The End of Stalinism
Socialist Outlook1990sPhil HearseScanned 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.
What was Stalinism, and why did it collapse?
St consume theatest tr the dives and emen the th century. thousands who were its victims or its champions. Its outcome combines both tragedy and farce. Alas, the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, however welcome, has not immediately resulted in the establishment of democratic socialism. To answer why not, it is necessary to ask what Stalinism was, and why it collapsed.
The debate on the origins of Stalinism is a long and complex one. Plainly Stalinism was a system that combined centralised state planning and ownership of the economy, with the more-or-less ruthless political dictatorship of a bureaucratic elite. Its evolution in the Soviet Union combined two things: the economic and social effects of backwardness and isolation, and the political defeat which the forces committed to democratic socialism suffered. The Bolshevik Party which led the Russian revolution lacked, because of the absence of any prior models, a deep-going
understanding of the dangers of bureaucracy. A theory of the bureaucratic degeneration of revolutions had to be worked out by the anti-Stalin opposition ad hoc, and in the midst of the struggle. The seeds of the destruction of the Stalinist system were embedded in its initial successes. In the USSR the bureaucratic command economy proved very successful in the rapid industrialisation of society through extensive growth. Because of the USSR's huge natural resources, the mobilisation of ever greater amounts of raw materials and labour could rapidly create an industrial infrastructure - but at a terrible and unnecessary human price, including the death of millions in the forced collectivisation of the peasantry and the Stalinist purges. But Stalinism lacked one thing which capitalism - at least in boom periods, possessed - an in-built dynamic towards innovation. Thus while very successful at extensive growth, it lacked the capacity for intensive growth, for the constant upgrading of the quality of production, and the ability to satisfy growing consumer demands when the standard of living in the capitalist West was growing. Bureaucratic command economies have an inbuilt tendency not only to chronic waste and irrationality, but also to constantly reproduce themselves without innovation. The simple reason for the collapse of Stalinism in the East is that, starting from a more backward economic position, it lost the economic competition with the capitalist West.
In the 1980s while the West underwent a mini-boom, the gap in the living standards between East and West increased. Western economic pressure, including the arms race, massively contributed to this outcome. Despite all the achievements over decades - the basic industrialisation, the cheap basic necessities of life, the uneven but generally free welfare system - in the end the Soviet economy went bankrupt. It showed, contrary to the illusions of many socialists in the '50s and '60s, the inability of the system to reform itself.
One factor which should be mentioned here is that the advanced capitalist countries, during the whole time which the Eastern bloc has existed, continued to draw huge imperial booty from the third world - in contrast to the Soviet Union. The result is that the world capitalist order contains not only the advanced countries, but areas where hundreds of millions endure the kind of grotesque poverty and misery which the workers in the Eastern bloc have never experienced. Therefore any picture of economic misery in the East and glorious success in the West is misplaced.
Why then has the revolt against Stalinism in Eastern Europe not led immediately to a democratic socialist outcome? First and foremost because the only visible alternative to 'actually existing socialism' is 'actually existing capitalism'. For the masses of East Germany in particular, but also the rest of Eastern Europe, democratic socialism is just an idea not a practical possibility. There is no attractive example of democratic socialism anywhere on this planet. In other words, it is because of the absence of socialism in the advanced countries, the failure of socialist revolution in the West. The fate of socialism in the West To answerthe question of why the political revolutions in the East have not produced democratic socialism, we have to answer the key question of socialism in the West. It is, in a certain sense, the issue on which the whole history of the twentieth century and the very viability of socialism as an alternative hinges. One answer to this puzzle is to say that socialism has not succeeded because capitalism has been 'too powerful. In the post-second world war period, clearly the long capitalist boom of the '50s and '60s created a difficult terrain for socialist transformation. But the strength of capitalism is just part of the picture. After all, capitalism in the twentieth century has been through major slumps and crises, including two world wars. The answer to the puzzle is more complex.
Capitalism was not defeated in the West because it fought off the huge challenges it faced, and this is only partially explicable by the intrinsic strength of the capitalist system itself. In part, this outcome was determined by the very existence of Stalinism. By undermining support for socialism, Stalinism contributed to the continuance of capitalism and, ironically, its own demise. This has been particularly true of the post-war period in the democratic capitalist countries, where the Stalinist states were only an attractive alternative for an isolated minority of the working class. Critical to the survival of capitalism was the defeat of the mass revolutionary parties and currents which emerged in the 1920s after the first world war. The historic defeat of the German workers' movement - the mass communist and social democratic parties - when Hitler came to power in 1933 - was the pivotal act in this tragedy. But the defeat of the left in the Spanish civil war, the defeat of the French Popular Front government and the second world war • Page 10
itself all contributed to the dispersal and defeat of the socialist vanguard of the inter-war period.
The history of the twentieth century is full of examples of missed opportunities for socialist advance, and needless defeats. At root is the fact that the workers' movement was channeled by Stalinist and social democratic leaderships that blocked the road to victory. While the defeat of the socialist vanguard of the inter-war years was cumulative, we would single out three key struggles as decisive. First, the defeat of the 1918-19 revolution in Germany, and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. The inability of the huge revolutionary vanguard organised in the USPD, the Spartakusbund and the revolutionary shop stewards movement to break the hold of the SPD reformists, opened the road to defeat. This, together with the lost opportunity in 1923, confirmed the isolation of the new Soviet state and made the rise of Stalinism much easier. Second, the defeat of the anti-bureaucratic opposition in the USSR in the 1920s sealed the rise of authoritarian state 'socialism' and the incorporation of the world communist movement into Stalinism.
Third, the rise to power of Hitler, referred to above, isolated the revolution in Spain and cleared the road to the second world war. Merely to argue that all these defeats were 'inevitable' is historical fatalism: saying that history turned out as it did because it was the only way it could have turned out. Such a position is profoundly mechanical, and underestimates the role of conscious human action.
At any rate, the militant socialist vanguard of the 1920s and "30s has not been rebuilt in the post-war years. Once the immediate post-war crisis was over, the long capitalist boom- while not exactly creating permanent stability - confined revolution to the third world. It has only been very gradually, since the onset of the long recession at the end of the 1960s, that militant socialism began to re-emerge as a significant current in the Western labour movements. So far, militant socialism has not become a mass force, at least on the scale of the 1920s and 1930s. That kind of force, with several mass revolutionary communist parties in Europe, was the result of events of the magnitude of the Russian revolution. Such unequivocally revolutionary developments have not occurred in the post-war period, outside the third world.
Thus the immediate outcome of the political revolutions in
Eastern Europe is a product of this long historical evolution. It can only be turned around when the workers in those countries go through the experience of what the attempts to restore capitalism and the laws of the market actually mean.
The future for Eastern Europe The outcome of the whole crisis that has been set in train by glasnost and perestroika centres on what will happen in the Soviet Union. Bureaucratic rule is much more deeply embedded there than in the other East European countries, and the Soviet Union is locked in a protracted crisis, the outcome of which is unclear. For now, democratic socialist forces are weak. There is no short-term possibility of a replacement of bureaucratic rule with socialist democracy.
Recent developments have thrown the role of the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into sharp relief. While the bureaucracy as a ruling caste cannot survive the restoration of capitalism intact, nonetheless sections of the bureaucracy will push for capitalist restoration as the only way to defend their individual position and privileges.
While big sections of the state apparatus would be destroyed by the rise of capitalism, many individual bureaucrats would find a niche either in a reconstituted state apparatus or by becoming individual capitalists. Developments in Poland show that local level bureaucrats are in a strong bargaining position to become managers or owners in newly privatised firms. A new capitalist state would have to incorporate wholesale sections of the old bureaucratic apparatus.
The various plans put forward by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and others for the marketisation of the Soviet economy all point in the direction of capitalist restoration. In the short term, however, they will lead to deepening chaos. Since there is not yet a powerful enough democratic socialist force in play, the result could well be a 'government of order - based on the power of the army and the KGB.
Such a 'government of order' would almost certainly be incapable of preventing the de facto secession of many of the non-Russian republics. Neither would it necessarily prevent the rise
of capitalism in the Russian republic. In fact a semi-military government could be the antechamber of the restoration of capitalism, as happened in Poland after 1981.
What we are seeing now is that the bureaucracy is not the fundamental force for preventing capitalist restoration. So long as the bureaucracy could defend its power and privileges by warding off imperialism and by maintaining the bureaucratic state, it went for that option. When that seems an impossibility it will go for other options.
In the rest of Eastern Europe, with the exception of Romania and Bulgaria, bureaucratic counter-revolution, the restoration of old-style Stalinism, is very unlikely.
German unification has in effect already restored capitalism in the territory of the GDR. While the 1989 movement against the Honecker regime was started by New Forum and other forces on the left, the movement was rapidly overtaken by the unity offensive launched by Kohl and the West German bourgeoisie. The left in the GDR left itself open to this offensive by underestimating the national question - the fact that Germany was divided, against the will of the German people, by imperialism and Stalinism, at the end of the second world war. Once a movement against bureaucratic rule had begun, the issue of German reunification was bound to be raised sharply within the movement. Instead of repeating the slogan "Germany never , the left in the GDR should have itself raised the demand for unification - but a unification which incorporated the social gains of the workers in the East.
The social costs of the transition to capitalism in East Germany are certain to be mass unemployment, the partial destruction of the state welfare system, and a growing backlash among the workers at the costs of the re-establishment of capitalism. But overall in Eastern Europe there will now take place a protracted struggle over the future social system. Pro-capitalist governments now exist in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. But a short-term re-establishment of capitalism is unlikely. These countries need a massive injection of foreign capital to privatise their decaying economies; that capital is not going to be forthcoming on an immediate and massive scale. Western investors will pick and choose the most profitable and advanced sectors. International capitalist institutions like the EEC, the IMF and the World Bank are already putting forward draconian conditions for investment funds and the renegotiation of the debt. Unemployment and austerity, the
removal of subsidies and a huge rise in prices - all these things are already happening in Poland - will be the result.
The austerity and restructuring offensive to create the preconditions for the resurrection of capitalism is bound to lead to a growing revolt among the workers. It is this which creates the objective possibility for the development of a socialist opposition capable of fighting for an alternative future.
Socialists in the West have to do everything possible to aid the developing socialist oppositions and to demand the removal of the debt and an end to austerity regime imposed by the IMF, World Bank and the EEC.
The new world situation summed up Overall then we can see that the new world situation comprises the collapse of world Stalinism which has run out of steam, together with a deepening and drawn out crisis of international capitalism, creating in its wake ever-deepening misery in the third world, and interacting with a chronic ecological crisis. Imperialism is attempting to resolve this crisis through an offensive which targets Eastern Europe, the third world and workers in the advanced countries. But we should reject all interpretations which see this situation as simply the crisis of Stalinism, with imperialism profiting through a massive offensive. International capitalism is still in a prolonged crisis which is one of the deepest in its history. How will it all turn out in the medium and long-term? A lot depends on the precise outcome in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. If capitalism is restored throughout the region; if the working class in those countries allows its gains to be destroyed over a long period of time without fighting back; if such a defeat were to be combined with new defeats for the workers and progressive forces in the advanced capitalist countries and the third world - then the possibility would exist of a massive new expansion of capitalism, a new wave of sustained accumulation similar to that which happened in the USA, Europe and Japan after 1950. We should remember that the collapse of Stalinism is a mixed blessing for the West. True, after some initial hesitation the Western leaders decided, in late 1989, to go all-out for the destruction of the Stalinist states, particularly by forcing through German unification. But the price to pay is the end of the bloc system and the division of
Europe, which was an essential part of the maintenance of the power of capitalists in the West and the bureaucrats in the East. Now international capitalism - like us - is entering uncharted waters in a situation where the division of the European working class is being overcome, in which all the political parties and trade unions - official and unofficial - in the east are being completely recomposed and recast.
Imperialism's international offensive contains its own dangers. The Gulf crisis shows these dangers graphically. The whole authority of international imperialism is at stake in the Gulf. Unless Saddam Hussein it totally defeated in a blitzkrieg war (which itself could lead to incalculable consequences for the world economy and imperialist domination of the Middle East) the US and its allies will suffer a gigantic political defeat. Such a defeat will have very negative consequences for imperialism in the whole of the third world.
All the developments in the crisis of Stalinism and the crisisoffensive of imperialism, show that the crucial obstacle to a new world order, which would combine imperialist hegemony with a new phase of rapid capitalist accumulation, is not the Stalinist bureaucracy but the international working class. It requires new defeats of world-historic proportions to make the world safe for imperialism again - defeats that have not occurred. It means defeating the labour movement in the West, the workers in the East and the rapidly growing new concentrations of the working class in countries like Korea and Brazil. It is a huge task, fraught with difficulties. There is still everything to play for.