Communist Breakdown, Social Democratic Paralysis

...Meanwhile, social democratic successes in the first half of this century had taken the edge off class grievance and diluted the appeal of the left...

...The indirect factors range from the globalization of economics and social change in the advanced countries to the inner dessication of most social democratic movements and what I might call the 1968 effect on the politics of the left...

...The post-Stalin regime was the outcome of a long and painful evolution that profoundly changed the character of the system, from the fanatical dreams of proletarian revolution to a militarized, bureaucratic, and ultimately stodgy despotism...

...Logically one should have expected that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites would liberate ideas of democratic control of our economic destiny from the onus of association with the militarized despotism that the Soviets called "really existing socialism...

...The political mind is reverting more than a century to an era where privilege was considered the birthright of the fortunate and inequality the price of social efficiency...

...The more surprising reaction to events in the East has been that of Western socialists and social democrats...

...But the cold war put the brakes on these ventures, thanks to the split in the left over allegiance to Moscow and to the anti-Soviet and antisocialist leadership of the United States (complete with CIA financing of right-wing parties), as it fell back from the reformism of the New Deal era...

...The right amassed new ammunition to denigrate reform in all its guises...

...In Germany the social democrats notably failed to challenge the disastrous policies of the Kohl government to merge East Germany legally and economically into the West, at the price of great material and psychological damage and a drain on western taxpayers...

...The misinformed Western response to the collapse of communism was a reaction waiting for an excuse...

...Along with all these shifts, the culture of mass media puts a premium on entertainment and sensationalism, making it increasingly difficult to reach what remains of the natural constituency of the left and persuade it to support leaders and policies representing their own interests...

...In the face of these frustrating trends the social democratic movement around the world has become tired and dispirited...

...Now there is a hegemonic shift in what Western societies consider to be their achievable norms, exemplified by "New Democrats" in the United States, the British Labour party, and socialists all over continental Europe...

...The system that broke down in the Soviet Union and its European satellites between 1985 and 1991 is almost universally misinterpreted as a "utopian experiment" that finally "failed," thereby disproving the socialist theory that had presumably animated it all along...

...Free-market reform in Russia may be sustainable only by the imposition of authoritarian rule—the Pinochet scenario that Yeltsin has already shown he is capable of acting out...

...Li SPRING • 1995 • 247...

...If there is any sense of class struggle left in the United States, it is not between the workers and the bosses, but between the middle class (now understood to include all wage earners) on the one hand, and the "underclass" of welfare clients, criminals, and socially disintegrating ghetto populations on the other...

...Nothing in life is that final, and in fact some countercurrents can be seen already...

...In turn, Easterners who may have had reservations about the new course were deprived of reference points in the West that might have sustained a less disruptive and ultimately more just path to postcommunist reform...

...As in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, these conditions have been turning third world countries in a revolutionary direction, but in this case toward revolutions of a new anti-Western sort...

...Communism's demise might not have been so disorienting had it not been for the turn of policy adopted by many of the successor governments themselves, notably by Boris Yeltsin in Russia...

...First of all, as numerous recent analyses have shown, the classic program of social democracy —or in the United States, of liberal Democrats —has been undercut by the evolution of the world economy...

...And a major contending alternative—the communist-nationalist forces, or a neofascist such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky — could combine authoritarianism with repudiation of the free market and once again defy the West...

...With the export of capital and the shift from natural economy to wage labor, the third world has become the new proletariat in a class struggle among nations...

...Ideology thus provided internal self-justification at the same time that it attracted external support through its claims to represent socialism and anti-imperialism...

...Middleclass reformism, always alarmed by disorder and tax bills, found an outlet in ecology movements and the Greens, or in the formula "social liberal but fiscal conservative...

...Ideology in the Soviet Union, far from guiding the country toward utopia, was reduced by Stalin's time to the instrumental role that Marx and Engels ascribed to the "false consciousness" of free-market ideology, a "bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production...

...In Western Europe the immediate aftermath of World War II witnessed the beginnings of a real revolution by ballot— under Labour in England, under socialistcommunist— left-Catholic coalitions elsewhere— to advance the traditional socialist program of nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy as well as instituting an advanced welfare state...

...By the direct discrediting of socialism and socialistic policies I have in mind two possible elements— naive or deliberate misrepresentation of the Soviet debacle by promoters of private business, and self-defeating misunderstanding by socialists and social democrats themselves of the communist system and the alternatives to it...

...Most Western political and economic leaders truly believe in their own form of false consciousness, that is, the free-market ideology as legitimation for corporate power...

...Finally, new forces for social change are bound to pick up strength in the West itself, though they may not necessarily work to the benefit of the traditional left any more than the movements of 1968 did...

...This transformation was masked, however, by continuity in the rule of the Communist party and its Marxist-Leninist ideology...

...This default of Western reformists in the face of a unique political opportunity to promote a "third way" leads us to the indirect factors in the flabby responses of the Western left, factors that have merely been accentuated by the collapse of communism...

...Control of inflation and deficits supersedes full employment and social welfare as the immediate policy imperative even of social democratic governments (or the Democrats in the United States...

...If the Stalinist and post-Stalinist system can be called socialist at all, it was barracks socialism— not the rule of the workers, but a 244 • DISSENT Social Democratic Paralysis terroristic and bureaucratic state exaggerating the worst of Russian tradition in order to build military-industrial power as an end in itself...

...The decline of the industrial sector in favor of services and information and the undermining of trade union movements have been clear trends for a generation...

...In the United States what is left of the industrial working class is increasingly made up of members of racial minorities, and this fact unfortunately drives a wedge into class solidarity that is accentuated by the public cost of supporting an unproductive "underclass...

...One random response is that of a former leftist, not especially expert in Soviet matters, Professor Eugene Genovese, who writes in The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism: "With the disintegration of the Soviet Union the Left has suffered a political and moral Waterloo" that "drowned the hopes of socialists...

...The Western left has done little to make common cause with the muchneglected Russian centrists, the people who could have become the democratic alternative both to Yeltsin's free-market authoritarianism and to the communist-nationalist nostalgics...

...This is especially ironic because Marxism in any meaningful sense had not guided the Soviet leaders for fifty or sixty years—all the real Marxists were shot in the purges—and objectively considered the theory never did explain the Soviet phenomenon...

...With the incorporation of the third world into the worldwide manufacturing and trading system, we are witnessing a new kind of imperialism, advanced not by armies but by multinational corporations and spearheaded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...

...The national state, traditional protector of wage earners in the first world, attempts to compensate for its weakness by supporting movements of regional unity and free trade, only to undermine its own role further...

...Up to the 1970s these movements took the form of anti-Western but westernizing movements in former colonies or semicolonial countries, often with Moscow's inspiration...

...Drawing the wrong lessons from the communist debacle will not help...

...In fact the opposite has happened...

...Thus, the salariat is more sensitive to inflation and taxes than to industrial democracy and redistributive economics...

...communism without Marx, as it were...

...If interpretation of the failure of communism is controversial, interpretation of the failure of its successor will be a donnybrook...

...Events in the East and the postcommunist embrace of pure capitalism were enough to trigger Western opinion into a paroxysm of antisocialist disgust...

...However, repeatedly denied the magic 50 percent of the electorate, social democrats and American liberals have progressively given up trying to change the economic power structure, in their elusive search for the centrist voter and coalition partners...

...Does this mean the indefinite shelving of the social democratic agenda and the unchallenged maceration of East European society by free-market fanatics...

...The more recent trend may be worse, from the Western point of view: anti-Western revolutions that are also anti-westernizing, under the leadership of fundamentalists and nativists...

...Ideas of socialism even in its broadest sense of public control of economic activity have never been in such disrepute...

...The shift to a society of meritocracy within large organizations, public or private, seems to promote atomistic self-interest and careerism rather than any collective spirit of resistance to the power structure...

...Certainly the discomfiture of the Western and third world lefts in the face of the Soviet collapse has been assiduously exploited by apologists for unfettered capitalism and the five market, who argue against history that capitalism always promotes democracy and that socialism must lead to dictatorship (though dictatorships have, to be sure, sometimes instituted what they called socialism...

...Why have things turned out like this...

...This assessment does not mean giving up on a philosophy of reason and justice, but the road will not be easy...

...In this new climate, there is little resistance to new counteroffensives by right-leaning governments to undo the social democratic compromise with privatizations and welfare state cutbacks...

...Including the New Deal and its Great Society epigones in America, the democratic left achieved varying degrees of its agenda in the welfare state, labor laws, business regulation, and consumer protection...

...These interests have figured prominently in the aid programs of Western governments and international lending agencies, and in their endorsement of Yeltsin's questionable democracy...

...With the disappearance of communism as a model, there is nowhere else for the revolutionary third world to turn...

...It was the coincidental demise of communism and its replacement by an ostensibly free-market regime that simply encouraged them to trumpet more loudly the eternal triumph of capitalism...

...Most obvious is the practical failure of free-market economics in Russia...

...There are numerous recent developments that might contribute to an answer, both direct and indirect...

...We may find that the next Western revolution has more in common with third world fundamentalism than with the old labor and socialist movements...

...Yet it is difficult to conceive of Western enthusiasm for the free-market alternative to socialism as a mere ploy to embarrass the left and smooth the way for business...

...Since the late 1940s the traditional social democratic program has advanced hardly at all, except for the catch-up played by the United States in the era of the Great Society...

...Yet so powerful was the identification of communism and social change in the outside world, in the minds both of adherents and enemies of socialism, that the collapse of the Muscovite empire appeared to be an epochal failure of socialist principles, and of Marxism in particular...

...A second factor that may help destabilize global capitalism is the resistance of the third world to the role that has been chosen for it...

...More recent events have added to the helplessness of the democratic left, above all the movements associated with the year 1968...

...First world capital moves overseas to exploit SPRING • 1995 • 245 Social Democratic Paralysis third world labor as well as resources, and by mobilizing a global "reserve army of the unemployed" it depresses first world wages (in the United States) or drives up unemployment (in Europe...

...Great new hopes have naturally sprung up in the West for profitable business relationships with the former communist countries, both as markets and as investment opportunities...

...Until the 1980s the European left and liberalism in the United States generally held onto their partial conquests, a situation that I term the "social-democratic compromise...

...An ossified and falsified postrevolutionary regime, hobbled by economic stagnation and interethnic tensions, was the actual system that came to grief as soon as a more enlightened generation of leaders tried to reform it...

...Social changes and past political disappointments had built up the potential for a radical shift against the traditional left and its goals...

...This has already been hinted at in extreme ecology movements, in the rejection of the Western cultural tradition by radical feminists and racial minorities, and in deeply antiscientific and antitechnological trends of thinking...

...Rather than question the lessons wrongly drawn from the Soviet experience, they have tried to dissociate themselves from it by retreating from their own principles...

...Whether the new Russian experiment will succeed remains for history to judge, but up to now it has failed disastrously, in a morass of inflation, impoverishment, corruption, and crime, convincing a majority of the Russian public that life was better and safer under the communists...

...A political backlash has already become evident everywhere from Lithuania to East Germany, as the electorate turns back to the communists in their reformist variant...

...Even the reformed communists in such countries as Hungary and Poland are yielding to free-market orthodoxy...

...At the time, 246 • DISSENT Social Democratic Paralysis both in Europe and in the Americas, it seemed that the emergence of the New Left, looking to alienated social groups for its base (students, women, racial minorities), was changing politics permanently...

...In retrospect, the effect was to divide and weaken the forces of reform...

...As I have noted before in these pages ("The Riddle of Russian Reform," Dissent, Fall 1993, and "The Revenge of Russian Political Culture," Dissent, Winter 1994), Russia's postcommunist choice was the result of a peculiar sequence of political developments, after President Mikhail Gorbachev found himself caught between the communist Old Guard and his personal rival Boris Yeltsin...

...This is to take Soviet propaganda at face value, even though it is repudiated rather than embraced...

...Meanwhile the societies of the first world have been changing in ways undreamed of by the traditional left...

...Then this new Russian line, the product of Western economic theory, was seized upon by the same Western theorists as evidence that socialism was a failure...

...In America, notably, the New Left repelled the white working class and in turn dismissed them as reactionaries, leaving the ground to the George Wallace movement and Reagan Democrats...

...Although the Soviet Union no longer exists as a bogey to frighten people away from radical ideas, and though the "lesson" of the communist collapse will eventually wear off, new forms of radicalism in the West may exhibit their own kind of irrationalism...

...Simply put, the latter embraced the utopian free-market perspective offered by his Western-oriented advisers as a weapon in his campaign to destroy his chief...