Marxism and the Collapse of Socialism with an Inhuman Face

The second great obstacle to a renewal of Marxist social theory has been the existence of "state socialist" dictatorships—societies characterized by a ruling class of bureaucrats controlling the means and distribution of "state-owned" production through a non-democratic monopoly of political power. The collapse of Stalinism has finally discredited the notion that socialism is simply a matter of the development of the forces of production without regard to the question of popular control over them.^[8] At the same time, centrally planned and administered "command" economies have failed to provide a sufficiently prosperous alternative to market mechanisms. These deficiencies cannot be laid entirely at the door of either economic backwardness or the exigencies of Cold War military production. The lessons are clear enough; socialism without democracy is a sham, and socialism without some market mechanisms is impossible to sustain. However, these lessons do not, as we so often hear, sprinkle historical holy water on capitalism: democracy without socialism and market mechanisms without democratic control over economic power are hardly less of a sham than Stalinism. With respect to democracy, the collapse of socialism's inhuman face is simply the obverse of the collapse of capitalism with a human face: either democracy means democratic control over the means of production and the process of accumulation, or it means nothing at all. The absence of either political or economic equality is always exploitive, and arguments masking inequalities of economic or political power behind rhetoric of political rights, social cooperation, or economic efficiency are never more than rationalizations of class exploitation.

State ownership of the means of production may or may not be a necessary condition for socialism, but it is most definitely not a sufficient condition. The collapse of Stalinism signals the end of a tradition of revolutionary dictatorship that privileges anti-democratic and coercive means over purportedly egalitarian and humanistic ends. Equally significant has been the failure of centrally planned command economies of the Soviet type. Not only has the Soviet attempt to "leap over capitalism" and to move from economic backwardness to industrial prosperity by means of cadre mobilization and party coercion rivaled the worst aspects of capitalist development, but it has also failed to catch up with, let alone surpass, capitalism. The collapse of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe signifies the failure of what

Stalin called "socialism in one country" and a necessary return to Marx and Engels's conception of capitalism as a world-historical force whose ultimate development is a global mode of production.

In The German Ideology , Marx and Engels rejected the possibility of "socialism in one country." They understood that no economic system can outproduce capitalism because no conceivable system of coercion is capable of extorting as much surplus value from its workers or more effectively compelling its ruling class to expand and innovate. No social system, in short, is more "totalitarian" than capitalism. Understanding the nature of capitalism, Marx and Engels understood that communism as a "local event"—that is, socialism in one country—would be destroyed by its relative backwardness, by its "limiting effect on the universalization" of the "intolerable powers of capital." The possibility of communism presupposes the development of capitalism as a global system whose class structure is truly international and homogeneous. Capitalism is a global process whereby "separate individuals . . . with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them . . . a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market " (Marx and Engels 1978, 163).

If capitalism is indeed a world-historical force and its development global rather than national, then its transformation must also be understood globally rather than nationally. Capitalism will disintegrate only when it has become general, when the "universal development of productive forces . . . produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition) [and] makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others" (Marx and Engels 1978, 161-62). The contradictions of capitalism—the elimination of real scarcity by creating artificial scarcity, the integration and interdependence of social production by reproducing class inequalities of wealth and power, the development of productive technology by producing crises, dislocation, and suffering—become progressively more irrational and intolerable as capitalism eliminates its rivals and begins to collapse in on itself in an orgy of "creative destruction" whose only real purpose will be the restoration of profitability for the ruling class. However, until it has subsumed completely every aspect of social existence in every region of global space, capitalism will always appear progressive and will always be able to resolve temporarily its contradictions by expansion as well as destruction.

The expansion of capitalism is inseparable from class struggle—a power struggle between wages and profits whose ultimate stake is democratic control over the means and distribution of production. The lesson to be learned from the collapse of both Stalinism and Fordism is that this struggle can no longer be conceived in purely national terms. As stereotypes of proletarian factory workers have given way to more complex concepts of a working class segmented into white- and blue-collar fractions, so stereotypes of "Third World" revolutions must yield to the reality of globally integrated production and the internationalization-multinationalization of the class struggle. The hardships caused by the dissolution of Fordism in the capitalist heartlands are now inseparable from the sufferings of working people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, who daily watch their hopes for democracy and prosperity sacrificed to the ambition of their professional middle class and to the harsh reality of the transition to capitalist relations of production. As daunting as this process of globalization seems to us now, the final outcome of capitalism's multinational restructuring will be to put democratic socialism back on the table—internationally, once again, but this time at a much higher level of socio-economic development and integration. The development of capitalism is, after all, the development of the conditions of the possibility for socialism: "communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself," it is rather "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx and Engels 1978, 162). As former communist countries join the capitalist global economy, they will discover soon enough the exploitation behind the opulence displayed in our television commercials and the class domination concealed behind our fervent enthusiasm for democracy. Most, I suspect, should look to Turkey or Brazil rather than Western Europe or the United States for a more realistic glimpse of their immediate future. But this is not really the point; what is most significant is the collapse of the last formidable obstacle to the internationalization of capitalism and the internationalization of social democracy. Those depressed by the thought that we are only now at the end of the beginning of global capitalism may take heart in the fact that we have also arrived at the beginning of the end.

Stalinism, let us not forget, was a monster created by the development of global capitalism. Its dissolution in no way validates Cold War rhetoric centered around the concept of totalitarianism—a term introduced as much to distort as to comprehend the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution.^[9] While pluralism, relativism, and individualism deny or

trivialize the significance of class exploitation and domination in capitalist societies, their maleficent antithesis, totalitarianism, projects onto the history of the Soviet Union a dystopian fable of an even harsher oppression stemming from the absence of capitalism. The complicity between the diatribes that passed for Soviet studies during the Cold War decades and contemporary post-Marxist social theory is worth noting because its persistence continues to be a major ideological obstacle to the revival of Marxist analysis. Vulgar pluralism, relativism, and individualism are all rooted in an elitist conception of freedom whose antithesis, egalitarian democracy and collective ownership of the means of production, must be portrayed as the absence of liberty, the end of history, and the loss of individuality. Totalitaria, if I may be forgiven the name, is a truly paradoxical space, a place where oppression is everywhere and nowhere, completely irrational in its lack of purpose but terrifyingly rational in its purposeful application. Most significant, economic exploitation and class struggle do not exist in Totalitaria, and thus a Marxist analysis of its structures of domination is ruled out of court. Explanation devolves instead on a Manichaean conflict between "liberty" and "oppression," a mythical contest whose enabling concept is the striving individual for whom liberty exists only as a predatory meritocracy—a zero-sum struggle for power—and for whom oppression is defined as any interference with the right of "talented" elites to exploit the "mediocre" masses. This view of the world, of course, is that of the professional middle class, and it is embraced enthusiastically by both its liberal and conservative fractions, each as unwilling as the other to call into question the assumptions on which rest their class freedom from proletarianization and their class power over the working class. Even as its theoretical bankruptcy was demonstrated by the "unthinkable" phenomenon of Gorbachev, the oxymoronic anti-Marxist myth of Totalitaria continues to thrive not because it explains anything—it never explained anything—but because it corresponds to the deepest class fear of the professional middle class (the dangers of participatory democracy and economic equality) while preserving its fondest class illusion (the identity of its class interest with the very principles of freedom and justice).