The Soviet Union Versus Socialism
Noam Chomsky
Our Generation, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1986) pp. 47-52

When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

As for the world's second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the 'socialist' dungeon.

The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period.

One may take note of another device used effectively by State capitalist ideologists in their service to existing power and privilege. The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' States is replete with distortions and often outright lies. Nothing is easier than to denounce the official enemy and to attribute to it any crime: there is no need to be burdened by the demands of evidence or logic as one marches in the parade. Critics of Western violence and atrocities often try to set the record straight, recognizing the criminal atrocities and repression that exist while exposing the tales that are concocted in the service of Western violence. With predictable regularity, these steps are at once interpreted as apologetics for the empire of evil and its minions. Thus the crucial Right to Lie in the Service of the State is preserved, and the critique of State violence and atrocities is undermined.

It is also worth noting the great appeal of Leninist doctrine to the modern intelligentsia in periods of conflict and upheaval. This doctrine affords the 'radical intellectuals' the right to hold State power and to impose the harsh rule of the 'Red Bureaucracy,' the 'new class,' in the terms of Bakunin's prescient analysis a century ago. As in the Bonapartist State denounced by Marx, they become the 'State priests,' and "parasitical excrescence upon civil society" that rules it with an iron hand.

In periods when there is little challenge to State capitalist institutions, the same fundamental commitments lead the 'new class' to serve as State managers and ideologists, "beating the people with the people's stick," in Bakunin's words. It is small wonder that intellectuals find the transition from 'revolutionary Communism' to 'celebration of the West' such an easy one, replaying a script that has evolved from tragedy to farce over the past half century. In essence, all that has changed is the assessment of where power lies. Lenin¹s dictum that "socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people," who must of course trust the benevolence of their leaders, expresses the perversion of 'socialism' to the needs of the State priests, and allows us to comprehend the rapid transition between positions that superficially seem diametric opposites, but in fact are quite close.

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, "this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie," but can only be "realized by the workers themselves being master over production." Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the 'revolutionary intellectuals' guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

The Leninist intelligentsia have a different agenda. They fit Marx's description of the 'conspirators' who "pre-empt the developing revolutionary process" and distort it to their ends of domination; "Hence their deepest disdain for the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests," which include the overthrow of the Red Bureaucracy and the creation of mechanisms of democratic control over production and social life. For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline "will become superfluous" as the freely associated producers "work for their own accord" (Marx). Libertarian socialism, furthermore, does not limit its aims to democratic control by producers over production, but seeks to abolish all forms of domination and hierarchy in every aspect of social and personal life, an unending struggle, since progress in achieving a more just society will lead to new insight and understanding of forms of oppression that may be concealed in traditional practice and consciousness.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders -- exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to "vigilant control from above," so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest. Before seizing State power, the Bolshevik leadership adopted much of the rhetoric of people who were engaged in the revolutionary struggle from below, but their true commitments were quite different. This was evident before and became crystal clear as they assumed State power in October 1917.

A historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, E.H. Carr, writes that "the spontaneous inclination of the workers to organize factory committees and to intervene in the management of the factories was inevitably encourage by a revolution with led the workers to believe that the productive machinery of the country belonged to them and could be operated by them at their own discretion and to their own advantage" (my emphasis). For the workers, as one anarchist delegate said, "The Factory committees were cells of the future... They, not the State, should now administer."

But the State priests knew better, and moved at once to destroy the factory committees and to reduce the Soviets to organs of their rule. On November 3, Lenin announced in a "Draft Decree on Workers' Control" that delegates elected to exercise such control were to be "answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property." As the year ended, Lenin noted that "we passed from workers' control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy," which was to "replace, absorb and supersede the machinery of workers' control" (Carr). "The very idea of socialism is embodied in the concept of workers' control," one Menshevik trade unionist lamented; the Bolshevik leadership expressed the same lament in action, by demolishing the very idea of socialism.

Soon Lenin was to decree that the leadership must assume "dictatorial powers" over the workers, who must accept "unquestioning submission to a single will" and "in the interests of socialism," must "unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process." As Lenin and Trotsky proceeded with the militarization of labour, the transformation of the society into a labour army submitted to their single will, Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to "individual authority" is "the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources" -- or as Robert McNamara expressed the same idea, "vital decision-making...must remain at the top...the real threat to democracy comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement"; "if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential," and management is nothing other than the rule of reason, which keeps us free. At the same time, 'factionalism' -- i.e., any modicum of free expression and organization -- was destroyed "in the interests of socialism," as the term was redefined for their purposes by Lenin and Trotsky, who proceeded to create the basic proto-fascist structures converted by Stalin into one of the horrors of the modern age.1

Failure to understand the intense hostility to socialism on the part of the Leninist intelligentsia (with roots in Marx, no doubt), and corresponding misunderstanding of the Leninist model, has had a devastating impact on the struggle for a more decent society and a livable world in the West, and not only there. It is necessary to find a way to save the socialist ideal from its enemies in both of the world's major centres of power, from those who will always seek to be the State priests and social managers, destroying freedom in the name of liberation.

Source:

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles...socialism.html

The problem is not that Lenin or Trotsky twisted the ideals of socialism. Its that they logically applied the ideals of socialism. Chomsky is wrong when he claims to the contrary. Nor does Chomsky, or other socialists who shares these views, explain how their socialist community will function without coercion. They simply declae that it will, and that is it...

What???? Of course Lenin twisted the ideals of socialism. How about you provide some data to back up claims that refute a scholar such as Chomsky. Or your whole post is just hot air.

Chomsky does not prove anything. He simply asserts that socialism does not favor what the USSR became. Fine. But that is proof of nothing.

He quotes Professor Carr and says this is what the objective of socialism is. But I would suggest that that is exactly what happenned in the USSR: The system was set so as to benefit the workers and their interests, not to benefit the consumers and their interests. The result was either the use of force to produce items (such as under Lenin and Stalin), or stagnation when that degree of force was removed (such as under Brezhnev).
The Communists dealt with issues which ALL socialists have to deal, but which issues Chomsky chooses to ignore. Instead, Chomsky suggests if the workers decided what they were going to produce, according to his lights, everything would have worked out fine. But the system is the problem, and Chomsky's take on the system would not have been different in result.

Any system that has a leader declare "dictatorial powers" is not a true communist state. Not even close. The point is that the soviet union was not communist/socialist by any stretch of the imagination. To relate communism/socialism to Russia and thus prove socialisms "inherent failure" is PURE propaganda. This is what Chomsky tries to correctly dispel.

Marx himself called for the "dictatorship" of the proleteriat in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.

I know that is what Chomsky tries to dispel. But he is wrong. Simply declaring a belief in "liberatarian socialism" does not prove its efficacy. Chomsky is under the impression that the communists just came along and acted all authoritarian. The reality is that the reds were faced with having to actually run a government as per socialist principles, rather than airly argue the points of it in a university. Chomsky claim is that the socialists are good guys and that socialism is good, therefore that the communists could not possibly be socialists. Pretty lame stuff.

You have provided nothing to refute Chomsky so I think I'll go with the ivy league educated opinion in this case.

Actually, what he meant about "the dictatorship of the proleteriat" was that the workers would have control over the means of production. This does not exclude any democracy as the overriding factor. He quipped about the "dictatorship of the beourgeoisie" in England which was democratic. Surely he didn't mean to imply that England was a dictatorship, did he?

It's disturbing to see you perpetuate that myth since you seem like an intelligent individual.

As for your second point, it's important to critically examine what immediately transpired after the revolution. First, civil war, and western invasion - Lenin decided to reign in the power, beaurocratize (many of them were ex-Tsarists), and start onward with industrialization. Lenin knew that the Soviet Union was too backward to have a function communist state (as did Trotsky and Stalin). They simply usurped power from the worker and consolidated it under the party vanguard.

Surprised you wouldn't have taken that into consideration when making your argument.

Correct. Which is what occurred in the USSR. The efforts of Lenin & Stalin were to ensure that the PROLETERIAT remained in charge, and the bourgoise, nobility, ect. would not be able to rule. Democracy is "rule of the majority over the minority" which, as Marx believed, would be rule of the proleteriat, as he believed that class was the most numerous in any given society.



The problem is that you are assuming that the consolidation of power would not occur in a more economically advanced state, or in a stable state. But the reality is that such consolidation would be even more important in such a state, because socialists believe (incorrectly, btw) that capitalists have such an overwhelming and massive power to crush its enemies. Also the transition from capitalism will create its own instances of instability.

You have provided nothing to refute Chomsky so I think I'll go with the ivy league educated opinion in this case.[/quote]

Chomsky is of the opinion that a socialist community exists when the workers of each little plant control the means of production, and its own direction. Fine. At first though, such a state of affairs is ridiculous from a SOCIALIST angle. Socialists say they are about people working together, not a bunch of individual contractors going there own way.

From an economic angle, it is even more absurd. The idea that the WORKERS will decide what they will produce, the manner it is produced ect. is irrational. In any rational system, production decisions are based upon what the consumers want. The producers simply respond to consumer demand. the socialist sytem proposes to up-end this and have production based upon the whims of the workers.

Chomsky likes to say people will work together in a socialist sytstem. Fine. But saying people will work together still requires a description of how people will work together.
The auto workers cannot just decide how many cars they produce and that is all. Because if they have that right, the workers who make the car batteries or the the workers who make the windows must have the same right. And if the decision of those two do not result in enough not batteries or windows, then it does not matter how many cars the auto workers decide to make. Capitalism has means to deal with these issues, means which are unavailable to the socialist. So what is the result? Simple. It means you need to create agencies and bureacracies to regulate the production of cars, car batteries and car windows. So in the end you don't have a situation where the workers get to control production- the bureacrats do.