Title: The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left
Author: Boris Kagarlitsky
Publisher: Pluto Press
Year: 2024
There have been a number of works examining the rise, decline and fall of the Soviet system but few from the angle of serious post-Soviet Marxism, at least when it comes to works translated into English. The imprisoned critic of Vladimir Putin, Boris Kagarlitsky, is one of the hardy band of Russian Marxists who have wrestled with providing an explanation, and in this effort he does not hesitate to draw on the insights of non Marxists such as Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes.
All three were not unsympathetic, though critical, observers of the unfolding Soviet experience. Concerned about the long-term prospects of socialism, Max Weber thought that the ‘premature’ effort to implant socialism in Russia was bound to fail owing to the country’s low level of economic development. Schumpeter was more optimistic, seeing the socialist transformation of the country as a ‘wonderful laboratory’, as did the young John Maynard Keynes, who saw ‘accidents’ as an ‘inevitable consequence of a large scale, risk-laden but indispensable experiment’.
It is to the judgments of contemporary Marxists, however, that Kagarlitsky pays special attention. Karl Kautsky, he says, was theoretically correct in interpreting the Soviet attempt to build socialism in a society that had not undergone capitalist transformation as not consistent with orthodox Marxist thinking. Rosa Luxemburg was more positive towards the Bolshevik experiment but considered it a tragic necessary choice. The circumstances were, from her perspective, ‘inauspicious for the success of socialism’ but for the proletariat that had already won power, the refusal to implement radical changes would be an act of ‘self-betrayal’.
Lenin was engaged in an actual, unfolding revolution, whose outcome was not predictable but would certainly be tragic if the Bolsheviks did not seize power in the political vacuum left by the collapse of the Russian monarchy and, later, exercise it ruthlessly during the civil war. Rather than rely on the classical Marxist texts to guide him, however, Lenin, the quintessential man of action, looked to history – specifically, to guidance from the Jacobins during the French revolution. To preserve the gains of the democratic revolution, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, had to impose dictatorship, and the Bolsheviks, facing a similar threat from the forces of counter revolution, had no choice but to follow suit.
How the socialist future was compromised
The Bolsheviks were faced with three tasks. One was simply holding on to power. Another was bringing administrative order to a vast country. These two challenges preoccupied them in the short term, but they did not forget the long term objective of building socialism. However, the short-term goals of rolling back the counter-revolution and dealing with economic and social chaos left its mark on their efforts to meet the third challenge when they finally got around to it.
Stabilisation necessitated recruiting allies and techniques from the military and bureaucratic machineries of the old regime, and when the Bolsheviks turned to the task of building socialism, the weight of these forces inherited from the past made itself felt. Furthermore, building the new society required technical experts to provide that ‘rationalisation’ of the economy and polity that Max Weber regarded as the inevitable direction of any comprehensive project of economic transformation, be this spreading capitalism or building socialism.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks may well have felt that the measures of administrative stabilisation would be temporary. The flaw in this view, according to Kagarlitsky, is not that authoritarianism ‘fails to work but precisely the fact that such measures do work, and often, may even work very well. So well that abolishing them and overcoming their legacies as society moves on to addressing new tasks can prove extremely difficult.’ While the Bolshevik Party had become a ‘powerful instrument of social progress’, it was transformed in the process of prioritising administrative stabilisation into something different from what it was originally.
Failure of reform
Kagarlitsky’s vibrant discussion of the debates from 1917 to the 1930s over the direction of the evolving political economy of the Soviet Union is, unfortunately, not matched by a similar comprehensive theoretical treatment of developments from the end of the second world war up to the collapse of the whole system in 1992.
Though the narrative is vague in parts, Kagarlitsky portrays this period as marked by unsuccessful attempts to decentralise the economy, such as the reforms introduced by prime minister Alexei Kosygin during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev, in order to achieve efficiency without resorting to market incentives. The reforms resulted in the proliferation of branches and sub-branches of the economy that became primarily concerned with furthering their own administrative interests and welfare. Central planners continued to exert power and authority, but rational coordination was increasingly replaced by competition to get preferential treatment from the central authorities on the part of different middle-level managerial groups.
The flaw in the Bolsheviks’ resort to authoritarianism was fact that such measures may work so well that abolishing them can prove extremely difficult
As a result, increasing deficits in some goods appeared. The distribution of these deficit goods became a prime object of lobbying by managers to meet their quotas. Commitments to deliver these deficit goods began to function as a kind of ‘hard currency’ in place of money, with the result being the ‘formation of a black market, in which clandestine entrepreneurs and speculators played substantial roles’. It was this economic bureaucracy that governed an increasingly dysfunctional system marked by shortages of consumer goods and even capital goods, leading to popular frustration and alienation.
It seems that what derailed these efforts was an inability to work out a positive relationship between planning and the market. Unfortunately, debate was frozen on whether the market was ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ This should not have been the case since there really was no contradiction between the market and planning.
The market is irreplaceable if we are discussing the production of footwear or the need to improve the quality of service in restaurants, but we are far less able to rely on it for organising the supply of electrical energy to whole regions or the financing of fundamental scientific research whose benefits are unlikely to be felt for decades. From this, the conclusion flows necessarily that the more massive and long-term the tasks that society sets itself, the less of a role the market will play in performing them and the greater the need for planning.
Gorbachev: doomed to fail?
It was this lumbering, stagnant system that Mikhail Gorbachev inherited in the mid-1980s. It is strange that Kagarlitsky does not treat us to an analysis of the Gorbachev reforms. In fact, not once is Gorbachev mentioned, and perestroika, or economic restructuring, only once. Yet the Gorbachev period from 1985 to 1991 was pivotal in leading to the crash of the system.
Why did perestroika, which sought to make the system more dynamic by relying on cooperatives and regulated forms of private ownership, fail? Was it an effort to ‘save socialism’ or the opening wedge for the privatisation of a socialist economy? Was the nomenklatura, or bureaucratic and party elite, largely supportive of Gorbachev’s reforms, or was it mainly a saboteur of the process? Or did the reform process simply run out of control?
Liberal analysts have written books to answer these questions, but few progressives outside the former Soviet Union have seriously grappled with them. Kagarlitsky could have helped us gain a deeper understanding of Gorbachev’s failed reform initiative by providing the perspective of a Russian Marxist who lived through that era.
The post-Soviet era
Focusing on the post-Soviet period in Russia, Kagarlitsky makes three important points.
First, the political economy that emerged from the half-hearted Kosygin reforms nevertheless paved the way for the privatisation that occurred under Boris Yetsin and later Vladimir Putin. The ‘conglomerate of groups and clans, each of which had its own ties and mutual obligations to its “own” economic bosses and regional chiefs’ that evolved from the half-hearted reforms of the Brezhnev era resulted in the Soviet economy being by the mid 1980s ‘already completely ready for privatisation’. The corporate structure ‘had more or less taken shape and become self-sufficient’. In other words, whole sectors were ripe for the picking by individuals or groups. This took place via manipulation of the ‘voucher’ system that was supposed to make millions of Russians owners of state assets that were being privatised. In the chaos of the ‘shock therapy’ of the 1990s, the vouchers ended up being cornered by a few shrewd individuals who eventually became the ‘new oligarchy.’
Second, capitalism came to Russia not as something that was organically created from below but as a set of neoliberal practices copied from the west and simply superimposed on society. This ‘shock therapy’ did not bring into being capitalist institutions from scratch, as had been expected by the short lived ‘democratic’ regime and its western advisers but led instead to the disintegration of the country’s industrial infrastructure and the rise of ‘mafia capitalism’.
Third, while the old nomenklatura under socialism felt obliged to pay attention to responding to society’s needs, however inefficiently, as a justification for its existence, the new bourgeoisie that emerged from the piratical privatisation of state assets ‘freed itself from these obligations just as it… freed itself from the old ideology. Neither the structure of the regime, nor its ideology, nor its direct interests dictated to the new masters that they needed to change, develop, or even improve anything.’
The crisis of legitimacy and the war in Ukraine
The absence of a legitimating ideology is problematic. The initial rise of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian brand of rule may have been justified as responding to the chaos and dislocations induced by the economic shock therapy of the 1990s, when the drunken Boris Yeltsin reigned, but that time is long past. A regime that cannot credibly justify its existence by presenting itself as serving and promoting the interests of the larger society inevitably invites a crisis of legitimacy. It is in this crisis, argues Kagarlitksy, that one must locate the war in Ukraine. The reason for the war, he argues, has to be sought ‘not in bilateral Russian-Ukrainian relations, or even Russia’s relations with the notorious “collective west” but in a rapidly deepening internal crisis’.
My reading of this passage is not that Kagarlitsky dismisses the geopolitical dimension of the war, whereby western governments crossed a red line that Russian diplomacy had consistently warned against, in their efforts to bring Ukraine formally into Nato. Rather, he locates as the central factor the deepening internal crisis of legitimacy linked to Russia’s integration into a global capitalist economy that was also entering into crisis. Kagarlitsky could have been more explicit in this regard to avoid conveying the impression of downplaying the western provocations that did constitute one of the causes, albeit secondary, of the conflict. Nevertheless, in going beyond the usual geopolitical explanations to focus on the largely internal roots of the crisis in Russian capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy, his interpretation of the war falls squarely within the tradition of Lenin’s classic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Coming to grips with the odyssey of the Soviet mode of production and the kleptocratic regime that succeeded it is of crucial importance for the left because the collapse of socialism in the USSR had a massive demoralising impact from which it has not yet recovered. Boris Kagarlitsky’s The Long Retreat is of immense value in helping us understand the causes of the Soviet tragedy, an enterprise that is essential if the global left is to again imagine the possibility of another world.
