Socialist Outlook spoke to OLIVER MacDONALD, one of the editors of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.
In the light of recent events in the USSR, Poland and Hungary would sybe mat to say there is a generalised crisis of the Eastern European YES, THE WHOLE set-up is in an historic crisis that has finally reached the USSk. At bottom this is a crisis of the Stalinist system established in the Soviet Union from 1929. The last major amendment to the basic social mechanism took place under Krushchev in the 1950s and gave the working class wide-ranging social rights, security and an egalitarian perspective. These gains continued under Brezhnev unti the earl 1970s, while of course all independent working class poutics was sup pressed. All this meant a huge budgetary commitment to the working class.
Brezhnev then added an open-ended economic commitment to achieving military 'parity' with the far stronger capitalist world in the illusory belief the he could strike a lasting deal with the US. A deal that would shore up the Soviet sphere - on the basis of the existing regime, al norink the needs toved ept. But today ical basin theinanims oV economic reproduction set up by Stalin no longer deliver the goods, the US has exposed the unreal and fallacious attempt to achieve military parity and a long-term deal, and the bureaucracy can no longer deliver its budgetary commitments to the Soviet workers.
This is the background to the attempt at restructuring' launched by Andropov and given tactical form by Gorbachev. The bottom line is restoring dynamic economic growth. This will involve, in the short term, undermining important social rights of the workers: massively subsidised food, housing, transport. Gorbachev is seeking to trade these short-term losses for greater political rights in the form of liberal freedoms. It will also involve marketising exchanges in the state sector, plus co-operatives and individual private enterprises. On the political front it will involve the rule of law, a higher profile for state bodies - the Soviets - and a transformation of the Communist Party, away trom being the nub of economic management and towards high politics and ideology. It also involves changes in international orientation. What does not seem to be envisaged is popular sovereignty: the anchoring of the system in institutions of popular, socialist democracy. In short, there is a generalised crisis, of very long duration in Eastern
Europe and which has reached acute proportions in the USSR since the end of the 1970s. There is now also a movement for attempting to overcome the crisis, a movement of enormous international significance, but with strict limits as far as the CPSU leadership is concerned. What does this mean for the Soviet Union's international politics? GORBACHEV, IS rejecting the old way of posing 'socialism in one country - the idea of autarky plus military strength, plus smooth and endless isolated devlopment towards communism.
He has recognised that the USSR must engage with the capitalist world and that internal development ultimately depends on the outcome of that engagement. The problem is that the capitalist classes are, at bottom, fundamentally hostile to Soviet success - so it is a big problem to try to figure out how to engage with the capitalist world market on favourable terms.
Trotsky's answer was that ultimately the USSR depended on the strength and support of the international working class movement to force concessions on the military, technological and economic front from the capitalists. The problem is that Stalinist policy, from 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, has been to treat the more elementary international socialist principles with contempt. The standing of the USSR within the labour movements of the advanced capitalist countries sank to an all-time low, and these movements have in turn been weakened by the offensive of the right.
The Gorbachev team would like to cut massively their military spending, via deals with the West, to divert resources to domestic economic growth. They would also like large credits on good terms to regenerate the domestic economy, as well as an end to the Cocom economic and technological warfare against the USSR. To gain these things they are trying to appeal directly to capitalist forces in the West, are offering very generous terms in disarmament deals with NATO and are offering to cut off their material aid to third world liberation move ments. They are quite capable of abandoning Nicaragua, for example. They are also offering the prospect of a big foot in the door of the Soviet market to Western capital. In short, we have a recognition of the bankruptcy of the old-style 'socialism in one country' and an attempt to find a way out through deepening collaboration with the main bourgeois states of the West.
What are the internal tactics of the Gorbachev group?
IT IS IMPORTANT to remember that the fundamental decisions were taken by Andropov betore he died. A very wide group of the leadership then agreed on the need to marketise the state sector, introduce a private
economic sector and increase the flow of information of debate and openness in society to generate economic growth. But the specific tactics of Gorbachev are to try to create popular support for a trade off - more freedom, although within certain tight limits, in exchange for economic austerity. In this Gorbachev's tactics are very reminiscent of those of Dubcek and his supporters in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Gorbachev is trying to create a bloc of the intelligentsia, technocrats and some sections of the working class in favour of glasnost. He also wants to downgrade the power of the Communist Party structures of the factories. While these were never independent structures of the working class - far from it - they did represent a channel by which working class discontent was transmitted and dealt with. Gorbachev wants to go over the heads of these party structures.
How does the party bureaucracy respond to Gorbachev's plan? CLEARLY THERE is a big divide inside the bureaucracy, and this runs hrough all levels of the party apparatus. There Is a big tear tha liberalisation will create a dynamic in the direction of a radica democratisation - or give rise to forces that favour it. There are bureaucrats who tear for their position or who fear that the party institutions could come under severe danger of dissolution. The anti-Gorbachev side of the bureaucracy has the advantage of not wanting to attack sharply the social gains of the working class; the Gorbachevites of course are much more in favour of a limited liberalisation on the political front.
My impression is that the Ligachev wing, which seems to be critical of the pace and methods of Gorbachev's reforms, retains a strong base of support in the party factory organisations. But this is not universal. For example, when Moscow party boss Yeltsin was overthrown there was an almighty flood of protest in Sverdlosk in the Urals, where Yeltsin comes from. They had to close the post office so great was the flood of letters! The Urals remains a strong base of support for Gorbachev, but we know next to nothing about what is going on inside the working class there.
How important is the national question in the Soviet Union? VERY IMPORTANT, because there are a number of unresolved national problems in the Soviet Union, and because the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe poses the national question directly. But the one thing the bureaucracy will never accept is any move out of the Soviet orbit of any nationality or Eastern European country. If it looked as if that were sious roublein daresult of glasnost, Gorbachev would be in very
What was Gorbachev's 'programme' coming out of the 19th Conference?
i some autonomy C rotest and mobilisation. But the practical problem seems to be that th igachev wing is still largely in control of the regional party apparatus Thus the fundamental issue is not what occured at the 19th Conference: it is whether the Gorbachev coalition can win the confidence of the industrial workers to the point where they will go into open struggle to destroy the control of the Ligachevites over the local apparatus. We have seen the first signs of what this could mean in the popular mobilisations in Sakhalin and Omsk. But these were isolated events in the form of protests against ballot-rigging for the conference. Will they now spread? If they do we could have the spread of popular mobilisations like that of Nagorno-Karabakh: there you have genuine popular mass mobilisation.
But this raises another question: does the Gorbachev wing want the rise of genuine working class struggle? It would certainly destroy the Ligachev wing of the party and in the present phase it would certainly be pro-Gorbachev. But it would also have an in-built tendency to lead in the direction of popular sovereignty: the subordination of the party leadership to organised popular power at the local level. And the Gorbachev leadership has certainly not called for that!
Can the Gorbachev liberalisation work?
He get an he over late it one comprom Bie.
Is Washington attracted by this? Hogwash! At the recent Moscow summit Reagan gave absolutely nothing away on a material level: no military cuts which could boost the Soviet economy; no end to the mechanisms of economic warfare (Cocom and so forth), no new credit deal. In fact there was a toughening of the US stand on these things combined with praise for Gorbachev - a very effective line, for the moment. But Gorbachev is trying to break through this resistance by using his popularity in the middle classes in the West, using the hypnotic appeal of a 280 million-person Soviet market on individual capitalists - hoping that inter-imperialist rivalries might make the Germans or the Japanese break ranks, and hoping that the budgetary crisis and domes-
tic growth crisis of the US economy might bring concessions. My own view is that the Washington elite's strategists may be pushing the following line: We'll give you massive credits, provided we know the money is secure; this means that you have to hit the food subsidies, housing, energy subsidies - in short go for the Soviet working class head on. If you do that, then we'll give you the money!
All in all, a big part of the fate of Soviet reform-Communism lies in political developments in the imperialist world. If the left here gets stronger, the prospects for a strong working class and Soviet left are far brighter. If the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution in the West gains strength in the next five years, the future for the Soviet workers' state will be very bleak as the counter-revolutionary elements in the Soviet leadership are strengthened.
As to the domestic fate of perestroika, in the immediate future, it is a continual attempt to square the circle: liberalisation without democratic popular sovereignty, maketisation and austerity without an explosion of working class discontent, weakening the Ligachevites without undermining the monopoly of decision making in the hands of the CPSU apparatus, the bureaucracy. Personally, I do not see these efforts being successful and I see the authoritarian sections of the bureaucracy gaining in strength in the context of deepening economic crisis and no decisive popular perspective being offered by the Gorbachev team.
Gorbachev has tried to generate a popular movement without breaking with the legality of the bureaucratic-authoritarian system. This requires a decisive breakthrough against the conservatives which does not seem to have happened. Now the breakthrough will have to take on more explosive forms or I suspect the conservative reaction will grow stronger.
Some people are saying that Gorbachevism vindicates Isaac Deutscher's view that the Soviet system can be reformed, and that revolutionary change is not needed.
ISAAC DEUTSCHER'S writings are vital for understanding the Soviet Union, but they don't lead to the conclusion that Gorbachev has the answers. One thing Deutscher stresses is that you have to understand the Soviet Union in terms of fundamental social forces and not take a sort of 'Kremlinological' view.
I would tend to counterpose Deutscher's political prognosis to Lukacs' view, just before his death, that only a qualitative break with the past will provide a solution. The decisive thing here is understanding democratisation as involving the institutionalisation of mass popular power. For Marxists, 'democracy' does not mean liberalism - formal
democratic rights of communication and so on - although that is important. It means the rights of the mass of ordinary people to make fundamental decisions about the allocation of social wealth: something of course which does not exist in the West. Liberalism as an economic force always ends up challenging the economic well-being of the masses. The contradiction is that as a political force, liberalism always generates forces that want a real democratisation, to go beyond just formal political rights. That's what happened in Europe in the 19th century, in the 1848 revolutions among others - from which Marx started to develop his notion of 'permanent revolution'.
Why is the Soviet Union getting out of Afghanistan? Will the Islamic fundamentalists take over?
THE WITHDRAWAL from Afghanistan should of course be understood in the general framework of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. But the fundamental consideration is domestic. This is the first time since the 2nd World War that Soviet military forces have been seriously engaged outside the Soviet Union. The Soviet population has a tremendous loyalty and respect for the armed forces, but they did not feel happy about the war in Afghanistan. It would be a triumph for Gorbachev in domestic terms if he is able to extricate the Soviet Union from the war. Also the Gorbachev team is very keen to reopen links with China, and Afghanistan is important in that.
It seems that the Soviet leadership is prepared to accept a collapse of the regime in Kabul, but they don't want chaos or a bloodbath of the CP, which is very weak and divided. The Soviets probably want a government where some arrangements can be made with perhaps the old king, or even some forces in the Mujahadeen. Don't forget that the most coherent force in the Mujahadeen is that linked with Iran. I would not be suprised if the diplomatic position taken by the Soviet Union in relation to Iran and the Gulf are connected to attempts to reach a solution to Afghanistan.
What gains for the Soviet Union are there in the INF deai? And why should the Americans be interested in this kind of deal' FOR GORBACHEV it is important internally because it shows that he can sign deals with the US and begin to do business with them again. It is symbolic of the world role of the USSR, and that is important both internally and externally.
The Soviet military regards it as a big victory that the Pershing missiles are being removed. The numbers of missiles removed from each side is not the key thing, the key thing is quality. The Pershing missiles could hit the Soviet Union in a few minutes and give the Soviet leadership no time for a calculated response. So removing them is a big plus.
In addition, the INF deal has opened up a new political process with the West. Vital here are the new relations with West Germany - a new 'Ostpolitik' - that have been opened. Without the Pershings, completely new relations with West Germany are possible. The fact that the American Senate, in defiance of the very powerful ultra-right wing in the US, is prepared to ratify the INF deal - which it would not do at the time of SALT II in 1979 - means that you have the possibility of new economic relations with the United States. And that is vital for the USSR. As far as the US is concerned, although it has not abandoned its attempts militarily and economically to pressurise the Soviet Union, the contradictory thing is that they have to take into account the whole situation of declining US economic and political power. With a new Soviet leadership in power taking many initiatives, the United States government, paradoxically has to put itself at the centre of the dealings with the Soviet government. If it does not, then others like the West Germans will, and this can help the West Germans in their economic competition with the US. It is wrong to see the INF deal and the summit as meaning that a new attitude to the Soviet Union has opened up. On the other hand, even with a 'hawkish' attitude on world affairs, the US cannot remain immobile in its dealings with the Russians.
Is the era of US dominance of the capitalist world over? And if so, will the European capitalist states go forreal economic and political union, the better to fight the Japanese?
THE UNITED STATES remains the overwhelmingly dominant capitalist power, despite economic decline. On the decisive issues be tween the imperialist powers, the United States tends to get its own way. Washington is the overwhelming military and political power. Its military power makes it the decisive political force - in relation to areas of the world like the Middle East and the Pacific. In any case, you should not confuse the domestic US economy with the power of the US-based transnational corporations, which remain immensely economically powertul. The problem with just talking about the decline of Us economic hegemony is what is going to replace it? The dollar may be ir CrISIS - but are we really going to trade on a world scale with the yen? That is a joke. Equally, who is going to police the Middle East for im ›erialism? The Japanese? The West Germans? These are not serious op tions in the short term. And there is one other factor: the relationship ot forces internally, inside the competing capitalist powers. Here, the US so called mad is tor. Pis very and capabled the lear healison the so-called mad factor.
international relation of forces.
Now, as to whether there can be a closer unity of the European states - the drive to a unification symbolised by the 'Single Europe 1992 proposal - this is still an open question. There are powerful political forces driving towards Western European integration, but there are also big objective obstacles to such a thing happening. The different states and the different national capitalist groupings have different interests, and nothing is sorted out from the point of view of deciding what the basic structures of a united Western capitalist Europe might be, and which groups would dominate it.
The other question is whether the United States would favour such a thing or be dead against it. This is a complicated matter. I suspect that sections of US capital with strong interests in Western Europe would tend to favour a more integrated Europe in return for certain trade offs. And of course, let us remember in all this that the US is trying to push the costs of defending Europe, of military expenditure, onto the Europeans. There might be some trade off as far as this is concerned. On the other hand, we should also remember that the biggest single industry in the US is agribusiness, and if European unity means a strengthening of the Common Agricultural Policy, and subsidising European farmers more, then the US would be bitterly against. Again, if one of the trade offs was scrapping the CAP and offering the Americans a deal on food, then that would be another matter. The other really powerful interest to mention, is the whole military-industrial complex, and 1am far from sure they would be happy about a more integrated European weapons industry which could compete on the world stage.
Finally, I am not trying to assert that there is no fierce inter-imperialist competition between the Americans, the Japanese and the Europeans. Of course there is - bitter conflict. But you have to keep a sense of proportion about the US decline.
Thatcher appears to be facing in two different directions: towards putling the alliance with the US above everything else, but at the samı time orientating sharply towards the 1992' option of uniting Europe How do you see this?
WELL OF COURSE Thatcher is caught in a bind. This is a tremendous potential policy crisis of the British state. The whole strategic stance of the British state since MacMillan - that is to say since the early 1960s - has been to try to have its cake and eat it, to go with European unity and the EEC, while maintaining its 'special relationship' with the Americans. lo put it another way, it goes with the Americans on high politics, but it goes with the Europeans on economics - this has been the British state policy.
The essence of this policy is being the number one 'broker between the US and Europe, the best of both worlds. But now Britain is going to be forced, more and more, to choose. How this will turn out, is difficult to say. One option would be for Britain to become the sort of American "Trojan horse' in Europe, going with the Europeans on everything but those crucial questions which affect the US - in return for which Britain could maintain its privileged relationship with the Americans. But there is a really big danger which British capitalism faces. The key economicmilitary forces in Europe are the Germans and the French. The German economy is by far the biggest in Europe. The French have superior military forces to Britain's and an economy which is 30 per cent bigger. A united capitalist Western burope could easily mean a Franco-German Europe with Britain marginalised. The US might conclude that it sumply wanted to deal with the Franco-Germans, rather than the British. But all this is very much open.
Now, Lord Young made a very interesting speech recently about 1992. He said that we do not need a Europe-wide co-operation against terrorism. Now what is the relevance of this? Heis saying that Europeanwide anti-terrorism is really European-wide intelligence co-operationand that means co-operation at the level of the inner-most sanctum of the state. Collaboration by European intelligence networks means breaking the umbilical cord which ties British intelligence to the United States, or to put it another way, the inner chambers of the British state to those of the American state. Intelligence involves making a joint analysis of the world - who are our friends and who are our enemies. The second thing which Lord Young, who is a close personal ally of Thatcher, said is that we should not go into the European Monetary System (EMS), which means going in more with the Europeans. This has been a key fight between Lawson and Thatcher. All this stutt about personality clashes is nonsense. It is about the orientation of British imperialism internationally, and clashes on this always cause a crisis - remember Westland - whereas domestic tactical issues rarely do. The other interesting thing about the clash over EMS of course is that Thatcher has been able to hold the line against great opposition from every sector of the establishment, because of the immense concentration of personal power she has - an interesting question in itself. Is the European working class movement in general retreat? There seem to be left-wing defeats and right-wing governments- bourgeois and social democratic-all over capitalist Europe. Also, trade unionism is declining in many countries, and you have factors like the spectacular decline of the French Communist Party. So are the workers and the left in general retreat?
LET US START with France. You have to take into account that the French right wing have not won the recent elections, on the contrary. The victory of Mitterrand in 1981 was a sea-change in the whole political culture ot France, and you can hardly call this moving to the right. The French workers saw for the first time they had the possibility of taking the government - that is why they rallied around the Socialist Party.
Let us take the issue of the decline of the PCF. The real thing to examine is why did the French CP remain so big in the 1950s and 1960s? Part of the answer is precisely because the working class had no chance of taking power, so the workers rallied around this organisation which they saw as the embodiment of their resistance. So the decline of the French CP in favour of the SP today does not surprise me - it is not a decline, fundamentally, of working class politics. I am not saying, of course, that the formal references of the CP to communism, socialism and all that is of no importance, but it is not the main thing. The really important thing in France is the rise of Le Pen and the National Front. This is the emergence in the French situation of a force which has - like Thatcherism in Britain - no regard at all for the postwar welfare state concensus, and even for that matter for democracy. It is only interested, like some of the very right wing currents in the Tory party, in a sort of formal plebiscitary 'fuhrer democracy. We have to recognise that in Britain you have a real counter-revolutionary project, which is aimed at overthrowing really basic gains of the working class, and a situation in which the right is immensely powerful. But you do not have the same kind of situation in any other country on the continent of Europe.
Central to how Thatcher's project is going to end up of course is what Is going on in the Labour Party, with Kinnock's attempt to reduce it to a sort of plebiscitary beauty contest. If Kinnock wins, then this of course is the victory of Thatcher's project for the Labour Party: the destruction of every last vestige of popular control of any party that can have access to the state - that is what it is all about, the Americanisation of the system.
You have put torward the idea of a 'non-aligned socialist Europe'. Should we be non-aligned between the Soviet Union and the capitalist powers?
I DO NOT SAY a 'non-aligned socialist Europe' - Europe after all includes kussia. What 1 advocateis a socialist non-aligned Western Europ - which means quite simply a Europe outside NATO and the Atlanti Alliance, making new relations with the Soviet bloc, with the eventual aim of uniting the whole of Europe - to put it in classical terms, a United
Socialist States of Europe. There is nothing 'neutralist about that. The left has to start thinking in pan-European strategic terms. During the 1950s and 1960s the working masses in northern Europe saw economic and social progress, basically within the framework of Atlantic Alliance and US leadership. But today, if we consider the big questions facing the masses and the development of civilisation in Western Europe, then this old framework can't possibly promote progress. What are these big issues? The need to promote a new development of the productive forces and the economy; the question of peace and the need to avoid another European war which would be a nuclear war; and the question of the ecological crisis. Now, can these issues be solved under US leadership? Impossible! The US regime is not in the least interested in the economic well-being of the masses in Europe - they want to smash up the old Christian Democratic/Social Democratic welfare states. They are not at all interested in de-militarisation or ecological issues.
There is only one way out of the impasse facing the people of Europe, in a world-historic strategic sense, and that is to tackle the division of Europe. The only realistic project for such a unification is one which would include both the Russians and the Germans, who are the two big national blocs in Europe. Moreover, the real issue of the integration of the various national economies, so that they are complementary and promote a new wave of economic growth is this: it must include both the Germanies, and it must include the Soviet Union. These are the two big, potentially complementary, economic blocs.
I might add that this project has a classical ancestry: it was of course the project of the Bolsheviks, who paid so much attention to the German revolution, at least up until 1923. Actually if many of the barriers be tween the Soviet Union and the West were broken down, even if the West remained capitalist, it could promote economic growth - although of course our project should be for the socialist unification of Europe. The great task for the left is to try to construct an alliance, going right the way across Europe, East and West, around a common programme for tackling these problems. Such a programme must of course include a bedrock of the economic and welfare rights of the the working masses, but it also has centrally to confront the issues of militarism and restrictions on democratic rights. Such a programme can be elaborated at all kinds of levels. I think it would be progressive for the left to call for a planned growth and increase of trade and aid between capitalist Europe and the Soviet bloc.
Of course we shall find great opposition to a pan-European socialist strategy not only from the West European right wing, but also of course
from the Soviet leadership. In their own way, they are also opponents of a united Europe.
Do you think we have the possibility of a 'new' European left alliance around formations like the Juquin committees in France, the Greens in Germany, Democrazia Proletaria in Italy, the VS in Denmark? And should this left fight to reform the Common Market in a socialist direction, rather than just oppose it?
WHAT IS needed in my opinion is first and foremost a united front of mass working class parties and other mass organisations. What we need trade unionists in the car industry, the kind of thing we saw embryonically in the seafarers' strike and so on. This counts for a lot more than a small reorganisation of basically far-left forces - although we might want to promote that as well, it is not the fundamental task. We should promote that united front of mass workers' organisations on any partial, minimum basis in defence of workers' demands. And finally, you cannot construct far-left alliances which cut across that strategic question of the unity of the masses, the basic question of the workers' united front.
Now, despite particular things happening on a national scale, I do not see the basis for any general reorganisation of the far-left on a European scale, some general political axis on which it could be reorganised, some new way forward for the movement. Sure, there are lots of positive things happening, but there is a tremendous lack of coherence in the far-left on a European scale.
On the Common Market, this is a peculiar institution, which finds it very difficult to co-ordinate the interests of the bosses on a European scale. The only thing they can always agree on is measures against the workers - like VAT which is a deeply regressive, anti-working class tax. It is really absurd to think the EEC is a neutral or even mildly biased instrument, which could be switched towards workers' interests. It is an utterly reactionary anti-working class institution. The left should counterpose to it not British nationalism but a workers' socialist programme to fight austerity and militarism, and overcome the economic crisis in the interests of the European masses.