[ Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, was a
tragic figure. He tried to build a humane socialism on the rotten
foundations of authoritarianism. Today, without the albatross of
Stalinism, we can fight for an entirely different kind of socialism.]
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GORBACHEV COULDN’T REFORM THE SOVIET SYSTEM  
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Ben Burgis
September 5, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, was a tragic
figure. He tried to build a humane socialism on the rotten foundations
of authoritarianism. Today, without the albatross of Stalinism, we can
fight for an entirely different kind of socialism. _

Former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev attends a
literary festival in Cologne, Germany, 2013. , Ralf Juergens / Getty
Images

 

The final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was laid to
rest on Saturday in Moscow. It wasn’t officially designated as a
state funeral, although it had “elements of a state funeral,” and
Russian president Vladimir Putin skipped it
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The snub isn’t surprising. Gorbachev’s program of _perestroika_
(restructuring) and _glasnost_ (openness) represented an attempt to
liberalize the Soviet system from within. At the same time, he allowed
the Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe to determine their own
destiny. As a militant Russian imperialist who presides over a
brutally unequal society marked by very few vestiges of the socialist
past, Putin has little reason to remember Gorbachev fondly.

Western media, for its own reasons, seems unsure of how to remember
him. By the end of his tenure in office, Gorbachev was wildly popular
in the West because he ended the Cold War and removed what had been
the ever-present danger of mutual destruction. But in his later years,
he railed against NATO expansion and warned that renewed great power
rivalry could bring that danger roaring back — a message that’s
unlikely to resonate with journalists who put Ukrainian flags in their
Twitter bios. After all, even if he wanted to reform Soviet Communism,
he _was_ a Communist.

From the perspective of those of us who hold out hope for a better
kind of socialism than what existed in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev can
be viewed as a tragic figure
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ground down between “oligarchs in waiting” who were salivating for
the return of capitalism and Brezhnevite hard-liners who thought the
USSR’s authoritarian and deeply dysfunctional economic system,
bitterly resented by much of its population, could totter along the
way it was forever. His reform program failed, and the first group
came to power — an outcome that generated an explosion of economic
inequality and immense human suffering.

Perhaps Gorbachev couldn’t have succeeded. It’s possible that the
system simply didn’t have the internal resources for successful
reform. But at least he _tried_ to find a third path. For that alone,
he deserves to be remembered more warmly than either his Stalinist
predecessors or his gangster-capitalist successors.
Meanwhile, we should recognize that the kind of socialism worth
fighting for today has very little in common with the system inherited
by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, or even the liberalized version that
collapsed in 1991. If we’re ever lucky enough to achieve a fully
socialist future, it’s going to have to be a kind of socialism that
promises _more_ freedom, _more_ prosperity, and a deeper kind of
democratic self-government than what exists in Western capitalist
democracies, if only because that’s the only kind that will have any
chance of securing popular support.

The Tragedy of Gorbachev

In his book _Beyond Perestroika
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the anti-Stalinist Marxist theoretician Ernest Mandel notes that at
the meeting of the Politburo — the ruling body of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union — where Gorbachev was elevated to his
position as general secretary, his candidature was formally proposed
by Andrei Gromyko, one of the Politburo’s longest-serving members.
Gromyko might have been chosen for this task because he knew how to
reassure Brezhnevite hard-liners that Gorbachev wouldn’t change too
much too quickly, and would be willing to defend the system by force
if push came to shove — Gromyko’s speech is supposed to have
included a line about Gorbachev having “teeth of steel” behind his
“enticing smile.”

But Gromyko’s role on the occasion is also a potent symbol of the
fact that long-serving party leaders like him understood that
_something_ would have to change. The Soviet economy had been
declining for a long time, both because of its own internally
generated dysfunction and the drain imposed by the Cold War arms race
with the United States. Within the Soviet Union itself, and to an even
greater extent in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the alleged
“workers states” were resented by the actual workers under their
thumbs. The rise of the Polish trade union movement Solidarność
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had been quashed a few years before, but more such explosions were
inevitable. The status quo couldn’t last forever.

Gorbachev’s reform program had three prongs. The first, and the most
important in explaining Putin’s disdain for his memory, was that he
wound down the Soviet Union’s de facto empire. He ended the Soviet
war in Afghanistan — overseeing, as left-wing foreign policy expert
Kuba Wrzesniewski writes in _Sublation_ magazine, “a more dignified
exit than Biden managed in 2021” — and negotiating an arms control
treaty with the United States, a considerable diplomatic feat
considering that he had “the arch hawk Reagan as his counterpart.”
Even more consequentially, he formally abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine
that asserted Soviet control over the nations of Eastern Europe. This
in turn emboldened nationalists within the USSR itself and ultimately
led to the dissolution of the union after Gorbachev lost power.

The second was _perestroika_, the economic restructuring that involved
introducing market mechanisms within the basic framework of
centralized state planning. The third, _glasnost_, was a gradual
process of political liberalization.

Mandel believed that the second prong would fail because the third
didn’t go far enough.

_Socialist democracy _is not a normative demand, nor is it an ideal to
be realized little by little. _It is an immediate practical necessity
for the proper functioning of the Soviet economy and Soviet society.
_Without this democracy it is impossible for the planners to know the
workers’ preferences both as producers and as consumers. Ignorant of
these preferences, it is impossible to allocate the social product and
the social surplus in the correct proportions. The mobilization of the
potential knowledge and initiative which still remains hidden in the
Soviet working class remains a mirage. Gorbachev’s plans remain
suspended in midair, dependent on the good will of the bureaucrats.

Mandel was right about the information problems
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faced by Soviet planners, even in the Gorbachev era — though his
proposed alternative is a bit vague. What ultimately happened was a
catastrophe. Instead of the Soviet model of being replaced by a
better, more democratic form of socialism, Gorbachev was succeeded by
the openly pro-capitalist Boris Yeltsin, and a handful of oligarchs
looted the state economy that had at least nominally been the
collective property of the entire Soviet people.

Mandel was surely right that adding a bit of liberalization to the
crumbling edifice of Soviet planning wasn’t enough to fix what was
wrong with the Soviet economy. Meanwhile, trying to keep the basic
structures of authoritarian control in place with a population
increasingly unafraid to speak its mind, protest, and call for change
was an increasingly difficult proposition. “Dissenting views,”
Wrzesniewski writes, “could be expressed in increasingly less
guarded ways, to the point of rising to a chorus in the late 80s.”
The “peaceful decolonization” of Eastern Europe inspired Soviet
citizens themselves “to protest and defy central authority,
confident that they too would be spared the tanks, the secret police,
and the camps of the Soviet apparatus of repression.”

Hard-liners nervous about the pace of reform staged an unsuccessful
coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, and in the wake of their
failure, the capitalist-restorationist faction led by Yeltsin seized
the steering wheel of what, by December, was no longer the Soviet
Union. The results were grim. Economic inequality grew to towering
heights, and while opportunity and prosperity increased for those
Russians who became part of the middle class, overall life expectancy
sharply declined
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Anyone who remembers reading news from Russia in the 1990s can
remember article after article painting a picture of immiseration and
lawlessness that sounded like something out of a dystopian
science-fiction novel. Things have stabilized considerably since, but
it’s hard to look back on the last thirty years of Russian history
and think, “Gosh, I sure am happy that what replaced the Soviet
system was capitalism.”
A Better Socialism Is Possible

Is there a version of Soviet history where Gorbachev succeeded in
reforming the Soviet Union into something qualitatively different and
better? It’s hard to answer that kind of counterfactual question
with any kind of certainty, but one problem is that the Soviet working
class wasn’t engaged in a democratic process of considering and
deciding on reforms to a state they fundamentally recognized as
_theirs_.

Wrzesniewski gives Gorbachev credit for the “socialist humanism”
he displayed in trying to reform and defend the Soviet system without
“spilling any more blood.” That may well be an accurate
description of Gorbachev’s subjective intentions, but given the kind
of system he was inheriting, much of the Soviet Union related to him
not as their representative but as a more generous and liberal prison
warden. And state officials who exercised actual power either saw him
as a threat to the system with which they identified or as a roadblock
that had to be swept away as they transformed themselves from state
socialist bureaucrats to wealth-hoarding capitalists. In such a
scenario, it’s hard to see how any result could have come about
except a transition to capitalism, a reversion to the pre-Gorbachev
status quo, or some Chinese-style combination of the two outcomes. At
the outer edge of possibility, perhaps, there’s a timeline where
Gorbachev steered the USSR (or just Russia) to a more humane and
social democratic form of capitalism — “Sweden with nukes.”

But a better version of a fully _socialist_ society would have to come
about in radically different circumstances. As Rosa Luxemburg
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presciently wrote as far back as 1918, when she wrote a pamphlet
criticizing the authoritarian aspects of the early Bolshevik regime,
socialist democracy _can’t_ come about “as some sort of Christmas
present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally
supported a handful of socialist dictators.” If you want your
socialism to end up democratic, it has to start that way.

But what would that actually look like? Mandel’s diagnosis of the
problem with Soviet planning is convincing enough, but simply
postulating “democracy” as the solution makes it sound like every
decision regarding how to “allocate the social product and the
social surplus” would be put to a vote — or worse yet, some
endless mass meeting where everyone spends interminable hours
searching for consensus. After all, it’s not easy to see how
_representative_ democracy could give planners detailed, fine-grain
information about “the workers’ preferences both as producers and
as consumers” — the absence of which led to the shoddy products
and empty grocery store shelves that routinely infuriated ordinary
Soviet citizens. Would every issue about which kinds of breakfast
cereal to produce, which factories should have first pick of raw
materials, and so on, be a campaign issue in the representatives’
elections?

In _The Blueprint_, a book I’m cowriting with Bhaskar Sunkara and
Mike Beggs, we lay out an alternative vision that disaggregates the
issue of workers’ democracy from the issue of consumer preferences.
The most important reason socialists have always advocated democracy
at the workplace is that the workplace is the place where most adults
have to spend at least half their waking lives most days of the week.
No one should have to spend all that time taking orders from bosses
over whom they can’t exercise any kind of direct democratic
accountability. And the lack of democratic input in deciding what
happens to the _product_ of workers’ collective labor — the lack
Marxists call
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“exploitation” — generates an utterly indefensible level of
economic inequality.

But there’s no reason that democracy at the workplace, and
marketless planning of those public goods where markets generate the
most socially undesirable consequences, can’t coexist with the use
of market mechanisms to solve the information problems that plagued
even Gorbachev-era Soviet planners. In the model outlined in our book,
full democratic socialism would entail not only domains like health
care and education but banks and other commanding heights of the
economy would be state-owned. The remaining quasi-private sector would
be made up of competing worker-owned cooperatives that would
essentially rent the physically means of production from the public as
a whole through grants from state-owned banks. When all this is
combined with a robust civil society, a free press, and real
multiparty elections, it is possible that such a setup could give us a
world fundamentally different from both what existed in the Soviet
Union and the neoliberal order that’s become globally hegemonic
since the USSR’s collapse.

Wrzesniewski expresses some discomfort with Gorbachev’s behavior in
the decades after he lost power and accommodated himself a bit too
comfortably to what came next. (Most notoriously, he starred in a
Pizza Hut commercial [[link removed]].)
But he offers a qualified defense. What came after Gorbachev left the
stage — “the ‘shock therapy’ transition to capitalism, the
plunder of national wealth by well-connected gangsters, the fatal
solutions peddled by Western advisors, and the social, economic, and
political catastrophe which still bedevils the post-Soviet state”
— was neither “his intention nor his doing.” He _tried_ to steer
a different course.
Gorbachev himself doubtless made a multitude of errors as he set out
on that course, and it’s impossible to know whether another man
could have achieved a different result. But the more basic problem may
have been that, as Rosa Luxemburg foresaw decades before Mikhail
Gorbachev was born, a socialist democracy _couldn’t_ emerge from any
allegedly “temporary” or “transitional” dictatorship. If we
want to achieve the kind of society where Pizza Hut is not just
nationalized but placed under workers’ control, the road there is
going to have to be a democratic one in which an organized and
politically engaged working class is operating in its own interests.
Most likely, this would mean first fighting for social democratic
reforms and then fighting to go beyond social democracy’s limits.
There are many ways to start on that road and never get to your
destination — because your enemies have defeated you, or because of
your own errors, or simply because you’ve lost popular support. But
it’s the only one that leads where we want to go.

Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at
Morehouse College, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give
Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently
Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He
Still Matters.

The new issue of Jacobin is out next week. Subscribe today
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print and digital subscription.

* Soviet Union
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* Mikhail Gorbachev
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