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WSWS : History : 2005 SEP/WSWS Summer School

Lecture one: The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century

Part 3

By David North
31 August 2005

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This is the third part of the lecture “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” delivered by World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture was posted in four parts. See Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4).

The ideological consequences of 1989

Explaining the political capitulation to the wave of Stalinist and fascist reaction during the 1930s, Trotsky observed that force not only conquers, it also convinces. The sudden collapse of the Stalinist regimes, which came as a complete surprise to so many radicals and left-inclined intellectuals, left them theoretically, politically and even morally disarmed before the onslaught of bourgeois and imperialist triumphalism that followed the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The myriad shades of petty-bourgeois left politics were utterly bewildered and demoralized by the sudden disappearance of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe. The politically shell-shocked petty-bourgeois academics proclaimed that the demise of the bureaucratic regimes represented the failure of Marxism.

There was, aside from cowardice, a substantial degree of intellectual dishonesty involved in their claims that Marxism had been discredited by the dissolution of the USSR. Professor Bryan Turner wrote, for example, that “the authority of Marxist theory has been severely challenged, not least for the failure of Marxism to anticipate the total collapse of east European communism and the Soviet Union.”[14] Such statements cannot be explained by mere ignorance. The left academics who wrote this and similar statements are not completely unaware of the Trotskyist analysis of the nature of the Stalinist regime, which warned that the policies of the bureaucracy would lead ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The International Committee can produce innumerable statements in which it foresaw the catastrophic trajectory of Stalinism. Prior to the demise of the USSR, the petty-bourgeois radicals considered such warnings nothing less than sectarian lunacy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they found it easier to blame Marxism for the failure of “real existing socialism” than to undertake a critical examination of their own political outlook. Angry and disappointed, they now looked upon their political, intellectual and emotional commitment to socialism as a bad investment that they deeply regretted. Their outlook has been summed up by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, long-time member of the British Communist Party who served for decades as an apologist for Stalinism. He has written in his autobiography:

“Communism is now dead: The USSR and most of the states and societies built on its model, children of the October Revolution which inspired us, have collapsed so completely, leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin, that it must be obvious that failure was built into the enterprise from the start.”[15]

Hobsbawm’s claim that the October Revolution was a doomed enterprise is a capitulation to the arguments of the unabashed right-wing opponents of socialism. The ideologists of bourgeois reaction assert that the collapse of the USSR is irrefutable proof that socialism is an insane utopian vision.

Robert Conquest, in his inquisitorial Reflections on a Ravaged Century, condemns “the archaic idea that utopia can be constructed on earth” and “the offer of a millenarian solution to all human problems.”[16] The Polish-American historian Andrzej Walicki has proclaimed that “The fate of communism worldwide indicates... that the vision itself was inherently unrealizable. Hence, the enormous energy put into its implementation was doomed to be wasted.”[17] The recently deceased American historian, Martin Malia, elaborated upon this theme in his 1994 book, The Soviet Tragedy, in which he declared that “... the failure of integral socialism stems not from its having been tried out first in the wrong place, Russia, but from the socialist idea per se. And the reason for this failure is that socialism as full noncapitalism is intrinsically impossible.”[18]

An explanation of why socialism is “intrinsically impossible” is to be found in a book by the dean of American anti-Marxist Cold War historians, Richard Pipes of Harvard University. In a book entitled Property and Freedom, Pipes establishes a profound zoological foundation for his theory of property:

“One of the constants of human nature, impervious to legislative and pedagogic manipulation, is acquisitiveness... Acquisitiveness is common to all living things, being universal among animals and children as well as adults at every level of civilization, for which reason it is not a proper subject for moralizing. On the most elementary level, it is an expression of the instinct for survival. But beyond this, it constitutes a basic trait of human personality, for which achievements and acquisitions are means of self-fulfillment. And inasmuch as fulfillment of the self is the essence of liberty, liberty cannot flourish when property and the inequality to which it gives rise are forcibly eliminated.”[19]

This is not the place to examine Pipes’ theory of property with the care that it deserves. Permit me to point out that the forms of property as well as their social and legal conceptualization have evolved historically. The exclusive identification of property with personal ownership dates back only to the seventeenth century. In earlier historical periods, property was generally defined in a far broader and even communal sense. Pipes employs a definition of property that came into usage only when market relations became predominant in economic life. At that point, property came to be understood principally as the right of an individual “to exclude others from some use or enjoyment of a thing.”[20]

This form of property, whose prominent role is of relatively recent vintage among human beings, is—I think it’s safe to say—more or less unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom! At any rate, for those of you who worry about what will become of your I-pods, homes, cars and other treasured pieces of personal property under socialism, allow me to assure you that the form of property that socialism seeks to abolish is private ownership of the means of production.

The one positive feature of Professor Pipes’ most recent works—those written in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union—is that the connection between his earlier tendentious volumes on Soviet history and his right-wing political agenda is made absolutely explicit. For Pipes, the October Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union represented an assault on the prerogatives of ownership and property. It was the apex of a worldwide and mass crusade for social equality, the terrible fruit of the ideals of the Enlightenment. But that chapter of history has now come to an end.

“The rights of ownership,” Pipes proclaims, “need to be restored to their proper place in the scale of values instead of being sacrificed to the unattainable ideal of social equality and all-embracing economic security.” What would the restoration of property rights demanded by Pipes entail? “The entire concept of the welfare state as it has evolved in the second half of the twentieth century is incompatible with individual liberty... Abolishing welfare with its sundry ‘entitlements’ and spurious ‘rights’ and returning the responsibilities for social assistance to the family or private charity, which shouldered them prior to the twentieth century, would go a long way toward resolving this predicament.”[21]

For the ruling elites, the end of the Soviet Union is seen as the beginning of a global restoration of the capitalist ancien regime, the reestablishment of a social order in which all restraints on the rights of property, the exploitation of labor, and the accumulation of personal wealth are removed. It is by no means a coincidence that during the nearly 15 years that have followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there has been a staggering growth in social inequality and in the scale of wealth concentration in the richest one percent (and especially the top .10 percent) of the world’s population. The world-wide assault on Marxism and socialism is, in essence, the ideological reflection of this reactionary and historically retrograde social process.

But this process finds expression not only in the anti-Marxist diatribes of the extreme right. The general intellectual decomposition of bourgeois society is also manifested in the demoralized capitulation of the remnants of the petty-bourgeois left to the ideological offensive of the extreme right. The bookstores of the world are well stocked with volumes produced by mournful ex-radicals, proclaiming to one and all the shipwreck of their hopes and dreams. They seem to derive some sort of perverse satisfaction from proclaiming their despair, discouragement and impotence to all who will listen. Of course, they do not hold themselves responsible for their failures. No, they were the victims of Marxism, which promised them a socialist revolution and then failed to deliver.

Their memoirs of confession are not only pathetic, but also somewhat funny. Attempting to invest their personal catastrophes with a sort of world-historical significance, they wind up making themselves look ridiculous. For example, Professor Ronald Aronson begins his volume After Marxism with the following unforgettable words:

“Marxism is over, and we are on our own. Until recently, for so many on the Left, being on our own has been an unthinkable affliction—an utter loss of bearings, an orphan’s state... As Marxism’s last generation, we have been assigned by history the unenviable task of burying it.”[22]

A theme common to so many of these would-be undertakers is that the dissolution of the Soviet Union shattered not only their political but also their emotional equilibrium. Whatever their political criticisms of the Kremlin bureaucracy, they never imagined that its policies would lead to the destruction of the USSR—that is, they never accepted Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as counter-revolutionary. Thus, Aronson confesses:

“The very immobility and ponderousness of the Soviet Union counted for something positive in our collective psychic space, allowing us to keep hope alive that a successful socialism might still emerge. It provided a backdrop against which alternatives could be thought about and discussed, including, for some, the hope that other versions of Marxism remained viable. But now, no longer. Try as we may to rescue its theoretical possibility from Communism’s demise, the great world-historical project of struggle and transformation identified with the name of Karl Marx seems to have ended. And, as the postmodernists know, an entire world view has crashed along with Marxism. Not only Marxists and socialists, but other radicals, as well as those regarding themselves as progressives and liberals, have lost their sense of direction.”[23]

Unintentionally, Aronson reveals the dirty little secret of so much of post-war radical politics—that is, the depth of its dependence upon the Stalinist and, it should be added, other reformist labor bureaucracies. This dependence had a concrete social basis in the class and political relationships of the post-World War II era. In seeking to redress the political and social grievances of their own class milieu, significant sections of the petty bourgeoisie relied upon the resources commanded by the powerful labor bureaucracies. As part of or in alliance with these bureaucracies, the disgruntled middle class radicals could shake their fists at the ruling class and extract concessions. The collapse of the Soviet regime, followed almost immediately by the disintegration of reformist labor organizations all over the world, deprived the radicals of the bureaucratic patronage upon which they relied. Suddenly, these unhappy Willy Lomans of radical politics were on their own.

It is more or less taken for granted among these tendencies that the historical role assigned by classical Marxism to the working class was a fatal error. At most, they may be prepared to accept that there was once, at some point safely in the past, a time when it might have been justified. But certainly not now. Aronson declares that “There is in fact much evidence in support of the argument that the Marxian project is over, because of structural transformations in capitalism and even in the working class itself. The centrality of Marxism’s cardinal category, labor, has been placed in question by capitalism’s own evolution, as has the primacy of class.”[24]

This is written at a time when the exploitation of the working class proceeds on a world scale at a level that neither Marx nor Engels could have imagined. The process of extracting surplus value from human labor power has been vastly intensified by the revolution in information and communication technology. Though not a central category in the ontology of petty-bourgeois radicalism, labor continues to occupy the decisive role in the capitalist mode of production. There, the relentless and increasingly brutal drive to lower wages, slash and eliminate social benefits, and rationalize production proceeds with a ferocity without precedent in history.

“There are none so blind as those who would not see.” If there exists no real social force capable of waging a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, how can one even conceptualize an alternative to the existing order? This dilemma underlies another form of contemporary political pessimism, neo-Utopianism. Seeking to revive the pre-Marxian and utopian stages of socialist thought, the neo-Utopians lament and denounce the efforts of Marx and Engels to place socialism on a scientific basis.

For the neo-Utopians, classical Marxism absorbed too much of the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with the discovery of objective forces. This outlook underlay the socialist movement’s preoccupation with the working class and its political education. The Marxists, claim the neo-Utopians, placed exaggerated and unwarranted confidence in the objective force of capitalist contradictions, not to mention the revolutionary potential of the working class. Moreover, they failed to appreciate the power and persuasive force of the irrational.

The way out of this dilemma, claim the neo-Utopians, is by embracing and propagating “myths” that can inspire and excite. Whether or not such myths correspond to any objective reality is of no real importance. A leading exponent of neo-Utopian mythologizing, Vincent Geoghegan, criticizes Marx and Engels for having “failed to develop a psychology. They left a very poor legacy on the complexities of human motivation and most of their immediate successors felt little need to overcome this deficiency.”[25] Unlike the socialists, complains Geoghegan, it was the extreme right, especially the Nazis, who understood the power of myths and their imagery. “It was the National Socialists who managed to create a vision of a thousand-year reich out of romantic conceptions of Teutonic Knights, Saxon kings, and the mysterious promptings of ‘the Blood.’ The left all too often abandoned the field, muttering about reaction appealing to reaction.”[26]

This flagrant appeal to irrationalism, with its deeply reactionary political implications, flows with a sort of perverse logic from the demoralized view that there exists no objective basis for socialist revolution.

What cannot be found in any of the demoralized jeremiads about the failure of Marxism, of socialism and, of course, the working class is any concrete historical examination of the history of the twentieth century, any attempt to uncover, based on a precise study of events, of parties, and of programs the causes for the victories and defeats of the revolutionary movement in the twentieth century. In its edition for the year 2000, which was devoted to the theme of utopianism, the Socialist Register informed us that it was necessary to add “a new conceptual layer to Marxism, a dimension formerly missing or undeveloped.”[27] That is the last thing that is needed. What is required, rather, is the use of the dialectical and historical materialist method in the study and analysis of the twentieth century.

To be continued

Notes:
[14] Preface to Max Weber and Karl Marx by Karl Löwith (New York and London, 1993), p. 5.
[15] Interesting Times (New York, 2002), p. 127.
[16] New York, 2000, p. 3.
[17] Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom—The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stamford, 1995)
[18] P. 225.
[19] New York, 2000, p. 286.
[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice (Oxford, 1987), p. 77.
[21] Ibid, pp. 284-88.
[22] New York, 1995. p. 1.
[23] Ibid, pp. vii-viii.
[24] Ibid, p. 56.
[25] Utopianism and Marxism (New York, 1987), p. 68.
[26] Ibid, p. 72.
[27] Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias (Suffolk, 1999), p. 22.