[The following is the text of the resolution adopted unanimously by the Congress For and About Rudolf Bahro. The translation from the German is by George Saunders.]
The participants in the International Congress For and About Rudolf Bahro in West Berlin, November 16-19, express their opposition once again to the sentencing of Rudolf Bahro by the GDR judiciary in a secret trial in which he had no effective legal defense. We demand his immediate release.
Bahro has attempted to apply Marxist methods and categories to the study of the societies in Eastern Europe and to point the way toward a socialist transformation.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Bahro's theses and particular statements, his book is a significant political and scientific contribution by a critical Marxist and Communist. With his work The Alternative. he has also made an essential contribution toward presenting socialism as a realistic perspective and has tried to work out practical steps toward change. Therefore he embodies, as does Robert Havemann, the hopes of many in both East and West.
We demonstrate for and discuss Rudolf Bahro because we are for socialism. Socialism and democracy are inseparable.
Solidarity with Rudolf Bahro to us means solidarity with all political prisoners and people persecuted for their political or religious convictions in the countries of Eastern Europe. However, as is shown by the many cases of Berufsuerbot and other restrictions on democratic rights in West Germany and West Berlin, people who think like Bahro in these places have difficulty in disseminating and explaining without interference their ideas and proposals for alternative social development. Therefore it is natural that we also fight against all forms of political repression, for the realization of social and civil rights, and for a general amnesty of political prisoners throughout the world.
The participants in this international congress-trade unionists, Communists, independent socialists, Socialists, and Social Democrats from different countries of Eastern and Western Europe-have debated over Bahro's work for the past three days in an open dialogue. Regardless of differences in day-to-day political work, we have tried to set an example with this congress.
We affirm our intention to continue this discussion in our various countries by further exchanging our experiences, and to strengthen the work of solidarity. Rudolf Bahro hopes for a critical reception and discussion of his book. We can only inform others of this hope and appeal to the political and moral sense of responsibility of all left organizations.
We call on democratic public opinion throughout the world, and especially the various political, religious, and trade-union organizations in the labor movement, as well as youth and student organizations, to do everything in their power to increase the pressure on the GDR authorities to free Rudolf Bahro. This will be possible only if further international initiatives follow this congress. In this regard the international trade-union movement has a special role to play.
Endorsed by:
The present individual sponsors of this congress, the Committee to Free Rudolf Bahro (Berlin), Committee to Free Rudolf Bahro (Paris), Biermann Committee (Paris), Editors of Listy (Frankfurt), United Socialist Party (PSU, France), Party of Proletarian Unity (PdUP, Italy), Il Manifesto (Italy).
Also, the representatives of the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI), Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE), Communist Party of Italy (PCI), United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
Also, in behalf of numerous French socialists, Gilles Martinet, member of the presidium of the Socialist Party of France (PSF).
BOOKS
The French CP Takes a Look at the Soviet Union
Reviewed by Louis Couturier
The publication of L'URSS et nous has been played up with unusual fanfare by the French Communist Party, including a special statement by the Political Bureau, a speech by Georges Marchais to the Central Committee, receptions, and a special page in l'Humanité.
This book is a collection of pieces by five CP authors, compiled by Francis Cohen. This is not a random choice. While the historian Alexandre Adler has written half of Chapter Two ("Stalinist Realities"), and while the Russian teachers Claude Frioux and Léon Robel, as well as the economist Maurice Decaillet, took part in the writing of several of the six chapters, it is to Francis Cohen that we owe the introduction, the historical background, half of several chapters, and the conclusion. It is no overstatement to say that he is the one who was responsible for "setting the tone" of the collection.
Now, who is Francis Cohen?
We will not go into his past in detail, for what middle-aged "Eurocommunist" today has not paid tribute to the Stalin cult? It should be recalled, however, that the CP considers him an expert on the USSR, and rightly so, for back in 1949 he wrote the most fawning articles in La Nouvelle
Critique on Lysenko, Soviet biology, Soviet science, Soviet painting, and Soviet cinema. True, at that time, under the guidance of the late Jean Kanapa, the editorial board of that magazine included, among others, Henri Lefebvre, Annie Besse (now Annie Kriegel), Victor Leduc, and Pierre Daix.
The others have changed. No one can deny that Francis Cohen has the merit of consistency. The various books that he published after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, though they make fewer references to Stalin and Lysenko, are still hymns of praise for the Soviet Union. In 1974—i.e., less than four years before L'URRS et nous-Editions Sociales published a book of his called Les Soviétiques [The Soviets]. This is a fat 350-page book, in which the Stalin era is treated in three miserable pages, and the repression is given ten lines.
But the book boasts long passages on Soviet democracy, and Comrade Cohen tells us that "in the Soviet Union, we are watching the old dream of untold millions-the dream of a workers government-being painfully born into reality."
This interesting article of faith must be kept in mind to appreciate the performance of L'URSS et nous. There is something in
L'URSS et nous [The USSR and Us].
By Francis
• Cohen et al. Paris:
Editions Sociales, 1978. 220 pp.
it for everyone-anti-Stalinists and unrepented Stalinists, those who like barefaced lies and more subtle types who prefer lies of omission, liberals, teachers, and especially future CP voters.
Francis Cohen-with a boldness that one would have thought him incapable of-asks questions that in the Soviet Union would each be worth several years of hard labor. Is the USSR socialist? What are its internal conflicts? Can we draw up a balance sheet of the damage done by Stalinism? Is terror an integral part of the system? Has a new class of exploiters been created? What are the principles of Soviet foreign policy? Is there an economic or political crisis in the Soviet Union?
A list of this type is obviously revolutionary enough, but what are the answers? The authors' foreword sounded promising ("The time has come for a serious reflection on Soviet socialism") and not very polite as far as Francis Cohen's earlier literary output was concerned.
In trying to summarize the book's 220 pages without distorting them, we come to the following conclusions:
1. Yes, the USSR is socialist.
2. There are internal conflicts (particularly between blue-collar workers and the peasants, who are supported by some intellectuals.
3. Stalinism took a heavy toll, but that's all in the past.
4. Terror is not an integral part of the system.
5. There is no new class of exploiters.
6. Soviet foreign policy is a policy of peace.
7. The crisis in the USSR, or in the international Communist movement, is a crisis of growth (like the growing pains of adolescence).
We can see why the Soviet press has gone easier on L'URSS et nous than on the works of Elleinstein or Carrillo. It condemns the anti-Soviet uses that such a book may be put to "despite the intentions of the authors," but this will not lead to transforming Comrades Cohen, Robel, and Frioux into agents of imperialism. They will still be able to get Soviet visas for their many trips to the USSR (which Elleinstein can no longer do).
However, L'URSS et nous cannot be compared to any other publication of the French CP. What we have here is a text that has the leadership's stamp of approval. Thus, it shows just how far it is possible to go in criticizing the USSR, and what are the boundaries that are not to be overstepped.
What is really new is the violent denunciation of Stalinist terror. This is nothing new to readers of Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor, but the CP activists stand to be shaken up by it. Alexander Adler, who has a postgraduate degree in history, tries his hand at a precise balance sheet, using Soviet figures, and engaging in calculations as intricate as they are questionable. He comes up with 400,000 to 500,000 executions between 1935 and 1939; 4 million persons arrested in the same period; 7 million prisoners in 1953; 10 million deaths owing to the repression of the 1930s.
These figures are a novelty in an official CP publication. Elleinstein gave no figures in his Histoire de l'URSS [History of the USSR], Vol. 2. Out of "scientific caution" (that is, out of a desire not to commit himself for the time being), he was content to speak of "several million persons deported." Khrushchev was equally evasive in his secret report in 1956.
Adler's figures seem to us to be greatly underestimated, and Victor Serge seemed much more believable when he estimated the prison-camp population at around 15 million in 1941. Nevertheless, the fact remains that for the first time the French CP has admitted the magnitude of Stalinist repression in the USSR.
After these confessions, Cohen takes great pains to explain the reasons for this repression, and concludes that it is impossible for it to recur. Using tortuous formulations, he explains that the democratic functioning of society was "limited, inhibited, contradicted in certain aspects" during the Stalinist period.
By skimming through the other chapters, it is possible to paint a very somber picture of the USSR—a total lack of democracy, censorship, apoliticalism of the masses, bureaucracy, incompetence, and so on. However, each statement of this kind is tempered by considerations designed to soften the impact and prevent the reader from drawing the obvious conclusions:
"It is around the concept of political democracy under socialism that the most serious differences between the CPSU and and our party have been made explicit" (Claude Frioux).
Several pages later:
"Soviet life in its basic fabric ... is neutralizing authoritarian practices more and more" (Claude Frioux).
*Those forbidden to publish or to see their works produced, forced into exile, stripped of their citizenship, censured, and attacked for their ideas-such cases can no longer be numbered....
"Clearly, what is involved are not occa-
"Clearly, what is involved are not occasional slips, but an entire authoritarian, dogmatic conception and practice on the part of the cultural administration, which has led to a general distortion of intellectual life in the Soviet Union. This situation has not improved in the slightest since the Twentieth Congress-just the opposite" (Claude Frioux).
And a few pages further on:
"It must be emphasized that overall, despite the forced departures, the prohibitions and constraints, Soviet culture displays great richness and an undeniable fertility" (Léon Robel).
This juxtaposing of contradictory quotations could go on indefinitely. What we have here is an eclectic type of collection corresponding to a particular need. Generally speaking, the authors, who are known
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"Regularly buy and read
INTERCONTINENTAL PRESS!"
to have lied shamelessly for decades, cloak themselves in "historic prudence" and "scientific doubt" before coming out with half-truths that have long been assimilated by all who are interested in the question. Jean Elleinstein's "History of the USSR," which came out in 1973, was a model of the genre. Elleinstein went much further than Francis Cohen, having been driven to it by the needs of his internal struggle inside the French CP.
L'URSS et nous was ordered up by the leadership of the CP, in order to win back some following among the intellectuals (its language makes it hardly accessible to anyone not lucky enough to have gone to college), without upsetting Brezhnev too much. This is the logical continuation of the 1976 turn brought on by the distressing
Eight major steel plants in the Ruhr region and in the cities of Bremen and Osnabrück were shut down November 28 as 37,000 West German steelworkers went out on strike.
The strike came after four months of unsuccessful negotiations between IG- Metall, the steel and metalworkers union, and the Steel Industry Employers Association. The union's main demand is for a thirty-five-hour week to protect workers against layoffs. The steel industry has been losing 1,000 jobs a month, with plants operating at about 65% of capacity. A total of 120,000 jobs have been eliminated in the industry since the 1960s.
Eugen Loderer, the union president, was quoted by John Vinocur in the November
29 New York Times as saying: "If you
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P.O. Box 116
increase in the number of SP voters. How to differentiate oneself from the "Soviet reality that appears less and less to the French masses as a model to be followed" (Francis Cohen), without breaking with the Soviet regime, which is a regime "oriented to the working class and partially led by it" with a painful evolution "oriented more and more toward socialism"" (Francis Cohen)?
To paraphrase a shrewd remark by Thierry Pfister in Le Monde, we will say that the authors of L'URSS et nous, as well as their partners, "appear not as scientists striving to refine an analysis, but as soldiers trying to abandon a position considered untenable by carrying out a strategic retreat in the most orderly possible fashion."
don't change the work hours, then you'll have to cut the work force in half by 1985."
The steel barons flatly rejected a union proposal to shorten work hours gradually, claiming this would hurt the industry's "competitiveness."
The union's demand for a shorter workweek has been coupled with a call for a 5% increase in the average hourly wage of $5.75. The steel industry countered by offering a 3% wage increase and up to six weeks' vacation.
The strike will have major repercussions throughout Western Europe. Negotiations on a forty-hour week are under way in the Dutch steel industry. In Belgium, steelworkers began a thirty-nine-hour week in November that will be reduced to thirtyfive hours by 1980.
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