GORBACHEV'S
What attitude should marxists take to the radical changes taking place in the
The emergence of a reforming wing of the Soviet bureaucracy, personified by Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the major events in world history since World War bureaucracy and for world politics, It follows that the left has a responsibility to try to come to grips with what is going on, study events and eschow simplistic and partial explanations.
While net engaging in unreasoning condemnation, we also have to avoid cheap 'Gorbymama"
is sweeping sections of the left.
It is universally recognised that the Gorhachey project - perestrika and glasnost is a response to the growing crisis of Soviet society:
more precisely to the economic.
political and cultural stagnation which has heen more and more ohvious throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. What is the basic cause of this crisis?
The cconomic crisis is a crisis of the system of bureaucratic central planning, compounded by a budgetary crisis of the first magnitude. Economic growth rates have been declining, and the waste and inefficiency which this lumbering system gives rise to have become crippling. While the system evolved under Stalin and Khruschev has guaranteed quantitative growth in heavy industry and the production of raw materials cin which the Sovict Union is especially rich) it has been unable to produce the innovative dynamism to maintain high growth rates and regularlyto upgrade the quality of production, Trotsky in
The Revolution Betrayed pointed out that bureaucratic rule inevitably produces economic inefficiency and inertia, and inevitably poor quality of production.
the United States has set out to deliberately financially crippple the Soviets through the arms race. The Soviet Union has devoted a much higher percentage of its GDP to defence than does the z ш
The stakes involved in the process which has been unleashed for the Russian workers, for the Soviet
The Soviet crisis has been intensified by two factors. First.
I
Soviet Union
GAMBLE
Soviet Union? PHIL HEARSE offers some answers.
sion and provision of cheap basic necessities.
foreign policy.
Second, the massive state subsidies on hasic goods and services - housing. transport, food and so on - have also created a huge financial and budgetary burden. The later was directly the product of the reforms of the Khruschey era. which aimed at securing at least the grudging acquiescence of core sectors of the
Soviet working class, through a combination of political repres-
Of course. the fact that the basics of life were provided cheaply did not make the burcaucratic regime after Khruschev proworker" - far from it. These concessions made to the working class on the cconomic front were a recognition of the enormous social weight of the Soviet working class, and were part of a strategy designed to sccur the continued rule of the bureaucracy, by trying to avoid major outbursts of working class discontent. Nonetheless.
the living standards of the Soviet workers remained far behind those in the west.
Gorbachev and the ruling wing of the political elite have now decided tomake a break with the system as it evolved under
Khruschey and Brezhnev. although they are divided on the speed and extent of the reforms.
Their basic proposals are:
• To attempt a re-engagement of the Soviet economy with the world capitalist ceonomy, in an attempt to develop trade, and to obtain advanced technology and cconomic assistance, on much better terms: This involves trying to obtain a new world-wide political arrangement with the capitalist west, a drastic shill in
Perestroika - cconomic restructuring. This envisages the utilisation of market relations much more widely: the ending of job security and cheap basic goods for the working class; an attempt to assess the efficiency of enterprisies through profit and loss accounting: the establishment of a private sector of small and medium-sized businesses; the removal of asoction of the administrative bureaucracy. although not of the political bureaucracy, Overall these proposals are aimed at shaking up
economic lethargy and the worst excesses of administrative in• Glasnost - the introduction of a limited political liberalisation, inside the party and outside, allowing more communication in society at large, and a degroe - although strictly limited - of public politival debate and argument. This also includes elections for some posts inside the party and state apparatus, and a limited term of office for some state officials.
Where Gorbachev's project has not created just mindiess enthusiasm on the left, it has often gencrated perplexity. Is not Gorhachev's