Monday, August 12, 2019

A perestroika era look at capitalism, socialism, and democracy (1 of 2)

This year we're getting retrospectives of the Revolutions of 1989, when Soviet-model socialist governments in eastern Europe entered the political crises that finally ended them.

I'll make a tiny contribution here by discussing a long essay I finally got around to reading that had been in my mental queue for a while. It's a German translation of an essay by a dissident Soviet writer, Juri Burtin, Die Achillesferse der Marxschen Geschichtstheorie ["The Achilles Heel of the Marxist Theory of History"] that appeared in the annual journal Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 13 (1991), then published in East Germany for the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. Burtin's essay was first published in the USSR in 1989.

I was interested in it as an example of someone examining the changes during a huge transitional moment in the socialist world.

I have to admit Burtin's essay was a somewhat disappointing experience. The most engaging thing about it was to disaggregate the various strands of the argument. It reads to me like the work of a committee, or like a discussion by three main participants that was summarized by someone else into an article using a single voice. One of the participants argues that Marxism was a dynamic democratic theory that has continuing significance and application. Another argues that, okay, the whole thing sounded good a century ago but it missed pretty much everything that was important. Another one is looking for a gig as an advocate for neoliberal, "free-market" radical reform in socialist countries. All combined into one by by feature writer that tosses in some dignified coffee-table-book reference to make it all sound sensibly important.

It is a transition piece in that it tries to argue for the complete failure across the board of Marxist thinking while trying to frame it in the traditional Soviet style of proceeding from Marxist premises in developing the argument.

Since Burtin is trying to argue on a Marxist theoretical basis, he praises Marx and Engels toward the end as incredible geniuses when it came to analyzing the developments of their own time and finds them thoroughly committed to democracy. But he also argues that they were massively deceived about the nature of capitalism and that the path their embraced inevitably leads to dictatorship, even one-person dictatorship.

We might say that it's not an entirely consistent picture. Not even in a "dialectical" sense. Although he does make some effort to present it that way, also not very convincingly.

I'm doing this in two separate posts. This one focuses on ...

Democracy

Burtin makes a version of the democratic determinist argument so popular among Western neoconservatives at the time, which is that capitalism inherently tends to produce liberal democracy:
... die für Diktatoren aller Zeiten und Volker „überflüssige" Demokratie eine Lebensbedingung der modernen Gesellschaft - nicht mehr und nicht weniger -; sie ist ebenso nötig wie Luft und Wasser. (S. 197)

... the democracy that for dictators of all times and peoples is "superfluous" is no more and no less the condition for life of modern society; it is just as necessary as air and water.
(All translations from the German in this post are mine.)

This was the era that spawned celebratory optimism about the definitive triumph of both Western-style liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" gave this view its iconic name. It was appealing for for advocates of the neoliberal position on economics that came to be known as the "Washington Consensus" because it allowed them to argue that spreading conservative economics and corporate-deregulation trade treaties would promote conditions leading to liberal democratic governance and its maintenance.

In 2019, in the times of Putin and Orbán, Bolsonaro and Modi, Trump and Salvini, the notion that liberal democracy is inevitably advancing in the world seems downright quaint.

But people in 1989 didn't need 30 years of future vision to have reservations about that idea. The 19th century examples of Britain and the United States could support that understanding. But capitalism was also developing in France and Germany, the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires, and they don't fit as well into the framework of liberal democracy being inevitably produced by capitalism. The Italian Fascist and German Nazi regimes were both brutal examples of capitalist countries with non-democratic regimes. Both also provide dramatic cases of big capitalist interests decided they thought democracy was not in their interest.

And the brand of neoliberal capitalism that became the standard for the "end of history" was pioneered and tested in the military dictatorships of Chile (1974-90) and Argentina (1976-83). No, the necessary link between democracy and capitalism is not self-evident.

But in 2019, this provides a nostalgic take as an argument for democracy:
Was nun die eigentliche Demokratie betrifft, so genügt es zu ihrer Charakterisierung vielleicht, sich an einen einzigen Fakt zu erinnern - Watergate, die Geschichte, wie der „Durchschnittsamerikaner", gekrankt durch die Unehrenhaftigkeit seines Prasidenten, diesen aus dem WeiBen Haus verjagte. (S. 198)

[As for democracy, perhaps it suffices here to characterize it by remembering a single fact - Watergate, the story of how the "average American," sickened by the dishonorable conduct of his President, chased him out of the White House.]
Yes, in 1989, America's willingness to use the impeachment process to force out a criminal President could be used as an obvious argument for the value of democracy. Nixon's resignation was only 15 years in the past then. Thirty years later, American democracy isn't looking quite so robust in the face of far more serious misconduct by the White House's current occupant.

The parts of the essay on democracy are basically a polemic against the idea that concentrated wealth, class realities, or oligarchical corruption can put any meaningful constraints on democracy. And therefore for the idea that it's illegitimate to talk about such problems restricting democracy.

Burtin actually makes a Burkean argument about democracy, nominally democratic but actually reactionary. Since he's framing the argument in terms of historical Marxism, he discusses Marxist and Leninist concepts of democracy and makes ritual invocations of "the classics of Marxism" (194)

He simultaneously argues that Marx and Engels had a radical democratic perspective and that their perspective was fundamentally anti-democratic:
Der Kern meines Gedankens besteht darin, daB wir Menschen am Ende des 20.Jahrhunderts in einer Welt Ieben, die schlecht oder gut sein mag, die aber von der, auf deren Boden die ldeen nicht nur von Marx, sondern auch von Lenin geboren wurden, wie der Himmel von der Erde entfernt ist. (S. 205)

[The core of my thought is that at the end of the 20th century we humans live in a world that may be bad or good, but on whose soil the ideas born not only from Marx but also by Lenin, are as far removed as the heavens from the earth.]
Burtin makes what amounts to a conventional Cold War commentary on the Marxist concept of "dictatorship of the proletarian". Here the broad theoretical argument about Marxism as an economic-social-political worldview is complicated by the particular forms the workers' state took in the Soviet bloc and China and related systems. In the 19th century, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was connected with the Marxist notion that government under capitalism functions as a de facto dictatorship of the capitalist class. The broad social-democrtic and Marxist goal then was to fight for parliamentary democracy with the goal of achieving control of the governmental organization and reorient it to policies in the interest of the working class and the establishment of socialism. In the classical Marxist conception, this would be a government representing the majority that would have to resort to "dictatorial" means in the case that the capitalist opposition would attempt to overthrow the democratic government by force.

The concept of the "withering away of the state" identified with Engels that also engendered much discussion, controversy, and a flood of polemics over the last couple of centuries is also related to the classical Marxist definition as the state as an instrument of class control. Once classes in the historical sense are abolished, a state in the sense of a mechanism of class domination would no longer exist. Public administration would still be needed, including very complex types. But that would not be a "state" in the previous sense.

(If anyone feels inspired to run down Frederick Engels’s version of this, it’s in Anti-Dühring, Part 3 (Socialism) Chapter 2 (Theoretical), where he writes that in the transition to socialism, The proletariat [working class] seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.“)

It's safe to say that the general understanding of what governments ("states") are today would also view administration of a classless society as a "state". If those 19th-century concepts seem quircky in contemporary terms, I would argue that that is also related to how Marx and Engels translated the Hegelian notion of the end of history. It wasn't because they were engaging in fuzzy utopianism, as Burtin heavily insinuates.

It was also a matter of practical discussion in Engels' time what form the democratic state should take, i.e., the social democrats tended to favor a unitary parliamentary government and weren't especially fond of Madisonian-Montesquieuian notions of separation of power and checks-and-balances, which also provide a supply of quotes that can be used polemically in Burtin's style of polemics.

Burtin's gauzy theoretical arguments on those historical concepts say nothing particularly meaningful about the real existing democratic deficits in the socialist countries of 1989. And his treatment of the history of democratic concepts is interesting as an example of an 1989 attempt at theoretically understanding an important transitional historical moment. But as historical arguments, they are notably lacking.

No comments:

Post a Comment