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The Rise and Fall of the Socialist
World
By M.P.
Parameswaran
It is an irony of history that working class revolutions
took place, not in advanced industrialised countries
like Germany or England as was conceived by Marx and
Engels, but in backward agrarian countries like Russia
and China, with poorly developed productive forces and
only a nascent working class. There are people who argue
that because of this very same reason, these revolutions
were bound to collapse sooner or later. According to
them, the roots of the twentieth century debacle of
socialist experiments lie in their very origin itself: a
premature revolution which ought not to have been
carried out is bound to collapse. It is difficult to
agree to this.
If this was true, the Russian revolution would not have
survived the civil war as well as the imperialist
encirclement. But it survived and grew from strength to
strength. By the late fifties, within about four decades
since revolution, it had already become one of the two
super powers of the world. In many departments,
especially in atomic and space technology, it had even
overtaken USA. Its overall productive forces might not
have been as advanced as that of contemporary USA, but
certainly was more advanced than Germany or England of
Marx’s time.
And Marx and Engels had thought that socialist
revolution is round the corner in those countries. At
the turn of the century, Lenin wrote his famous book "Imperialism:
The Highest and Last Stage of Capitalism." According
to him, the world was near maturity for a total
revolution. The ‘general crises’ in capitalism had
become already so acute that its collapse was imminent.
But nothing of the sort ensued. A century later, it is
still going strong. It is, in fact, socialism that
collapsed. This needs to be explained. What is the
strength of capitalism? Why has it not exhausted its
potential? How long more it can grow? Will it have to be
necessarily socialism that follows? Or could it be
barbarism?
The routes of revolutions of the twentieth century were
different in different countries. The establishment of
socialism in Eastern Europe was indebted to the Soviet
Army than to internal revolutionary forces. This may be
the reason for the appearance of the phenomenon called
Euro-Communism and post-modernism. In Cuba and Vietnam,
it was a total battle for survival. And both defeated
the strongest super-power in the world—the USA. China
had a long agrarian march towards revolution and its
commitment to peasants remained strong till Dengian
reforms.
The Soviet Union disintegrated in an explosive manner.
Generally, it is considered as a ‘Revolution from
Above"—a revolution carried out by the leadership of the
Communist Party. In our day-to-day parlance, it is
called a ‘counter-revolution’. But there was practically
nobody to ‘protect revolution’. Apparently, people too
participated in it or at least did not resist it. The
third generation after the Great October Revolution was
a thoroughly disillusioned lot—or rather suffered from
utter illusion, that capitalism can make things better.
Was this a Gorbachevian counter-revolution? Perhaps not.
It will be unscientific to think so.
Even as early as the sixties, symptoms of a possible
decay were visible. Some of them have been pointed out
in the previous chapter. Some of the observations made
by the author while he was a doctoral scholar in Moscow
from 1962 to 1965 are summarised below:
1. Ordinary people
had distanced themselves from the CPSU(B), the distance
was increasing; the feeling that Party officials were
enjoying undeserving benefits was becoming widespread.
2. Establishments
were becoming centres of corruption, nepotism and
despotism—not much different from those in India then
and now. Daniel Granin, a popular author published a
novel called Iskaateli (The Researchers) in 1959.
The theme of this novel was the plight of an honest
researcher in such an institution.
3. Marxist
philosophy was a compulsory subject for all university
students. They found it only as a subject to get through
in the examination with the necessary minimum marks.
Seldom did they strive to excel in it. Never did they
find in it a world view to guide their own life.
4. The red-tape in
government offices had become proverbially ‘redder and
longer’—even worse than in India.
5. Neither the
people in general nor the working class in particular
had any interest in managing the affairs of the society.
They left it all to the Party and politicians.
6. Already black
market in dollar had become widely prevalent. One could
get 3 to 4 roubles a dollar in place of the official
exchange rate 0.9 rouble a dollar.
7. People were
enamoured with ‘foreign goods’ in general and American
goods in particular. They were ready to stand in queue
for any number of hours for this.
8. An ordinary
citizen had to stand in queue several times a day for
various services—whether it was the eating place or the
shopping place. Service facilities were few and queues
long. A substantial part of their life was spent in
queues. Nobody liked it.
9. Just as they had caught up with and surpassed
the USA in nuclear and space technology, they wanted to
outstrip it in the production and consumption of all
commodities—whether they had any welfare value or not.
Those days, the above- mentioned issues did not affect
the ordinary people seriously except creating some minor
inconveniences. Compared to India or the USA of that
period, USSR definitely was a paradise. Their
achievements were astounding
1.
Right to work, to education, to health care—all were
fundamental. There was nobody unemployed.
2.
Poverty had been eradicated.
3.
Everybody had neat and comfortable, if not large,
dwelling places.
4.
Education up to 14 years of age was free and compulsory.
Children were accorded ‘princely’ treatment.
5. One
could easily describe the then Soviet Union as a
‘paradise on earth’.
6. No
price would have been too much to pay to build such a
paradise in India. However, they had a different concept
of paradise. Their concept of communism was apparently
one of unlimited consumption. The category ‘need’ was an
extended one, that ‘greed’ is simply a need which cannot
be satisfied today, but can be tomorrow. Yes, their
concept of paradise was very much like the heaven of the
Hindu Indra, a place where people eat, drink and enjoy
women, doing no work. The USA was, in their eyes, closer
to heaven than their own country. They strived to be
like the USA. And by end of eighties, they became even
worse.
Looking back, one can discern three important reasons
for this:
a)
Economic centralization.
b)
Political centralization.
c)
Distorted view of progress.
In
international publications, socialist countries are
referred to as ‘centrally planned economies.’ This is in
tune with the Communist Manifesto. It states:
|
The proletariat will use
its political supremacy, to wrest by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to
centralise all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organized as the ruling class;
and to increase the total productive forces
as rapidly as possible . . . centralisation
of credit in the hands of the State by means
of a national bank with state capital and
exclusive monopoly . . . centralisation of
the means of communication and transport in
the hands of the State. |
Centralisation was a major principle with Communists.
But, just as ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat was
conceived, in reality, as wider democracy, it can be
argued that centralization in the hands of a proletarian
State is in fact the most extensive form of
decentralization. But both proved to be not true. Just
as there is no dictatorial road to democracy,
centralisation is no method for increased participation
and democracy. There had been no individual capitalist
who could exploit the workers by virtue of the ownership
of the means of production. But ultimately, by the late
eighties and early nineties, Party managers had become
the virtual owners of enterprises. Capitalism was
reestablished.
Is State ownership the only form of ‘social’ ownership
of the means of production? How do workers effectively
control production in such enterprises? In fact, in the
then USSR, there was no way at all. They became more and
more alienated. The larger an enterprise is, the more
severe was this alienation, in spite of all subjective
desires to be otherwise.
On the occasion of the 175th
birth anniversary of Karl Marx, an "International
Conference of Communist Parties" was held at Calcutta.
In a paper presented there, Maria De Los Angeles Gracia,
Politburo Member of the Cuban Party, stated:
| . . . this raises a compulsory question:
why did socialism collapse in these
countries? In Eastern
Europe and the USSR, the objective
contradictions inherent to the socialist
development intertwined with factors alien
to the very nature of socialism,
circumstantial elements alien to socialism,
brought about a specific political and
economic model that began distancing itself
from the socialism conceived by Marx, Engels
and Lenin . . .
Among these direct causes (for the
collapse) the denial of the democratic
essence of socialism is highlighted ... it
was impossible to promote real democratic
relations in a situation in which there was
a power monopoly without real participation
of the masses..
This brought about the alienation of the
masses from the Party, the usurpation of the
legitimate power of the working class, the
omnipotence of the ruling class and the
corruption that prevented the masses from
having the leading role in society. |
Maria
De Gracia was quite frank.
So was
the CPI(M). In its 1992 "Resolution on Certain
Ideological Issues," it stated:
|
Another major distortion
that needs to be noted concern the fact that
the dictatorship of the proletariat is the
dictatorship of the class as a whole, i.e.,
the overwhelming majority. Often in
practice, as has been revealed in the recent
developments, this dictatorship of the class
was replaced by that of the vanguard, the
Party, and more often than not, by the
leadership of the Party (Para 5.3.9).
Unfortunately, in the
name of centralism, inner party democracy
can become a casualty, leading to growth of
bureaucratism, which is the very antithesis
of democracy. Tendencies alien to socialism,
such as corruption and nepotism, surfaced.
An example of this was the
institutionalization of privileges to large
sections of the leadership of CPSU and other
ruling Communist Parties. . . .
(8) |
Yes, quite frank. But one has to ask the question: Is
that criticism applicable to the present Communist
Parties of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba? Is it
applicable to parties which are not ruling? How much of
this disease has infected the Indian Communist Parties?
Communists are characterised by theoretical clarity,
organizational ability and ethical tenacity. We have
read stories about great Communists in books like
Sundaraya’s Telangana Struggle, Niranjana’s Chira
Smarana, Kunhambu’s Kayyur Comrades, in
classics like Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was
Tempered or Alexei Tolstoy’s ‘Travel to Calvery’
or Boris Polevoy’s ‘Story of a Real Man’.
Is it an unassailable law that immersed in a bourgeois
society, even communists will get infected by its
values? I don’t think so. I think that a Communist is a
Communist because she or he can resist such infection.
They have built in for themselves sufficient immunity.
The ruling communists in USSR and elsewhere, perhaps,
had lost this immunity and become infected with
bourgeois greed. The Communist Parties in these
countries were still relatively big, but
organizationally weak (no democracy, no resistance
power) and having only very few communists – a communist
party led by non-communists.
This may sound to be exaggerated to a level of
absurdity. But perhaps not. It may be nearer to truth
than what one may imagine. The end result: a people
which had relative stability and security, which had
more than what others could aspire, who lived in a
relative paradise, suddenly lost everything. A counter-
revolution took away everything. No social security, no
job, no food . . .
What about China? After the debacle of ‘Cultural
Revolution’ and getting rid of the ‘Gang of Four,’
China, in 1978, chartered a new course of development
under the leadership of Deng Xiao Ping. The
emphasis on agriculture, peasantry and re-distributive
justice was replaced by one of rapid development of
productive forces and industries—a path of soft
socialism. Soon, especially after the landmark period of
1990-1991, it chartered a far more ‘bold’ course, called
‘market socialism’. While we were on a visit as part of
an education delegation to Beijing, the hosts were
trying to explain to us, "we are capitalists in economy
and socialists in politics."
On being confronted with the question, "won’t economy
ultimately transform politics too?" he exclaimed: "Am I
hearing the voice of old Communism"? The decisive role
of economics was ‘old communism’. However, for more than
a decade, China remained as a world wonder, with a
two-digit economic growth. And where is it now? Beijing,
Shanghai, Canton, Kumming . . . citadels of wealth,
competing with New York, London or Paris. The number of
five-star hotels have increased a hundred fold. So have
the number of billionnaires and millionnairs. The
Casinos, gambling dens and underworld in these cities
are on par with those in any capitalist city. The gap
between rich and the poor has been increasing by leaps
and bounds. Villages are becoming pauperized. Peasants
are selling off cultivation rights.
Capitalist farmers are on the increase. Village poor are
migrating into cities in millions. There, they live in
ghettos, as construction workers. By the early nineties,
grand slogans like "It is a virtue to become rich" were
being raised openly. Corporations were named as Grow
Rich Corporation, Rich More Corporation, etc. The town
and village enterprises which had helped strengthen the
village economy were in doldrums. Now, employment, food,
health care, education—nothing is anymore a fundamental
right. They are to be paid for.
A large section of the poor cannot avail health care
services or even send their children to school. As the
GNP of China been surges forward, as it creates
millionaires, social security is going backward.
Initially, there was even a fall-back in life
expectation and infant mortality. Communist officials
believe that this is a passing phase, but they don’t
have anything to offer to improve the situation of the
poor, to reduce the rich-poor gap. The Party no longer
claims that China is a socialist country. Socialism,
they say, is a distant goal. How long it will take to
reach there—one cannot say. Maybe 20 years, maybe be 50
or 100 years. A new ruling class has emerged. They come
from the party leadership, high level bureaucracy and
high-ranking army personnel. They control the new
private enterprises. Though still weakly, within the
party, people have started questioning, enquiring
alternative paths.
Cuba and Vietnam. Communists all over the world get
thrilled at the very thought of them. Both have resisted
successfully the mighty America. The entire economic
base of these countries, the soil, the forests, the
water sources, was destroyed many times over by the
Americans. It was with great courage that they rebuilt
their economy. However, today even they are in danger.
Vietnam has already taken the stand that ‘There Is No
Alternative’. Having defeated America in military
warfare, Vietnam is now capitulating to the economic
strength of the USA. Apparently only Cuba is still
trying to restructure itself under new conditions
without sacrificing equity and people’s power.
The
experience of the last one century can be summarised as
below:
|
Socialism is not round the corner. There is
a long way to go. There will be ups and
downs, bends and turns, mounts and pits on
the road. One has to hold the steering
Wheel—the theoretical and ideological
perspectives—firmly and not press the
accelerator unduly hard. It is also clear
that democracy cannot be established through
dictatorship, that there is no democracy
without participation. |
"Source:
Geocities. Another World Is Possible—Thoughts
about a Fourth World, Chapter 2
posted 27 November 2011
* * * * *
Fourth World Essays
Afro-America
& The Fourth World
The
Black Middle Class & a Political Party of the Poor (essay)
Dark
Child of the Fourth World
The
Fourth World and the Marxists
The
Fourth World: In the Belly of the Beast
New
Orleans: The American Nightmare
On
the Fourth World: Black Power, Black Panthers,
and White Allies
Why I Support
the Latino Demonstrators
Other Fourth World Essays
African
America –
A Fourth World (Waldron H. Giles)
Dark Child of the Fourth World Reaches Out
(Dennis Leroy Moore)
Fourth World Introduction (M.P. Parameswaran)
Fourth
World: Marxist, Gandhian, Environmentalist
(M.P. Parameswaran)
The Fourth World Multiculturalism (Rose Ure Mezu)
Fourth World Programme
M.P. Parameswaran)
Neo-Liberalism Dictatorship of the Market
M.P. Parameswaran)
The Rise and Fall of the Socialist World
M.P. Parameswaran)
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
*
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
|
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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