Upheaval In The East

...Over the decades, the Soviet people have made a huge contribution to improving the balance of world forces...

...The recent demonstrations in China have been directed at similar phenomena: sons of high party officials flourishing in private business because of their contacts...

...A visitor can't fail to be assailed, indeed bewildered, by a host of contradictory sensations...

...Derelicts, homeless, and beggars are not to be seen...

...Yeltsin's criticism of the special shops reserved for Party officials are an important factor in his popularity...

...Today's post-capitalist states have now reached a similar watershed...

...Though Trotsky liked to describe the Soviet Union as a bureaucratized "workers' state," this designation has generally fallen out of use in recent decades...

...He was warned by the police to desist from "provocation" and dismissed from his job as concierge in an apartment block...

...When I retured to Moscow in November 1988, however, I found quite a different climate...

...The rank-and-file members have no control over the apparatus, though they do constitute a sort of mute constraint on the projects and power of the Party chiefs: To achieve anything, even simply to keep the system going, the latter need to enlist the cooperation, if not the enthusiasm, of the former...

...Likewise, the planners can plan only to the extent that they can motivate and mobilize the producers...

...However, even if some versions of centralized planning can be shown to work better than the authoritarian forms of market socialism, some basic problems remain to be solved: how to attain a socialist economy in which the market mechanism itself is subject to social regulation, how to devise an institutional mechanism for consumer representation, and how to provide appropriate opportunities for worker self-management...

...The Soviet worker can acquire a color television set but may find that the supply of toothpaste has suddenly run out...

...Gorbachev has declared that we live in one world and that the day of "closed societies" and Cold War stereotypes is past...

...it did mean that Party leaders were able to rule the society thanks to the obedience and commitment of the cadres and the mass Party membership...

...The Soviet Communist Party, like other ruling parties, has always tried to ensure that it had a worker membership, using it to monitor the managers and to mobilize fellow workers...

...Bethell's puzzlement at the labels reminds us that the historic values and objectives of the Left are being reinvented in the East as new social forces try to break out of the impasse of state-socialist stagnation and market Stalinism...

...But it is simply unrealistic to suppose that popular support for internationalism can be sustained if the only rewards offered are continuing privation and Stalinist regimentation...

...When Lord Bethell, a Conservative peer and veteran Cold Warrior, recently reported from Moscow on his meetings with members of the Popular Front, he said they were "radical reformers who call themselves 'progressives' or 'the Left.' " He added, "Their main battle will then be against those they call, confusingly, the 'conservatives' or 'the Right,' who believe that perestroika has gone too far...

...During the period from the 1920s through the 1940s, the poor performance of capitalism and the threats it mounted The West will come under new pressure as the more daring experiments in socialist democracy show up the hollow pretensions of the Free World...

...But I believe they will swiftly encounter a vigorous, popular, and sophisticated anti-capitalism...

...Enterprises, ministries, public institutions determine priorities...

...Even now, almost three-quarters of a century after the Russian Revolution, a Western leftist cannot travel The radicalization of the Gorbachev regime dates from the Chernobyl disaster...

...Soviet management can offer certain crude incentives, but these are not calculated to produce continuous or high-quality performance, so management and work force may conspire to misinform the central planners by concealing the true capacity of their plant...

...Though full-time Party officials—the apparatus—are widely unpopular, this is not generally the case with rank-and-file Party members in the workplaces, who tend to be seen as repositories of whatever idealism the Party can still muster...

...Local managers and Party chiefs find ways of feathering their own nests and doing favors for friends and relations...

...The chauffeur-driven car is both a common and a wasteful perquisite, but it is not accompanied by the display of conspicuous luxury that can be seen any day in Manhattan, or in London's West End, or in the choicer suburbs of the West...

...The case of Poland in 1980-1981 is somewhat different...

...I do not believe that anything can save the old Stalinist model of the bureaucratized "workers' state," but I feel reasonably confident that its unceremonious departure will, sooner rather than later, bring us closer to a viable socialist democracy and a replenished internationalism...

...Shortly before election day, Kagarlitsky—along with a spectrum of speakers ranging from "liberal communists" to radical New Leftists—addressed a meeting attended by 35,000 citizens...

...To ward off the prospect of stagnation, many reform-minded Communist leaders have opted for "market socialism" or, more accurately, "market Stalinism"—authoritarian politics and economics supplemented by greater reliance on market forces...

...Even when Lenin used this term, he felt he had to qualify it by stressing the many bureaucratic encrustations and distortions of workers' power embodied by the young Soviet state...

...The new cooperatives are thought to meet a need, though the Soviet consumer is quick to resent profiteering and high prices...

...The system works best when there are simple, widely shared objectives, when there is a clear and present danger, when the Party leadership enjoys great authority, and when a powerful ideology helps to weld together the goals of the top leadership, the local cadres, and the masses of people...

...the contrast with the London underground or New York subway is very much to Moscow's advantage...

...Left-wing opponents, even if they were not anticommunist, thought it wrong to confer proletarian credentials on a state that so often repressed independent working-class action...

...Most communists could agree on the need for building up Soviet industrial and military capacity...

...The ruling parties rule only to the extent that they can motivate and mobilize the Party membership...

...He points out that Poland's most successful capitalist has held a government post and was a regional Party secretary before he went into business...

...The goad of fear or the lure of gain can achieve some results, but these do not constitute a sufficiently stable or reliable set of motivations...

...Gorbachev has an extraordinary ability to project the need for reform and to improvise solutions in a crisis...

...And he cautioned that the eruption of national movements n the outlying republics, where popular fronts attracted the support of hundreds of :housands, was being mishandled by the :entral authorities and might well provide the opportunity for a renewed conservative onslaught...

...Soviet citizens would certainly like to see improvements in the education and welfare systems to ensure higher standards and eliminate corruption, but there is no support for scrapping their basically universal and free character...

...against the Soviet Union encouraged the cadres to accept bureaucratic control from the top...

...Stalin was quoted as saying that "cadres decide everything," and this formula had broad validity in the post-revolutionary, post-Leninist Soviet state...

...Within every enterprise, the Communist Party branch acts as both the ally and the monitor of the management...

...By the time of my latest visit in February and March of this year, the Popular Front in Moscow was organizing support for the candidacy of Boris Yeltsin, whose outspoken criticism of the slow pace of glasnost and perestroika had led to his removal as Moscow Party chief in October 1987...

...The visitor's overwhelming impression is of surprisingly uniform consumption standards, without extremes of poverty or wealth...

...Why shouldn't the workers' state appear in undemocratic forms just as the bourgeois state did in the early stages of its development, in the days of Cromwell or Napoleon, of King George III or Kaiser Wilhelm II...

...Solidarity, it need hardly be said, was not a Communist-sponsored organization, but its mass membership did overlap significantly with that of the Party—some estimated that one-third of Party members prior to the imposition of martial law were Solidarity sympathizers...

...Already the Soviet media are in some respects more pluralistic than our own...

...Despite every intention of the more comfortable Party chiefs, communist societies sustain a powerful egalitarian ideology in which bureaucratic privilege is greatly resented...

...At this stage, however, the Soviet citizen does not bother much with ideology and is looking mainly for results...

...A vicious circle of corruption, irresponsibility, and obfuscation clogs the system...

...The Muscovites seem better-dressed than one might have thought...

...The local store is likely to have only a limited and random stock of fresh vegetables, which can be supplemented at high prices by recourse to the private peasant markets...

...In addition to the faith in egalitarian ideals, there is the popular belief, incarnated by Solidarity as much as by any ruling party, that ordinary workers should have a say in public affairs, that trade unions should be strong and should have access to the media, and that managers in enterprises should be accountable to their work force...

...The latest issue of the magazine Foreign Literature, for example, includes a chapter, "Hell-Black Night," from Isaac Deutscher's monumental biography of Leon Trotsky, The Prophet Outcast...

...that is supplied, instead, by the profit motive, the urge to accumulate, the commercial rivalry between corporations pursuing their ends largely without government intervention or control...

...The problem is one of the oldest to beset the societies that call, themselves "workers' states...

...IS THE SOCIALIST BLOC READY FOR SOCIALISM UPHEAVAL IN THE EAST U BY ROBIN BLACKBURN Over the last year, I have visited Moscow three times in connection with my work as an editor for the Verso publishing house and New Left Review...

...Today, the Polish government, after a wave of strikes and what was seen as weak support in the 1987 referendum, has returned to negotiations with Solidarity...

...The Nineteenth Party Conference in June of last year had witnessed an unprecedented airing of criticism of the Communist Party apparatus from delegates who had been directly elected by local and workplace Party branches...

...Material incentives must be offered, and these are often distributed by way of the workplace organization or trade unions...

...Needless to say, such a system is open to abuse...

...Throughout Eastern Europe, ecological movements are growing rapidly...

...Despite all the talk, and despite such rude shocks as the elections, the Soviet Union is still run by an organization jealous of its wide-ranging powers...

...Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 19801981 seemed to prove* conclusively that Soviet-style communism was antithetical to workers' self-expression...

...All these convictions have run through the various historic crises of the communist states, and all of them are at work today in the Soviet Union...

...to the Soviet Union without experiencing a certain sense of awe...

...As industrial development creates the need and opportunity for a sophisticated and diversified pattern of goods and services, the uncomfortable mixture of bureaucratic negotiation, lobbying, and centralized planning fails to produce the goods...

...While I am sure he has a point, needless shortages and shoddy goods do generate frustration.One of the central problems of Soviet life today, in fact, is a pervasive sense that the economy is failing the consumer...

...The political changes even in that short span of time have been remarkable...

...Western analysts seem to have a hard time fitting developments in the East to their ideological preconceptions...

...it has a key role in mobilizing the work force and establishing the objectives of the enterprise...

...The desperate defense of the Soviet Union against the ferocity of the Nazi invasion cemented a new bond between Party, army, and masses, while strengthening central authority...

...Margaret Thatcher has never received more than 43 per cent of the votes of the British electorate...

...By late 1988, too, a broad coalition, the Popular Front, was holding regular meetings in Moscow and had links with clubs in most Russian towns and cities—campaigning on ecological issues and laying the basis for an independent radical presence in the elections Gorbachev had announced...

...But the Soviet system finds it much more difficult to cope with the demands of a peacetime economy than with a wartime emergency...

...But the pioneers of marketization have allowed the market to dictate overall social priorities, and this has bred such familiar capitalist evils as unemployment and inequality without much sign of genuine capitalist growth or dynamism...

...Only last March, I had been told by Soviet publishers that the public was not yet ready to read Deutscher—an early and important critic of Stalin—on Trotsky...

...When the ballots were counted, Yeltsin had won five million votes—89 per cent of the vote in Moscow's No.l District—and candidates identified with the official Party apparatus had been defeated for nearly 200 seats in the new Congress of People's Deputies...

...There, reform communism had already been tried by Wlad-yslaw Gomulka and Edward Gierek...

...The most important characteristic shared by the communist one-party regimes is the government's claim that, guided by the precepts of Marxist socialism, it determines the basic pattern of economic activity by engaging in public ownership and planning...

...This complex system of organization responds only slowly and ineffectively to orders from the top, unless these orders evoke willing and active collaboration from the multimillion membership of the ruling Party and its associated mass organizations...

...A somewhat ascetic British philosopher friend who has been resident in Moscow for six months told me he found Soviet intellectuals' complaints about living conditions quite exaggerated: "One has all that a reasonable man requires: good bread, good cheese...

...Right-wing opponents saw it simply as a totalitarian nightmare run by an elite of Communist Party leaders...

...This view tended to overlook the ways in which bourgeois states might, themselves, be democratic or authoritarian, militaristic or welfare-orientated...

...This may mean that the East will be offering concessions to capitalism and the West...

...In fact, the unreformed, if modified, planning systems of East Germany or Bulgaria seem to work better than those which have opted for rampant marketization...

...Imperfect as Soviet electoral rules may be, at least they provide that candidates are elected only if they receive more than 50 per cent of the votes cast...

...Soviet citizens don't want to spend so much of their time standing in line, and they want to see a greater diversity of goods in the stores.This doesn't mean they want capitalism, though the social democracy of Sweden and Austria does exert a definite attraction...

...Even when communist regimes appear to have exceptional strength and autonomy, they are vulnerable to mass working-class disaffection in ways that do not apply, unfortunately, to Western governments...

...This was generally the case with Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader in 1956, Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and most recently with the demonstrations around the funeral of Hu Yaobang in Beijing, in which many workers joined the tens of thousands of students singing the "Internationale...

...But though it seemed that the conservative faction was in retreat, Kagarlitsky warned that it was not yet clear who held the balance of power in the Politburo and the Central Committee...

...The jettisoning of old taboos continually takes one by surprise—but so, too, do stubborn vestiges of the old order...

...The Soviet Union has a complex modern economy, but it persistently fails to meet consumers' needs in a comprehensive and flexible way...

...At the time, Kagarlitsky warned me that a conservative faction based on the Communist Party apparatus wanted to halt Mikhail Gorbachev's program of political openness, glasnost, and press ahead with a narrowly defined per-estroika—the so-called South Korean model in which privatization and mar-ketization are combined with authoritarian control over political activity...

...Their part in defeating Nazi Germany or in encouraging the retreat of colonialism or in sustaining revolutions in Cuba or Vietnam can hardly be exaggerated...

...Admirers of the Soviet Union were inclined to accept its self-description as a "state of the whole people...

...Mass organizations can give some input, but the most significant of these, the trade unions, are also workplace-based...

...The Aeroflot jets that fly to Moscow are the technological equal of their Western rivals and have a good safety record...

...In the 1970s, the Polish Communist Party had been especially nervous about its relations with the working class...

...Kagarlitsky had won a libel action against Komsomolskaya Pravda, and his articles were appearing in a trade-union journal and in The Twentieth Century and Peace, a magazine published in a number of languages and then earning a reputation as a pacesetter for glasnost...

...Members of the Soviet nomenklatura enjoy real privileges but, on the whole, are careful not to flaunt them...

...What, then, does such a system have to do with the concept of a "workers' state...

...In the Soviet Union, however, and the countries of the East that followed its example, the state allocates investment and sets prices...

...Almost invariably, the major crises of communism involve Party leaders who become symbols for a reform of the established system to make it more democratic and more responsive to the vaunted ideals of socialism...

...The restrictions on booze are a problem, and that is the only item I find it necessary to buy at the be-riozka [foreign currency shop...

...Throughout Eastern Europe, ecological movements are growing rapidly, and the authorities in most states deem it unwise to try to stamp on this unofficial form of citizens' action...

...It did not mean, of course, that the cadres had real democratic control of the Communist Party apparatus...

...The plan itself is, at best, a compromise between what the enterprises think possible and the goals set by the Party chiefe-who have their own factions based on different institutions and regions...

...Robin Blackburn is the editor of New Left Review and the author, most recently, of "The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery," published by Verso at $19.95...

...Then Cold War tensions gave this sense of national crisis an extra lease on life...

...The Polish government acknowledged a setback and entered into dialogue with Solidarity after it was rebuffed in a referendum in which it received the support of only two-thirds of the voters with a two-thirds turnout...

...It took a century or two to impose democratic and welfare institutions on these early bourgeois states, and such achievements remain precarious...

...These were, he held, lamentable but difficult to avoid—consequences of trying to break with capitalism in a huge, relatively backward, and absolutely war-devastated land besieged by Western imperialism, a land-that had virtually no experience of democracy even in its limited bourgeois form...

...But it also promises new pressures on the West as the more daring experiments in socialist democracy show up the hollow pretensions of the Free World...

...Collective concern for protection of the environment is also easily aroused, and seems to have direct repercussions on the rulers...

...Timothy Garton Ash, a British expert on Eastern Europe, predicts we may soon see repressive communist governments in the East defending a new breed of local capitalists from the discontent of their workers...

...He was attacked by name in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Youth League newspaper...

...This world power, with all its flaws, represents an attempt to construct something different from capitalism...

...Consumer interests have little or no bureaucratic clout...

...In the same contradictory vein, immediately after the first round of the recent election, with its remarkable rebuff to many entrenched Party leaders, the world was treated to the bloody spectacle of Soviet troops in armored cars suppressing a nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia...

...a hundred of the largest factories had hot-line telephone links to Party headquarters to give early warning of proletarian discontent...

...Despite some tentative moves toward a market economy, the state still establishes goals for each sector of the economy...

...It is my contention, therefore, that the major communist states aye workers' states, but in primitive and undemocratic versions...

...Only gradually, and in laborious and contested ways, did bourgeois society purge itself of distortions and monstrosities—chattel slavery and naked oligarchy—and find a path to a more democratic model of capitalist development...

...Perestroika lurches forward uncertainly...

...Thus, the Soviet worker is as likely to acquire a washing machine or television set from a workplace or trade-union depot as from a store...

...In January-February 1988, such leftist critics of the Soviet government as my friend Boris Kagarlitsky were singled out for official attack...

...In the socialist tradition, the workers' state was always thought of as more democratic than the bourgeois state and workers' organizations were to be animated by lofty ideals...

...They can overfulfill plant targets by producing substandard goods...

...In both the United States and Britain, a decade of right-wing government has received the active assent of somewhere between a quarter and a third of those entitled to vote...

...But it is much too soon to conclude that the tide of reform is carrying all before it...

...Political analysts of all persuasions are likely to be surprised by the strength of certain progressive beliefs that seem to be almost spontaneously generated by these uncomfortable workers' states...

...While it may be impossible to return to the past, it is still far from certain that anyone has a clear vision of the road ahead...

...In China, Yugoslavia, and Hungary this has led to short-term improvements as petty producers and traders fill gaps in the centralized economy...

...At the workplace, Party and management have found that pure ideological exhortation is not an adequate means of motivation and mobilization in normal times...

...The notion that these state-socialist regimes embody a "planned" economy makes them visibly responsible when ecological disaster threatens—or occurs...

...The looming presence of Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union further complicated matters and undercut the credibility of a new and chastened reform current within the Party...

...in fact, the radicalization of the Gorbachev regime—the real espousal of glasnost—dates from the Chernobyl disaster...

...Party organization is based on the workplace...

...Market socialism finds it difficult to overcome two big obstacles: the local or regional bureaucrats who bend the rules to favor themselves, friends, or relations, and the workers who find ways of blocking reforms that hurt their interests...

...The commuter on the Moscow Metro enjoys reliable, clean transport in splendid surroundings...

...Kagarlitsky was unable to publish in the Soviet Union except in samizdat, the privately printed, secretly circulated underground press...

...It is almost inevitable that capitalist forms and forces will make inroads in the East...

...Management is tempted to tolerate weak labor discipline, and workers can find themselves drawn into the sterile stand-off summed up in the saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us...

...Unevenness and complexity beset the reform process on every side...

...This is not to say that everyday problems are not immediately apparent...

...Though a Western government has economic powers, it does not decide what should be produced or how it should be produced, nor does it furnish the animating principle of economic activity...