The Meaning of the New Soviet Manifesto
Lens, Sidney
The Meaning of the New Soviet Manifesto by SIDNEY LENS REACTION IN THE United States to the recent draft program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union brings to mind the story of the...
...What the program says, if one disregards its genuflections to past dogma, is this: Russia is now a "have" nation and hopes within twenty years to become the strongest economic force in the world that will offer its citizens higher living and cultural standards than those of the United States...
...There is certainly plenty that is wrong with capitalism, and perhaps it would be healthier if our unions and our employers were less chummy...
...In the end it will probably be as different from the Communism under Stalin as French capitalism today is different from that of Louis Phillipe or the second Bonaparte...
...Weighed coolly, this is a manifesto of moderation, not bellicosity...
...Now, says Khrushchev, a new type of "popular front" can "defeat the reactionary, antipopular forces, win a solid majority in parliament, [and] transform it from a tool serving the class interests of the bourgeoisie into an instrument serving the working people...
...Just as an American politician may swear by "Jeffersonian democracy" even as he torpedoes it, so every Soviet politician pays his respects to "Marxist-Leninism" even as he reshapes much of its theory...
...SIDNEY LENS is a Chicago labor leader who has traveled throughout the world and written widely on foreign affairs for a number of publications, including the Yale Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and Liberation...
...Now, Khrushchev insists, war can be banished "from the life of society even before the complete victory of socialism on earth, with capitalism surviving in a part of the world...
...He pays the routine obeisance to Marx and Lenin—omitting, significantly, even a single mention of Stalin—so that if one reads the document hastily he can conclude that there is "nothing new" here...
...For all of the proposed changes are in the direction of liberalism rather than tightened centralism...
...But what is significant, I feel, is the direction of Communist development...
...Russia is no longer isolated or invaded...
...Look," he said, "I'm not a Communist, I'm an anti-Communist...
...The first result was the downgrading of the secret police...
...Even further, the Soviet leader stated, "there will arise in certain countries a situation in which it will be preferable for the bourgeoisie . . . to agree to the means of production being purchased from it and for the proletariat to 'pay off the bourgeoisie...
...Socialism will inevitably succeed capitalism everywhere...
...There is a strong implication that in the future there will be a number of candidates for each post (as there are now in Yugoslavia), and leading officials will not be permitted—except in "special" cases—to serve more than three terms...
...The anti-war and antimonopoly forces in each country— workers, peasants, middle-class elements, and small businessmen—are now so strong they can prevent their capitalist governments from initiating thermonuclear war...
...It is no accident that Stalin's name is never mentioned in the document, for it is precisely the tensions and tribulations under his regime that Khrushchev wants to avoid...
...Russians are still unhappy on many counts, but they are no longer afraid of being sent off to slave labor camps or arrested in the dark of night...
...Yet it would be folly to judge the draft program by its empty repetition of old slogans...
...The Soviet Union is now rapidly becoming a "have" nation...
...It would be difficult to conceive of a more self-defeating course than for us to go on with our diet of soothing syrup- in a world exploding with change...
...Clearly the critique of the present capitalist system presented by Khrushchev is grossly distorted...
...One can argue, therefore, that the present relaxations will not even put the Communist Party back to the levels of dissent it enjoyed prior to Stalin's total victory in the 1920's...
...The second program, forty-two years later, was presented recently in an entirely different atmosphere...
...Even if the program is not realized completely, the prospect is enormously heartening to the average Soviet family which has waited for four decades for a modest standard of living...
...This is a symbolic dream of a nation entering the fraternity of "haves...
...The entire draft program is in effect an ideological blast at Chinese Communism...
...Speaking to the Communist International that year, Lenin said: "We do not seek an agreement with the bourgeoisie, we are going into the last, decisive fight with it...
...For some of us this may seem an insignificant gain, since it certainly does not begin to represent democracy or freedom...
...By 1980 the nation will be producing 250 million tons of steel—two and a half times the present American level and almost twice our present capacity...
...Such self-delusion doubtless provides solace for those who are afraid to evaluate the achievements of the Soviet Union, but it does nothing to strengthen our own position or prepare us to meet the challenge of Communist expansion...
...The area of decision is widening and the members of the presidium and central committee now have some actual power in the "collective leadership...
...If Khrushchev singles out Yugoslav "revisionism" as the main enemy of the moment and dogmatism as the potentially equal enemy tomorrow, it is only to cover his tracks and carry some of the conservatives along with him...
...Arrests are now by Warrant and there is considerable respect for orderly prosecution...
...This hardly sustains the thesis of "growing contradictions...
...Emphasis added...
...They are loathe to grant full freedom of speech, assembly, or any of the other concepts now being discussed by revisionists in Poland or Yugoslavia, because that might seriously weaken their position...
...The Soviet leaders are afraid of an uncontrolled move towards liberal ideas...
...Within the next two decades, as Russian society becomes ever more affluent, we may even see the institutionalization of dissent—the right of basic criticism in the press, the formation of factions within the Communist Party, unions, and Soviets...
...The Meaning of the New Soviet Manifesto by SIDNEY LENS REACTION IN THE United States to the recent draft program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union brings to mind the story of the chap watching a Communist demonstration in New York's Union Square...
...There is also China, aggressively trying to continue "hard Cbmmunism...
...Past doctrine held that capitalism would die a bloody death in a wave of violent revolution...
...and unprecedented growth of political reaction in all spheres, rejection of bourgeois freedoms, and establishment of Fascist and despotic regimes in a number of countries...
...It was surrounded and invaded on many fronts...
...The latter continues to adhere to the theme that war is inevitable and revolution necessarily violent...
...Under the previous Leninist doctrine war was said to be inevitable so long as capitalism existed...
...Russia is passing the hump into the society of "haves...
...Secret police no longer conduct trials in absentia, as they did in Stalin's day...
...Concepts such as these, of course, make the draft programs seem wildly unrealistic...
...Even more, there is a "mounting struggle between labor and capital...
...The New York Times' expert, Harry Schwartz, noted that the document departed "in some significant measure from a policy favoring consumers...
...And they add as an important footnote the fact that the opposite evil, "dogmatism and sectarianism," must be "steadfastly combated" because it "can also become the chief danger at a particular stage in the development of individual parties...
...It was not written, however, for an American capitalist audience, but for Soviet Communists who have been nursed on a specific dogma for forty-four years...
...If much of this is hidden, it is .only because the draft program drips with the religiosity of Communism...
...And as for "Fascist and despotic" regimes, none has been established in any of the advanced capitalist countries...
...There have been no purge trials since 1953, although the power of many of Khrushchev's opponents—Molotov, Malenkov, Zhukov—has been severely curtailed...
...Behind the facade of bombast and tired rhetoric Khrushchev is in effect telling the world: "We are tired of wars, violent revolutions, upheavals, anu turmoil...
...The draft program seems to signify that these gains will not only be kept but that more will follow...
...It punctuates the new direction of Soviet life which began five or six years ago and promises now to continue indefinitely into the future...
...And like all "have" nations it wants to avoid war—if only to enjoy its largesse of convertibles and new apartments...
...But the Russian Revolution, like all revolutions, has reached a point of stability...
...It was weak, starving, isolated...
...Khrushchev promises him that the "real income per head of population will increase by more than 250 per cent in twenty years...
...Khrushchev moves therefore with a certain degree of caution...
...Even Khrushchev's denunciation of "revisionism" as the "main enemy," and Yugoslavia as the main offender, must be taken with a grain of salt...
...But the program calls for national referenda on major legislative issues...
...Workers once imprisoned for being frequently absent from work or late, and plant managers who were sometimes jailed for wrong economic decisions, are now treated much as they would be in Western capitalist countries—by being discharged...
...Communism must come: just as chattel slavery replaced primitive Communism, and feudalism chattel slavery, and capitalism feudalism, so socialism must inevitably "bury" capitalism...
...It is no accident either that only eleven words are spent on China, with its 650 million people and its potentially pivotal role in world affairs...
...We seem always to be searching for the negative, and to underrate or ignore the positive...
...Thus, in unions half the leadership is to be replaced each election, and in the Communist Party's central committee one-quarter each election...
...an acute intensification of contradictions within the world capitalist economy...
...To the Russian who for thirty years has lived with his entire family in a single room—and this included a majority of the population—the world of 1980 must loom as paradise...
...While revising standard Leninism themselves, therefore, they attack revisionism as the "main enemy" in order to control its pace...
...The capitalist world, we are told, is no longer able to "cope with the growing forces of democracy and socialism...
...Last year in Moscow I saw a movie showing a beautiful girl being driven in a convertible car from one Soviet area to another...
...In the future, as in the past, there will be only one party in Russia, and it will tolerate no "manifestations of factionalism and group activity incompatible with MarxistLeninist party principles...
...Cynics may argue that this is a long way from political democracy —and that is certainly true...
...To Senator Gore it may seem "ugly" and to our State Department experts it may be just a "rehash," but a sober reading of the document reveals the outlines of significant change in Soviet thinking and the emergence of concepts that magnify the challenge with which the West is confronted in the worldwide competition of ideas and ideologies...
...The first program of the Soviet Communist Party was written in 1919, two years after the revolution...
...She is producing seventy million tons of steel a year, has a gross national product of i>250 billion, and is now the second most important industrial nation on earth...
...This may conflict with the American image of Communism, as a permanent totalitarian system...
...It is even distant from the lively factionalism that existed in the Bolshevik Party at the time the first program was written in 1919...
...Whereupon the policeman hit him over the head with his billy and shouted: "I don't give a damn what kind of a Communist you are...
...Russia had lost ten million men in war...
...his rent, electricity, transportation, gas, medical, educational, and cultural facilities are all to be free...
...the Chinese become the custodians of Communist orthodoxy...
...One-third of mankind lives under the hammer and sickle, while hundreds of millions more are in neutralist lands...
...One of the magnetic features of Communist ideology has been its claim of inevitability...
...The Soviet program, only the second to be drafted since Bolshevism came to power in 1917, abounds in dreary cliches, dull diatribes, and wordy repetitions of previous themes...
...The criticism is made not to obviate revisionism as such but to slow its tempo...
...There are still many Russian leaders who long for the "good old days" of Stalinism when the state ordered and the individual obeyed or found himself in a labor camp...
...The present seven-year plan contemplates twenty-two million dwelling units, enough to shelter one-quarter to onethird of the population...
...But for a harassed generation accustomed to Stalin's terror it is a new world...
...With the loosening of political controls there has been a sizable increase in the satisfaction of consumer needs, particularly in housing...
...After forty-four years the Soviet citizen can see on the horizon an accelerated improvement in his living standards...
...The Russians formulate a "soft" Communism, revising basic theorems of the past...
...It is equally true that despite the loss of so many colonies, most Western nations are more prosperous and more stable than ever before...
...We are now entering a period of plenty and we would like to be left in peace to enjoy it...
...Khrushchev, therefore, reassures them that the evil system of capitalism is dying and the liberating force of socialism is triumphant...
...As in all Communist documents, the kernel of this one is not in the verbose and standardized analyses but in a few choice phrases on war and revolution...
...But it is nevertheless true that the struggle between, labor and capital is abating in most capitalist countries, rather than mounting...
...But Communism, like capitalism, is capable of evolutionary change...
...Though it condemns "revisionism," it represents the most significant revision of Leninist doctrine in Soviet history...
...China is still a have-not nation struggling to achieve viability...
...Most of its industrial plant had been destroyed...
...Step by step the reins have been relaxed— since the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956 where Khrushchev and Mikoyan roundly denounced many of Stalin's more flagrant crimes...
...The new program, therefore, while containing most of the shibboleths of the past, is essentially a reformist rather than a revolutionary document...
...the capitalist world is shrinking...
...There is to be a constant turnover of leading personnel in all bodies...
...Yet there is an important message in the draft program...
...Senator Albert Gore, Tennessee Democrat, labeled the draft "ugly," and an unnamed State Department official deduced from it that "their problems appear to be more serious than was previously imagined...
...In another day such concepts would have been characterized as bordering on "social democracy" and their enunciators denounced as "traitors to the working class...
...Its words then bore the fiery tones of a have-not nation bent on revolutionary change...
...The ideological difference between these two Communist countries is rooted in their divergent economic circumstance...
...Most of the document is aimed at attempting to buttress this doctrine of inevitability...
...Capitalism has been so drastically weakened by the growth of Communism that it can be expected now to fall without violent revolution but rather by parliamentary means...
...The basis is being laid for an affluent society— and affluence, whether in a capitalist or Communist system, tends to make people grow less radical...
...Under such conditions, the Soviet Union need no longer rely on Stalinist terror, but can relax controls and introduce a few democratic safeguards...
...His housing problems, he has been told, will be solved...
...As the police descended on the crowd, the bystander turned to the officer approaching him...
...Comments on the new Soviet manifesto reflect this general attitude...
...This is, whether we like it or not, a type of Communism different from that of Stalin's day—and every Soviet citizen knows it...
...The first part speaks of the victory of socialism over capitalism: "The socialist world is expanding...
...As a condition for admission to the Communist International formed the same year, foreign radical parties had to agree that "the class struggle in almost every country of Europe and America is entering the phase of civil war," that "without a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism no international arbitration, no talk of disarmament, no democratic reorganization of the League of Nations will be capable of saving mankind from new imperialist wars...
...It is no secret that in almost every Communist party today there is a Khrushchev "liberal" wing and a Mao-ist "dogmatic" one...
...There has slowly evolved an increasing structure of legality...
...To dismiss the Communist program as cavalierly as the American press has done is to sleep through history...
...A tragic result of the sterile antiCommunism that has evolved these last fifteen years is that we seem incapable of measuring change in the Communist world...
Vol. 25 • October 1961 • No. 10
