ERRORS OF THE SOCIALIST ERA
(August 2004)
(Comments: Tony.Papard@btinternet.com)
(Background music: The Red Flag - tune: Tannembaum)
Crushing of opposition parties
This was a great mistake. There was no need to crush or ban any political parties at all so long as they upheld the Socialist Constitution. It was, on the contrary, vital to socialist democracy to maintain various political parties with different approaches to Socialism. In the words of Mao Ze-dung - ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ There are many roads to Socialism.
Exile and eventual assassination of Leon Trotsky
This was of course one of Stalin’s unforgiveable crimes, along with the murder of many other Bolshevik comrades. However, it is doubtful whether things would have been that much different had Trotsky or any other comrade won the power struggle in the young Soviet Union.
Whilst Stalin was undoubtedly ruthless and paranoid, and whilst Lenin’s last testament warned the Party not to make Stalin General Secretary, the real danger was the one-party system operating democratic centralism, coupled with the apathy of the masses for active political involvement. This meant it was all too easy for the Party and State machine to be turned into an instrument of terror and repression, and for one dictator or a ruling class to usurp the system and use it against their perceived ‘enemies’.
The Stalinist purges and terror were only possible because of the one-party state. The ‘democratic’ part of ‘democratic centralism’ could not operate because of the terror imposed from above. Once the masses lost contol of the Party, they’d lost it forever, or until the dictator died (1953) or until the Party itself could be overthrown (1989/91).
Stalin’s persecution of the kulaks
This was brutal and ruthless, and the resulting famine led to millions starving to death. But nevertheless it was absolutely necessary to collectivize the farms. The kulak peasantry were a barrier to Socialism, and their small agricultural holdings were inefficient.
Stalin saw people as expendable, and he and his followers sacrificed millions in order to drag the Soviet Union into the 20th century and forward to Socialism. They should, like Lenin, have proceeded at a slower pace, taking the people with them. Lenin was forced to adopt the New Economic Policy and allow some private enterprise, but Stalin was ruthless in crushing all opposition to Socialism.
In the campaign against the kulaks (peasantry) Soviet officials seized all their produce and left them to starve to death. This was not the way to win them over to the idea of collectivization. They should of course have been allowed to keep enough produce for themselves and their families, and even smallish private plots and to sell the produce of these at market. There is no need under Socialism to crush all private enterprise. The stipulation, whether for land, shops or other private enterprises, should be that the prices should be regulated, and the owners of the enterprise must work themselves, they cannot be allowed to employ labor to work for them because this is capitalist exploitation. If enterprises get too big, they have to be turned into worker cooperatives.
The one-party system
The idea that the proletariat only needed one Party to represent them, and that thru democratic centralism the wishes of the people could be carried out in the march towards Socialism and Communism was far too naïve and simplistic.
There are many roads to Socialism, and many forms of Socialism. There is, for instance, the State-enterprise model, which in many cases proved inefficient and wasteful. There is the cooperative model, as adopted largely by Yugoslavia. There are other models – publicly owned companies competing in the market place, but with no shareholders to siphon off profits. Enterprises owned and controlled by local or regional authorities, also competing in the national market place. Some small scale private enterprise can also be allowed. Different political parties will have different approaches, and the people should be allowed to experiment with different forms of Socialism.
It is very dangerous for any one Party or group to become entrenched. Absolute power not only corrupts, but it invites opportunists and careerists to move in and distort the aims of the revolution.
Trotsky preached ‘permanent revolution’ to prevent a new ruling class gaining power and oppressing the people. Mao Ze-dung, in a peculiar mix of Stalinist practice and Trotskyist theory, launched from above his ‘Cultural Revolution’ and the young ‘Red Guards’ tried to put this into practice, with disastrous results. The only ‘permanent revolution’ is the ballot box and free elections, so any political party which is failing to govern properly or is becoming too remote from the people can be voted out of office.
The classless society, if it is ever achieved, may well still need different political parties, not to represent different classes, but to guard against dictatorship and corruption, and because even under Communism, were that ideal ever to be reached, there will be different ideas on how society should be organized, what should be the priorities of production, services, etc.. Whilst the State may or may not eventually ‘wither away’ as Marx and others optimistically hoped, there will always be the need for organization, and different ideas of how things should be done.
The exapansion of Socialism following World War II
Europe was carved up by the victorious Allied Powers after the defeat of Germany. It was therefore disingenious and hypocritical of Churchill to claim that an ‘Iron Curtain’ had descended over Europe, as though he wasn’t at Potsdam and Yalta where the fate of Europe was decided. Churchill had pulled the cord which helped bring the Iron Curtain down, it didn’t suddenly appear out of a clear blue sky!
It was only natural, after being invaded by the Hitler fascists and losing untold millions in the War, that the Soviet Union wanted socialist ‘buffer’ states and a divided Germany to protect it from future invasion from the West. It was also natural to want to nurture Socialism beyond the Soviet borders. Indeed, Stalin could have insisted all of Eastern Europe be incorporated into the Soviet Union, as the three Baltic States were. It is to his credit he did not do this.
The plain fact is wars never solve anything. The victors in one war always grab the spoils, and sow the seeds of the next war. The Second World War sowed the seeds of the division of Europe and the Cold War. It was only by sheer luck the world wasn’t destroyed in the nuclear standoff which followed from 1945 to 1991 by which time the Soviet Empire was falling apart.
Some of the Eastern European countries had very strong Communist Parties or partisan movements – Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, for instance. They would probably have gone Communist with or without Soviet backing. Indeed Tito broke away from the Soviet Bloc very early on, but Yugoslavia remained in the Socialist camp right up until the federation broke up in the 1990s. Czechoslovakia voted in a Communist government in the late 1940s – who knows how long this would have lasted without Soviet backing though?
I can only repeat that Socialism cannot be imposed from above, not by one political party or group, and not by one country upon another. To try to do so will alienate the people who must be won over for Socialism to work efficiently.
Nevertheless, Eastern European Socialism brought great gains to the people of that region in the form of full employment and all the benefits of a socialist welfare state. Indeed the people didn’t realize what they had lost until too late in the capitalist counter-revolutions of 1989.
It would have been better if at Potsdam and Yalta a band of neutral countries, like Austria, Switzerland and Finland, had been established on the Western borders of the Soviet Union, and if countries had been allowed to decide their own political systems. But Stalin and the Soviet Union can’t be blamed entirely – the other victorious Allies or World War II agreed that ‘possession is nine tenths of the law’ and let the Red Army remain in effective control of much of the land the Soviets liberated from Fascism. They signed the papers which fixed the Iron Curtain for the next 44 years.
The Berlin Wall
Once Germany was divided, and especially once Berlin (100 or so miles inside East Germany) was also divided into Western and Eastern sectors, it was inevitable that some sort of barrier would need to be erected between what in effect became two separate countries, the (East) German Democratic Republic and the (West) German Federal Republic plus West Berlin. They were not just two countries, but two countries with completely different political systems.
In Berlin itself, the remarkable thing is that no such barrier existed for 16 years. It was possible to live in a cheap State-subsidized flat in East Berlin, shop at State-subsidized shops in the East and travel on State-subsidized S-bahn to high paid jobs in the Western sector, paying taxes to the West Berlin authorities, not a pfennig of which went to the GDR to pay for the cheap rents, prices and fares these pampered citizens were enjoying. This situation couldn’t be allowed to continue indefinitely– the Berlin Wall was an economic necessity. Can you think of ANY country which doesn’t have border controls, let alone a country which borders on another with a completely different political system? In the East wages were low because taxes were high and subsidies were high.
Once the Berlin Wall was erected, it had to be policed. This is true of all borders between neighboring states, and the fact that a border ran thru a city makes no difference. Nicosia is similarly divided. It was not, however, justified to shoot people trying to cross this border illegally, nor was it justified to plant minefields to protect the border. All that was necessary was to insure that people crossing this border paid the necessary taxes to insure that the scams that were bleeding the GDR dry didn’t continue. If people wanted to work in the West for higher wages, they couldn’t continue to enjoy the subsidized lower cost of living in the East without paying something towards it. Of course people should have been allowed to emigrate from East to West Berlin, or from East to West Germany, and vice versa. But they couldn’t be allowed to enjoy the best of both worlds at the expense of the East.
The same is true of all Socialist countries – their citizens should have been allowed to emigrate to the West if they so wished. Socialism cannot be imposed by force – that much we have learnt at least by the disastrous experience of the Soviet Union and the Socialist bloc in the 20th century.
How to make Socialism more attractive than capitalism so people won’t want to emigrate to capitalist countries, that is the question that needs to be addressed. First the Socialist countries need to get rid of corruption and inefficiency, and to do that they need a pluralist multi-party democracy and a market socialist economy. See article on Socialism in the 21st Century.
Sorry Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Ulbricht and even Gorbachov – you all got it wrong! Tito gets 8 out of 10 for trying. At least he made the Socialist economy work, but he got the political bit wrong. No permanent revolution in the form of a genuine free election ballot box even in Tito's Yugoslavia.
Uprisings in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland
These Socialist countries all experienced uprisings, unrest or experiments in other forms of Socialism which were crushed either by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, or internally by the State as in Poland when the Solidariy movement first appeared. It was inevitable sooner or later that counter-revolution would sweep away these regimes. The longer you hold a lid on a boiling kettle and block up the spout, the greater the pressure becomes. Had these earlier uprisings and alternative Socialist experiments not been brutally suppressed, Socialism could well have survived. By 1989 resentment against the Soviet imperialists and their puppets had become so great, that the people wanted nothing more to do with Socialism, and embraced Westerm capitalism with disastrous results in many cases. The people of Eastern Europe lost their jobs-for-life security, and all their cradle to the grave social security in one blow. They became cheap labor markets to be exploited by the capitalist West and by a few home-grown millionaires from the former Soviet-era ruling class.
Alexander Dubcek said he was trying to build ‘Socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I and many other hard-line Communists were wrong in saying this was a dangerous and stupid slogan. It was, in fact, the only way to build Socialism. If taxi drivers don’t want to work for the State, let them form taxi cooperatives. Even own their own cabs, so long as prices are regulated and they don’t employ others to drive cabs for them whilst they sit back and rake in the profits, exploiting the labor of others.
The sad fact is the crushing of all these uprisings and experiments had little to do with preserving Socialism and much to do with protecting the buffer zone of Soviet satellite states. The terrible losses inflicted on the Soviet Union by the Hitler fascists meant they were determined to maintain a bloc of client socialist states effectively controlled by the Red Army West of the Soviet borders. This was admitted to us on a visit to the GDR in August 1968 just after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when our hosts invited us to just look at a map of Europe. If Czechoslovakia were allowed to slip out of Soviet control, the West German ‘revanchists’ (revenge-seekers) or a future fascist regime would have a corridor right up to the Soviet border. It was old fashioned Soviet, or let’s face it, Russian imperialism behind the crushing of all these uprisings/alternative Socialist experiments in Eastern Europe. Stalin could afford to let Tito go his own way – Yugoslavia wasn’t a vital Soviet border state, unlike the others which provided a barrier between the Soviet Union and the West.