Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-1985)

THE INTERNATIONALE
by Eugene Pottier

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth, For
justice thunders condemnation,
A better world's in birth. No more
tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
We have been naught, we shall be all.

Chorus:
‘Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The international working class
Shall be the human race.

We want no condescending saviors,
To rule us from a judgement hall; We
workers ask not for their favors;
Let us consult for all. To make the
thief disgorge his booty,
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide and do it well.

Only a few years ago, the People's Republic of China enjoyed overwhelming prestige among U.S. leftists. China's proximity to Vietnam, both in geography and experience, its exclusion from the United Nations and isolation from the cynical farce of big-power politics, the resounding calls of its leaders for world revolution and their insistence on armed struggle as the principle means of achieving it, the bold and inspiring Cultural Revolution — all of these combined to give China and its Communist Party the image of militant champion of the oppressed and dedicated enemy of imperialism.

In contrast, the persistent stressing by the Soviet leaders of the need for "peaceful coexistence," even to the point of attempting to restrain wars of national liberation which they saw as threats to the fragile relations they had worked out with the U.S. (this was expressed most clearly in the ignominious pressure to negotiate which they directed at the Vietnamese) gave the Soviet Union an image of conservatism. Its leaders seemed far more concerned with preserving their country's status as a major world power than with advancing the cause of the two thirds of the earth's population still under the heel of capitalist domination.

All of the above has changed. China's venture into diplomatic exchanges with the U.S., initiated while bombs were raining on Vietnam, followed by the unseemly haste with which it recognized the military junta in Chile while denying recognition to the revolutionary regime in Portugal, its abstaining at the U.N. when the question of Puerto Rican independence was brought to a vote — all these, and other similar gestures which were appreciatively noted in Washington, have gravely tarnished China's revolutionary image and diminished its influence among U.S. leftists.

At the same time, the Soviet Union and its allies began to take stands in world affairs which were generally welcomed by leftists. More than any other single event, the action of Cuba — a Soviet ally — in Angola produced a change in attitudes toward the Soviet Union among U.S. leftists. Many people who had once dismissed the Soviet Union as hopelessly conservative swung over to viewing it positively as a supporter of revolutionary movements.

This paper is an attempt to explain the bewildering turns in policy on the part of the Soviet Union and China. It is also an attempt to uncover the internal causes behind such turns, since as is well known, a country's foreign policy is an extension of its domestic one. Briefly stated, the writer's thesis is that, owing to a combination of objective difficulties and mistaken policy decisions, the Soviet Union never attained socialism, and that subsequently its course not merely slowed down but reversed direction; that instead of socialism there developed a kind of state capitalism in which a class of bureaucrats, in control of the state apparatus and the nationalized wealth of the country, lives by exploiting the labor of the mass of propertyless proletarians; that China and the other newly liberated countries, notwithstanding great successes, have not yet overcome the conditions that were crucial in halting the advance of the Soviet Union in its early days; and that the proletariat of east and west shares a common goal — to free itself from the domination of hostile class forces which are stifling its initiative, autonomy and self-development.

The point must be emphasized that, for the Sojourner Truth Organization, the examination of developments in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere is not intended to call into question the conception that our main task is the destruction of U.S. imperialism. Unlike some others, in particular the October League, whose discovery of the reactionary character of the Soviet state has led them to oppose it even where that opposition coincides with U.S. government policy, we remain firmly committed to the traditional stance of communists in an imperialist country — for American workers, the enemy is at home!

The purpose of this examination is the lessons it can teach us about the making of revolution in this country, lessons concerning the relations between the vanguard party and the class whose interests it proposes to represent, relations between the proletariat and the state which is supposed to embody its dictatorship, and relations between the working class and other strata of the population with which it may find itself aligned.

For the overall conception and many of the specific interpretations advanced in this paper, the writer has drawn heavily on the theory of state capitalism, first put forward by a group within the now-defunct Workers Party and most clearly and fully expressed in the pamphlet, "State Capitalism and World Revolution," by C. L. R. James, originally published in 1950. What is written in this paper, however, is solely the responsibility of this writer, and should not be laid at the door of James or any of the other early proponents of the theory of state capitalism. Nor should it be taken to be an official statement by the Sojourner Truth Organization, which has undertaken to publish it without necessarily subscribing to everything stated within, because it believes the paper raises important questions which are, or ought to be, of major concern to the U.S. left.

The most dramatic accomplishment of the Bolshevik Revolution was the violent expropriation of the exploiters and the establishment of a state based on nationalized property. Because of this it came to be generally accepted that capitalism depended on private ownership of the means of production, and that wherever such ownership was abolished, socialism prevailed.

This is the view held by nearly all sections of the left; even most Trotskyists [1], bitter critics of the Soviet regime, agree that property relations there are socialist.

This was not how Marx, Engels, or Lenin understood the nature of capitalism and socialism.

In his chapter entitled "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation" in Volume I of CAPITAL, Marx, in discussing the tendency toward centralization of capital, wrote:

In SOCIALISM, UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC Engels vividly described the course of capitalist development:

Engels speaks of the periodic crises of overproduction, in which the capitalists are unable to set in motion the existing means of production, and goes on to say:

He speaks of the tendency to form joint-stock companies and, later, trusts, and how this introduces "production upon a definite plan." But even trusts are inadequate. He continues:

Please re-read the above passage; better yet, go back to the original and read it in its entirety, including the parts omitted here.

"Socialized means of production ..." Note that. Socialized, not by the proletarian revolution, but by capitalism. "Slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie ..." — not after the proletarian revolution, but before it.

To emphasize his point, and to ridicule the notion that nationalization of industry equals socialism, Engels includes a long footnote reviewing various examples of nationalization in France, Germany and Belgium, which concludes with the remark that if the above examples are to be considered socialism, then surely the proposal to have the state take over the brothels, made in Germany during the reign of Frederick William III, must be regarded as a socialistic measure.

Engels' point is clear; yet hundreds of thousands of Marxists (including this writer) studied it for decades and simply refused to believe that it could mean what the words say.[2]

Lenin showed that he had read Engels and, what is more, had understood him. Shortly after his return to Russia in the spring of 1917, he made a report to the All-Russian Conference of the Party, in which he referred to the above-cited passage from SOCIALISM, UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC. In his reply to the discussion, Lenin quoted from the Resolution on the Current Situation, under discussion at the Conference:

Throughout 1917 Lenin hammered away continuously at this idea. In "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It," he wrote:

Very well. It should be clear that the view which equates nationalization of industry with socialism, commonly held among left-wingers, was not the view of Marx, Engels or Lenin. And what of socialism? What did they have to say about how the socialist society would look?

In Section 9 of the chapter in volume I of CAPITAL entitled "Machinery and Modern Industry," Marx writes:

That is the socialist society. More specific than that he would not get; he was not giving "kitchen recipes" for the future. But when the Paris Commune broke out, he studied it carefully, and after that, whenever anyone asked him what the dictatorship of the proletariat would look like, he said — study the Paris Commune — that was the dictatorship of the proletariat!

Now the Paris Commune nationalized nothing; its most important economic reform in the life of the workers was the abolition of night work for bakers! Nevertheless it did much to give Marx, and later Lenin, a view of the new society toward which the proletariat was striving.

And what did they think this new society would look like? From their writings on the Paris Commune we can get some idea. It would abolish the distinction between town and country, and between manual and intellectual labor; it would abolish the bourgeois family and emancipate women; it would show a tendency toward equalization of income; it would introduce universal literacy, universal arming of the workers, and universal participation in administering the state, which would be "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word."

Please note that the above program involves considerably more than nationalization of industry and land, although that may be a part of it; it is more than free medical care, retirement pensions and vacation benefits, although these, too, are part of it. The socialist society involves the complete transformation of social relations, relations among people, so that at last the worker becomes master of the process of production. That is why Lenin wrote that:

How Lenin hoped, in the concrete conditions of Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, to erect the "extremely intricate and subtle system of new organizational relationships," we shall see in a later section. Before we get to that, we must take up a recent, curious use of the theory of state capitalism.

Since the beginning of the Sino-Soviet dispute over fifteen years ago, the Chinese Communist Party has moved from describing the Soviet leaders as "revisionist" and "capitulationist," to charging them with "seeking the all-round restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union," to the present characterization of the Soviet Union as "imperialist" and "fascist."

Those U.S. groups which subscribe to "Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung Thought" follow the lead of China on this matter, as on others. The "anti-revisionists" have produced two fairly ambitious studies of Soviet society. They are: RED PAPERS 7, "How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle," published by the Revolutionary Union (today the Revolutionary Communist Party), and RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN THE USSR by Martin Nicolaus, which originally ran as a series in the Guardian and has been published in book form by the October League's Liberator Press. Both are recommended, in spite of their faulty premises and conclusions, for the valuable information they contain.

How do these works explain what they call the "restoration of capitalism" in the Soviet Union? The RCP pamphlet states:

Of course, neither one claims it was so simple as that. They both devote considerable space to reviewing the history of the Soviet Union prior to Khrushchev, to show how various theoretical and practical errors weakened the socialist forces and prepared the conditions for capitalist restoration. And both trace the history of the Soviet Union since Khrushchev's rise to show how what they call the "new bourgeoisie" used its positions at the pinnacles of power to transform, step by step, the overall character of the Soviet Union.

All their analysis and research is aimed at proving one basic point: that prior to Khrushchev the working class held power and was pursuing a generally correct course, albeit with shortcomings, even "serious" shortcomings. And then in 1956-57, when the Khrushchev "coup" occurred, power slipped from the hands of the workers into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the full-scale restoration of capitalism began.

Everyone familiar with U.S. life knows that if the bourgeoisie tried to eliminate the health and pension plans, paid vacations, unemployment insurance and other achievements of the mass struggle, the workers would respond with a wave of strikes and social disorders that would rock the country to its foundations. Indeed, within the last few years, as living conditions have declined due to the economic crisis, there has developed a rise in working class militancy, as nationwide strikes have broken out in mining, transportation, auto, electrical manufacturing, public services, and elsewhere.

And this militancy has developed in response to what is, after all, a fairly limited assault on some of the reform gains won during a period of extended economic growth.

Furthermore it has developed, in many cases, in spite of and against a trade union movement dominated by reactionary class-collaborationist leadership, unwilling and unable to wage an effective struggle.

(We have deliberately left out the uprisings of Black people in over a hundred cities in 1967 and '68, which broke out without any national coordinated organization, because the argument could be made that they were in response more to national than to class oppression.)

American workers have shown that they will use whatever means are at hand to resist what they perceive as an attack on their interests.

If this is true of the U.S., how is it possible that the Soviet workers, veterans of three revolutions and two wars, creators of the factory councils and the Soviets, experienced for forty years in exercising power in a modern state, could allow power to slip from their hands without putting up at least equal resistance?

The OL and RCP do cite various examples of strikes and demonstrations on the part of Soviet workers in recent years. In the first place, the examples they cite aren't well documented. In the second place, even if they are all authentic, they are on a tiny scale, especially when one considers the monstrous scale of the assault launched against them, according to the "anti-revisionists."

Where are the general strikes, like in France in 1968? Where are the factory occupations, like in Italy in 1969? Where are the seizures of the radio stations and newspapers, like in Portugal in 1974? Where are the uprisings in the military forces, like in the U.S. during the Vietnam War?

In a modern industrial society like the Soviet Union such things cannot be concealed no matter how tightly controlled the means of propaganda. The reason the "anti-revisionists" cannot cite them is because they haven't occurred.

It will not do to argue that, because capitalist restoration was carried out under the banner of Communism, the workers were unable to recognize the nature and gravity of the threat. That would make the Soviet workers the least class conscious ruling class in history — after forty years of socialism! A class which cannot recognize a fundamental threat to its interests, which cannot even tell when it has been ousted from power, such a class could not have held power for four years, let alone forty!

Nor will it do to argue that, owing to the repression utilized by the new bourgeoisie, the workers did not have in their hands the means to defend themselves. Those means of defense were supposed to have been built up during the previous forty years, when the working class was exercising power in the state, was master of the society.

If the Soviet workers, in 1957, were unable to put up effective resistance to the seizure of power by a new clique of bloodsuckers, that must mean that those workers, prior to 1957, were the most oppressed and downtrodden class of proletarians the world has ever seen, possibly excepting the German workers under the Hitler regime![3]

The position of the OL and the RCP on the "restoration of capitalism" in the USSR is an insult to the working class and to human intelligence.

There are only two opinions on this matter that meet minimum standards of reasonableness: either socialism exists in the Soviet Union, in spite of any backward steps that may have been taken by the revisionists; or socialism was never attained there, and the Khrushchev-Brezhnev policies represent, in the most fundamental sense, not a reversal but a continuation of previous policies.

We shall proceed to an examination of Soviet development following the Revolution, to see which of the two positions best fits the facts.

Throughout 1917, Lenin stressed the importance of state capitalism. In "The Impending Catastrophe," he writes that "state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs." (Vol. 25, p. 359)

All that is necessary to achieve the transition, he writes, is the consistent application of revolutionary democratic measures. He writes:

There are those who think that, to Lenin, democracy was merely one among a number of alternate paths to socialism. Those who think that should ponder the above, together with a number of other articles and pamphlets he wrote during the same period, culminating in his master-work, STATE AND REVOLUTION. These writings make it clear that, to Lenin, democracy was not an adjunct, more or less desirable, to the socialist society, but the very essence of it!

In 1917 the Bolsheviks took power in a relatively bloodless insurrection. By signing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany they were able to extricate Russia from the World War. There began a peaceful interlude. It is during this interlude that Lenin again takes up the matter of state capitalism. In " 'Left-Wing' Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality," he describes the Russian economy as a mixture of five elements: (1) patriarchal farming; (2) small commodity production (including the majority of peasants who sell their grain); (3) private capitalism; (4) state capitalism; (5) socialism. He goes on to say that, "It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism." (Vol. 27, p. 336)

And to underline the fact that his appreciation for the role of state capitalism pre-dated the Bolshevik seizure of power, he quoted from his earlier work, "The Impending Catastrophe."

It must be noted that Lenin, at the time the above was written (spring 1918), expected the socialist revolution to spread quickly to one or more of the advanced countries, in particular Germany. This expectation certainly influenced how he regarded state capitalism, as a stage through which Russia would pass relatively quickly, assisted by other, more advanced, socialist countries.

However, things did not develop as Lenin anticipated. Not only was the revolution delayed in Europe, but Russia itself, after an all-too-brief respite, was embroiled in civil war, with the domestic armies of reaction aided by foreign interventionary forces.

This was the period of "War Communism" — emergency rationing and egalitarianism, and forcible seizures from the peasants of grain and other products necessary to feed and equip the Red Army and the workers in the cities.

In February of 1921, after nearly seven years of almost uninterrupted imperialist war and civil war, the Red Army captured Tiflis; the last of the White Armies had been defeated and driven from Russian soil. What was the situation in the country?

In the countryside, the peasants had responded to the government policy of forcible requisitioning by decreasing the area of land under cultivation, so that by the end of 1920 the amount of sown acreage in European Russia was only three fifths of what it had been in 1913.[4] By 1921 total output had fallen to less than half, and the quantity of livestock to about two thirds of pre-war figures.

Waves of peasant risings swept rural Russia, as hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers returned to find extreme deprivation in their native villages. In February 1921 alone, the Cheka reported 118 separate peasant risings in various parts of the country. In March there occurred the mutiny in the naval base at Kronstadt, which revealed how extremely shaky Bolshevik rule was.

The situation in the cities was, if anything, even worse than in the countryside. By the end of 1920 total industrial output had shrunk to about a fifth of 1913 levels. The total production of coal at the end of 1920 was only a quarter, and of oil only a third, of pre-war levels. The production of copper and cast iron had virtually ceased. Lacking these vital materials, many factories went on part-time. The manufacture of footwear was reduced to a tenth of normal, and only one in twenty textile spindles remained in operation.

The war and the blockade had brought the railroad system to virtual collapse, which held back the delivery of food to the cities. At the beginning of 1921, the workers of Petrograd's metal smelting shops received a daily ration of 800 grams of black bread, while lesser categories received as little as onequarter of that. Even this meager allotment was doled out on an irregular basis.

The food crisis in the cities was complicated by the disintegration of the regular market during the Civil War. By the end of 1920 illicit trade had largely supplanted the official channels of distribution. At the same time, inflation mounted to dizzying heights, the price of bread increasing ten-fold in 1920 alone. By the end of 1920 the real wages of factory workers in Petrograd had fallen to 8.6 per cent of their pre-war levels, according to official estimates.

One result of the collapse was that workers began to join the droves who were abandoning the cities to go into the countryside in search of something to eat. Between October 1917 and August 1920 (when a new census was taken), the population of Petrograd fell by almost two thirds, from almost 2.5 million to about three quarters of a million. During the same period Moscow lost nearly half its inhabitants.

In August of 1920 the 300,000 factory hands in Petrograd three years earlier had been reduced to one third that many, and the overall decrease throughout Russia exceeded fifty per cent. Those who were left derived a considerable portion of their income by directly bartering the products of their labor (and sometimes the tools of it as well) on the open market, on weekend trips to the countryside.

Lenin himself declared that the "industrial proletariat . . . has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat. The proletariat is the class which is engaged in the production of material values in large-scale capitalist industry. Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories are at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared. It has sometimes figured in statistics, but it has not been held together economically." (Vol. 33, pp. 65-6)[5]

Think about that for a moment. After four years of revolution, the class in whose interest the revolution was made "has disappeared." Such was the situation after seven years of war and blockade — an auspicious beginning for socialist construction! What did Lenin propose to do about it?/p>

"Whenever I wrote about the New Economic Policy," said Lenin in 1923,[6] "I always quoted the article on state-capitalism which I wrote in 1928." He was referring to the article, "'Left-Wing' Childishness and Petty-Bourgeois Mentality" quoted here earlier. In his article, "The Tax in Kind," written in 1921 on the introduction of the New Economic Policy, he quoted ten pages of his earlier pamphlet.[7] For Lenin, state capitalism was not simply a passing fancy, but a concept central to his plan for developing socialism.[8]

And what was the New Economic Policy? It was a policy of concessions to native and foreign capital, to encourage the development of large-scale industry in Russia, on which depended the development of socialist society. It was an alliance between the Soviet state and large-scale capitalism, against the petty capitalism which then prevailed. Lenin was willing to make concessions to big capitalism, he was willing to invite back to Russia the French and German exploiters who had been expelled, was willing to sign agreements with them to undertake certain profit-making ventures, on condition that these ventures contribute to the erection of a large-scale industrial base, and to "the restoration of the proletarian class."

Lenin was willing to do this because he was confident that the working class, in possession of the state power, would be able to restrict and control the development of capitalism.

The New Economic Policy was introduced in the early spring of 1921 and one year later, on March 27,1922, in his Political Report of the Central Committee to the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin sounded the first alarm.

He says that the state capitalism which had been discussed in all economic literature is of a different type than that which exists in Russia. In Russia state capitalism exists under a proletarian state, and "not a single book" has been written about this phenomenon, which is "absolutely unprecedented in history."

What is it that is needed, he asks. "We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power; we also have economic resources at our command, but the vanguard . . . lacks sufficient ability for it . . . All that is needed here is ability ..."

"Well, we have lived through a year," he says, "the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted during the past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it." (Vol. 33, p. 278-9)

The problem, he says, is one of leadership: "But if we take Moscow, with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: Who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed." (Vol. 33, p. 288)

Seven months later, he raises his voice again, this time in a speech at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet:

The reader will observe that he is still talking in terms of leadership, but now there is a new problem, "the old machinery," which must be reorganized "along new lines," though this cannot be done "all at once."

The above was written on November 20, 1922. Lenin had but a few months working life left to him. A mere six weeks later, on January 4,1923, he published the first of his sharp attacks on the state apparatus in the Soviet Union, that remarkable series of attacks which occupied the last months of his life and which not even the most dedicated enemy of the Soviet Union could have surpassed in ferocity. In "On Co-Operation," he says that "our machinery of state . . . is utterly useless," that "we took [it] over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it." (Vol. 33, p. 474)

It is difficult to imagine a more damning criticism of the Soviet regime. Then two weeks later, he writes:

To show how seriously he regarded the matter, he proposed, for the consideration of the twelfth Party Congress, to merge the central control commission of the party and the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, which was a non-party body set up by the soviets! It was the last article he wrote before the stroke which permanently incapacitated him.

No soviets worthy of the name, the state apparatus largely a survival of tsarism, etc. — Lenin was here calling into doubt the most basic, and hitherto unquestioned, achievement of the October Revolution: the smashing of the old state apparatus and the building of a new one. And it should be noted that Lenin was not given over to light and irresponsible talk.

Thus, in Lenin's eyes, there was a situation where the country was flat on its back and paralyzed, where the proletariat had virtually ceased to exist as a class, where they were forced to turn to foreign capital to build up the economic base for socialism, where they were able to do this because the proletariat wielded power through a new state apparatus — and where this new state apparatus was in fact non-existent!

What did he propose to do about it? He listed two tasks which, according to him, "constitute the epoch: the first is to reorganize our machinery of state ... Our second task is educational work among the peasants." (Vol. 33, p.474)

That is all. Just two tasks. Were they carried out? We leave that to the reader to decide, limiting ourselves to a few questions:

To what extent was the slogan, "universal arming of the working class" carried out in Russia?

How determinedly did the Soviet leaders, after Lenin's death, pursue the goal of involving everyone in the work of administering the state?

Was the collectivization of agriculture in 1929, and the way it was carried out, what Lenin had in mind when he referred to "educational work among the peasants"?

In "State Capitalism and World Revolution," C. L. R. James recounts the stages in the development of labor relations in Russia. He does it so well that, rather than attempting to paraphrase what he says, we prefer to quote him at some length:

James concludes his analysis of the mode of labor in Russia as follows: "The rulers of Russia perform the same functions as are performed by Ford, General Motors, the coal operators and their huge bureaucratic staffs. Capital is not Henry Ford; he can die and leave his whole empire to an institution; the plant, the scientific apparatus, the method, the personnel organization and supervision, the social system which sets these up in opposition to the direct producer will remain."

James is right. As soon as one's head is cleared of the notion that state property equals socialism, one can see that Russia managed to attain, through a violent upheaval, that stage in social development toward which the U.S. has been moving for several decades, the stage predicted by Engels nearly a century ago, wherein the state becomes "the ideal personification of the total national capital" and "the workers remain wage workers — proletarians."

Stalin's great historic contribution was to lead the way in the transformation of Russia from a backward, feudal country into a modern industrial state. He did it by relying on barbarous methods, and at the cost of stamping out, with a thoroughness never before seen, the strivings of the working class to put forward its independent interests as a class.

Stalin proved that it was possible, by enticing and dragging people off the farms, standing them in front of a machine and enforcing production quotas by a system of punishment and reward, to develop modern industry in a backward country. But such methods will not suffice to operate the industry so developed.

The problem his successors have faced, and which has plagued them continuously for two decades, is — how to get the workers to operate the highspeed precision lathes, electronic controls and the rest of the equipment typical of modern industry, while still maintaining those workers in a subordinate position. It is this problem, and nothing else but this, which is responsible for the agricultural shortages, shoddy goods and insufficient replacement parts for which the Soviet Union is notorious.

The problem of productivity in modern industry is the problem of the worker. It can be solved in only one way — by making the worker the master of the production process. The rulers of the Soviet Union will no more be able to resolve the crisis in production than will their U.S. counterparts, with their "work psychology" studies, "job enrichment" schemes, and all the rest.

In Russia, as in the United States, the workers will take power in the process of production — or the society will perish, in the words of C. L. R. James, "blown up by the antagonisms that can no longer be hidden."

Did it have to turn out that way? Was there no path to modernization other than the one actually followed?

It is not possible to answer with any certainty. It is true that the Russian proletariat was extremely small, fragmented and exhausted, and that any attempt to institute the kind of changes Lenin advocated would have entailed the risk of total collapse, leading to the dismemberment of Russia and a protracted dark age. That is a consideration, although it is not the only one. Any political choice must be made with the fullest possible awareness of the risks involved.

It is the opinion of this writer, arrived at with the aid of hindsight, that the net effect on the world revolutionary movement would have been better had the Soviet leaders taken steps to broaden the base of participation in state affairs.

Instead, they chose another course, to rely increasingly on the Party to perform the administrative tasks of the new state. As time went on, the administrative function of the Party came to occupy the most important place in its work, to the neglect, and finally to the denial, of all other tasks.

Such a development did not take place without its accompanying theoretical justification. The theory of the party as the repository of all knowledge, whose task was to mobilize the population to carry out its directives, is historically associated with the name of Stalin, although it was not the product of his thought alone.

As must inevitably result from the application of the theory of the party as "general staff," there developed a corps of administrators who, like bureaucrats everywhere, believe that they understand the needs of the people better than the people themselves, and who are convinced that if the "masses" do not follow them, it is because the "masses" are backward. This view was satirized by Bertolt Brecht in a poem called "The Solution," which he wrote following the 1953 uprising in East Berlin against the Soviet-imposed regime:

How much of the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet Union is rooted in Lenin's theory of the party? In the opinion of this writer, the answer is — none, even though those who led the way in the process of degeneration claimed to base their actions on his teachings.

Lenin's view of the nature and function of the party contained two aspects. One was the well-known conception, put forward in WHAT IS TO BE DONE, of the party of professional revolutionaries, individuals lifted out from the life of the ordinary citizens and "specially trained" in politics, organization, agitation and technical skills. The other aspect, not so well known, is his conception of the party as a group of people united around a common project — to develop within the proletariat the capacity to rule, to bring the class alive, in a historical sense.

It is this latter aspect of Lenin's thought which has been neglected, partly because it suited the interests of those who came after him to have it neglected. The fact that it was present, however, can be seen in a number of ideas he advanced at various times: his insistence, during the 1905-7 upsurge, that the party boldly recruit active workers without much training,[11] exactly the opposite of what he advocated a few years earlier in quiet times; his insistence on free and open debate within the party on all questions of program, and his further insistence — this point has been deliberately suppressed by all those who prefer caricatures of Lenin to the real thing — that this debate be carried on, as much as possible, in full view of the workers outside of the party [12]; his writing of a major theoretical work on the dictatorship of the proletariat, STATE AND REVOLUTION, which does not even mention the vanguard party; his insistence, in 1921, when he reluctantly agreed to the banning of factions within the party, that he regarded it only as a temporary provision during a period of extreme emergency.[13] The proof that Lenin's conception of the party was at significant variance from Stalin's was the fact that the latter, in order to carry out his program, found it necessary to physically eliminate literally the majority of prominent party members from Lenin's time and to rewrite the history of the Bolshevik Party to erase from it Lenin's ideal of the open, critical organization.[14]

How much of a leap is it from a well-intentioned body of administrators to a clique of parasites which lives by exploiting those whom they formerly served? The labor union bureaucracy of every modern country is composed primarily of individuals who began their careers as more-or-less conscientious people desiring to represent the workers. When conditions are right, it is quite possible for representatives of the workers to be transformed into the most relentless opponents of workers' power.

Virtually all observers report the existence in the Soviet Union of a stratum of people which enjoys considerable material privileges in relation to the population in general, and which wields a disproportionate amount of authority in the making of policy. The question at issue is: can this stratum be properly said to constitute a class in the sense in which Marxists use the term?

Several arguments have been advanced on the negative side. The most important of these are (1) that membership in the privileged stratum is not hereditary, or is so only to a minor degree; and (2) that members of the privileged stratum cannot be shown to have any individual proprietary relation to the means of production.

Both of these arguments are countered by the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, who on various occasions used the term "class" to refer to social formations that do not meet the above criteria. Engels spoke of "the emergence of a special class of administrative government officials that have the main power in their hands and that stand in opposition to all other classes."[15] In examining conditions in Germany in 1847 he observed: "The present situation in Germany is nothing but a compromise between the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie; it results in putting the administration in the hands of a third class: the bureaucracy."

Perhaps the most telling historic parallel to the modern Soviet ruling group is the Church in medieval times. "The fact that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages formed its hierarchy out of the best brains in the land, regardless of their estate, birth, or fortune," wrote Marx, "was one of the main means of strengthening priestly rule and holding down the laity. The more a ruling class is able to co-opt the best minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule."

As Gandy points out, "Marx was aware that a ruling class could collectively own the means of production: that is how the Church hierarchy ruled. And he observed that this priestly ruling class recruited many of its members from the working class (just as the Soviet bureaucracy does today)."

Even if it is granted that, because of their material privileges, monopoly of power and distinct interests, the Soviet bureaucracy constitutes a ruling class, the question still remains: what kind of a ruling class?

In order for capitalism to exist, two conditions are ordinarily considered necessary: first, the working population must be effectively separated from the means of production and compelled to sell its labor power in order to survive. There is little doubt that this condition exists in the Soviet Union, perhaps more thoroughly even than in the United States.

Second, there must exist some force which compels the exploiters to accumulate capital, to revolutionize the process of production and to increase the organic composition of capital. Ordinarily under capitalism, this force is provided by the competition among individual capitalists and blocs of capital. Each entrepreneur is compelled, "on pain of death," to continually introduce the most modem and efficient methods of production, replacing workers by ever-more-costly machinery in order to be able to produce at a rate at least equal to that of the others. It is this competition among different capitals which is responsible for the discarding of perfectly adequate equipment simply because it is not the most advanced existing, for the tendency for the rate of profit to decline (since profits are made only from workers, not from machines), and for the recurring crises of overproduction typical of capitalism.

In the Soviet Union today, there are no competing blocs of capital. As one commentator [16] points out, industry within the Soviet Union is organized as if it were a single factory, "USSR, Inc.," albeit less efficiently. That is, there is a division of labor, there is provision for the flow of raw materials from one "department" to another, there is a hierarchy of production and supervision — but there is no compelling force, inside the Soviet Union itself, forcing the bureaucracy to accumulate capital.

Where is the force compelling the Soviet bureaucrats to accumulate capital, and thus rendering the Soviet Union subject to the laws of capitalism? The British International Socialists, who hold the view that the Soviet Union is state capitalist, answer as follows:

Binns, who bases his argument in large part on Cliff's book (previously referred to), goes on to cite figures showing that the Soviet Union has, over the years, spent an increasing proportion of its total production on armaments, and that this relentless drive to accumulate arms, vital to the bureaucracy preserving its power in the face of threats and competition from western imperialism, has created an internal dynamic of capital accumulation basically identical to that which exists in the West.

Elsewhere, Binns and another writer from the British IS [17] quote Stalin himself to show the innate drive to accumulate which motivates the Soviet bureaucracy. "No, comrades," says Stalin in 1931. ". . . The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and possibilities . . . To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind; and those who fall behind are beaten." (J. Stalin, WORKS, Volume 13, page 40.)

"Why can and should and necessarily will socialism conquer the capitalist system of economy?" the writers quote Stalin as asking in 1935. "Because it can give a higher productivity of labor."

Binns and Hallas remark, "There may be room for argument about the mechanisms whereby the Russian bureaucracy is locked in competition with its bourgeois (and bureaucratic) rivals. Only those who live in cloud-cuckoo land can doubt the fact that it is constrained, driven, to maximize accumulation."

At this point I would like to set aside the third-person form that I have used up to now and enter into a more personal conversation with the reader.

I do not doubt the accuracy of the figures that show the Soviet Union devoting an increasing portion of its total production to arms accumulation, with the result being the reproduction there of many features typical of western capitalist societies. Nor do I doubt that the Soviet leaders themselves feel a drive to accumulate. I do not doubt that living labor in the Soviet Union is subject to the same kind of domination by dead labor (accumulated capital) that it is in the U.S.

What I do not see is the existence of any objective, intrinsic, overpowering compulsion to accumulate, with roots in the nature of Soviet society comparable to those which exist in the West.

In what sense is the Soviet bureaucracy compelled to engage in strategic arms competition with the western imperialist powers? In his 1931 remarks cited above, Stalin went on to say, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we shall go under." (Volume 13, page 41) Stalin showed remarkable foresight; it was ten years, almost to the day, from the above remarks to the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941. There is little doubt that, but for the military and industrial might of the Soviet Union, the forces of German imperialism would have conquered the country, ushering in a period of something other than Communist Party rule. In the same sense, U.S. imperialism in the post-war period has been a very real threat to the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. Arms accumulation has certainly been required to stave off that threat.

But the point is — how much arms accumulation? From purely military considerations, the Soviet Union is now, and has been for some time, in possession of far more arms than what is necessary to prevent U.S. invasion and conquest. After all, it is hardly necessary to possess the capability to destroy the U.S. seventy times over; once will do.

Cliff states, "The privileges of the Russian bureaucracy, as those of the bourgeoisie, are conditioned by the unceasing advance of accumulation." (Cliff, op. cit., p. 239)

But he merely asserts this; he does not prove it; nor do any of the other IS writers who accept his view.

In my opinion, Cliff's assertion is true, but in a somewhat different sense than he means it. It is true mainly in the political sense: that is, the prestige and authority of the Soviet bureaucracy depend on transforming the Soviet Union into a modern, prosperous state through accumulation of an increasing quantity of use values, which requires heavy investments in the means of production with the promise of larger amounts of the means of consumption some time in the future. The Soviet bureaucracy has declared that "socialism" is superior to capitalism because it can provide more cars, televisions, household appliances and a general "higher standard of living." On this basis the Soviet bureaucracy will be judged by its own subjects, and by others in the world, at least in part. To the extent to which they have pinned their hopes for success on the ability to achieve this "prosperity," to that extent the Soviet bureaucrats are "compelled" to accumulate. But that is not a compulsion in the traditional sense in which Marx used the term, or in the sense in which Cliff uses it.

For a number of years, western observers have speculated on divisions within the Soviet ruling elite. The "battle" has supposedly been between the "moderates," who wished to "surpass" the West in "standard of living," and the "hard-liners," who preferred to rely on the traditional military means to achieve the "spread of communism."

In spite of the stupidity of the various western observers, they have latched onto something real. There are two alternative paths, each with its own set of demands, and the contradictions between the two courses are also real. At one time or another, the advocates of one or the other position wield greater influence, and Soviet policy shifts accordingly.

The repeated calls of the Soviet government for disarmament, against U.S. objections, are at least partly motivated by the desire to free productive capacity for use in the manufacture of consumer goods. But even if those calls are pure demagogy, or even if the policy changes to one of total reliance on accumulating an ever-growing pile of the means of production of the means of destruction, the point is that such questions still lie within the realm of conscious decision rather than immutable law.

No one has yet demonstrated, to my satisfaction, the existence of any basic, internal features in Soviet society which would prevent its rulers, if they so desired, from ending the arms accumulation and improving the living standards of the Soviet people.

Until someone can offer some explanation of Soviet behavior that roots accumulation of capital in objective law, irrespective of the wishes of men, I shall have to continue to live in "cloud-cuckoo land."

I wrote earlier that two conditions, one of which is the drive to accumulate, are "ordinarily considered necessary" for capitalism to exist. In the past, however, certain societies lacking in one of these conditions have nevertheless been regarded by Marxists as capitalist, although not "ordinary" capitalist.

Specifically, what comes to mind is the pre-Civil War American South, which Marx repeatedly referred to as capitalist.[18] In certain important respects, that society offers useful insights into the Soviet Union today. Just as in the case of the Soviets today, the drive to accumulate was not economic in the sense that Marx had traditionally considered it, but political: in the case of the South, the need to maintain parity with the North in political influence and, more generally, the need to provide some opportunity for advancement to the poor whites, whose discontent threatened the slaveholders' rule. Both of these considerations led the slaveholders to a policy of expansion, and led ultimately to a Civil War, certainly an indication that policy motivations do not necessarily have to be weak ones.

In spite of its deviation from the general laws of capitalism, Marx considered the slave South to be capitalist, partly because of its role in the world system of capitalism. In my opinion, the same consideration should govern our characterization of the Soviet Union; while it does not exhibit all the features traditionally associated with capitalism, it should still be regarded as a type of state capitalism, partly because of the epoch in world history in which it makes its appearance.

The main point is not whether one chooses to apply the term "capitalism" to Soviet society. The point is to be aware of both the similarities and the differences between the Soviet Union and the western capitalist states, in order to be able to properly analyze both.

One additional point should be made: up to now, the absence of any fundamental drive to accumulate has been predicated on the isolation of the Soviet Union from the world market owing to the state monopoly on foreign trade. As this isolation breaks down, which it shows signs of doing (the construction of a new Fiat plant, the manufacture and sale of Pepsicola), it is to be expected that Soviet society will begin to display more of the blessings of western capitalism — inflation, unemployment, the economic cycle, etc. Indeed, these have already made their appearance in Eastern Europe, where the process of breaking down the trade walls is more advanced than in the Soviet Union itself.

Soviet exploitation of foreign countries takes place in at least three ways: First of these is direct looting; thus, at the end of World War II, the Red Army, in the name of "reparations," carried whole industrial plants back to the Soviet Union from Germany, Hungary, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and from Mongolia (author's erratum: should read Manchuria).

The second means is direct ownership of industry in foreign countries: the best-known example of this is Soviet ownership, in partnership with Indian interests, of the Indian steel industry, which can hardly be said to have improved the conditions of the Indian proletarians. This type of relationship is also common throughout Eastern Europe, where the local governments have been forced to grant part ownership of important industries to the Soviet government.

The third means is unequal trade agreements, whereby the recipients of Soviet "aid" are forced to sell their products to the Soviet government at below world market prices, and buy in return inferior Soviet goods at above world market prices. This last has been a particular grievance among some of the African countries.

All of the above means of exploitation have been documented adequately [19] so that there is no need to go into detail here. Taken singly or together they represent behavior which is typical of western imperialism. But do they indicate that the Soviet Union has literally reached that stage of social development which Lenin characterized as Imperialism, which is what the proponents of the "social imperialism" thesis charge?

The weakness in the argument is the same as in the one put forward by Cliff and the other IS advocates of the state capitalism thesis: namely, where is the compelling drive for the Soviet rulers to export capital, extract superprofits, etc.? It is not enough that they do these things; in order to meet Lenin's definition of imperialism it is required that they be compelled to do them, in spite of themselves. And no one has yet demonstrated the existence of any objective, inherent force capable of compelling them to imperialistic behavior.[20]

The differences between the Soviet Union and the western capitalist powers become especially important in analyzing world politics, for it is an undeniable fact that Soviet policy is to a major extent aimed at weakening the system of private property capitalism, and that in the course of doing this the Soviet leaders find themselves often allied with the progressive forces in those countries suffering under western imperialist rule.

It is not unheard of for an imperialist power to give aid to forces struggling against one of its rivals, and genuine revolutionaries are always quick to take advantage of such possibilities. The anti-colonialist movements in a number of Asian and African countries were able to make good use of certain kinds of Japanese assistance in their struggle against British and French imperialism in the period of the second World War.

However, the kind of aid some of the nationalist leaders were able to get from Japanese (or German) imperialism was on a totally different scale from what is taking place today, where the Soviet Union, after a period of eclipse, has become the main armorer of the national liberation movements against western imperialism.

In the first place, the occasional and sporadic assistance which the Japanese imperialists extended to certain anti-colonialists was never accompanied by any serious attempt to put forward any ideological alternative to imperialism, whereas the Soviet leaders distribute, along with the hardware, the teachings of Marx and Lenin (selectively, it is true) and present themselves as the continuators of the tradition of the Paris Commune and the October Revolution.

Secondly, because of the above, direct use of military force constitutes a minor part of Soviet tactics. This means that the Soviet leaders rely, to a larger extent than any previous world power, on the good will of indigenous people, in most cases representing the oppressed and struggling masses. This plays an important role in determining Soviet conduct. For example, for years the Soviet Union has been supplying Egypt with weapons and various kinds of aid, and many observers regarded that country as a Soviet satellite. Yet recently, when the Egyptian government requested the complete withdrawal of Soviet bases and military personnel, they were pulled out within seventy-two hours — surely unusual behavior for an imperialist superpower.

Such considerations mean that, for the oppressed peoples struggling for liberation, the differences between the Soviet Union and the Western powers are more important than the similarities. Never before have the colonial and dependent peoples enjoyed the support — even vacillating and conditional — from a major power that they receive today from the Soviet Union. This is a tremendous aid to the movements for national freedom. From the standpoint of the colonial peoples, if any criticism is to be leveled at the Soviet Union, it is more likely to be that it is too hesitant in coming to the aid of others rather than that it is too active in imposing its will on them.

For those who live under the heel of the Soviet Union, or face the threat of its might, the situation is different. Thus, for instance, the Poles, or the Hungarians, or the Rumanians would be quite justified in reminding all the anti-imperialists in the world who regard the Soviet Union favorably that they, too, have histories of revolutionary struggle and aspirations for national freedom, and that the Soviet Union is, to them, an occupying colonial power.

Even in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet rulers have, in the last three decades, directly intervened militarily four times — Poland and Germany, 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 — to suppress popular rebellions, the principal motivation has been broadly political more than immediately economic. It must not be forgotten that in each of these cases the Soviet rulers justified their actions by citing the need to defend the "socialist camp." The fact that the Soviet Union comes forward not as just another imperialist power with certain sectarian interests, but as the bastion of world revolution, means that, in a certain sense, it is more dangerous to the peoples of the world than the old imperialisms. But it also means that it cannot be equated with them.

Every social class tries to reshape the world according to its own vision. The global vision of the Soviet rulers is a world in which all wealth belongs to the state, and in which the elite of the Communist Party functions as the active, conscious ruling group over the masses of docile proletarians toiling happily away at achieving a "higher standard of living." It is the world of proletcult and Newspeak, a world based on such a total crushing of the human personality that when a writer projects in a work of fiction the image of the society as it would look were it to be fully realized, our minds recoil in horror. This is the vision that motivates the Soviet rulers, and it is precisely the fact that they are motivated by such a vision, and not by the need to engage in small-scale land grabbing, that makes them and what they represent the most dangerous, repeat, the most dangerous enemy that the working class movement has even known.

The system which prevails in the U.S.S.R., if it is to be fought, must be understood. And it can only be understood through a framework which places as much stress on the differences as on the similarities between the Soviet Union and the western imperialist powers. The "social imperialism" thesis fails to do this, and that is why it is a hindrance rather than an aid.

Between 1925 and 1927 the Chinese proletariat made its first attempt to independently intervene on the political scene. Its efforts were suppressed in a wave of white terror which is estimated to have cost five million lives.

Mao Tse-tung and some of the other Communist leaders responded to the repression in the cities by withdrawing, with the armed forces under their command, into the rural areas. From their base in the countryside they were able to rally the peasants around them. Following the epic of the Long March, perhaps the greatest military feat in human history, they placed themselves at the head of the national liberation movement against Japanese imperialism, overthrew the Chiang Kai-shek regime and, on October 1,1949, formally proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

One quarter of humanity had been torn out of the grip of imperialism. The Chinese proletariat played virtually no role in these earth-shaking events.

Over the next decade and a half the new regime in China carried out changes which, considering the scale of the operation, surpassed even the experience of Russia.

By 1965, a situation had developed in which important areas of public life were under the domination of a conservative-minded bureaucracy, similar to that which had arisen in Russia. The chairman of the government, the general secretary of the party, the mayor of the capital city, the editorial staff of the most important daily newspaper, a number of officers in the People's Liberation Army and many provincial governors were found to be "persons in positions of authority who have taken the capitalist road."

Mao and those close to him in the party leadership responded by launching what came to be known as "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," which they characterized as a revolution of a new type, a revolution under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Cultural Revolution was a tremendous mass movement directed against old methods of thought and work which had either not been eliminated or had sunk fresh roots. It depended to a considerable extent on popular initiative. In the course of the movement, millions of people were drawn into active political life, numerous conservative officials were dragged out and exposed and great changes were made in the way things were done. An editorial published in "People's Daily" and "Red Flag" on New Year's Day, 1967, declared, "The emergence of the great proletarian cultural revolution in China in 1966 is the greatest event in this sixth decade [21] of the twentieth century."

They were perhaps not wrong. But was it a revolution? A revolution, as is well known, is an act (of violence, according to Mao) in which one class overthrows another. It involves the smashing of the old state apparatus and the building of a new one.

In the Cultural Revolution, which class was overthrown, and which class did the overthrowing? And to what extent was the state apparatus smashed, and to what extent was it merely reformed?

There are question of estimate here for which "Mao Tse-tung Thought" provides no adequate explanation. Let us see if we can answer some of them by applying what has been said so far about the relation between the party regime and state capitalism.

When Mao Tse-tung and his army of peasants commanded by revolutionary intellectuals arrived in Peking in 1949, it became the basis of the new state apparatus which was created. The state reproduced the relations within the army, namely, that the revolutionary intellectuals occupied the pinnacles of power and important positions of responsibility.

After fifteen years a relatively high degree of stability had been achieved; the Party had managed to withstand various difficulties and its control was assured. At that time, perhaps spurred by the experience of the Soviet Union, Mao began to turn his attention to some of the same questions which concerned Lenin in the last year of his life. In reviewing the situation in China, he noted the growth of a stratum of administrators, increasingly isolated from the people and increasingly conservative in its outlook. In order to counteract its influence, he launched a mass movement, based largely outside of the party, directed against the conservative stratum. It was something unprecedented in the history of the "socialist countries" and the Communist Parties.

Well and good. The attempt to open up the administration of public affairs to popular pressure is an admirable goal, but it does not, of itself, constitute a revolution. There still remain a number of nagging questions about the nature of the changes brought about by the Cultural Revolution.

The practice of assigning all leading cadres to spend a certain portion of each year doing manual labor obviously tends to make them more responsive to the needs of the populace, but what is the significance of having the managers work, so long as the workers do not manage?

It is a welcome reform to have the army live and work among the population, but is that the same as arming the people?

It is refreshing to hear the Chinese leaders refer to the need for a critical spirit within the Party, but how do they square that with their high regard (at least in their public statements) for Stalin,[22] or the way they handled the Lin Piao affair?[23]

The evidence indicates that, while parts of the Chinese leadership seem to be more concerned than others to prevent the solid entrenchment of a conservative ruling group, and that the struggle between the opposing groups is a real one, no significant faction in the official leadership of the country is willing to place total reliance on the free, self-conscious, selfmobilizing proletariat. An analogy which may be useful is that with the new and old leadership in the United Mine Workers Union in this country: the new Miller regime is obviously more interested than the old Boyle gang in opening up the union to the influence of the membership, and in establishing means whereby active rank-and-file workers can take part in union affairs; but when it comes to suppressing wildcat strikes in the coal fields, the two factions are united like one man.

There are signs that the proletariat did, during the Cultural Revolution, attempt to make itself felt as a force independent of both the "moderates" and the "extremists." In Shanghai, the city with the largest working class population and richest tradition of struggle, organizations of workers rose up with as many as a half million members, whose aim was to carry the Cultural Revolution through to the end and impose their own direct rule on Chinese society. These organizations were used by the cultural revolution group in the Chinese leadership to break the hold of the Liu Shai-chi faction, and were then suppressed in their turn.[24]

As this is being written, word has just arrived that four prominent figures— including the well-known Chiang Ching and Yao Wen-yuan, who wrote, with Mao's encouragement, the original attack on the rightists that launched the Cultural Revolution — have been declared members of an "anti-party group" and removed from all positions of responsibility. The U.S. press has accurately observed that, after a number of twists and turns, the right is again ascendant in China. It should not be forgotten that these four "leftists," back in 1967 in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, took part in crushing what they termed the "ultra-left," and thus prepared the way for their own eventual defeat. Such episodes are not unknown in previous revolutions.[25]

It may be that K'ang Sheng, Chen Po-ta, Chiang Ching and the other leftists who took part in the suppression of the "ultra-left" and have now been defeated themselves believed that the Chinese proletariat was simply not large and mature enough to exercise power; in that case, Engels' remarks express perfectly the dilemma they felt themselves in. Perhaps they believed themselves to be following the only course open to them under the circumstances, namely that of attempting to maintain a fluid situation pending the day when the proletariat attains sufficient strength to rule directly. Such considerations cannot be easily dismissed, especially by us who live in a country where the working class constitutes a majority of the population, and where illiteracy, child marriage and ancestor worship did not prevail up to a few years ago. But this can only be speculation. To the best of our knowledge, no Chinese leader — not the most leftist, not Mao Tse-tung himself — has ever discussed openly the questions raised by Engels.

It should be clear from what has been written that this writer sees a great difference between the Soviet Union and China, and between the policies of their respective Communist Parties. The fact that a major section of the Chinese leadership, at least up 'til now, has seen the need to encourage an atmosphere of continuous turbulence, has had a significant positive influence on the world revolutionary movement, and will have an even greater one in the future. The point, for friends of China, is not to line up behind Liu, or Lin, or Chou, or Teng, or Hua, or whoever is in power when this is read; the point is to ponder seriously the implications of what Mao himself wrote in 1957, in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People":

Chinese foreign policy, which has caused so much distress among those around the world who once looked to China for leadership in the antiimperialist struggle, is a reflection of the relation of class forces within the country. It is paradoxical that China's stance on foreign affairs, prior to the Cultural Revolution, was more revolutionary and internationalist than subsequent to it, and that the impact of the Cultural Revolution on foreign affairs has been to push China toward a policy of "building bridges" with the U.S. The reason for this is that the ending of the Cultural Revolution (and, in part, its launching) marked the emergence, in China, of a stratum of rulers able to exist independently of the Soviet Union and who are no longer willing to subordinate the national interests of China to the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy.

When the Chinese leaders refer to Brezhnev et al. as the "new Hitlers," they are not just talking loosely. They are expressing the idea that the Soviet Union, while perhaps not yet the biggest exploiter and oppressor in the world, is the most ambitious and, to China, the most dangerous. For that reason the Chinese policy of opposing "both superpowers" means, in practice, devoting most of its efforts toward forging something like a worldwide collective security against Soviet expansionism. For some time, opposition to the Soviet Union has been the central aspect of Chinese foreign policy, overshadowing all other considerations. That is why the Chinese government, in Angola, failed to identify itself with the most anti-imperialist forces, because these forces were not anti-Soviet, why Chinese representatives at the United Nations have abstained when the question of Puerto Rican independence has come up, because the leadership of the largest pro-independence party is not anti-Soviet, have withheld recognition from the new government of Portugal while rushing to extend it, before the blood has dried, to the fascist junta in Chile, and a host of similar actions.

To find a parallel to China's present foreign policy, it is necessary to go back to the 1930's and Stalin's policy regarding Nazi Germany. After the rise of Hitler, the Soviet leaders came to the conclusion that German imperialism, while not the largest imperialism, represented, because of its voracious appetite, the most significant threat to Soviet security. They therefore set about building a series of international alliances to protect themselves from the threat. In this they were not wrong.

However, in order to establish these alliances, in the first place with Britain and France, the Soviet Union was required to give up something in return. That "something" was its support to the anti-colonialist movements in the British and French dependencies. One after the other, liberation movements in Algeria, Indo-China and elsewhere found that the Communists, once the most militant champions of the anti-imperialist struggle, had become, under Soviet instructions, more concerned with the danger of "war and fascism" emanating from Nazi Germany and its allies. It was this act by the Communist International, under Soviet hegemony, of demobilizing the struggles against the "western democracies" (and pulling the teeth of the class struggles in the metropolitan countries as well) that brought about the loss of leadership in the independence movements to various right-wing nationalists in every one of the British, French and Dutch dependencies. Only in those countries directly invaded by Japan did the Communists remain anti-imperialist and thus able to spearhead the movement for national liberation.

Stalin's policy didn't work. It did not succeed in staving off an attack by Germany, and it did manage to weaken some of the support the Soviet Union might have otherwise enjoyed.[26] Such must always be the outcome of any policy which gives greater weight to tactical alliances (one or another group of rival imperialists) than to strategic ones (the toiling masses of the world).

Stalin's policy coincided with the rise of a new bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union. The conservatism and lack of faith in the mass movements which characterized Soviet foreign policy were a reflection of the needs of a privileged class in the Soviet Union, which had elevated contempt for the masses to the level of official policy.

We believe that the same factors are at work in China. Governments do not "make mistakes." Policies, especially those which are relatively consistent on a world scale, represent the interests of distinct classes. And it seems clear that the policy of the Chinese government, of relying for its security on some kind of an "understanding" with U.S. imperialism rather than on the revolutionary people of the world, represents not those forces that wished to carry the Cultural Revolution through to the end, but those who halted it partway.

When, in the early days following the October Revolution, it appeared as if the Bolshevik government might not be able to survive the combined counter-revolutionary onslaught and might have to go underground, Lenin stressed that the revolution had already been a success, in that it had set an example for the oppressed of the world, and that this example was indelible. That was the meaning of proletarian internationalism. There has been nothing like it since. When in the future a new government is born that takes the slogan "Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World, Unite!" out of the textbooks and makes it the guiding principle of policy, then workers and all the wretched of the earth will turn their heads toward that government and say ... there is the dictatorship of the proletariat!

Since the end of the second World War, the people of Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, and a number of small countries in the Third World have carried out successful military struggles against western imperialism. Following these struggles, which have astonished and inspired the whole world, these countries have embarked on the arduous task of lifting themselves out of the backwardness imposed on them by colonialism and foreign domination.

In assessing the course of the revolution in these countries, one cannot repeat too often Lenin's words, applied to Russia, that state capitalism represents a great advance over the system that prevailed there previously. To recall Lenin's words does not in the slightest degree detract from the profoundly progressive impact which the revolutions of national liberation have had on the world revolutionary movement. Still, the question must be asked: in the smaller countries which have broken away from western imperialism, does the working class, "disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself," play the dominant role in organizing a new society in its own image?

The evidence indicates that, in every one of the newly liberated countries, the answer is — no, the working class does not play such a role. How then to characterize the regimes which exist there?

This writer believes that they must be regarded as transitional regimes. Transitional to what? It is not yet possible to say. In all of the newly liberated countries, there are signs of a developing bureaucracy based on state-owned enterprises, such as exists in Russia, along with signs of a genuine concern on the part of the leadership to develop the "extremely intricate and subtle system of new organizational relationships" which are the hallmark of a socialist society.

The leading group in every one of the new countries, without exception, is composed of the schoolteachers, lawyers, doctors, government functionaries and other revolutionary intellectuals who headed the mass movements that drove out the imperialists. This is true whether the leading group is drawn from the ranks of the traditional Communist Party, as in north Korea, or from the new movements of liberation, as in Angola. At the same time, the fact that the new regimes in the liberated countries, especially Vietnam, came to power after a protracted struggle involving a great mobilization of the initiatives of millions of people, has charted a course of development for them which represents a major departure from the course followed by the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin. That is why one can observe so many contradictions in the theory and practice of the smaller countries which have recently won their liberation.

Let us look at the case of Cuba, the country most familiar to Americans and the one perhaps most beset with contradictions. The achievements of the Cuban Revolution are familiar to U.S. leftists and do not require listing here. Cuba's posture of support for various oppressed peoples struggling against U.S. imperialism is also well known and widely admired in this country.

But the point is — not a single one of Cuba's accomplishments since the overthrow of Batista in 1959, nor all of them taken together, necessarily imply that the proletariat is exercising power there. Nor can the "exposure" of various policies of the Cuban government — such as its continued dependence on one crop or its support for Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, which the Maoists are fond of citing — be used to disprove the existence of socialism there.

The only positive way to determine which class is wielding power in a country is to examine the decision-making process there, especially as it affects the relations of production.

In this context, two items assume great significance: the role of dark-skinned Cubans in the wielding of authority, and the measures taken to regulate the labor process.

A rough draft of this paper, circulated privately, made reference to "the near-total absence of dark-skinned Cubans — the bulk of the working class — from authoritative positions." The criticism was soon forthcoming that, while it is admitted that dark Cubans do not play a role in government and the Party proportionate to their numbers, the Party is taking steps to draw more of them into leading positions, to develop them politically and promote them to positions of greater responsibility and authority.

That argument is entirely beside the point. The outstanding feature of Cuban life is that Afro-Cubans historically formed the heart of the laboring population, in the sugar fields, in the mills, on the docks and in the other areas of activity on which the Cuban economy was based, and continue to do so today.

The cause of this phenomenon can be found in the historic development of Cuba as a sugar island, a history which it shares with the other West Indian nations. In an essay entitled "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro" which he published in 1963 as an appendix to his 1938 book, THE BLACK JACOBINS, C. L. R. James describes the process as follows:

James remarks later on in the same essay that, "Cuba is the most West Indian island in the West Indies."[28]

The point is that, for Cuba, the scarcity of blacks in leading positions cannot be ascribed to a "cultural lag" to be overcome through education, etc., as was the case with some of the nationalities in Russia, who were at a genuinely primitive level of culture. The Afro-Cubans were, prior to the Revolution, the most proletarianized sector of the population, the sector most familiar with the technology and organizational principles of modern industry, the sector most "disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself." To the degree to which they are denied predominance in Cuban society — to that degree is the proletariat kept out of power.

The fact that the leading force in Cuba at present is something other than the free, conscious and self-mobilizing proletariat is reflected in the perpetual crisis of productivity with which the revolutionary government has been plagued. The problem can be revealed with a few figures: total agricultural output from 1961 (when "socialist" planning commenced) to 1969 declined 23%. Per capita food production in 1969 was 28% lower than it was ten years earlier. Total agricultural production per person also declined 28% during the same period.[29]

Fidel Castro has claimed that Cuba did not have "work habits" because of the lack of a developed industry, that Cubans hold cultural values from the Spanish colonial period which are antithetical to manual labor.[30]

In 1962, the government introduced "socialist emulation," in the words of Che Guevara, a "weapon by which production is increased and the consciousness of the masses improved."[31] This was a system by which workers were urged to compete with each other and with other work centers in order to produce more, while material rewards were mixed with public recognition. After two years, one government official admitted that, "Very few workers truly participate in the emulation campaign . . . To the emulation assemblies go only 20 percent of the workers . . . Sometimes it is reported that 92 percent of the workers are taking part in emulation, but the truth is quite the opposite. Fraternal competition has not taken root in the masses."[32]

By mid-1962 absenteeism reached alarming proportions, as the old repressive measures no longer functioned, and as purchasing power outstripped the supply of goods. Coercive measures were introduced, including a scheme of graduated punishments, ranging from salary reductions to job transfers.[33] The results were not adequate, and in 1964 the government introduced a system of norms and quotas, on which salaries were to depend.

On August 29, 1966 Castro discussed the causes behind the decline of productivity. He attributed it to the fact that the means by which capitalism guaranteed a work force — the whip of hunger — no longer existed and had not yet been replaced by a new force, revolutionary consciousness. On May 7, 1968 "Granma," the official organ of the Communist Party, observed that labor discipline "had failed to emerge spontaneously" and called for the application of "moral and social sanctions."

In 1968 the policy of militarization of labor was introduced in the agricultural sector. Military personnel were placed at every important administrative and managerial position throughout the island. A large percentage of the labor force was organized as military units.[34]

A year later it was clear that the efforts to raise productivity were disappointing. Thus the government decreed, on August 29, 1969, Law Number 225, which made it mandatory for all workers to have a work card in which their productivity, background, political views and employment history are recorded. The card is necessary to obtain a job or receive a salary. Moreover, changing jobs without the permission of a regional office of the Labor Ministry is not allowed.[35]

Management was required to keep exhaustive administrative files on the life and job history of each worker. A worker's ability to receive social security or a salary raise depend on what is in the work record.[36]

On July 26, 1970 Castro discussed Cuba's economic problems. On September 20, "Granma" revealed that absences on a daily basis reached as high as 20% of the work force. A series of drastic measures designed to strengthen labor discipline were presented to the workers.[37]

These measures, now in effect, restore the system of quotas without material incentives, update the record of the worker's performance, and define in detail the proletariat's responsibilities. Temporary absentees will not be permitted to buy durable goods, their homes will not be repaired, new or better housing will be denied, and their vacations will be suspended. They can be excluded from social benefits such as the use of beaches, free education and hospitalization. They will not be able to eat at the inexpensive workers' dining rooms.[38]

On the same day the above measures were announced, a campaign was begun to overcome the tension between the workers and administrators. Fidel Castro declared, "We are going to trust our workers and hold trade union elections in all locals . .. They will be absolutely free, and the workers will choose the candidates. The workers will elect their leaders . . . If the worker has really been elected by a majority of all his comrades, he will have authority. He will not be a nobody who has been placed there by decree. He will have the moral authority of his election, and when the Revolution establishes a line, he will go all out to defend and fight for that line."

Imagine! After more than a decade of Revolution, the Cuban workers achieve what U.S. auto and steel workers have (more or less) had for a generation — the right to elect their own leaders. However, note the last phrase in Castro's remarks: the function of these leaders will be to carry out the line, not to develop it.

The Valdes article carries the story up to 1970. Since that time there is no indication that things have gotten any better. Rene Dumont, in a 1972 appendix to his book IS CUBA SOCIALIST?, notes that the situation is still pretty much as he and the Valdeses reported earlier. He states explicitly that, "In point of fact it is the petty bourgeois who seem to hold essential practical power in Cuba ...." (p. 153)

As the Valdeses remark in the conclusion to their article which I have drawn upon so heavily, "The revolutionary substitutes for capitalism's reliance on selfishness cannot be coercive decrees or militarization, but the concrete practice of decentralization and socialist democracy. To continue to adhere to the concept of the trade union as a 'transmission belt' to implement party directives in the economic sphere is an obstacle to meaningful democratization. Socialist democracy, to be real, requires that revolutionary initiative and power be found in the hands of the people and not be the monopoly of a group . . . The state should be the instrument of the masses and not the other way around."

In winding up this section I must make it clear that I have placed so much stress on the negative aspects of Cuba because the audience for which I am writing generally tends to romanticize everything that comes out of that country and the other small Asian and African countries which have broken out of the grip of imperialism.

Cuba, as much as any country on earth, illustrates the complexities of political struggle in today's world. Those who regard Cuba as a model for the United States, and who think that Fidel Castro and the other Cuban leaders can do no wrong, are mistaken. Those who think that the Cuban leaders have fallen entirely under the thumb of Moscow are also mistaken. The leaders of the new Cuba, like the leaders of the new regimes in Indo-China, Angola and elsewhere, are great revolutionaries, who have carried out the sharpest and most progressive struggles against imperialism anywhere in the world.

In many respects their situation is parallel to that which prevailed in the U.S. South during Reconstruction after the Civil War: a great popular upsurge, whose potential was unlimited, in which various social forces were contending for hegemony. In the case of the newly freed nations of today, as in the case of Black Reconstruction, their ability to go forward to socialism depends partly on forces outside of their control, namely, on developments within those countries which are already highly industrialized. This does not detract in the slightest from one's appreciation of the role that the smaller Third World countries have played and are playing in bringing the entire proletariat to its feet.

All of the cases looked at up to this point have been ones where the working class was extremely small in relation to the rest of the population, and where the reactionary regime held on to power through a system of total repression. In such cases it is natural that conditions of underground existence should give rise to military conceptions of unity and discipline which, while making the party into the most effective instrument for overturning the old regime, also tend to make it suspicious of any independent initiatives from outside its own ranks, including the working class seeking to realize itself directly.

What of the situation in western Europe, North America and Japan, where the working class is large and experienced, and where for at least a generation trade union and parliamentary forms have existed to mediate the class struggle? How do the Communist Parties function in these countries?

At the beginning of the 1960's, when Khrushchev was at the head of the Soviet government, the Communist Parties in a number of western countries, with his encouragement, began to evolve theories of peaceful transition to socialism, democracy without class content, and other ideas of classical social democracy. At that time the Chinese Communist Party opposed these new tendencies in a series of polemics which effectively restated the traditional principles of Marxism-Leninism, and won it a great deal of support from many Parties in the Third World and some in the developed countries. In some countries, significant groups of "Marxist-Leninists" split away from the existing Parties and began the process of building new "anti-revisionist" ones, often with Chinese encouragement and support.

Well, Khrushchev was removed from authority and in the more than a decade since, several important developments have unfolded within the Communist movement:

(1) The Soviet CP dropped the line of peaceful transition and so forth, and those Parties that hung on to it, such as the Italian and Scandinavian Parties, did so in defiance of Moscow.

(2) Some Parties, including some most closely aligned with the Soviet CP, proved in deeds, not words, that they were quite willing to discard bourgeois democracy and become serious contenders for power, under certain circumstances. The outstanding example of this is Portugal.

(3) Owing partly to the inability of the "anti-revisionist" forces to explain the above developments, they have been unable in even a single industrialized country to come together in one hegemonic organization, and moreover, have spawned a multitude of different groups, some with politics virtually indistinguishable from the official CP's, others so sectarian that they are led to oppose every progressive movement in their own countries, with the result that the very concept of the "anti-revisionist left" is now totally without validity, except in a historical sense.

Just as in an earlier period the dramatic expropriation of private capital by the Soviet government gave rise to the view that equated socialism with expropriation, so now the drift of the Communist Parties toward reformism leads to the tendency to dismiss them as "class collaborationist" and "revisionist."

Nothing reveals the dangerous consequences of the confusion regarding the Communist Parties more clearly than the events in Portugal. In that country, following the April 25, 1974 overthrow of the fascist regime by a group of young officers in the Armed Forces Movement, there arose several different forces contending for power:

First were the forces grouped around the new-born Socialist Party, headed by Mario Soares; these were the elements who hoped to see Portugal evolve as a traditional, western European bourgeois democratic state, based on private property in the means of production. This was the sector supported by the U.S. and the principal forces of European capitalism.

Second was the revolutionary proletariat seeking to establish its direct power in society and expressing its will, in a not-yet-clearly-distinct manner, through the Workers' Commissions, Workers' Councils and a group in the armed forces, Soldiers United for Victory. No single party was hegemonic within the proletariat. The Party of the Revolutionary Proletariat most completely identified itself with the independent revolutionary aspirations of the workers.

Third was the Communist Party, dominant in the trade unions, and the largest party among the workers. The Community Party represented neither of the above-mentioned forces, nor did it represent a vacillating, compromising element between them. It had its own independent policy, which it pursued throughout the stormy events of the next two years and is pursuing today. And what was that policy? Simply put, it was a policy aimed at the creation of a new Portugal, without private ownership of the means of production and with the Party as the administrator of the new state and manager of the state-owned property: in other words, a regime similar to that which exists in any of the eastern European states today.

In order to accomplish its strategic aim, the CP must achieve two things: first, it must expropriate the property and crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie; second, it must restrict the scope of the mass working class movement and bring it under the control of the Party. And it must accomplish these tasks under the special conditions prevailing in Portugal: namely, that while the bourgeoisie had been dealt a severe blow with the fall of fascism, it was stronger than the working class; and also that the Party itself was a mass party and therefore necessarily responsive to various currents within the working class.

It was the need to balance various conflicting tasks and pressures that was responsible for the seemingly contradictory turns in policy. But tactics have always been subordinate to the overall goal.

When the fascists were first overthrown and CP leader Cunhal returned to Portugal to assume a post in the provisional government, various analysts around the world dismissed him as a "revisionist" committed to the parliamentary road to socialism. But when he came out with statements minimizing the importance of elections and calling on the army to continue to exercise power, and then when the CP twice took to the barricades to bar fascist attempts to overthrow the new regime, these same analysts were left with no explanation.

Several of the Maoist groups characterized the CP as "social-fascist," meaning socialist in words, fascist in deeds. But what kind of fascist is it that takes the lead in demanding full, unconditional independence for one's own colonies, as the CP did in regard to Portugal's African territories or fights for land reform, as it is doing in Portugal itself?

Both theories — the "revisionist" and the "social-fascist" — failed to explain the behavior of the Portuguese CP during the post-revolutionary crisis.

On the other hand, the CP was not a consistently revolutionary party. It had seized power in the trade union movement by simply moving into the offices and had used its authority to oppose strikes aimed at higher wages, on the grounds that they would jeopardize the country's economic position. And it opposed the formation of the Workers' Commissions and Workers' Councils, which were non-party mass organizations of direct democracy, as it likewise opposed the formation of any groups within the armed forces that ran counter to the Armed Forces Movement of the rebel officers. And even while opposing one or another conservative measure of the different provisional governments, it always maintained a presence in the government.

These various maneuvers of the Party can be explained in only one way: the Party was, and remains, a vigorous opponent of the existing capitalist regime and a serious contender for power; but the regime it strives to establish is not the "free association" spoken of by Marx. In its efforts to attain its goal, it must utilize its influence in the government and in the mass movement to crush the traditional bourgeoisie, must use exactly the same influence to prevent the working class movement from getting out of hand, and must accomplish these two contradictory tasks without losing its base of popular support.

But then don't these various considerations determining CP policy offer tremendous possibilities of support to the working class movement which exists outside of CP control? Of course they do, and the revolutionary movement in Portugal has taken advantage of that fact. Thus, for instance, when the CP took to the barricades against the fascists, the revolutionary left joined it; when the CP defended itself from the attacks of the fascists and the church, the left joined in the defense; when the CP opposed the right-ward drift of the sixth provisional government, the left was on the same side.

On the other hand, when the CP opposed strikes or opposed the Workers' Commissions (and later tried to take them over), the left fought against it. The policy of the left toward the CP in Portugal is what is meant by the working class maintaining an independent stance in the political struggle.

By contrast, those groups which claim to be followers of Mao Tse-tung Thought were blinded by their unreasonable hatred for the CP, so that they joined together with the CIA-backed Socialist Party against the CP in the unions, and joined in with the fascist mobs that were burning down Party headquarters in the northern cities, on the grounds of "opposing social-fascism."

The Maoist groups are unable to analyze the role of the CP and unable to arrive at a proper stance in relation to it, because they, like the CP itself, are motivated by the theory which sees the rule of the vanguard party as equivalent to proletarian power. They differ from the Communist Party only in the particular foreign country to which they look as a model.

Italy is another country where the CP is reaching for power and where the state capitalist theory offers the only reasonable explanation for its behavior.

The Italian Communist leaders trace their tradition back in a direct line through the anti-fascist resistance, the Civil War in Spain, the post-World War I uprisings and the founding of the Party. They are the most cynical and astute group of leaders in the western communist movement, including those in the Soviet Union, whom they undoubtedly consider "backward" and "lacking in culture."

If the Italian Communists have temporarily adopted a reformist course, it is not because they have renounced their fundamental aim of taking power in Italian society, but because they feel that such a course is best suited to their cause at the present time.

The Soviet leaders, for their own reasons, do not approve of the new line of the Italian CP and exert efforts to reverse it. Paradoxically, it is the improved position of the Soviet Union in the world that makes it possible for the Italian and other western CP's to stray from Moscow's strict control, by eliminating the need for the formerly weak, isolated, hounded communists to huddle together for mutual support.

For the time being, the Italian Communists are trying to gain entrance to the government by offering themselves as the only force able to bring about labor peace, that is, to halt the wave of strikes that threatens the very foundations of the Italian state.

If the CP comes into the government, there is no doubt that it will have exactly the opposite effect from that intended by the bourgeoisie; namely, it will encourage the workers to be bolder in their demands.

If that happens, the pressure will be on the CP either to risk its base of support among the workers by suppressing the strikes or give up its position in government.

There is a third alternative, of course — the Portuguese one. That is, to attempt to take power into the hands of the Party while preventing the struggle of the working class from going too far. It should be noted, however, that Italy in the 1970's is not eastern Europe after World War II, where the Red Army was present to both suppress private capital and enforce labor discipline.

All the conceivable paths offer great difficulties to the Italian CP, while holding out tremendous possibilities to the working class.

The Communist Parties in the advanced countries are not alien presences imposed on the working class from outside. Even if the Stalin regime had never existed in Russia, something very similar to them would have developed. Nor are they more radical versions of the old, class-collaborationist social democracy. The Communist Parties are products of that stage of social evolution in which the working class is not yet sufficiently mature to fulfill its historic role. They represent that element of the population which is bitterly hostile to the existing regime and is at the same time able to conceive of no alternative to it other than the substitution of a more efficient and benevolent group of rulers for the exploiting class that presently holds power. The fact that the Communist Parties are attempting to achieve their aim in a place and time where the working class no longer has need of their services produces terrible strains on these parties, which must eventually blow them apart.

"Men make their own history," wrote Marx, in the famous and often-cited passage from THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE, "but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like an incubus of the brain of the living."

The workers' movements in Europe and the United States proved strong enough to prevent the crushing of the young Soviet Republic but not strong enough to overthrow capitalism in their own countries. The confinement of the revolution to backward Russia gave rise to a certain conception of the relation of the Party to the class, a conception based on the demonstrated inability of the Russian working class to establish its direct rule. Thus, in place of the dictatorship by the proletariat, there arose the theory of the dictatorship for the proletariat, which became transformed into a dictatorship over the proletariat.

The communist parties of the various countries, strongly influenced by the Russian model, are products of that stage in development in which the working class is not yet capable of establishing its own class rule. These parties have been, on one hand, more or less effective instruments for waging the class struggle and, on the other hand, terrible weapons for the suppression of all strivings of the proletariat to express itself as a class independent of their control.

The working class in the developed countries no longer has need of these revolutionary mandarins. To take the most well-known of recent examples, in May of 1968 the French working class, acting under the guidance of no leading party, showed that it is "disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production," and is capable of standing at the head of the nation — so much so that President de Gaulle went on a secret inspection tour of French military units in Germany, unable to rely any longer on those stationed in France itself, who had been exposed to the revolutionary virus.

If the general strike and factory occupation of 1968 did not lead to the conquest of power by the proletariat, it was not because the workers were insufficiently organized, or did not possess adequate weapons, or lacked means of communication, or any of the other reasons that revolutionary attempts have failed in the past. It was because the workers themselves lacked an appreciation of their own capacity to rule.

Workers do very revolutionary things, but they think of them in old ways. The French workers, who demonstrated their ability to carry out a nation-wide movement, create forms of direct democracy and regulate their relations with non-proletarian social strata — the essential tasks of any government — were unable to s