Life and Times – Socialism: a difficult word
A few months ago I attended a talk at my local university entitled ‘Transitional Justice in the Post-Soviet Space’. The speaker, Anja Mihr, a German academic specialising in International Human Rights Law, attempted an explanation of how and why, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former Soviet republics or satellite states quickly became functioning capitalist democracies (eg Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), while others did not and in some cases have remained relative autocracies to this day (eg Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan). Her talk had many thought-provoking facets which gave rise to a lively exchange of ideas in the discussion that followed, but one thing that particularly caught my attention and jarred with me was the speaker’s frequent use of the word, ‘socialism’ to describe the system that had existed in the countries of the former Soviet bloc – a description she usually qualified with the word ‘state’, so ‘state socialism’.
Positive or negative?
I felt that using the word in this way was to perpetuate the mistaken idea that somehow what had existed in the Soviet bloc was something to do with the fundamental idea of socialism as a democratic world society of free access, and production and distribution to meet people’s needs, when in reality in just about every conceivable way it was the polar opposite of that. At the same time, I was aware that ‘socialism’ is a word that’s used in all sorts of different ways to mean all sorts of different things. Some people use it to denote something positive, others to indicate or describe something they find undesirable or dangerous. And even when they declare support for socialism, they are not necessarily all signalling support for the same thing.
So, for example, there are some on the left of the political spectrum who still voice support for the old Soviet Union and similar regimes today (so called ‘tankies’) and are happy to label as socialism what most people regard as authoritarian tyrannies. Others on the left reject the former Soviet system but continue to believe in the existence today of some form of ‘socialism’ in other countries (eg Cuba, China) and are enthused by this. The left-wingers who reject the idea that such countries are ‘socialist’ and consider that the Soviet Union wasn’t either still think that there was an attempt to establish socialism in Russia under Lenin and Trotsky after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution but that it was quashed in the 1920s when Stalin took over and ‘state capitalism’ rather than ‘state socialism’ was established. If we add to this the often expressed idea that the Labour Party and other similar parties in Western countries stand for some kind of socialism or that there is a form of socialism in some of the Scandinavian countries where poverty tends to be alleviated by state support (so-called Nordic socialism), we should not be surprised that, in a recent YouGov poll across the UK, ‘socialism’ was found to be a more popular idea than ‘capitalism’ among a cross-section of people deemed to be representative of the UK population.
57 varieties
Are these ‘57 varieties’ a serious obstacle to the spread of understanding of socialism as defined by the Socialist Party? Well, maybe not necessarily, since the highly variable use of the word gives a ‘handle’ for socialists to use when they hear it used ‘wrongly’. So, in the discussion following Professor Mihr’s talk, I was able to challenge her use of the term ‘state socialism’ and argue that what actually existed – and had always existed in the Soviet era, as far back as Lenin and Trotsky – was state capitalism and that socialism was something decidedly different and should be thought of in entirely different terms. I received a somewhat nondescript answer, but at least I’d made the point and the gathering of people at the talk had heard it, and it perhaps gave them food for thought.
Default to autocracy?
The speaker too offered some food for thought during the discussion period. To a question asking whether the more ‘backward’ ex-Soviet states (ie those that have remained autocratic) would come to be more democratic any time soon, she said she thought that time was the key and that, as the older generations disappeared, those who followed them, coupled with economic forces, would cause the powers-that-be in those countries to move gradually to more democratic forms of government. And she rejected the frequently cited idea of the inevitable permanence of what has been called ‘homo sovieticus’ or, in the words of one commentator, ‘the default to autocracy’ – the idea that Russia and its sphere of influence have some kind of inbuilt tendency to remain authoritarian regardless of changes that are taking place in the wider world.
Not of course that a more ‘democratic’ Russian sphere would alter the fact that capitalism would still be operating. And it would still be exhibiting its characteristic features – poverty amid plenty, a wealthy owning class lording it over a class of wage and salary workers, technological progress perverted by war and waste. But movement to a more democratic form of capitalism would at least lay a better foundation for the spread of real socialist ideas and create the means for majority political action via the ballot box as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society once the necessary spread of consciousness has taken place.
HOWARD MOSS