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`The search for a just society has ended — and its capitalist`
Francis Fukuyama 1989
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Introduction
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ublished in 1989 immediately prior to the Soviet collapse Francis Fukuyama`s `THE END OF HISTORY` (TEOH) famously proclaimed `the search for a just society has reached its final destination – and its capitalist! Its very title an epitaph for Marxism. 25yrs on we proudly reissue;
`THE END OF HISTORY & HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ; A DEFENCE OF MARXIST DIALECTICS ` (DOM) By John Foster Pbl. 1998 `Marxism and Struggle ; Toward the Millenium.` Praxis Books. (edtd)
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eploying an in-depth command of Marxist theory & practice, never blinking the severity of the global ideological setback for socialism in the late 1980s &90s - DOM;
Draws on a body of meticulous work by a number of Marxist historians to parallel the protracted conflicts, failures and reversals littering the history of the founding of the worlds` first capitalist State, with its first socialist one.
Demolishes
Fukuyamas’ (TEOH) - citing its obvious blindness to the realities of modern finance capitalism. And - taking his `Hegelianism` at face value – demonstrates his route into an a-historic cul-de-sac.
Exposes the reductive, mechanistic un-Marxist basis of `Althussian Structuralism` and `Analytical Marxism ` (AS&AM). Its formulations of more than academic interest - (as deployed by the `Marxism Today` faction within the former Communist Party of Britain) - to liquidate it.
Places this `Marxism-confounding
end of history` event firmly within the ambit of Marxist historical-materialism - to clear the ideological ground for the next advance.
History reversed. History moves unevenly say Marxists - the snails pace of gradualism overtaking the hare of revolution and vice versa. Few though were prepared for the events of the early 1990s. History reversed. A globally organised socialist system vanished in two years the power of global capital left with virtually no challengers. The ideological case for socialism deeply fractured.
Fukuyamas` end of history. Enter Frances Fukuyama proclaiming `TEOH` - the search for a just society had reached its final destination – and its capitalist!` Fukuyamas` case however is a serious one - TEOH standing as the most authoritative liberal analysis of the collapse of the old socialist system, in turn demanding Marxists focus on the questions of progress and reversibility in history. This focus begins by contrasting Fukuyamas` `Heglian` dialectics with those of Marx, tackles the issue of historical reversibility, and defends Marxist `historical materialism` against its re-interpretation by the AS&AMs Fukuyamas` `Heglianism` in its surface resemblance to Marxism s lends TEOH a veneer of cogency, asserting; `The root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal & social structure of our society which is fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributive, so much as with the cultural & social characteristics of the groups which made it up, the historical legacy of pre-modern conditions... Concluding.....`the end of history is upon us` having reached a point where the possibility of progressive change has been exhausted. Two possible replacement ideologies (fascism & communism) have been tested; both have failed - there is no other contender in the field. On these terms Fukuyamas` argument is very simple. Up to C.20th , the finest concept of social justice was embodied in the state system of liberal democracy. To be then challenged by fascism & communism. Fascism died in 1945, and according to Fukuyama, long since lost its ability to mobilise large social movements. Communism has also run its course, dying in a way clearly
demonstrating the march of history has ended. The intellectual & political elites of the socialist states, realising the economic political superiority of capitalism, abandondened the idea of an economy owned and run socially on behalf of an entity called `the working class` to re-introduce a market based economy. The only system able to combine legally entrenched rights of individual freedom with the individual choice of the market, liberate full human potential, and do so in conditions of economic prosperity & progress.
What is the Marxist Response? The most obvious challenge would be on the terms set by Fukuyama himself. Capitalist Liberalism may be temporarily victorious but patently riven with internal contradictions, fundamental enough to generate a replacement. Not least its concentration and socially dominating ownership of societies` productive resources. And its genetic antagonism to organised labour dependent on its class based political ability nationally & internationally to secure its rights; to organise , to vote and to win state intervention against the capitalist market. The post 1945 commitments to full employment and welfare state policies across Europe directly underwritten by the existence of the socialist States. This is Fukuyamas` problem, redistribution results from something other than ideas. In its classic form, liberal ideology says nothing – or nothing good – about the collective power of labour. Even if Fukuyama replies the freedom of collective bargaining was immanent in the unfolding of fully democratic liberalism there is still a problem. The process of redistribution of wealth has never been either smooth or irreversible! Always directly dependent on the materially organised class power of Labour - weaken Labours’ power and redistribution stops. Two decades of full collective bargaining denied in the UK & USA increasing the rate of exploitation, and inequality. The same trend general across the liberal democracies of Europe. Developments that cannot be accommodated in the approach Fukuyama brings to the study of history.
The process of progressive change may take place materially through the human implementation of ideas. The contradictions experienced in implementing an ideology may induce the development of another idea. But the actual prescription for change comes from the ideology itself. If a redistribution of wealth was inherent within the ideas of liberal democracy then its reversibility on Fukuyamas` terms, is inexplicable. Had Fukuyama embraced Marxism he might readily have explained how both a period of redistribution and its reverse are inherent within the material conditions of capitalist society. On his ` Heglian` terms, redistribution, and its reverse can only be explained in terms of ideological processes other than of liberal democracy –ergo–the logic of his argument is lost!
Heglian and Marxist dialectics of change Time for some important clarifications between Hegelian & Marxist dialectics especially in their application to historical change and its reversibility. Much of what passed for Marxist writing on historical materialism and modes of production during the 1960s & 70s were dominated by perspectives that excluded dialectics. Reestablishing Marxs` approach to historical change accordingly requires a brief preliminary reassertion of his methods. Marx; Human beings in the social production of their means of existence .. must enter into definite, necessary relationships - independent of their own will`. ` A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy`. These relationships are social, involve thought & language, demand the assimilation of previously created knowledge, and correspond to the ability to develop and transform it though social practice. In essence; productive, necessary to the physical survival of the group, and accordingly, correspond to a definite stage in the development of human societies productive forces. It is the totality of these relations of production which constitute the economic structure of society, The economic
foundations of an era, its mode of production. Marx goes on to describe the processes of social transformation. `Changes in the economic foundation, lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure` the touchstone for understanding its ideology; `Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge a period of transformation by its consciousness, on the contrary this consciousness must be judged from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production`. But then, after noting the importance of consciousness, and at the same time placing it within the contradictions of material life. ` No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production replace older one before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the old society`
Acknowledgement of uncertainty This acknowledgement of uncertainty, of the need to test and take the consequences, is a position to which we will return What concerns us immediately are what the passages say about the character of Marxs` dialectics. For Marx, social transformations are rooted materially in processes that exist independently of individuals or their ideas. The clash of ideas not taking place in a vacuum; people do not make history `just as they please`. Individuals and human nature, language and consciousness, materially determined across history not static. Development inherent within the material process of socially producing and transforming their conditions of existence. Not part of a divine dialectic external to the social process. - precisely in this Marxs` philosophical method different from Hegels`.
Analytical Marxism These are no minor points. The writings of Lucio Colletti and Louis Althusser in the 1960s &70s fostered a belief that Marx
rejected dialectics as metaphysical or non scientific , and in so far as a dialectical element existed in Marxs` early writing, it was simply `Hegelian`. The fateful sequel to this belief giving us AS&AM. Both schools claiming to fill a vacuum of philosophical method to introduce assumptions little to do with Marxism and much to do with the conventions French & Anglo-American University philosophy departments. But their starting point lacked foundation. As we’ve seen Marx himself never sought to hide his debt to Hegel. Dialects for Marx `the process by which the prosaic, static, conception, the unconnected idea inherited from everyday speech is `evaporated` until it can no longer predetermine our reality`. Marxist dialectics starting with the simplest most general abstractions, made concrete precisely by placing them in terms of their interconnections, made part of a material unity of the diverse. Hegels` by the clash of one idea against itself to produce another. It could therefore be simple - in the sense of proceeding by single contradictions. What it failed to grasp was the material complexity of historical process. Preventing it from analysing the material base of progress and reversibility. Fukuyama`s understsanding of Marxs` analysis is of the conflict between capital and labour, definitely an expression of capitalist contradictions as a mode of production - but a pale caricature of what Marx actually said! For Marx, capitalisms` fatal contradictions are far more complex, in line with his wider analysis of the driving force of human development - between the increasingly social character of production and their concentrated private ownership. The contradictions posed by Marx argue for a new social order where Fukuyama simply identifies a containable conflict of interest. Fukuyamas` methodology enabling him to analyse the clash of ideas historical change produces - but not what drives it. Has no way of knowing why the pace of historical change suddenly speeds up – or reverses.
Revolution and counter revolution in feudal Europe Taking Fukuyamas` self appointment as arbiter of historys` end as licence we’ll counter with a ride in the Tardis - whisking him back to the papal chancellery in Rome 301 yrs before TEOHs publication. On a balcony overlooking St Peters Square an ambitious diplomat waving his newly finished treatise `Historia Terminata`. A document citing the Protestant heresy`s` intellectual disintegration and collapse of the market-based societies espousing its ideas. The social havoc unleashed on Mediterranean society by the abandonment of orthodoxy, the rise of commercialism and the ideological revolution it set in train. The Church supreme again in Portugal , Italy & Spain even Galileo had recanted. Popular anger enforcing the expulsion of the last remaining Protestants from France. Across central Europe, from Prague to Vienna, Cologne to Brabant the old social relations were restored. Even in England James ll, son of the blessed martyr Charles was reconverting the land, driving its heretics to the ends of the earth. Pointing to the splendour and symmetry of St Peters, the diplomat might conclude by challenging Fukuyama to justify his belief in market based individualism. Had not these ideas been tried and tested over the best part of 200yrs then rejected by the very people who first espoused them? Had not the timeless ideals of social justice vested in the verities of divine order visibly triumphed? Given the structure of `TEOH` how he could reply? His weakness is precisely that it is not historical. Primacy given to ideas `clashing with themselves` decisive. Unable to look beneath the surface to see what might produce such ideas and why at certain times their base may temporarily disappear. And if Fukuyama were to be at a loss what of the AS&AMs? The Papal diplomat pointing out the rational choices taken by individuals choosing the certainty of subsistence under feudalism over the risks associated with the free market. Historical reversibility a concrete analysis
The work of Soviet historian Alexander Chistozvonov analysing the crisis of C.16th &17th feudalism seeks to explain why so many nascent commercial capitalist societies failed to consolidate and establish selfsustaining growth. As shown, up to a dozen European regions were embarked on this process, all failing save part of an island on the edge of the European feudal state system England. Chistozvonov seeks to identify at what point within the accumulating contradictions of feudalism and the development of capitalist forms of production how in England became irreversible. Tracing developments over two centuries to 1700 his method examines the process as whole. Not looking at individual societies in isolation, or events on a comparative basis. Setting Europe within its global colonial hinterland, seeking to identify the unfolding contradictions of feudalism as a completed process. Places each anti-feudal challenge in terms of region, its positioning and stage, within the development of feudalisms` contradictions, and the terms of their contingent historical relationship to other elements of change. Seeking to explore the moment at which, to use Marxs` words `the old order is no longer sufficient to develop the forces of production, as against the maturing of the material conditions required for the new superior relations of production`. The force of Chistozvonovs analysis deriving from its integrated application. Analysing the relative strength of `formational processes`; those essential to sustain and reproduce the conditions for the existing mode of production. As against `genetic processes` those necessary for the new, contradictory conditions of capitalist production. Each attempted transformation concretely and specifically analysed within their contingent historical and regional settings. In the early commercial capitalist states of north Italy, Central Europe and Switzerland, the vigour of anti-feudal ideology at least comparable to that in England – as was in some removal of the old regimes ideological apparatus. In Barcelona, Portugal, Holland, North Germany, access to external markets and colonial surpluses originally, superior to Englands`. Holland and England more or
less coeval in their pace of development and ability to draw on the most advanced levels of technology. Yet only England made the transition to cumulative capitalist growth and industrial revolution.
What made the difference? According to Chistozvonov it was the character of rural and agricultural production. How far it could be sustained and reformed on a feudal basis to reach higher levels of productivity, as happened in eastern and central Europe. Or as England, transformed to become the basis for expanded commodity production. The key `formational factors` needed to sustain feudalism; retention or re-imposition of non-market methods for extracting the agrarian surplus and the subordination of urban commodity production to these nonmarket economic forms within a feudal legal superstructure. The countervailing `genetic factors`; technological change, the size of productive units and the matching spread of hired labour; expansion of town economies on the basis of commodity exchange; deforming feudal reproduction. Hollands` commercial elite forced to enter a long-term alliance with local feudal land owners to fight off the Spanish Habsburgs. Its rural commercialisation retarded by the consequent weak internal market for labour and potential for commodity based production, largely extinguished By contrast , as Marx pointed out, Englands commercialisation stimulated by European trade was dependent on the transformation of agriculture: the production of wool as a cash crop for export to these centres, and later the use of rural labour in textile production. Englands civil war essentially fought between two different types (and regions) of agricultural producer. In the south and east, commercialised agricultural production landlords rented land to tenant farmers often labour employing producers themselves, - closely linked to the production of textiles using rural free labour. The far less commercialised north and west, dominated by old-style landed magnates, sustaining relations in the towns with traditional merchant elites and royal monopolists.
The anti-feudal forces victory conclusive furthering the process of internal `primitive accumulation` - the capitalist expropriation of the remaining feudal property – within a regional European context enabling England to seize a major share of the colonial surplus. `Genetic` factors of development reaching a point where `deformation` of the feudal base had become permanent. This says Chistozvonov is why James lls counterrevolution came so spectacularly adrift. By the 1680s, feudalism in England had no significant base from which to regenerate itself. Nowhere else had the production relations in agriculture been so transformed. So dependent on `free` employed labour deprived of any escape from its relationship with capital. Chistozvonovs` method demonstrates the rich complexity of materialist dialectics. Ideas important but not in themselves the determinants of outcome. Regardless of how much they might in general be appropriate to their time and superior to what came before (and after), ideas were not enough. And if this was true, so too was the converse. The defeat of the ideas of liberal individualism across continental Europe did not mean that these ideas would not rise again.
Modes of production and historical change. As noted earlier much of what is currently presented as Marxism excludes dialectics. Marxs` entire vocabulary successively redefined in terms essentially alien to Marxs` approach. Not as the result of concrete historical analysis but of academic philosophers mimicking the idealism of Hegel. Not the analysis of historical transformation, but to use Marx`s words, thought folding out of itself, by itself. Static definitions of `autonomous spheres` of a mode of production - not founded in the concrete study of human development - but by the conventions governing academic philosophy. In the 1960s. Althusser pronounced only the work of the `mature Marx` could be construed as a truly scientific basis for Marxism - represented largely by the economic texts written after his `epistemological break` with Hegel he dated
between 1845 -1865. The result was Althussers` `Science Of History` - achieved by separating society into ideological, political, economic and theoretical spheres of production. Each operating within a separate time frame of `relative autonomy`, To ascribe functions and relations in various combinations for different modes of production with a static exactitude that Marx refused to countenance. The issue of determining and analysing the decisive deforming elements, evaded by ascribing a `causal force` to the `economic sphere`, but `only in the last resort`. Whatever the merits of this scheme - it had little or nothing to do with Marx. Althussers` pupil Nicos Poulantzas going on to give a `special position` to the State in the `economic sphere`. A proposition bizaarely fulfilled in Britain by the `Marxism Today` faction within the CPGB, elevating Thatchers `ideological project` into an `impasse breaking` all powerful historical force.
A System in Motion. Returning to the concrete example of the crisis of the C17th. Marxs` analysis saw feudalism as neither a static system of functions, or sustained by the intentions of statically conceived individuals. It was to be understood as a constantly changing system in motion - a result of something excluded by the AS&AMs - its own internal contradictions. The material character of these contradictions the key to emergence of the new capitalist mode of production. Chistozvonovs work sought to define the determining moment within these material contradictions. Marx himself had set out what he saw as the conditions: capitalist relations of production fully matured within the contradictions of the feudal mode; feudal relations no longer sufficient to develop further new productive forces. Feudalisms central contradictions deriving from its progressive potential over preceding advanced slave society, to develop new productive forces within the agrarian sector. Ultimately producing new class forces feudalism itself could not contain. For while non-market feudal rents extracted a surplus, notionally at a rate maintaining its producers at subsistence level. What defined feudalism
as dynamically more productive was the freedom of the peasant household to possess and develop their own means of production. Contradictions stemming from the physical increase in the peasants capital against the limits of household labour, expressed in classbased struggles against the level of feudal rent and the institution of serfdom. And, an increasingly large surplus sustaining nonrural sector based on commodity relations. The work of Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton & Guy Bois has progressively exposed the historical dialectics of this contradiction. It did not proceed evenly, producing a series of spectacular breakdowns in feudal stability. At particular urban sector growth points, increases in the peasant share of rural output producing very fast population expansion. In C.13th and again in C.16th large areas of Europe able to sustain quite developed forms of capitalist employment relations and commodity exchange. At these points particularly in the C.16th, anti-feudal ideas and anti-feudal political structures began to emerge. But not irreversibly. Non-capitalist feudal class forces often able to regroup taking advantage of the fatal weakness of the emergent capitalist relations - the tendency of population growth to outstrip food supply. The resulting demographic crises often wiping out the labour reserves essential for capitalist market relations. The economic shutters closing on commercially organised farming before its ability to achieve decisively higher levels of food or advanced commodity production could significantly cut labour costs. Conditions of sharp economic dislocation and outright famine reconstructing feudal relations of production, increasing its share of the agrarian surplus allowing a further development of the productive forces on a feudal basis. Chistozvonovs contribution was to examine the final phase of this process as a totality. The irreversible transformation of England not understood as simply a consequence of internal developments. Its revolution feasible only by dint of it moment in time and regional location. Its emergent capitalism benefiting from technologies and social and political experience, developed elsewhere.
The collapse of competing European attempts at capitalist growth. And Englands seizure of much of the colonial surplus extracted from other continents by restored feudal absolutism. The ability of English merchants to trade colonial produce for the large agrarian surpluses of central & eastern Europe, crucial to the avoidance of subsistence crises and population decline in the later C.17th. Factors external to England but very much part of the overall motion of feudal social development, without which the process of change cannot be explained. So while Chistozvonov stresses the importance of ideology and considers the emergent organs of capitalist state power as crucial in uprooting feudal relations in the English countryside, all remained dependent on the unfolding material contradictions. The overall dialectic between the forces and relations of production, understood as a historically contingent and developing process - key to its concrete analysis
Marxs` historical materialism. To criticise AS&AM is not to dismiss carefully honed definitions as unimportant. Marx spent his life seeking to define the essential elements of social change. The key issue is how these definitions are obtained. For Marx the `abstract determination` was obtained by `evaporating` initial isolated , everyday conceptions that grab unrelated bits of experience, achieved only through active dialogue with reality. It could never emerge from some preliminary construction of neat and logically non-contradictory definitions. Such idealist constructions could only stand in the way; preventing the penetration of a richly contradictory material world - caught in constant tension between what it is and what it is becoming; Marx; The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations...it appears in the process of thinking as a process of concentration, as a result, not a departure. This is the real test. Over 3 decades AS&AM in different guises has explicitly rejected Marxs` method. In general their definitions have not assisted historical analysis, to often turning out to be dead-ends. The phenomenon of reversibility we are compelled to focus on today, a case in point.
Such reversibility defies Hegels dialectic of ideas, or systems depending on staticallydefined relations, populated by people conceived as statically-defined individuals rather than social beings. Demanding a concrete, historically contingent assessment of the balance between the maturing new production relations, and the continuing productive potential of the old mode of production. Focusing not on static relations but on the `laws of motion` within a mode of production. The `science of history` being truly deployed in concrete analyses of the material contradictions behind the process of change. The aim of this chapter has been to restore a Marxist understanding of history as a process of concrete analysis as the ground for further work. Limited to the exploration at second hand of one example of reversibility - two points stand out. 1) The issue of totality – no phenomenon becomes `concrete` until understood in its full dialectical linkage to the overall process of change within a mode of production. Englands` exceptionality having as much to do with events in Europe and the colonial world as domestic events, and the mode of production seen in relation to its predecessor. Marx `Grundrisse`; ...the system itself has its presuppositions and its development to its totality consisting precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself or in creating out of these organs that which it still lacks. This historically is how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forming a moment of its process of its development. 2) To stress the potential reversibility of this process; subordinating elements of the old society to the needs of the new, developing new organs of state power crystallising the level of control needed for the new mode of production into a self sustaining totality. All contingent on the maturing material contradictions within the old mode of production. To set an agenda in terms of history writing and social science, starkly different to the current vogue. While focus on the specific, the immediate, the personal, the spoken word, are rightly the subject matter of history, their
full significance – what makes them concrete – dependent on a precise placement within the totality of change and their time.
Continuing history. Shifting focus to C.20th and events in the former socialist countries. The rise of capitalism required some vital internal factors for its development: technological advance; population growth; progressive erosion of peasant agriculture; ending of feudal limits on the movement of labour. Plus the external ones of colonial surplus and European markets. Take any one of these away and labours status as a commodity would start to slip away, sooner or later the balance of power tested, the vigour of the emerging capitalist class forces begin to ebb. Whatever the strength of capitalist ideology without the necessary material conditions, the process of reversal would gather momentum, deformed feudal institutions be repaired and the `totality` of a feudal mode of production reinstated. What then are the parallel moments in the winning and destruction of a socialist mode? For most Marxists the key preconditions for socialism needing to mature within the contradictions of capitalism are a class based labour collectivism of sufficient internal cohesion and consciousness of its class interests to address & resolve the key contradictions of the old order. The increasingly society wide and dependent character of the productive forces, and their concentrated private (but state dependent) ownership. A political ability to organise production collectively, to fully utilise the productive forces of human intellectual potential, eliminate the waste of the unemployed reserve, To socially plan the levels of investment for the reproduction of labour & technology needed for dynamic growth. Preconditions very different from those for capitalism. Most also agreeing the initial fatal weakness within the new relations of production in the Soviet Union, the long term inability to reproduce and regenerate the necessary levels of mass class cohesion and understanding. A failure often attributed to subjective mistakes (undue centralisation of
political & economic power) themselves materially situated in the context of an originally mainly peasant economy. Along with external isolation, blockade & military assault. Also the ending of capitalism itself removing one of the original generators of class consciousness
Revolutionary historic parallel. All undoubtedly correct but often forgetting - the issue of `totality`, and the relative success of the first socialist mode of production. For revolutionary English capitalism, the existence of a highly geared system of global commodity exchange; providing the material conditions needed for a labour-commodity economy in one small island benefiting from the contradictions of late feudalism, has parallels with the Soviet Unions 70year survival. It benefiting from the contradictions of C.20th Finance Capital and the global existence of collectivist class politics following the October revolution. Post Revolution pro-capitalist forces needed to reinstate the institutional totality of the capitalist market. Its inability to do so, inevitably deforming imperialisms` development as a mode of production. Its failure to reassert global dominance stemming from no lack of will as clearly demonstrated by the 1920s wars of intervention, the events of the 1930s and the Cold War. The European capitalist states, at least, unable to mobilise the forces required consequence of the potential social conflicts they faced in doing so. In the 1920s and again after 1945 a full-scale frontal military assault judged incompatible with their own political stability. The same working class cohesion inhibiting direct attack, ultimately underpinning the new mode of production – paralleling the historic global external factor favouring English capitalism. Lloyd George in the 1920s in his famous calculation of the forces needed to subdue socialist Russia weighing the political as well as financial costs – and abandoning the attempt.
Initial success. Bringing us to the initial relative success of the new mode of production. In the 1930s
German imperialism did for a time manage to liquidate much of its own internal class opposition it ultimately failed in its bid destroy the Soviet Union. From an initially smaller productive base, it was the socialist mode which emerged victorious. Doing so in a predominantly industrial war of outcomes largely determined by the fastest most efficient producer of tanks , artillery and aircraft. Recent research shows an important strength of Soviet industrialisation – whatever its weaknesses - its ability to draw upon the conscious determination of large sections of the workforce to enhance production methods, throughout the war becoming ever more crucial. The overnight reconstruction of armaments industries east of the Urals seeing the introduction of `flowline group production planning` as the Soviets called it, pioneering systems described 30yrs later as ` just-in-time flexible manufacturing`. In this sense collectivism and socialist understanding created in the transition to socialism, in the form of direct involvement in work generating the most efficient methods of production - a material force intrinsic to the development of the socialist economic base. Corresponding in terms of Marxs` assessment of the process of transition `the conditions for the new mode maturing within the old`. Working people had to run and know how to run a socialised economy. Knowledge no less than other scientific knowledge a force of production.
Socialisms deformation The Soviet Unions exhaustion as a state structure for sustaining socialism came later, although its origins lay undoubtedly in the forms of economic and political centralisation consolidated in war conditions. Two factors were central, both ultimately relating to that central material condition for socialism - the level of socialist understanding. i) Internally, the passing of the revolutionary collectivist generation proved impossible to replace. Involvement in economic planning might have done so but its over centralised form prevented it. Exclusion of much of the workforce from the wider political process no less detrimental.
ii) Externally for the Soviet Unions first half century the imperialist powers were in general held back from a frontal military assault by the dangers of domestic political conflict. The mutinies in Britain & France in 1919, the fate of Hitler, political events in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece, the American debacles in Cuba and Vietnam all showed the difficulties of this path. The final phase of the cold war however was marked by a technique of confrontation avoiding this problem - through the weight of military expenditure rather than its use. The capitalist powers successfully exploiting their systems capacity for short-term dynamism by allocating high levels of expenditure on armaments. Requiring the Soviet Union, to match them with an economy a third the size of NATO countries, by the 1980s spending up to 15% of GNP on defence. New investment in civilian industry and product innovation virtually ceased. Up to that point the economic as against democratic deficit in the Soviet Union was by no means as severe as portrayed by ant-socialist critics. The interaction of the two proved fatal. It remains to be seen if a mass resurgence in Russia for socialism can be won. Creating a socially legitimate base for capitalist property relations has proved difficult - seemingly linked to a residual commitment to socialised property relations among working people. The `genetic` factor of collectivism obstructing, or in Chistozvonovs terms `deforming` the formational factors needed for a resumption of capital accumulation and investment?
Not the end of history Historical reversibility must be understood in terms of the hard facts of material life. History itself passes no judgement. The collapse of the Soviet Union does not mean history has ended. The material contradictions of the capitalist world order continue. Systems of ideology exist and develop within material conditions, not on their own or in the abstract. On this score we might remember Marx`s words after the defeat of the first primitive attempt at a noncapitalist state system in the Paris commune of 1871. Prime Minister Theirs’ victorious liberal democratic government felt it
necessary to destroy what it saw as the key `genetic` element of this new order politically conscious human beings and their ideas summarily executing 8,000 communard prisoners of war. Marx replied: Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle gains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association (the 1st International) should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out the Governments would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labour – the condition of their own parasitical existence. Our intention has been to reinstate this perspective. Ideas and political forms do not exist in a vacuum. Their content, viability and sequence not understood on the basis of an internalised dialogue. Nor analysed from first principles of relationships defined in the abstract. As Marx said, the `soil` of the real life of society and its productive relations holds the key to our understanding of the past and the future. END.
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