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Social Sciences
Vol. 29, No. 1/April 1998
Socialist Orientation: An Anomaly or a Natural Development Stage?
By Alexei Kiva *
Today it seems that mankind is finally abandoning one of the greatest delusions: an idea of an ideal society, a paradise on Earth built according to a definite pattern. Cuba and North Korea, both in a deep crisis, are two fragments of the once powerful socialist community. There are also China and Vietnam the success of which are ensured by the logic of capitalist development. Yet while there is at least one socialist country in the world we can hardly argue that the phenomenon of alternative development (Marxist–Leninist socialism, in this case) is dead and that, as Francis Fukuyama has loudly announced, “the end of history” has come.
Mankind has never followed a single model of social development; what is more, this development has been always proceeding in stages: at the same time there existed different socioeconomic formations. It is important to take into account that a huge part of the developing world (the Third World), the poorest and most backward, has not yet reached a model that allowed it sustained progress. There is always a possibility, albeit a theoretical one, that having become disappointed with the market economy and the Western political model at least some of these countries (African in the first place) may give the Marxist model another try.
It is also important that there are no chance developments in history: the variant which has the greatest chance to be realized becomes a reality. The rise and fall of world socialism belong to such phenomena. This is what Hegel meant when he said that what was rational was existing and what existed was rational. From this it follows that socialism was no chance development in the same way as its failure as a world phenomenon was not a chance occurrence either. The researcher should look for an adequate explanation. Time alone will show whether socialism’s retreat was of an irreversible or temporary (as the Russian communists prefer to think) nature. This is related to Marxist (if not Leninist–Stalinist) socialism.
Such words as “the post-socialist” or “post-communist” countries or simply “post-socialism” and “post-communism” are widely used yet few are talking about “the post-non-capitalist way” or “post-socialist orientation”. Meanwhile there are at least twenty developing countries that, at different times, tried the theory of non-capitalist development, sought progress along the road of socialist orientation. In his time Academician Ye. Zhukov counted Mongolia among the countries of successful non-capitalist development. Upon the Soviet Union’s decline and the bankruptcy of the so-called world socialism Mongolia (that had been described as socialist) and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia found themselves among either “post-socialist” of “post-capitalist” countries.
This raises a number of questions. First, how and why did the phenomenon of non-capitalist development or socialist orientation appear in the Third World? Second, what caused its failure? Third, what was left after its disappearance? The answer to the third question is especially important if we want to determine the place of this phenomenon in the process of history.
We should seek answers to these questions if only because socialist orientation in Asia, Africa and Latin America was not a fleeting phenomenon. Soviet academics spent years on its study; the Soviet Union lavished resources on the new forms of life in the countries of socialist orientation. Here it is irrelevant whether this was a phenomenon of mass delusion or it was brought to life by objective circumstances, that is was called on by history to play a certain role in the newly liberated countries’ social process, or probably in a wider context. The main thing is that the phenomenon existed and left its traces, sometimes, deep-cutting traces in the lives of many nations.
We should bear in mind that “real” non-capitalist development, or socialist orientation, was not a phenomenon on its own right but rather a product of real socialism. It presupposed existence of the countries of Marxist–Leninist socialism in the world. From this it follows that, first, the collapse of real socialism should have toppled down socialist orientation, and second, that the latter should not be regarded outside the theory and practice of scientific communism.
What Is Socialism Seen Retrospectively?
There was such as concept as “world socialism” that included not only the countries of real socialism but also the states of socialist orientation. It was implied that the concept embraced the communist parties of the capitalist and developing world especially if they had massive support. For example, the communist party of India (Marxist) has been at the helm in Western Bengal for a long time, the state itself with its 60 million-strong population being equal to a large European country. I believe that large administrative units in the developed countries where communist self-administration was of a more or less stable nature were also included into the world socialism concept though for obvious reasons this was never explicitly stated.
At some time it was expected that the number of such administrative units would grow. 1 While Mao Zedong believed that the countryside should be won to proceed with winning over the cities there were communist ideologues in Europe convinced that winning over the local administrative structures would finally secure them the victory in the center.
In other words, everything that is connected with “world socialism” is based on the theory and practice of socialism. The latter were developed in the “first country of triumphant socialism” and then extended to many other countries. After all, socialist orientation is a means of reaching what was declared in the Communist Manifesto.
In his time Lenin offered scores of definitions of the “dictatorship of proletariat” concept. I believe that the concept of socialism may stand no less definitions. Somebody may call it the theory and practice of social modeling which is resolutely confirmed by the world community. There are people who may consider it a blind alley of social progress, that is, a dead alley as far as the final result is concerned and progress at some of the development stages. There can be other descriptions, each of them correct. It seems that it would have been useful to objectively identify the theory and practice of socialism. Indeed, “being ignorant of the past we cannot predict future”.
If we regard socialism as a delusion of the epoch and of several generations of not dumb people we should arrive at a conclusion that, having overcome the delusion mankind would follow its own path. There is another aspect of the same problem. World socialism and its decline are the natural phases of human development, each of them dealing with specific problems. Today, it is hard to say which problems. Surmises and hypotheses rather than final conclusions are possible so far.
For example, the struggle for socialism and its appearance in a part of the world spurred on mankind’s progress, including liquidation of the colonialist system. On the one hand, the two-polar world in the nuclear age was fraught with self-destruction, on the other, prevented large-scale wars for the longest period in contemporary history. It changed the attitude to wars as such in people’s minds. It accelerated international integration first in the West to mobilize the forces of “the capitalist world” to fight “the world communism”. Later, this integration acquired the logic and dynamism of its own and involved the countries not according to the laws of confrontation. Today, time itself requires economic, social and other relations to internationalize the trend being undoubtedly progressive. I am absolutely convinced that the present level of integration in Europe and elsewhere is a product of the battle of two opposing systems.
There is another approach: society’s response to the very concept of progress seen through Marxism and real socialism which grew out of it. Here I have in mind how traditional, precapitalist society reacted to the capitalist, that is, industrial, development stage as it appeared and developed. Precapitalist relationships especially in the spiritual sphere were still very much alive in Germany, the birthplace of scientific socialism, when it was born there. Everywhere modernization, followed by industrialization and urbanization, meets with opposition: they go hand in hand with negative social and spiritual phenomena (increasing pauperization, lumpenization, asocial behavior, crumbling traditional life style and values even before they are replaced with new life styles and values). Mass consciousness takes this for not what these things are—a by-product of a new and more progressive development stage—but as a wrong road to follow.
Social response may assume different forms. Witness the Luddites in England or the attempts to plunge the country back into the Early Middle Ages evident at the height of the Islamic revolution in Iran. In Russia today, “wild capitalism” as a by-product of a stormy and chaotic development of a new economic system (obviously more progressive than the economic order of real socialism) is frequently perceived as a result of an alien tradition imposed on Russia.
Those who regard the Marxist theory as a reflection, at the level of theoretical substantiation, of a semi-traditionalist and semi-industrial society’s response to bourgeois modernization can always draw on the fact that socialism was the lot of developing countries to prop up their arguments. Socialism never won in a single developed country for which it had been tailored. The developed countries on which socialism had been actually imposed by force (Czechoslovakia, the GDR or Hungary) dropped it as soon as external pressure and the danger of military intervention disappeared. Any more or less influential political force and convinced communist ideologues also disappeared there.
Here some specifications are needed. No theory of social progress, no matter how perfect and scientifically substantiated, can turn into “a material force” all by itself. To become this it should meet the cherished dreams of the masses that can rest on both a real and illusory foundation. Born in the heart of Europe Marxism kindled these dreams in the minds of millions of destitute people whose interests the Marxist ideologists expressed. As European society was modernizing itself Marxism was receding to the margin of social interest.
On the eve of the October 1917 revolution 85 per cent of Russia’s population lived in the countryside and was mainly traditionalist. For a number of reasons mass consciousness was not rationalized, it was irrational and this increased social utopianism and widened the field of illusory expectations. To borrow Lenin’s words who said that Russia had suffered to be worthy of Marxism we may say that Russia suffered to acquire a theory represented by Bolshevism that promised satisfaction of an illusory hope.
In the course of urbanization and industrialization the Bolsheviks failed to liquidate traditionalist society. Not only peasants byt industrial workers, too, preserved traditionalist values in their minds: this was first explicitly stated when Gorbachev’s perestroika began. There is an explanation of this: life under real socialism was rooted in social values of a traditionalist society. Indeed, only a traditionalist society with the mentality and values inevitably removed in the process of capitalist modernization could accept depersonalization, primitive collectivist psychology, the ideas of “honest poverty”, etc.
Today, communist influence in post-socialist Russia rests on the same traditionalist pillars, or rather, on what was left of them. In the first place, this is collective agriculture that cannot adjust to the market; a large part of the older generation who find it hard to embrace bourgeois values and to live in the conditions of the competitive economy. The same illusions, sometimes with different content, are protracting the life of communism in Russia. There are illusions about a possibility to reestablish the Soviet Union and Soviet power and to return the Brezhnev golden age when sausage was cheap.
Some people of the Soviet creative intelligentsia have found themselves siding with the communist ideologues. In fact, it was also traditionalist and flourished by serving the communist regime. Intellectual products no matter whether competitive or not were ordered by the powers that be; intellectuals enjoyed the ramified system of socialist boons. In fact, the intelligentsia as a community is also a product of a traditionalist society.
There is another point of view of socialism that deserves attention. Let’s assume that Marx and Engels indeed discovered proletariat as a lever with the help of which they could move the Earth. Let’s assume that at the level of consciousness the carriers of communist ideology indeed want to restructure society along the Marxist principles. At the subconscious level, however, there are different dominating motives, namely: overcoming the country’s backwardness in the shortest possible historical period by using the motivations and levers supplied by Marxism and especially by its Russified version. I think that the Bolsheviks in Russia were pursuing this aim. Bolshevism became the theoretical foundation of the “catch up with and overtake” principle. In the same way all types of national socialism (not only Marxist socialism) underlay this principle in the newly liberated countries. All sorts of propositions and slogans may serve the same aim: for example, Otto Bismarck who united Germany by force, used nationalism to substantiate the “catch up with and overtake principle”. In his case the principle rested on the contribution received from France defeated in the 1870 war against Germany. The Bolsheviks put their principle on the material basis created by extreme concentration of all resources for the sake of several narrow fields to the detriment of popular consumption.
There is another position from which socialism is sometimes contemplated. This is equally debatable or inconsistent but is worth of even greater attention. The supporters of socialism recognize that in Russia (and the Soviet Union) the socialist theory was applied in a very unfortunate way. They agree that the Marxist theory was distorted and vulgarized yet the theory itself remains the “ever living teaching”. From this it follows that Marxism should be reestablished in “its original meaning” and applied in practice in a more professional way without the “abuses” of the past. Zyuganov insists that the debate between socialism and capitalism is going on. The fact that Marxism–Leninism was realized in different countries in different ways is the weakest point of Zyuganov’s proposition. The result was more or less the same: unable to compete with the opposite system it fell down.
In fact, Marxism has refuted itself. It is common knowledge that Marx said that, first, none of the social systems died out before it had exhausted their development resources; second, it proved its advantages over the dying system in the economic sphere by gaining an incomparably higher labor productivity level. If this is true, then socialism has failed to prove itself according to the Marxian criteria. Nowhere the social system based on the public (read: state-owned) property and planned economy could approach the economic efficiency level of the market.
Marx believed that capitalism had either exhausted itself or was close to it. The main thing for him was that capitalism had got entangled in its own contradictions. The revolution was considered to be the only way out. It so happened that old capitalism tapped self-development resources to grow into a better and harmonious phase which many researchers call postcapitalism.
At the same time, inconsistency of the Marxist–Leninist pattern fails to prove at least two significant things.
Was socialism a chance development? If we accept the theory of scientific socialism as a social hypothesis then by analogy we may conclude that a hypothesis that failed to become a theory may substantially advance human progress in one of the directions.
Second, there is no proof that Marxism has disappeared from reality leaving no traces. It impregnated the world social-democratic movement, one of the most powerful factors of world development. In the Scandinavian countries the social-democrats have been in power for a long time, in Great Britain the Labor Party returned to power, in France the social-democrats won the latest parliamentary elections. This testifies that the search by the founders of scientific socialism for an alternative to old capitalism have finally materialized in the social-democratic development model. This happened in a way they never expected.
The Marxian theory gave birth to Bolshevism which, in its turn, created the social-economic system set up by the October 1917 revolution. When our ire against the Bolsheviks and the revolution subsides we shall be able to discern some positive features in the factors that changed our planet. For example, but for the system alternative to capitalism the colonial world might have taken a different road of development.
Socialist Orientation: Was It The Child Of Practice Or Theory?
There is no sense to recall now all the details mentioned by prominent Marxist theoreticians on that score, yet there are some things that deserve mention. First, there has never been a theory of non-capitalist development (later known as the theory of socialist orientation). There were pronouncements by the classics of Marxism that, at best, were a scientific hypothesis. Such pronouncements were uttered to clarify specific questions put by supporters of socialism. They were mainly asked by Russian Narodniks who were naive enough to believe that Russia should be delivered from capitalism and that Marxian socialism showed the road to salvation. The proponents of “peasant socialism” normally ignored that fact that socialism, by definition, was rooted in capitalism as one of the most important stages of world progress.
Second, the hypothesis of noncapitalist development was put to use or pushed aside depending on specific circumstances. While fighting against the Narodniks Lenin branded as “nonsense” their hope that Russia would manage to by-pass capitalism. According to him, the Narodniks drove Marx into a corner; in order not to offend the ideologues of the Russian peasant revolution (which the classics considered to be important because it could have eased the way for socialist revolutions in Europe) Marx offered certain hypotheses. On 3 January, 1911, Lenin, in a letter to Maxim Gorky sang capitalism as an order that created civilizational prerequisites for a socialist revolution. He wrote: “except through the growth of capitalism there is no guarantee of victory over it”. 2 This was the ABC of Marxism.
From time to time communists urgently needed the theory, or rather, the hypothesis of noncapitalist development. For the first time this happened after October 1917 when the Comintern was being set up. At that time, the Bolsheviks, and Lenin, more than others, believed in a coming world revolution. Being aware that the revolution cannot be worldwide once 70 per cent of the world’s population were living in precapitalist conditions and that it was hard to expect a socialist revolution in Britain or the US Lenin sort of read once more everything that Marx and Engels had had to say about by-passing capitalism. He never added any fundamentally new element. Any novelty, if any, boiled down to a rejection of the idea (widely accepted among social-democrats the world over) that historical stages could not be abandoned at will for the sake of “more straightforward” social progress. In fact, Lenin abandoned his own earlier assertions that socialism needed capitalism for its growth. Speaking at the Second Congress of the Communist International Lenin declared that capitalism could be avoided if the countries of the victorious socialist revolution helped national-liberation revolutions with all means at their disposal. 3 This was never discussed from the practical point of view. Indeed, even if socialist revolutions won in Germany, France or Italy they could have never mastered enough means (without finally devastating their economies undermined by the First World War) to promote social transformations in such giants as China, India, etc. This alone would allow to talk about the world-wide revolution.
Contrary to what many people thought, the idea of noncapitalist development was revived for the second time not when the backward margins of the former Russian Empire were being transferred to socialism. It should be said that Stalin was little interested in them. Socialist changes there proceeded along the same line as in the center. All of a sudden Stalin imagined that the problems in the West on the eve of a world economic crisis had finally created preconditions for the world revolution. It was Stalin who imposed on the Comintern “the tactics that proceeded from the prospects of a proletarian revolution as one of the most urgent items on the agenda.” 4
It is hard, if not impossible, to follow the logic of the “leader of all nations”. Probably, he needed international tension to deal with domestic problems. The next, 1929 year, was the turning point—it brought victory to Stalin’s line of social development. The Comintern was charged with the task of reviving the idea of noncapitalist development once more. Indeed, if a world revolution was imminent in the nearest future then the Third World (to borrow a contemporary term) should be drawn into it. The 4th Congress of the Comintern adopted a program that presented a gladdening picture of a triumph over capitalism. The triumph was represented by the socialist centers, that is, the Soviet republics, their growing economic might. They attracted the colonies that had managed to separate themselves from imperialism, become involved into socialist construction, by-passing capitalism as a dominating system and become opened to swift economic and cultural progress. 5
Finally, the third, and the longest, interest in the idea of noncapitalist development flared up among the party functionaries and social scientists in the USSR at the turn of the sixties. This could be called a delusion of a global nature. The euphoria of the short-lived Khrushchev “thaw” created an illusion that having been purged of “Stalin’s admixtures” socialism became more attractive than capitalism which, by that time, had not yet delivered itself from the “birthmarks” of old capitalism and was still a far cry from postcapitalism of today. It was still aggressive and was waging cruel colonial wars, it even suffered of the inferiority complex when compared with socialism. On the one hand, the captains of capitalism envied our social security system that was a fairly progressive at that time. On the other, they were convinced that, if the growth rates continued, the Soviets would sooner or later catch up with the “free world” where the per capita production and the standard of living were concerned. In an anticipation of this President Kennedy posed the task to his own country and the West to bring up the growth rates from 2.5 to 5 per cent, while in the Soviet Union the figure was 8 to 10 per cent. It caused some doubts but everybody knew that the Soviet Union was first to launch a man-made Earth satellite, that it had created the atomic and hydrogen weapon in a very short period, and produced intercontinental ballistic missiles.
This was a unique situation. If it repeated itself then we should have been repeatedly staking on the Third World and their (or at least, of some of them) development along the Soviet pattern; we would have been seeking their support on the international scene and in the UN. This was demanded by the logic of confrontation that started immediately after the 1917 October revolution. It should be added, that the Soviet Union displayed an interests in the “progressive regimes” because of their advantageous strategic situation.
What prompted many of the Third World leaders to opt for socialist orientation? There is a common opinion that the vast popular masses with their anticolonial and anti-imperialist sentiments were all for it. After all, colonialism was a product of capitalism as a social order. These sentiments existed but were not of decisive importance. The idea of socialism was very popular in the Third World: in Africa where its prestige was very high, in Asia where it enjoyed less popularity and in Latin America where it was still less popular because capitalism had been firmly planted there. It should be added that different forces understood socialism in different ways. It was not so much scientific socialism as “African socialism”, “Arabic socialism”, “Islamic socialism” and even “cooperative socialism”.
Each great revolution gives birth to great super-tasks in people’s minds that rarely comes true and is pushed to the background by real life. During the French Revolution this was “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”, during the October revolution “Peace to the Nations”, “Land to the Peasants”, “Factories to the Workers”. The colonial peoples’ liberation was another great revolution with a super-task of finding self-identity. It also embraced the social development course. They needed a course of their own—Western or capitalist. The bias towards socialism was explained by many leaders of the national-liberation movements by its closeness to, or even identity with, the precolonial social order.
Social euphoria of the first postcolonial years receded under the impact of painful efforts to settle urgent problems. The following factors were at play. First, the very idea of development and setting up national ethnic economies called for a quest of socialist orientation patterns. Under President Nasser Egypt became the mother of a renewed theory of noncapitalist development. The changes in Egypt prompted many young states, especially in the Arab world, to seek a new path. Having come to power through a military coup in July 1952, Nasser never thought about socialism. He was a typical “bourgeois (petty-bourgeois) nationalist” to borrow a Marxist term. He wanted to accelerate his country’s advance and put it on the road of industrialization. Local bourgeoisie (like now in Russia) preferred to invest in the spheres where returns were prompt. His attempts to get help from the West failed.
It should be recognized that in the fifties and even much later Western capitalism remained inflexible and aggressive; it had not yet transformed into postcapitalism. This was true of the former mother countries and the US, to a great degree. Capitalism did not want to let its colonies and semi-colonies go. Even if it withdrew from some of them it was seeking to impose on them other, neocolonialist, forms of dependence. It did not want to help the young states set up their own economies and industries. (India was the first to encounter with this unwillingness. This forced these countries to look at socialism.)
In these conditions Nasser took a very bold step by nationalizing the Suez Canal that belonged to a British–French company. The triple aggression of Britain, France and Israel of 1956 was a response to this challenge. The Soviet Union resolutely supported Egypt and invited the United States (that were taking the armed venture of their allies with a grain of salt) to jointly curb the aggression. It was the beginning of nationalization of foreign capital in Egypt: a powerful public sector appeared. By the early sixties it included 428 companies and was managed from a single center according to the principles of planned economy. At this time Egypt and the Soviet Union began widely cooperating in setting up foundations for Egypt’s national economy. The idea of industrialization and national economy was one of the most popular in the world.
Second, encouraged by the example of India, Egypt and some other countries which were relying on the Soviet help to build up their national economies other young states realized that it was an alternative to the Western sources. They concluded that to extend its zone of influence, the Soviet Union would be prepared to help them. The potentials of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries were obviously overestimated yet the young states were eager to regard the Soviet Union as their defender against a possible aggression from their former mother countries.
Third, for many years the Soviet Union extended all sorts of assistance, including military aid, to the fighting nations, especially in Africa. Many leaders of the national-liberation movements were educated in the Soviet Union, studied the theory of scientific socialism and were familiar with the successes of socialism. We know that the successes were overestimated while the shortcomings were either ignored or downplayed. In this way or another Soviet aid proved to be of decisive importance when Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea–Bissau and others opted for socialism.
Fourth, many of the Third World leaders were deeply impressed by the USSR’s socialist successes (greatly overstated). They were ignorant of the fact that spectacular breakthroughs in some fields (connected with the military matters) or with the need to demonstrate them were achieved at the expense of other spheres that were wilting, and at the expense of the low living standards of the Soviet people. They were impressed but never took account of our country’s fabulous natural resources. They never took account of the fact that Soviet Russia had started on the road towards industrialization, education and the cultural revolution when old capitalism was in a deep crisis between two world wars. Everybody knows that foreign guests, including Gandhi and Nehru, were much impressed with the wide scale of construction projects.
A large part of the public in the Third World deeply believed in the myth that socialism with its planned economy guaranteed growth rates that outstripped those under capitalism several times over and that backwardness that existed for many centuries could be eliminated in the life time of one generation. One of such believers was prominent African leader Julius Nyerere who said many times that the developing countries could not afford other than socialist road to overcome their backwardness. 6
It’s a pity history cannot be relived in a different way: contrary to the common opinion it has no variants. I have already written that the single variant with the best chances to be realized becomes the reality. There is another point of view on historical development in general, and Russian history, in particular based on the idea of multivariant alternative. It argues that despite the problems of the last years, the early mistakes and abuses and even its “birth out of wedlock” socialism had a chance to survive in Russia. It perished because of the tragic coincidences multiplied by evil will. In fact, analysts all over the world did not expect socialism’s demise; it was unexpected. In the West they hoped at best to make socialism more humane and, in the final analysis, to make it converge with capitalism.
China is a living example of a different turn of events. Economy is the linchpin of anyy system’s viability. If the Soviet Union started reforms in the Chinese style as soon as the command economy began to fail (this was obvious in the late sixties), if it curbed its started on the road claims to world domination and stepped aside from the crazy arms race the situation might have been different.
There is some logic in these words, but another approach seems even more consistent. Serious historians say that Napoleon as a historical phenomenon was inevitable. We can follow this logic by saying that if history needed it then a Soviet Den Xiaoping would have been the Soviet leader instead of Khrushchev, or a Soviet Roosevelt instead of Gorbachev, while Brezhnev would have had no place in history. Yet history follows its own laws: what is doomed goes to perish and follows a definite time pattern. Probably this explains the huge number of blunders the State Emergency Committee committed just in three days in August 1991.
Translated by Valentina Levina
Endnotes
*: A. Kiva, D. Sc. (Hist.), Chief Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS. The article appeared in Russian in Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost, No. 5, 1997. Back.
Note 1: Today Gennadi Zyuganov, the CPRF leader, follows the same idea. He said that the communists had set themselves the task of removing the reformers from power structures in the regions. This was actively promoted during the 1996–1997 elections of governors. V. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 41, p. 119. Back.
Note 2: Ibid., Vol. , p. 438. Back.
Note 3: Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, Moscow, 1990, p. 619 (in Russian). Back.
Note 4: Communist International in Documents (1919–1932), Moscow, 1933, p. 31 (in Russian). Back.
Note 6: J. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, Dar es Salaam, 1968. Back.