The Activist

Winston Churchill’s famous diatribe, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries,” is firmly entrenched in the psyche of the modern western worker. Certainly the attempts at the revolutionary reconstitution of society in the 20th century seemed to prove Churchill right. Yet there was a time when socialism seemed not only as a pragmatic program for human governance, but an inevitable one. Struggles for national liberation from colonialism and the triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Mao’s Red Army seemed to herald the revolution that Marx portended a century earlier. In a burst of rhetorical splendor, Marx, near the conclusion of the first volume of his epic Das Kapital, asserts that the self-evident contradictions of the bourgeois capitalist system would sweep it into the trash heap of history and bring about its replacement by a new epoch, that of the classless socialist society. Marx promulgates that “the centralization of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist husk. The husk is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

In the early stages of the 21st century it appears that it is socialism, not capitalism, that has been thrown into the dustbin of history; the expropriators, it would seem, have managed to impart to the working-class more wealth, more freedom and more prosperity than societies based upon economic collectivism. As such, most commentators on both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum saw the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union and the subsequent capitalist counterrevolution as the death-knell of socialism. In his 2000 article “Renewals,” Perry Anderson, a major figure in the 1960s New Left and editor of the New Left Review echoed this belief that capitalism had been triumphant:

For the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions–that is, systematic rival outlooks–within the thought-world of the West; and scarcely any on the world stage either … Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history.”

Anderson continues his virtual eulogy for Marxism, the same movement that had so potently captured the imaginations of multitudes and terrified the ruling class decades earlier, proclaiming ominously that “Little short of a slump of inter-war proportions looks capable of shaking the parameters of the current consensus.” Some commentators were even more blunt in their appraisal of the future for socialism. In his 1990 work Reflections on Revolution in Europe, Ralph Dahrendorf proclaims that, “The point has to be made that socialism is dead, and that none of its variants can be revived from a world recovering from the double nightmares of Stalinism and Brezhnevism.”

The problem with these arguments is that they equate the Eastern Bloc and the ideologies that dominated it, namely Stalinism and Brezhnevism, with socialism, and thus the fall of these bureaucratic police-states with the demise of socialism. Yet the cynic would argue that whether or not these states were indeed socialist in nature or not is not of much significance since the modern working-class’s vision of socialism is inexorably linked to these so-called workers’ states. Hence, in order to exorcise the “specter of communism” from the phantom that was Soviet “socialism” it will take a deeper analysis into Marx’s philosophical writings and a commitment to abandoning large chunks of so-called “Marxist-Leninist” theory in order to resolve socialism’s “crisis of theory” and successfully promote a new form of society to save humanity from both the unsustainable excesses, inequalities and institutionalized exploitation of capitalism and the dystopia of bureaucratic collectivist states.

To quote an old Soviet-era joke murmured in the streets of Eastern Bloc capitals, “What is the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.” This essay will examine the nature of 20th century state -socialism, its shortcomings, and its effect on the workers that it claimed empower. This examination of early attempts at socialism will be contrasted by the writings of Karl Marx, particularly his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in addition to more contemporary Marxist thought. TIt will address deficiencies in democracy in both modern liberal, bourgeois democracy and in Soviet-style bureaucratic collectivist states based upon Marx’s writings on the alienation of labor, the nature of capital, and epicurean thought. It will attempt show that through a society based upon solidarity and equality individuality would not be achieved “automatically,” but would rather be won.

John Reed, American socialist, journalist and author of the acclaimed account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, is alleged to have said upon his first visit to the Soviet Union that he had “seen the future and the future is bright.” Yet as we embark on yet another millennium of human development the future seems to be devoid of not only the Soviet Union, but its self-proclaimed goal, socialism. For all its success in building strong and universal institutions of education, health and science, Eastern Bloc rule was punctuated by state-terror and the growth of a bureaucratic clique, the Communist Party, that merely replaced the capitalist class’s position atop society. Hal Draper once wrote, in The Two Souls of Socialism, that

These two self-styled socialisms [social democracy and bureaucratic collectivism] are very different, but they have more in common than they think. The social democracy has typically dreamed of “socializing” capitalism from above. Its principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and economy is per se socialistic. It bears a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing something called socialism from the top down, and of equating statification with socialism.

Yet this sort of statification was never the intention of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The party was merely meant to facilitate the seizure of the state by the working-class and the new state was merely meant as a device to suppress the old injust order and to help bring about a new era of historic development, one based not upon competition and exploitation, but rather upon solidarity and collective prosperity. In his important thesis State and Revolution, written just months before his Bolshevik Party seized power, Lenin expresses his view that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be a combination of the expansion of democracy for the working class and the suppression of the power of the dethroned capitalist class:

But from this capitalist democracy–that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through–forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy”, as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force.

Yet when Lenin come to power what became of the extension of democracy from merely the political into the economic sectors of life? Why did after a mere few years the power of the state trump the power of the soviets (workers’ councils) within the so-called Soviet Union?

The fact that even under the tutelage of Lenin the young Soviet republic was exhibiting characteristics of a typical dictatorship was not lost upon Lenin’s revolutionary contemporaries such as the esteemed Polish-born German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg asserts that the creation of socialism must be the action of the whole working class and that it must not result in either in a faux democracy ripe with inequalities and exploitation, like that of capitalist states, or an autocratic collectivist state, but rather a true, participatory democracy:

Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class — that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; It must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.

Yet Luxemburg is enthusiastic about the great triumph of the Russian Bolsheviks and merely wishes to express her opinion that what Trotsky and Lenin were forced to implement due to historical circumstances unique to socialist revolution in a backwards, war-ravaged and semi-feudal country should not become the norm for future socialist revolutions and post-capitalist societies:

It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics. (emphasis added)

Lenin to a large extent can be forgiven. There was little history of political democracy in Russia. When he was writing State and Revolution he was theorizing about the revolution that he foresaw occurring one day in Western Europe, with its history of liberal democracy and more advanced economic development. Lenin needed in backwards Russia not merely to redistribute wealth, but also to create it; thus bureaucratic collectivism was borne out of necessity. Russia also had no democracy to begin with and little experience in participatory civil society, so who can blame Lenin for prioritizing the rebounding of the war-ravaged Soviet state over following his own theoretical models for advanced socialist construction?

Tragically, Lenin died unexpectedly early during the synthesis of the Soviet state and he was replaced by men less committed to the construction of genuine socialism. The rigid system of state management and control created by Lenin in order to resist invasion by imperialist nations, end perpetual famine and stave off counter-revolution became even more abrasive and entrenched under Stalin, and also became a model for export to oppressed peoples across the world. History has shown how ominous Luxemburg’s warning was. Lenin’s successors indeed made a virtue out of necessity.

The development of “socialism” within the Soviet Union was commanded by the Communist Party, not the working class itself. The voices of workers who actual created the wealth of Soviet society were marginalized. The relationship between labor and party authority within the Soviet Union was thus more analogous to labor and capital in capitalist society than to the radical democracy that Marxists sought to achieve. The staunch Stalinist would counter that perhaps the USSR’s “socialism” wasn’t perfect, but its centralized nature provided the only way that it could survive in a largely capitalist world and assure that its citizens the bare necessities, if not perhaps the finer luxuries, of life. Had there not been capitalist counterrevolution prosperity would have arisen in the USSR through state-led economic development, and then the state would begin to whiter away and a truly communist society would arise. To quote one of Marx’s view writings on what communist society would be like:

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Yet communism could never emerge from bureaucratic collectivism, because power unchecked is rarely willing to ever relinquish power and because in such a society workers are forced to work for the state. Yes, their “surplus value” is funneled back into the collective, but how can workers dependent on the state ever learn to freely associate and cooperate with one another? If history is any example, the state will only grow rather than wither away and a classless society can never arise under the rule of a coordinating bureaucratic stratum. Years before the Russian Revolution Rosa Luxemburg wrote about the experience that workers themselves got when they took collective action, even when they failed: “Even mistakes which a truly revolutionary labour movement commits are, in historical perspective, immeasurably more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of the very best ‘central committee’.” Imagine the lessons and experiences the Russian working class would have been able to amass over the course of seventy-plus years in a democratic workers’ state. Yet this became impossible once the Stalinist clique had grabbed control of the Communist Party.

As Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and a leader of the international Marxist opposition to Stalin, put it:

The revolution explodes the social lie. The revolution is true. It begins by calling things and the relations between things by their proper names But the revolution itself is not an integral and harmonious process. It is full of contradictions. The revolution itself produces a new ruling stratum which seeks to consolidate its privileged position and is prone to see itself not as a transitory historical instrument, but as the completion and crowning of history.

In the view of a true revolutionary Marxist, the seizure of power by the working class and the expropriation of private property is merely the beginning of the process of socialist construction, which culminates in a communist society in which “the full development of each would be the condition for the full development of all.” This was not the case in Stalinist states, states that tried to impose “communism” upon the working class, hoping through propaganda and exhortation to force them to adapt to totalitarian statism, instead of allowing workers to build communism themselves.

Yet the Soviet era had a laundry-list of often-ignored accomplishments. Russia went from a feudal society with serfs, royalty, tsars and court healers to a society that in a few tumultuous decades managed to propel a human being into the far-flung reaches of outer space! Soviet weapons and economic support aided oppressed people across the world in their fight against imperialism and colonialism and to this day Kalashnikov rifles sound off in all corners of the world, defying authority and challenging capitalist Empire. Yet how steep was the human price of these accomplishments? The veteran German Marxist Karl Kautsky, writing about the dictatorship in Russia, claimed that

Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.

What Kautsky does not directly say, but is alluding to is that something was lost in these collectivist societies–the soul and spirit of the human being, the individual. The Stalinist may counter that “it takes breaking a few eggs to make an omelet.” But human beings are not eggs and socialism is not an “omelet.” What socialism is, however, is the empowerment of the working class through the full democratization of politics and the extension of democracy to the economic sphere. As Kautsky describes in Is Soviet Russia a Socialist State?, the collectivism in Soviet Russia was the empowerment of a “party of the people” over the people; instead of emancipated labor guiding itself, labor was being guided permanently by party elites:

How can a ruling caste among whom such elements dominate in increasing measure the despotism from which they sprang, while ejecting progressively the influence of decent comrades, be animated by any readiness for high self-sacrifice in the name of a great human ideal? No doubt, they speak much of sacrifice, as do many German Nazis, they demand immeasurable sacrifices of others, but never of themselves. They themselves are quite comfortable as long as the Communist Party remains in power. The Russian Communist Party which is seeking to impose this road to “future welfare” upon 170,000,000 human beings embraces some 2,000,000 members. How many among them are spies, informers, careerists?

It can be asserted that some within the Soviet Communist Party had genuinely socialist principles and did their best to make socialism an actuality, to provide for their follow man, to support oppressed peoples abroad. But for every CPSU member in this mold, how many careerists and opportunists lurked? If socialism is the result of the dictatorship of the proletariat–the empowerment of the working class and the expropriation of the capitalist class–how could the end of the Soviet Union, ruled by an unaccountable party elite, be seen as cause to mourn the passing of socialism? It cannot. As Trotsky explains:

The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation–not only theoretically, but this time, practically–of the theory of socialism in one country.

Whatever its intended effects were, Stalin’s autarkic policy of “socialism in one country” was anti-Marxist. It was at this point that the Soviet Union devolved from a workers’ state that might have someday become a true socialist democracy to a brutal police state that can be best characterized by the term “bureaucratic collectivist”. But human lives and democracy were not the only casualties of this degeneration; the creative spirit and romantic passions that ironically precipitated the first stage of the revolution, the seizure of the power by the Bolsheviks, were surrendered as well.

Writing about the effect that Stalin had on Soviet culture and art, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote, “Now that ten years have gone by [Stalin died in 1953], I realize that Stalin’s greatest crime was not the arrests and the shootings he ordered. His greatest crime was the corruption of the human spirit.” Russian art was transformed from revolutionary pieces of creative self-expression to “revolution-approved” Socialist Realism: fanciful state-approved renderings that depicted how life should be in a “socialist” utopia (or perhaps how self-deluded party bosses actually thought life was like in the Soviet Union). Similarly, under the rigidity of Stalinism the true spirit and vision of Karl Marx was, along with his name, was dragged through the mud and molded to justify the unjustifiable. In order to attempt to wipe the slate clean and reclaim Karl Marx and socialism in the name of humanism and epicureanism we must reexamine the true meaning of Marxist socialism.