Does Socialism Have a Future? Volume 1 When and Why Socialism in the Soviet Union Failed Translated into English by George Gruenthal Published by: Red Star Publishers P.O. Box 1641 Manhattanville Sta. New York, NY 10027 www.RedStarPublishers.org Table of Contents Critical Comments on the Book ...........................................7 Note on the Translation ........................................................9 Preliminary Remark ...........................................................11 1. Some Observations by Eugen Varga .............................13 Huge Income Differentials .............................................14 Production Determines Consumption ............................15 Gossweiler and Holz Cover up the Class Interests ........17 Marxist Socialism ..........................................................18 Gossweiler and Holz: Fighters for the Survival of Revisionism....................................................................19 Stalin against the Pigs in the State’s Vegetable Garden 22 Varga on the Abolition of the Party Maximum .............23 Varga on Conditions during the War .............................24 Svetlana Alliluyeva: Stalin Was in Many Ways a Prisoner of the Relations ................................................26 Varga on Stalin ..............................................................28 2. From the October Revolution to Collectivization ..........30 The Chain of the Imperialist World System Breaks Where It Is Weakest .......................................................30 What Is To Be Done in a Backward Country? ..............31 The NEP Could Only Be Carried Out For a Limited Time ...............................................................................34 3. Creation of the Industrial Basis for Socialism under the Conditions in the Soviet Union ....................36 The Upswing in Industry Created a New Working Class with the Imprint of the Peasantry ........................36 A Slower Pace of Industrialization Would Have Led to Its Downfall ........................................................39 The Relations Limited the Possibilities of Understanding ................................................................40 Today One Must Soberly Analyze the Development at That Time ...................................................................42 Incorrect Assessment of the Question of the State ........46 4. The Workers’ Power Needed Two Crutches Taken from the Old Society to Build a New One ...................51 The Management System of the 1930s Was Outdated .51 The Economic Accounting of the NEP ..........................53 The System of Economic Accounting after the End of the NEP ......................................................................54 Why Commodity-Money Relations? .............................57 Shortcomings in State Management ..............................62 On the Method of Using Opposition Literature .............66 The Role of the Working Masses Became Increasingly Weak .........................................................67 5. Revolutionary or Counter-Revolutionary Dismantling of Over-Centralism? ......................................................76 How Could a Revolutionary Dismantling of Rigid Centralist Forms of Leadership Have Looked? ............77 What Stood in the Way of Socialist Decentralization? ..80 The Enterprise Managers Demanded Liberal Economic Reforms.........................................................81 6. The Forces of “Liberal” Counter-Revolution Were Stirring ...........................................................................85 Stalin against Yaroshenko..............................................85 Yaroshenko Stood for a Whole Current.........................88 The Problems Were Not Resolved .................................90 7. “Workers’ Self-Administration” in Yugoslavia and in the CSSR of Dubcek ................................................95 “Self-Administration” in Yugoslavia .............................95 “Self-Administration” in the CSSR .............................100 8. The Bureaucratic Variety of the Counter-Revolution ..106 Different Class Interests in the Defense of State Management of Production ..........................................107 Stalin’s Two-Front Battle ............................................109 The Interests of the Bureaucrats ..................................112 9. Victory of Counter-Revolution after Stalin’s Death ...115 Stalin’s Death. Intrigues within the Party Leadership 115 Big Consumer Promises of the New Leadership .........119 Khrushchev’s Program: Expansion of Commodity- Money Relations, Strengthening the Position of the Enterprise Managers ....................................................121 10. The 20th Party Congress: The New Class Celebrates Its Victory ....................................................................129 11. Why Did the Working Class Lose the Struggle for Power? ...................................................................137 12. The Policy of Alliance of the New Ruling Class towards the Peasants ....................................................140 13. Contradictions within the New Ruling Class ............149 The Power Struggle in June 1957 ................................157 14. “The Leading Role of the Party” à la Khrushchev ...160 15. Mafioso Structures under Brezhnev...........................162 16. The Liberman Legend ................................................168 17. Was the Soviet Union Capitalist? ..............................174 18. Was the Soviet Union Imperialist? ............................181 Develop the Theory of the Transitional Society to Communism Based on Historical Experience! ...........188 Appendix ..........................................................................190 1) A Controversy about Socialism and Revisionism ...190 With which “Defenders” of Stalin We Have Nothing in Common...................................................................190 Gossweiler’s Fairy Tales: Ulbricht as a vanguard fighter against revisionism.......................................................192 June 17 – Reactionary Turning Point in the GDR ......193 2) Letter to the Editor from Dr. Kurt Gossweiler, June 10, 1996 ...............................................................198 3) Answer of the Editorial Board of Roter Morgen ....202 The Development of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s Death ............................................................................202 On the Question of Creating a Unified Communist Party in Germany .........................................................210 Other Questions ...........................................................212 Bibliography ....................................................................215 Critical Comments on the Book This book originally appeared as a series of articles in Roter Morgen, the organ of the KPD in 1995, just a few years after the final downfall of the Soviet Union, the revisionist countries of East- ern Europe, and of socialist Albania. (To understand why this trans- lation took so long, see the Note on the Translation.) This is one of the first (and few) attempts to analyze the down- fall of the Soviet Union from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, that is, recognizing that socialism was overthrown shortly after Stalin’s death and the coming to power of Khrushchev and company, and not just after Gorbachev was ousted in 1991. What makes this book even more important is that it tries to an- alyze those class-based forces that were acting in the Soviet Union while Stalin was still alive, and were already looking for an oppor- tunity to turn away from socialism, a transitional society to com- munism, a classless society, and to return the country to capitalism. Thus, it tries to deepen the analysis beyond pointing out that Khrushchev was a traitor (which he was). For a brief summary of this analysis, see Chapter 11. This does not mean that everything in this book is correct. There are some obvious errors from a Marxist-Leninist point of view, and others that are less obvious. The most obvious is that the authors, revising the earlier correct view of their party, think that the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and later, was a society of exploitation, but it was not capitalist. This leads to the rather ab- surd conclusion that it was (or at least had features of) a pre- bourgeois society. The authors only state this view directly in Chap- ter 17.* Another point that the authors make is that the socialist Soviet Union had to rely on two “crutches” from the old society, commodi- * The undialectical nature of this view is similar to that of Bill Bland and his U.S.-based protégé, Hari Kumar. They said of the revisionist Soviet Union that it was capitalist, and capitalist counties are either bourgeois-democratic or fascist; since it was obviously not bourgeois democratic it must be fascist. The authors of this book take the view that since it was an exploitative society, but not capitalist, it must be pre-bourgeois. I will not try to deal here with their view that a capitalist society must be based on competition. 7 Preliminary Remark ty-money relations and the state apparatus. Beyond noting that Sta- lin pointed out the need to continuously restrict commodity ex- change, and that he fought against bureaucracy in the state appa- ratus, I will not deal more with this here. What I hope Marxist-Leninist forces will not do is to reject the book out-of-hand because it contains criticism of forces in