(The West German monthly magazine Das Da, published in Hamburg, has run a series of comments on the political views of the Soviet nuclear scientist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov. Among those who have taken part in this debate are a representative of the Soviet writers union; a pro-CP West German novelist; Rudi Dutschke, the well-known radical student leader of the late 1960s; and Heinz Brandt, a left socialist who was a victim of a GPU kidnapping and is now a regular contributor to the West German metalworkers' weekly newspaper Metall, as well as others. The editors asked Ernest Mandel to state his views on the same subject. The following article by Mandel appeared in the June 1976 issue of Das Da. The translation from the German is by Intercontinental Press.]
I completely reject Sakharov's current political position. Under the influence of a one-sided preoccupation with the internal political situation in the USSR, the Soviet scientist has shifted his course away from his socialist convictions toward openly procapitalist views. He has lost his understanding of the decisive responsibility capitalism and imperialism bear for the dreadful conditions in the semicolonies and for the inhuman crimes of the old and new fascist dictatorships.
Sakharov is increasingly blind to the gradual restriction of democratic freedoms in the West that is coming in the train of growing economic difficulties and sharpening class struggles. He fails to notice the newly demonstrated fact that mass unemployment and setbacks in the standard of living and the working conditions of broad strata periodically recur in the capitalist countries.
The Soviet scientist no longer understands that private ownership of the means of production, along with competition, generates a dynamic of capital accumulation and lust for profit that threatens to turn the forces of production into forces of destruction, periodically endangering the existence of material and intellectual culture, and even the physical survival of humanity itself.
As a result of this loss of vision he also cannot comprehend the only possible solution to the world crisis of society-the liberation of human beings from their subordination to reified technology and alienated commodity production, their transformation from victims of technological "professional deformation" and the "eternal laws of the market" into freely associating producers who determine their own fate in accordance with a plan commonly arrived at. He does not understand that history has brought us up against the dilemma of socialism or barbarism.
while I reject
Sakharov's
However, political position, I unconditionally support his right to advocate these views freely and openly in the Soviet Union. I support his courageous campaign in defense of the human and civil rights of all Soviet citizens. I maintain, along with him, that there can be no real soviet democracy as long as dissident views cannot be openly printed and propagated. As Rosa Luxemburg put it so cogently, democracy is always freedom for dissenters.
So, I think the paragraphs in the Soviet penal code that make "antisoviet agitation" or "slander against the soviet regime" punishable by imprisonment are unconstitutional, and as such should be stricken as soon as possible. These sections are an attempt to decisively restrict the freedoms of expression, speech, assembly, and the right to demonstrate that are granted by the constitution. Moreover, they reintroduce the antiquated and reactionary category of "crimes of opinion" harking back to the era of absolutism, like the reactionary blacklisting laws in the German Federal Republic that degrade persons to the status of second-class citizens not because of any criminal acts but solely because of their political convictions.
The fact that in the USSR working people can be sentenced to long years in labor camps for nothing more than criticizing the political decisions of their government stands in clear contradiction to the Marxist-Leninist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a type of state modeled on the Paris Commune, without political police, without a standing repressive apparatus, a type of state in which regardless of their political convictions or party allegiances working people must enjoy more freedom of thought and speech, more freedom to organize and demonstrate, than in the freest bourgeois republic.
In the USSR, there is no free access to printing presses and meeting halls for every group of workers that wants it in order to criticize the general line (in economic, domestic, foreign, cultural, or nationalities policy) of the regime in power. To the contrary, any attempt to exercise the rights guaranteed in the constitution for such a purpose would immediately result in imprisonment.
The paragraphs in the penal code that make "antisoviet agitation" punishable by terms in forced labor camps enable the government and the government party to assure unchallenged their unconstitutional monopoly in administering the state and the economy. Any criticism of the general line of the party leadership is immediately punished as "antisoviet agitation."
Sometimes this leads to absurd results. If convinced advocates of the power of workers councils and democracy based on workers councils called for immediately transferring state power in the USSR to a congress of workers councils elected directly in the factories, in which more than one party could be represented (including of course the Communist party of the Soviet Union), they would be sentenced as "antisoviet agitators." But the word "workers councils" means the same thing as "soviets." Agitation for workers councils is thus considered antisoviet agitation, that is, agitation against workers councils! Thus, the bureaucracy arbitrarily decrees that white is really black.
Freedom of opinion and speech, freedom to conduct agitation, do not harm the construction of socialism but rather benefit it. Since there are no all-knowing general secretaries or Central Committees (CCs), since governments and CCs can err and have clearly done so in innumerable cases, free public discussion makes it possible to more rapidly formulate alternative solutions that may be more correct than those of the majority (only practical experience can demonstrate who is right) and to more rapidly correct errors.
Can anyone seriously maintain that the grave crisis that has marked the Soviet economy for decades could not have been more easily and rapidly overcome if there were a free and open discussion of alternative economic and agricultural policies? At every congress of the CPSU for the last twenty-five years, there has been a denunciation of abuses in the factories-vast unutilized reserves, investment plans frozen for years, irregular supply of raw materials.
ho can denv that these abuses coul ot have heen decisivelv reduced if th work force were able to denounce them openly in the press without having to check first with the party committees, or if
Canadian Labour criticizing the invasion, despite fact that West European Communist
Czechoslovak demonstration against 1968 Soviet invasion. Soviet Communists have been sentenced to long prison terms for parties have often denounced it in even stronger terms.
they had the right in fact to themselves eliminate them by introducing a system of factory management through elected factory councils subject to recall at any time? Why can't there be an open discussion in the Soviet Union in the press and in factory assemblies about democratically centralized workers self-management as an alternative to the "one-man rule" of factory directors? Does workers selfmanagement equal "capitalist restoration"? Does agitating for workers selfmanagement constitute "antisoviet agitation"?
Still worse: Why as soon as they make the mildest criticism of the Soviet government do communists and socialists in the Soviet Union have less freedom than they enjoy in many capitalist countries? Why can the French and Italian Communists attack their bourgeois governments without having their statements censored, while Pravda censored the French CP representative's speech at the Twenty- Fifth Congress of the CPSU, as Jean Kanapa complained in his last report to the CC of the French party?
Why have Soviet Communists been sentenced to long prison terms if they criticized the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact powers in Czechoslovakia, when the strongest Communist parties in West Europe (the Italian, French, Spanish, British, Swedish, and Belgian) have often denounced this intervention in still stronger terms? Are the majority of West European Communists perhaps only disguised anti-Communists?
Citizen Gerasimov of the Soviet writers union ended his contribution to the discussion in Das Da on the "Sakharov case" with the following sentences:
"After the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, there were more than a few people-either conservative or just feebleminded-who wanted to go back to feudalism. It should be remembered that at that time such people were also called 'dissidents'" (Das Da, May 1976, p. 23).
I have to round out Citizen Gerasimov's memory in two respects. First, fifty years after the bourgeois revolution these profeudal conservatives were not being imprisoned or locked up in insane asylums. They were allowed to speak and write freely. Why fifty years after the victory of the October revolution does the Soviet government feel so threatened by "feebleminded" individuals that it does not let them speak and write freely but rather frequently condemns them to forced labor for crimes of opinion?
How could the exploitative capitalist societies of England and Switzerland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, societies deeply riven by class antagonisms, allow Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin to agitate openly against the established social order, while Soviet society, which is supposed to be so united, feels gravely threatened by agitation against the established order and resorts to repression to stamp it out? Is Soviet society today perhaps more divided than the capitalist England of 1865 with its mass poverty?
Secondly, not only procapitalist opinions are suppressed in the Soviet Union but also Marxist, revolutionary-socialist, and communist ones that differ from the official party line. As is shown by the "Open Letter to the European and American CPs," there are more than a few people sitting in Soviet forced labor camps who openly, both during and after the trials where they were sentenced, proclaim their allegiance to the teachings of Marx and Lenin, and whose only "crime" consists of printing and distributing texts expressing their interpretations of Marxism-Leninism.
I myself wrote, among other things, a book on Marxist economic theory and a Marxist analysis of "late capitalism," which stimulated vigorous discussion in broad circles in the international workers movement (including the Communist parties), as well as among scholars. The Western governments regard me as an irreconcilable opponent of capitalism. Four of them, including the United States, the German Federal Republic, and France, have banned me from their territories. Why can't my books be freely printed and distributed in the Soviet Union? Why is it that this article of mine, which despite its sharp criticism of capitalism can be published in capitalist Germany, cannot appear in the "socialist" Soviet Union?
Why is it that the works of L.D. Trotsky, the organizer of the October insurrection, the creator of the Red Army, the man designated in Lenin's last testament as the CPSU's most capable leader, are not freely available in the USSR? Why is it that they no longer print the works of such outstanding Communists as Gregory Zinoviev, the first chairman of the Communist International; Nikolai Bukharin, Zinoviev's successor in this post; Evgeny Preobrazhensky, the first general secretary
(preceding Stalin) of the CC of the CPSU; Christian Rakovsky, the first chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic; and of many other members of Lenin's Central Committee, whose names, despite Stalin's crimes against them, remain inseparably bound up with the history of the socialist October revolution and the founding of the Soviet state?
Suppression of freedom of opinion, thought, and the press in the USSR only assists capitalism in its attempt to present itself to people both in the East and West as a "freer" system than socialist society. It is an obstacle to the consolidation of genuine socialist consciousness in the minds of Soviet citizens. Ideologies (even reactionary ones) can only be effectively combatedon the level of ideas. If you try to suppress them by force, in the long run you only give them more force.
It was not without reason that the great Soviet scholar Kapitza said on the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution that the present generation of Soviet youth no longer knows how to argue. Only in a climate of sharp, public, wide-ranging debate, can Marxism (which has been withering in the role of a state religion) bloom again, can new Plekhanovs, new Lenins, new Trotskys, flourish in the
But this is probably precisely the USSR.
main reason why the Soviet bureaucracy suppresses freedom of debate. There is nothing it fears more than a politically active, conscious working class.
Marxism is a science, which like any science, can only develop in a climate of unrestricted, free confrontation of opinions. We should note what the old Friedrich Engels wrote to August Bebel on May 1, 1891:2
2. Marx's criticism of the Gotha program of the German Social Democratic party in a letter
"Since you tried to prevent publication of the article by force and Neue Zeit has been warned that the next time this happens it may be expropriated by the party and placed under censorship, the seizure of your entire press by the party must necessarily appear to me in a peculiar light. How are you any different than Puttkammer,? if you introduce an 'antisocialist law'* into our own ranks? No party in any country can impose silence on me if I am determined to speak out. But I should like you to consider if you would not do better to be less touchy-less Prussian-in your dealings. You-the party—need socialist scholarship, and the latter cannot live without freedom of movement."
These words breathe the whole spirit of genuine Marxism. They haunt the conscience of the present rulers of the USSR.
Repression of dissidents for mere crimes of opinion, the brutal suppression freedom of the press and freedom to organize for political oppositionists, an "antisocialist law" and censorship "in our own ranks"-all these things are by no means just "blemishes" that "with time" can be removed from the lovely face of "socialism" in the USSR. As Marxists we have to find the social explanation for the continuing absence of soviet democracy in the USSR, more than twenty years after the Twentieth Party Congress, more than twenty-five years since the victory of the Chinese revolution broke the encirclement of the Soviet Union, when the USSR has already become the world's second-largest naustrial power. 1o conunue to attribut nis boltical detormation today to bach wardness and relative poverty is insufficient; ascribing it to "the cult of the personality" is simply laughable.
The explanation of the abuses in the Soviet Union lies in the fact that Lenin already described in 1921: The Soviet Union is not a pure workers state but a known under the title "Marginal Comments" was long suppressed by the party leadership. It attacked formulations in the program reflecting concessions to the concepts of Lassalle. (The Gotha program was drafted as a basis for fusion between the Lassalleans and the Marxists.) Although the letter was written in 1875, it did not become generally known until 1891, when Engels got it published in the party journal Neue Zeit without the approval of the party officials. The leadership raised the question of discipline and procedures. It was in response to this that Engels made these remarks in his May 1 letter to Bebel. For the text, see Marx Engels Werke, Berlin 1968, vol. 38, p. 89.—IP
bureaucratically deformed one. The direct exercise of state power gradually slipped out of the hands of the working class, out of the hands of its freely elected councils, out of the hands of its vanguard. It was monopolized by the state, economic, and party bureaucracy.
On the basis of that monopoly of administration and authority, this social layer holds enormous material privileges, which it seeks by every means to defend. Soviet democracy with unrestricted civil rights for everyone; workers leaders freely elected in votes where various parties and groupings could present slates; workers control over the entire economy and state; unrestricted public debate on all questions of interest to the society, including those of "high policy"; democratically centralized workers self-management in the factories-all this would mean the end of these privileges. And so the bureaucracy clings to its monopoly of power and to the one-party system that covers it up and legitimizes it. For this reason it stubbornly opposes any genuine soviet democracy, even though this could only help in building socialism.
The bureaucracy is not a new class. Capitalism has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The Soviet working class feels instinctively what a gigantic step backward such a restoration would bring and is vigorously resisting the first steps in this direction, such as, for example, giving factory directors the right to dismiss workers. I stand completely on the side of these workers in their defense of the gains of the October revolution, against the procapitalist machinations of their oppressors, as well as against the proposals of a Sakharov.
The best guarantee against such a restoration is an independently acting, self-managing, politically mobilized working class. Such a force will once again come onto the stage in the Soviet Union, to the terror not only of the present rulers but also of imperialism and of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. The struggle of the international working class, especially the West European workers, for a democratic system of workers councils in the highly industrialized countries, will, once it wins a decisive victory, make an important contribution to this new rise of the Soviet working class.
Thousands of Uruguayans
Deprived of Political Rights
The political rights of thousands of Uruguayans were suspended September 1 under a decree signed as the first official act by the country's new president, Aparicio Méndez.
The suspension of the right to be elected or to hold public office is to remain in effect for fifteen years. It applies to the leading members of all existing political parties, including former President Juan María Bordaberry.
Notes
1. This document was printed in the July 3, 1975, issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly magazine published in Brussels by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. It was also printed in the September 12, 1975, issue of the Militant, a secialist weekly newspaper published in New York.-IP
3. Robert Victor von Puttkamer, German minister of the interior from 1881 to 1888, during much of the period when repressive legislation was in force against the Social Democratic party.—IP
4. The Antisocialist Law was in force in the German Empire from 1878 to 1890. It denied legal rights to the Social Democratic party and its mass organizations.-IP