Dissecting the failure of Soviet ‘socialism’
Review by John Riddell of The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted, by Michael A. Lebowitz, New York: Monthly Review 2012.
In current discussions of twenty-first century socialism, the work of Michael Lebowitz has a unique merit: it is rooted in the experience of Cuba and Venezuela, where efforts in recent decades to move toward socialism have been the most vigorous. Quotations from Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez set the tone.
Lebowitz’s vision of the path to a socialist future is developed in several recent volumes (see “Selective Bibliography,” below). His Contradictions of “Real Socialism”, by contrast, analyzes the failure of the most concerted attempt to launch a transition to socialism, which took place in the Soviet Union and, after 1945, in allied states in Eastern Europe. As late as the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was widely hailed for setting the pace in economic growth among industrialized countries. But already its dynamism was flagging. Its downhill course from sputnik (the world’s first artificial satellite, 1957) to zastoy (stagnation) and collapse took only 34 years.
Lebowitz maintains that this failure was caused not by adverse objective conditions but by productive relations justified by a wrong theory – “a distortion that forgot about human beings.” Paraphrasing Che Guevara, he insists that “to build socialism it is essential, along with building new material foundations, to build new human beings.” This cannot be done from above, by a state, Lebowitz says. “Only through their own activities through autonomous organizations – at the neighbourhood, community and national levels – can people transform both circumstances and themselves,” he adds, quoting from an essay he wrote as the USSR staggered toward collapse in 1990.
This principle remains true in the new century. “The absence of a vision of a socialist alternative ensures that there is no alternative to capitalism. If you don’t know where you want to go, no road will take you there,” Lebowitz says. He charts this path by drawing on Hugo Chávez’s conception of the “triangle of socialism,” whose three elements are:
Social ownership of the means of production, in which people, as producers and as members of society, determine the use of their social labour.
Social production democratically organized by workers through cooperation and solidarity.
Satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes – our needs as members of the human family.
The mature Soviet model failed to achieve any of these three goals.
Lebowitz limits his inquiry to the social structures in the USSR and the Eastern European states that took the Soviet Union as a model from 1950 to 1990. (The latter states are presumably Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Lebowitz discusses the Yugoslav experience in Build It Now.) He calls these structures “real socialism,” picking up on a term coined in 1973 and used by defenders of these structures. The words functioned as a euphemism, acknowledging that these societies, which claimed to be socialist, did in fact deviate from the socialism envisaged by Marx and Engels. Critics of these structures use other words, such as “Stalinism,” “state capitalism,” or “bureaucratized workers’ states,” and the differences are significant. In this article, however, I will use Lebowitz’s term…..
Read on:- https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/dissecting-the-failure-of-soviet-socialism/
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