WW in 1988: On the eve of the Soviet Party Conference

Below are excerpts from an article by Sam Marcy that appeared originally on May 26, 1988, during economic changes in the USSR promoted by Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The full text can be found in the Archives section of workers.org in the book “Perestroika: a Marxist Critique.”

The cheering in the imperialist press for perestroika seems to get louder with each passing day.

Where are the reforms leading? What is their true overall direction? Is perestroika, as the imperialist bourgeoisie hopes, a move away from the socialist perspective, from socialist planning? Or is it only a temporary retreat meant to lay the basis for a swifter momentum in socialist construction at a later date?

[T]he rebellions that recently took place in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the first of their kind since the Revolution and the Civil War, should be a matter of great importance [at the 19th Conference of the Communist Party]. Adequate representation by all sides would be especially necessary, with reports from the people concerned. There is scarcely an issue of more significance to socialist construction than the national question.

A remark by Gorbachev about the procedure for selecting delegates to the Conference is altogether disturbing and may breach the usual procedures by which Conferences and Party Congresses are organized. The Bolshevik Party was founded as the militant working class organizer of the vanguard. Its ideological standpoint as a proletarian party meant that the leadership had to ceaselessly strive to see to it that the social composition of the Party corresponded to its ideological position as the vanguard of the working class. From its very inception the Party leadership sought to enroll workers, peasants and the rural poor, women and all the disadvantaged as the bulwarks of the future socialist dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry.

Even if this has been abandoned, even if only a formality or a shell remains of it, nevertheless, at the last Congress what was significant from the point of view of formality was the predominance of workers. There were also many from the collectives, many women, and many from the various nationalities in the USSR. Now we see a change with respect to the social composition of the Conference. Gorbachev recently said in a speech to editors and Party leaders, “There must be no more quotas, as we had in the past—so many workers and peasants, so many women and so forth.”

This sounds really alarming. He then buttressed his remark by saying, “The principal political imperative is to elect active supporters of perestroika.” What about those who are not supporters? If it’s only for supporters, why have the Conference at all?

What about democratization? Is it only for the supporters of perestroika, even the most extreme ones who can scarcely be differentiated from outright bourgeois types? Doesn’t this make a mockery out of the whole democratization process? It is well known that there is a considerable amount of opposition in the Party to perestroika.

If perestroika is to be the great turning point in Soviet society about which Gorbachev and his supporters are continually exhorting the population, does it not rate an open discussion in the Party?

In all previous five-year plans, great enthusiasm was evident, coming particularly from the masses. But now it seems that no matter how much exhortation there is, no matter how many times the masses are told and retold that they are now co-owners in plants and industries, it does not seem to take hold. It must be that a good many feel alienated from ownership and that the restructuring plans have caused apprehension and uncertainty among the mass of the workers, although there is no evidence of an opposition movement in the working class.

The issue is how the changes will affect the workers, and most immediately how a price restructuring will affect them. A great eagerness was shown by the administration to restructure the prices of some 200,000 items, including food, household utensils, so forth and so on. This restructuring would supposedly put prices more in line with costs and ultimately benefit the workers, but it appears to be an upward movement, not a downward one.

Price is nothing but the monetary expression of value. Value is another name for the amount of socially necessary labor time spent in the production of an article. Has not the progress of socialist construction in the USSR shown that scientific-technological development ought to reduce the amount of socially necessary labor? This should mean the reduction of cost. But the projection of the perestroika economists is that prices have to be raised. Putting prices in line with costs and the adoption of new cost accounting methods all adds up to a redistribution of the national income in a way that spreads apprehension and fear among the workers. This is reflected in the lower bodies of the Party, which, while by no means as faithful a representation of the working class as they should be, are nevertheless more significant than the cheerleaders for the reforms from the bourgeois intelligentsia of the USSR.

It is this problem that has to be addressed. If the stagnation of Soviet industry is so great, can it be due merely to the existence of lethargy and the prevalence of bureaucratic methods? Or is it due to a slowly but surely developing momentum toward modifying the social system in the direction of bourgeois norms, toward encouraging individual acquisitiveness, favoring individual entrepreneurs, vastly extending managerial prerogatives, stimulating competitiveness among workers—instead of promoting cooperation and solidarity and reawakening genuine mass enthusiasm? Isn’t this what has to be discussed?

The problem of perestroika lies in the fact that this is an attempt to change social conditions, to redistribute the national product in another, more unequal way. It lies in the attempt to foist bourgeois norms, bourgeois incentives and bourgeois economic doctrines upon a socialist economy. They bring in their train all of the evils of a capitalist market economy. You can’t improve it by calling it market socialism.

The issue is whether perestroika is oriented in the direction of strengthening the socialist perspective or whether it is an attempt at a throwback to favor the upper crust of Soviet society. The lesson of Poland ought to be sobering to the Gorbachev supporters, and even more so the lesson of Yugoslavia with its galloping inflation, its subordination to the imperialist IMF, its chronic unemployment and the reemergence of national antagonisms.