Beyond Perestroika?
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPaul LawsonScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Revolution from Above, Tariq Ali, Hutchinson £3.95
Beyond Perestroika, Ernest Mandel, Verso £9.95 (published April 13)
Reviewed by Paul Lawson
THE near-simultaneous appearance of books on Gorbachev and the Soviet Union by two authors who have for decades been close political collaborators gives us an opportunity to contrast the different approaches from within the Marxist tradition to the upheaval in the USSR.
Mandel starts his book with the opinion that the events in the USSR are the most important in world politics since 1968, and perhaps even the Chinese revolution in 1949 – an opinion clearly shared by Ali. This question is clearly a touchstone for marxist politics.
Tariq Ali's book is the product of several recent visits to the USSR, containing a lot of fascinating first-hand material on the debates and changes going on. In particular his account of the 'Yeltsin affair', and Yeltsin's conflict with the corrupt cabal of Moscow bureaucrats around his predecessor in the Moscow party leadership, Victor Grishin, is particularly useful.
But Tariq's book has to be judged by the criterion of its own self-declared objective – as a political intervention into the debate on the left about Gorbachev, on a line with which neither this journal nor the new book by Mandel are in accord.
Tariq declares, in effect, that a full-scale 'political revolution' has started in the Soviet Union – a 'political revolution from above'. He chides the far left in Britain and internationally for being blinded by the fact that this has started from above, and not, as we would have all wished, by a movement from the working class below. For him the success of this revolution means the victory of glasnost and perestroika, and he gives a qualified welcome to the foreign policy initiatives of Gorbachev.
Mandel's book, by contrast, insists on the need to differentiate between glasnost and perestroika. His line can be summed up by the formula: a criticial 'yes' to glasnost; 'no' to perestroika; and 'no' to the overall drift of Soviet foreign policy, although within that we can welcome some moves, in particular the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the INF treaty.
The nub of the difference – one which of course goes through the whole left and does not just divide these two authors – is what attitude to take towards the perestroika 'marketisation' reforms. Mandel's conclusion is unequivocal:
'All the talk about "market socialism" reduces itself to a turning of the screw at the cost of consumption in order to stimulate investments and increase labour productivity. In other words it amounts to a Soviet version of austerity' (p64). And therefore: 'The only conclusion we can draw from all this is that perestroika will not benefit the mass of the Soviet workers, at least not in its initial stages. To sweeten the medicine, therefore, there will be political changes.'
Now I have read Tariq's book twice, and while he is unambiguous in his condemnation of centralised bureaucratic planning as the source of the country's economic stagnation, it is far from clear what his attitude is to perestroika as the basic motor of economic change. He certainly condemns the view that Gorbachev and his advisors want to attack the living standards of the Soviet working class as 'beneath contempt'.
This makes very strange reading. What Gorbachev and his supporters want to do is one thing; the objective effects of the economic reforms which they are pushing through is something else again. And it is a matter of fact that perestroika involves, among other things, the removal of subsidies from a wide range of basic consumer goods like housing, food and transport, and the de facto introduction of mass unemployment as the labour market is 'shaken out' in the name of efficiency. It is for these reasons that the working class response to perestroika is decidedly mixed, and that many Soviet workers – not just bureaucrats – see it as a threat. It is hard to understand why it is 'beneath contempt' to point these things out.
In many analyses of the contemporary conflicts in the Soviet Union, from left and right alike, there is, in my opinion, a basic flaw. This common mistake reflects the ideology of the Gorbachevites: it is to say that glasnost and perestroika are part and parcel of the same process, a unified project, which we must more or less accept, or more or less reject.
In this, particularly striking are the views of some of the leaders of the socialist clubs which have emerged in the Soviet Union. Some of those who have the most radical views on political reform, who demand 'All Power to the Soviets, but real democratically elected Soviets', are the self-same people who demand a more rapid implementation of the perestroika economic reforms, which would have very negative effects on many Soviet workers.
All approaches to the giant and many-sided upheaval in the USSR which want to put either a 'tick' or a 'cross' against the whole business come unstuck. To put it at is most basic, the attitudes which marxists adopt towards political liberalisation and to economic liberalisation are different.
Political liberalisation in post-capitalist societies generally opens up opportunities for the masses to re-awaken politically, giving them more freedom for information and organisation and to formulate their own demands. Economic liberalisation, on the contrary, generally ends up attacking working class living standards – and this is something which socialists in Britain in the 1980s should be only too aware of!
Mandel's approach is meticulously to dissect the different components of Gorbachevism – political reform, economic reform and the new foreign policy – examine them individually, and then to reassemble them to make overall sense of what is happening. Tariq's book is much more concerned with approaching the whole business as a unified project, and giving support to the most radical wing in the perestroika/glasnost process – Yeltsin in the bureaucracy and the radical wing of the socialist clubs.
Having made our preference between these two approaches clear, a few words in defence of Revolution from Above. Having bothered to visit the Soviet Union several times, Tariq's book is packed with information from which anyone on the left can usefully learn. Its author is quite right – there are a lot of bone-headed sectarians who think that Gorbachev is simply 'taking the capitalist road' – but Tariq is too knowledgable about the far left to think that this is the majority, as he sometimes seems to imply. And this journal can only endorse enthusiastically the pan-European socialist strategy which he outlines in his conclusion.
On one specific point this reviewer sides with Tariq Ali against Ernest Mandel. It seems to me quite wrong to put the invasion of Kampuchea by Vietnamese troops to oust Pol Pot on the same level as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, by inference, wrong to give an equally enthusiastic response to the withdrawal of Vietnamese and Soviet troops from these respective countries, as Mandel seems to do.
Recent information has shown that the Khmer Rouge are still the real force behind the anti-Vietnamese guerrillas camped on the Thai border. A 'political settlement' at the behest of China and the US which puts Pol Pot's forces back in power in Kampuchea would be a real political sell-out, and a disaster for the people of that unfortunate country.