The Alternative in Eastern Europe, by Rudolf Bahro, New Left [illegible].
[illegible] pass the test meant to manifest unconditional fealty to the dictates emanating from the Stalin leadership in Moscow; but there is a very different sense in which his motto holds true for revolutionary Marxists today. The acid test for communism today is its ability to regain its credibility as a true movement of emancipation, for the working masses, East and West, have for the most part ceased to regard [it] as a science of liberation, as a result precisely of the depredations of the Stalins and Thalmanns. Unless the problem is clearly stated in these fundamental terms, the immensity of the task cannot be properly understood.
It is easy for Trotskyists to adopt a dangerously smug attitude towards the past and present crimes committed in the name of Marxism, which are responsible for the ideological demoralization of the international communist movement — a demoralization that leads Eurocommunists and East European dissidents alike to seek salvation in the virtues of bourgeois democracy. Did we not sound the alarm as early as 1923? Do the documents of our movement not present a consistent and coherent alternative to Stalinism? Will history not work in our favour, as the empirical lessons of the class struggle in the West and the anti-bureaucratic movement in the East sooner or later force people to assimilate the rich heritage of the Transitional Programme and The Revolution Betrayed?
For the small but growing number of Marxist dissidents in Eastern Europe, however, the problem is posed differently. The true history of the October Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the world communist movement is still largely inaccessible to them; they live in an ambiance of popular hostility to 'Marxism-Leninism' as the language of oppression. This has tended to divide the dissidents into two currents: those who continue broadly to accept the official doctrine and concentrate on demanding democratic reforms, and those who seek the roots of the system's degeneration in the doctrine itself. The former course is that of the 'reform communists' (the Dubcek current in Czechoslovakia, Medvedev in the USSR, Havemann in East Germany); Rudolf Bahro's The Alternative in Eastern Europe represents the most systematic attempt to apply the latter.
In no way does Bahro shirk the possible consequences of his endeavour, be they imprisonment or accusations of theoretical revisionism. He writes: 'The conception of politics and history expressed in the method of argument as to "what Marx really said" is completely unfruitful: it always leads to distortions in the presentation of the "doctrine" that are easily assailable, and thus shifts the ground of dispute to the level of scholastic battles of quotations' (p. 21). The problem, he argues, is rather that 'it is no longer sufficient to be a "Marxist" in the traditional sense. We must rather raise [illegible] level Marx's own legacy, the most developed theory and [illegible] of social science that we have, and transform it into the communism of the future.'
It would therefore be wholly inappropriate to discuss The Alternative in Eastern Europe by exhibiting Bahro's breaks with orthodox Marxism on many important questions, contrasting his views with those of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky. Instead, we must accept that there is nothing wrong in principle with questioning even the most central elements of the traditional canon, and must attempt to assess Bahro's theoretical innovations on their merit.
The Division of Labour and General Emancipation
'Overall social organization on the basis of the traditional division of labour can only be overall state organization, it can only be socialization in this alienated form' (p. 141). The central categories of Bahro's analysis are the social division of labour (arising prior to private property) as the real historic source of class division and domination, and the need for its abolition on the road to communism. 'If the classes as bound up with private property are destroyed and rendered impotent', he writes, 'then the earlier element of the division of mental and manual work labour emerges once again as an autonomous factor of class formation, and does so long as this division of labour is at all reproduced' (p. 77). Thus, while capitalism furnishes the material preconditions for the transition to socialism and communism, the abolition of capitalist private property by no means automatically or necessarily eradicates all forms of social domination, of social and political inequality. The state, in particular, survives as an instrument of oppression, even if it is an instrument of the proletarian dictatorship.
For Bahro, the history of class society is the history of the division of labour. The term 'class' is itself subject to redefinition, for his analysis of the East European societies leads him to a theoretical model of social stratification that lacks definable class barriers, in which 'the historical task which I have in mind' is not the traditional one of abolishing class barriers, but 'the overcoming of subalternity, the form of existence and mode of thought of "little people"' (p. 271). Bahro's method of analysing history in terms of the rise, development, and eventual abolition of the social division of labour has both strengths and weaknesses. Its greatest strength is undoubtedly that it enables him to focus sharply on the forms of social inequality and oppression and to explain theoretically why they persist, and sometimes even reach new heights of absurdity, in societies that claim to have eliminated them along with private property in the means of production: 'The exploitation and oppression of women, in the overall patriarchal family structure with which this is connected... the dominance of the town over the country ..., the exploitation and oppression of the manual worker (whoever has to perform physical, schematic, executive work) by the mental worker (whoever performs predominantly intellectual, creative, planning and managerial activity)' (pp. 46-47).
The relevance of this approach is by no means restricted to 'actually existing socialism with its cultivation of social inequalities that go far beyond the spectrum of money incomes: with its perpetuation of wage-labour, commodity production, and money; with its rationalisation of the traditional division of labour; with its almost clerical family and sexual policy; with its high official dignitaries, its standing army and police, who are all responsible only to those above them; with its official corporations for the organization and tutelage of the population; with its duplication of the unwieldy state machine into a state and party apparatus; with its isolation within the national frontiers' (p. 37). Bahro's approach will be welcomed as a breath of fresh air by anyone familiar with the extent to which 'nationalization of the means of production' and 'a centrally planned economy' have become the ideological surrogate of socialism (not only for 'reformists' but also for 'revolutionary' socialist militants), and the extent to which crude economistic determinism and, on a more sophisticated plane, Althusserian 'science', have been counterposed to the allegedly 'pre-scientific' emancipatory humanism of Marx's early philosophy.
Equally relevant for socialists both East and West is Bahro's questioning of the primacy of quantitative economic growth. In his otherwise fair and sympathetic review in the Morning Star (8 December 1978), Monty Johnstone charges Bahro with [illegible] of the actual levels of development and the international position of the socialist countries, [illegible] are still necessarily a long way from communism', and alleges that 'instead of recognising with Marx that the highest development of the productive forces is 'an absolutely necessary premise' for superseding the old social relations, he argues for 'a slow evolution of technology'' and defends 'renunciation of economic growth'''. This criticism is mistaken on two counts. To begin with, Bahro does not at all deny the need for continued economic growth in the post-capitalism societies both today and in the foreseeable future. Indeed he explicitly states that 'a strategic decision against continuing the policy of economic growth so far pursued ... can of course not be put into practice immediately' (p. 395), because the quantitative growth will be needed to aid the development of the poorer regions of the world. Second, and more important, Johnstone has failed to understand Bahro's completely 'orthodox' assertion that the 'productive forces' do not consist merely of dead, objectified labour, and that the development of the decisive productive force, human labour, is actually fettered by the fetish of quantitative growth targets. For Bahro, as for Marx, it is the development of labour productivity in the sense of a reduction of socially necessary labour-time that is central to communist policy, and not the growth in the volume of production per se. This 'does not mean making a new law of "zero growth"', but rather displacing the criterion of quantity from its dominant position' (p. 405).
But Bahro's achievement — his firm re-establishment of the [illegible] of political economics, his demolition [illegible] of Marxism and a communist realpolitik — comes at a price. His one-sided emphasis on the social division of labour as the axis of human history is accompanied by an underestimation of the specific role of capitalism in that history. This point may be highlighted by contrasting two passages from Bahro's book. At one point (p. 43), he claims that 'the Hegelian tradition, and a Eurocentrism that was scarcely avoidable, may have been responsible for the way that Marx focused his attention too one-sidedly on capitalist private property and saw the entire past and future historical process as passing through this nodal period'. Subsequently, however (p. 127), Bahro himself concedes that 'the industrial civilization that has changed European life beyond recognition in the last two centuries leaves other nations no alternative; whether they had already reached the threshold of capitalism and industrialization in their own evolution, or whether it encountered them epochs removed from it — they must go through this crucible'. Thus, while all societies must reach the European level of industrialization as a precondition for communism they need not go through the stage of capitalist private property. The alternative to capitalist industrialization, the non-capitalist road of 'despotic industrialization', is the concept with which Bahro explains the history of the Russian revolution. The weaknesses in his method can best be illustrated in that context.
As Bahro sees it, the 'decisive objective fact' in the genesis of Stalinism 'was the absence of a bourgeois development of the productive forces, the absence of capitalist work habits, discipline and skill in the broadest sense' (p. 99). Since Russia was basically pre-capitalist when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, the only alternative to the economic compulsion through which capitalism had instilled 'work habits, discipline and skill' in the workers was the despotism of the state — in other words, terror. The specifically 'Asiatic' features of Russian society — omnipotence of a centralized state bureaucracy as the only cohesive force in a country dominated by more or less isolated peasant communities — reasserted themselves after the revolution in the Bolshevik Party itself, which now constituted a new all-powerful bureaucracy 'as a substitute for an exploiting class, as the labourlord of Soviet society' (p. 141). The prospect facing the 'Lenin-Stalin apparatus' (p. 322) was thus 'not yet ... socialism, no matter how resolutely the Bolsheviks believed in this, but rather the rapid industrial development of Russia on a non-capitalist road. Only now, when this is by and large completed, is the struggle for socialism on the agenda in the Soviet Union' (p. 50). Bahro thus defines the Stalinist system as an 'industrial despotism' historically analogous to the 'agricultural despotism' of the Asian mode of production.
The two most striking features of this analysis are the degree to which Bahro isolates this 'Asiatic' road to industrialization from the development of capitalism and the historical fatalism that flows from it concerning the inevitability of the bureaucratic degeneration of Bolshevism. It is strange that Bahro, who proves himself thoroughly familiar with Lenin's writings on many other matters, seems wholly unaware of the essential international dimension of the October Revolution [illegible] Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. (In 1920, for example, Lenin wrote: 'When three years ago we raised the question of the [illegible] and the conditions of the proletarian revolution's victory in Russia, we always stated emphatically that victory could not be permanent unless it was followed by a proletarian revolution in the West, and that a correct appraisal of our revolution was possible only from the international point of view'.) Indeed, the Bolshevik leadership did not expect the Russian revolution to survive as a socialist transformation if it remained confined within the borders of the former Tsarist empire.
The October Revolution was conceived on the basis of a theoretical analysis of imperialism, the system through which capital dominated even those parts of the world it had not yet fully penetrated economically and culturally. In that context, the evident strategic choice was to overcome Russia's 'Asiatic' backwardness in a revolutionary alliance with the proletariat of one or more of the advanced capitalist countries, and not to retreat to the isolationist road of 'socialism in one country', which indeed could lead only to despotic modernization controlled by the bureaucracy whose ideology it expressed. But Bahro dismisses the alternatives espoused by the Left Opposition as irrelevant. These alternatives consisted not merely in a set of proposals for economic policy, but also, and more importantly, in an orientation to the proletarian revolution in the West, seen as essential to the socialist development of the Soviet Union itself. It was the cynical betrayal of the world revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy that set the stage for the 'despotic industrialization' of the USSR, a bureaucracy which Bahro [illegible] completely unjustified' in appealing to the Leninist [illegible].
Bahro's rejection of the original Bolshevik project of linking their revolution to the fate of the revolution in the West is based on this line of argument: 'With the revolutions in Russia and China, with the [illegible] in Latin America, in Africa [illegible], [illegible] humanity is taking the shortest route to socialism. There, in the "East", the real wretched of this earth have awakened. The role of the working class, who gave the decisive impulse to the Russian revolution and who obviously have a task in Europe, must be seen afresh in this context. Moreover, even the revolution in Europe would not have lead directly to the socialism for which Marx hoped, but far more probably to the phenomenal form so familiar to us ...Time and again, our bureaucratic centralism is explained in terms of Russian backwardness, though in fact this is responsible only for certain excesses. In so far as the hierarchical apparatus of functionaries of the workers' organizations is the potential state machine, what this is preparing is not a new Paris Commune, but rather a state monopoly freed from capitalism' (p. 61). In other words since Stalinism was not rooted exclusively in Russia's backwardness, any more developed country undergoing a proletarian revolution would have suffered a similar fate. 'The entire perspective under which we have seen the transition to communism stands in need of correction, and in no way just with respect to the time factor. The dissolution of private property in the means of production on the one hand, and universal human emancipation on the other, are separated by an entire epoch' (p. 21).
The key to an understanding of the new perspective, Bahro argues, lies in consideration of the role of the state: 'The transition stage between communism and developed class society, which was initially crossed 'forwards', and is now to be crossed "backwards", is characterized in both cases by a specific function of the state which arises directly from the social division of labour and cooperation. Productive forces which belong to the state, which are either no longer of are not yet so, are what provide the specific characteristic of both epochs' (p. 67). The state, both as the agent of social reproduction so long as the division of labour persists and as an instrument of political domination, will continue to exist for an entire epoch following the abolition of capitalism. Those who hold state power — the new ruling 'class' — will be the bureaucrats spawned in the hierarchy of the old labour movement.
The Working Class and 'Subalternity'
'It was probably necessary to be both an anarchist and a Russian to perceive behind the authority of Marx and his doctrine, in the year 1873, the shadow of Stalin.' Thus Bahro, writing of Bakunin's warnings that in practice Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would mean the dictatorship of a new privileged class of socialist intellectuals. Because of the division of labour, the de-humanization of the immediate producers by their alienated, repetitive, and schematic activity, the emancipation of the proletariat can lead only 'to the satisfaction of a few of its pent-up compensatory needs' (p. 199). For the working masses, then, the revolution produces little in the way of immediate progress, for they are called upon to sacrifice their immediate for their long-term interests: 'Gramsci's idea, therefore, formulated with Russia and Italy particularly in mind, according to which the proletariat can only remain the ruling class by giving up its present vital interests in favour of its hegemony, and placing itself in the service of a scientifically proven interest of humanity, simply boils down to the fact that has since become quite evident enough, that the proletariat cannot be a ruling class' (p. 197). What Bahro calls the 'core of the ruling party, state and economic bureaucracy' is composed of the socialist intellectuals; their genesis lies in the conflict between the immediate interests of the workers and the historic interests of humanity.
Therefore, not only does the abolition of capitalist private property not lead directly to 'general emancipation', but the revolutionary class that represents the negation of private property, the proletariat, is also unable to accomplish the historic task ascribed to it by Marx and the Marxist tradition. In any event, the abolition of capitalism is also the abolition of the working class as a class (see chapter 7, entitled 'The Working Class as an Inapplicable Concept in Proto-Socialist Society'), so that the revolutionary subject must now be defined in entirely new terms.
The key to Bahro's definition of the 'subject of the emancipatory movement' as 'the energetic and creative elements of all strata and spheres of society' (p. 326) is: 'surplus consciousness... an energetic mental capacity that is no longer absorbed by the immediate necessities and dangers of human existence and can thus orient itself to more distant problems' (p. 257). The concept of 'surplus consciousness' is not as novel as it may sound at first. Trotsky wrote that 'the improvement of the material situation of the workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way for an open conflict with the bureaucracy'. Trotsky, however, applied this concept to an objectively definable collective, namely the working class, whereas for Bahro, the 'cultural-[illegible] represent the 'emancipatory' against the 'compensatory interests'. The concept of 'subalternity' (defined as the dominance of compensatory over emancipatory needs) is, of course, itself a category of individual psychology. It is this transplantation of social conflict from the objective class struggle to the personality structure of the individual that accounts for Bahro's inability to formulate a concrete political strategy.
Bahro in Perspective
It is doubtless true that in the last instance Marxism is concerned with the emancipation of the individual and that the social division of labour is incompatible with that emancipation. This conflict, however, though it is present throughout human history, has always been mediated through the particular social formations of each epoch, their modes of production, class antagonisms, and political institutions. Marx held that capitalism would be the last of class societies because:
1. The unprecedented expansion of the productive forces under capitalism creates the material preconditions for the abolition of social inequality;
2. Capitalism forges a unified world market, which is a pre-condition for the abolition of national inequalities;
3. Capitalism creates a particular social class, the proletariat, whose objective interests conflict directly with the maintenance of private property, privilege, and the division of labour; this class therefore has interests that may be considered universal in that they are identical to the long-term interests of the human species itself. Hence, although the state, the social division of labour, money, and so on, will persist during the transitional period, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', conceived in Marx's sense, must by nature lead to a classless society in which the social division of labour has itself vanished; communism.
As we have seen, Bahro parts company with Marx in designating not capitalism, but industrialism as the universal stage through which all societies must pass on the road to communism; Russia, China, and the other 'socialist countries' have reached this stage, this industrialism, through a non-capitalist road, thus demonstrating that European capitalism was the first, but not the only, road to industrialization. But by severing the historical connection between capitalism and socialism, Bahro has lost sight of the revolutionary subject, the proletariat, and the new type of state that can be realized through its rule: the direct democracy of the working masses. The antagonism between the state and society exists in a 'pure form', so to speak, in Bahro's alternative scenario: an alien apparatus confronts all individuals, embodied in the 'collective worker'. His definition of the revolutionary subject is therefore necessarily vague, and he thus has little to say about the form state power will assume after the political expropriation of the 'politbureaucracy'. The method that enables him both to describe so accurately how 'actually existing socialism' is alien to the socialism of Marx and Engels and to outline some of the measures needed to revolutionize it (particularly in the domain of the abolition of all bureaucratic privilege, the need for a new 'economy of time', and education — see especially the excellent chapters 14 and 1) fails him when it comes to the central questions of political strategy.
To some extent, of course, this is a reflection of Bahro's personal situation. The tragedy of the isolated Marxist 'dissident' deprived of access to many indispensable sources about the real history of the Russian revolution and the world communist movement and confronted with an atomized working class seemingly preoccupied with 'compensatory interests' is sharply reflected in many aspects of Bahro's 'alternative'. But there can be no doubt that despite these weaknesses, his book is a landmark in the resurgence of a new generation of East European Marxists. Rudolf Bahro is not only a thinker of exceptional force (a quality to which this review, focusing on one aspect of the book, and emphasizing its weaknesses at that, cannot possibly do justice); he is also a true revolutionary in spirit, as his conclusion makes clear: 'Communism is not only necessary, it is also possible. Whether it becomes a reality or not must be decided in the struggle for its conditions of existence.' If the emergence of a creative but somewhat less than orthodox 'East European Marxism' is indeed a necessary stage through which the rediscovery of the rich Bolshevik tradition by the new generation of East European revolutionaries will have to pass, then Bahro's book has helped to lay foundations which cannot be ignored, East or West, in the debates to come. There can be no better reason for reading, studying, and criticizing it.
Gunther Minnerup