THE SECOND COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
Lens, Sidney
The Second Communist Revolution by SIDNEY LENS Warsaw [AMERICAN public opinion con-f* tinues to resist any significant icceptance of the notion that the iridespread convulsions in the Com-nunist...
...A saleslady's job, under these circumstances, can be such a boon that black marketeers often buy such jobs from store managers for $400 to $1,600 apiece, and place their own underlings in those berths...
...But life has a way of widening rifts beyond their original dimensions...
...The tenants in a building arrange their own bank credit to repair their building and set policy on the use of apartments...
...Investments this year will be only 18 per cent of the national product, instead of the back-breaking 30 to 40 per cent that once prevailed...
...The rest is a hidden "turnover" tax which gives the state the money for investment...
...Each state factory sets its own price, advertises its products, hires salesmen to push them, and determines what it shall make and what it shall discontinue...
...The Poles call the October events a "revolution...
...What is going on in the Communist world is certainly not a "trick" to fool the West into "being soft on Communism...
...And why did Khrushchev release so many slave laborers in the first place...
...People are no longer afraid they will be jailed for speaking...
...Neither the system in Yugoslavia nor the one in Poland measures up to the standards of democracy we in America take for granted—150 years after our own national revolution...
...Why is Stalinism changing...
...The Titoists are developing a form of Communism that radically differs from previous forms, in my judgment...
...I asked that question of leaders of the United Workers (Communist) Party in Poland...
...each day it becomes more difficult to turn back...
...today it is two and one-half times as much as pre-war...
...Ordinarily he would be happy to bring his grain to market, sell it, and buy consumer goods in turn...
...In no place in the world is it possible to do so as thoroughly as in Poland today...
...To see all this as part of a great complex process, it is perhaps necessary to reconstruct the picture of Stalinism in its most graphic details...
...at the lower- levels, in the factories and on the farms, among the students and the intelligentsia, there are rumblings even hard-headed Communists can understand and must respond to...
...Most slave camps, it is admitted by Western observers, are now closed...
...It watches them relentlessly and it creates an atmosphere of terror to dissuade people from either stealing "state property" or politically combating the whole system of consumer shortages and false planning...
...On the contrary, the more monolithic it became the more inner-hostility it engendered...
...It is no exaggeration to say that under a system of Stalinism the regime is hysterically afraid of its own people...
...But because the state is short of consumer goods, and because in the normal course of events the peasant would hold back a part of his produce for a better day if he can't buy what he needs, the state must force the peasant to give up his produce...
...Pressure from down below was clearly a factor in the recent shakeup in the mother country...
...the state again just couldn't "spare" enough moai| for maintenance...
...Writers began to speak j'SUtle more irreverently...
...The Yugoslav economic model is based essentially on the free market and competition...
...I sat in at workers councils meetings in Belgrade where they were considering —on their own, without central state direction—merger with other enterprises...
...The Catholic Church, they concede, was able to recruit thousands of young people away from Communism because the Party failed to give these young men and women a true ideal, and the church was the only place where one could stand in opposition ^Hp|P^ of persons either refuse HSRheir talents for the state or HpPt diem...
...They know that it was a miracle for them that Hungary didn't bring the whole house toppling down...
...It could benefit greatly from the free market-competition philosophy of the Yugoslavs...
...The workers councils pass on hirings and firings, handle grievances with the unions, and set wages, prices, and all trade policies...
...In the bureaucracy it ¦pgrlfen to fifty times as long to get things done because no one wants to exercising his own initiative...
...Now a wing of the Socialist Party was mechanically- forced to merge into the Communist Party, the Peasants Party and the Democratic Party were emasculated, and other forces were simply put out of existence...
...This happened last year when the state imported textiles in order to force its own factories to reduce prices and improve quality...
...4—Destruction of personal initiative...
...for here—though Stalinism is dying—its remnants are still woven into the political and social fabric...
...If it earns money it divides a good portion of the profit among the workers (usually between one and six months additional pay), or builds houses and other facilities...
...What I have tried to indicate is that, with many zigs and zags, it is being transformed...
...Representatives of the teachers, parents, students, and local government manage the operation of each school...
...2—A consequently far too small amount of consumer goods for the people...
...If a new director is needed, the factory advertises for candidates and together with the people's committee in the local area selects one...
...The downgrading of the secret police has resulted in the slow unwinding of the taut, monolithic monstrosity that Stalin built over thirty years...
...The weakening of the secret police is loosening forces within Communist society (and especially within the Communist Parties) that must eventually reverse the Stalinist trend...
...finally the Poznan riots occurred in June 1956, and later the October demonstrations and meetings brought Gomulka and his friends back to power...
...Salespeople have rackets with black marketeers whereby they sell these men choice articles to be resold just outside the store or sometimes in the store itself for two to five times the price...
...But the direction of Communist development has changed...
...The worker therefore pays perhaps five times the real value of the cloth in order to finance new industry...
...Where yesterday the state discouraged private artisans, they are now being encouraged to set up small plants...
...No one can predict the exact dynamics of future changes in the Communist orbit, but there is no doubt in my mind that in large measure progressive leadership will come from sections within the Communist Party itself...
...From 1950 to 1953, Poland lived through a period of intense police repression and severe shortages...
...Nothing stands out so glaringly: no one in Stalinist Poland seemed to care one whit about the state or its interests or its property...
...Yugoslavia, on the other hand, has less free speech than Poland...
...That development, I think, must be viewed not through mechanical parallels, but as part of a historical process...
...They are only in a stage of infancy...
...The new architects of Polish economy are striving to instill confidence and re-establish initiative...
...Small" incidents sometimes camouflage great historical turning points...
...When an enterprise has a virtual monopoly and boosts prices, the state "competes" against its own factories by importing goods...
...All that is true, and one must be wary of making absolute predictions...
...But there are also Belgrade and Peking...
...One of the factors leading to Khrushchev's famous speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in February, 1956, they claim, was the release of millions of people held in "corrective" labor camps...
...It involves not only <dil ferences at the top but deep struggle...
...at the bottom...
...If a factory loses money the bank has a right to intervene and cut wages down to 60 per cent of normal...
...no one, in turn, was willing to work freely and fully for the state...
...A yard of goods which costs 80 zloty to produce is sold for 500 to 600 on the market...
...Others, who have seen so many of their hopes [shattered over the years, shy away pom optimistic appraisal lest this be another false-alarm...
...In 1948, coincident with the Gold War, Stalin tightened the screws...
...The conflict is much broader than that...
...Young students early in 1955 jwe already talking about "Soviet Imperialism...
...The forces for change, however, have been unleashed...
...I might say that not once in a Communist country did I meet anyone who wanted to put basic industry back into private hands...
...And the people's committee in each local area has rights and powers that do not exist anywhere else in the Communist world...
...Stalinism presented to the world a facade of monolithic action but it could never establish monolithic thought...
...The Stalinist economic system— which was the underpinning for the secret police system—was one of permanent under-production...
...Police no longer arrest as recklessly as they did, and they are forbidden to keep anyone for more than three days without trial...
...3—Enlargement of the secret police to control the disaffected people...
...The director pf a factory merely carries |pt orders set by the state plan...
...To stimulate private initiative the state is partly decentralizing investment...
...Some of them have a religious passion for bringing consumer goods to the market...
...Even the houses and apartments that do exist have a short life expectancy...
...The leaders of world Communism re learning at last that they cannot ffectively build an industrial society "th a terrified populace, that a meas-re of freedom is an essential in-redient in economic development, for are they learning this from text-PPt*1...
...And in weakening the secret police they had not only to cut down the untrammeled right of arrest but to emasculate its slave labor empire as well...
...These have been the greatest changes in Russian society in the last few years...
...promulgated his so-called democratic constitution, only to drown a whole generation of old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Zinoviev in their own blood shortly afterward...
...Even more significant, the Communist world itself is splitting up...
...Here, I feel, is the basic underpinning for a new era of world Communism...
...They think of it as part of a broad process of breaking away completely from Stalinism...
...Because of this we tend to underrate their importance...
...they are part of a lual and decisive process going on lot only at the top of the social at-nosphere, but at the bottom, among he people, as well...
...Their view of the situation is worth recording...
...Everyone who travels in the Soviet sphere knows that the people at the grass roots are beginning to fight back...
...From these two sources the demand for legality reached a high pitch in the inner-party circles...
...In addition Poland is relieved of paying many millions of dollars to Russia and has arranged for $500 million in credits from Russia, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and others...
...The collective elects a workers council and the council in turn a management committee which make factory policy for the director...
...Khrushchev and his associates had to weaken the secret police if they were to stay at the helm...
...But sitting in this Polish capital thousands of miles away from Main Street, one gets the feeling that history has reached a turning-point in pis part of the world...
...With the decline of the secret police in Russia, that process goes on even within Russia itself...
...His articles have appeared in Harper's, the Yale Review, Liberation, and the Bulletin of the Harvard School of Business Administration...
...Since October there has been some semblance of legal standards in Poland...
...The pro-louncements of Nikita Khrushchev Wi decentralization, the exhortations 9y Mao Tse-tung on the need for a hundred flowers to bloom, the pro-of democratization in Poland, md the development of the new eco-»omic model in Yugoslavia—from iere, all these add to more than snpty gestures...
...The Polish economy, in my opinion, is too rigid...
...Even before Gomulka was released, ffessures inside the ranks began to JOount...
...The important consideration, however, is that these two societies are definitely in motion—away from Stalinism...
...Workers councils in some 300 factories are now conducting experiments on the best means of freeing worker initiative...
...What does seem to be significant, however, is that decline of the secret police and emphasis on consumer goods always go together...
...Peasants have been permitted to leave collectives (most collectives are now liquidated), and the hated forced delivery of grain will end this year...
...In the same year Wladyslaw Gomulka promised the peasants they would not be collectivized and proposed a Titoist program...
...As for the worker, from the moment he rises in the morning until he goes to sleep at night he is plagued by shortages, high prices, and inferior quality of goods...
...From 1945 to 1948 there were still opposition parties functioning in Poland...
...It was a shot that ended a whole epoch...
...Few persons are permitted to make decisions, and few want permission...
...The state trusted no one...
...In the scramble for power after Stalin's death the leaders of the Party could reach a modus vivendi with one another only if they checked the power of the secret police which stood over them...
...But they never mentioned the price that people have had to pay for this increase—in the under-production of consumer goods, desperately low living standards, and shortages in virtually every phase of living...
...In Poland this process of Stalin-ization—despite the presence of Soviet troops—required half a decade...
...A The decline in moral standards i$ evident everywhere...
...Communism, I am convinced after weeks of examining it close-up, is in the first stages of its second revolution...
...Something is happening in the Red orbit—at various tempos in various places, with small zigs and zags as it proceeds, but something definite...
...It makes investments on its own, merges and dissolves enterprises, in agreement with workers councils, and supervises not only the political life of the area but its economic life as well, with little accountability to the central government...
...It is now beginning to reap the full fruit of that monolithic cast and inner-hostility...
...the demand for reform is persistent and widespread...
...Youth in particular—the generation upon which Stalinism staked its future—is using a hundred and one little tricks to show its disaffection...
...The tide began to turn in 1954...
...The answer here too is not mysterious but grounded in genuine social pressures...
...From now on each enterprise will be permitted to invest 25 per cent of the total on its own, without state direction...
...x This, then, was the system of Stalin-4sm in its worst form, a combination of four facets: 1—A far too great investment of ^capital for industrialization...
...A family with more than one room is doing better than average, and most families in Poland must share kitchen and toilet facilities with three other families...
...This is true lespite the criminal intervention of pe Soviets against the Hungarian Beople last year and other acts which ttigress from the new trend...
...To cut himself off from the Stalinist "bad" road, Tito embarked on one which is far more free of police reprisals (though not fully democratic by any means), and which is far more concerned with providing the people with consumer goods and with releasing their energy and initiative...
...We will really revive personal initiative," one of them told me, "only when people know they can buy what they want in our stores...
...and periodically that inner-hostility spilled over into small or large acts against the state itself...
...I don't know whether these plans will succeed...
...They have a long way to go to win out, but it would be folly to think of their efforts as minor struggles among brothers...
...They have not achieved their final form...
...Soviet po-wk domination created its own re-EM& people were disgusted with having to learn Russian in school, listen to an allotted quota of Russian music, study Polish history through Russian eyes, to repeat rote-like that Russians were responsible for almost all inventions...
...An American labor official who specializes in foreign affairs, Mr...
...Since Gomulka attained power last October there has been a move to improve housing ;jminas nance, but until then no one in the thority seemed to care...
...Officially the Khrushchev line continues to prattle that "imperialist agents" were responsible for the Hungarian Revolution, but the men of the Kremlin, and their counterparts in the Communist orbit, have learned something from East Berlin, Vorkuta, Poznan, and Budapest...
...The bureaucracy itself has been greatly reduced, not only in the League of Communists, but in the secret police and all ministries...
...The stories these people brought back and the pressures they generated inevitably made an impact on the men of the Kremlin...
...men who were responsible for running big enterprises insisted they had to be assured of legal safeguards...
...Tito developed the ideological concept which now harasses Moscow unmercifully: that there are good and bad roads to socialism...
...It is significant that one of Gomulka's first acts was to liquidate the hated secret police, the UB...
...Housing conditions are equally bad, perhaps worse...
...The state momentarily is trying to encourage private enterprise on the land so as to regain the peasant's confidence...
...At its height, in its worst and final form, Stalinism represented not only a dictatorship of the Party over the people, but of a few key leaders over the Party, and, above all, of the secret police over these few leaders...
...In Yugoslavia, anti-Stalinist Communism developed earlier...
...Under such a system the first victim of these shortages is the peasant...
...If despite all this the Communist countries can now show factories and steel mills where once there were only barren fields, it does so at a staggering cost in human suffering and waste...
...There is Moscow, of course...
...I hope that nothing I have said here implies that I think Communism has now been transformed into democratic socialism or democracy, even in Yugoslavia or Poland...
...The Communists who want more consumer goods are currently on the offensive...
...No man or array of men can perform tricks with such imposing forces—particularly after countercur-rents to the main trend have been released on so wide a front...
...There are now three Communist centers instead of one...
...There are a billion1 people and a whole historical process involved...
...The result is thai all the cities are becoming slums...
...Perhaps, in fact, it was...
...Workers, tired of scrounging for their daily bread, steal small items from their factories and sell them...
...Store managers work the racket themselves...
...In every city I visited in Poland there was not enough transport to take workers to their jobs...
...tens is the author of "Left, Right, and Center," "The Counterfeit Revolution," end "A World in Revolution...
...Thousands of little items like needles, nails, toilet articles, kitchen utensils, and tableware were all in short supply or unavailable except in the gray and black markets...
...The character of Yugoslav decentralization can perhaps best be appreciated by the fact that the biggest share of taxes goes to local authorities...
...Life is so drab, in fact, that per capita consumption of vodka is rising sharply...
...Textiles were short in every Communist country I toured...
...One can look back on the past and say that in 1936 too there was a supposed relaxation, that Stalin then SIDNEY tENS is now completing an extensive journey through Central Europe...
...Each factory is organized as a "collective" and works—just as in capitalist countries—to make a profit...
...The Second Communist Revolution by SIDNEY LENS Warsaw [AMERICAN public opinion con-f* tinues to resist any significant icceptance of the notion that the iridespread convulsions in the Com-nunist world represent the beginning if decisive change...
...Instead the changes are taking place in spurts and spasms, and in large measure are initiated by Communists themselves—both at the top and bottom...
...It is even urging him to buy land, and above all to buy bricks and building materials for homes...
...They also invest funds in housing, expansion of plant facilities, and new equipment...
...Directors of factories make deals with other factory directors to exchange merchandise with each other—for personal use...
...Instead of Communist leaders in Belgrade making all decisions, each school or apartment house or city or village is supposed to "manage itself...
...They could not operate with the shadow of prison constantly over their heads if they made mistakes, or with the constant interference of the secret police in economic matters they knew nothing about...
...he COuld not alter the plan without fear-iJplly long delays...
...Parallel to the changes in Russia after the Beria execution, the Polish Communists weakened the hold of the secret police, and then step by step the youth, students, and intellectuals began to speak up...
...Back in 1948 the struggle between Stalin and Tito seemed like a mere misunderstanding between brothers...
...Neither country has established full legal safeguards for its people...
...This development coincided with rumblings within the Communist bureaucracy...
...For these "crimes" he was removed from the Party leadership and imprisoned for four years...
...The impressive statistics produced by the Stalinist theoreticians always spoke of enormous increases in the production of steel and other ingredients of heavy industry...
...All accepted the central tenets of socialism, but opposed Stalinist "socialism...
...Each has basic weaknesses...
...They may not organize opposition factions or write completely as they please, but the decline of fear is a great departure from the past...
...They call it "self-management...
...Another by-product of the system, and probably its hallmark, has been the destruction of personal initiative...
...If it has not yet attained greater results in countries like Poland, Yugoslavia, or China, it is only because they must mark time until the process matures further in the heartland of Communism...
...Left wing (liberal) Communists freely admit this today...
...Some, like the Editors of Time, routinely regard all levelopments behind the Iron Curtain as mere "tricks" by wily Red Strategists designed to deceive the predulous and unwary...
...Future students of Communism will conclude, I am convinced, that the shot that killed Beria, in the struggle for power after Stalin died, was such a turning point...
...That revolution is not coming all at once nor in the form that many people hoped it might—a complete overthrow of the old regime and a substitution of a democratic society...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
