Dissecting the Failure of Soviet 'Socialism'
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- Published on Monday, 18 May 2015 23:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1118 .... May 19, 2015
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Dissecting the Failure of Soviet ‘Socialism’
John Riddell
In current discussions of twenty-first century socialism, the work of Michael Lebowitz has a unique merit: it is rooted in the experience of Cuba and Venezuela, where efforts in recent decades to move toward socialism have been the most vigorous. Quotations from Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez set the tone.
Lebowitz's vision of the path to a socialist future is developed in several recent volumes (see "Selective Bibliography," below). His Contradictions of "Real Socialism", by contrast, analyzes the failure of the most concerted attempt to launch a transition to socialism, which took place in the Soviet Union and, after 1945, in allied states in Eastern Europe. As late as the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was... widely hailed for setting the pace in economic growth among industrialized countries. But already its dynamism was flagging. Its downhill course from sputnik (the world's first artificial satellite, 1957) to zastoy (stagnation) and collapse took only 34 years.
Lebowitz maintains that this failure was caused not by adverse objective conditions but by productive relations justified by a wrong theory -- "a distortion that forgot about human beings." Paraphrasing Che Guevara, he insists that "to build socialism it is essential, along with building new material foundations, to build new human beings." This cannot be done from above, by a state, Lebowitz says. "Only through their own activities through autonomous organizations -- at the neighbourhood, community and national levels -- can people transform both circumstances and themselves," he adds, quoting from an essay he wrote as the USSR staggered toward collapse in 1990.