Introduction
Socialist Outlook1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV and his supporters are carrying out a major upheaval in the Soviet Union's economic and political life. Such is the scale of the proposed changes that the outcome of the battle to imple ment them will have a major effect on world politics until the end of the century and beyond. What we are seeing is history in the making - the most important upheaval in the Eastern bloc since 1956.
Because a major part of what Gorbachev and his supporters want to do involves changing the relationship of the Soviet Union to the outside world, the new wind of perestroika is bound to shake up political alliances internationally. For a start, Gorbachevism is having a major impact on the hundreds of millions of people who are vitally concerned with the problem of world peace. It is shaking up the pro-Moscow Communist parties. It is changing the relationship of the different imperialist powers with the Soviet Union. It is directly affecting conflicts in Afghanistan, Kampuchea and Southern Africa. There is a hardly an aspect of world politics which is not being affected one way or another. This pamphlet, the main part of which is a long interview with Oliver MacDonald of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, is a contribution to unravelling the overall meaning of recent developments in the Soviet Union.
The position we put forward here can be summed up, schematically, as follows:
1) That Gorbachevism is an attempt to deal with the crisis of Soviet society - basically the crisis of the economy, of centralised bureaucratic planning - from within the bureaucracy itself. Although they may give rise to currents inside and outside the Communist Party which are more or less anti-bureaucratic, the function of Gorbachev's reforms is nonetheless to save the system of bureaucratic rule by changing it. Gorbachev is not trying to overthrow the bureaucratic political elite of which he is part - far from it. However, the events he and his supporters set in train may indeed have the effect of promoting anti-bureaucratic currents and sentiments.
2) Internationally, the new course in the Soviet Union proposes to relieve the economic and political pressure of US imperialism- especially the economic pressure of cold war arms competition - by promoting a new era of 'peaceful coexistence'. For the bureaucracy this means making major concessions to the US and the West in general, and attempting to forge important new economic and political links with the major capitalist states. One aim of this process is to deepen trade, and to
get access to new technology from the West, as well as large bank loans and other credits.
3) Restructuring - perestroika - is an attempt to renew the mechanisms of the bureaucratically planned economy by limited marketisation, removal of subsidies on basic consumer goods, removal of job security and by market competition to promote overall efficiency. While this is not an attempt to restore capitalism, it is an attempt to get out of the economic crisis by making the working class pay - at least in the short and medium term. Perestroika is not a pro-working class, antibureaucratic policy.
4) In order to create the mass base for perestroika, and a general ideological rubric for the changes which can find wide appeal in the USSR, the Gorbachevites have simultaneously introduced glasnost - 'openness'. The precise proposals of glasnost - some limited elections, more freedom of expression - represent a limited political liberalisation and not a real democratisation, which would involve handing political power to the masses.
Of course, glasnost plays another role for the Soviet leadership, and a more rational one at that. Gorbachev and his advisors have understood that there is a link between democracy and freedom of expression on the one hand, and economic efficiency on the other. In the 1920s and 1930s Trotsky eloquently denounced the view that an ultra-centralised system could be efficient. The wasteful, inefficient and corrupt character of the economic functioning of the Soviet Union is widely known. For revolutionary socialists, the answer is democratically-controlled planning, in which the priorities for economic activity and growth are subject to the direct control of the masses.
Glasnost and perestroika are very high-risk strategies for the ruling bureaucracy. There are perhaps three main, inter-linked, dangers facing Gorbachev as he attempts to carry them out. First, is the danger that the United States and the rest of the capitalist world will not play ball, and that international peaceful co-existence does not break out. In this situation the economic room for manouevre for Gorbachev would be drastically reduced.
Second, Gorbachevism has stimulated the growing discontent within the working class, to which it was partly a response, and is giving rise to a series of dissident movements and currents, inside and outside of the bureaucracy, which might want to go a lot further than Gorbachev and the wing of the bureaucracy which supports him. There is the eruption of struggles over the national question, especially in the Armenian part of Azerbaijan but also in Estonia and the other Baltic areas. Then there is the growth of the socialist clubs, and other independent politi-
cal forces, including the extreme-right group, Pamyat. There appears to be the beginning of a trend which raises anti-bureaucratic demands inside the CP, with some support in the working class, around Boris Yeltsin.
The biggest danger for the bureaucracy, however, is that the working class will take Gorbachev's green light as a signal for a struggle towards genuine democratisation; or that a pro-perestroika mobilisation among the masses might turn into something much more far-reaching than Gorbachev and his supporters want; or indeed that the austerity implied by perestroika might meet with strong resistance in the factories. Any of these developments could strike a major blow at the whole perestroika process.
Gorbachev faces a very rocky road. Even among those in the leadership who want fundamental reform, there are big differences over the scope and tempo. While Gorbachev was on holiday this summer, his number two, Ligachev - who chairs the Politburo meetings - took the opportunity to outline, in a speech in Gorky, more or less open criticisms of glasnost and perestroika - too much freedom for groups outside the party, too much emphasis on the market and so on. If Gorbachev should falter, there are plenty of groups inside the bureaucratic elite - and espe cially in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy among enterprise managers - who would very much like to bring him down.
What attitude, then, should revolutionary socialists take towards the Gorbachev renewal plan? While Gorbachev addresses the key problems of the bureaucratic Stalinist states, he does not proposea working class, democratic socialist solution. In particular, his foreign policy threatens to deepen international class collaboration, and his economic policy involves- explicitly - big attacks on the working class. However, particular democratisation proposals, such as more freedom of expression, limited right of election and so on, must be supported by socialists, in the same way as we give critical support to democratic reforms in capitalist countries. More democratic rights will create more space for the rediscovery of politics by the Soviet workers, and more space for their social and political self-confidence and self-organisation in general. It is natural that Gorbachevism should cause many illusions among those who have lived for decades under the dead hand of old-style Brezhnevite Stalinism. On the eve of the 19th Party Conference the Socialist Clubs organised a rally in Pushkin Square under the name of the Organising Committee for a Popular Front. Several hundred people gathered to listen to speeches by Boris Kagarlitsky and other leaders of the left-wing opposition. The meeting demanded: 'All power to the Soviets' - but democratically elected Soviets. At the same time, not seeing any contradiction, they held up pictures of Mikhail Gorbachev and flew
red flags. And they demanded a faster implementation of perestroika. Without doubt it is among such people that the nucleus of a real socialist opposition - a left opposition - is being formed. Revolutionary socialists cannot expect a tinished Marxist opposition to arise spontaneously. There are bound to be many confusions and illusions in the first stage of this historic process.
In the context of the developments inside the Soviet Union, the question of the rehabilitation of Stalin's most feared opponent - Leon Trotsky - and of the publication of his works, takes on an enormous significance. The bureacracy cannot tell the full, final truth about the history of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, because in that history lies the key to the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the construction of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In that history is the story of the struggle of the Left Opposition, the Trotskyist opposition, mainly done to death in the camps of the gulag, which fought for socialist democracy against Stalin. By fighting for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and the Left Opposition we can make a material contribution to the fight for socialist democracy in the Soviet Union.
The interview with Oliver MacDonald in this pamphlet represents, in broad outline, the position of Socialist Outlook, although there may be hich or paints which a contre alame is represses a ve e ranging attempt to put Gorbachev in perspective.
MacDonald extends the discussion into the debate about triangular relations between the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States, and the overall configuration of world politics today - on which Gorbachevism will have a profound impact.
Ernest Mandel's article discusses the scope and limits of the de Stalinisation process in the Soviet Union itself. We think that both of occuring today at whirlwind speed.