For two decades revolutionary Marxists and other opposition communists have conducted a vigorous discussion about the model of a developed socialist society. The combined effect of the rise of the world revolution and the crisis of Stalinism has increasingly injected this debate into the ranks of the Communist parties both in the capitalist countries and the bureaucratized workers states. Finally, this has not failed to have an impact even on the top echelons of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). One of the most notable features of the otherwise colorless and undistinguished Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU is the fact that Brezhnev and his collaborators were obliged to take up this series of questions.
They did so in a crude, clumsy, and demagogic way, that is, as befits typical leaders of the bureaucracy, a materially privileged layer that is obliged both to defend and to conceal its social position. Brezhnev's excursions into Marxist- Leninist theory were no more successful than his endeavors in the field of agriculture.
However, the fact that the bureaucracy did take up these questions is a new indication that slowly but surely the ground under their feet is getting too hot for them. The political revolution in the USSR, that is, the struggle for the right of the workers to exercise real soviet power and soviet democracy in the state and economy, is advancing in the same way as in the capitalist countries. It is following a contradictory course, often with a cadence of "one step forward, two steps backward," too slowly, too unevenly to achieve a rapid victory. But the main thing is that it is advancing! In their own way and in spite of themselves, Brezhnev and Company objectively testify to this.
Democratic Rights for Soviet Citizens
According to the version in the international press (at this writing, I still do not have the official Soviet text of Brezhnev's report), the first secretary of the CPSU discussed soviet democracy in the following Byzantine style:
Developing the political system in Soviet society to the fullest is an important area in the work in building communism. This endeavor aims at perfecting the system of socialist advancing institutions, continually socialist democracy, consolidating the juridical bases of the operation of the state and society, and intensifying the activity of the social organizations. (Le Monde, February 26.)
What is striking in this passage is these bureaucrats' obvious revision of the classical positions of Marx and Lenin regarding soviet, socialist democracy. When Lenin, following Marx and Engels, defined soviet or socialist democracy, and when these principles were institutionalized by the first soviet constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1918 (which in its general lines was incorporated into the constitution of the USSR in 1924), the focus was much more concretely and specifically on the rights of working people.
Then the focus was on the need to extend the rights of the working people in the cities and in the countryside beyond those available under a bourgeois democratic republic. Nor did this refer only to social and economic rights such as the right to a job, equality with respect to the means of production (that is, abolition of private ownership of the means of production), and the right to free education and medical care. It also referred explicitly to political rights-the right of any group of working people to free access to the printing presses and meeting halls, the right to form political and social organizations, freedom to demonstrate, freedom of the press, and so on.
These rights, which were reduced to limited formal generalities in the Soviet constitution of 1936, were specifically confirmed in the constitution that was in force from 1918 to 1924. Furthermore, in the earlier constitution there was no reference to the CPSU as the official party or to its holding a political monopoly. This corresponded completely to the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Anyone can read this in Lenin's State and Revolution. This, however, is not what Brezhnev was talking about.
One of Brezhnev's closest collaborators, Kirilenko, tried to avoid the problem at the French CP congress with the following formula:
The laws of the Soviet state clearly set down and firmly guarantee such individual rights as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, freedom of conscience and religious belief, the inviolability of the person and the home. All these rights and all these freedoms are fully guaranteed to Soviet citizens. That is the real situation in the Soviet Union. ..:
The Soviet people, whose will is expressed in the laws of our socialist state, is categorically opposed to giving a free hand to individuals who do harm to the socialist society and the security of the country, individuals such as those who in order to achieve their reactionary objectives do not hesitate to enter into direct contact with imperialist centers of diversion and with foreign counterrevolutionary organizations. (Le Monde, February 8-9)
February 8-9)
Obviously the second paragraph contradiets and largely cancels the first. The first paragraph says that all Soviet citizens enjoy complete freedom of opinion and of the press. The second says that we, the Soviet bureaucracy that claims to speak in the name of the Soviet people, will not allow anyone to speak who harms the socialist society. But who decides whether an opinion is harmful to Soviet society? The way the bureaucracy decides this question is well known. Anyone who expresses any criticism of the general line of the CPSU is a troublemaker and should not have the right to speak. But where is this set down in the constitution? Where does it say this in the works of Marx and Lenin? So, this leads us to the paradoxical situation that today in the USSR anyone who demands the rights of opinion and freedom of the press that are set down in the Soviet constitution is sentenced to long years in prison for anti-Soviet agitation!
Building Socialism and the Role of Criticism
In his report to the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU, Brezhnev tried to gress of the CPSU, Brezhnev tried to extricate himself from this theoretical dilemma by a reference to Lenin, raising the argument of the needs of building socialism:
As Lenin said, in our society everything that promotes building socialism is moral, and everything that obstructs this task we reject... We know now, not only in theory but through long years of experience, that true democracy is impossible without socialism, just as socialism is impossible without a continual advance of democracy. (Le Monde, February 26.)
Once again, the second part of this proposition totally contradicts the first part. If it is, in fact, true that socialism is unrealizable without democracy, then it follows that democracy promotes building socialism rather than obstructing it. Thus, criticism, even of the general line, must be not only tolerated but encouraged (since, to use Rosa Luxemburg's rich formulation, democracy is always for those who dissent). Without such an open, clear, and sharp counterposition of various political lines and various roads in building socialism, it is impossible either to raise the average level of political consciousness of the working people or to find the best road.
Two recent examples can illustrate this. The Soviet economy has been in a deep crisis for decades. The present grain shortage, which has led to massive purchases in the United States, is only one of the most recent expressions of this. Can anyone claim, to begin with, that if in recent years (and decades!) there had been an open discussion in the USSR of alternative policies for agriculture and for managing the national economy—i.e., a discussion of alternative models and roads of economic growth-that no one could have come up with anything better (that is, more successful for the USSR!) than the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU?
If they really upheld the Stalinist dogma of the infallibility of the majority in the CC of the CPSU (which hardly anyone would openly do anymore), wouldn't it have been desirable to let the opponents of the general line air their views publicly, since their ineffectualness could only have underscored the authority of the CC of the CPSU? Does anyone, on the other hand, realistically think that if more effective alternatives to the official general line could have been dissected in open discussion, that this would not have greatly benefited the Soviet people and state, as well as the construction of socialism?
The military intervention of the Warsaw Pact armies in Czechoslovakia in 1968 provoked a sharp discussion in the world Communist movement. This debate is one of the sources of the present differences and discords between the Soviet bureaucracy and the West European mass CPs in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere.
At the Twenty-Fifth Congress, representatives of these parties spoke, although in a cautious and muffled way, for a pluralistic model of socialism (that is, for the existence of more than one party, and even of opposition parties, during the building of socialism). They did this for their own largely electoral opportunist reasons, to increase their "democratic credibility" with the Social Democracy and the bourgeoisie in their countries. They did not draw the slightest conclusion from this about the need for restoring proletarian democracy in their own ranks and in the trade unions and other mass organizations they lead.
But since Brezhnev let them speak to the 5,000 delegates to the Twenty-Fifth Congress in Moscow, then they were obviously not "agents of the imperialist centers of diversion and of counterrevolutionary organizations." So, how can it be explained that Soviet citizens who defend identical views in the USSR are sentenced to long prison terms for "anti-Soviet agitation"?
If there is an open discussion in the world Communist movement about the reasons behind the intervention in Czeand several positions have choslovakia, been taken, including some that directly contradict the general line of the CPSU, why shouldn't such a discussion take place in the USSR? Why do the foreign Communists from the capitalist countries have more political rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of the press both in those countries and in the Soviet Union than Soviet Communists and Soviet citizens?
In his report to the Twenty-Fifth Congress, Brezhnev felt compelled to defend the KGB against criticism. He presented nings as it this agency were used onl gainst foreign spies and diversionists
BREZHNEV
This is an obvious falsification of the real state of affairs. There is no end of evidence of the Soviet secret police being used against Soviet citizens solely for the purposes of political repression, that is, against opponents or mere critics (often, even very mild critics) of the general line of the CPSU.
One member of Brezhnev's leading team, the first secretary of the Belorussian CP, Masherov, broached this question in a less hypocritical way at the Twenty-Fifth Congress. He said, according to the reports in Le Monde and l'Humanité, without mincing any words: "The anti- Sovieteers ... will seek out enemies of the socialist system in the psychiatric hospitals."
We think that a "socialist" system that locks its opponents up in psychiatric clinics and tries in this way to bring them around to its way of thinking dishonors both itself and socialism. Under Lenin and Trotsky, no such outrages were perpetrated in the USSR, not even in the worst moments of the civil war. In a society that has attained, as they claim, "the highest level of political and social unity" in the entire world, it is not only criminal to do such things, it is senseless as well. How is it that societies such as those of England and Switzerland, which were marked by profound class cleavages, could let Karl Marx and Lenin pursue their literary work freely, and a united class society cannot tolerate free literary activity on the part of its opponents?
However, what stands out most in Masherov's remark is the confession that persons regarded as "enemies of the socialist system" are confined in psychiatric clinics. Isn't this political repression? A person like the Ukrainian mathematician Leonid Plyushch, who underwent this deplorable treatment, was neither mentally ill nor an enemy of socialism, as anyone can see who talks to him. Even leaving this aside, the "Marxist-Leninist" Brezhnev should recall the following words by Marx and Lenin on this question. In The Civil War in France, Marx wrote about the Paris Commune:
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. ... Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. (My emphasis.)'
In State and Revolution, Lenin quoted this passage with approval and added:
And since the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more functions of state power devolve upon the people as a whole the less need is there for the existence of this power.?
These quotations show how far the Soviet Union of today is from a real socialist society, and how far the official doctrine of the CPSU is from the teachings of Marx and Lenin. If innumerable "special institutions" exist in order to carry out social repression, if "privileged officials" of the state, economic, military, and police apparatuses (who in fact enjoy gigantic material privileges) exercise and monopolize the functions of leadership and repression instead of letting these be exercised by the masses of working people, then this testifies to the continuation of powerful social contradictions. There can be no question of socialism having already been built. If Brezhnev and his collaborators approve of the police forces and their functionaries carrying out political repression against Soviet citizens, then in their own way, they are testifying that the USSR today is not a state modeled on the Paris Commune, which Marx and Lenin identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In doing so, Brezhnev and the others in their own way demonstrate the correctness of Trotsky's thesis that the dietatorship of the proletariat has been replaced by the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, and that it is high time, in the interests of the USSR and world communism, to move forward to the dictatorship of the proletariat-that is, to soviet democracy with a multiparty system and with more political freedoms for Soviet citizens than those enjoyed in the countries with bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
This would not only accelerate the construction of socialism and quantitatively reduce the social and economic overhead costs and waste. Above all, it would promote the international extension of socialism, and thus help to bring about a situation where by free and democratic decision the working masses in the West will link their economic potential with that of the USSR and China, so as to solve the problem of world economic development in a harmonious way.
Notes
1. The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1940), p. 57.
2. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. II, part 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), p. 242.