Reviewed by Roger Perkins
This valuable book does not give all the right answers; nor does it even ask all the right questions. But it does convincingly refute claims by capitalist ideologies that the Soviet economic system was not viable and had to eventually collapse due to fatal economic contradictions. Nor were the party and state inundated by an upsurge of the populace demanding “freedom and free markets.” The vast majority of Soviet citizens remained loyal to socialism. However, according to Kotz and Weir the top leaders of the CPSU and the top holders of governmental power (The “party-state elite,” but not Gorbachev personally) consciously decided to transfer their allegiance from one socio-economic formation to another, in other words the Soviet Union was betrayed at the very top by leaders who preferred capitalism to socialism. Astounding as this conclusion may seem to Western anti-communists and many socialists, the authors persuasively document this process. The book provides a chronology of events – who did what, where, when and why. It also supplies extensive tables, charts and graphs which indicate a slowing (but not collapsing) Soviet economy. Such data is absolutely necessary when analyzing socio-political events.
The authors are not Marxist-Leninists. Kotz is a university professor of economics with sympathies for “democratic market socialism.” Weir is an ex-member of our party, an admirer of Gorbachev, and former
The sudden demise of such an economically and militarily powerful entity as the
The appearance of this qualitatively new social phenomenon is not further developed by the authors but present and future revolutionaries should take note that a relatively “peaceful” transition from socialism to capitalism is possible under certain conditions if revolutionary vigilance and class struggle against the internal enemy is not maintained. But why Kotz and Weir characterize this phenomenon as a “revolution” instead of a counter-revolution is puzzling. Perhaps their ideological spectacles have been misted over by a gloomy “post-modernist” fog and they no longer view history as having directional qualities.
But revolutions do not happen without the fruition of a revolutionary situation. The same rule should apply to counter-revolutions. To the authors’ credit they do set the Soviet demise within such a framework and write:
...The particular form of economic administration adopted in the
In the authors’ view the counter-revolutionary situation was created when
...A new leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev set off on the path of major structural reform, the aim being to democratize and renew Soviet socialism. However, unforseen by Gorbachev and his fellow reformers, the economic, political, and cultural reforms they carried out unleashed processes that created a coalition of groups and classes that favored replacing socialism with capitalism” (pp.4-5)
In other words, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost created the counter–revolutionary situation!
Once the future course of the
The authors conclude that:
The ultimate explanation for the surprisingly sudden and peaceful demise of the Soviet system was that it was abandoned by most of its own elite whose material and ideological ties to any form of socialism had grown weaker and weaker as the
But what exactly was the “party-state elite”? Was it a Soviet “bourgeoisie”? Although owning no capital, did it nevertheless exist somewhat like a national minority living within another nation – the source of its identity and culture being external? Or was it an entirely new class similar that long ago postulated by many anti–communists including the Yugoslav revisionist Milovan Djilas or the Trotskyite/conservative James Burnham? Or was it not a class at all but a bureaucratic stratum, a caste or an estate? Was the Soviet “party-state elite” made up of “deformed workers” and the
Whatever the nature of the Soviet “party-state elite” (much more theoretical work is necessary), it seems to have had determinative power. When the elite switched sides capitalism replaced socialism. The conclusion inferred is that the working class did not have state power (when did it lose it?). Nor were the “people as a whole” sovereign, as Khrushchev once claimed. In the authors’ view not only was the “party-state elite” sovereign, but it also ruled in an authoritarian, undemocratic manner. This undemocratic trend, they claim, is traceable to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party with its democratic centralism. While parties of this type
...were able to mobilize masses of workers... to fight for power, they were not conducive to constructing a democratic state after the old regime had been vanquished.
and
....the democratic centralist party, with its military–like structure, had a tendency to produce a top–down structure of power in the new state. The principle of setting policies by the top leadership, with the rank and file expected to carry them out without question, was extended from the party to the entire society. (p. 19)
Perhaps Kotz, but certainly Weir who was once a Communist, should know better than to approach the democracy question in the abstract. There is no such thing as “democracy” taken out of class context. Either through ignorance or design they further cloud the issue by referring to the practice of “setting policies by the top leadership, with the rank and file expected to carry them out without question” as “democratic centralism”. Anyone who reads Lenin knows that this is not a description of democratic centralism but of bureaucratic centralism. Democratic centralism requires the widest and most free discussion possible followed by a majority decision, followed by a unity of action in carrying out the majority decision, followed by re-evaluation, questioning and criticism of results obtained through practice. Whatever the errors of Soviet socialism regarding proletarian democracy, and there were many, including bureaucratic centralist deviations, the USSR for most of its existence was a million times more “democratic” than the most “democratic” bourgeois republic. The authors fail to grasp this concept.
As to the declining Soviet economy, Kotz and Weir point out that the rate of growth was slowing down but at no time did it become negative, at least until the very end when the policies of perestroika and glasnost took full effect. They believe that some decline in the rate of growth in newly industrializing countries (socialist or capitalist) is inevitable. In their opinion this natural trend was exacerbated by over-centralization, bureaucratism and lack of motivation. Their solution to this problem was more material incentives, decentralization and “market reforms” – i.e., a bigger, better perestroika! Kotz and Weir’s affection for Gorbachev and his reforms seem to override the presentation of evidence that such a policy could work.
Politics is concentrated economics; but economics is also concentrated politics. Would not a revitalized workers’ movement with a meaningful form of workers’ control go a long way to invigorate the Soviet economy? Would not a re-affirmed socialism with improved central planning have worked better than perestroika? After all, advances in digital information technology now make it possible to determine at
On the question of external pressure, Kotz and Weir convincingly disprove the widely held view that the “arms race” bankrupted the
The authors are correct about some sort of “party-state elite” changing sides. They are also right that perestroika and glasnost unleashed “unforseen processes.” But the dichotomy of the “good” Gorbachev who wanted renewed socialism versus the “bad” capitalist-roader Yeltsin is a much more dubious contention. Differences did indeed exist within the “party–state elite,” particularly regarding the pace of perestroika. Some even remained loyal to socialism. Gorbachev, however, was not among them if the word “socialism” has any Marxist-Leninist content at all. Gorbachev’s “socialism” was the capitalism of right-wing social democracy. He believed (or at least stated publicly) that the concepts “socialism” and “capitalism” no longer had relevance in the modern world, a merging of the two systems was taking place. As commodity relations in the
Gorbachev as counter-revolutionary is, of course, not explored by Kotz and Weir. The now multi-millionaire Gorbachev has been rewarded with six figure fees for delivering one–hour speeches to assembled conservatives in the West. In the
Whatever the facts about Gorbachev, he could theoretically have been ousted, as was Khrushchev a quarter-century earlier. The bourgeois results of perestroika and glasnost could have been reversed if there had been a Marxist-Leninist core at the highest levels of the party supported by a rank-and-file proletarian democracy infused with Marxism-Leninism. Unfortunately this was not the case. Yeltsin, Shevardnadze, Yakovlev et al wanted a quicker pace to capitalism. The disorganized bunglers of the inept “Gorbachev-friendly” pseudo–coup wanted the pace of perestroika to slow but succeeded only in speeding things up by creating the conditions for the Yeltsin forces to stage a real coup. The opposition of “left” Politburo critic Yegor Ligachev proved more verbal than concrete. Kotz and Weir describe all this, but because they don’t believe in Marxism-Leninism they therefore are unable to classify what they observe as revisionism (or worse). It is the lack of this theoretical framework that is the major weakness of the book. The index lists “working class” seven times and not once past page 26, “Marxism-Leninism” four times and “revisionism” not at all. Class dynamics were forgotten; nor was the failure of the Soviet working class to alter the course of events focussed on. At least half of the forty-five volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works are polemics against revisionism of various sorts. The CPSU during the last period of its existence and the authors’ description of events are almost devoid of such concepts. The old Russian saying, “A fish first starts to rot at its head”, applies both to the CPSU as well as Kotz and Weir.
So what could have saved the
The fact that the CPSU had been hollowed out by the cancer of revisionism and was no longer a Marxist-Leninist party did not strike Kotz and Weir as particularly important. But any revolutionary not in an ideological coma knows instinctively that the only way out of the terminal Soviet dilemma would have been the re-establishment of Marxism-Leninism with the working class asserting its power, if it still theoretically had it, or taking power if this power had been lost. Whether this was possible as late as 1989 can be debated by future socialist historians. Perhaps the
