Sam Webb started the discussion with a piece he wrote in a recent issue of People's World. Among other points made, Sam said the following:
Soviet working people were not the authors of their own lives and the architects of their society in any deep sense. Despite the existence of local councils, trade unions and other organizations, political power wasn't really diffused to the various layers of society. Instead it was concentrated in the hands of the ruling Communist Party, and in too many instances employed arbitrarily. The party's near-monopoly of power foreclosed popular participation in and outside of the institutional structures of Soviet society.
You can read the entire article here.
Gary Hicks said much of what was on my mind when he wrote:
This article contains a lot of 1950s-1960s high-school Democracy versus Communism. I flunked that course and now I remember why. It explained nothing, caused me to zone out, not take notes on something my gut told me reeked of falsity. That being said, I'm willing to go with fighting for democracy and socialism in this bourgeois republic of which Ben Franklin quipped "if you can keep it".........this bourgeois republic of which President Lincoln said that "whenever a people grow weary of their government, they may exercise their democratic right to change it, or their revolutionary right to dismember and overthrow it." This seems to be in sync with Marx and Engels, when they wrote of the need for the revolution to "make despotic inroads" on capitalist property".
Trade unions and other civil society organizations probably do need more autonomy from political parties. Our Communist Party can set an example by advocating a process of dress rehearsal.....the liberation of trade unions, women's organizations, advocacy organizations, racial/ethnic advocacy groups......from the Democratic Party. Like the South African comrades once told their people and the world: socialism is the future, build it now.
Finally, the Soviet Union. This discourse and many others are able to take place because of the victory of the Red Army, and it's Supreme Commander, a certain Uncle of whom so, so many members of our family are embarassed. Those forces that put an end to the nazism on whose shoulders stood Jim Crow. My very ability as a black man to write items like this without penalty of physical extinction for being too uppity and worse still, red............I owe that ability to those folks of whom Bertolt Brecht wrote "in searching for kindness/could not ourselves be kind".
Thomas Kenney also spoke for much of my thinking when he wrote:
Sam Webb shows deep confusion. Here he uses the old social reformist standby of non-class definitions of democracy, that is, of democracy as synonymous with those formal processes (elections, etc.) acceptable to the bourgeoisie under normal conditions.
Sam also yields ground to the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist stereotypes still dominant in US political discourse. He alleges, as if it were self-evident, that deficiencies of Soviet democracy led to the downfall of the USSR.
That view is false and can be shown to be false, and in fact is now rejected by most parties in the world Communist movement.
What brought down the Soviet Union was primarily right opportunism and corruption that took root in Soviet society in the 30 years before 1985.
Books have been written on this, and I could suggest a few titles if asked, but a simple thought experiment suggests how obviously false Webb’s assertion is.
If lack of democracy brought Soviet socialism down, why didn’t the end of socialism and the USSR in 1991 bring about a new, restored "democratic" dispensation? In other words, if it was Soviet socialism holding back democratic development, why did not a sparkling “democracy” arise after 1991?
What did arise? The Soviet downfall brought to power in 1991 despotic, thieving oligarchs whose front men were Yeltsin and later Putin. All these were corrupt products of the dark recesses of the Soviet private, underground economy, which by 1985-91 penetrated even the upper reaches of the CPSU. That is why, after 1991, the former USSR became the heartland of a hideous gangster capitalism. To a great extent, it still is.
Survey after survey, even those conducted by Western conservative publications, suggest the peoples of the former USSR, now in their majority impoverished, know they were deceived. They say so to pollsters. They know their defeat has led to the de-modernization of their once prosperous country and to demographic collapse.
Sam Webb shoud re-read Lenin. Lenin demanded that every discussion of democracy should, for a Marxist, begin with the clarifying question: democracy for which class?
Even in its most hard-pressed moments of encirclement, invasion, and military pressure, the USSR was superior to the USA in real democracy, in class democracy, in worker political power, and in worker political participation.
Socialism means democracy for the many. Capitalism is democracy for the few.
But I'm really interested in what you think. Join the debate!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
As someone new to CPUSA (as of last Fall), and in a Club which is left of the current Party leadership, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the sentiments expressed here.
In the 1990s I did a little work with some friends trying to get the New Party going in MN. The people I knew in that Party were social dems, which reflected my own political views at the time. My politics changed and morphed a bit over time, but I became fairly apolitical until a lay-off from my job as a sheet metal worker gave me a lot more time to read in 2008, and I began reading those Marxist books my dad had told me about when I was younger.
For me, a blue collar working living in the Tea Party South (Memphis, well, at least the white people here are Tea Party types), it was a big deal to join the Communist Party. It meant something to me when I realized that I was a Communist and that this meant something different than embracing bourgeois liberalism or some form of bourgeois socialism.
Thankfully, the members of the local Memphis Club are communists, committed to the communist movement. We are happy to work with all sorts of progressive folks, and don't seek to be in any way exclusive in our efforts, but we all happen to believe that communism, particularly that expressed in Marxist-Leninist thought, is the best lens through which to look at economic and social life in late capitalism.
I've read enough to know that the history of CPUSA is a history of different of ideological turns. I think it might be time for a turn back toward more explicit communist ideological commitments. I don't think this means we have to be isolationists or acting in the manner of the usual caricature of Trot groups. I think that we can express communism in a way that is new, fresh, appealing, and engaging, but still decidedly communist, with a commitment to always put our class first and with an end in sight that involves the eradication of class distinctions.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to address all of the points here fully. It goes without saying that I'm with Comrades Hicks and Kenny.
Sam Webb's assertion that socialism "cannot dispense with accepted notions of freedom of expression and civil liberties" deserves a closer look. I'm reminded of other calls by the Webb leadership for a Party that is "in tune with contemporary life". A Canadian comrade said it best: "Who is to interpret the prescription for contemporary life? Who are the people venturing to discern the problems and characteristics of "contemporary life" and how will they interpret according to which assemblage of preconceptions?" One could easily replace "contemporary life" with "accepted notions of freedom of expression". The vagueness of these arguments is bad enough, but the implication that communists should abandon historical materialism for some idealist conception of "universal human values" is worse. Human values arise from historical conditions, not the other way around. This is a central Marxist idea, not some "Stalinist" formulation; to cast it aside is to cast aside Marxism.
This idealism is the central problem with Webb's argument; he is attempting to prescribe specific political (and economic, in his other pieces) forms for US socialism before the historical conditions for the realization of socialism in the United States even exist. Further, Webb attempts to proscribe the forms that arose in the USSR and other socialist states, while ignoring the historical conditions that led to their adoption. Indeed, the recent defense of Bukharin by Phil Amadon reads just like one of Webb's, or John Case's for that matter, prescriptions: a market economy, multi-party democracy, and soft-pedaling of class struggle are the hallmarks of "true" socialism. Judging by what he and like-minded social democrats have written on the subject, one can only conclude that Webb argues for exactly one set of acceptable forms, universally applicable to all socialist societies at all points in history. Ironic, coming from one who has railed so often against "dogmatic" and "rigid" thinking!
Post a Comment