Marxism and ‘Really Existing Socialism’

Abstract

What is the connection between the Soviet system, as developed under Stalin and as modified since his death, and the socialism envisaged by Marx? That there are differences is, of course, both obvious and inevitable, and this for several reasons. Firstly, Marx nowhere systematically set out any ‘blueprint’ of a socialist future, and indeed considered such exercises to be futile and even reactionary. His refusal to give any detailed description of a future world was no doubt part of his sincere conviction that his ideas on socialism were quite distinct from those whom he called utopian socialists. Secondly, Marx has been dead for over a hundred years, and even his most fervent and uncritical admirers would agree that this great man could not foresee all that was to come, computers to nuclear weapons included. Quite evidently he would have modified his doctrines in the light of experience, including the experience of socialist planning. Thirdly, since he could not modify his doctrines after his death, we must, unless we are incurable dogmatist believers, perform this task ourselves: which of Marx’s ideas on socialism appear to be contradictory or unreal, given the experience of ‘really existing socialism’? Only then might it be possible to develop a critique of such socialism in Marxist terms.

Written in 1984 and published in 1986 by Harwood Academic Publishers, as a volume in the Marxian Economics section of Pure and applied economics, this essay would now have to take into account the increasingly frank public discussion of Marx and of socialism that one finds in the press of the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland and China. A whole number of authors point openly to the utopian or erroneous views of Marx and Engels about socialism, especially with regard to markets (‘commodity production’). Lenin is no longer regarded as sacrosanct, though direct criticism is still rare. The question can be and is directly asked: which of the doctrines inherited from the Founding Fathers are relevant today and which can be seen as mistaken? Also the applicability of the term ‘class’ to Soviet society, the nature of the bureaucracy, its relationship to the party apparat, can be freely discussed in a challenging way. Indeed, it is now possible to envisage the publication of such a paper as this in Moscow, which shows how glasnost’ has stretched the boundaries of the permissible.