Abstract
This essay, written in 1989–90 as the Soviet Union was collapsing, challenges the triumphalism of capitalism’s defenders. It characterizes the 1917–89 period not as “the” epoch of socialism but only as its “first epoch.” The form of socialism that evolved in the Soviet Union, under conditions of widespread poverty and under pressure of external attacks and threats, was one that failed to develop democratic structures. While this much is widely recognized, what is often forgotten is how the global presence of the Soviet “pole,” despite its negative aspects, facilitated progressive developments elsewhere. The dialectics of transformation are discussed, and the position of an isolated anti-capitalist regime is compared to that of a dissident and besieged working class.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul M. Sweezy used this phrase, quoted from György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, as the title for a collection of his own essays, The Present as History: Essays and Reviews on Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953).
- 2.
I use the terms socialism and socialist sometimes in a loose sense and sometimes in a strict one. The double usage is inherent in the complexity of the phenomenon, but the particular sense intended at any given moment should be clear from the context. The “loose” sense of the term refers to any arrangement in which the major means of production have been taken out of private or corporate hands; the “strict” sense entails the additional requirement that the control of large-scale decisions should be genuinely social, that is, exercised through participatory mechanisms embracing the entire society.
- 3.
Communist Manifesto, Part I.
- 4.
On the importance of method, see György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
- 5.
See Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 52–69.
- 6.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (available in many editions), section on “Alienated Labor.”
- 7.
Lenin, in his 1918 article, “On the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” called explicitly for the application of draconian capitalist methods to the management of production enterprises.
- 8.
Delivered at Oxford University and published in Edward Hallett Carr, The Soviet Impact on the Western World (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
- 9.
These views are exemplified in Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Marxism and Socialist Theory (Boston: South End Press, 1981), and are criticized in Milton Fisk, “Why the Anti-Marxists Are Wrong,” Monthly Review, 38:10 (March 1987); see also the reply and rejoinder in MR 39:7 (December 1987).
- 10.
Engels’ words are as follows (his emphasis throughout): “The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication…. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded…. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.” The Peasant War in Germany (1850), ch. VI, par. 2 (quoted from Engels, The German Revolutions, ed. Leonard Krieger [University of Chicago Press, 1967], 103f).
- 11.
This implied long-run reconcilability of “each particular demand” with “all other demands” is of course limited to demands—often termed “rights”—of the kind that can be satisfied simultaneously for an entire population (e.g., demands for dignity as opposed to demands for unlimited private accumulation). The possibility of such universal satisfaction does not mean that the process of reconciling the individual with the multiple demands is without complications; it means only that reconciliation is possible in principle because of the multi-faceted character of each human being and our capacity to recognize a connection between our own wellbeing and that of others. The boundaries within which such reciprocity can exist are what immediately concern us here.
- 12.
The reference here is to the discussion in Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
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Wallis, V. (2020). The End of First-Epoch Socialism and the Problem of Transition. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_3
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