No More Learning

Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that "when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts. "1 While professing a dedication to fighting dog- matism "both of the Right and Left," individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red- baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U. S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a pro- gressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.
A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a "willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual hon- esty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous" (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a vir- ulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
1 Mark Green and Gail MacColl, New York: Pantheon Books, There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (1983), 12.
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Sorely lacking within the U. S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capi- talism took a century to accomplish--while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as cap- italist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa.
Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dra- matic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for "the poor little children who got fed under communism" (his words).
Slinging Labels
Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as "Soviet apologists" and "Stalinists," even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. 2 Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we
2 In the first edition of my book Inventing Reality (New York: St. Martins Press, 1986) I wrote: "The U. S. me? dias encompassing negativity in regard to the Soviet Union might induce some of us to react with an unqualifiedly glowing view of
that society. The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problems of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some persons in the population. "
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refused to uncritically swallow U. S. media propaganda about com- munist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well- publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did. 3
Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U. S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorse- ments, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration. 4
That many U. S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the "Leninist" label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: "Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the
3 Many on the U. S. Left, who displayed only hostility and loathing toward the Soviet Union and other European communist states, have a warm feeling for Cuba, which they see as having a true revolutionary tradition and a somewhat more open society. In fact, at least until the present (January 1997), Cuba has had much the same system as the USSR and other communist nations: public ownership of industry, a planned economy, close relations with existing communist nations, and one-party rule--with the party playing a hegemonic role in the government, media, labor unions, women's federations, youth groups, and other institutions.
4 Partly in reaction to the ubiquitous anticommunist propaganda that permeated U. S. media and public life, many U. S. communists, and others close to them, refrained from criticizing the autocratic features of the Soviet Union. Conse- quently, they were accused of thinking that the USSR was a workers "paradise" by critics who seemingly would settle for nothing less than paradisial standards. After the Khrushchev revelations in 1953, U. S. communists grudgingly allowed that Stalin had made "mistakes" and even had committed crimes.
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Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals"5 Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolu- tionary means to fight injustice but power for power s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.
At the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: "Lenin said that the purpose of ter- ror is to terrorize. " U. S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disap- proving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political devel- opment. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a suc- cessful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.
Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventur- ism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. Whether Lenins approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question
5 Chomsky interviewed by Husayn Al-Kurdi: Perception, March/April 1996.
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that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice. 6
Left anticommunists find any association with communist orga- nizations morally unacceptable because of the "crimes of commu- nism" Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic party in this country, either as voters or as members, apparently unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into deten- tion camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; deten- tion camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a "national emergency"; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco's fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-
lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the "democratic socialist" anticommunists to insist
6 I refer the reader to Lenins books: The State and Revolution; "Left-Wing" Communism--an Infantile Disorder; What is to Be Doneand various articles and statements still available in collected editions. See also John Ehrenberg s treatment of Marxism-Leninism in his The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Marxism's Theory of Socialist Democracy (New York: Routledge, 1992).
? LEFT ANTICOMMUNISM 49
repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.
Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism
The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, accord- ing to some U. S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party "state capitalism" or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries "socialist" is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world--as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.
First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri
Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed man- sions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U. S. leaders possess.
The "lavish life" enjoyed by East Germany's party leaders, as widely publicized in the U. S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the out- skirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese elec- tronics. The U. S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans
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had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and elec- tronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the "lavish" consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.
Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not orga- nized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means ofproduction supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from
their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.
Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.
F o u r t h , communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment oppor- tunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and nat- ural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern
European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.
All of the above were organizing principles for every communist
system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free- market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the work- ers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by
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Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this "pure socialism" view is ahistorical and nonfalsi- fiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It com- pares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priori- ties set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its funda- ments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they "feel betrayed" by this or that revolution.
The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure social- ists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of social- ism--not created from ones imagination but developed through
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actual historical experience--could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possi- ble at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:
How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the "nature" of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this "nature" come from? Was this "nature" disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the soci- ety itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of "social- ism" and the negative of "bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny" interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92. )
The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolu- tionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the "direct actions" of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critics own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.
Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:
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It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe--and the millions of heroic people who fol- lowed and fought with them--all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . .
These leaders weren't in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91)
To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agen- das for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appeal- ing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U. S. -sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.
Decentralization vs. Survival
For a peoples revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society's institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reac- tionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone's liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.
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Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872- 73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdi- cated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thou- sand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. "Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta)," Engels writes. "[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separa- tion from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces] " It was "the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other. "7
Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insur- gency--which may be one reason why there has never been a suc- cessful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.
One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik gov-
7 Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism: Selected Writings
(New York: International Publishers, 1972), 139. In her biography of Louise Michel, the anarchist historian Edith Thomas asserts that anarchism is "the absence of government, the direct adminstration by people of their own lives. " Who could not want that? Thomas doesn't say how it would work except to assert that "anarchists want it right now, in all the confusion and disorder of right now. " She notes proudly that anarchism "is still intact as an ideal, for it has never been tried. " That is exactly the problem. Why in so many hundreds of actual rebellions, including ones led by anarchists themselves, has anarchism never been tried or never succeeded in surviving for any length of time in an "intact" anarchist form? (In the anarchist uprising Engels described, the rebels, in seeming violation
of their own ideology, did not rely on Thomas's "direct administration by the people" but set up ruling juntas. ) The unpracticed, unattainable quality of the ideal helps it to retain its better-than-anything appeal in the minds of some.
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ernment. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks' siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of inter- nal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers' Opposition and other factional groups within the party. 8 "The time has come," he told an enthusiastically concur- ring Tenth Party Congress, "to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.
" Open disputes and conflict- ing tendencies within and without the party, the communists con- cluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.
Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party's Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution -- like every other--that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way. 9
By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by
8 Trotsky was among the more authoritarian Bolshevik leaders, least inclined to tolerate organizational autonomy, diverse views, and internal party democracy. But in the fall of 1923, finding himself in a minority position, outmaneuvered by Stalin and others, Trotsky developed a sudden commitment to open party procedures and workers' democracy. Ever since, he has been hailed by some followers as an anti-Stalinist democrat.
9 Regarding the several years before 1921, the Sovietologist Stephen Cohen writes, "The experience of civil war and war communism profoundly altered both the party and the emerging political system. " Other socialist parties were expelled from the soviets. And the Communist party's "democratic norms . . . as well as its almost libertarian and reformist profile" gave way to a "rigid authoritarianism and pervasive 'militarization. ' " Much of the popular control exercised by local soviets and factory committees was eliminated. In the words of one Bolshevik leader, "The republic is an armed camp": see Cohens Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 79.
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Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more polit- ical diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organiza- tions, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small busi- nesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military- industrial base.
The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more com- fortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only prob- lem is that the country would have risked being incapable of with- standing the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his peo- ple. 10 It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the bar- ren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. "Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history. "11
Stalins prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviet citizens who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.
10 To give one of innumerable examples, recently Roger Bu? rbach faulted Stalin for "rushing the Soviet Union headlong on the road to industrialization": see his correspondence, Monthly Review, March 1996, 35.
11 John Scott, Behind the Urals, an American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
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All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not "make inevitable" the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regard- ing the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deporta- tions of "suspect" nationalities.
The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were "not a warrior people" but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U. S. - sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U. S. -financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands--the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the sup- pression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.
The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist gov- ernments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of com- munism and the U. S. Left would be free from the albatross of exist- ing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, "liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China. "
In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-
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in-glove with U. S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe. In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer restrained by a compet- ing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. "Capitalism with a human face" is being replaced by "capitalism in your face. " As Richard Levins put it, "So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what
communists and their allies had held at bay" (Monthly Review> 9/96). Having never understood the role that existing communist pow- ers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the
losses that were to come. Some of them still don't get it.
? CHAPTER 4
COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND
The various communist countries suffered from major systemic deficiencies. While these internal problems were seriously exacer- bated by the destruction and military threat imposed by the Western capitalist powers, there were a number of difficulties that seemed to inhere in the system itself.
Rewarding Inefficiency
All communist nations were burdened by rigid economic com- mand systems. 1 Central planning was useful and even necessary in the earlier period of siege socialism to produce steel, wheat, and tanks in order to build an industrial base and withstand the Nazi onslaught. But it eventually hindered technological development and growth, and proved incapable of supplying a wide-enough range of consumer goods and services. No computerized system could be devised to accurately model a vast and intricate economy.
1 While framed in the past tense, the following discussion also applies to the few remaining communist countries still in existence.
59
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No system could gather and process the immense range of detailed information needed to make correct decisions about millions of production tasks.
Top-down planning stifled initiative throughout the system. Stagnation was evident in the failure of the Soviet industrial estab- lishment to apply the innovations of the scientific-technological rev- olution of the 1970s and 1980s, including the use of computer technology. Though the Soviets produced many of the world's best mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists, little of their work found actual application. As Mikhail Gorbachev complained before the 28th Communist Party Congress in 1990, "We can no longer tol- erate the managerial system that rejects scientific and technological progress and new technologies, that is committed to cost-ineffective- ness and generates squandering and waste. "
It is not enough to denounce ineptitude, one must also try to explain why it persisted despite repeated exhortations from lead- ers--going as far back as Stalin himself who seethed about time- serving bureaucrats. An explanation for the failure of the managerial system may be found in the system itself, which created disincentives for innovation:
1. Managers were little inclined to pursue technological paths that might lead to their own obsolescence. Many of them were not com- petent in the new technologies and should have been replaced.
2. Managers received no rewards for taking risks. They main- tained their positions regardless of whether innovative technology was developed, as was true of their superiors and central planners.
3. Supplies needed for technological change were not readily avail- able. Since inputs were fixed by the plan and all materials and labor were fully committed, it was difficult to divert resources to innovative production. In addition, experimentation increased the risks of fail- ing to meet one s quotas.
4. There was no incentive to produce better machines for other enterprises since that brought no rewards to one's own firm. Quite
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the contrary, under the pressure to get quantitative results, managers often cut corners on quality.
5. There was a scarcity of replacement parts both for industrial production and for durable-use consumer goods. Because top plan- ners set such artificially low prices for spare parts, it was seldom cost- efficient for factories to produce them.
6. Because producers did not pay real-value prices for raw materi- als, fuel, and other things, enterprises often used them inefficiently.
7. Productive capacity was under-utilized. Problems of distribu- tion led to excessive unused inventory. Because of irregular ship- ments, there was a tendency to hoard more than could be put into production, further adding to shortages.
8. Improvements in production would lead only to an increase in one s production quota. In effect, well-run factories were punished with greater work loads. Poor performing ones were rewarded with lower quotas and state subsidies.
Managerial irresponsibility was a problem in agriculture as well as industry. One Vietnamese farm organizers comment could describe the situation in most other communist countries: "The painful les- son of [farm] cooperatization was that management was not moti- vated to succeed or produce. " If anything, farm management was often motivated to provide a poor product. For instance, since state buyers of meat paid attention to quantity rather than quality, collec- tive farmers maximized profits by producing fatter animals. Consumers might not care to eat fatty meat but that was their prob- lem. Only a foolish or saintly farmer would work harder to produce better quality meat for the privilege of getting paid less.
As in all countries, bureaucracy tended to become a self-feeding animal. Administrative personnel increased at a faster rate than pro- ductive workers. A factory with 11,000 production workers might have an administrative staff of 5,000, a considerable burden on pro- ductivity. In some enterprises, administrative personnel made up half the full number of workers.
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The heavily bureaucratic mode of operation did not allow for crit- ical, self-corrective feedback. In general, there was a paucity of the kind of debate that might have held planners and managers account- able to the public. The fate of the whistleblower was the same in communist countries as in our own. Those who exposed waste, incompetence, and corruption were more likely to run risks than receive rewards.
Nobody Minding the Store
We have been taught that people living under communism suffer from "the totalitarian control over every aspect of life," as Time mag- azine (5/27/96) still tells us. Talking to the people themselves, one found that they complained less about overbearing control than about the absence of responsible control. Maintenance people failed to perform needed repairs. Occupants of a new housing project might refuse to pay rent and no one bothered to collect it. With lax management in harvesting, storage, and transportation, as much as 30 percent of all produce was lost between field and store and thou- sands of tons of meat were left to spoil. People complained about broken toilets, leaky roofs, rude salespeople, poor quality goods, late trains, deficient hospital services, and corrupt and unresponsive bureaucrats.
Corruption and favoritism were commonplace. There was the manager who regularly pilfered the till, the workers who filched foodstuffs and goods from state stores or supplies from factories in order to service private homes for personal gain, the peasants on col- lective farms who stripped parts from tractors to sell them on the black market, the director who accepted bribes to place people at the top of a waiting list to buy cars, and the farmers who hoarded live- stock which they sold to townspeople at three times the govern- ments low procurement price. All this was hardly the behavior of people trembling under a totalitarian rule of terror.
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The system itself rewarded evasion and noncompliance. Thus, the poorer the performance of the collective farm, the more substantial the subsidy and the less demanded in the way of work quotas. The poorer the performance of plumbers and mechanics, the less bur- dened they were with calls and quotas. The poorer the restaurant ser- vice, the fewer the number of clients and the more food left over to take home for oneself or sell on the black market. The last thing restaurant personnel wanted was satisfied customers who would return to dine at the officially fixed low prices.
Not surprisingly, work discipline left much to be desired. There was the clerk who chatted endlessly with a friend on the telephone while a long line of people waited resentfully for service, the two workers who took three days to paint a hotel wall that should have taken a few hours, the many who would walk off their jobs to go shopping. Such poor performance itself contributed to low produc- tivity and the cycle of scarcity. In 1979, Cuban leader Raul Castro offered this list of abuses:
[The] lack of work discipline, unjustified absences from work, deliberate go-slows so as not to surpass the norms--which are already low and poorly applied in practice--so that they won t be changed. . . . In contrast to capitalism, when people in the country- side worked an exhausting 12-hour workday and more, there are a good many instances today especially in agriculture, of people . . . working no more than four or six hours, with the exception of cane- cutters and possibly a few other kinds of work. We know that in many cases heads of brigades and foremen make a deal with workers to meet the norm in half a day and then go off and work for the other half for some nearby small [private] farmer [for extra income]; or to go slow and meet the norm in seven or eight hours; or do two or three norms in a day and report them over other days on which they don't go to work
All these "tricks of the trade" in agriculture are also to be found in industry, transportation services, repair shops and many other places where theres rampant buddyism, cases of "you do me a favor and I'll do you one" and pilfering on the side. (Cuba Update, 3/80)
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If fired, an individual had a constitutional guarantee to another job and seldom had any difficulty finding one. The labor market was a seller's market. Workers did not fear losing their jobs but managers feared losing their best workers and sometimes overpaid them to prevent them from leaving. Too often, however, neither monetary rewards nor employment itself were linked to performance. The ded- icated employee usually earned no more than the irresponsible one. The slackers and pilferers had a demoralizing effect on those who wanted to work in earnest.
Full employment was achieved by padding the workforce with people who had relatively little to do. This added to labor scarcity, low productivity, lack of work discipline, and the failure to imple- ment labor-saving technologies that could maximize production.
The communists operated on the assumption that once capital- ism and its attendant economic abuses were eliminated, and once social production was communalized and people were afforded some decent measure of security and prosperity, they would con- tentedly do their fair share of work. That often proved not so.
Communist economies had a kind of Wonderland quality in that prices seldom bore any relation to actual cost or value. Many expen- sive services were provided almost entirely free, such as education, medical care, and most recreational, sporting, and cultural events. Housing, transportation, utilities, and basic foods were heavily sub- sidized. Many people had money but not much to buy with it. High- priced quality goods and luxury items were hard to come by. All this in turn affected work performance. Why work hard to earn more when there was not that much to buy?
Wage increases, designed to attract workers to disagreeable or low-prestige jobs or as incentives to production, only added to the disparity between purchasing power and the supply of goods. Prices were held artificially low, first out of dedication to egalitarian princi- ples but also because attempts to readjust them provoked worker protests in Poland, East Germany, and the USSR. Thus in the Soviet
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Union and Poland, the state refused to raise the price of bread, which was priced at only a few pennies per loaf, though it cost less than ani- mal feed. One result: Farmers in both countries bought the bread to feed their pigs. With rigorous price controls, there was hidden infla- tion, a large black market, and long shopping lines.
Citizens were expected to play by the rules and not take advantage of the system, even when the system inadvertently invited transgres- sions. They were expected to discard a self-interested mode of behav- ior when in fact there was no reward and some disadvantage in doing so. The "brutal totalitarian regime" was actually a giant trough from which many took whatever they could.
There was strong resentment concerning consumer scarcities: the endless shopping lines, the ten-year wait for a new automobile, the housing shortage that compelled single people to live at home or get married in order to qualify for an apartment of their own, and the five-year wait for that apartment. The crowding and financial depen- dency on parents often led to early divorce. These and other such problems took their toll on people s commitment to socialism.
Wanting It All
I listened to an East German friend complain of poor services and inferior products; the system did not work, he concluded. But what of the numerous social benefits so lacking in much of the world, I asked, aren't these to be valued? His response was revealing: "Oh, nobody ever talks about that. " People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations.
The human capacity for discontent should not be underesti- mated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the
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good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have. Leading professionals who had attained relatively good living standards wanted to dress better, travel abroad, and enjoy the more abundant life styles available to people of means in the capitalist world.
It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West. Material wants were mentioned far more often than the lack of democracy. The e? migre? s who fled Vietnam in 1989 were not perse- cuted political dissidents. Usually they were relatively prosperous craftsmen, small entrepreneurs, well-educated engineers, architects, and intellectuals seeking greater opportunities.