Prometheus rebound?

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ....

-Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

"In Russia the problem could only be posed," wrote Rosa Luxemburg, referring to the realization of socialism, "It could not be solved in Russia." I am not quoting Luxemburg because she was the only person treating the Bolshevik revolution as potentially an episode; when she wrote those lines in the summer of 1918, its hold on power was very uncertain. I mention her because she seemed more than anybody else to view revolution as a worldwide phenomenon spread over a historical period, thus involving advances and retreats, victories and defeats. This vision of seizure of power as provisional added even more importance to her emphasis on the need to stick to socialist principles in order to show an example, to prepare the ground for future fighters and coming generations. It took clever servants of our establishment a great deal of chutzpah subsequently to present that great woman revolutionary as the scourge of the Bolsheviks. In fact, even in her most critical pamphlet from which these quotations are taken, she hailed them for doing everything that could be done 16 within the limits of historical possibilities," thus saving "the honor of international socialism." But she also warned Lenin and Trotsky not to make of necessity a virtue, and of the limitations dictated by circumstances an example for the movement at large. What in their case was still a minor blemish was turned into a calamity, as Stalin forged his system and imposed it on an obedient international movement as the undisputed model of socialism. An exorbitant price is still being paid for this confusion of the Stalinist nightmare with the socialist dream.

Such thoughts came to mind watching the dramatic unfolding of events in 1989. The year of the bicentennial of the French Revolution was to be celebrated as marking the burial of all radical breaks. History, as if offended, then quickened pace. Prompted by Gorbachev's perestroika and fed by domestic discontent, a tidal wave swept across Eastern Europe, toppling a series of regimes that were communist in name only, in Warsaw and Budapest, in Berlin and Prague. Before the year was out even Ceaucescu, the Rumanian Caligula, had left the stage with bullets in his head. We were clearly watching the twilight of a reign, the end of an era, the collapse of regimes that were the result of revolutions not only carried out from above but imported from abroad. We were also attending the final funeral of Stalinism as a system. In February 1956, in his famous "secret" indictment of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev stunned the faithful by revealing that the corpse of their demigod was stinking. The shock was terrible. Yet it took a third of a century for the system based on this cult to be dismantled throughout the empire.

Behind these certainties lurks a question mark. For the first time it is necessary to ask whether 1917 marks the beginning of an epoch, like 1789, or whether it inaugurates a heroic but tragic experiment, the abortive search for a shortcut, and is therefore in historical terms merely a parenthesis. The problem, whatever the answer, is crucial. When the balance sheet of this era is finally drawn up, it will not be as one-sided as the assessments improvised today on the spur of the moment. The impact of the Soviet experiment on the outside world illustrates this complexity. There is no doubt that the identification of communism with the Russian concentration camp or with the Soviet tank contributed to the current discredit of the very idea of socialism both in the West and in Eastern Europe. But it is also true that the pioneering exploit of the Bolsheviks, the seizure of power by the workers, gave hope to millions of downtrodden throughout the world, encouraged them to resist and to rebel. Not all the subsequent revolutions were sponsored from above. Or, to take another instance, it is absurd to suggest that the foreign policy of Stalin and his epigones was driven by the desire to spread revolution and communism throughout the world. On the contrary, the international revolutionary movement was strictly subordinated to the interests of Soviet foreign policy. Yet the very existence of that policy sometimes acted as a limit on the expansion of western imperialism. (Today the Brezhnev doctrine is fortunately vanishing, but the Monroe Doctrine, in its Bush version, is alas stronger than ever.)

There are more immediate reasons why we must face up to this issue. The collapse of the East European regimes is trumpeted by the propaganda machine as final proof that socialism is unworkable. Capital hates frontiers that limit its field of action. It now eyes with growing appetite both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as territory to swallow in order to both expand its rule and extend its survival. This, however, is the potential prize for tomorrow. Meanwhile, there are ideological benefits to be gathered. Francis Fukuyama, the poor man's Hegel, describing capitalism as the culmination of history was only part of a vast chorus singing the vanity of any attempt to get rid of the prevailing system.

However noisy, this propaganda can actually be countered quite easily. To die you must have lived, and what we have known so far is really inexisting socialism. Besides, the prophets now announcing the final death of socialism are the very same who only yesterday, with equal conviction, spoke of the immutability of "totalitarian communism," the hell from which there was and there could be no exit. The Fukuyamas can also be reminded that they are saying what the servants of the ruling system have always proclaimed, namely that history did exist but has come to an end with the victory of their masters. Yet before scoring debating points, itself quite a useful exercise, we must ourselves grasp what is really collapsing on the eastern front, ask why it is falling to pieces, and guess what is likely to be put in its place.

The "original sin" and its consequences

To seize the tragic dimension of the Soviet Revolution it is indispensable to go back to the "original sin," if one may use such a religious term, of its inception, to the contrast between the Marxist design conceived for the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and its application to backward Mother Russia, to the "proletarian revolution" carried out in a land where the working class, shrunk by civil war, was surrounded by a huge peasant sea. Russia was supposed to be only the weakest link" in the chain. The center of gravity was to shift to Germany and beyond as the revolution spread westward. But the revolution failed to spread. The Bolsheviks could either surrender, or they could cling to power hoping their isolation would prove temporary. In that case, in the meantime they had to carry out by themselves their country's unaccomplished task, its industrial revolution. Isolated, surrounded by enemies, the Soviet Union had to achieve within a decade because the danger was immediate-what in the West had taken over a century with the help of colonial plunder and ruthless uprooting of the peasantry. The highly contradictory term, primitive socialist accumulation," coined by Vladimir Smirnov and elaborated by Yevgenii Preobrazhensky, sums up the terrible, completely-unexpected task thrust on the revolution's agenda.3

Barbarism, as Lenin put it even more bluntly, had to be uprooted in Russia by barbarian means. Does this mean that only a Georgian tyrant could fulfill this function? Personally, I am not convinced that Stalinism, with its concentration camps and its Byzantine cult of the leader, was inevitable in the circumstances. This, however, is not the place for a complex discussion of this subject. For the sake of our argument only two points have to be made. The first is that the system did fulfill its role for a time and in its own fashion. It turned peasants into workers, spread skills and education. The crude economic command from above did function as long as the "planning" was mainly concerned with the coordination of a limited number of huge plants. The industrialization at breakneck speed provided the Soviet Union with the guns, tanks, and planes thanks to which the Red Army was able to resist the German invasion and then liberate Europe from the Nazis.

The counterpoint is that this process of development, hardly the most efficient, had very little to do with socialism. It was not a case of capitalism being superseded because it had reached its full potential. The Soviet peasants did not join collective farms because the private ones had got beyond the point of highest efficiency; they were driven into the kolkhozy by a bloody collectivization. The Bolsheviks did not inherit a complex industry which required planning for coherent growth; they had to build an industry almost from scratch using methods borrowed from F.W. Taylor. Altogether, either in economic or political terms, the ruthless mechanism of command from above had nothing in common with Marx's vision of freely associated producers gaining mastery over their labor and leisure, that is to say, over their lives. But this strange product of unexpected circumstances was painted as the workers' paradise and imposed as a model for the world at large. The more or less necessary evils were hailed as virtues. Worst of all, friends and foes alike seemed agreed that what was being forged in the Soviet Union was socialism.

However, Stalinism too contained the seeds of its own destruction. The political system designed for uprooted and half-illiterate muzhiks became increasingly obsolete as the population grew more urban and better educated. An economy more complex and more sophisticated rendered the crude dictation from the top and from the center counterproductive. By mid-century, the whole structure was held together only by the conditioned reflexes of an aging dictator, and in 1953 his successors were faced with the need for a complete overhaul. Though their problem was immense, the basic question could be worded rather simply: how do you make people work if you wish to get rid of a system of coercion based fundamentally on the fear of the concentration camp coupled with moral exhortations and do not wish to replace it by the capitalist system of coercion based on the fear of unemployment linked with the dazzling tyranny of the market?

A socialist answer to this question required in Russia nothing less than a democratic revolution. Democratic relations e needed on the shop floor, giving the working people a real say in the organization of their own work and the general division of labor, if the slogan about "our factories" was to cease to be a hypocritical metaphor. But this was not enough. Democracy had to be spread, or rather invented, at all levels of the country's life so that planning, the need for which would not vanish, could cease to be an alien dictation and become the self management of a society seeking to master its own destiny. These major questions, which have not yet been tackled, let alone solved, by Gorbachev's perestroika, could not even be raised by Stalin's epigones.

Nikita Khrushchev, half-peasant, half-townsman, and as such a symbol of the Soviet Union in transition, did show a striking awareness of the need for radical change. However, he chose a constituency-the party apparatus-utterly unsuited to this task. The apparatchiks saw nothing wrong with the inherited system except Stalin's propensity to purge his own faithful servants (his bloody way to prevent the crystallization of a ruling class). What they wanted was Stalinism plus security of tenure. Even Khrushchev's haphazard half-measures were too much for them, and they toppled him when the reforms seemed to threaten their position. The man they picked to replace him, Leonid Brezhnev, made the unwritten pledge never to endanger the interests of the privileged. He kept his word and his job for 18 years. The political price paid for this unexpected longevity was what is now known as the age of stagnation. All important reforms were shelved. After a time Brezhnev also reached a truce with the working class: you don't mix in politics and we shall not drive you too fast on the assembly lines. The inevitable happened. The Soviet economy slackened its pace. The returns on investment diminished. Housing and the welfare state were squeezed in the process. But if the economy came almost to a halt, society kept on changing, with peasants moving to town, with less frightened and much better educated generations entering the labor market. They had been promised "goulash socialism" and were getting neither. The potentially explosive mixture of economic stagnation and social discontent could not last. The apparatchiks showed their resistance to change by selecting the decrepit Konstantin Chernenko as a stopgap leader. By 1985 they had to resign themselves to Mikhail Gorbachev and radical reforms. But before we tackle perestroika, we must have a glance at the area where its results were to be most spectacular in 1989, at the empire Stalin acquired, not in any fit of absentmindedness, but in the struggle for survival against the Nazis.

"Socialism" in a Single Bloc

By one of those ironies of which history is apparently fond, Joseph Stalin, champion of "socialism in a single country," spread his version of socialism to the east bank of the Elbe. At first he saw the conquered land as merely a protective glacis. (Otherwise, punitive reparations against East Germany, a future partner, would not have made sense.) He then decided to reshape it in Russia's image. Thus Stalin's armies, like Napoleon's, altered the social order in the countries they crossed. Throughout Eastern and Central Europe they eliminated factory owners and uprooted landlords. This was their revolutionary heritage and, whatever may be written today, their progressive function.

Unfortunately it was linked with less progressive features. The revolution was an imported product, and by this very nature had not been carried out by the people but imposed on them from above. Later the split of the world into two blocs, with the ensuing separation from the international division of labor, was a serious drawback, particularly for more industrialized countries like Czechoslovakia. This third handicap might have been more than compensated by the advantages of an alternative system, if the imposed model were not the Stalinist one which, in political terms, meant one-party dictatorship, police repression, and Moscow-like trials, and was economically obsolete from the very start.

Naturally, things did not look quite as bad at the time as they do now in the hour of bankruptcy proceedings. Though imported, the regime was not always unwelcome. Pro-Russian feelings were strong in, say, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia had deep left-wing traditions. Even in Hungary or Poland, where hostility was greater, the memories of the pre-war regimes, of their failures and their injustices, were sufficiently fresh for quite a number of people, particularly young intellectuals, to greet a new regime promising a radical break with the past (some of these early enthusiasts are today lecturing on the evils of socialism in western, particularly American, universities). But all over Eastern Europe, the story of the last forty-five years has been one of missed opportunities and broken illusions.

The effects of the failure of Stalin's successors to reshape his heritage spread beyond Soviet frontiers. The year 1956 was probably the last moment of great expectations throughout the area. In Poland's "Spring in October," the hopes were provisionally confirmed as the (once imprisoned) Wladyslaw Gomulka returned to office. But the limits of change were at once written in blood by the Soviet troops crushing the Hungarian insurrection. Nevertheless, the revisionists," those thinking that the regimes were fundamentally right though in need of radical reform, could still cling to their belief for a time, even if the redundant name given to their next project, the Czech "socialism with a human face," showed how much the very idea was now in need of qualification. And, in 1968, the Soviet tanks entering Prague put an end to a whole period. The Polish workers who climbed on the stage next were not talking of reforming the regime but of changing it.

Indeed, instead of widening, the social base of these regimes kept on shrinking. Stalin and the iron fist provided a myth, and for a time there were still many believers. Khrushchev replaced the ideology by the promise of a new deal for the consumer. Brezhnev had nothing to offer. The health and education services open to all, the prospect of social advancement for children of workers and peasants, all yesterday's attractions, were falling victims of stagnation. "Socialism" no longer meant only the Soviet tank and repression. For millions it also stood for economic backwardness. The prewar past was now sufficiently distant to be idealized for the new generations, and the West sufficiently dazzling to be perceived as a cornucopia. Propped up only by the fear of Soviet intervention, the ruling Communist parties were ready for history's broom.

The case of Poland, often a pioneer of change, shows how the movement first turned against the regime and then swung to the right, two trends that should not be confused. The illusion that Gomulka would radically reform the system did not last. By 1970, Poland's workers won from their "workers' state" in bloody battle the right to veto the government's policy on consumer prices. Six years later, as the Party vainly tried to abolish that veto, a small band of intellectuals came to the rescue of the battered workers. This alliance was reenacted in that glorious summer of 1980, when the intellectuals offered to serve the workers who were asserting the then unprecedented right to form an independent union. The victorious workers were no lovers of "really existing socialism" but, in very Marxist fashion, they presented their own interests as "the superior interests of society as a whole." And the year after, Solidarity, their union, was talking in terms of self-management both in the factories and the country at large. Indeed, the vague project of a new parliament, with a lower house in which the Communist Party still had a guaranteed majority, and a senate representing workers' councils and other forms of autogestion, was probably the last chance of transition in a noncapitalist direction. The CP chose otherwise. It was ready to make a deal with the Catholic Church, but not with the workers. It opted for the military coup that crushed the labor movement-not badly enough to impose an economic reform, and this is why it had to resign itself to new talks within a decade, but sufficiently to alter the balance of forces within Solidarity. In 1989, when it came to the new historical compromise and the transfer, the intelligentsia was in charge and the proletariat was part of the electoral fodder. And the resulting government had dropped its vision of workers' democracy for the sake of the monetarist vision of Milton Friedman.

When one comes to study carefully the sweep and speed of this metamorphosis, all sorts of factors will have to be taken into account, and the circumstance that during its years underground Solidarity was helped by American money (channeled through the AFL-CIO) is not to be neglected. But the real reasons are much deeper. Actually, the strong western emphasis on the immediate conversion to capitalism, as we shall see, came only later. To understand why a Tadeusz Mazowiecki, once a progressive Catholic trying to reconcile Socialism with Christianity, becomes a prime minister who presides over Thatcherite privatization, or why a Vaclav Havel, who a few years ago described himself vaguely as a socialist, no longer does so today, one must keep in mind the extraordinary change in the ideological climate. The bankruptcy of the command economy has been interpreted as that of democratic planning, the fiasco of neo-Stalinism as the funeral of socialism, and the failure of a Mitterrand to build something different as the final proof of the absence of any radical alternative. To talk of "the end of ideology" is as absurd today as it ever was. What we have been witnessing for some years now is the ideological hegemony of the capitalist gospel. But I am running ahead of the story. Mazowiecki's premiership, Havel's presidency, or the crumbling of the Berlin wall for that matter, were inconceivable without the crucial shifts in Moscow.

The Center and the Periphery

Mikhail Gorbachev was accepted by his peers because the economic stagnation had reached the point of potential political explosion. Though himself a member of the ruling group, he belonged to the fraction pleading that a radical reform had become inevitable. He also understood, unlike the Chinese and unlike so many Western advisers now suffering from amnesia, that to reform the economy it is necessary to proceed with a deep political transformation. If he may not have known from the start how far this would take him, he has shown a great capacity to sail forward with each new tide. Thus in its first years perestroika offered the exhilarating experience of a country awakening from its slumber, recovering its memory and its voice, of a people learning to debate, to choose between various versions and different candidates. As books were published, plays staged, films shown that had no chance of being produced a few years earlier, as newspapers changed their nature and television its coverage, the Soviet Union became an altogether different country. All these freedoms of speech or assembly, it will be objected, are merely the bourgeois revolution come to Russia two centuries late. But freedoms are no less precious because they were originally bourgeois, and they change content, raising new issues, in a country where private ownership of the means of production was eliminated.

It is in economics that the perestroika has so far failed to produce results. It was supposed to alter the system entirely, shifting it from a command mechanism to some form of market economy. According to its critics, up to now it has begotten the worst of both systems. The main reason for this failure is that the leadership does not really know where and how far it wants to go, and this brings us back to politics. In Stalin's time all social forces were reduced to obedient silence. Under Brezhnev the premise was that interests would neither be hurt nor expressed. It is only now that the interests of the various classes and social groups begin to crystallize and seek political expression. The most articulate grouping, and a pioneer of perestroika, is the potential priviligentsia, the managers, economists, and all sorts of other professionals, whose numbers have grown and who want to have more say in running the factories and the rest of the country. They want the market, big income differentials, incentives involving different standards of housing, health, and education for the successful. Contrary to legend, they are not for introducing privileges into an allegedly egalitarian society. They are for shifting privileges and power from the obedient apparatchiks to the dynamic managers, from the nomenklatura to what they would describe as the meritocracy. Are they not perturbed by the prospect of where the logic of the market might lead? The lessons of Eastern Europe have induced them to urge that the process of reform be speeded up and not slowed down or altered.

These developments have also led to a divorce between Gorbachev and some of his original supporters, based on political rather than philosophical grounds. Mikhail Gorbachev has too sure a grasp of Soviet realities to believe that he can win backed simply by a section of the intelligentsia. He has always known that to break the resistance of the bureaucracy he needs the support of the workers, whose interests are threatened by the reform. The idea of having managers elected by the staff, which has not got very far, was conceived as a stratagem to gain their sympathy. Above all he realizes that in a country affected by shortages, the prospect of unemployment, of ostentatious social differences, and the current resentment against private speculators, (barely disguised under the cooperative label), may well allow the conservatives to mobilize, pretending not to defend their own interests but those of the country's downtrodden.

In the ambiguous controversy over economic reform one voice is still too faint, that of the socialist opposition-trying to reconcile the workers with a good part of the intelligentsia, admitting the need for incentives yet setting them in an egalitarian perspective, defending planning while attacking the bureaucracy-all this by a movement from below, by spreading democracy well beyond the bounds conceived by Gorbachev and his reformist critics, through self-management on the shop floor leading to self-government on the national scale. Only such an attempt to answer questions facing society since Stalin's death can, in my opinion, provide a solution to Russia's predicament, and, possibly, preserve the Soviet Union as an entity.

That the Union should now be threatened is Gorbachev's heritage, not his accomplishment. The perestroika merely released the accumulated tensions and glasnost revealed them to the world. It does not betray one's belief in democracy to observe that when the lid was finally lifted all the smell that surfaced was not Chanel No. 5. There also came a stench of prejudice, jingoism, anti-semitic hatred, an odor that spread well beyond the allegedly patriotic Pamyat society. Old ghosts are being joined by new monsters, and this is not surprising, the irrationality of the government having abetted the forces of unreason in the society at large. In particular, the Great Russian chauvinism, encouraged by the Georgian tyrant, stimulated nationalism in the republics and prevented it from finding a natural outlet. Now the regime is faced not only with the reasonable aspirations towards autonomy but also with atavistic hatreds and medieval passions. The Union will not be kept together without a renewed community of interests cemented by some form of ideological cohesion.

In this short survey I have purposely excluded foreign policy-where Gorbachev has scored serious successes and altered the international equation-except as far as it affects the Soviet bloc in Europe, that is to say tremendously. For years all the protest movements in Eastern Europe knew that there was a Rubicon, crossing which would provoke a Soviet intervention, and all the achievements at the periphery were fragile as long as reform was not consolidated at the center. Perestroika changed all that. When Mikhail Gorbachev dropped the Brezhnev doctrine, or at least its provision that members of the Warsaw Pact could not alter the prevailing social order, he signed the death warrant for regimes which, by then, were only resting on the threat of Soviet intervention. He can thus be described as the stage manager of the revolutionary events of 1989. If he did not necessarily desire the outcome nor set the exact timetable, we now know that he did accept well in advance the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. 4

Quite naturally, the countries of imported revolution have gone much further in their restoration than Russia. Here the ghosts from the past seem to have taken over the whole stage. Though the revival of capitalism is for tomorrow, all the prewar parties are being resurrected without paying much attention to the intervening social changes (such as the reduced role of the peasantry). Actually, the new governments in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, including Communists in senior or junior positions, act as if they wanted to wipe out half a century and recover their prewar position in Europe, forgetting that except for the Czechs they were then very poor relations. Contrary to some of their expectations, the East Europeans will not be offered the choice between social-democratic Sweden and Thatcherite Britain. Their comparative rank will be closer to that of Mexico or Bolivia. The new rulers are not deterred. Will they be followed? The people of Eastern Europe have shown with their feet and their ballots what they do not want. They still have to determine what they wish to put in its place. Open frontiers and restoration

When regimes tumble every week, it is presumptuous or foolish to forecast the course of events in the months to come. But one can venture hypotheses about deeper trends. This is the sense in which I want to suggest that all the countries of Eastern Europe, including Russia, will first move in a capitalist direction. This concept, however, has to be defined. The existence of a market does not mean a return to capitalism. Any transition to a socialism worthy of the name will take time and involve a long period with a mixed economy. The search for a proper yardstick or incentives does not mean capitalism either. What is at stake is the general sense of direction. Is the economy moving towards a system in which production, consumption, and investment will be shaped by the conscious will of society, or towards one in which the main outlines of the economy will be determined by profit-oriented forces of the market? I suggest that Eastern Europe will be moving toward the latter if it proceeds with its intention to open up its frontiers, accept full convertibility of its currencies, and recover its place in the international division of labor.

When the Bolsheviks introduced their monopoly of foreign trade, they knew that their departure from the international division would be costly. But this was the price they had to pay, as Preobrazhensky put it, to dissociate their "private economy from the world private economy towards which it was tending."' The hope was that as the revolution spread to more advanced capitalist countries, the damage would be limited. Then Stalin invented the theory of socialism in one country" and coined the slogan: "To catch up with and overtake Ameri - " But though he spread his regime up to the Elbe, he did not ca. I produce an alternative society, and though Russia began by closing the gap, it still lies far behind. Indeed, the frontiers are being opened at the worst moment, after a period of stagnation. Knowing the tendency of the capitalist market to remove obstacles and the prevailing discrepancy in productivity or technological know-how, the outcome of an open contest is beyond doubt.

A bridgehead, however, should not be confused with a successful invasion, and here one must draw quantitative differences between the various countries of Eastern Europe and a qualitative one between them and the Soviet Union. All these post-revolutionary states, while nowhere forging a socialist society, had nationalized the means of production. They are now faced with the unprecedented task of privatizing not a plant or an industry but the bulk of the economy. The Poles have opted for a shortcut to capitalism, on which you can break your political neck. The Czechs, whose crisis is less acute, are proceeding more slowly; even their monetarism is supposed to have a human face. Yet in all these countries where socialism is now perceived as an allen imposition and the leaders of the conversion as yesterday's resisters, capitalism will have to show its seamy side-the unemployment, the yawning gap between rich and poor-for an entirely new left to emerge. In the Soviet Union the turning point may come at an earlier stage.

Whether the resistance will be successful is another matter. These regimes are more complicated than they are now being described. They preached one thing and practiced another. This gap between promise and fulfillment greatly contributed to the political apathy and cynicism. Yet the socialist ideal, in some curious fashion, also managed to sink in. Eastern technocrats, who (whether they still hold a party card or not) sound like Harvard Business School graduates, have joined the International Monetary Fund and bitterly complain about their worst handicap-the egalitarianism and thirst for social justice of their populations. It remains to be seen whether the quite understandable resentment against "really existing socialism" will prove stronger and more lasting than the socialist unconscious. All that can be said for the moment is that this is the beginning of a long conflict, that the main confrontation will take place in the Soviet center, not at the periphery, and that only early in the next millenium will it be possible to answer the crucial question at the heart of this essay: Was 1917 the beginning of a heroic yet tragic diversion ending in capitalism or was the revolution, though premature and then perverted, a positive step on humanity's road toward mastery over its own fate?

The abuses and uses of the Eastern question

Even this bird's-eye view of the Eastern scene shows how its dramatic metamorphosis is vital for the Western world, both for our rulers and for parties and people who consider themselves progressive. For the capitalist establishment, Eastern Europe offers a tantalizing prize and its members have descended upon it like vultures. Special envoys of the IMF and the World Bank, of the European Commission and the OECD, prepare the ground. Bankers, industrialists, ministers, and presidents, the German Chancellor and the Japanese Prime Minister follow with their checkbooks and the common query"What's in it for me?" Liberty and democracy have been quickly translated into freedom to sell and then export profits. Incidentally, "socialist market" has proved a short-lived craze, both East and West now apparently only interested in the noun. To those who, in keeping with common East-west fashion, claim that there is no need to mention democracy in the same breath as the market because the former is by definition inseparable from the latter, one is tempted to reply they should preach their sermon in johannesburg. Actually, because it will be difficult to push the "market economy" down the throat of a surprised population, voices are already raised suggesting "special powers" in Poland and "authoritarian rule" in Russia, on the grounds that the market must come first and democracy will follow after. The invasion has begun. Whether the capitalist conquest will succeed is still uncertain.

The ideological dividends, on the other hand, are already being collected and have been for some time. In the mid- 1970s, when a deep capitalist economic crisis followed student protests, the system felt threatened. The gulag campaign-the discovery by latter-day Christopher Columbuses, the nouveaux philosophies, of Soviet concentration camps-came to the rescue. Describing the search for any radical solution as leading inevitably to a totalitarian dead-end, it helped capitalism to survive, to break the resistance of the labor movement, and to reassert its ideological domination. The reactionary trends in the two halves of Europe fed one another. This helped the rightward swing in the East, and the tide has now gathered much momentum. The ambition today is to break the Promethean spirit altogether, to destroy the belief in a radical alternative. It is no longer "totalitarian communism," it is capitalism, whether you like it or not, which is being presented as a system from which there can be no exit, since it marks the end of history.

This line of the establishment, carried with Eastern help and mass mobilization of the media, dictates the strategy of the left. We no longer need to defend in Eastern Europe the right of expression of people with whom we disagree; many former victims are now in the corridors of power. We can pick and choose our allies, broadly where latter-day Black Hundreds or neo-nazis are a serious threat, more selectively when we seek partners to struggle together for a socialist resurrection. It may be objected that at least to begin with there will not be many candidates for that struggle in Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly. But we can help to shorten that period in many ways by reminding, for instance, the East Europeans who look at their prewar past through rosy spectacles of its real color, recalling Admiral Horthy for the Hungarians, Marshal Pilsudski for the Poles, reacting against the new Russian myth that the left-wing critics of Stalin were as bad or worse than the dictator. Yet our main task is obvious. It is human and natural for East Europeans, who waste hours standing in line or otherwise chasing scarce goods to be dazzled by our glittering city lights and our tempting shopping centers- for people who had to deal with a stupid censorship to be thrilled by our freedom of expression at once real and apparent. But we must show them the seamy side of our societies.

This is our duty to our Eastern friends, but also to ourselves, because of the damage wrought here by the huge propaganda machine. We must restate some fundamental truths about our system. Our inability to organize society to the best advantage of its population is such that we turn even our technological genius into a handicap: higher productivity leads to bigger unemployment. Shocking discrepancies between the haves and the have-nots are not the only feature of this increasingly two-tier society. Its prosperity rests on the poverty and exploitation of the rest of the world. We are unable to insert our economy into its natural environment and can only deal with pollution ex post-facto so as to provide room for profit once again. Our alienated and alienating society has made little progress towards the equality of sexes, but has shown a peculiar talent for commercializing culture, for turning everything into merchandise. These are only some of the points which must be expanded to draw a genuine picture of really existing capitalism.

Only dinosaurs, the post-moderns on both sides of the Elbe will object, can use such antediluvian concepts as capitalism or socialism. If you wish to be up to date the operating terms are rule-of-law," the "law abiding state," the "Rights of Man," in short the vocabulary of democracy. So let us take them at their word. Democracy is crucial for a socialist. Though Russia should never have been our model, nor any other place for that matter, it would be foolish to deny the heritage and refuse to learn from bitter experience. Rosa Luxemburg was prophetic when she pleaded for the "active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people" and warned that "without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.,,6 The most important lesson from the Soviet past is that when people are deprived of say over their lives however temporarily and for however justifiable reasons, they will find it extremely difficult to recover their rights, and the price paid for this allegedly temporary exception proves prohibitive and long lasting. This is an additional reason why democracy must figure at the very heart of any revived socialist project.

But it must be real democracy and not the empty phraseology of our trend-setters. When an American on the minimum wage has to work 79,000 years to earn as much-$550 million-as Michael Milken did in 1987, to say one person, one vote and leave it at that is shockingly superficial. When the Berlusconis, Bertelsmans, and other Murdochs are extending their mediatic stranglehold over the whole globe, to talk of freedom of expression as if these tycoons were not "more equal" than any Tom, Hans, or Giovanni is hypocritical. And to add that the property of the Puerto Rican immigrant is protected in New York as well as that of Donald Trump is to reveal the class nature of this society and of its preachers. Genuine socialists were never against basic freedoms because these were bourgeois. They have always, as the words of Luxemburg testify, "revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom," not to abolish democracy, but on the contrary to fill it with social content. This is the terrain on which common struggle must soon be resumed in Europe, across the fast-vanishing divide.

The main message from Eastern Europe is not the one frenetically drummed by the media. It is that when institutions do not correspond to needs, sooner or later they must yield; that people inspired by an idea can bring down walls; in other words, that radical transformation is possible. The philosophers from the State Department, Rand, and other corporations know better than they pretend. Their incantation about the end of history is merely designed to gain time for their masters. They know that a system torn by contradictions like capitalism, unless it first blows up the planet or poisons it through pollution, will also collapse in its turn. How soon? Admittedly it is now necessary to ask whether capitalism, universal in its aspiration like socialism, will invade the whole world before it leaves the historical stage. This is but another way of asking whether capitalism's grave-diggers will come from the West or, after all and despite everything that is happening, from the East.

The time factor, however, is not without influence on our own mood. The 37 years that have elapsed since Stalin's death are for the historian but a brief spell. For us they mark the passage from youth to nearly old age. It is in this contrast between historical perspective and humanity's natural political impatience that lies the reason why, in moments of despondency, when broken illusions, wasted lives, bloody sacrifices are vividly seen behind a shattered political model, one begins to doubt for a while, though only for a while, whether hope will ever create "from its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

NOTES

1 .Rosa Luxemburg; The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 80.

2. Personally I think that for a socialist there are no taboos dealing with the Soviet regime. But his or her judgment must assess the event in its historical context; draw a distinction between the early years and the Stalin era; and take into account the consequences of possible defeat and of surrender of power not to other left-wing groups but to the forces of reaction.

3. See Yevgenii Preobrazhensky; The New Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Also Alexander Erlich; The Soviet Industrialisation Debate, 1924-28. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

4. Karoly Grosz, leader of the Hungarian Communist Party at the time, has confirmed that in the spring of 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed in principle to a total withdrawal of Soviet troops (International Herald Tribune 23 - January 1990). Hungary, with no NATO frontier, was a simpler case than, say, Czechoslovakia. Yet the only real problem is presented by the German Democratic Republic, where the quickening of the process of reunification could still spoil Gorbachev's East European gamble.

5. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics.

6. Luxemburg, p. 71.

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