What is the nature of the despotic but supposedly socialist regimes,
like the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union yesterday and the
present-day regimes in Cuba and China? Is it socialism or
state-capitalism that forms the basis of the oppressive political
systems in various countries that called themselves “communist” but
gave no voice to the working class? This issue of Communist Voice
carries material relevant to this question, which still is one of the
central issues in the theoretical crisis in left-wing thought. It deals
with the on-going privatization in Cuba, which shows how market
fundamentalism is growing in Cuba and with the debate in Ukraine on the
nature of the former Soviet Union.
This issue of CV also deals with the Arab Spring, and the
issue of the nature of the state sector also arises in this connection.
It is one of the reasons that various sectors of the supposed
anti-imperialist left are skeptical of the mass uprisings in the Arab
Spring. They are upset that it is striking regimes which have both a
major state sector, such as Libya and Syria, and stronger ties to
Russian and Chinese imperialism than to US and European imperialism.
These sectors of the left are non-class anti-imperialists, who don’t
evaluate regimes by their relationship to the masses, but by arbitrary
economic and political standards. They unwittingly abandon the
standpoint of the class struggle and end up regarding the mass struggle
against oppression as simply a plot of this or that section of
imperialism. And they don’t have faith that, whatever the nature of the
regimes that follow the downfall of the tyrants of the Middle East and
North Africa, it is the development of mass initiative of the working
masses that will eventually radically transform politics in the Middle
East and North Africa.
In fact, the question of the nature of state ownership will arise in
other ways as well, such as prospectives for the US economy. As
the environmental and economic crises deepen, there is a renewed
interest in Marxism and what it takes to overcome capitalism. Market
fundamentalism, which seems so firmly entrenched, is in crisis. The
capitalists are clinging more and more tightly to market fundamentalism
as it strangles the masses, yet the time is coming when even the
capitalist government will have to move to regulation and a renewal of
the state sector. What should the attitude of the working class
to the renewed regulation be? Should it be regarded as pro-working
class and socialistic in itself? Or should the working class remain
vigilant against capitalist management, whether by corporations or the
state apparatus run by the capitalists? Should activists prepare the
working class for a fierce struggle over the nature of the renewed
regulation and empowered state sector to come, or simply sigh in relief
whenever state regulation is strengthened? The attitude towards the
state-capitalism of the past in other countries will affect the
attitude of activists towards the coming state regulation.
For activists in Ukraine too, the debate among activists in the
Ukraine over the nature of the former Soviet Union isn’t just an
historical question. It already bears on current issues. For example,
it affects their evaluation of such things as the nature of those
present-day “communist” parties which are descended from the former
“Communist” Party of the Soviet Union.
This issue contains the translation into English of an article by
the Ukrainian communist activist Yury Shakin, thus bringing to readers
here an example of the best of the discussion in the Ukrainian left.
Shakin’s article is an insightful comment on the discussion which has
been going on in the journal What Is To Be done?, a journal which uses
the name of one of Lenin’s famous works. Some of the people in this
discussion, such as the participant D. Yakushev, advocate that
since the Soviet Union didn’t have the exact same form of capitalism as
in the West, and it had replaced the former tsarist bourgeoisie, it
must have been socialist. They present a glorified picture of what
existed in the past. They think that capitalism didn’t arrive in the
Soviet Union until perestroika under Gorbachev.
Another participant, S.S. Gubanov, denounces the cheery picture of
the Soviet Union painted by Yakushev as illusionary and simply
repeating Stalinist myths. He sets forward his explanation for why the
Soviet economy, while differing from the Western market economies, was
not socialist. But his economic reasoning is flawed by his idea that
what was wrong with the Soviet economy was that it was not real
state-capitalism. In his view, actual state-capitalism is well-nigh
tantamount to socialism.
Shakhin holds that the system was state-capitalism under both Stalin
and his successors who denounced him, such as Khrushchov. He
points out problems with Gubanov’s reasoning, and stresses the need to
make a class evaluation of the Soviet economy.
And this issue of CV also contains our letter to Shakhin
commenting on the Ukrainian discussion, and pointing out the need to
look explicitly at the question of what the transitional economy
between capitalism and socialism would look like.
We at Communist Voice are anti-revisionist communists. We are
dedicated to helping the working class organize a new and stronger
class struggle than in the past, and we hold that communism will once
again become the banner of the working class, when it rises in
revolutionary struggle. But we hold that communism can only play this
role when activists repudiate the distorted form of Marxism that is
used to justify despotic regimes abroad and subservience to the liberal
bourgeoisie here in the US. We are opposed to the parody of
Marxism and socialism by the new bourgeoisie that came to power in the
Stalinist Soviet Union and in the various state-capitalist countries.
Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, which stands for the mobilization of
the working class and its genuine role in transforming the economy and
society, was replaced with the teaching that the state sector is
socialist in itself, and that a country can be a “workers state” if the
state sector dominates the economy and the old bourgeoisie has been
replaced by a new privileged ruling strata of technocrats and
exploiters. A supposedly “benevolent” despotism is not socialism, but
another form of capitalism. This distortion of Marxism is advocated by
both Stalinists and Trotskyists, and both these revisionist political
trends will have to be thrown aside if revolutionary Marxism is to be
reborn today. <>
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