31 years ago, the USSR came to an ignominious end. In the IMT, I was indoctrinated to see the USSR as a noble and heroic attempt at building a better world. It was, for all its flaws, a ‘workers’ state’, worth defending in the face of its bourgeois enemies. The nationalised planned economy had created the basis for a better society. All that was necessary was to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the system would right itself.
If only it were that simple. It turns out that the bureaucracy and the state were so intertwined that the abolition of one meant the abolition of the other. When you read accounts of the USSR’s collapse, it is striking how little the working-class actually did to preserve ‘their’ state. Whether they necessarily approved of everything that happened after the collapse of the USSR is neither here nor there. The point is that they did little to nothing to preserve the regime when it came crumbling down, not even to defend the nationalised planned economy, the ‘gains of October’. So much for the leading role of the working-class in Marixst theology.
Maybe, just maybe, we should give up this fiction of the USSR as a workers’ state. The workers did not feel any sense of ownership or any protective instinct towards this monstrous totalitarian entity, and looked upon its disintegration with indifference at best. It is no good saying that the 1990s were ‘worse’ – Stalinism had so destroyed society that it was always going to be a painful road back to normality. As Martin Malia says in The Soviet Tragedy:
A market in an industrial society cannot be created by simple fiat, as was possible in the peasant-dominated societies of Russia in 1921 or China in 1979: then it had been sufficient for the state to stop interfering with the peasants’ production and to let them take their goods to town in order for prosperity to return overnight. An industrial market requires complex wholesale and retail distribution networks, well-developed credit facilities, and a body of law covering everything from contracts to labor relations; it also requires disciplined habits of work, positive attitudes towards profit, and a willingness to take calculated risks. And it takes time to build such institutions and to nurture such attitudes. But the Soviet regime had actively discouraged all such developments; thus, by 1989, when the central administrative-command apparatus was half-dismantled, the state enterprises stepped out into a void.-p.477
Besides, when the USSR was being constructed, life was undoubtedly worse than under the Tsars. The Bolsheviks inherited a chaotic situation which they then exacerbated. Their economic illiteracy destroyed what was left of the country’s prosperity, and their penchant for violence helped bring about a devastating war that plunged Russia into an era of barbarism surpassing anything seen under the Romanovs. Lenin and his cohorts had to begrudgingly restore capitalism again before any recovery could begin. Needless to say, no Trotskyist cites these difficult beginnings as proof of socialism’s failure. They instead appeal to ‘difficult objective conditions’ – as if every attempt at socialism in any country would not face difficulties of a similar nature. They ignore the difficult objective conditions placed by decades of Stalinism in the way of a successful capitalist restoration – that, apparently, is to be overlooked. If the USSR under Stalin was a ‘degenerated’ form of socialism, then post-communist Russia was ‘degenerated’ capitalism – capitalism without liberal democracy, without institutions, without a mature civil society, recovering from the carnage left behind by decades of communist tyranny.
The brief recovery that flourished in interwar Russia thanks to the NEP was, of course, sabotaged and destroyed by Stalin. As such, the USSR never developed a sustainable economic model. The idea that a bit more workers’ democracy could have fixed something so inherently broken is simply Trotskyist drivel. A planned economy cannot be democratic, but by its very nature must be centralised, rigid, fossilised. Something so cumbersome cannot possibly allow for popular input of any kind, and all the attempts to decentralise control under Khrushchev and Brezhnev stalled precisely because of this. Besides, none other than Trotsky crushed all the attempts at workers’ democracy from the outset. He was hardly in any place to complain at the subsequent lack of democracy! Even if some sort of workers’ democracy had been successfully put in place as part of a revolution against the bureaucracy, how likely is it that the workers would have voted to make themselves redundant and to liquidate a good chunk of the economy in the name of greater efficiency? One of the first things the workers did in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was to vote themselves massive, economy-destroying pay increases – as any worker would if given the chance. In all likelihood, another bureaucracy would have recreated itself.
It is worth recounting what Ted Grant and the wise men of Militant claimed back in the day. They boasted that the USSR’s planned economy had proven its superiority over capitalism, and ‘ruled out’ a capitalist restoration – which Trotsky, to his credit, had anticipated. Ted’s false prophecies were exposed when the USSR did in fact collapse and give way to capitalism. Woods and Grant would not admit this until years later! Moreover, Grant even supported the 1991 coup attempt, thinking it was a last-ditch effort to save what remained of the planned economy. As always with orthodox Trotskyists, preserving the ‘nationalised planned economy’ was more important than actual democracy and freedom. Grant and Woods were left with egg on their faces. So much for dialectical materialism allowing them to predict the future! Let us remember that Grant and his loathsome minions were on the wrong side of history as this glorious liberation was taking place in the USSR and across eastern Europe.
We should celebrate the downfall of communist tyranny in the USSR and across Eastern Europe. We should salute those brave opponents of totalitarianism for their sterling efforts in defeating Stalinism and freeing their people. We should honour people like Leszek Kolakowski, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Czeslaw Milosz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others who mobilised their people to resist this monstrous and inhuman system. Ironically, some of the strongest supporters of the insurrectionary movement against communist tyranny were former Trotskyists like Adam Michnik, who had now come to the conclusion that freedom was more important than some illusory ‘real socialism’.
It was not easy. These men and women braved death, imprisonment and humiliation for their ideals. Many of them had once been part of the apparatus. Kolakowski was Poland’s leading Marxist philosopher and took part in witch-hunts against those who defied the established order. He would soon join forces with his old foes against the common enemy, Marxist tyranny.
The people in the IMT and similar Marxist cults are not being threatened with death or imprisonment, but they still fear to speak out. They are afraid of losing friends, of being expelled, of being shunned. They fear disapproval before their peers, they fear the humiliating experience of being slandered and demonised for going against the party line. They should take heart from the far worse experiences of these brave dissidents, who have inspired me in my own battle against totalitarianism. It was reading about Kolakowski’s struggle with Polish communism, and his own disillusionment with leftist utopianism, that spurred me on to leave the IMT and abandon Marxism altogether. Kolakowski paid dearly for standing up for his ideals. He lost his teaching position. He was slandered in the press. He, too, lost well-connected friends who preferred to conform and bow the knee before tyranny. His Jewish wife was the target of vicious anti-Semitism from the Polish Communist regime, something our friends in the IMT should be familiar with, given their own loud support for disgusting anti-Semites. He had to leave Poland for the West, and at Berkeley University, he encountered far-left students who propagated all the loathsome ideas he had left Poland to escape. He met people like myself and my ex-comrades in the IMT – young, ignorant, self-righteous, convinced that they had the right to destroy the lives of anyone who did not get on board with their corrupt vision of utopia. All this chastened him, even embittered him, but he never lost his faith in humanity and in human freedom, even if he remained a pessimist and a sceptic of the very idea of human perfection to the end of his days.
Kolakowski is my model and my hero, among many others. They had the courage to speak out. How can we, living such privileged, pampered lives in the West, not be vociferous in the defence of human freedom, like they were? Life is too short to be lived under tyranny of any kind. In celebrating the collapse of communism, I also look forward to the collapse of the totalitarian regimes of today that are still in existence, oppressing and killing with abandon. This also means exposing the totalitarians in our midst in the form of cults like the IMT. I hope that all those who read this blog will join me in this noble and heroic quest – ‘To dream the impossible dream/To fight the unbeatable foe/To bear with unbearable sorrow/To run where the brave dare not go/’.