COLUMN ONE : Marxism Down but Not Out : They’re writing the Communist obituary in the Soviet Union. But socialist ideas have left a mark on politics and economics that endures around the world.

The collapse of the Soviet Communist Party, for 74 years the center of what was both feared and hailed as a worldwide revolution, marks the last gasp of a force that played a central role in the history of the 20th Century: a militant drive toward a secular, socialist utopia, built according to the vision of Karl Marx.

Congratulating Americans for standing up to Communist totalitarianism for so many years, President Bush closed the tomb on the movement without any hesitation last week. “It clearly is the death knell for the Communist movement around the world,” the President told reporters at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me. “There’s only a handful of people that stick out like a sore thumb. I think of one down there in Cuba right now that must be sweating.”

Communism died in the Soviet Union because it did not work and could maintain itself only by terror. The Bolsheviks had boasted, “We will drive mankind forcibly to happiness.” But, while they drove the people by force, happiness eluded them. Communist rule failed to provide either the material or spiritual sustenance that had been promised by its drivers.

But, while communism is largely dead, not all of its ideas have withered. Despite the triumphant declarations from some conservatives, Marx’s legacy is still influential in politics and economics. Socialist parties and Marxist-influenced guerrilla movements are still strong throughout the world and will probably remain so long after the Soviet Communist Party loses its last dacha.

Communism, of course, still reigns in such countries as China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam--though all are threatened by the winds from the whirlwind disintegration in the Soviet Union. And sizable Communist parties still exist in Europe, though their constituencies are ever dwindling.

But the more significant legacy of Marxism can be seen best on three sides:

* Socialism is alive and well in the economic policies of many of the democratic world’s strongest political parties (even some conservative ones). The welfare state, for example, is much more rooted in Western Europe than most Americans imagine. Governments have embraced Marxist ideas of social obligation even as they have fought Marxist political expansionism.

* Marx’s social thought has left an indelible mark on Western scholarship. Much of the politics and sociology and economy of the world is analyzed through a Marxist prism and described in Marxist vocabulary.

* V. I. Lenin’s relentless and single-minded precepts for forging a revolution are still followed by rebels in the most backward and benighted parts of the Third World, such as the highlands of Peru and the mountain jungles of the Philippines.

Moreover, while the collapse of communism has meant a triumph for the free-market system, capitalism itself has changed as a result of its century-long struggle with socialist critics. The idea that pure capitalism should not be allowed to run uncurbed is widely accepted, even by many in the United States. And Pope John Paul II, in a recent encyclical that praised the free-market system, warned that capitalism has no innate sense of morality and must be regulated according to humane values.

Right Questions

In a subtle commentary on this theme, the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, has said: “The failure of communism to provide a satisfactory answer to society’s questions does not mean that the questions are wrong.”

Robert L. Heilbroner, an economist who teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York, believes that capitalism will always attract reformers since it is, by definition, more concerned with the mechanics of the marketplace than the morals of its works, and it breeds troublesome problems such as high unemployment.

Free-market theorists do not accept this thesis about the dearth of morality in capitalism. They contend that the mechanics of the marketplace, by powering a bountiful economy, create the greatest good for the greatest number and thus in the long run are inherently more moral than socialist systems. But sociologists and economists such as Heilbroner insist that a mechanical system that can hurt people indiscriminately--even if only for a short time--can hardly be described as infused with morality.

Capitalism “doesn’t have a moral basis; it’s never claimed to have a moral basis,” Heilbroner says. “That is why religious people, including the Pope, are never comfortable with capitalism.”

Moreover, he continues, capitalism “keeps on growing and churning . . . and making trouble for itself”--unleashing problems such as unemployment and pollution. “People will always yearn for a morally satisfying system,” he says.

There is some feeling among socialists, in fact, that in the long run the collapse of communism could open the way to a revival of socialist politics and thought--because it will free socialists of the taint of the Marxist failure in the Soviet Union.

Socialists, who believe in democratic elections, have always treated the Soviet Union with disdain--the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Communist Party, after all, had broken away from the socialists before the Russian Revolution of 1917. But the distinction was not always clear to many conservatives, and many confused outsiders found it hard to take the Marxist ideas of democratic socialists seriously when Marxism was doing so poorly in the Soviet Union.

The hopes of socialists now pale when compared to their vision earlier in the century. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had underscored the basic political split within the socialist movement: The socialists believed in achieving socialism through democratic elections; the Communists, inspired by Lenin, believed that only an authoritarian vanguard, acting in the name of the workers, could achieve socialism. The economic goals of the two, however, were more or less the same.

Infuriated by the cruelties and disparities of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, striving to break monopolies that made a few people rich amid seas of poverty, convinced that capitalism inspired imperialistic wars, both socialists and Communists accepted Marx’s theories that a planned economy--in which the state rather than private capitalists controlled production and distribution--would lead to an egalitarian society.

Soviet Example

Since the Soviet Union was the only example of a socialist society in 1917, communism attracted many followers. The renowned American muckraker Lincoln Steffens traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and concluded: “I have been over to see the future, and it works.” Although American officialdom, especially during the era dominated by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, tended to look on Communists as subversives and Soviet agents, many American Communists were really gullible idealists. The novelist Howard Fast, who left the party in 1957, looked on the American Revolution as a prelude to the Bolshevik Revolution and longed for “a people’s government for the people, a government to see that no man starved and no man wanted, to see that hate and misery and crime disappeared through education and enlightenment. . . . God would come to Earth in the simple goodness of all men. . . . “

But the Soviet Union proved to be a rather sorry beacon for communism. Many Communists who had fought fascism for years were demoralized when Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed a cynical nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939. After World War II, the Soviet Union’s image was stained even more when Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev laid bare the murderous cruelties of Stalin, and novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn exposed the terrible Gulag Archipelago of political prisoners throughout the Soviet Union.

Moreover, the economy of the Soviet Union simply did not work. The Soviet Union was an egalitarian society--by capitalist standards, a physician did not earn that much more than a laborer--but production was so stunted that there was very little to share. This sorry example helped persuade socialists who came to power through democratic elections elsewhere in Europe that it would be foolish to nationalize all means of production and distribution. Instead, they advocated “mixed” economies--a lot of private investment combined with some government ownership of industries--and looked on themselves largely as reformers of the free market.

In the Third World, however, where disparities between rich and poor are as bad or even worse than they were in Russia before the 1917 revolution, one model of communism seemed to work reasonably well: Lenin’s revolutionary idea of a vanguard seizing power in the name of the masses. The Communist regimes of China, Cuba and Vietnam are all examples of this Leninist idea at work.

The continued strength of socialism and socialist parties, despite the collapse of communism, has troubled James Buchanan, a George Mason University free-market economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986.

“There are many who still cannot escape from the socialist mind-set,” Buchanan told a conference in Australia a year ago. “And even for those of us who have, however begrudgingly, acknowledged that the socialist god is dead, there may not have emerged any faith or belief in any non-socialist alternative.”

In fact, most socialist parties have toned down their Marxism in recent years. In 1989, the Socialist International, although it advocated regulation “in the interests of the people,” praised the market system as “a dynamic way of promoting innovation.” Socialist International President Willy Brandt said that socialists had been mistaken in their past “strong confidence in the role of the state in the economic process.”

Socialist Michel Rocard, the French prime minister at that time, said: “Democratic socialism has broken with the messianic dimension of early socialism. Too often in the past, utopian visions of a perfect society have proved destructive. No longer do we have a ready-made blueprint for social change to offer the world.”

New Pragmatism

The collapse of communism has evoked an anti-ideological mood, a sense that no single set of beliefs can possibly provide the key to well-being. Problems, according to this new mood, must be solved pragmatically, one by one, and not by applying some orderly body of philosophy toward them. This mood can help socialists only as long as they apply more pragmatism than Marxism to problems.

In fact, to an analyst such as Francis Fukuyama of the RAND Corp., who created a stir in 1989 with his essay, “The End of History,” all the socialist machinations about the need to embrace and regulate the market only prove the weakness of the Marxist legacy.

In the essay, Fukuyama suggested that the coming triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union could mean that humanity had reached its final, highest stage of development. He contended--in a statement that struck his critics as overblown--that “what we may be witnessing is . . . the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

After the collapse of the attempted coup and of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Fukuyama belittled suggestions that socialism--in its modern guise as a system of reformed and controlled capitalism--has any real meaning. “If there’s any meaning to socialism, it has to be public ownership of means of production, not just regulation,” Fukuyama says. “Nobody’s in favor of completely unregulated capitalism. If that is the way you define socialism, there’s no meaningful sense in which socialism is different from capitalism.”

At a Socialist International conference in Vienna a year ago, many socialist delegates from Eastern Europe rose to warn their colleagues from the West that the time had come to rid the East of most of its socialist policies. Otherwise, they insisted, recovery was impossible.

Welfare State

Nevertheless, the idea of the welfare state is unshaken in Western Europe and has deep roots in Eastern Europe. Despite the comments of Pucnik, it is likely that the welfare state of Western Europe, rather than the relatively unfettered free-market system of the United States, will serve as a model for an Eastern Europe in feverish transition.

This was shown clearly in a recent poll by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. Asked whether it was more important that everyone be free to pursue their life’s goals without interference from the state, or whether it was more important that the state play an active role in society to guarantee that nobody is in need, a majority of Americans chose the first concept. Under the influence of socialist ideas, the people of every country in Western Europe except Germany and every country in Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia disagreed with the Americans.

In a kind of obverse way, some of the lost power of communism lingers in the defiance of steadfast, stubborn, hard-line Communists in Europe even as their parties dwindle in popular support. Their continued zeal for a lost cause shows just how poor they have always been as practical politicians.

The French Communist Party, once the largest political party in France with more than a quarter of the vote, now has only 6% support in the polls. Party leader Georges Marchais’ refusal to condemn the Moscow coup and his chiding of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin as an arrogant right-winger have not helped, and some party reformers have mounted a campaign to rid themselves of Marchais.

“What we called real socialism is dead,” said Anicet LePors, a dissident Communist and former Cabinet member. “The idea that Communist parties must have a leading role in society is dead. The idea of democratic centralism is dead.”

End of Marx?

For many years, Communists pored over the books and pamphlets of Karl Marx like zealous monks. Will anyone read him any longer? Fukuyama dismisses Marx as no more than a historical figure, no longer “a matter of contemporary politics.” But Heilbroner disagrees.

“Marx is the great economist of capitalism,” he says. “He has nothing to say about socialism; that was utopian. You can’t be a penetrative economic thinker without reading Marx. All historians read Marx. All sociologists read Marx.”

The same view--with a key qualification--comes from an Italian Communist labor leader in Milan. “I hope people do not stop reading Karl Marx,” Riccardo Terri, a member of the Democratic Party of the Left, the former Italian Communist Party, says.

“Marx has been a necessary part of history. He should be read. It used to be that you read Marx to find the answers to everything. . . . Now we have to read specialists and not look to Marx as the answer to everything. . . . Nobody can give you the answer to everything.”

Tenets of Communism

* All property will be owned by society.

* All economic activity will be planned and controlled by society.

* Distribution of goods will be “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”

* Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class (proletariat) by moneyed interests.

* The value of a commodity is determined by the labor necessary to produce it. But wages are held down by the increasing population and the army of the unemployed. The difference between the wage level and the value of the product is the “surplus value,” which the capitalist confiscates as his profit.

* Each social system generates the forces that will destroy it and create a new system.

* The working class will overthrow the ruling class, creating a dictatorship of the proletariat and a classless Communist society.

* Eventually, the state will wither away.

Source: Encyclopedia Americana

Ripples Through Communist World

A sampling of reactions to the Soviet Union’s suspension of its Communist Party, from parties around the world.

France

Reformers in the French Communist Party plan to challenge hard-line leader Georges Marchais at a special meeting of the Central Committee this week. The reform group, which includes three ex-Cabinet ministers, charges that Marchais and the Politburo failed to condemn the Soviet coup and are thereby ruining chances for the party to regain lost voters. The party’s share of popular support has tumbled to 6% from about 20% a decade ago. Many ex-Communists have written off the party as unreformable. They urge disaffected members to form a new organization. The party currently has 185,000 members.

Germany

The Communist Party that ran East Germany for four decades had only minor support in its former nation and virtually none in the united one. Renamed the Party for Democratic Socialism, it holds 17 of the 662 seats in the united German Parliament and had maintained close official contacts with Soviet Communists. The Soviet coup and its defeat threw the shattered and shrinking party into further disarray. Some supported the coup, most supported Gorbachev, and all called for some strong socialist presence to remain in the Soviet Union.

Hungary

“Our party would not accept the Gorbachev of today,” Hungarian Socialist Workers Party leader Gyula Thuermer told a party gathering last week. “We only accept the Gorbachev of 1985, who brought an end to the Brezhnev era, who wanted to renew socialism. . . . But not now, because he couldn’t renew the CPSU. . . . We cannot accept the Gorbachev who returned from the Crimea and smilingly signed the document banning the CPSU.” The party won only 3.68% of the March, 1990, vote and is not represented in Parliament.

Greece

The Greek Communist Party, which welcomed the attempted hard-line coup as a reversal of what it said was an anti-Communist climate in the Soviet Union, called the suspension of the Soviet Communist Party a “vote of shame” in a front-page comment in Rizospastis, the party paper. Shortly after the coup, the party suspended more than 60 dissenting journalists at the paper and replaced its editor. The Greek Communist Party has six seats in the 300-member Parliament.

Peru

Peru’s most important Communist party, the Mao Tse Tung-inspired Shining Path, has made no comment about the Soviet crisis. But it has said it regards itself as the only true Communist movement in the world. Since taking up arms in 1980, it has attacked Soviet and Chinese targets in Peru, claiming the parties in those countries had become “revisionist.” Peru’s array of peaceful Marxist political parties have also distanced themselves from the Soviet Union in recent years and say their theses for social revolution are unaffected by events overseas.

Spain

Communist Party Secretary General Julio Anguita condemned the attempted Soviet coup from the outset and described Yeltsin’s actions as “valiant.” But he said Yeltsin “remains a man of the right and of the West who is a source of many problems.” On Friday, the head of the Communist-oriented union, the Workers Commissions, Antonio Gutierrez, and Nicolas Sartorius, spokesman for the leftist coalition in Parliament, called for the Spanish Communist Party to dissolve and become part of a united left party. Anguita has threatened to resign as president of the leftist coalition if the Communist Party disbands.

Israel

The Communist Party of Israel said it is outraged by the coup but nevertheless rejected calls to abandon symbols like the red flag and change its name to “Socialist.” Tamar Gozansky, one of three Communist members of Parliament, said: “I think Boris Yeltsin is dangerous. Standing up and saying, ‘Now I outlawed the Communist Party,’ waving documents in front of crowds and calling that democracy. It’s distressing,” she said.

South Africa

Leaders of South Africa’s small but influential Communist Party rejected suggestions that the failed Soviet coup sounded the death knell of communism. One chapter of the South African party supported the Soviet coup, saying Gorbachev’s reforms were “destructive to socialism,” before embarrassed party leaders disowned the statement. Joe Slovo, the Communist Party leader, congratulated Gorbachev on defeating the coup attempt, saying in a statement: “The struggle to develop democratic socialism, which you have so courageously led in difficult circumstances over these last years, is proving its resilience.”

World Communism: Where the Reds Are--or Were Country & Years under Communist or Marxist rule Soviet Union: 1917-1991 Mongolia: 1921-1990 Yugoslavia: 1945-1990 Albania: 1946-1990/91 Poland: 1947-1989 Bulgaria: 1947-1990 Romania: 1947-1990 East Germany: 1949-1989 Czechoslovakia: 1948-1989/90 Hungary: 1948-1989/90 North Korea: 1948-present China: 1949-present North Vietnam: 1954-present Cuba: 1959-present Laos: 1959-present Congo: 1970-1990 Ethiopia: 1974-1991 Benin: 1975-1990 South Vietnam: 1975-present Cambodia: 1976-present Afghanistan: 1978-present Source: Yearbook of International Communist Affairs