More questions than answers

"The Soviet Union Demystified" is a book by Frank Füredi published in 1986 by Junius, a small left-wing press in Britain associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP were nominally Trotskyist, but their politics were frequently weird and erratic. Today, the ex-RCP call themselves Spiked and are some kind of quasi-right wing libertarians! That being said, I admit that "The Soviet Union Demystified" does sound broadly Trotskyist in its analysis of the Soviet Union. It's also heavily dependent on Hillel Ticktin's analyses of the USSR, published in the Marxist (but anti-Stalinist) journal Critique.

Füredi argues that the Soviet Union is neither capitalist, "state capitalist" nor a new bureaucratic mode of production. It's definitely not socialist. After the death of Lenin and defeat of Trotsky, the bureaucracy (represented by Stalin) transformed the Soviet Union into an artificial system which isn't properly speaking a "mode of production" at all. It lacks a proper economic mechanism for the rational distribution of labour-time. Having neither a capitalist market nor a real plan, the Soviet Union is a stagnant system marked by a combination of complete chaos and bureaucratic attempts to curb it. There is a tendency towards decomposition into small, autarkic units with each company being forced to fend for itself when the "plans" constantly malfunction. At the same time, the central bureaucracy attempts (with varying degrees of success) to whip the individual companies into line through administrative pressure from above. This contradiction between bureaucratic fiat and sheer disorder is impossible to solve without overthrowing the bureaucracy and the introduction of "workers' management". How on earth *that* would improve anything, is much less clear... Füredi assumes that the failure of planning means that a better plan must be devised. But what if the failure of a strictly centralized planning is due to the strictly centralized planning itself? This is never contemplated by our Marxist author.

In other chapters, Füredi argues that the bureaucracy isn't a ruling class in the "Marxist" sense of that term, but he never explains what it might be instead. He toys with the idea that the working class in the Soviet Union is somehow different from the working class in the capitalist nations, but this is unconvincing in the extreme. An extensive section of the book argues that the Soviet bureaucracy is fundamentally conservative, that the United States started the Cold War, and that the revolutions in the Third World weren't the result of Soviet influence, but happened because of American weakness. The Soviets simply stepped into the vacuum. Here, too, the analysis is broadly Trotskyist.

"The Soviet Union Demystified" strikes me as oddly parochial. What about China, Vietnam, Cuba and similar societies? Why aren't they analyzed? And what about "Eastern" Europe? The working class in Hungary 1956 or in Poland 1980-81 certainly acted as any typical angry working class! Yet, the mode of production (or lack of it) in "Eastern" Europe was surely similar to the system in the Soviet Union. Or does Füredi believe that Polish workers actually are workers, whereas Soviet workers are a new kind of underclass? This reminds me of Ticktin's scholarly parochialism - Ticktin, after all, once said that he couldn't comment on the situation in the Baltic Soviet republics, since he only studied the Moscow region!

What about the future of the Soviet Union? The book was published in 1986, only five years before the collapse of the USSR. Füredi didn't see it coming - perhaps he can be excused on this point, since nobody else did either! The author treats Gorbachev as just another Soviet leader desperately trying to reform a system that just can't be made to work. However, he doesn't seem to believe in an internal, revolutionary upheaval among Soviet proletarians, finally ushering "workers' management". In fact, it's not clear at all how Füredi believes that the Soviet regime will eventually fall. He simply says that its fate might be decided by international factors. But which are they? The arms race? A foreign invasion? The defeat of the Third World revolutions? It's curious that Füredi never predicts that the Soviet command economy will simply collapse under its own weight, which is arguably what actually happened. One would also like to see a closer analysis of China. In contrast to the ever-stagnant Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping's China launched successful economic reforms. Why this crucial difference? Why could China, but not the Soviet Union, be reformed if the bureaucratic system is fundamentally non-reformable?

Since the author (who was actually the main leader of the RCP) has left Marxism or Trotskyism behind in favour of weird libertarianism, I suppose we will never get an answer to these questions. But then, perhaps we can make up some answers for ourselves? ;-)