Communist Experience Research Articles

The Limited Impact of Communist and Democratic Socio-Legal Experiences

The Limited Impact of Communist and Democratic Socio-Legal Experiences

Samuel Huntington and Communist Civil-Military Relations

Contrary to Huntington's hypothesis, analysis suggests that the relationship between the party-political apparatus and line elements of the armed forces of the former Soviet Union and the former German Democratic Republic was less confrontational and more symbiotic. In the USSR, Huntington's subjective control measures accurately described the situation that existed during the early 1920s. However, as Soviet officers internalized the regime's value structure, the relationship became more symbiotic and was increasingly characterized by what he called objective control measures. In the case of East Germany's National People's Army, the relationship between political and line officers was never as confrontational as Huntington expected. To encompass the communist experiment, Huntington's model would have to be modified to take into account the fact that subjective control measures can change into objective ones over time. The nature of civil-military relations in communist countries was more dynamic than Huntington assumed.

Russian Cinema in the Free-Market Realm

RUSSIAN CINEMA IN THE FREE-MARKET REALM: STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL For a motto of this article I would like to paraphrase the title of Werner Herzog's 1974 film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle(1) (Every Man for Himself and God Against All) to read: Every Director for Himself and the Free Market Against All. The Hungarian-born social economist and philosopher Karl Polanyi provides a useful theoretical framework for the current situation in post-Communist national cinemas. In his ground-breaking work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944) he critiques the inherent tendency of an all powerful market to subordinate and manipulate society. His famous dictum "laissez-faire was planned, central planning was not" rings more true today on the basis of post Communist experience, than at the time he wrote his book between the wars.(2) Polanyi has consistently warned against the dangers of separation...

The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE JUNE 1956 UPRISING IN POZNAN', Solidarity labor leaders in that city unveiled a monument to those who died in that struggle; two massive crosses, lashed together, were emblazoned with five dates of popular struggle against communism: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. At least until recently, every Pole knew the meaning of this litany of dates and could connect them to the seemingly inevitable fall of communism. Indeed, the history of the Polish People's Republic is framed largely by the drama of Polish resistance. Towering over the nation both literally and figuratively, that series of monumental dates has forced postwar Polish history into a rather tight teleology. The events of those years seem to accelerate and build on one another until they culminate in the victory of a presumably informed and organized society in 1988-1989. Poland was the site of the most sustained and articulate resistance to state communism anywhere in the world. No case is better .documented or more evidently central to the fall of communism. These events of resistance are the most compelling-and hopefulmoments in the otherwise gray era of communist rule, in Poland or elsewhere. The events of the last decade have challenged many assumptions about the communist experience in Europe. While some questions-about the nature of "revolution" and "transition," or about desires for democracy and the free market-are already the focus of new academic subfields, the central question of opposition to communism remains largely unexamined. Who participated, and why? What effect did opposition have on the communist regimes? How should historians evaluate the experience of opposition? Surely it is impossible to understand either communism or its fall if we do not know what opposition in fact was. The Poznan' monument is emblematic of the difficulty of studying Polish resistance to communism. As monolithic as opposition may seem fifteen or twenty-five years later, it was not experienced the same way by all Poles, even all Polish workers. In fact, divisions in Polish society were no less than those that

The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE JUNE 1956 UPRISING IN POZNAN', Solidarity labor leaders in that city unveiled a monument to those who died in that struggle; two massive crosses, lashed together, were emblazoned with five dates of popular struggle against communism: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. At least until recently, every Pole knew the meaning of this litany of dates and could connect them to the seemingly inevitable fall of communism. Indeed, the history of the Polish People's Republic is framed largely by the drama of Polish resistance. Towering over the nation both literally and figuratively, that series of monumental dates has forced postwar Polish history into a rather tight teleology. The events of those years seem to accelerate and build on one another until they culminate in the victory of a presumably informed and organized society in 1988-1989. Poland was the site of the most sustained and articulate resistance to state communism anywhere in the world. No case is better .documented or more evidently central to the fall of communism. These events of resistance are the most compelling-and hopefulmoments in the otherwise gray era of communist rule, in Poland or elsewhere. The events of the last decade have challenged many assumptions about the communist experience in Europe. While some questions-about the nature of revolution and transition, or about desires for democracy and the free market-are already the focus of new academic subfields, the central question of opposition to communism remains largely unexamined. Who participated, and why? What effect did opposition have on the communist regimes? How should historians evaluate the experience of opposition? Surely it is impossible to understand either communism or its fall if we do not know what opposition in fact was. The Poznan' monument is emblematic of the difficulty of studying Polish resistance to communism. As monolithic as opposition may seem fifteen or twenty-five years later, it was not experienced the same way by all Poles, even all Polish workers. In fact, divisions in Polish society were no less than those that

What Is Cultural Revolution?

Old historical paradigms never die; they are simplified and codified in textbooks. The collapse of Soviet Union has prompted many historians to reassess Communist experience. Those who discuss cultural revolution, however, continue to treat problem-one crucial in both Russian Revolution and Western understandings of early Soviet period-in ways that have been dominant in Anglo-American scholarship since late 1970s. First, we are taught, cultural revolution was an episode largely bounded by years of First Five-Year Plan. One new account predictably begins topic with Shakhty trial of 1928 and associates cultural revolution solely with a few selected themes from years that followed: purging of intelligentsia, proletarian episode in literature, vydvizhenie.' Secondly, when understandings of cultural revolution on part of historical actors are discussed at all, a familiar opposition is drawn between Lenin's definition, frequently reduced to mass education and cultivation of civilized behavior, and sudden and abrupt introduction of militant class-war definitions after 1928. Another new account, while discussing that 1920s dichotomy, explains that 1928-31 period in culture and literature came to be known as 'Cultural Revolution' -neglecting to add that it acquired that label only in Western scholarship circa 1978!2 Ubiquitous references to the cultural revolution of 1928-31, in both general histories and specialized scholarship, convey impression that we are dealing with a concrete, particular phenomenon or even periodization. The title of this article, in contrast, deliberately recalls perennial cursed of Russian revolutionary movement, such as Who is to blame? What is to be done? and, most evocatively, What is intelligentsia? To debate such questions was to talk at once about transforming

Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950

The first book to examine the communist takeover in Poland from the bottom up, and the first to use archives opened in 1989, Rebuilding Poland provides a radically new interpretation of the communist experience. Padraic Kenney argues that the postwar takeover was also a social revolution, in which workers expressed their hopes for dramatic social change and influenced the evolution-and eventual downfall-of the communist regime. Kenney compares Loedz, Poland's largest manufacturing center, and Wroclaw, a city rebuilt as Polish upon the ruins of wartime destruction. His account of dramatic strikes in the textile mills of Loedz shows how workers resisted the communist party's encroachment on factory terrain and its infringements of worker dignity. The contrasting absence of labor conflict among migrants in the frontier city of Wroclaw holds important clues to the nature of stalinism in Poland: communist power was strongest where workers lacked organizational ties or cultural roots. In the collective reaction of workers in Loedz and the individualism of those in Wroclaw, Kenney locates the beginnings of the end of the communist regime. Losing the battle for worker identity, the communists placed their hopes in labor competition, which ultimately left the regime hostage to a resistant work force and an overextended economy incapable of reform.

Relations among Sociopolitical Values in Eastern Europe: Effects of the Communist Experience?

Studies of values around the world have revealed that a world at peace, social justice, and equality (universalism values) are ordinarily opposed motivationally to social order and national security (security values). We first establish that these sociopolitical values exhibit an unusual pattern of compatibility in East European samples from eight countries (N = 2770). This pattern suggests a shared meaning for the sociopolitical values similar to that of conformity values and opposed to that of self-direction values. We then hypothesize that this unusual meaning of sociopolitical values reflects the experience of living under East European communist regimes. Comparison of the value priorities of opponents and supporters of the communist regime in Poland supports this hypothesis. Implications for the nature and speed of value change are discussed.

The Rectifying Revolutions? Organizational Futures in the New Eastern Europe

The democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe were united in what they were opposing, but contained diverse visions of organizational futures. Whilst their leaders claimed to be rejoining the path of western modernity, a view echoed in Habermas's notion of the `rectifying revolutions', past communist experience structures the shape of emergent organizational forms. The transformation encounters problems of the scale of privatization and of creating capitalism by democratic design, whilst social costs are accumulating. The state, weakly embedded in society, confronts a legacy of ambiguous property relations in which the former nomenklatura, workers' collectives and other stakeholders struggle for control of the transformation. The fate of democratization and the shape of the new organizational modernity will depend on the outcomes of these conflicts.

In Memoriam

Annie Kriegel died on August 26, 1995 at age 69. She had fought cancer for almost two decades so successfully that her friends had come to believe she would always win. This time, she did not, and she had to leave us before becoming old. Annie had perhaps the satisfaction of knowing she had achieved what she had set out to do: understanding two of the twentieth century's most tragic events-the communist experience and the fate of the Jewish people.

A perspective on solidarity in a ‘post-socialist’ world

The dissolution of the Soviet Union following the August 1991 coup detat concluded the Bolshevik experiment to bring about socialism ‘from without’ and realise a society unencumbered by the ‘logic of capital’. It reflects the failure of communism to engineer human emancipation and rationally dominate nature. Conservatives have heralded the ‘end of socialism’ as such, rejoicing in claims of the ‘fulfilment of history’ in liberal, capitalist democracy, preferably that of the American persuasion. A number of socialists have acquiesced to the ‘capitalist victory’ and have jettisoned their hopes for the emancipatory potential of any ‘socialist project’.’ Save for a few exceptions* discussion within the democratic Left that puts the communist experiment into the historical perspective of the long tradition of democratic socialism has yet to emerge. The continued silence of the democratic Left3 must be broken with the unmistakenly clear rejection of a narrow economic definition of socialism as ‘socialisation plus planned economy’. Socialism, understood as the complete ‘abolition of the commodity form’-a utopian ‘other’ to some form of market economy-has indeed come to an end. At the same time, the end of Soviet totalitarianism has vindicated the democratic tradition of socialist figures like Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Jean Jaurb and Olof Palme. Democratic socialism remains the sole heir to the Enlightenment ethos of the socialist movement, an ethos that always championed the approximation of the liberal ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity that still await a wider expansion in capitalist society. Starting with demands for democracy in all aspects of life, this socialist ethos defines ‘socialism as a movement toward, or the state of, a cooperative order of society’.4 In a move reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller’s restoration of an ethical totality that would protect the moral and economic autonomy of individuals from the atomising and dehumanising tendencies of a bourgeois-capitalist society,5 social democracy has emphasised ‘civic’ instead of ‘bourgeois’ values, seeking to ‘continuously uplift the worker from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citoyen, thus universalising citizenship’.6 Social democracy has developed into a reformist ‘people’s party’ that formulates socialist objectives within a language of rights and ethics. The market is taken for granted, and the critique of the capitalist production process has given way to questions that centre on a more equitable distribution of the social product. In the Scandinavian case, despite its achievements, this development has led to a form of a welfare-state Keynesian socialism, currently under attack from neo-classical supply-side forces. Working class cohesion has ceased to be

Radical Transitions: The Survival and Revival of Entrepreneurship in the GDR

This is a study of entrepreneurship under communist rule in the GDR. It sets out to show how the private sector made the initial transistion from a capitalist to a socialist society after World War II, was integrated into the socialist system that prevailed until 1989, and then developed in the rapid transition to a market new socioeconomic order. Exploring the continuing relevance of the lessons to be learned from the communist experiment in social engineering, the book also discusses how these lessons can be applied to the current radical transformation of the East German political economy.

The Meaning of the Communist Experience

Review of Socialist Register 1991: Communist Regimes: The Aftermath edited by Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Die Philosophie und das Marxsche Erbe

What is the fate of philosophy as the spiritual weapon of the proletariat in changing reality when it is clear that the communist experiment has failed? The question pertains above all to the heritage of Marx's theory, not to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The latter are party-inspired and -dominated and aspire to be schools of philosophy, whereas Marx did not seek to create a philosophy but to realize philosophy in the material world. For Marx, philosophy and emancipation go hand in hand: man is emancipated when philosophy is realized in the world. The fate of the Marxian idea is set off against the development of dialectical materialist philosophy and Marxist social theory. In this way, the ground is laid for the conclusion that what is properly philosophical in Marx is restricted to a philosophy of history attendant on a theory of economic development. The conclusion is subject to the caveat that as yet unpublished notes by Marx about the true nature of dialectic may in fact reveal a more far-reaching philosophical conception. The realization of philosophy seems like a romantic illusion against the background of the events in Germany in autumn 1989. The working masses have elected capital as the basis of their future social existence, thus putting paid to the Marxian theme of class struggle. The fundamental conclusion is that Marx's vision of the task of philosophy is vitiated by a deep-rooted ambivalence: on one hand it is the ‘head’ of emancipation but on the other hand it neglects, indeed supresses, historical details, as shown by the example of the dialectic of class struggle and class exchange. This kind of suppression, neglect, comes to the fore in Marx's writing whenever he substitutes his romantic vision of the deprived proletariat for social science. This blind eye to detail is at the root of the later ideologization of Marxist theory and its subordination to local party interests.

Cuba, Latin America, and the communist experience: A comparative note

Cuba, Latin America, and the communist experience: A comparative note

Unions and the Popular Front: The West Coast Waterfront in the 1930s

Recent discussions of the history of American communism have generated a good deal of controversy. A youthful generation of “new social historians” has combined with veterans of the Communist party to produce a portrait of the Communist experience in the United States which posits a tension between the Byzantine pursuit of the “correct line” at the top and the impulses and needs of members at the base trying to cope with a complex reality. In the words of one of its most skillful practitioners, “the new Communist history begins with the assumption that … everyone brought to the movement expectations, traditions, patterns of behavior and thought that had little to do with the decisions made in the Kremlin or on the 9th floor of the Communist Party headquarters in New York.” The “new” historians have focused mainly on the lives of individuals, the relationship between communism and ethnic and racial subcultures, and the effort to build the party's influence within particular unions and working-class constituencies. Overall, the portrait has been critical but sympathetic and has served to highlight the party's “human face” and the integrity of its members.

Unions and the Popular Front: The West Coast Waterfront in the 1930s

Recent discussions of the history of American communism have generated a good deal of controversy. A youthful generation of “new social historians” has combined with veterans of the Communist party to produce a portrait of the Communist experience in the United States which posits a tension between the Byzantine pursuit of the “correct line” at the top and the impulses and needs of members at the base trying to cope with a complex reality. In the words of one of its most skillful practitioners, “the new Communist history begins with the assumption that … everyone brought to the movement expectations, traditions, patterns of behavior and thought that had little to do with the decisions made in the Kremlin or on the 9th floor of the Communist Party headquarters in New York.” The “new” historians have focused mainly on the lives of individuals, the relationship between communism and ethnic and racial subcultures, and the effort to build the party's influence within particular unions and working-class constituencies. Overall, the portrait has been critical but sympathetic and has served to highlight the party's “human face” and the integrity of its members.

Unions and the Popular Front: The West Coast Waterfront in the 1930s

Recent discussions of the history of American communism have generated a good deal of controversy. A youthful generation of “new social historians” has combined with veterans of the Communist party to produce a portrait of the Communist experience in the United States which posits a tension between the Byzantine pursuit of the “correct line” at the top and the impulses and needs of members at the base trying to cope with a complex reality. In the words of one of its most skillful practitioners, “the new Communist history begins with the assumption that … everyone brought to the movement expectations, traditions, patterns of behavior and thought that had little to do with the decisions made in the Kremlin or on the 9th floor of the Communist Party headquarters in New York.” The “new” historians have focused mainly on the lives of individuals, the relationship between communism and ethnic and racial subcultures, and the effort to build the party's influence within particular unions and working-class constituencies. Overall, the portrait has been critical but sympathetic and has served to highlight the party's “human face” and the integrity of its members.

The American Communist Party in Its Heyday: A Case of Premature Eurocommunism?

Each generation rewrites the history of its era as a guide to a remolded future. In no field has this been more self-consciously the case than in that worked over by historians of the American left. Little more than a decade ago, for example, young scholars found the Industrial Workers of the World nearly irresistible. Perhaps there was something about Wobbly spontaneity and social iconoclasm, their very political marginality, that distantly mirrored the passions and hopes generated in the 1960s. In these days of industrial decline and conservative drift, the romantic Wob blies are not much in vogue. The possibilities open to the left seem more prosaic: halt the decline of the unions, temper the arms race, begin a reconstruction of the old liberal-labor alliance. Utopian and revolutionary visions, whether of 1917, 1932 or 1968 now seem anachronistic, even embarrassing, while foreign models of social ist reconstruction hold little interest. Neither Moscow nor Havana brings much inspiration, and only the long neglected social democratic movements of Western Europe ? whether in their Eurosocialist or Eurocommunist forms ? attract much excitement. It is out of this decade's rather sober political landscape that a remarkably positive r??valuation of the Communist experience in American life has emerged. For here was a movement which at its height in the 1930s and 1940s enrolled upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 members, won the respect of a wide strata of liberals and progressives, and perhaps most importantly made its weight felt in the new industrial unions and on the broad terrain of national politics. Two new books by Harvey Levenstein and Maurice Isserman are particularly symptomatic of this retro spectively appreciative 1980s mood. Making use of extensive archival resources, including the heretofore unopened Earl Browder papers, both volumes are scho larly but not detached, and each uses the Communist past to search for answers to contemporary dilemmas. Isserman r??valu?tes the Party's experience during World

A Critique of Western Medical Commentary on the People's Republic of China

The American medical literature generally has given favorable reviews to the Chinese Communist experiment, which has often been credited with astonishing, unprecedented achievements in public health. Improvements are explicitly attributed to the Chinese political system, despite its acknowledged shortcomings from an American perspective. A survey of articles about Chinese medicine discloses numerous scientific flaws, eg, inadequate sampling, biased reporting, inappropriate attribution of causal relationships, lack of suitable controls, and ablation of conflicting data. The promulgation of such errors results in part from imprecise euphemistic language.