1917 and all that

The job of understanding what happened and why

Drawing the right conclusions from the whole “socialist camp” experience will be critical to the success of future revolutionary movements. There is already the beginnings of a good understanding out there, but much is still murky and you also have to fight your way through competing nonsense.

So, I have decided to spend some time on the whole question, and see if I can shed more light than confusion. This will require plowing through the stuff that has already been written on the subject and then hopefully producing a bountiful harvest after separating the wheat from the chaff.

This is bound to divert time and energy from the Substack but hopefully it won’t suffer too much in quantity and quality.

I have already written a bit on this theme. In particular, there is my paper The Absence of Communism in Soviet Economic Planning. And below I have attached a relevant section from Some Forgotten Marxism:

Absence of Preconditions in the “Communist” Countries

The need for capitalism to prepare the ground is starkly displayed in the experience of revolutions during the 20th century. According to the prevailing view it shows that communism has failed. While it is true that there was a failure, it was not of communism, but rather of an attempt to sustain a path towards it when its preconditions were quite inadequate. Russia in 1917 and virtually all the “communist” regimes established mid-century were essentially backward pre-capitalist societies. They had not passed through the capitalist transformation that we have been discussing and which is necessary for a successful communist revolution. Most people were peasants rather than proletarians, and they were more interested in land for the tiller than social ownership. There was little modern industry and thinking was more medieval than modern. As the experience of other backward countries shows, even getting capitalism off the ground under these circumstances is hard enough, let alone a society that aims to supersede it.

This peculiar state of affairs arose because the bourgeoisie was too weak, cowardly or treacherous to take the helm and carry out its own tasks. Instead, in the first half of the 20th century, communists found themselves at the head of both anti-feudal modernizing revolutions and patriotic resistance to fascist aggression and occupation.

After World War II, the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was joined by a host of other countries in what became ‘the socialist camp’. It included Albania, China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia where their own revolutionary forces had taken power, and eastern and central Europe and northern Korea where regimes were established by virtue of Soviet military occupation in the aftermath of the defeat of Germany and Japan. So, by historical accident communists found themselves burdened with the task of raising their societies out of social and economic backwardness. They had to perform the work of capitalism. They had to create an industrial base and a trained workforce virtually from scratch.

Under these conditions the move in a communist direction could only be quite limited and eventually proved unsustainable. There were important preliminary steps but the real substance was out of reach. Industry was placed under state ownership which meant that capitalist industry was expropriated and the new accumulation of private wealth thwarted. The system was described as socialism, the first stage on the road to communism. However, the weakness of the proletariat placed severe limits on what could be achieved. With a couple of exceptions in central Europe, it only began to become a significant section of society with the industrialization that followed the revolution. Proletarians were former peasants engaged mainly in the low paid toil that you would expect at this stage of development. They were simply not ready to be a ruling class. There was not the basis for a society based on mutual regard. Enthusiasm and unprompted initiative were limited in these harsh conditions and so there was a heavy reliance on material incentives and top down command with all kinds of perverse results. The freedom and democracy required for the full political development of the proletariat was not possible given the intensity of external and internal opposition and the weak position of the revolutionary forces.

Because most work was arduous and repetitive manual labor, and the education level and background of the typical worker left them ill-equipped for involvement in the mental aspects of production, there was a minority who did the thinking and deciding. These were the managers, engineers and officials - generally referred to as cadres. Members of this elite had a vested interest in entrenching their privileged position and were unlikely to encourage an invasion of their domain as workers became more skilled and educated, and industry more mechanized, nor to willingly start to take upon themselves a share of the more routine forms of labor.

Once career, income and position are the primary impulse, economic results take a second place to empire building, undermining rivals, promoting loyal followers, scamming the system and concealing one’s poor performance from both superiors and subordinates. The opportunity for workers to push back against these developments was limited by the lack of freedom and the culture of subordination which drains away confidence and the courage to act. This culture can be very strong even in more “liberal” capitalist societies. At the same time, one can imagine that, under these conditions, rank and file workers with special abilities or talents would tend to be more interested in escaping the workers’ lot by becoming one of the privileged rather than in struggling against them.

Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party until his death in 1976, referred to this process, once fully entrenched and endorsed at the top, as capitalist restoration and those encouraging it as revisionists and capitalist roaders, indeed a new bourgeoisie. The Chinese Cultural Revolution that he led in the late 1960s was an attempt to beat back this trend. However, that revolution was undermined and defeated, and the capitalist roaders were able to seize supreme power in China after his death.

The Soviet Union and similar regimes in Eastern Europe ended up as a distinctive type of dead-end, economically, politically and socially, and their demise in 1989-90 is justly one of the most celebrated events of the late 20th century. At the same time, China and Vietnam have managed to achieve considerable economic development in recent decades by discarding much of the empty and dysfunctional formal shell of socialism and operating more like normal capitalist economies. This was greatly assisted by large amounts of foreign investment in industry. Cuba has gone some of the way down this road and would fully embrace it if the US abandoned its sanctions. The monstrosity in North Korea survives through mass terror, artillery pointed at Seoul, nuclear weapons and the support of the Chinese. All these regimes are an affront to freedom and democracy, and they must share the same fate as the “Communist Parties” that were overthrown 30 years ago.

Notwithstanding this grim picture, there were still some significant achievements. In a large part of the world, landlords and feudal relations were swept from the countryside. Industrialization was raised from a very low base and generally outperformed the backward countries in the capitalist camp. Most importantly, after a crash industrialization in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was able to defeat the fascist Axis powers through the largest military mobilization in human history. This is something for which the world should be eternally grateful.

Frederick Engels, Marx’s closest colleague, anticipated the dilemma of the sort faced by 20th century communists. In a letter to a fellow revolutionary in 1853 he wrote:

“I have a feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary and specifically petty-bourgeois interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populous and bound by our own published statements and plans — more or less wrongly interpreted and more or less impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife — we shall find ourselves compelled to make communist experiments and leaps which no-one knows better than ourselves to be untimely. One then proceeds to lose one’s head — only physique parlant I hope — , a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgment of this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast, which wouldn’t matter a rap, but, also as bête, and that’s far worse.”