© Immanuel Wallerstein 1997.
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(ISA Regional Colloquium, "Building Open Society and Perspectives of Sociology in East-Central Europe," Krakow, Poland, Sept. 15-17, 1996)
A Communist interlude? Between what and what? and first of all, when? I shall consider it to be the period between November, 1917 (the so-called Great October Revolution) and 1991, the year of the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in August, and of the U.S.S.R. itself in December. This is the period in which there were states governed by Communist, or Marxist-Leninist, parties in Russia and its empire and in East-Central Europe. To be sure, there are still today a few states in Asia who consider themselves to be governed by Marxist-Leninist parties, to wit, China, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. And there is Cuba. But the era in which there was a "socialist bloc of states" in any meaningful sense is over. So in my view is the era in which Marxism-Leninism is an ideology that commands significant support.
So, we are talking of an interlude in the elementary sense that there was a point of time prior to the era in which there was a coherent bloc of states asserting that they were governed by Marxist-Leninist ideology and that today we are living in a period posterior to this era. Of course, its shadow was there before 1917. Marx and Engels had asserted in the Manifesto already in 1848 that "a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism." And, in many ways, this spectre is still haunting Europe. Only Europe? Let us discuss that.
What was the spectre before 1917? What was it between 1917 and 1991? What is it today? I think it is not too difficult to come to an agreement on what the spectre was before 1917. It was the spectre that somehow the "people" seen as a largely uneducated, uncultivated, and unsophisticated mass of persons would rise up in some disorderly manner, destroy and confiscate property and redistribute it more or less, putting into power persons who would govern without respect for talent or initiative. And in the process, they would destroy what was seen as valuable in the country's traditions, including of course their religious traditions.
This was not a totally delusionary fear. There is a scene in the movie version of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, when Dr. Zhivago, returning from the front shortly after the Revolution to his relatively palatial home in Moscow, is greeted not merely by his family but by the very large collective of persons who have occupied his home as their new residence. His own family has been relegated to a single room in the vast house. Zhivago, representing the essential idealistic Russian intellectual, is asked somewhat aggressively what he thinks of this new reality, and he replies "This is a better arrangement, comrades, more just.[1] "To the end of his quite eventful life, Dr. Zhivago continues to believe that it is better, even if the reader is left to have more ambiguous sentiments.
[1]In Pasternak's original novel, he is greeted only by his family, who explain that they have "given away" two of the three floors of "living space" (the new term) to various Soviet institutions. But in this version, too, Zhivago expresses his sense that this is more just, that the rich have previously had too much of everything.
We know the political and social history of nineteenth-century Europe fairly well. Let me summarize it. After the French Revolution, there was widespread and increasing acceptance in Europe of two concepts which would have been considered strange by most persons before the French Revolution. The first was that political change was an absolutely normal and expectable phenomenon. The second was that sovereignty, national sovereignty, resided not in rulers or legislatures but in something called the "people." These were not only new ideas; they were radical ideas, disturbing to most persons of property and power.
This new set of values that transcended particular states, what I call the emerging geoculture of the world-system, was accompanied by important changes in the demographic and social structuring of most European states. The rate of urbanization increased and the percentage of wage labor increased. This sudden geographic concentration of sizeable numbers of urban wage-workers in European cities, whose living conditions were generally abysmal, created a new political force composed of persons who were largely excluded from the benefits of economic growth: they suffered economically, were excluded socially, and had no say in the political processes, either at the national or the local levels. When Marx and Engels said, "workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains," it was this group to whom they were both referring and addressing these words.
Two things happened in Europe between 1848 and 1917 that affected this situation. First, the political leaders of the different states began to effectuate a program of reform, rational reform, designed to respond to the plaints of this group, palliate their miseries, and appease their sense of alienation. Such programs were put into effect within most European states, albeit at different paces and at different moments. (I include in my definition of Europe the principal White settler states: the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.)
The programs of reform had three main components. The first was suffrage. Introduced cautiously but steadily expanding in coverage, sooner or later all adult males (and then women as well) were accorded the right to vote. The second reform was remedial workplace legislation plus redistributive benefits, what we would later call the "welfare state." The third reform, if reform is the right word, was the creation of national identities, largely via compulsory primary education and universal military service (for males).
The three elements together political participation via the ballot, the intervention of the state to reduce the polarizing consequences of ungoverned market relations, and a trans-class unifying national loyalty comprise the underpinnings, and indeed in actuality the definition, of the liberal state, which by 1914 had become the pan-European norm and partial practice. After 1848, the pre-1848 differences between so-called liberal and so-called conservative political forces diminished radically as they tended to come together on the merits of a reform program, although of course there continued to be debate about the pace of reform and about the degree to which it was useful to preserve the veneration of traditional symbols and authorities.
This same period saw the emergence in Europe of what is sometimes called the social movement, composed on the one hand of the trade-unions and on the other hand of socialist or labor parties. Most, although not all, of these political parties considered themselves to be "Marxist," though what this really meant has been a continuing matter of dispute, then and since. The strongest among these parties, and the "model" party for itself and for most of the others, was the German Social-Democratic Party.
The German Social-Democratic Party, like most of the other parties, was faced with one major practical question: should it participate in parliamentary elections (with the subsequent question, should its members participate in governments)? In the end, the overwhelming majority of the parties and of the militants of parties answered yes to these questions. The reasoning was rather simple. They could thereby do some immediate good on behalf of their constituencies. Eventually, with extended suffrage and sufficient political education, the majority would vote them into total power, and once in power, they could legislate the end of capitalism and the installation of a socialist society. There were some premises that underpinned this reasoning. One was the Enlightenment view of human rationality: All persons will act in their own rational interest, provided they have the chance and the education to perceive it correctly. The second was that progress was inevitable, and that therefore history was on the side of the socialist cause.
This line of reasoning by the socialist parties of Europe in the pre-1914 period transformed them in practice from a revolutionary force, if they ever were one, into merely a somewhat more impatient version of centrist liberalism. Although many of the parties still talked a language of "revolution," they no longer really conceived of revolution as involving insurrection or even the use of force. Revolution had become rather the expectation of some dramatic political happening, say a 60% victory at the polls. Since at the time socialist parties were still doing quite poorly at the polls on the whole, prospective victory at the polls still bore the psychological flavor of revolution.
Enter Lenin, or rather enter the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Party. The Bolshevik analysis had two main elements to it. First, they said that the theorizing and praxis of the European social-democratic parties was not at all revolutionary but was at best a variant of liberalism. Secondly, they said that, whatever the justification for such "revisionism" might be elsewhere, it was irrelevant to Russian reality, since Russia was not a liberal state, and there was therefore no possibility that socialists could vote themselves into socialism. One has to say that these two assessments seem in retrospect absolutely correct.
The Bolsheviks drew from this analysis a crucial conclusion: Russia would never become socialist (and implicitly neither would anyone else) without an insurrectionary process that involved seizing control of the state apparatus. Therefore, Russia's "proletariat" (the approved subject of history), which was in fact still numerically small, had to do this by organizing itself into a tightly-structured cadre party which would plan and organize the "revolution." The "small" size of the urban industrial proletariat was more important to the implicit, not explicit, theorizing than Lenin and his colleagues admitted. For what we in effect got here was a theory of how to be a socialist party in a country that was neither wealthy nor highly industrialized, and was therefore not a part of the core zone of the capitalist world-economy.
The leaders of the October Revolution considered themselves to have led the first proletarian revolution of modern history. It is more realistic to say that they led one of the first, and possibly the most dramatic, of the national liberation uprisings in the periphery and semiperiphery of the world-system. What made this particular national liberation uprising different, however, from the others were two things: one, it was led by a cadre party which affected a universalist ideology and therefore proceeded to create a worldwide political structure under its direct control; and the revolution occurred in the particular country outside the core zone that was the strongest among them industrially and militarily. The whole history of the Communist interlude of 1917-1991 derived from these two facts.
A party that proclaims itself a vanguard party, and then proceeds to achieve state power, cannot but be a dictatorial party. If one defines oneself as vanguard, then one is necessarily right. And if history is on the side of socialism, then the vanguard party is logically fulfilling the world's destiny by enforcing its will on everyone else, including on those persons of whom it is supposed to be the vanguard, in this case, the industrial proletariat. Indeed, it would be remiss in its duty were it to act differently. If in addition only one of these parties in the entire world had state power, which was essentially the case between 1917 and 1945, then if one organizes an international cadre structure, it does seem natural and plausible that the party of the state in power become the leading party. In any case, this party had the material and political means to insist on this role against any opposition that arose. Thus it seems not unfair to state that the one-party regime of the U.S.S.R. and its de facto control of the Comintern were almost inevitable consequences of the theory of the vanguard party. And with it came, if not quite inevitably then at least with high probability, what actually happened: purges, gulags, and an Iron Curtain.
No doubt the clear and continuous hostility of the rest of the world to the Communist regime in Russia played a big role in these developments. But it is surely specious to attribute these developments to that hostility, since Leninist theory predicted the hostility and therefore the hostility represented part of the constants of external reality with which the regime always knew it had to deal.
The hostility was to be expected. The internal structuring of the regime was to be expected. What was perhaps less to be expected was the geopolitics of the Soviet regime. There are four successive geopolitical decisions taken by the Bolsheviks that marked turning-points, and which do not seem to me to have been necessarily the only route that the Soviet regime could have taken.
The first was the reassembling of the Russian empire. In 1917, the Russian imperial forces were in military disarray, and vast segments of the Russian population were calling out for "bread and peace." This was the social situation within which the Tsar was forced to abdicate, and in which, after a brief period, the Bolsheviks could launch their attack on the Winter Palace and seize state power.
At first, the Bolsheviks seemed to be indifferent to the fate of the Russian empire as such. After all, they were internationalist socialists, who were committed to a belief in the evils of nationalism, of imperialism, and of Tsarism. They "let go" both Finland and Poland. One can be cynical and say that they were merely casting ballast overboard at a difficult moment. I think rather that it was a kind of immediate, almost instinctive, reaction in accord with their ideological prejudices.
What happened then was rational reflection. The Bolsheviks found themselves in a militarily difficult civil war. They were afraid that "letting go" meant the creation of actively hostile regimes on their borders. They wanted to win the civil war and they decided that this required reconquest of the empire. It turned out to be too late for Finland and Poland, but not for the Ukraine and the Caucasus. And thus it was that, of the three great multinational empires that existed in Europe at the time of the First World War the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the Russian only the Russian empire was to survive, at least until 1991. And thus it was that the first Marxist-Leninist regime became a Russian imperial regime, the successor to the Tsarist empire.
The second turning-point was the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in 1921. Faced with the reality that the long-awaited German revolution was not going to happen, the Bolsheviks turned inward and eastward. They turned inward insofar as they now proclaimed a new doctrine, that of building socialism in one country. And they turned eastward insofar as Baku shifted the world-systemic emphasis of the Bolsheviks from a revolution of the proletariat in highly industrialized countries to an anti-imperialist struggle in the colonial and semicolonial countries of the world. Both seemed sensible as pragmatic shifts. Both had enormous consequences for the taming of Leninism as a world revolutionary ideology.
To turn inward meant to concentrate upon the reconsolidation of the Russian state and empire as state structures and to put forward a program of economic catching-up, via industrialization, with the countries of the core zone. To turn eastward was to admit implicitly (not yet explicitly) the virtual impossibility of workers' insurrection in the core zone. It was also to join in the struggle for Wilson's self-determination of nations (under the more colorful banner of anti-imperialism). These shifts in objectives made the Soviet regime far less unpalatable to the political leadership of Western countries than its previous stance, and laid the basis for a possible geopolitical entente.
This led logically to the next turning-point, which came the very next year, 1922, in Rapallo, when Germany and Soviet Russia both reentered the world political scene as major players by agreeing to resume diplomatic and economic relations and to renounce all war claims on each other, thereby effectively circumventing the different kinds of ostracism each was suffering at the hands of France, Great Britain, and the United States. From that point on, the U.S.S.R. was committed to a full integration in the interstate system. She joined the League of Nations in 1933 (and would have done it sooner, if permitted), allied herself with the West in the Second World War, co-founded the United Nations, and never ceased in the post-1945 world to seek recognition by everyone (and first of all, by the United States) as one of the world's two "great powers." Such efforts, as Charles de Gaulle was repeatedly to point out, might be hard to explain in terms of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism but were perfectly expectable as the policies of a great military power operating within the framework of the existing world-system.
And it was then not surprising that we saw the fourth turning-point, the often-neglected but ideologically significant dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. To dissolve the Comintern was first of all to recognize formally what had been a reality for a long time, the abandonment of the original Bolshevik project of proletarian revolutions in the most "advanced" countries. This seems obvious. What was less obvious is that this represented the abandonment of the Baku objectives as well, or at least in their original form.
Baku extolled the merits of anti-imperialist national liberation movements in the "East." But by 1943 the U.S.S.R. leadership was no longer really interested in revolutions anywhere, unless they were entirely controlled by them. The Soviet leadership was not stupid, and it realized that movements which came to power through long national struggles were unlikely to surrender their integrity to someone in Moscow. Who would then? There was only one possible answer, movements that came to power because of and under the watchful eye of Russia's Red Army. Thus was born the Soviet policy towards the only part of the world of which this could possibly be true, at least at the time, east-central Europe. In the period 1944-47, the U.S.S.R. was determined to place in power subservient Communist regimes in all areas where the Red Army found itself at the end of the Second World War, essentially Europe east of the Elbe. I say essentially because immediately there are three exceptions: Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. But we know what happened there. The Red Army was located in none of these three countries in 1945. In Greece, Stalin abandoned the Greek Communist Party dramatically. And both Yugoslavia and Albania, which had Marxist-Leninist regimes that had come to power through their own insurrectionary efforts, would openly break with the U.S.S.R. As for Asia, Stalin's foot-dragging was obvious to the world, not least of all to the Chinese Communist Party, which also broke dramatically with the U.S.S.R. as soon as it could. Mao's meeting with Nixon is the direct outcome of this fourth Soviet turning-point.
After four turning-points, what was left? Not much of the old spectre of Communism. What was left was something quite different. The U.S.S.R. was the second-strongest military power in the world. It was in fact strong enough to make a deal with the United States, which was the strongest power, and by far, that allowed it to carve out a zone of exclusive influence, from the Elbe to the Yalu, but not beyond. The deal was that this zone was its to control and that its free rein there would be respected by the U.S., provided only that the U.S.S.R. really stayed inside that zone. The deal was consecrated at Yalta and was essentially respected by the Western powers and the Soviet Union right up to 1991. In this, the Soviets played the game as the direct heirs of the Tsars, performing their geopolitical role better.
Economically, the U.S.S.R. had set out on the classic road to catching-up, via industrialization. They did fairly well, considering all their handicaps and the costs of the destruction of the Second World War. If one looks at the 1945-70 figures, they are impressive on a world comparative scale. They forced their satellite countries to pursue the same path, which made less sense for some of them, but these countries too did fairly well at first. But the economics were naive, not because they didn't leave enough place for private enterprise but because they assumed that steady "catching-up" was a plausible policy and industrialization was the wave of the economic future. In any case, as we know, the U.S.S.R. as well as the east-Central European countries, began to do badly in economic terms in the 1970's and 1980's and eventually collapsed. This was of course a period in which much of the world was also doing badly, and much of what happened in these countries was part of a larger pattern. The point however is that, from the point of view of people living in these countries, the economic failures were a sort of last straw, especially given the official propaganda that the greatest proof of the merits of Marxism-Leninism lay in what it could do immediately to improve the economic situation.
It was the last straw, because of course the internal political situation in all these countries was one that virtually no one liked. Democratic political participation was nonexistent. If the worst of the terrorism was over by the mid-1950's, arbitrary imprisonment and control by the secret police was still the normal, ongoing reality of life. And nationalism was allowed no expression. This mattered perhaps least in Russia, where the reality was that Russians were on top of this political world, even if they were not allowed to say so. But for everyone else, Russian dominance was intolerable. Finally, the one-party system meant that, in all these countries, there was a very privileged stratum, the Nomenklatura, whose existence made the ideological claim of the Bolsheviks to represent egalitarianism seem a mockery.
There were always very many people in all these countries who in no sense shared the original Bolshevik objectives. What made the whole system collapse in the end, however, is that large numbers of those who did share these objectives became as hostile to the regimes, perhaps even more hostile, as the others. The spectre that haunted the world in the period 1917-1991 had become transformed into a monstrous caricature of the spectre that had haunted Europe from 1848 to 1917. The old spectre exuded optimism, justice, morality, which were its strengths. The second spectre came to exude stagnation, betrayal, and ugly oppression. Is there a third spectre on the horizon?
The first spectre was not one for Russia or east-central Europe but rather for Europe (and the world). The second spectre was one for the whole world. And the third spectre will surely be that for the whole world again. But can we call it the spectre of Communism? Certainly not in the 1917-1991 use of the term. And only up to a point in the 1848-1917 usage of the term. But the spectre is nonetheless awesome and is not unrelated to the continuing problem of the modern world, its combination of great material and technological advance and extraordinary polarization of the world's populations.
In the ex-Communist world, many see thesemlves as having gone "back to normalcy." But this is no more realistic a possibility than it was when Pres. Warren Harding launched that slogan for the United States in 1920. The U.S. could never go back to the pre-1914 world, and Russia and its ex-satellites cannot go back to the pre-1945 or pre-1917 world, neither in detail nor in spirit. The world has moved decisively on. And while most persons in the ex-Communist world are immensely relieved that the Communist interlude is behind them, it is not at all sure that they, or the rest of us, have moved into a safer or more hopeful or more liveable world.
For one thing, the world of the next fifty years promises to be a far more violent one than the Cold War world out of which we have come. The Cold War was highly choreographed, highly constrained by the concern of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that there be no nuclear war between them, and just as important by the fact that the two countries had between them the necessary power to ensure that such a war would not break out. But this situation has changed radically. Russia's military strength, while still great, is considerably weakened. But so, it must be said, is that of the U.S., if less so. In particular, the U.S. no longer had three elements which ensured its military strength previously: the money, popular willingness within the U.S. to bear the losses of military action, and political control over western Europe and Japan.
The results are already clear. It is extremely difficult to contain escalating local violence (Bosnia, Rwanda and Burundi, etc.). It will be virtually impossible over the next 25 years to contain weapons proliferation, and we should anticipate a significant increase in the number of states who have nuclear weapons at their disposition, as well as biological and chemical weapons. Furthermore, given, on the one hand, the relative weakening of U.S. power and the emergence of a triadic division among the strongest states and, on the other hand, a continuing economic North-South polarization in the world-system, we should expect the likelihood that there will be more deliberate South-North military provocations (of the Saddam Hussein variety). Such provocations will be increasingly difficult to handle politically, and if several occur simultaneously, it is doubtful that the North will be able to stem the tide. The U.S. military has already moved into a mode of preparing to handle two such situations at the same time. But if there are three?
The second new element is South-North migration (which includes eastern Europe-western Europe migration). I say it is new, but of course such migration has been a feature of the capitalist world-economy for 500 years now. Three things however have changed. The first is the technology of transport, which makes the process far easier. The second is the extensiveness of the global economic and demographic polarization, which makes the global push far more intensive. The third is the spread of democratic ideology, which undermines the political ability of wealthy states to resist the tide.
What will happen? It seems clear in the short run. In the wealthy states, we shall see the growth of right-wing movements that focus their rhetoric around keeping migrants out. We shall see the erection of more and more legal and physical barriers to migration. We shall nonetheless see a rise in the real rate of migration, legal and illegal in part because the cost of real barriers is too high, in part because of the extensive collusion of employers who wish to utilize such migrant labor.
The middle-run consequences are also clear. There will come to be a statistically significant group of migrant families (including often the second-generation families) who will be poorly-paid, not socially integrated, and almost certainly without political rights. These persons will comprise essentially the bottom stratum of the working class in each country. If this is the case, we shall be back to the pre-1848 situation in western Europe an underclass concentrated in urban areas without rights and with very strong complaints, and this time clearly identifiable ethnically. It was this situation which led to the first spectre of which Marx and Engels spoke.
There is however now another difference with 1848. The world-system was riding a wave of enormous optimism about the future in the nineteenth century, and indeed up to about twenty years ago. We lived in an era in which everyone was sure that history was on the side of progress. Such faith has one enormous political consequence: it was incredibly stabilizing. It created patience, since it assured everyone that things will be better one day, one day soon, for at least one's children. It was what made the liberal state plausible and acceptable as a political structure. Today the world has lost that faith, and having lost it the world has lost its essential stabilizer.
It is this loss of faith in inevitable reform that accounts for the great turn against the state, which we see everywhere today. No one ever really liked the state, but the great majority had permitted its powers to grow ever greater because they saw the state as the mediator of reform. But if it cannot play this function, then why suffer the state? But if we don't have a strong state, who will provide daily security? The answer is we must then provide it ourselves, for ourselves. And this puts the world collectively back to the period of the beginning of the modern world-system. It was to get out of the necessity of constructing our own local security that we engaged in the construction of the modern state-system.
And one last, not so small, change. It is called democratization. Everyone speaks of it, and I believe it is really occurring. But democratization will not diminish, but add to, the great disorder. For, to most people, democratization translates primarily as the demand for three things as equal rights: a reasonable income (a job and later a pension), access to education for one's children, and adequate medical facilities. To the extent that there is democratization, people insist not merely on having these three, but on regularly raising the minimal acceptable threshold for each. But having these three, at the level that people are demanding each day, is incredibly expensive, even for the wealthy countries, not to speak of for Russia, China, India. The only way everyone can really have more of these is to have a radically different system of distribution of the world's resources than we have today.
So what shall we call this third spectre? The spectre of disintegration of the state structures, in which people no longer have confidence? The spectre of democratization, and the demand for a radically different system of distribution? The next 25-50 years will be a long political debate about how to handle this new spectre. It is by no means clear, or possible to predict, the outcome of this worldwide political debate, which will be a worldwide political struggle. What is clear is that the responsibility of social scientists is to help in clarifying the historical choices that are before us.
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