I would like to take a broader overview of
this whole question, rather than the sort of nitpicking
that I and others have been engaging in, who said
what when where and what did they mean by it, blah blah.
There is both a broad link and a deep discontinuity
between Marx and what followed in the USSR. Arguably,
there is much continuity. Certainly most of the "platform"
of the Marx-Engels CM was implemented in the USSR,
however "temporary" a platform it was intended to be
(I shall eschew getting into the Marx vs Engels debate
other than to note that Engels wrote things that never appeared
in Marx, some of them important such as the support of
central planning in the Anti-Duhring, but none of which Marx
ever openly repudiated while he was alive.)
Marx clearly supported democracy of some sort or other,
despite his arguably not entirely democratic behavior while
running the First International. But then, that was a revolutionary
organization, a movement, rather than a government.
Clearly, Lenin "deviated" from Marx in various ways, which
may be linked, while at the same time deeply respecting him
and drawing on him profoundly. As I have argued, and some
others have agreed while others have disagreed, one such
deviation involved this very issue of democracy, that Lenin
argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat in effect needed
to be more dictatorial and less democratic if a return to power
by the capitalists was to be avoided. This may or may not have
been the case. It is difficult to say what would have happened
if the SR-controlled Duma had sat and come to power. Would
there have been a civil war? Would the tsar and his family
have been executed? Would democratic and civil liberties
have been recognized? There is no clear answer to any of these.
A more serious argument would be that Kerensky would
in fact have implemented various positive social reforms if he
had been able to maintain power. Perhaps he would not have
been able to and would have been overthrown by overtly
reactionary forces. But it is much less likely that there would
have been a civil war if he had retained power, although who
knows how long he would have dragged out Russia's participation
in WW I.
A yet more serious argument, made by many, is that the
"deviation" on democracy by Lenin was linked inevitably to
another deviation, that on having a revolution in an essentially
feudal country rather than in an advanced capitalist country.
Of course Marx late in life did support the idea of a possible
revolution in Russia. And, Luxemburg clearly thought it was
possible to have a revolution in a "weak link" country (like
Russia) while not abandoning democracy. But, Russia
certainly had a deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic
history and past, and despite the brief experiment with the
Duma, it is quite likely that after WW I Russia would have
ended up with a non-democratic regime no matter who was
in power, as happened in all of the Central European, non-
socialist countries except for Czechoslovakia.
Now it is a truism that Lenin was more progressive than
Stalin, as such discussions as the treatment of abstract art,
alternative sexual lifestyles, etc. etc. make clear. Stalin was
both horribly repressive and led a regime that engaged in
mass murder. At the same time, the progressive aspects
of the USSR, such as they were, and they were substantial,
numerous and very real, were largely put in place under
Stalin. And in various ways, as pointed out by Charles Brown,
the USSR played a progressive role in parts of the rest of the
world, even under Stalin, such as in the US civil rights movement.
Now there are folks like Adolfo Olaechea over on marxism-
international (if that list even still exists) who consider the worst
moment in the history of socialism to be the destalinization speech
of 1956 and its aftermath by Nikita Khrushchev. Of course this
was the effective end of the gulags, at least as a mass phenomenon,
although some of them did continue later. Also, for all his
vaguely market-oriented and decentralizing reforms, Khrushchev
and his successor Brezhnev oversaw a substantial increase in
income equality in the USSR. Wage inequality under Stalin was
as great as in the US, with industrial workers paid far more than
the less-than-subsistence that was being received (at least in
the 1930s) on the kolkhozes.
Of course, Khrushchev did send troops into Hungary and
did build the Berlin Wall. And, more generally made a fool of
himself, much to the disgust of his countrymen.
Although it has been much derided as the "period of
stagnation," the Brezhnev period is now rather fondly recalled
by many former Soviets. Life was not so bad socio-economically.
The safety net was in place, nobody was starving or homeless or
jobless (unless fired for being a dissident). And real incomes
were certainly higher than they are today for most citizens.
Equality was substantial.
There was not democracy, and there was repression of
dissidents and those questioning the system. But, there were
no executions of dissidents (Beria was the last to be executed
on such grounds, to the best of my knowledge, and he was not
really a dissident). There were many rights that were not
exercised by the citizens, some of which now are (e.g. freedom
to marry a foreigner and emigrate, quasi-freedom of the press).
But the suppression of dissent was very mild compared with
what went on the Stalin period, which many remembered, of course.
Life was not so bad, even if it could have been better in many ways.
The colllapse of that system is a very complicated matter.
I shall not discuss that here and now. But, we did see historically
a movement in world socialism from support for democracy by
Marx to its exact opposite under Stalin, followed by some
movement back in the opposite direction. It appears that Gorbachev
tried to achieve democratic socialism. Clearly, he failed.
Barkley Rosser
