The Future of Socialism?

Abstract

On Sunday evening February 4, the largest Soviet protest demonstration in more than seventy years was held in Moscow to demand the end of the Communist party's monopoly over political power. Naturally, one cannot fail to have noticed that the event was called on the eve of the opening of a meeting of the party's Central Committee, where President Mikhail Gorbachev was widely rumored to plan to call for the end of the one party state. At the demonstration of 200,000, some people carried signs with the simple phrase 1990, an unmistakable reference to the February, 1917 revolution. 1 Some Russians were hoping that the unfulfilled promise of that democratic uprising, cut short by the Bolshevik October would be redeemed. Nevertheless, even if the demonstration was not oppositional to the leading party group's program, recalling the February revolution in which the popular goal was to establish a republic, a multiparty political system, civil liberties, and greater popular participation in processes of governance implied a severe critique of the Great October Revolution, which introduced the principle of proletarian dictatorship, a complex doctrine in whose name the Soviet state and party oligarchy ruled in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's call for a multiparty political system and for the return of limited market relations has followed a year during which all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. The explanations for this astonishing turn of events are, by now, fairly well known: the palpable failure of really existing socialist economies to meet the basic needs of the underlying population, especially after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund eliminated loans to many countries in the mid '80s; visible corruption by a decrepit oligarchy softened by generations of largely unchallenged power; the disaffection of intellectuals after Khruschev's downfall in 1964 and, more comprehensively, after the brief spark of Czech socialism with a human face was ruthlessly snuffed out by Soviet tanks in 1968; and, of course, the surfacing of the unresolved nationalities question, particularly within the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Most of these weaknesses might have been controlled and displaced if the working classes of Eastern Europe had not demonstrated their own impatience and protest. Beyond the well-known Polish Solidarity movement which holds majority government power today, Soviet Miners and Czech and East German workers developed their own grievances which became the basis for strikes and demonstrations.