The second response is to shift political allegiance to another model that holds state power: China. But it would be a mistake to repeat, in relation to China, the uncritical approach previously adopted with respect to the Soviet Union.
Third is a tendency to make a direct link between fundamental Marxist categories and a perverse reality that we’re trying to explain. So if socialism was destroyed in the USSR, this must have been the work of a capitalist class, a "Soviet bourgeoisie." That is an attempt to create some kind of Marxist explanation for what happened, but I think we need a more nuanced approach.
Finally, there’s a retreat to pre-Marxist understandings. Here I refer to the concept of market socialism. Again, we need to more carefully preserve the positive content of the Soviet experience, rather than reviving concepts that aren’t adequate to current tasks.
PA: Picking up on market socialism, discussions of different methods of building socialist societies have emerged. Which view do you see as the strongest?
DL: Bertell Ollman recently stated his anti-market position in PA. Others put forward a market socialist view: markets are an inherent feature of human life and socialism should be based on them. In my view, both the pro-market and anti-market positions are wrong. Both use an ahistorical, decontextualized concept of "the market," which ignores the social relations in which markets are embedded.
A general model of socialism can be synthesized from the entire 20th-century experience. That model has at its center a system of democratic planning, with evolving market relations surrounding it. Let me explain both aspects. First, democratic planning combines central with decentral planning. The most common error here is to counterpose central to decentral, to treat them as opposites, whereas they are in fact mutually supporting. You need both the stability provided by central planning and the detailed, quality information available only at the level of the enterprise, or work team. There’s a continuous iterative flow of information and task assignments among levels. Negotiated coordination takes place in a climate of visibility and open debate. Finally, evaluations and rewards are formed according to planned criteria, very different from anything a spontaneous market could achieve. For example, you can build criteria into the pricing and bonus systems that evaluate a collective’s impact on the environment, its progress in overcoming ethnic and national antagonisms, gender divisions and gender oppression, its relation to the community in which it is located and the sector within which it resides, so that its work can be subjected to a broad qualitative social evaluation.
But this model requires a completely articulated plan, with all of its input/output relations and the millions of equations that the economists constantly tell us about. However, modern electronic technology places socialism in a wholly new light. If the means to compute a plan did not exist at the middle of the 20th century, they do now. In place of the commercial waste and anarchy of today’s Internet, one can envision Intranets for enterprises, and sectors, progressively linked together in a continuous computational and information flow that undercuts the impossibilist arguments of the capitalist economists. Social planning is the essence of socialism. We can go in that direction, put it forward as a vision, with due regard for the particular circumstances of different countries.
Now the market is a necessary part of this. First, the planned sector must have market relations with sectors that continue to function spontaneously: agriculture, retail trade and personal services. Markets also provide secondary confirmation of the social validity of an enterprise’s activity. While enterprises are under indivisible social ownership, they don’t immediately feel that way; they act as separate collectives, and so need to sell their output, as a confirmation of their work. Finally, markets survive at an even higher level as horizontal relations within planning. Horizontal search-and-discovery and contract formation, on the basis of known rules and evaluation criteria and always visible to the center which can step in when coordination is necessary, are an inherent part of modern planning.
Here is a simple analogy. Think about the working class, the state and the market. The working class eventually abolishes itself, by becoming stronger – empowered economically, politically, culturally. But of course, worker-citizens continue to exist and in that sense the working class continues to exist. The state, in turn, is also slowly abolished – it "withers away" – but again by becoming stronger and more democratic. But this doesn’t mean that public administration will disappear; society won’t revert to isolated communes or formless anarchy.
Now similarly, the market, and this point hasn’t been recognized, acquires new social content as it evolves under the umbrella of democratic planning. It slowly abolishes itself, transcending the polarizing, fragmenting, alienating, possessive-individualist qualities of the spontaneous market that market socialism’s critics rightly refer to. But the market is not "abolished"; it, too, withers away. It slowly evolves away from its negative roles, which were functional for capitalist society, not merely by-products. The rational core – reasoned horizontal search and contracting – continues to exist.
PA: Why do people have such a difficult time discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union? People tend to propose one of two main reasons: human error or systemic problems. What is your view on this? Was the collapse inevitable?
DL: Again we need to distinguish between the political culture of a society and its political economy. Soviet political culture was defined by the over-politicized and repressive aspects of the CPSU, the bureaucratic-authoritarian deformation. I don’t have to go into detail, I think. Everyone knows what I’m referring to.
But in the area of political economy, I’m going to make a radical claim: the Soviet Union had it right! It was enormously advanced in the level of socialist development over other socialist countries. Some Eastern European countries were more developed technologically and industrially, but not in the sense of socialist relations of production.
By 1980 a system of central/decentral institutions was in place in the USSR. This was a functioning system of comprehensive or democratic socialism. It was, needless to say, overlain with a deformed political culture that undermined it and kept it from realizing its potential.
In July 1979 – note that this is under Brezhnev, long before Gorbachev – a Council of Ministers Resolution established a major set of new directions, which were then progressively implemented during the 1980s. One was direct election of factory managers. This is not well known, even in the non-anti-Soviet left. Nothing done anywhere else, before on since, comes close to this vast movement for democratic election throughout industry – whatever the actual quality of the elections and the degree of democracy achieved.
The Resolution also called for elected team councils, which were responsible for the work team’s plan. So planning was extended from the enterprise level to that of the team, with potential for much greater mass participation in economic life.
Third, the teams received collective bonuses, based on the performance of the team. This bonus was distributed to individual workers based on evaluation by the team council. This is a complex political structure, which requires a high degree of maturity to prevent abuse. But it was a subtle and potentially profound advance in worker control.
Last is a series of technical innovations: normative indicators to solve the long-standing problems of evaluation and more sophisticated methods of price planning, etc.
The Soviet demise was due to the culture, not to the economy. Something like the late Soviet economic system, but in a climate of visibility, discussion and debate, is the core of a socialist answer to TINA ("there is no alternative"). However, in the USSR the accumulated anger and pain
from the Stalin deformation, from everything that had happened to people as a result of that, eventually overcame the positive potentials. Was this inevitable? Nothing is inevitable. If the institutional basis for more developed socialism and the cleansing power of glasnost had emerged earlier; if the leadership had been different, if, say, Gorbachev had come along ten years earlier at a time when the reservoir of patriotic support and popular mandate was still strong; and if the world’s working-class movement had been stronger, then the negative deformations could have been overcome without the loss of Soviet state power and the horrendous suffering imposed on the post-Soviet peoples today. So the fall of the USSR had structural causes, but not in the sense that the socialist system or model was wrong. Rather, the blame lies with the structural aspects of the political and cultural deformation.
Many people blame Gorbachev, saying that he "sold out." I think this is superficial. Gorbachev had to walk a knife-edge. On one side you had the entrenched bureaucratic system, and on the other you had political chaos. It would have taken a politician larger than life to survive that. To blame Gorbachev, or "human error," misses the point.
PA: A variety of views have emerged to explain or define capitalist triumphalism: neoliberalism, neoconservativism, etc. Many on the left regard these as having little or no distinction. What is your view on this? <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese