Dr. B. Harasymiw

January 1990
Unclassified

Editors Note: This first issue of Commentary is devoted to an article by Dr. B. Harasymiw, the Strategic Expert on Soviet Affairs within the Analysis and Production Branch (RAP) of CSIS.

Disclaimer: Publication of an article in the Commentary series does not imply CSIS authentication of the information nor CSIS endorsement of the author's views.

On Sunday, 26 November 1989, Pravda featured a lengthy article by Mikhail Gorbachev entitled, "The Socialist Idea and Revolutionary Restructuring." In it, Gorbachev attempts to explain perestroika as a concept in the Marxist-Leninist context and as a policy indicating the way ahead for his country. If the intent was to shore up the official Soviet ideology, the effect is likely to be quite the opposite. At heart, Gorbachev's thinking is simple common sense dressed up with references to Marx and Lenin, barely distinguishable from the tempered radicalism of contemporary European democratic socialists. Whether it is anything more than a deathbed conversion, and whether it can save him and his party from oblivion, remains to be seen-sooner rather than later, given the changes sweeping the world today.

The article is said to be a synthesis of Gorbachev's ideas contained in several of his recent appearances. It is, in fact, a selective rather than comprehensive rethinking of socialist theory, a cobbled-together version of Marxism-Leninism which justifies the policy of perestroika, but which has little continuity with the preexisting ideology. That hitherto existing ideology itself could not have been the source of Gorbachev's ideas for perestroika, but whatever the source, this latest pronouncement is probably a better guide to the leader's thinking than the body of doctrine called Marxism-Leninism. Whether it is faithful to Marx and Lenin, as it claims, is a question of lesser significance (except to professional ideologists on both sides of the rapidly dissolving Iron Curtain) than whether and how it might shape the policy-making decisions of Gorbachev in the 1990's.

Gorbachev begins by tracing the terrain already traversed by the policy of perestroika and indicating how the new policy is destined to unfold. Its appearance at this point in time does not, he is at pains to reassure his readers, mean that its advocates have lost their way, nor that they are abandoning Lenin and Marx. Since the future develops out of the present rather than as a result of dreaming about it, Gorbachev eschews the formulation of a detailed plan for the attainment of perestroika. (Even though he says here at the outset that it grows "out of the contradictions and developmental tendencies inherent in the present," Gorbachev does not subsequently employ the Marxist concept of contradiction to explain this growth and does not in fact identify the dynamic contradictions of the present. His terminology may be Marxist; his analysis is not.) The plan grows out of discussion, it is not ready-made. The only alternatives to it, both rejected, are retention of the "command-administrative system" or capitalism. Perestroika based on a rejuvenated Marxism, is seen as a long-term stage in the development of socialism leading to progress, a renewal of socialism that will take the Soviet Union well into the 21st century. The idea of socialism, based on a proper understanding (the one he is supplying now) of Marxist-Leninist theory, Gorbachev asserts, offers the potential to build "a humane, free, and rational society." Perestroika, based on the idea of socialism, does have a future.

Some people, Gorbachev acknowledges, have been saying that socialism has no future, and that Marxism, its basis and expression, has not proven correct since it is the very reason for the current crisis. This requires a serious analysis, by which he means a rehabilitation of Marxism, socialism and communism. He argues that Marx and Engels rescued the socialist idea from the utopians and from the crudely levelling advocates of "barracks" communism. They saw it as the result of historical progress, a stage in which man, liberated from exploitation and domination, would achieve what Marx called "the kingdom of freedom." Since they nowhere elaborated in detail their idea of this new society, it is unfair and incorrect to blame them for the deformity of socialism which as in fact occurred. If socialism now carries bad connotations, it is not the fault of Marx and Engels. Nor can they be blamed for not foreseeing everything that has happened since their time, like the technological revolution, the survival of capitalism, the transformation of capitalist property, the internationalization of production, or the globalization of the world and its problems. Socialism has actually taken may forms from which we can well learn, including the experience of social democracy. So Marxism is not a prescription for the future exclusive to us, he says, but is shared with others; nor is it fixed for all time, but must be adapted. Marxism is valid because it provides the scientific basis-it predicted this would unfold-for the present-day multifaceted and multifarious development of socialist movements, parties, ideas and governments.

Having rehabilitated Marx, the next task for Gorbachev is to rehabilitate Lenin. Just as Marx was not wrong about socialism-and still isn't-so Lenin was not wrong in engineering the October Revolution and in his initial policies thereafter. It is important for Gorbachev to go this far back, dealing with the prophet and his apostle, so as to draw the line delineating exactly how much of the Soviet experience has been a mistake, and to forestall criticism which claims that it was all a mistake. In his position, he cannot go all the way, nor would any leader who was not a revolutionary intent on toppling the regime.

Gorbachev insists that the October Revolution was neither a mistake nor an accident. Taking some liberties with history, he depicts the alternative as having been a anarchistic revolt and a bloody military dictatorship, which conveniently overlooks the Constituent Assembly election that would have produced a legitimate, peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary government. While not everything that followed the Revolution was right in terms of turning socialist theory into practice, the October overturn itself was, he insists.

What happened after the Revolution was "not simple," but Lenin is saved from blame by Gorbachev's rediscovery of Lenin's open-mindedness, later to be covered over by Stalin. According to Gorbachev, Lenin was beginning to change his ideas and in his post-October writing was probing for new approaches. Stalin, regarding such exploration as a weakness, suppressed it; in fact, such searching was precisely a strength of Lenin's. Indeed, Lenin has no fixed for the building of socialism, although Stalin made it seem so. His undogmatic initiation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) Gorbachev calls "courageous." When the worldwide proletarian revolution failed to materialize, Lenin and the Bolsheviks decided correctly to use the proletarian power to create the economic and cultural foundations for socialism, foundations that otherwise should have been built by capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Lenin also began to develop the idea that cooperation, not the entire nation serving as a single factory, ought to be the basis for the socialist order. Thus Lenin's approach-flexibility, pragmatism, appreciation of the cultural basis of sociopolitical change, and endorsement of cooperatives-all elements of Gorbachev's own reform programme-are among the genuine features of socialism which perestroika aims to resurrect.

Taking advantage, however, of the utopianism, impatience, and levelling tendencies of the masses, as well as of the eagerness of the revolutionary vanguard to reach its goal, Stalin narrowed the meaning of socialism to an authoritarian, bureaucratic, command-administrative system, quite antithetical to the humanism of Marx and the adaptability of Lenin. (Stalin's distortions, says Gorbachev, led to the main element in Marx's and Lenin's conception of socialism being lost sight of: the understanding of man as the aim, not the means. This phrase is significantly reminiscent of the Menshevik slogan, during their ultimately unsuccessful fight with Lenin's Bolsheviks: "The means are everything; the goal, nothing." Will the unfortunate Mensheviks, relegated by a gloating Trotsky to "the ash-heap of history," too, soon be rehabilitated?) Instead of a guide to action, theory became its justification. Nevertheless, says Gorbachev, the masses (and this is hard to believe) kept the humanist understanding of socialism in their hearts throughout all this "deformity." The 20th CPSU Congress, at which Khrushchev exposed and condemned the "cult of personality" of Stalin, was of great significance. Yet it failed to follow through-it condemned, but did not change, the bureaucratic system. It assumed that all would be well if only the extremes of Stalinism were curbed. Marked by the utopianism and exaggeration of "developed socialism," the Brezhnev era, too, retained the bureaucratic-command system. Often now called the "period of stagnation," Gorbachev prefers to see it as one of missed opportunities, of an inadequate appreciation for the technological revolution. As a result, he says, the Soviet Union was left behind in an earlier technological era, while the West advanced into an entirely novel one of high tech, of essentially new interrelations between science and production, of new life-support systems (transplants and biotechnology, presumably), and of varied lifestyles.

How Gorbachev and his advisers arrived at perestroika, by what process of Marxist-Leninist reasoning (use of the dialectic, contradictions, class analysis, and political economy), and how the concept itself constitutes a Marxist category, is not explained, probably because there is no such explanation. Yet it is important to Gorbachev to connect perestroika to Marxist-Leninist theory. Perestroika is the translation of socialism's first principles into reality. But these principles have to have the dusty coating of confrontations towards other contemporary social systems blown off them. This means abandoning an important attribute of Leninism-its implacable hostility to the outside, bourgeois world. Today, however, we are, according to Gorbachev, part of a universal, human civilization. That antagonism, he says, caused the Soviets to underestimate the significance of many achievements of civilization.

Among things that thus passed them by, Gorbachev mentions in particular "not only plain norms of morality and justice, but also formal legal principles, i.e., equality of all before the law, individual rights and freedoms, as well as the principles of commodity production and equivalent exchange based on the operation of the law of value." Soviet socialism, in other words, missed a lot of classes on morality, law and economics during its long, self-imposed quarantine, and now must catch up.

Lenin's ideas on the difference between monopoly capitalism and socialism have to be examined anew. The resemblance between the two modes of production means this is a universal mechanism. In the circumstances, the performance of the two systems has to be judged not by quantitative, but qualitative, indicators. The latter are related to man's needs and interests. Furthermore, economic competition needs to be replaced by cooperation, and the USSR needs to become more integrated into the world economy.

The idea of socialism in its contemporary understanding, therefore, includes the following components: freedom, since liberation of the working class must lead in the Marxist scheme of things, to the release off all mankind from exploitation and oppression; collectivism, which must not inhibit individual development; real socialization of production, which can take many forms, and does not become narrowed down to statism; rejection of crude levelling in favour of rewards according to one's labour, productivity, and contribution of society; and genuine people power, for which Khrushchev had introduced the term "all-people's state," but which was not practically followed up. What has happened, one wonders, to the dialectic, to history, and to class warfare? Gorbachev seems to have abandoned these elements of Marxism as analytical tools, although they are still sprinkled like seasoning throughout this work. The class approach, he says, in the contemporary era of he primacy of universal human values, is problematical. Nevertheless, a class analysis (not further defined, which is not surprising in the absence of a class analysis of Soviet socialist society generally) is indispensable for formulating a realistic policy, except that it is not really offered here.

The new face of socialism, according to Gorbachev, is its human face, "which completely corresponds with the thought of Marx, for whom the society of the future is a real, fully actualized humanism. And insofar as its creation is the main aim of restructuring, we can with full justification say that we are building a humane socialism" (original emphasis). Accordingly, the renewal of socialism requires, on the one hand, a humanization of socioeconomic and political structures, making them the means of achieving human aims (instead of fitting humans into the institutions), and, on the other, greater investment in people, meaning more spending on education, health, and social services. Here Gorbachev appears as a late arrival among the modern critics of statism in the contemporary world, definitely a disciple of the early rather than the later Marx.

Applying this rejuvenated, rediscovered concept of socialism to the several other spheres of social life, Gorbachev comes up with these respective policies. In the economic sphere, to achieve progress and to attain growth in productivity, it is necessary to introduce different forms of property, new economic mechanisms, effective organization, and incentives to work. Of course, he says, it is not necessary to abandon centralism and strategic planning, only the bureaucratic and formalistic forms thereof. The economy will have to be restructured, because the old model of industrialism is outdated. Defence industry enterprises will have to be converted to consumer goods, the transition being hastened by increasing international security, disarmament, and the changeover to a non-nuclear world. All of this will be difficult, he admits, because the Soviet Union is not a leader in economic development, either technologically or organizationally. For Gorbachev, the economy is the key: perestroika will only emerge victorious if it wins economically, meaning its attainment of stability, growth in productivity, and higher rates of technological progress.

In the political sphere, Gorbachev's ideas are the very apotheosis of Leninism. He explicitly embraces the notion of "democratic socialism" and defines it so as to include almost everything that Lenin used to anathematize as "bourgeois democracy": the primacy of the law, social and political rights and freedoms, the formal principles of democracy, and the strict observance of the law. "Democracy and freedom," he says, apparently still inspired by the celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and forgetting completely his Marxist-Leninist schooling, "these are great values of human civilization." And is it Dobrynin's influence or Arbatov's which has Gorbachev saying that development of government and politics in the USSR is proceeding by a dialectical combination of, on the one hand, the Soviet people's practice of self-government together with, on the other, the lengthy experience (in the rest of the world) with representative, parliamentary democracy, separation of executive and legislative powers, and an independent judiciary? In fact, of course, the committee system of the Supreme Soviet is consciously patterned on that of the United States Congress.

As far as the Communist Party itself is concerned, Gorbachev describes it as being called upon to be society's vanguard, but he seems pessimistic about its being able to rise to the occasion. Its tasks, he says, are to change the system and itself, to grasp what is happening in society, to fight against bureaucracy, and to act as the moral vanguard of society. He acknowledges, however, that the party's own perestroika is proceeding slowly. Its organizational structure has not yet been brought into line with its new functions.

Very little space is devoted in Gorbachev's tract to the remaining policy spheres. Briefly, what he says here is that in the social sphere, including social and everyday services, the Soviets have only just begun to meet people's needs. In the area of the dynamics of social structure, the realization is just dawning that social differences will not be no easily erased as has formerly been thought, and that the rural areas need rejuvenation rather that eradication. On nationality relations, he endorses the party platform recently affirmed (20 September 1989), express the hope that claims to defend national sovereignty will not harm other nationalities, and suggests that diverse social problems such as bureaucracy and corruption often manifest themselves as ethnic.

"It may be," Gorbachev writes near the end of his essay, "that the most radical changes leading to the renewal of socialism should take place in the sphere of ideology, culture, and education" (original emphasis). This is highly significant. He goes on to speak of a change of psychological mindsets, of the role of the intelligentsia, of the need for creativity, and of the need for competition and exchange of ideas on a world scale. He wants schools with up-to-date equipment and properly qualified teachers. "Knowledge, culture, and intellect-that is the future," he says. What he does not say can be inferred: Marxism-Leninism itself is not the future; change is driven by culture, not by material conditions and class warfare based on class consciousness; the intelligentsia, not the working class, is the agent of change.

It might, in conclusion, be useful to quote Gorbachev's closing definition of socialism. It goes as follows:

And so the century-long detour begun by Lenin is almost over for Russia and its empire. Gorbachev is neither a Marxist, nor a Leninist, nor a Bolshevik. He is a modernizer-of a large and powerful developing country. But he is a hundred years too late.

One of the requirements of effective political leadership is the ability to manage change, based on a realistic appreciation of it. Gorbachev's grasp of the nature and sources of change in the contemporary world-the globalization of economic forces, the diffusion of ideas, and the key role of elite's-is reasonably complete, save in a few respects. He still thinks, for example that Communists are or can be competent managers. And so he is discarding major components of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, and issuing a new authorized version to let his followers know that the policies of reform are proper and legitimate from the point of view of historical continuity. It remains to be seen whether his people will listen to him, believe him, and give him the kind of legitimacy that counts-popular acceptance.

In the meantime, Gorbachev's priorities in the direction of public policy are fairly clear from this "manifesto." Number one priority is the rejuvenation of the economy, by means of marketization and closer integration into the global economy, since no country can be a super-power without a dynamic economy and this cannot be sustained in isolation. Given this priority, and his perspective, it is unlikely that Gorbachev will dwell much on symbols and on symbolic obstacles to economic health such as greater Baltic independence. A looser federation, or even outright separation, would still leave the Baltic republics with economic ties to Moscow. If the economic imperative is stronger that the political, as is the case already for the European Community, who make a fuss about the political (except for political purposes at home)? A second priority is on science, education, and technology, on accelerating the more rapid acquisition of these through contact with outside world, even at the expense of ideological dogma, indoctrination, and orthodoxy. Greater emphasis on Social services and their improvement, instead of military spending, is another priority. As far as the Communist Party itself is concerned, of which he is still the uncontested leader, his attitude seems to be that it will have to sink or swim. Gorbachev has the attributes of leadership-vision, understanding of the forces of change, political skills, and strategic thinking-and the party will quickly have to acquire them, too.

Commentary is a regular publication of the Analysis and Production Branch of CSIS. Inquires regarding submissions may be made to the Chairman of the Editorial Board at the following address:

The views expressed herein are those of the author, who may be contacted by writing to:

CSIS
P.O.Box 9732
Postal Station T
Ottawa, Ontario K1G 4G4
Fax: 613-842-1312

ISSN 1192-277X
Catalogue JS73-1/1