Neil Davidson argues that the Soviet Bloc was state capitalist in nature and that therefore the revolutions of 1989 which saw their overthrow should be seen as progressive. Neil Davidson is a member of the SWP and Solidarity, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde. His forthcoming book, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? will be published by Haymarket in 2010. 

THE PLACE OF 1989 IN HISTORY

How one regards the significance of the revolutions of 1989 depends on how one regards the nature of Stalinism. If you considered the Easter European states to have been “post-capitalist” in any way, whether straightforwardly socialist or as some species of worker’s state, them the revolutions of 1989 were actually, and inescapably, counter-revolutions. The analogy is with the restorations of 1620 in Bohemia or 1660 in Scotland, which not only re-imposed the monarchy but also feudal social relations, not the restorations of 1660 in England or 1815 in France, both of which also brought back the monarchy, but retained capitalist social relations. Since I do not think that the Eastern European states had moved beyond capitalism, my opinion of the revolutions is correspondingly different. This article is clearly not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of the merits of the theory of bureaucratic state capitalism as an explanatory framework compared to those of bureaucratic collectivism or degenerated and deformed worker’s states. However, since I do believe that the former more accurately explains the dynamics of Stalinism than any rival theory, I want to state briefly why this is the case.

One of the problems with the “Russian Question”, as it used to be called, is precisely that it begins with the fate of the Russian Revolution. Much more helpful is to begin with the world economy as a whole, which enables us to see that the tendencies towards state capitalism were already well developed within the system before 1917 (and had indeed been identified by Russian Marxists like Bukharin). The Revolution of 1917 saw a break with these developments; but the Stalinist counter-revolution of 1928-9 saw Russia rejoin the general tendency of the world system in perhaps its most extreme form. What is exceptional about Russia is the way in which the turn to state capitalism took place–the total degeneration of a worker’s revolution to the point where nothing remained of its original achievements. “Nothing” is meant literally. What defined Russia after October as a worker’s state was the fact that the working class was actually in possession of political power, through the soviets and trade unions and, increasingly indirectly, though the Bolshevik Party. Such a definition did not depend on nationalisation, since there were several different forms of production (petty commodity, private capitalism, state capitalism, socialism) in the USSR until the late 1920s, when both total nationalisation and–not coincidentally–the total atomisation and destruction of the worker’s movement took place simultaneously. To treat nationalisation as gain of 1917 is bad history; to treat it as the defining characteristic of a worker’s state, in a context where workers lack all power and are subject to an even more oppressive regime than in the West, is simply a form of metaphysics and, all too often, of apologetics.

The transformations which subsequently took place independently of the USSR, in Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Vietnam, and so on were certainly genuine revolutions–the Chinese revolution above all is one of the great moments of modern history–but they were not socialist revolutions: they are far more comprehensible as the functional equivalents of the bourgeois revolutions. Again, China is the classic example. It is difficult to take seriously the idea that a movement of middle-class intellectuals, leading an army of ex-peasants, which explicitly sought to demobilise potential working class participation, can be regarded as socialist revolution in any sense–unless of course you see actual working class power and democracy as an optional extra. These revolutions could easily have happened, in much the same forms, without October 1917, but they could not have happened without 1928: that provided their inspiration and their model. This does not mean that they were all equivalent, any more than the multinational capitalist states of the West are. Just as there are advantages to being a citizen of Sweden rather than, say, Texas, so too might it have been preferable to be a citizen of Cuba or former Yugoslavia rather than, say, North Korea or Albania; but internal variation does not override their fundamental similarity.

In short, rather than view these societies as being fundamentally different from those of the West, as was endlessly declared in the Cold War propaganda of both sides, it is better to see them as existing on a continuum of state intervention, with two extremes, the USA and the USSR, at opposite ends of the scale. In Eastern Europe the state itself assumed the role of a “collective capitalist”, the end point of the Keynesianism dominant in the West until the neoliberal ascendancy of the late 1970s. Between the two extremes lay many states which combined elements of both, most in the post-colonial world, particularly in those which were to be classified as the Newly Industrialising Countries.

This of course raises the question of why the two camps were in such potentially lethal opposition, if both were fundamentally capitalist, but the answer is less obscure than is sometimes supposed. Capitalist nation-states, after all, had been known to go to war with each other before the onset of the Cold War. France and Germany, both capitalist states, were geopolitical rivals between 1871 until 1945–a longer period that the Cold War, incidentally–going to war in 1914 and 1939 with out any suggestion that they represented different social systems. In the case of the USA and USSR, however, there was an additional reason. The complete supersession of private capital by state capital would be experienced by individual capitalists as “socialism”, and would not be accepted by them without opposition or even civil war. The same is also true on the other side, as any attempt to reintroduce private capital into wholly state capitalist economies would mean that some sections of the bureaucratic ruling class would lose their privileged positions in a situation of market competition–as a many did after 1991, particularly in former East Germany, although in Russia perhaps as much as 80 per cent still managed to transform themselves into private capitalists or managers. For the ruling class in the West, the revolutions of 1989-91 (since the collapse of Russia itself, and not the fall of the Berlin Wall, was the actual climax of the process), had two major benefits.

The first was ideological. The Stalinist regimes had claimed, however inaccurately, to show an alternative future: their collapse could be hailed as closing off that alternative and bourgeois ideologues realised this even before the actual revolutions took place. Earlier in 1989, former US State Department official Francis Fukuyama announced in the pages of The National Interest that we had arrived at the End of History. In this truly empty homogenous future time, he assured his readers, economies based on market capitalism and polities based on liberal democracy would be the only viable options for humanity. Fukuyama was fortunate in his timing, for the revolutions seemed to confirm his diagnosis, although he was almost universally mocked for his Hegelian pretensions. But as Slavjo Zizek has recently pointed out, there is a sense in which most people are adherents of Fukuyama now–not in the sense that they think neo-liberalism is the best way of organising society, but simply because they cannot conceive of any fundamental alternative to it.

Francis Fukuyama

It is possible to exaggerate the impact of 1989 in this respect. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not so much “prove” as confirm the already widely held belief that any alternative form of economy to neoliberal capitalism was impossible. By 1989, virtually no-one, especially not on the post-1968 revolutionary left, regarded the Stalinist regimes as “a model for socialism”. The real ideological shock, although one which was more slow-acting, had been the earlier revelation that the welfare state in its post-1945 form was incompatible with capitalism, at least as anything other than a short-term expedient.

The second benefit for the Western bourgeoisie was the opening up a section of world economy from which the market had previously been minimised, if not entirely excluded. No new value was created in this process, but neither did it simply involve relocating resources within the system from the public to the private sector. Privatisation provided resources which–potentially at least–could be used directly for production rather than in the process of realisation or as part of the social wage. But there are limits to how much this can contribute to sustaining the system. Although there have been subsequent re-nationalisations in response to the current recession, the opportunities provided by opening up the hitherto closed Stalinist economies were essentially once-and-for-all operations, the scale of which will never again be repeated.

But what should the revolutions mean for us on the left? If, as I have suggested, the Stalinist regimes were components of the capitalist system, the revolutions of 1989 have to seen, not as examples of social (counter-) revolution, but as political revolutions, which changed the nature and–to a far more limited extent–the personnel of the regime, within the same mode of production: France in 1848 rather than France in 1789. They are not for that reason irrelevant or totally negative in their impact. It ill-behoves socialists in the West, who have never been shot at by the Romanian Securitate or tortured by the East German Stasi, to complain about East German illusions in Western democracy or bemoan the influence of the Vatican on Polish trade unionists. Indeed, it is astonishing that resistance to the regimes retained a working-class, essentially socialist character for as long as it did, above all in Poland. But eventually the fact of having to define yourself in opposition to states which described themselves as socialist (and which were also described in this way by most of the Western Left) was bound in the end to lead to anti-socialist, or at best social democratic conclusions, at least in the absence of genuine socialist revolutions elsewhere to provide an alternative vision.  

The revolutions of 1989 were complex affairs, involving movements from the top-down as well as from the bottom up; the latter should, however, provide us with inspiration, as a portent of what can be achieved even in the most intellectually and materially difficult circumstances. The Czech general strike, the mass demonstrations in East Germany, the Romanian insurrection–these are not negligible moments in the history of the class struggle in Europe, and we should not allow them to be hypocritically appropriated by the bourgeoisie who in virtually every other circumstance oppose the type of collective action they represent.

To situate the revolutions of 1989 within a specifically socialist tradition of struggle means however decisively rejecting the notion that the states they destroyed had any connection with socialism: this self-inflicted wound has festered long enough. The current crisis of the system raises the question of an alternative, but two things are certain: the states destroyed by the revolutions of 1989 are not that alternative, but by demonstrating the power of human self-activity the movements which led to their destruction, whatever their formal politics, may contribute towards one.