The latest in a series of articles elaborating on the ISO's "Where We
Stand" statement.
August 28, 2008 | Issue 679
China and Cuba, like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, have
nothing to do with socialism. They are state capitalist regimes. We
support the struggles of workers in these countries against the
bureaucratic ruling class.
--From the ISO "Where We Stand"
Series: Where We Stand
You can read previous installments of Paul D'Amato's articles on the
ISO's "Where We Stand" statement.
IT WOULD be wrong to argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union has
rendered irrelevant questions about what sort of system it was.
Though the pall of "Soviet socialism"--with its bureaucratic police
methods--no longer hangs over the socialist movement, we still must
answer the questions: What was the nature of the Soviet Union? Was it
socialist in fact or in name only? Was it an inevitable outcome of what
the Russian revolutionaries set out to do in 1917?
The same questions must also apply to those countries where similar
societies were set up--China and Cuba, for example. How we answer these
questions today determines whether Marxism is a living system of thought
that can help us change the world, or whether it is obsolete.
To defend the social relations in either of these societies as somehow
socialist--where wages are low, workers have few rights, and political
parties other than the official state party are banned--is to make a
mockery of socialism.
Cuba today--much less so China, because of its lurch to the
market--still stands as an apparent alternative to capitalism on the
left. It is necessary to make a clear distinction, however, between the
defense of Cuba's sovereignty against the U.S. blockade and other
attacks on the island, and defense of Cuba's economic and political system.
Columnist: Paul D'Amato
Paul D'Amato Paul D'Amato is managing editor of the International
Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and
accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he
founded.
The most honest historical accounts of the Russian Revolution
acknowledge that the October Revolution was led by a mass working-class
party that enjoyed the support of the majority of the working class in
Russia. The revolution established soviet power--that is, it created a
workers' state based upon the elected councils of workers, soldiers and
sailors that had arisen during the February Revolution.
But only months into the revolutionary process, the new workers' state
began to falter. Bureaucracy re-emerged, democracy began to wither, and
a gradual process began in which the end result was a new bureaucratic
regime that the revolution's initiators had never intended.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHAT WENT wrong?
Marx once wrote, "A development of the productive forces is the absolute
practical premise of communism because without it, want is generalized,
and that means that all the old crap must revive again."
World capitalism had created the material conditions of abundance that
made socialism a real possibility. However, in no single country, least
of all Russia, did the material conditions exist such that socialism
could be built in isolation. Generalized want, that is poverty, creates
the conditions in which the "old crap"--inequality, class divisions,
oppression--revives, regardless of the intentions of those attempting to
change society. This is the dilemma the Bolsheviks faced.
Though the European working class was restive, and in some instances
revolutionary, no successful European revolution came to Russia's aid.
The revolutionary government faced an onslaught of counterrevolutionary
"white" armies, foreign invasion, starvation and economic collapse.
The civil war brought mass depopulation of Russia's major cities and the
breakdown of industry. The mobilization of the nation's resources
overwhelmed the weak shoots of workers' power that the revolution had
created. The necessity of mobilizing for total war to save the
revolution, combined with the terrible economic privation, obliterated
soviet democracy and replaced it with a command structure that gave the
revolution success in the civil war, but at the cost of strangling the
revolution's very reason for being.
What kind of state arose in Russia? It was socialist only in name.
Workers did not hold power. Yet the old capitalists and landowners were
gone, and their military defeat in the civil war meant they were not
coming back. The state, governed by a single party, owned the means of
production.
Many argued that since private property had been abolished, and since
the market inside Russia had been abolished, Russia was no longer
capitalist. Yet Russia remained in the orbit of world capitalism.
The ruling bureaucracy under Stalin consolidated its power by exiling
and murdering the majority of Bolsheviks, including Trotsky. It was
clearly a new ruling class--it controlled the means of production and it
held state power.
But it was not free to do whatever it liked. In order to consolidate its
power, it was compelled to make Russia militarily competitive with the
West. That meant squeezing the workers and peasantry and using every
last drop of surplus wealth to build up Russia's military hardware.
The new bureaucratic ruling class embarked on a period of massive state
accumulation to achieve this goal. This drive to accumulate, imposed on
Russia's new rulers by its competitors, marked Russia's turn to state
capitalism.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IF, IN Russia, workers lost power when the revolution degenerated, in
China, workers never had it.
The Red Army that seized state power in 1949 after a protracted
guerrilla war was drawn largely from the peasantry, with almost no
workers in it and led by a declassed intelligentsia. The army, rather
than any social class, became the source of revolutionary power.
The politics of its main leader, Mao Zedong, were not so much
Marxism--though Mao used some of Marxism's terminology--but agrarian
populism combined with radical nationalism. According to Mao, this rural
Red Army with almost no workers in it was "the main instrument of the
dictatorship of the proletariat."
When Mao's army marched into the main cities, it issued communiqués
urging the workers to remain calm and obey orders. Essentially, the
Communist Party's aim was to utilize state power to bring about national
unity, land reform and launch industrial development, using Stalin's
Russia in the 1930s as its model. Trade unions, in the words of
historian Nigel Harris, became "disciplinary and propaganda agencies of
management and state."
The main difference between Stalin and Mao's ideology is that while
Stalin emphasized the inevitable march of the productive forces, Mao
emphasized the role of will power in transforming society. The
population was exhorted through slogans to work as hard as possible for
the glory of the Chinese state.
The most famous example of Mao's voluntarism was the Great Leap Forward
of 1958, when the state embarked on a policy designed to mobilize
millions of people in rural communes to expand output. Wildly
unrealistic plans for increasing steel output were devised. The attempt
to burst through the objective barriers to fast growth had an opposite
effect, creating a breakdown in industry and massive economic dislocation.
China's transition since the 1970s from a state capitalist economy to
one allowing for greater leeway for private capital represents not a
transition from socialism to capitalism, but from one to another form of
capitalist development.
The Cuban revolution of 1959, like Mao's, involved the toppling of a
dictatorial regime by a guerrilla army. The most significant difference
is that while Mao's Red Army numbered in the hundreds of thousands,
Fidel Castro's army numbered at most 2,000. As in China, workers in the
Cuban revolution played no significant role in the revolution. It was
the guerrillas who marched from the Sierra Maestra to seize power, not
in the name of socialism (that came later), but in the name of
nationalist and populist ideals.
The revolution was wildly popular for its land, educational and economic
reforms, but the Cuban masses neither carried out the revolution nor
created the state that emerged from it. For Fidel, the mass
organizations created after the seizure of power were sounding boards
and conduits for his policies rather than organs of mass struggle and
self-organization.
As Che Guevara wrote, "The mass carries out with matchless enthusiasm
and discipline the tasks set by the government, whether in the field of
the economy, culture, defense, sports, etc. The initiative generally
comes from Fidel, or from the revolutionary leadership, and is explained
to the people, who make it their own."
Fidel only declared the revolution socialist retroactively, after his
forces crushed the U.S.-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and increasing
U.S. hostility and counterrevolutionary measures compelled him to wrest
control of the economy from hostile Cuban capitalists and move closer
into Russia's orbit.
Like Mao, Castro and Guevara's politics were voluntarist. Writes Nigel
Harris, the guerrillas believed that "armed struggle creates the
objective conditions for winning power, and, in Castro's words, those
conditions can be created in the 'immense majority of Latin American
countries' if between four and seven dedicated guerrillas can be found."
The Cuban model of guerrilla warfare proved successful, however, only in
Cuba.
This was a far cry from the politics of Marx and Engels, who argued that
the "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant the rule of the working
class, not a dictatorship of a minority.
Engels, in his criticism of August Blanqui, a French socialist who
believed that revolution would be brought to the masses by a minority,
wrote: "From Blanqui's assumption, that any revolution may be made by
the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the
necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture.
"This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary
class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the
revolution, and who are themselves previously organized under the
dictatorship of one or several individuals."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHAT IS notable about the ideology of the Cuban and Chinese revolutions,
as well as of Stalin, is that they turn the basic tenets of Marxism on
their head. For Marxism, socialism can only succeed as a movement of the
international working class. There can be no socialism in one country.
Stalin pioneered the slogan "socialism in one country," and the
foundation of Che, Castro and Mao's politics was first and foremost
nationalism and national development. For Marxism, socialism can only be
achieved through the self-emancipation of the working class and the
oppressed.
In the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the working class played at best a
passive role, with the center stage taken by armies acting in the name
of the working class, which itself never seized nor held state power at
any moment.
In Marxism, the workers' state--armed democracy--is a transitory body
with the purpose of ensuring that the old ruling classes cannot regain
power. Its purpose is to work itself out of a job, once class
distinctions have been abolished.
In Stalin's Russia--and in the national versions of "socialism" it
inspired--the state is continually strengthened. This is indirect proof,
as the existence of all state power is, that classes in those societies
have not been abolished.
http://socialistworker.org/2008/08/28/in-the-name-of-socialism
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