The Masses Make History: Lessons from China and Eastern Europe
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.
The events of 1989 should logically reinforce the idea that it is the power of the masses which makes history. The workers of China, Czechoslovakia and the GDR were not partisans of contesting theories of revolution; they just acted - and their action took them into the street and into conflict with the state authorities. Equally so in the Soviet Union: massive social change inevitably involves the mass mobilisation of the people.
Nobody should want to hold up some bizarre conspiratorial theory of violent revolution carried out by a disciplined minority; but then anyone who thinks that fundamental socialist change, the transformation of society in a democratic and egalitarian direction, will necessarily conform to the deadening antique rituals of the Mother of Parliaments is not living in the real world. The events in the GDR and China in 1989 of course cannot be taken as direct analogies with advanced capitalist countries like Britain: but they do tell us something about socialist change. The difference between China and East Germany was that in the former the state power held firm and fought back using
counter-revolutionary repressive methods.
In the GDR, however, the state machine was paralysed by the instructions of its senior partner, the USSR not to resist the mass mobilisations. The result of its inability to use repression was its collapse. The last refuge of any repressive order is always its military apparatus, its use of force: there is no reason why advanced capitalist countries should be different from East Germany, China or South Africa.
Every repressive social order relies on a combination of consent and coercion. In advanced capitalist countries which are 'democratic' there is particular emphasis on complex and sophisticated methods of consent, in particular the dominance of the ideology of 'democracy' itself. Eurocommunist theoreticians, misusing Gramsci, put all the emphasis on the maintenance of capitalist ideological 'hegemony', and reduce the tasks of socialist transformation (if they still believe in it) to fighting that hegemony. But the defeat of pro-capitalist ideology in society is not primarily a directly ideological task; if it were, the task of socialist would be reduced to speechifying, rather than building and Europe shows that ideological extending struggles. Eastern certainties can collapse overnight in the face of mass struggles. The key to the reform/revolution debate is the idea of state power. Social democratic reformists and liberals reduce the notion of'power to something that is distributed around society in discrete blocks among different 'elites'. Militant socialists understand that power in capitalist society is concentrated and articulated in a hierarchical class power, which has the state at its apex. That this state has immense repressive potential, even in Britain, can hardly be doubted by anyone who has either been on a large demonstration or given it a moment's thought.
Partisans of 'the revolutionary road to socialism' are not for a militaristic form of struggle. They do not deny that instances of the capitalist state - a parliamentary majority - can be captured by socialist and progressive forces. All they say is that the repressive function of the state has to be dealt with. The best variant is the collapse of the repressive state power in the face of demoralisation and overwhelming odds, as happened in East Germany. In the GDR the repressive power collapsed; but there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. In times of revolutionary turmoil the working class cannot give up the option of coercion against the ruling class to impose the democratic will of the majority. . Page 34