Shockwave: The Mixed Experience of Exporting Socialism
Posted by Mike E on October 30, 2009
Our discussion of the nature of the post-50s Soviet Union and their bloc is (not surprisingly) producing some strong and differing views. I think we should plan to engage this, with substance and patience, over time. I’m going to argue for my own partisan analysis in these discussions — because i think that having this Maoist pole represented well will draw out opposing views and (hopefully) raise the quality of the engagement.
by Mike Ely
Let’s take up some of Saoirse’s points (and hopefully others will do it from their perspective).
“Aside from the USSR and China were there any other socialist revolutions?”
I think there were two major socialist revolutions in the last century. The major socialist revolutions intepenetrated with a huge wave of anti-colonial struggles that burst from the exhaustion of Euro-powers during both world wars. And they interpenetrated with the liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation in 1945. And while many states emerged with socialist coloration from those events (both in the third world and in eastern europe), they were (in most cases, in my view) not able to actually initiate and propell forward a genuinely socialist revolutionary process.
There was a major element of center and periphery in those dynamics — where the emergence of major socialist power greatly influenced the politics at their edges.
I discussed my views on this, in some detail, with in an earlier essay “A Revolutionary People & the Problems at Its Periphery.” I won’t repeat all those arguments here.
But I’m trying to make the point that a major socialist revolution ripples into the surrounding areas in complex ways.
For example, after there was a socialist revolution in the urban heart of the Russian empire it extended its influence (by various political, economic and military means) far beyond the core of its conscious popular support. And the farther you got to the periphery of that influence — the more certain contradictions emerged. Someone above mentioned the armed intrusion of Bolshevik power into Georgia (February 15 – March 17 1921, during the civil war. Another examples: I wrote a book on Tibet where that is the core issue.
Bob Avakian once said (in the early 80s):
“There is nothing wrong with exporting revolution, but there has to be someone there to import it.”
I think that gets it right, and that dilemma is inherent in the spread and consolidation of revolutions. If you think about the complexity and diversity of North America (or even a medium sized country like Columbia), this dynamic of center and periphery will certainly mark any conceivable revolution in the future.
Is There Someone There to Import Socialism?
If there is no one to “import it” (meaning no embryonic revolutionary people, no basis for a mass line etc.) then the nature of the “socialism” this extension of power erects is rather weak (and even dubious).
Nepal has a revolutionary movement reaching for power, and the ripples have already been felt in India — where there is someone significant, long implanted and increasingly ready to exploit those revolutionary shockwaves.
If the Red Army had made it to Berlin in 1920, there might well have been millions ready to “import” the revolution — but the revolutionary troops had to pass through Poland on the way, and the new nationalist Polish Army was determined to prevent any “exports” from the Russian homeland.
The socialist character in a locality or plant, doesn’t just reside in whether local production takes place as part of a larger five-year plan — even a socialist one. There is a checkerboard of socialist and capitalist relations (and institutions) in any socialist society. And the socialism of localities and whole regions gets more and more dubious (we have learned through actual experience) if the social order is imposed, but there is virtually no mass force there to “import it.”
There were, in all of the Eastern European countries (after world war 2), some indigenous pro-Soviet forces — but they were of a highly mixed character, and their ability to lead a genuinely revolutionary process within those social formations was very weak.
In some places you had rather weak minorities attracted to the new power — as when many surviving Jewish people became fierce partisans of the New Poland. Or you get careerists, hacks and opportunists with their finger sensing the wind, filling in the posts of a new government — a kind of “socialist” apparatus constructed of cynical Mayor Daley machine-politics types).
What About Cuba, Laos and Korea?
Saiorse writes:
After WWII the USSR mechanically imposed a system onto East Germany. There was no socialist revolution. But was there a socialist revolution in Cuba? Laos? North Korea?
I think there was a genuine, popular revolution in Cuba. And bending to obvious and real pressures of geo-politics and survival, the Cuban leadership chose to turn to one of the anti-American international power for protection and economic support.
Recently I ran across the 1964 comment from Mao Zedong that said:
“Revisionism is being rebuffed everywhere…. In Cuba they listen to half and reject half; they listen to half because they can’t do otherwise, since they don’t produce oil or weapons.”
Unfortunately for Cuba’s revolution, they were very soon listening more than half to the Russians. Cuba’s very real revolution turned to the Soviet Union for stark geopolitical reasons. China may have been more clearly revolutionary, but it was simply not going to buy lots of sugar. And in particular, for important reasons, the Chinese refused to send rice to facilitate a Cuban policy of exaggerated mono-culture.
In other words, there was (in a real sense) someone in Cuba to “import” new social forms, i.e. there was both an indigenous leadership and a popular basis among the Cuban people for major changes (a popular basis deeply rooted in patriotism, anti-U.S. sentiments, and support for using state forms to narrow the gap between rich and poor.)
But, by then the Soviet Union had gone through profound conservative changes (in leaps) — including in the 1963 Kosigin Reforms that imposed profit as the standard of success down to the enterprise level and in particular established profit as the basis for future investment (even within a nominally socialist planning system).
So, ironically, the forms that got “imported” from the Soviet bloc (most starkly in the “gray” years of the early seventies) were not revolutionary ones, or socialist ones. This was not an importation enforced at the point of Soviet weapons (as in East Germany) but it was imposed on Cuba by the harsh dilemma of U.S. embargo and threat.
The importing of late Soviet non-socialist forms (regardless of their labels and coloration) thwarted the socialist character of Cuba’s revolution. And their close alliance transformed the nature of Cuba’s complex intervention in the world — their endorsement of Soviet invasions in Czechoslovakia and Afganistan, Castro’s promotion of disasterous non-revolutionary politics in Chile, their military propping of pro-Soviet cliques in Ethiopia and elsewhere) in ways that (by the 1970s) was “exporting revolution” but serving cold Soviet attempts to assemble a worldwide sphere of influence on a quite imperialist basis.
As for Korea and Vietnam/Laos:
Did the Pathet Lao create socialism out of their anti-colonial struggle?
There was a world-historic wave of anti-colonial revolutions that swept the world after World War 2. Korea was fighting its way free from Japan. Indochina was fighting its way free from France, Japan and the U.S.
These were real and popular anti-colonial revolutions, and I believe they had real communist currents within them at the beginning. There also many currents within their leading parties that were really just anti-colonial nationalists (adopting a communist coloration because their struggle was taking place in the context of the Chinese revolution — which created major openings for success to movements happening on its periphery.)
One of the main reasons the Koreans could stalemate the U.S. in the early 50s, and the Vietnamese could defeat the U.S. in the 1970s had to do with the fact that they received heavy military aid from the Soviet Union (for its geo-strategic reasons) and because they had China as a major rearguard base area (literally at their backs).
The U.S. was well aware that, even with nukes, they could not defeat China in a major land war for East Asia). That is why Truman pulled MacArthur back.
I think the anti-colonial revolution was real — but (like in China) the political drive and motivation was often a desire for independence, national unity and modernization, which was not inherently socialist, and became less so. (i.e. Juche vs. Marxism). China’s revolution developed a much more profoundly socialist character — for a number of reasons, but significantly because of the very radical line and influence of Mao himself throughout the course of his life.
Was Tito’s path any different than many in Africa, the middle east, south america, etc? It would seem too that many countries were caught btwn soviet social imperialism and US imperialism. This is not to make excuses but to suggest that these countries were on a tightrope of survivalism. Drawing on ideas and models for practical and rhetorical reasons.
There are powerful reasons for smaller states to seek some arrangement with imperialist powers. There is a “tightrope of survivalism.”
That is one of the reasons that actual socialist revolution is difficult in a world dominated by imperialism. Even for very large countries, it is difficult — especially if, like China, they are poor and without a developed industrial sector at the time of liberation. Maoist histories of their own revolution underplayed (considerably) the degree of aid (capital, technology transfer, trainers, etc.) the early Chinese state received from the Soviet Union — and it is hard to underestimate the difficulty they faced when, after the mid-50s, that mutually beneficial trade was cut off.
Tito (and Castro, and others) may have had important reasons for their choices — and they did. But that didn’t make their ultimately chosen road a socialist one. And if you look closely at Yugoslavia’s internal dynamics, the capitalism of it can be seen.
I think that when we look at Vietnam (and Laos was basically an occupied border region for Vietnam) the socialist character of their revolution was very shallow — they faced the sharp choices and internal struggles inherent in forms of New Democracy (or National Democracy as they called it in Vietnam).
Then, the horrific and devastating destruction they suffered in the course of the genocidal U.S. attack left them (even in victory) in a very difficult position, and this greatly strengthened the forces (around Le Duan) who were advocates of a capitalist road and of close integration into the Soviet spheres of influence.
A Scattered Empire of Basket Cases
And there was a dilemma for those states: The Soviet Union was trying to build an empire out of the highly impoverished, geographically scattered states falling out of the grip of declining European colonialists (angola, vietnam, afghanistan, egypt, potentially nicaragua, and so on.
These far flung “acquisitions” did not add up to a profitable and integrated empire — which is why the USSR was so eager to use them as levers to a larger, more profitable and much more integratable world empire.
The Soviet Union had great difficulty both supporting allied regimes (militarily) and exploiting them profitably for itself (here we are talking about after their “coming out” phase in the mid-60s).
In a study of profit relations in the Soviet empire (which I participated in during 1983) — we found that virtually the only place where the Soviet Union was able to establish stable and profitable arrangements was with the Indian state (where unequal treaties left the Soviets investing capital into the state sectors like steel, and then extracting its surplus value through artificially low prices in the import of Indian raw materials and consumer goods.) [The work by then-leftist economist Pat Clawson on those Soviet-Indian imperialist relations was very revealing, and for me very convincing.]
In other places within their primitive and scattered “sphere of influence” (in the third world), the Soviets were often paying more than they reaped… especially in Cuba (which they maintained artificially as a forward military post and as a kind of attractive come-on model for potential client states.) It was an unstable situation, and very unpopular with the Soviets, who were trying to do a full court press for much wider and closer acquisitions in Africa and Asia — especially in regard to India and the Middle East. (I have always thought that they were dabbling in Latin America — Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador — mainly to distract the U.S. in its own backyard, but that they never serious considered that they could consolidate dominance beyond Cuba.)
Gary said
If one acknowledges that the Soviets were “paying more than they reaped” outside of their relationship with India (and I think they were paying more than they reaped in their relations with their Eastern European clients as well), it becomes, it seems to me, difficult to argue that the USSR was “imperialist” in the Leninist sense.
Maz said
Gary: Why? It doesn’t seem unreasonable that an emerging imperialist power would spend more investing and setting up clients initially before they see the fruits of these efforts over the long term. These fruits, by the way, must also be seen not just in a balance sheet profit line, but need to take into consideration global geo-political alignments as well. So while Cuba may have been unprofitable, it was a necessity to prop it up and retain it as a client state as part of the overall imperialist aspirations of the SU, especially considering their number one obstacle in achieving these aspirations was the United States.
The US has certainly paid more than they’ve reaped thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan – but it seems fairly clear that these adventures are part of a broader imperialist strategic necessity. What matters for the US, and what mattered for the Soviet Union, are the drivers that compel them to act in such a way.
Mike pointed out the Kosygin reforms that put profit maximization as The primary guiding principle for Soviet economics – from enterprise level up to investment allocation by the central ministries. The Soviet economy was certainly cosmetically different from the West, but at its core were profit-maximizing monopolies driven to overproduction and capital export.
Mike E said
Gary:
You are raising an important argument. Let me share the counterargument (written before Maz’s comment above appeared, and along the same lines):
Imperialist powers often establish colonies, beachheads and strategic bases that are not in themselves profitable. They do so for many reasons.
Think of Britain in Aden, U.S. in the Panama Canal and so on.
Many other colonies were money-drains for a major part of their existence (and only over long time developed any profitable features.) Think of the many European water stations on the African coast (on the way to the spice islands) — like Capetown.
Take one major example: The U.S. support for Israel. You can look at that relationship in isolation and not find much profit for the U.S. (certainly on balance). And some people even argue that it is an example of the U.S. not pursuing imperialist self interest — because that relationship (seen in isolation) seems so unprofitable.
To be clear: I am using the word “imperialist” in precisely what gary calls “the strictest Leninist sense.” I.e. that we are talking about monopoly capitalist powers, divided against themselves into geo-political rivalries (as a manifestation of the inherent “manyness of capital.”)
Often such powers scarf up a client state to deny it to their rivals. Sometimes they pick one up because it has larger military than commercial value. Look at the U.S. military colonialization in Midway and Okinawa — where is the immediate profit in that?
So the issue is really not the immediate profitability of any particular colonial venture — but the role it plays in the larger efforts by imperialist power to achieve (as lenin called) a favorable redistribution of the world. An expanded sphere of influence.
Several imperialist powers have come “late to the table.” Germany, in particular, wasn’t unified until the late 1800s, after many of the richest colonial “plums” had been gathered (i.e. India, Indonesia, etc.) Germany pushed for the notorious Berlin conference, and managed to grab for itself a few scattered African colonies, which were not particularly rich (Namibia?) at the time, or profitable — but which they eagerly tried to exploit (and where they conducted energetic genocide).
But really, to prosper as a major imperialist power, Germany needed to FORCE re-division of the world — and for that they needed victory in a world war, and for that the colonies appeared (not mainly as immediately profitable sites for exploitation, but as geopolitical “chips” for the larger “game.”)
An interesting example: Before World War 1 Germany had one very rich and valuable colony, the east African trading center of Zanzibar. And meanwhile Germany had a major military strategic problem: Helgoland. Helgoland is a barren rocky island in the middle of the north sea — which has a major naval strategic value: it was like a British pistol in the GErmany’s naval (close to the major port of Hamburg.)
So what did Germany do? They agreed to a swap in 1890. They gave Britain the previous riches of Zanzibar island, in exchange for the rocky barrenness of Helgoland’s cold cliffs.
If you look at that using Gary’s method (“giving more than they reaped”) — this exchange would seem to suggest that Germany was not very imperialist, that their motives were defensive (not aggressive), that they cared more about their homeland waters than rich distant colonies.
But of course, the truth is the opposite. Germany was preparing a huge world-class navy, precisely to CHALLENGE britain for its colonies (including East Africa and India). And the exchange of rich Zanzibar for rocky Helgoland was a strategic move within this much larger imperialist game.
Also, you have to see that different imperialist powers are playing different games. Britain was a big island-based naval power with an existing colonial empire to protect. Germany was a power on the continent of Europe, and it was seeking to project power overland through the Bosphorus straits, through alliances and influence within the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, today), into the Persian Gulf. It was a strategy for splitting the British empire, negating British power in the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal (opened in 1860s).
And so what did Germany do? They built the famous “Berlin to Badgad Railway.” Now if you look at that (very very expensive) engineering project, it was not profitable. Does that prove that the German imperialists were not imperialists? Were they “giving aid” to the impoverished nations along that railroad (as they claimed, of course)?
They needed great government involvement in the project (precisely because private companies were not willing to take losses without profits). Was that a sign that they too were not imperialist or capitalist? No.
* * * * * * *
I mention Germany before World War 1 as an analogy here. In other words, the common arguments against Soviet imperialist nature are often rooted in a very mechanical and ahistorical view of what imperialists are actually like.
If you applied that same method to ANY imperialist power in history, you would end up finding it “difficult to argue” that ANY OF THEM were “imperialist in the Leninist sense.”
The Soviet Union had been a socialist country. By the late sixties they had gone through profound internal changes. And they had developed a massive world-class nuclear ICBM force (negating the U.S. nuclear monopoly). And their main rival (the U.S.) was staggering from the growing defeat in Vietnam (which Soviet aid had helped along).
And so there was an opening.
The soviet imperialist attempts to build an empire came in a number of stages (which I won’t elaborate here), and they came under a number of different public “signboards” (public semi-”Marxist” justification).
They had slogans like “socialist division of labor” (i.e. we provide loans, you send us raw material, or whatever). They tried to develop a set of close relations with an array of new nationalist states (iraq, egypt under nasser, sukarno, etc.) They tried to encourage “colonel’s coups” — which they could then flip in their direction. They embraced popular anti-colonial revolutions (vietnam, cuba, etc.) — while fiercely arguing against new revolutions, and saying that such popular revolutions should rely on soviet power for both development and protection.
There are some further points worth making:
They did not do well in any of these policies — and they went from one strategy to another trying to make it work.
What they accumulated by the 1980s were a global network of basket cases — some of the most impoverished, devastated and disarticulated economies on earth. And what their prospects looked like was “more of the same” (nicaragua, el salvador, north yemen, etc.)
The three exceptions were: Parts of eastern Europe, India and Cuba.
But in fact, the Soviet Union was not able to integrate these client states into a coherent and profitable empire (for obvious reasons). For one thing the USSR had virtually no goods (other than weapons) that anyone wanted. Their technology and quality was terrible. (Big example: Soviet bulldozers at Nasser’s Aswan dam were a disaster.)
Further, these client states were widely scattered and poor. Their resources were hard to assemble into a coherent set of production circuits. The soviet imperialists may have talked about a new “division of labor” in their sphere — but how to you integrate north Yemen with Nicaragua into a profitable imperialist world operation. And Cuba (which is a rich island) was producing only one product — sugar — which the USSR was buying below world market prices (i.e. subsidizing from a distance). Grenada (which was briefly in the Soviet camp) produced nutmeg.
How solid and profitable an empire can you build on products like sugar and nutmeg?
Now that is why India is important. There they HAD stable and growing relations with a mature economy. There they were able to develop long term trade arrangements (based on India’s anti-China and anti-U.S. lean). There they were able to invest in major industries, and contract for the consumer goods that the people of the Soviet bloc were demanding. And so THERE we can see the NATURE OF THE RELATIONS that the Soviet Union was then going for. It is a microcosm of what their desired international economic relations would have been like — if they had been able to mature within a coherent and integrated world empire.
And exactly in those Indian unequal treaties, Patrick Clawson documents that a process of extraction of surplus value is carried out — through the mediation of state-to-state loans (for investment in Indian heavy industry) coupled with highly beneficial prices given to Soviet purchasers of Indian consumer goods.
This work is included in the book “Soviet Union Socialist or Social-Imperialist: Essays Toward the Debate on the Nature of Soviet Society” which I helped edit and which was published in 1983. [Note again: Clawson was then, in 1983, on the edge of becoming the extremely reactionary writer that he is today. But I don't think his politics today negates the value of this earlier work. It would be great if someone would scan his essay so we could post it here on this site for a new generation and a world movement.]
So you get a situation where there is a developing and clearly imperialist economic relationship between the Soviet Union and their most economically developed client state (India) — while everywhere else the Soviets are reduced to providing military help propping up sympathetic, unstable regimes (Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, etc.)
And what you have (in the 1970s and 80s) is a situation where a major power is seeking to position itself to force a re-division of the world — using these unprofitable forward base areas as levers (as strategic “investments” of a kind) to use in future crisis. If the U.S. had declined, if it had been unable to mount its 1980s military arms race, if it had been unable to bankrupt the Soviets (at the level of STRATEGIC weapons), these scattered bases would have potentially served as a way to extend and project Soviet influence.
For example, oil rich Iran was, in 1979, a suddenly prize that was suddenly “in play” in that kind of great game after the Shah fell. And it is impossible to understand the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan outside the context of that.
* * * * * * * * *
There is a second set of issues that Gary is also correctly pointing to:
It is unusual for an imperialist power to be less developed than its client states. And it is true that the countries in Eastern Europe were (overall and generally) more economically developed and even richer than the Soviet Union.
When I was in Eastern Europe (briefly, for a month in 1969), everyone I met said “Whatever you see here is worse in the Soviet Union.” They meant the relative scarcity of many consumer goods, for example, and they also meant conditions of political repression. And that observation is backed up by the available economic data.
For example, in Czech stores, you would see a bra counter, and behind it stacks of one model of bra, organized by size. And customers would line up to “buy a bra” — and there was no question of picking types, or styles, or finding “one that fit” — women would mention their size, get their bra and go. And people were well aware that just over the West German border, a much more diverse array of goods were available. And they would say to me “The scarcity we have here is much worse in the Soviet Union.”
There are several sides to this: The Soviet bloc suffered (as imperialist societies) from the weakness of their international empire. This scarcity was not so much a result of planned economics, or the inability of state-owned societies to innovate. It was rooted in two things:
1) The Soviet bloc had a huge, huge military burden. They were confronting a world U.S.-alliance that had three times the GDP, and the Warsaw Pact had to field a credible, comparable (if not equivalent) military force on that much smaller economic base. The joke was “The U.S. has a military industrial complex, the USSR is a military industrial complex.” Meaning that the consumer goods sector of the Soviet (and East European) economies suffered terribly from the military rivalry with the West. And (ultimately) that Cold War arms race broke the back of the Soviet Union.
2) The Soviet bloc (as imperialists) suffered from their inability to exploit a profitable empire. They did not (as did France, or Britain or the U.S.) have relatively easy access to cheap labor and cheap resources in ways they could profitably integrate into their home economies. There are economies of scale, and a genuine imperialist “division of labor” that was simply outside the grasp of the Soviet economic tzars.
So the scarcity of goods in the East bloc was itself a by-product of the relative weakness of the Soviet imperialist world position — and it was also a spur for the Soviets to aggressively try to get their empire-shit together.
(Example: When the wall fell, and the East German people were voting for the first time, on whether to undergo Anschluss — i.e. annexation — to West Germany…. the conservative Christian Democrats handed out (as vote encouraging gifts) bananas and little bags of coffee with the initials CDU stamped on them. Now, if you think about it, they were not saying “If you join West Germany, we can offer you our highly technological and efficient society.” They were saying “Our side, on the west, has much better access to the Third World, we have bananas and coffee and the beaches of Cyprus.” It was an explicit imperialist appeal by the West German party — saying our bloc is bigger and therefore better. But that is not to say that the East didn’t have imperialist benefits — they did. And my example of Vietnamese “guest workers” slaving away — as payment for East German loans — is a vivid one of the 1980s. It is a sign of both classic imperialist relations within the Eastern bloc, and also of East Germany’s status in the world order. East Germany was not, as some three-worldists claimed, a country somehow colonized by the Soviet Union — it was a major imperialist power in its own right, operating and profiting jointly with the USSR within that larger Soviet empire.)
It is true that the Soviet Union was poorer than its Eastern European clients, and it is true that this is odd for an imperialist power historically.
But the USSR (as an imperialist power) is unique in this way:
It was the only imperialist power in history that had major parts of its colonial possessions legally and formally included within its formal borders. You can imagine the USSR of those days as a kind of “Canada that had annexed Mexico.” It was a cold northern rather barren, military and industrial powerhouse, that had annexed poor, oil-rich, agricultural countries like Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakstan etc.)
So yes, the Soviet Union was poorer (statistically) than say Poland — but this was in part because the imperialist-thirdworld divide ran through the USSR itself.
(This kind of arrangement is not literally unheard of in the history of other imperialist states: France legally considered Algeria as literally “a department” of the metropole — as if the U.S. had made Puerto Rico a state.)
Adrienne said
Mike wrote:
Maybe many will disagree with this viewpoint, but the way I see it, there were two major attempts at socialist revolution in the last century, and I believe that the reason they ultimately failed is because real emancipation and participation was never fully extended to women. And, that this factor is a critical and very serious flaw that really needs to be acknowledged and addressed by revolutionary people moving into the future.
I think that’s an excellent essay, and you certainly covered a lot of territory there, however, it does leave out this specific factor which I’ve always considered a major problem within the very core of these revolutionary movements of the past. One that has also created serious problems that automatically extend to the periphery. Because I have always suspected that a significant portion of resistance at the periphery had/has the potential to evaporate quickly if true emancipation and participation of women was/is allowed to become a hallmark of socialist revolution.
So far this has not been the case, and that is why I can’t consider any revolution that has been attempted thus far to be a true socialist revolution.
To me it seems that the state has very obviously needed women in terms of our ability to agitate and fight effectively for revolution, and for our labor power, and for the reproduction of society, yet women have actually received little in return — a situation which only (and can only) weaken, rather than strengthen revolutionary movements.
For instance, the Bolshevik’s clearly started out with strong revolutionary libertarian principles regarding women’s emancipation, and free unions, and plans for the socialization of housework, and in 1918 when the first Soviet ‘Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship’ was instituted it seemed as though they really did understand that this was a critically important and necessary step towards creating the transition from capitalism to socialism within their society. But of course, problems quickly arose because the Bolshevik’s didn’t plan at all for the necessity of immediate state involvement in what had previously been considered family responsibilities.
With theory and social reality sharply colliding, the needs of women and children began to totally overwhelm social services after the revolution. So, rather than an emancipated society, what they soon ended up with was a situation where women (and children) who had been deserted by their husbands (and fathers) only became more dependent on their families to survive. Those without family to help them were forced to do without, and naturally there was an explosion of destitute people — lots of homeless children and delinquency and juvenile crime, and among women who faced few job opportunities and discriminatory hiring for work there was widespread unemployment — as well as plenty of prostitution.
People who lived beyond the urban areas must have immediately seen that there could be a very wide margin of difference between what the revolutionaries were saying, versus what the reality could be — a situation that would naturally create distrust and cynicism on the periphery.
As we all know, eventually the Bolsheviks threw away many of their ideals and principles and began restoring capitalist elements in order to rebuild their shattered economy (and at the same time turned back to the idea that the family should be the primary institution for bringing up children for the good of society). The ‘Land Code’ of 1922 solidified patriarchal heads of households as the main unit of production — a death knell to gender equality. Legalized abortion remained the sole area where Russian women had some measure of control over their lives (it had been legalized in 1920, although it wasn’t actually available to all women in many areas). Then came the 1936 law that reversed that single measure of control by outlawing abortions once again, forcing women to take on the burdens of having to work a job, and do the housework, and raise children at the same time.
So, to sum up my thoughts on this: I don’t think that revolutions that benefit only a portion of the population can honestly be considered successful ones.
Just my opinion.
David_D said
I think it is a mistake to dismiss or denigrate the experience of socialism in countries outside the USSR and China. The extension of this logic is that the only in Russia, and not the entire USSR, was there a somehow “legitimate” socialist revolution. There was a socialist revolution in Czechoslovakia, and there was in the eastern part of Germany. The armed might of the Red Army played an important role, to be sure, buy nonetheless, the working class in the European socialist countries did make revolution!
Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia – they too took the path of new democracy on the road to socialism. We cannot dismiss these experiences in any way.
Mike E said
David:
Please break your views down a bit more for us. How did the working class in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany “make revolution.” What was the process you are seeing? What is the evidence and theory you base this on?
Vietnam did I believe take the road of New Democracy (they called it national democracy). But by the time you get Le Duan, i think that it is not socialist. What is your evaluation?
Mongolia, I don’t know much about. Can you share how you think the people there were involved in the emancipation, and what radical social changes came about?
David_D said
I cannot be too authoritative here, and so perhaps I should not be speaking. But… we have seen many cases in which middle-level officers launched coups during a period in which the masses were not in revolutionary ferment, and then proceeded to implement “revolutionary” programs. The Derg comes to mind in Ethiopia. The Derg did some good things in the countryside, and certainly did try to spread knowledge of the works of the communist greats. They tried to cobble together a communist party after the fact. I am not upholding the Derg, but using it as an extreme example of a “revolution” not rooted in the masses at the time it happened.
The Bolshevik revolution itself could be called a coup of sorts. The Bolshevik party was indeed very strong, but lacked a rural presence, where the bulk of the masses resided. A relatively narrow social sector actively supported the revolution. This was different than China, for instance, or Vietnam.
Now, with regard to what you asked: The working class of Czechoslovakia very strongly supported the Communist Party and looked to Klement Gottwald as their leader in the post-war period. There was indeed a situation of dual power after the fascists were defeated. The masses were mobilized in the streets and in their workplaces to defeat the attempts to consolidate a bourgeois democracy in these conditions. And they succeeded. I see some parallels between Nepal and this case in a very superficial sense.
The Germans successfully formed a unified workers party based on communist politics. But, it is true, the German case is different…
Dave said
Mike writes: “I have always thought that [the Soviets] were dabbling in Latin America — Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador — mainly to distract the U.S. in its own backyard [...]”
Bad relationships always leave a lasting imprint, and as Kasama forges ahead with the task of rethinking, it’s natural that sometimes the imprint of old thinking will show through. I believe that the thought Mike expresses above was the line of the RCP. It was also, more or less, the line of the Reagan Administration.
That the Reagan Administration would see things in such a way was understandable, but it’s unfortunate that some communists would be incapable of seeing “small country” revolutions through anything but the lens of “big country” politics. (That is, unless the “small country” revolution happens to be led by a party from a similar tendency to one’s own, in which case it suddenly attains world-historic importance). I think that this type of one-sided thinking is something that Lenin warned against in his polemic with Rosa Luxemburg, isn’t it?
The Central American revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s deserve to be examined in their own right. The idea that the Salvadoran revolution was in some way a product of Soviet “imperialism” is easily disproved by the fact that the FMLN strengthened and grew while the Soviet Union was collapsing, and that the final offensive which forced the government to the negotiating table came at the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s autobiography “Con sueños se escribe la vida” is a good reference for anyone who wants to understand the revolutionary process in El Salvador. Sánchez Cerén was the leader of the Fuerzas Populares de Liberacion (FPL), one of the main organizations which united to form the FMLN, and today is the Vice President of the Republic.
Similarly, Mike’s claim that the Soviet Union “maintained [Cuba] artificially as a forward military post and as a kind of attractive come-on model for potential client states” dismisses the uniqueness and importance of the revolutionary process in Cuba.
It’s unfortunate that neither Mike’s essay about Che Guevara which he wrote for the RCP in 1998, nor his self-criticism of that essay on this site, really engaged with Che’s actual writings. It’s unfortunate, because Che’s writings as minister of industry and as chief of the National Bank were actually quite critical of the Khrushchev-era economic model, and promoted the idea of structuring economic activity in such a way as to promote communist consciousness.
What I’m trying to convey is not that any particular revolutionary experience should be upheld as a model for all times and places, but simply that every revolutionary experience should be examined in its own right, and that we should avoid a one-sided view. The idea that the Russian and Chinese revolutions are the only ones that we can learn anything of value from is an idea which should be utterly rejected. And the tendency to view the world as basically a chess game of nation states and major powers — rather than focusing on people, classes, and their struggles — is an example of old (and not very Marxist) thinking which should be reconsidered.