Reality And Experience: An Analysis Of The Draft Program Of The Cpsu
Lichtheim, George
A document such as the 1961 Draft Program of the CPSU serves so many different purposes that at first sight it may appear pointless to try to classify it with reference to the tradition it...
...One may treat this whole perspective as utopian, but that is a different matter...
...This puts the responsibility squarely upon the community as a whole, so that if things should go wrong it might be argued that the people were not up to the great task presented to them by the Party...
...In this the Party was, of course, greatly aided by the fact that Marxism contains a genuinely universal idea, so that the regime could get under way with an internationalist creed: unlike Fascism which subsequently came a cropper among other reasons because it lacked the universal content which every genuinely world-shaking movement must possess...
...or, if one wants to be more modest, Lenin's own rather long-winded "Notes on Plekhanov's Draft Program" in 1902 (Collected Works, vol...
...Prices must to a growing extent reflect the socially necessary outlays of labor, ensure return of productive and distributive expenditures and a certain profit for every enterprise that is operating normally...
...But the fact that they have to be painfully inculcated, instead of flowering freely from the new soil, makes it rather awkward to talk of the present epoch as being a transitional phase from Socialism to Communism...
...This dialectic (to employ a term much in vogue though little understood in the USSR) runs through all major revolutions and accounts for the fact that nations are able to identify themselves quite naively with what was originally a universal message addressed to an elite of enthusiasts...
...Given the formal commitment of Soviet Marxism to the aims sketched out in the classic texts, it is incumbent upon the authors of the Draft Program to explain how their authoritarian ideology can justify itself on theoretical grounds...
...This exactly defines a Socialist society, not a Communist one, so that one must ask once again why the Party leadership should have committed itself to what, from the Marxist standpoint, is a fraudulent prospectus...
...In strict logic the notion of a task involves the possibility of failure, but this is not admitted...
...But what if the budding class distinctions of Soviet society should become too pronounced to be concealed any longer behind disingenuous talk about "individual requirements and tastes...
...This, of course, is orthodox Marxism, in the sense that Marx (in the Critique of the Gotha Program) specified these traits as belonging to a fully developed Communist society...
...Hence the self-interpretation of the ruling elite involves the acceptance of a body of doctrine originally evolved as a critique of West European society, in terms of that society's own aspirations...
...At this point, loyalty to an accepted phraseology may not be strong enough to prevent the conversion of the political elite into a new privileged class with an appropriate ideology, one that frankly recognizes the unattainable nature of the Communist ideal...
...When it comes to the fundamentals of the Leninist faith, including the division of the world into "socialist" and "capitalist" blocs, all the evidence points to the conclusion that what is officially affirmed is genuinely held to be true...
...One begins to sympathize with Molotov's reported strictures on the claim that Socialism has already been fully established...
...First, the obligatory bow to history: "In the course of the transition to Communism, the moral principles of society become increasingly important, the sphere of action of the moral factor expands, the importance of administrative control of human relations diminishes accordingly...
...And anyone who takes the trouble to wade through the 877 pages of the official 1960 handbook entitled Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, as well as the more ideological sections of the 1961 Draft Program of the CPS U, will discover ample evidence that the Weltanschauung of the ruling State party stems directly from that of the Russian radicals of a hundred years ago, none of whom were Marxists, though they all hoped and believed that Russia could show the world something new by "building socialism...
...This comes out plainly enough in the enormous emphasis laid upon production, which would be utterly misplaced were the authors really concerned with what lies beyond a scarcity economy...
...Communism is being "built" by the conscious effort of the people, but looked at from a different angle it may also be said to be growing spontaneously from its natural foundations...
...Only when that point has been reached will the official ideology begin to reflect the contradictions inherent in the structure of Soviet society...
...Briefly then, it would appear that the present-day Russian Communist party has really made the best of both worlds and integrated the Marxian heritage, or at least the Marxist terminology, within a tradition which can perhaps be described as National-Socialist: in the sense that from the very start it envisaged socialism as the specifically Russian answer to a specifically Russian problem, namely, what was to be Russia's future as a nation, given the fact that the Old Regime had lost its historic sanction and that Western liberalism was somehow not appropriate to Russian conditions...
...One has to bear in mind that Marxism was originally a critique of Western liberalism in terms of liberalism's own proclaimed goals...
...Here, after a critical side-glance at Herzen's Pan-Slavism, we find another tribute to Chernyshevsky, and then the well-known statement: "If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a people, and undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime...
...Society, he thought, could very well do without the state, on condition that the citizen took precedence over the bourgeois...
...One may surmise that the traditional aims will then be reinterpreted to make room for new social realities...
...Quite apart from the fact that the content of Soviet morality is not sensationally different from what is regarded as moral in Manchester or Pittsburgh, the authoritarian tone of the Party's pronouncements discloses a state of affairs with which sociologists are familiar: The claims made by society upon the individual are resisted by the latter, or at least not spontaneously recognized as being in harmony with one's own personal strivings...
...After all, the Preamble to Part II reads: "The building of a Communist society has become the direct practical task of the Soviet people...
...The French original runs: "Si la Russie continue A marcher dans le sentier suivi depuis 1861, elle perdra la plus belle chance que l'histoire ait jamais offerte A un peuple, pour subir toutes les peripeties fatales du regime capitaliste...
...341-42) draws attention (though with no critical intent) to the fact that "in the discussion of the last few years it has been emphasized that the importance of commodity production and of market categories, and with this the use of economic incentives in production will continue and even increase [our italics] during the transition from Socialism to Communism...
...It may be compatible with Saint-Simon, but it is certainly not compatible with Marx...
...It is only against this background that the classless society can also be seen as a stateless one...
...But there is a further contradiction: the Program tells us that "Communism makes the elementary standards of morality and justice, which were distorted or shamelessly flouted under the rule of exploiters, into inviolable rules for relations both between individuals and between peoples...
...Given such a state of affairs it would clearly be superfluous to subject people to the kind of social discipline envisaged in the Program...
...This raises the question why the Party leadership should have committed itself at this stage to the promise that the transition from Socialism to Communism is going to be made, or at any rate initiated, within the experience of those now living...
...This too has its parallels elsewhere, though in fairness one must concede that it probably represents a genuine delusion, not simply an excuse for making the "camp of socialism" co-extensive with the habitable globe...
...If one feels like being paradoxical, one may say that Marxism became the means of reconstituting Russian National-Socialism on a more respectable basis...
...As the regime comes to identify itself with accomplishments which go far toward turning Russia into a modern industrial country on a non-capitalist basis, it inevitably sees itself as the inheritor of those socialists who from about 1850 onward preached Russia's mission to show the decadent West how socialism could be built on virgin soil uncorrupted by capitalism, liberalism, inividualism, and other tiresome Western inventions...
...This, of course, is simply a further development of the paradox embodied in the familiar two-fold thesis that the October Revolution was a great event because it confirmed Marx's predictions about the inevitable course of history, and that Lenin was a great man because he inaugurated a completely new era...
...Lenin's successors are clearly determined to claim similar status for their body of revealed truth, so that at any rate it should not be pos sible to say of Lenin what Marx once said of Bakunin: that he was a "Mohammed without a Koran...
...Notwithstanding Chinese (or Albanian) charges of "revisionism," there is nothing to suggest that the authors of the Draft Program have come anywhere near to accepting the heretical notion that socialism is a world-wide trend, operative in the West as well as in the East, and that there are many roads to the final goal...
...One has only to read Herzen to hear the first faint bars of a music whose full impact crashes upon the ear in the 1961 Draft Program...
...340ff...
...The first step, * This article is adapted from a chapter which will appear in a forthcoming book, The USSR and the Future: An Analysis of the New Program of the CPSU, soon to be published by Praeger...
...To that extent it rationalizes the inherent need to restate new aims in traditional language...
...But Soviet society is anything but egalitarian, and is steadily becoming less so, notwithstanding some recent efforts to do away with the grosser disparities in salaries...
...A document such as the 1961 Draft Program of the CPSU serves so many different purposes that at first sight it may appear pointless to try to classify it with reference to the tradition it purports to incarnate...
...Communism has to be both inevitable and freely willed, and the Party is there to see to it that both aspects are constantly held in balance...
...As the idea is clothed with flesh, the flesh of course is sanctified and loses some of its sinful aspects...
...In retrospect we can now see that all the internal conflicts within the revolutionary movement turned on the question whether Russia could skip the capitalist phase and "build socialism" on the basis of her own, fortunately still intact, pre-capitalist foundations...
...As for liberalism, it had always been designated in Bolshevik literature by the adjective "rotten" long before Stalin employed this vocabulary to justify his massacre of the Old Bolsheviks...
...Yet readers of Venturi's great history of Populism will be aware that the Russian revolutionary movement which triumphed in 1917 has an intellectual ancestry that runs parallel with West European socialism but must not be simply identified with it...
...For the same reason official morality loses its political character and is no longer differentiated from private morality, i.e., from what the individual regards as desirable...
...The latter—like their Western counterparts, whom they are beginning to resemble—are substantially committed to a technocratic version of Socialism, which the politicians are free to describe as "Communism" as long as their antics do not interfere with the operation of the system...
...So the working class has something new to contribute to the age-old heritage of toiling mankind, but we are not told exactly what it is...
...itself a governing body not clearly differentiated from the dominant social stratum of Soviet society, including, as it does, genuine representatives of the latter along with veterans of the Stalinist epoch and spokesmen of a Leninist tradition which almost half a century ago supplied the "professional revolutionaries" with an operational code...
...It is obvious that its prime use lies in the propaganda field, and that for the rest its significance is likely to depend on shifting political alignments within the ruling Party apparatus...
...It is impossible to go into details, but the central political paradox of the whole enterprise needs to be brought out...
...Dobb (loc...
...Instead, I propose to address myself to a single subject, namely, the status of the Program within the general tradition of "MarxismLeninism," so-called...
...In a dynamic industrial society the workers cannot fail to press for the conversion of mere "wants" into socially recognized "needs" which the planners would ideally be instructed by the political authority to fulfill...
...In such cases they customarily offer more or less fraudulent comparisons between standards of living and other claims which are part of the official make-believe...
...The price system should be continuously improved...
...What all this may have to do with the emergence of the New Man (which we are also promised) remains unclear...
...If Communism means anything—and Marx had a fairly clear notion of what it meant—it denotes a state of affairs where the producers control their tools and are in no need of an infallible party to tell them what to do...
...The society it looks forward to is a hierarchical one in which final authority rests with a self-ap pointed elite...
...Rather confusingly the next sentence adds, as a kind of afterthought: "The revolutionary morality of the working class is of particular importance to the moral advancement of society...
...therefore, must consist in asking what one means by Leninism, and in what sense the Draft Program is to be regarded as a Leninist document.* There are perfectly good theoretical reasons for adopting this approach, but there is also an eminently practical one: namely, the fact that we are dealing with the outlook of the Russian State Party, whose founder was the creator of the Soviet regime, pre- and post-Stalin...
...A recent collection of essays by a well-known British sociologist includes a chapter entitled "The Bolshevik Ideology" from which no one who did not already know it would gather that Bolshevism grew on Russian soil, or that it numbered among its ancestors some eminent 19th-century Russian thinkers who were not Marxists, but belonged to an earlier stratum...
...That the social order outlined in the Program is in fact "a society in which scarcities remain, and highly centralized planning operates, where the planner's scale of preferences dominates and the national product is divided on lines determined by himself, and where contradictions persist,"* must be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to study the document with due care for its practical implications...
...What we have before us then is not simply a Party program in the ordinary sense of the term, but a document which formulates the manner in which the ruling political elite of the USSR views itself and wants to be viewed by others...
...If one suggests that Leninism is an offshoot of Populism, or at least that it possesses two ancestors: Marx and Chernyshevsky, one runs the risk of being accused of dealing in willful paradoxes...
...Whether he would have maintained this position had he lived to witness the startling efflorescence of Russian capitalism in the 1890s is a different question...
...Yet Chernyshevsky (together with Herzen) represents the intellectual core of Populist socialism (Narodnichestvo), which Leninism is alleged to have overcome (with some help from Plekhanov and earlier Russian Marxists who were not yet Leninists...
...To be a good Leninist one must be able to believe both statements to be true and balance them simultaneously inside one's head...
...Marx reacted against Hegel partly because he regarded this distinction as absurd and intolerable...
...It is therefore essential to inculcate certain moral attitudes and work disciplines which, broadly speaking, are the same in East and West, except that in the USSR they carry the label "Communist morality...
...One can then proceed to the further point of affirming that the next stage, namely the building of Communism in the USSR, is in conformity with determined necessity, while it also represents a great task now before the Party and the people...
...Communist morality encompasses the fundamental norms of human morality which the masses of the people evolved in the course of millenniums as they struggled against vice and social oppression...
...But then the entire document, from start to finish, is nothing but an elaborate attempt to side-step the Marxian distinction between the lower and the higher stages of Socialist society...
...There is no need here to go at length into the question of Marx's views on the prospects of Russian socialism, but since Chernyshevsky has been mentioned, it is worth quoting at least one locus classicus: Marx's letter to the editors of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski in November 1877...
...and practice of a successful revolution in a backward country which did evolve an alternative to capitalism...
...cit., pp...
...It may be argued that the ambiguous language of the Program does in some manner bridge the disparity between reality and ideology...
...Thus the entire SocialDemocratic tradition, which for half a century before I9I7 was associated with the teachings of Marx and Engels, is once more declared to be incompatible with Leninism, as indeed it is...
...The Program recognizes in an oblique fashion that Socialism has not yet been established in the USSR, and sketches its future outline, but does so in the guise of claiming to describe the classless and stateless Communist society of the future...
...What we have in fact is a prospectus for a state-controlled system, with a fast rate of growth and a planned economy...
...A proper textual analysis of the document would have to distinguish all these strata, relate what is genuinely operational to the actual policies of the Party leadership, draw the necessary distinctions between the general framework of Leninist philosophy and the specific elements of current Soviet theory and practice, and in addition, supply the kind of critical commentary that Marx appended to the Gotha Program of 1875...
...Even setting aside the fact that the promised welfare legislation is not very startling by Western standards, the mere fact that the central core of the document relates to the need for rapid economic growth under conditions of intensive rationalization and mechanization would be enough to discredit the claim that what we have here is a blueprint for a Communist society...
...for a singularly unconvincing apologia of the Program, cf...
...Within the confines of a scarcity economy, in which heavy industry continues to take precedence, this would raise serious practical problems even in an egalitarian community in which planners were free to disregard social stratification...
...The Draft Program has this to say about the rule of the Party: Unlike all preceding socio-economic formations, Communist society does not develop sporadically, but as a result of the conscious and purposeful efforts of the masses, led by the Marxist-Leninist Party...
...And the fact that Marx protested against Herzen's notion that (as he put it) "rotten old Europe should be regenerated by the victory of Pan-Slavism," and that this protest had appeared in print side by side with his appreciative reference to Chernyshevsky, only heightens the irony...
...But anyone who wants to relate the Draft Program to the much lengthier exposition of the Leninist philosophy in the 1960 Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism will inevitably discover that he is in the presence of a genuine world-view, not just a statement of aims...
...These included a certain precarious balance beween state and society, the state tending to represent the "citizen" as against the "bourgeois," to employ Marx's terminology...
...The least one can say is that if by 1981 substantial social cleavages still exist, there is going to be trouble for the surviving members of the drafting committee...
...The danger of forgetting this is vividly illustrated by those Western writings which somehow manage to treat Bolshevism in abstraction from the Russian Revolution...
...There will be a further strengthening of the monetary and credit system...
...As it happens, 1961 was the centenary of the emancipation decree which ended serfdom, but did not satisfy either the peasants or the radical intelligentsia...
...This disjunction between everyday reality as perceived by the individual and the higher rationality of the whole body politic, which only the ruling elite can interpret, has been the justification of every entrenched governing class since the days of the Egyptian priesthood...
...Prior to that Chernyshevsky had published an essay on Mill's economics which drew praise from Marx, in the preface to the second edition of Capital...
...The state, that is to say, represented the general will, together with the official morality of society, as against the selfish and immoral strivings of the individual...
...Thus the State is no longer an oppressor if it serves the ends of socialism, but becomes the institutional framework of a perfect democracy...
...Nonetheless, what is called Soviet Marxism—or in the official terminology "Marxism-Leninism"—is today essentially a national ideology...
...But there is no evidence that they are in fact capable of making such a distinction, except here and there in relation to facts of a lower order, such as the incidence of unemployment in the Western world...
...Furthermore, we read: "Socialism, the inevitability of which was scientifically foretold by Marx and Engels—Socialism the plan of which was drafted by Lenin, has become actual reality in the Soviet Union...
...Among historians of the Revolution this is common ground, but how much weight should one assign to it in an evaluation of a document published in 1961...
...The Communist party, which unites the foremost representatives of the working people and is closely connected with the masses, which enjoys unbounded authority among the people and understands the laws of social development, provides proper leadership in Communist construction as a whole, giving it an organized, planned and scientifically based character...
...That this is not an academic matter appears from the passage a little further on where we read: "It is therefore necessary to raise labor productivity in industry in ten years more than twice, and in twenty years by four or five times...
...The planners are doubtless content to operate their centralized and authoritarian system with a minimum of lip-service to such historic slogans as "to each according to his needs," as long as they decide what the needs are...
...it is comparable in this respect with French Republicanism or the "American Idea," which latter may be said to embody the universal idea of 18th-century liberalism within the specific American framework...
...At the political level the explanation clearly has to do with the need to associate the post-Stalin regime with something at least as grandiose as Stalin's own construction of "Socialism in one country...
...Still, the fact remains that it came off and that Leninism has now become the theory • Cited after the text in Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1956...
...It becomes dangerous only when the masses place their own naive interpretation upon the dogma by pressing for an egalitarian share—out of the limited supply of goods...
...At any rate that was how the matter was viewed in the authoritarian philosophy of Hegel, where the state is quite consistently treated as morally superior to the members of civil society...
...This is the extreme case, but there are other problematic claims, e.g., the forecast that all remaining differences between classes or between town and country are to disappear, and that the distinction between physical and intellectual labor (and therewith the status of the intelligentsia as a separate stratum) is to come to an end...
...The final judgment of the Draft Program must be that for all its employment of vulgarized Marxist terminology, it is essentially a statement of faith in an authoritarian brand of Socialism imposed upon the masses by a technocratic ruling stratum...
...The minimum of work that would still have to be performed under full Communism (as Marx understood it) would be done freely by individuals no longer subjected to "the enslaving division of labor...
...This is the proper starting point for considering the Program, since as an intellectual production it is held together and validated by precisely this claim...
...But there must come a point where the discrepancy between "Socialist" reality and "Communist" terminology becomes too glaring to be overlooked...
...To some extent this has already happened...
...This again is good old-fashioned Populism, but hardly in accordance with Marx's notion about history...
...For obvious reasons the fact that it is simply intended to complete this particular construction disappears behind a cloud of ambiguous language about "Communism"—the latter so interpreted as to leave the planners in control of a highly centralized scarcity economy, in which commodity production, cash remuneration, and economic differentials to promote efficiency, are to continue...
...This insistence that everything Marx and Engels said pointed in one direction only, namely that taken by Lenin, is central to the official ideology...
...In point of fact Soviet patriotism today is sustained, if not by Pan-Slavism, at any rate by the contrast between virtuous socialist Russia and "rotten old Europe," to which, of course, rotten America must now be added...
...The need for a central authority with coercive power disappears because the objective rationality of society is no longer in conflict with the individual needs and desires of its members...
...On the contrary, he thought Russia could very well reap all the fruits of modern economic progress "by developing the historical conditions specifically her own...
...an economically stationary society need have no definable scarcities once all "reasonable" wants are satisfied—economic rationality continues to express itself in a calculus of resources and allocations...
...Soviet Marxism is officially committed to the same aim, but its outlook is idealist and authoritarian, and its emphasis lies not on what people spontaneously want to do but on what the Party (which is of course identical with the State) considers good for them...
...The difficulty with such a characterization is that it credits the authors with the ability to distinguish between what is really going on and what is affirmed in official texts...
...As an ideology Soviet Marxism is precariously poised between the determinist notion that the October Revolution was "lawful" and inevitable, and the voluntarist idea that the Bolshevik vanguard, led by Lenin, broke away from the entire previous course of European history...
...And what if at some point the more doctrinaire and puritanical wing of the Party should get the upper hand and try to enforce a measure of egalitarianism upon the privileged stratum—which also happens to be the directing stratum —in the name of Communism...
...Yet it may also store up trouble for the future...
...VI...
...Since scarcities are to continue—and indeed probably cannot be removed under any system if economic growth is to take place, though * Cf...
...In this respect Lenin harks back to Populism, but of course it can be argued that by 1917 Populism was out of date, and that Marx himself would have counselled against an attempt to go back on the whole evolution of the preceding decades...
...The Program implicitly recognizes the difficulty of allowing for individual variations: The purpose of Communist production is stated to be "to provide all its members with material and cultural benefits according to their growing needs, their individual requirements and tastes...
...The quasi-theological character of this thinking comes out in that part of the document where Communist morality is first described as something that is spontaneously developing, and then converted into a set of normative rules delivered from on high...
...This may be a legitimate aim for a country which has chosen a non-capitalist way of modernizing itself, but it has little to do with what Marxists have traditionally called Communism...
...It may therefore be said to have stood Marx on his head, at any rate insofar as Marxism represented an attempt to transcend the dichotomy of individual choice and collective restraint...
...We are not told if that also covers Stalin's misdemeanors, but the general sense is clear enough: What is taking place in the USSR is not only desirable, but by a happy chance it also conforms to a necessary development...
...a party, moreover, which legitimizes itself by its superior insight into the laws of social development: laws—we are given to understand—that remain concealed from ordinary mortals...
...In any case he did not regard the capitalist form of evolution as the only possible one, and he made it quite clear in this interesting letter that, so far as Russia was concerned, he agreed with Chernyshevsky in holding that there was no need for the village community to disappear...
...In other words, the so-called building of Communism reduced itself in practice to the construction of a modern industrial economy which is to compete with the United States...
...however much Soviet Marxism may have been bowdlerized, one must not overlook the fact that the regime does create genuine difficulties for itself by propagating a doctrine which is inherently subversive of much that goes on in the Soviet Union...
...From a theoretical viewpoint the noteworthy thing about this awkward tension between actual circumstances and normative rules is that it reproduces the kind of dualism to which Marx was hostile and which it was his ultimate aim to overcome...
...Compared with modern capitalism, the chief difference is that the basic calculations are made by the planners, while the market—without disappearing—assumes a subordinate function...
...Leaving aside the clap-trap about the Party's close connection with the masses, the authoritarian tone of this pronouncement is enough to discredit it as a statement of the Marxist faith...
...Alfred Zaubermann, "Value, Price and Profit," Survey, London, October 1961, pp...
...In principle this was quite in accordance with Marx's view that European capitalism was historically unique and for the rest it was a question of fact...
...Next the authoritarian counterpoint: "The Party holds [our italics] that the moral code of the builder of Communism should [sic!] comprise the following principles," and there follows a long string of rather commonplace ethical precepts, including patriotism, honesty, and devotion to one's family (I), which no Rotarian could possibly take exception to...
...I must make it plain at the outset that I regard "Marxism-Leninism" as a misnomer, insofar as it treats Marx as a precursor of Lenin, and Leninism consequently as the realization of the "union of theory and practice...
...In fact, Marx was careful not to say anything about inevitable devel opments—on the contrary, he said Russia might or might not miss its chance—and the importance of Lenin resides precisely in the fact that he exploited a unique and fleeting opportunity...
...Certainly most Russian Marxists in 1917 were against Lenin and treated his coup d'etat as a utopian venture...
...Unfortunately the sentence immediately following runs: "The gradual development of Socialism into Communism is in objective conformity with a natural phenomenon—it was prepared by the whole previous development of Soviet Socialist society...
...in other words, a Socialist society in the precise sense of the term...
...The Party, in fact, decides what is or is not inevitable, and if it lays down an order of priorities, it does so in the light of its superior insight into what is or is not possible and/or desirable...
...The Draft Program is very precisely a Socialist document in the Marxian sense of the term, not a Communist one...
...The Program indeed makes no bones about it...
...Now, the "material-technical base of Communism" is simply another name for Socialism, bearing in mind the definition which Marx gives to these terms in the Critique of the Gotha Program, a definition which is, of course, canonical for Leninists...
...or perhaps a question of will...
...it is not Communism and never will be...
...To that extent the operation has a pragmatic character, in that it enables the leadership to formulate its actual policies in traditional language...
...On the contrary, the Program goes out of its way to affirm that "the experience of the USSR has shown that people can come to socialism only as a result of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...But since the entire Soviet world-view is based on the assertion that Leninism is the contemporary form of Marxism, it is necessary to begin from there, whatever one's own views...
...So here is a link between Marx and Lenin, which of course has always delighted all good Leninists...
...For obvious reasons this historical background has obliged the Soviet elite to undertake a tacit reevaluation of the Populist heritage...
...But of course the process works both ways: If Leninism retains Koranic status it does so only by relating itself constantly to the antecedent body of revealed truth communicated by Marx and Engels...
...This may be Socialism of sorts...
...In the following year Chernyshevsky was sent to prison, where he wrote What Is to Be Done?, a title that was to become doubly famous when Lenin cribbed it forty years later...
...But the Draft Program actually declares that this is to happen within the near future, which is rather a different matter from simply laying down a desideratum...
...Once the liberal thesis that capitalism represented the normal and inevitable form of progress had been rejected, it followed that new countries about to enter the modern age might experiment with new social forms...
...This equivocation runs through the entire document, starting with the opening paragraph of Part II, where "the gradual development of Socialism into Communism" is described as the task of the near future, only to be qualified a few pages further on, where we read: "The chief economic task of the Party and the Soviet people is to create the material-technical base of Communism within the course of two decades...
...III Of course, the real, i.e., non-ideological explanation is simple enough...
...They may, of course, put the blame elsewhere...
...But though the growth of welfare services supplied free of charge may help to obscure the fact that allocation "according to needs" is going to take place—even under what the Program calls full Communism— within a centrally planned system of scarcities, it is not possible to eliminate by a mere terminological quibble the disparity between the "needs" of the directing stratum and the "wants" of the working population...
...It says textually: It is necessary in the course of constructing Communism to make full use of commodity-money relations in keeping with their meaning in the period of Socialism...
...So here apparently is evidence that Marx was a good Leninist avant la lettre, but of course this conclusion imposes itself only because of the fact that on this particular issue he happened to be in agreement with Chernyshevsky, the apostle of Populism...
...54ff...
...The elaborate rigmarole about "Communist morality" in the Draftt Program is senseless in terms of Marx's description of Communism as a society in which the subordination of the individual to the division of labor—that is, to social constraint based on economic necessity—has come to an end...
...Follow the rather Rotarian precepts already mentioned...
...The ambiguous language of the Program, while it does not commit the Party to anything of the kind, does not rule out such ventures, however irrational they may appear from the viewpoint of the planners...
...It would seem that this confusion is another aspect of that cleavage between libertarian rhetoric and authoritarian practice which runs through the whole of Soviet society...
...For the convenience of the reader it may be added that many of the relevant doctrinal points are discussed at length in the October 1961 issue of the London quarterly, Survey, of which I have made use in what follows...
...This insight it owes to revelation...
...Lastly, "as Socialist and Communist construction progresses, Communist morality is enriched with new principles, a new content...
...This built-in contradiction between reality and appearance is politically harmless so long as it manifests itself only in the contrast between authoritarian regulation of the economic calculus and the intelligentsia's Platonic attachment to the young Marx's vision of a society which has left every form of "human self-estrangement" behind...
...The resulting tension should not be underrated...
...Maurice Dobb, Marxism Today, London, November 1961, pp...
...The gap between theory and practice would certainly be narrower, for example, if the Party were not committed to the idea that the State is going to wither away...
...or the Russian nation is not a nation like any other, but the bearer of a revelation of such inestimable value to the rest of mankind that minor misdemeanors, e.g., the annexation of foreign territories, must be regarded as the faux frais of world-historical progress...
...Since Communism had once been defined by Marx as a state of affairs in which the disjunction between individual wills and social needs has been overcome, it would appear that Soviet society still has a long way to go...
...The founder of Islam asserted that the Old Testament was a preparatory stage toward his own revelation...
...What this really amounts to, of course, is that modern industrial man—whether he staffs a chamber of commerce or a state-owned factory—must display a minimum of responsibility if the whole show is not to collapse...
...This passage, by the way, shows that Marx remained a good Hegelian to the end, and never became the kind of determinist he sometimes appears to be, especially when interpreted by Engels: If history offers genuine choices to peoples as well as individuals, and if Russia in 1877 could be said to be in danger of missing a historic opportunity, namely that of skipping the capitalist stage of development, it would seem that Marx reserved a much larger place to free will than is commonly supposed...
...much as in the West the disingenuous twaddle about "people's capitalism" is genially tolerated by the real controllers of the system...
...To that extent one has to qualify the earlier statement that the prime significance of the Program is propagandist...
Vol. 9 • July 1962 • No. 3
