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On The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: Michael A. Lebowitz Responds

The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”

"Where fresh insights are rare, indeed, Michael Lebowitz provides a bundle of them … rich material for badly-needed discussion."

—Paul Buhle, author, Marxism in the United States

The following is Michael A. Lebowitz’s response to a review of The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”, which was written by Alex Cistelecan for Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. Read the original review here.

In the opening line of his essay on The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: the Conductor and the Conducted, Alex Cistelecan proposes that my book should be read as ‘an exercise in the moral psychology of “human development”’; and he proceeds to riff on this theme by speaking of my ‘moral supplement to Marxism’, ‘the moral supplement of human development’, ‘the moral approach to Real Socialism’, and my apparent claim that the classical elements of socialism should be supplemented ‘with a vital third element’—namely, that my ‘revised formula for 21st century socialism’ would be ‘soviets+ electrification+ human kindness’. HA! Not only is this unrecognisable as a description of my book on ‘real socialism’ book but it is precisely contrary to what I have argued in that book and developed in my immediately preceding work, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (2010).

One of Cistelecan’s problems is that he appears incapable of distinguishing between the concept of socialism as fully developed upon its own foundations (‘Communism’ in the lexicon of Histmat) and the struggle to build that society. Thus, to speak of the characteristics of the former (e.g., a society in which there is ‘recognition of our common humanity and our needs as members of the human family’) is presumably to assume that one can realise this by a focus upon ‘the required social morality’ and the ‘human kindness’ which allows for the construction of a ‘solidarian society’. Cistelecan glides from the real process to the ideal by ignoring my specific points that the solidarian society does not develop spontaneously and requires ‘the development of an entire complex of organs—individual workers’ councils, coordinating bodies of workers’ councils, and organs that transmit the identification of needs (communal councils, communes, etc)’—‘institutions that foster the development of human capacities’ (including the expansion of the commons) (166, 169, 187-8).

So, how can we explain that all he sees is moral psychology, a moral supplement to Marxism, the moral supplement of human development—rather than the real process of struggling to create new social institutions? As has been noted before, reading to discover silences is often very revealing. And there is a deafening silence in Cistelecan’s review. In The Socialist Alternative and in the Introduction to this book, I stressed Marx’s key link of human development and practice and noted that emphasis upon this key link implies our ‘need to be able to develop through democratic, participatory and protagonistic activity in every aspect of our lives’. Indeed, the focus is upon ‘revolutionary practice in our communities, our workplaces, and in all our social institutions’—it is upon the development of revolutionary subjects through their practice (18).

The silence in Cistelecan concerns practice. It’s not there, and the implications are apparent. Take away practice from the key link of human development and practice, and human development floats in mid-air to be grounded by Cistelecan’s preoccupation with a moral supplement of human development (or by Vanguard Marxism’s inexorable march of productive forces). It is precisely because I focus upon revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change, that I stress the centrality of building those new institutions from below in which people can transform themselves. And this focus upon the key link is not abstract theory—it was something immediately visible in the communal councils, workers councils and recovered factories in Venezuela in the seven years I was there as an adviser. Practice is how we build the socialist alternative (as I stressed in the book with that name).

But what’s all this got to do with ‘real socialism’, the subject of the book under review? After all, I explicitly indicated in the Preface that the focus on human development ‘is not the subject matter of this book’ and in the Introduction that the book was ‘not about the theory of socialism as an organic system’ but, rather, about the ‘attempt in the twentieth century to build an alternative to capitalism’ (8, 20). Cistelecan’s preoccupation is with the theme of The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development rather than with my attempt to theorise the nature of ‘real socialism’ as it consolidated over the period of the 1950s through the 1980s.

In Contradictions, my starting point was the concrete phenomena of shortages in ‘real socialism’ from which I distilled by analysis the simple concept of vanguard relations of production which involved a vanguard oriented to building socialism and a particular relation to the working class which, under a social contract, received job rights and other support not present within capitalism in return for not challenging the rule of the vanguard in workplace and society. Logically developing, then, what was inherent in that relation, I explored its particular laws of motion (including the difficulty of intensive development) and (given the inability of workers in this relation to develop their capacities), the emergence of a separate body of enterprise managers induced to support the plans of the vanguard by material incentives in the form of bonuses. This latter group, I argued, increasingly took form as a separate class (an incipient capitalist class), and its struggle against the logic of the vanguard became the source of dysfunction in the economy and deformation in the vanguard. Indeed, rather than choosing ‘to follow faithfully all through the volume’ Janos Kornai (as Cistelecan asserts), my emphasis upon the centrality of this class struggle is a complete rejection of Kornai who subsumed the managers and the vanguard within a single bureaucracy and accordingly by definition excluded the possibility of this struggle so much at the core of the trajectory of ‘real socialism’ and the ultimate victory of capital.

Although seeing everything through the prism of his premises, Cistelecan does not entirely ignore the book. For one, he criticises my concrete starting point of scarcity. ‘The choice of this surface phenomenon as key to the systemic nature of the object of study’, he claims, ‘is rather ungrounded.’ It cannot compare to Marx’s identification of the commodity as the entry point to unveil the nature of capitalism. A very interesting assertion. So, what would Cistelecan propose as an alternative logical starting point? Does he think there is one? Or, does he reject the method of attempting to develop logically an understanding of the systemic nature of ‘real socialism’? Specifically, does he reject Marx’s method (which I attempt to follow) in favour of empiricism? Yes, from his scattered comments about ‘real socialism’ this appears to be the case—thus, a formless soup combining empiricism and lamentations about supposed moral supplements to Marxism.

True, he does say that the idea of viewing ‘real socialism’ as a system is ‘promising’. However, he immediately complains that what I have produced is an analysis of how ‘the subjective incentives’ of the main contenders in the system ‘were pitted against each other’. Indeed, ‘this focus on the interplay of subjective incentives’ is akin to ‘the method of rational choice theory’. I have learned to my surprise that, rather making class struggle the core of my description of the course of ‘real socialism’, I have merely presented ‘a contested system traversed by three contrasting subjective logics’ (those of the vanguard, capital and the working class). But this is not a matter of the ‘subjective incentives’ of the contending parties! Rather, those subjective incentives flow from the class positions of the respective parties. One wonders if Cistelecan would refer to the capitalist system as the locus of the interplay of the contrasting subjective logics of capital and the working class.

The class struggle which I focus upon in Contradictions is the one immediately between the vanguard and capital but there is also a logic of the working class—one latent because it is disarmed both in practice by the restrictions imposed by the vanguard and in theory by Vanguard Marxism. In considering the side of the working class, I do refer to the ‘moral economy of the working class’ (could this be my original sin?). Certainly, it is essential to recognise the social norms and beliefs as to right and wrong on the part of workers in ‘real socialism’ (e.g., the orientation toward egalitarianism). However, I explicitly argued the necessity to go beyond moral economy to the political economy of the working class and to struggle for workers control and solidarity among the working class through the creation of workers councils and communal councils at the base (cf. Chapter 6 ‘From Moral Economy to Political Economy’ and Ch, 7 ‘Towards a Society of Associated Conductors’). Once again, practice; once again, class struggle.

It is true, as Cistelecan observes, that socialised means of production, worker self-management and communal councils do not guarantee the spontaneous development of socialism as fully developed and, indeed, that there is a ‘need for the Party’ as a conductor. On this question, he is pushing through an open door: I have always stressed the need for leadership (186) and explicitly a party in Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (2006) and The Socialist Alternative. But not the vanguard party. Not a party which presumes to deliver socialism as ‘a gift to those below by the only ones above who know how to create socialism’ (70). Rather, a different type of party—one which recognises the importance of fostering the conditions in which people can develop their capacities, one which learns how to listen, one which can govern by following.

11 August 2014

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