Marxism: Old Order in Disorder

In the remaining years of the 20th Century, after 70 years of Soviet communism, every ruling Communist Party will have to address the problem of political participation-- real participation, in shaping the national and local decisions that are of consequential importance to the citizen. In its origins, the ideology and political movement of communism represented an attempt to create a basis for a fuller participation both in the social system and in the political system of the early industrial age.

But while its proponents have succeeded in seizing state power, communism has become an institutionalized system of highly regimented, disciplined and bureaucratized non-participation. It is, moreover, very difficult for communist states to break out of this mold. None has been capable of transforming itself from a system with an elite-exerted top-down control into a society shaping its future from the bottom up, through choice and freedom of information.

As successful as ruling Communist parties have been in controling societies, they have failed in mobilizing societies to achieve desired social objectives. Therein lies the contemporary problem of participation under communism.

The real failure of the communist system lies in its inability to transcend the phase of industrialization, to move from the industrial era into the post-industrial world. This transformation will reshape the world as much as industrialization did. It involves three interrelated revolutions: political, social and economic.

The political revolution is animated by the idea of democracy. Human rights, self-government and pluralism have become the universal aspirations of mankind. Fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal have failed, democratic governments in Latin America have proliferated and a dictator in the Philippines has fallen. It is no exaggeration to assert that human rights and individual liberty have become the historical inevitability of our times.

The social revolution has been spawned by the appearance of new techniques of communication and processing information. Advances in technology have transformed the way people interact in modern society--and have on balance tended to break down the ability of a centralized state to control the flow of information through dogmatic censorship. These new technologies have also opened the way for vast increases in social productivity and will, over time, have the effect of increasing the gap between those societies which adapt to the new environment and those which do not.

The economic revolution involves the globalization of economic activity. The great national economic success stories of the last 10 years--Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore--capitalized on the growth of world trade. We can expect the countries that lead economically in the years ahead to be those whose political, social and economic systems maximize individual and collective innovation. For communist countries, transcending the industrial phase requires a solution to the problem of encouraging individual participation.

A system can motivate its members by ideas, threats or incentives. Today, the idea of communism as a motivating force is dead; no one even in the ruling Communist parties wants to resurrect the mechanism of mass terror. Incentives remain the only means to induce participation by the citizens in communist countries. But communist regimes have been singularly incapable of providing and structuring such incentives.

As they confront the crisis of communism, the Soviet Union, China and Poland have a common point of departure: the heritage of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. In the political sphere, this involves the exclusive party rule, imposing strict control over members by the uppermost elite. In the economic sphere, the state controls all productive resources, with allocation based on central planning and with the price mechanism exerting minimal influence on economic decisions. The social sphere involves state-directed cultural and intellectual life--and strict prohibition of independent social organizations.

In the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s three initiatives--openness, democratization and economic restructuring--represent an effort to address the question of participation. One must give Gorbachev credit for having put his finger on the critical problems. Solutions are more difficult to identify. He has used his campaign for glasnost to remove political adversaries, create more participation at the lowest levels of the party and stimulate a higher degree of individual motivation. However, reformist rhetoric still outweighs any concrete reform program.

Gorbachev’s announced reforms at best nudge the country away from central planning, particularly in foreign trade, but they in no sense promote widespread market-based pricing or allocation of resources. Central planning will still prescribe production quotas, but factory managers will have increased latitude in determining their production and in marketing their products. Gorbachev has sought not to overturn the system but to rationalize it, using East Germany, not Hungary or China, as his model.

After all these years, neither Soviet workers nor Soviet managers are predisposed toward self-motivation and risk-taking. The ingrained habits of work emphasize conformity, laxity, bureaucratic security and camouflaged privilege. There is an enormous divide beyond economic decentralization from above and economic participation from below, between economic dispersal and political participation. Efforts to increase participation may result in conflict among the dozen major nations and scores of lesser nations of the Soviet Union.

In China, top leader Deng Xiaoping has focused on economic decentralization. He has disbanded collectivized agriculture and introduced other reforms that, when completed, will remove 65% to 70% of production from state control by the year 2000. This will make profitability, not political pliability, the test of economic management. The central dilemma is whether economic reform will produce irresistible pressures for political reform.

Last year I discussed the issue of political reform with Hu Yaobang, then general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Hu said that the program was far from finished and that future reforms would have to involve a restructuring of the Chinese political system. He said that initial discussion on this issue had taken place and that a document on the subject would be finished in 1987. While the party would remain the leadership core, the bureaucracy would be streamlined and other political parties would be given greater autonomy.

But Chinese leaders are clearly reluctant to take that giant step leading from economic decentralization to political decentralization. Key leaders have become alarmed about liberalization, they have been quite explicit in their denunciations--and Hu has fallen from power.

The most likely catalyst for China’s political future will be the succession struggle after Deng passes from the scene. My expectation is that the economic requirements of modernization will prevail over the political imperatives of the communist system--but only after a few zigzags in domestic policy and after intense conflicts on the political level.

In Poland, the Communist Party still formally rules. But in reality a combined military-police clique holds power in the name of the party. The church is a significant force and the leadership of Solidarity has become an organized, if unofficial, political opposition.

Polish society has in a very real sense emancipated itself. The Communist Party has been unable to retain its monopoly on social organization and has had to accommodate, to an unprecedented degree, pressures from below. When I traveled through Poland recently, I was impressed by the extent to which the opposition functions as a parallel leadership. Its underground press has published hundreds of widely available newspapers. It even has managed to break the state monopoly on electronic media by use of video-cassette recorders.

Communist leaders know that Poland is an economic calamity. To begin the process of economic renewal, the state needs to persuade the people to participate in the process. Since the imposition of martial law, however, Polish society has essentially adopted a strategy of passive resistance. The party leaders must engage or co-opt the opposition leadership to overcome this willful inertia.

There seem to be three prospects for communism in Poland, the precipitating catalyst for change being Poland’s deepening economic crisis and the need for Western credits. The first is a continuation of the current political stalemate, with the growing risk of an eventual explosion from below. The second is a progressive return to repression, leading to a renewal of central control. The third is a continuing transformation of the sociopolitical structure, leading perhaps to formalized co-participation and, in the long term, even to a system that, for geopolitical reasons, remains communist in name only.

What is common to these three countries is that all have so far been unable to solve the problem of participation. Their ruling parties are incompatible with the notion of genuinely spontaneous social participation in the political, economic and social spheres of a more modern, complex society. Until the nature of the party is changed or the party disappears, the issue of participation will continue to be a source of conflict.

Ultimately, the inability to resolve that conflict and to provide for genuine participation may prove to be the undoing of communism. There is considerable evidence that modern communism is becoming an increasingly sterile system, viewed as the principal obstacle to social progress and societal well-being. Indeed, the public mood within large portions of the communist world is reminiscent of the mood within capitalist states almost six decades ago, during the Great Depression: There is a sense that a fatal flaw exists in the system itself. That flaw is called the Communist Party.