtedly a unique historical dialectic...
...What of the capitalist systems that exist today in the West...
...EDS...
...As always, historical development is more complex than the polar image of a war between good and evil...
...We print it as a contribution to the ongoing discussion in our pages, from various points of view, regarding the world after communism...
...It is likely that one day, when someone tries to immortalize the person who inspired the complex developments that led to the rise of this system, Karl Marx will, ironically, be seen as the harbinger of this developed neocapitalist world, in which moral suasion, economic interest, and fear of revolution combined in a potent mixture to yield a more humane transformation of a system whose predatory beginnings threatened to destroy it from the outset...
...Only a measured examination of all three will permit even a temporary verdict on the meaning of these developments: (1) What is the social and political character of the system now collapsing in the Soviet Union...
...But it is hard to assume that countries like Romania or Bulgaria are on their way to a market economy or parliamentary democracy...
...The transition to capitalism, or to democracy on the political plane, is difficult and complex, and its chances in each country are linked to local traditions and history...
...From the viewpoint of the Marxian socialist canon itself, it must be noted that the Soviet system was not and could not have been a socialist system (without considering what its leaders claimed it to be...
...England, France, Germany, and the United States of today are a world away from the unbridled capitalism upon which the socialist critics poured their wrath in the nineteenth century...
...workers had no right to vote, as the political franchise was conditioned on property ownership or minimum tax payment...
...This is a complex system, which has a broad public sector and significant social services (despite all the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan to narrow their scope...
...It is this model that is now disintegrating...
...To the anarchist Bakunin's ruminations on social revolution in Russia, without capitalism or a bourgeoisie, and a direct transition to a socialist system, Marx reacted with alarm: it would result in a "barracks socialism," he claimed...
...The experience in Germany and Italy of sliding into nazism and fascism are evidence of how complex the process remains, even in the West...
...What is now passing from the world is one more of the many forms of human 8 • DISSENT After the Fall servitude...
...As a result of this process, it was clearly no longer possible to tell the workers they had nothing to lose but their chains...
...Marxism saw socialism as a stage that would follow capitalism and take its place...
...Socialism by its very nature involves freedom...
...In the West, capitalism arose and democracy developed over the course of hundreds of years, and the two systems require a civil society and political and social traditions that cannot simply be created ex nihilo...
...One of the most striking historical paradoxes, perhaps, lies in the fact that socialism might have its strongest impact WINTER • 1992 • 9 After the Fall in the industrialized countries of the West...
...A majority in this assembly was held by the three socialist parties, Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks, but not by Lenin's Bolshevik bloc alone...
...Against the view of the Russian Narodniks and the Social-Revolutionary party (SR), Lenin and his allies rejected the possibility of a shortcut from a precapitalist Russia, without civil society, to socialism...
...Translated from the Hebrew by J. J. GOLDBERG WINTER • 1992 • 11...
...there were no restrictions on women's and children's labor...
...The capitalism of the early nineteenth century was characterized by unbridled competition and absolute nonintervention by the state in economic processes...
...Marx and his disciples repeatedly emphasized that socialism was inherently a postcapitalist system...
...All this is very far from an unequivocal victory of liberalism or capitalism...
...The Spanish Inquisition was led by some of the best minds of the Christian clergy, yet there is nothing in common between Torquemada and the Sermon on the Mount...
...It is clear that Soviet communism has failed, but what exists today in the West is not capitalism in all its ideological purity and atrocious practice...
...As distant as it is, even in Western Europe and the United States, from being a perfect system (something no human system will ever be), still, it is not the monster that emerges from the Communist Manifesto or the writings of Dickens...
...But in fact the face of these societies, as they exist today, was shaped in no small measure by the socialist critique of the predatory capitalism of the nineteenth century...
...Likewise the American New Deal was connected, at least in part, with an effort to curb the influence of the communists and the Soviet Union...
...There are other possibilities, and one should not make the mistake of seeing the world as a polarity in which anything that is not communist and totalitarian is necessarily capitalist and democratic...
...If the Leninists thought after their fatal error of 1917 that they could separate the two, reality proved that the confused attempt to create "socialism" without freedom, and in precapitalist conditions, leads to the creation of that oppressive monster called the Soviet system...
...Marx never foresaw the possibility of building a socialist system in precapitalist countries, and certainly not under the slogan of "socialism in one country...
...Even though an evaluation of the failure of the Soviet system does not relate directly to the concept of democratic socialism in the West, this article clearly suggests not only that Soviet communism is a failure but that any challenge to the principles of the free market and capitalist economics has now been proven to be fundamentally spurious...
...Therefore, anyone observing the events in Eastern Europe must pose three linked questions...
...As such, it is clear that the Western synthesis of today, which the postcommunist regimes of the East are seeking to emulate, teaches that just as in other historical instances, there are no decisive victors...
...This society and socialism have nothing in common, just as there is nothing in common between Ivan the Terrible and Christianity, even though the czar was baptized as a Christian...
...If it is true that socialism is to arise from the ruins of capitalism, then this capitalist structure has first to exist before it can be replaced...
...there were no public health or welfare services, except for church charities...
...After 1945 the Soviet model was forcibly imposed by the Red Army on the other nations of Eastern Europe—again in defiance of socialist, Marxist, or any other theory...
...That is now recognized by Gorbachev and his allies...
...The capitalist systems of today are radically different from these systems, and it is not important whether they are now called the "welfare state" or "social market economy" or "reformed capitalism...
...In those places where there had been democratic regimes, or even partial attempts to create democracy (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland), the transition seems possible, despite the difficulties...
...It is far more reasonable to assume that developments will vary from place to place...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
