‘THE NEW CLASS’ ¹

(A Review)

By PHILIP SPRATT

At the time of the second Russian Revolution, Kautsky and most of the orthodox Marxists considered that Lenin ought not to have taken power but should have supported the democratic republic, under which, in Lenin’s words, Russia was for eight months “the freest country in the world.” They argued that according to the Marxian theory the socialist revolution ought not to have taken place in Russia, where capitalism was backward, but should have come first in Germany, Britain or America, where capitalism was highly developed.

Less has been heard of this argument lately. The revolutionary regime has grown very powerful and is spreading fast, and the protest that Marx thought it ought to have started somewhere else is apt to seem a mere debating point. However, it is more than that. Together with his scholasticism, there is much shrewd political sense in Marx. Though his tactics were not entirely consistent, there can be no doubt that the main drift of his doctrine supports Kautsky’s protest against Lenin’s opportunism. “New and higher social institutions are never established until the material conditions of life to support them have been prepared in the womb of the old society...mankind never sets for itself any tasks except those for which it has received the proper training and which it is able to perform.” Translated out of Marx’s metaphysical language, that is sound common sense. Engels pointed the moral with an emphatic warning of the embarrassing situation a socialist party wou1d find itself in, if it were to come to power too soon.

Marx and Engels argued that a highly developed capitalist economy would have built up the pre-conditions necessary to central control, whereas in a backward economy such pre-conditions would not exist, and the socialists would have the difficult and unpopular job of constructing them. In such a society the public would still be ‘feudal’ in mentality, alternating between slavish submission and anarchic self-assertion; the democratic outlook and habit would be ill-developed; the rights of the individual would not be firmly grounded in public opinion and could be infringed with impunity; and democracy would be an inefficient method of government. Further, the proportion of industrial workers, the principal supporters of socialism, would be small, and they would be ill-educated and without the ‘proper training’ to run the State and the economy. The economy would, in any case, be unable to provide a reasonable standard of living for all. In such a situation a socialist party in power would be unable to fulfill the promises implied in its socialist slogans of liberty, equality, democracy and prosperity. In order to stay in power it would have to set up a dictatorship; in order to obtain efficiency it would have to permit extreme differences of reward; and in order to develop the economy it would have to hold down the standard of life and compel the workers to give up a big slice of surplus value.

That, in substance, is what Engels warned the socialists against, and that is what Lenin, Stalin, Tito and Mao have found, is what happens if a socialist party insists on taking power in a backward country. The real force of the warning is not that a determined socialist party cannot hold on to power and transform a backward society. It is that the outcome will be only a caricature of socialism. There will be no liberty, no equality, no democracy; even prosperity will be very slow in coming; but in the hands of the ruling group or individual there will be such power as no ruler has ever before wielded, built upon such suffering as no ruler has ever before inflicted.

It is doubtful if Marx’s exalted vision of socialism was realistic in any respect. Even if the revolution had been postponed, as he desired, until capitalism had fully “solved the problem of production,” it might well have failed to achieve the ideal society he foretold. Whether, in the long run, economic socialism and political democracy are compatible is highly problematic. Probably the soundest conclusion from the experience of the past century is that, while the threat of revolution may be progressive, its actuality is to be avoided.

That, however, does not affect the validity of Engels’s criticism of a premature revolution. A mature revolution might or might not have done good: a premature revolution certainly does great harm. We cannot expect a premature revolution to lead to the ideal goal after a brief transition period. The direction of social evolution has been drastically changed, and to get back to a world in which the liberal principles are once more secure will be, at best, the work of generations.

Those, therefore, who argue that the revolution ‘ought not’ to have taken place in Russia are not making a futile debating point. They are raising an objection to socialism in any backward country, an objection which all advocates of socialism in India ought to ponder very carefully. Their consideration of this vital and urgent question will be greatly helped by the celebrated book The New Class, by Milovan Djilas. Though by no means an easy book, it will be widely read, if only for the romantic circumstances surrounding it.

Written in a Yugoslav jail in 1956, and smuggled out and published abroad–the first time that anything of the kind has happened in a communist country–The New Class earned its author an additional sentence of seven years. As a former guerrilla leader and party theorist he had been one of the ruling group round Tito, and one of the top personalities in world communism, grudgingly admired by Stalin as ‘a very frank man’. But, alone of all the men rvho have reached such a position (M. N. Roy was on the most intimate terms with the Russian rulers, but he had no power), Djilas came to the conclusion that communism is wrong, and said so. The New Class is the considered judgment on communism of a man of outstanding brains and character who has known the system from within as a revolutionary leader and top-rank ruler. It is as important a document as Khrushchev’s speech on Stalin.

Its purpose, however, is not indictment but analysis. It argues that the way in which the communist societies have developed is to be explained in the Marxian terms by the evolution of the communist party, or its upper ranks, into a new ruling and exploiting class. Addressed to fellow-Marxists, that conclusion is enough. Their theoretical aim is to abolish classes, and if he has proved that they have not succeeded, he has made his point. For non-Marxists the implications are not so devastating. There are ruling classes and ruling classes, and though, even at their best, we may not like them, we are not so impatient to get rid of them. What is devastating about the communist ruling authorities, whether they are a class or not, is the way they behave to those they rule.

Why have they acted in this way, flouting their original high and humane principles, and endangering their own regime? Djilas says the explanation is self-interest, the corporate self-interest of the new ruling class. As one of them he knows what he is talking about, and no doubt he is partly right. But his own book suggests a different explanation, namely, that the communist parties are forcing socialism upon societies which, according to the socialist theory, are unripe for it, with the results foreshadowed by Engels.

Djilas is quite clear that communism can achieve power only in backward countries. “Communism is dying out or being eliminated in those countries where industrialism has achieved its basic aims. It flourishes in those countries where this has not happened.” (Page 14). “….In Czarist Russia, capitalist private ownership not only showed itself incapable of rapid industrial transformation, but actually obstructed it.” (Page 15). “The countries which were not yet industrialised, particularly Russia...found themselves in a dilemma they had either to become industrialised or to discontinue active participation on the stage of history, turning into captives of the developed countries and their monopolies, thus doomed to degeneracy…In these countries revolution became an inescapable necessity, a vital need for the nation.” (Page 11).

Some of these statements are certainly false. Before 1917 in Russia capitalist industry was developing very rapidly. It has been calculated that if it had not been destroyed then and had continued to expand at the some pace till today, Russia would now be just as highly industrialised as she has in fact become under Communism. It is true that much of her capital was imported. But the same is true of America, which has industrialised successfully on foreign capital and retained economic and political independence.

It is also false that communism triumphed in Russia because of the need for industrialisation. The Bolsheviks did not go before the public with that slogan. They did not take up rapid industrialisation until eleven years after the revolution. In 1917 it was the Mensheviks and the Cadets who were identified with that cause. In fact this question played no part whatever in the revolutionary period. But Djilas’s assertion with its assumption of final causes, is typically Marxist.

However, he is right to assert that there is a connection between communism and economic backwardness. He also sees that there is a connection between backwardness and the continuance of violence long after the revolutionary crisis. “In earlier revolutions, revolutionary force and violence became a hindrance to the economy as soon as the old order was overthrown. In communism revolutionary force and violence are a condition for further development. Force and violence are elevated to the lofty position of a cult and an ultimate goal. In the past, the classes and forces which made up a new society already existed before the revolution erupted. The communist revolutions are the first which have had to create a new society.” (Pages 21-22). It is not his purpose to go into detail, but he remarks that communist methods “are perhaps the most brutal ones recorded in history.”

He points out repeatedly that the backwardness of society and the consequent magnitude of the task of transformation brought it about that the party was uncommonly dogmatic and fanatical. “None had, before, the task of transforming all of society. For such a task a complete, fanatical confidence in the righteousness and nobility of their views is necessary. Such a task calls for exceptionally brutal measures against other ideologies.” (Pages 76-77). He devotes a whole chapter to ideological dictatorship, and reserves for it his harshest condemnation. “A sword hangs over Yugoslav culture, but the sword has been driven into the heart of Soviet culture. “The Communist oligarchy cannot but accomplish complete corruption of the mind.” “History will pardon Communists for much...But the stifling of every divergent thought, the exclusive monopoly of thinking...will nail the Communists to a cross of shame in history.”

Djilas denies that the labour camp system was mainly due to the low level of technology. But since Stalin’s death compulsory labour has been greatly reduced, and one of the reasons given by foreign students of Russian affairs is that at the higher technological level now being reached it no longer pays. The camp system continues in China, where the technological level is still low. Probably, therefore, Djilas is wrong on this point. “Even though,” he says, “they are adherents of Smith’s theory that labour creates value, a theory that Marx adopted, these power-wielders pay the least attention to labour and manpower, regarding them as something very little value which can be readily replaced.” (Page 120). This is the normal mentality of the backward society, with its vast gulf between the educated administrative class and the illiterate masses who cost nothing for education, swarm everywhere in greater numbers than can be employed, and are constantly reinforced by reckless procreation. In a highly developed capitalist economy, the workers output and wages rise, their birthrate falls, their numbers diminish, their education costs money; in short no employer or government can afford to treat them as “something of very little value.”

Djilas does admit, in fact, that “compulsory labour became too costly as soon as advanced technology was introduced in the U. S. S. R.” (Page 111). It was only because labour was so plentiful and cheap, and technology so backward, that the labour camp system could assume such monstrous proportions. Even under the drastic and ingenious compulsions used, camp labour was of low efficiency, and the wastage of manpower was terribly high. Julius Margolin, an Israel citizen who had been an inmate and then made a special study of the camps, calculated that in the 1940’s three-quarters of a million labourers died in the Russian camps every year.

The all-round moral decline of communism after taking power is a puzzling phenomenon, but most anomalous and surprising of all is the bad treatment of labour. It has been common in the early stages of industrialisation for the ill-educated and inefficient labour typical of such periods to be treated badly. The Marxian movement was founded as a protest against this, and has always claimed to base itself on the working class and to cherish the emancipation of labour as its principal aim. How, on taking power, could it abandon what purported to be its very raison d’ etre?

Djilas comments on this wide gulf between profession and practice. He quotes a parallel from the 15th century and remarks, “there is much of the feudal and fanatic in the dogmatism of contemporary Communism.” (Page 150). The hint may be worth pursuing. The mediaeval man, writes Huizinga, oscillates “between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachment to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness.” In that era man expressed his emotions in art more readily than in practice. The mediaeval noble solemnly proclaimed his belief that his high social status should be the reward of virtue: he commiserated with the poor, enunciated the principle of the equality of men, and long before John Ball, sang “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” In the same way he professed the ideal of courtly love, while his actual sexual conduct was shameless. All this high principle and devotion to Christian ethics remained stereotyped and theoretical.” “The soul of the middle ages, ferocious and passionate, could only have been led by placing the ideal far too high…” All this from Huizinga. Bryce writes on mediaeval society in a very similar strain.

Let us make what allowance we can for men brought up in a mediaeval social climate which makes them schizophrenic. Still the puzzle is not solved. Lenin was an honest and clear-headed man, completely free from sordid ambition. He was under no compulsion when in 1903 he began to think out and put into practice the plan of party organisation which, as he knew, and Martov, Trotsky and Luxemburg also knew, would end, if he succeeded, in making him the Robespierre of Russia. They called him by that name long before the revolution. Stalin was under no compulsion when, long before Hitler took power in Germany, he decided to launch a series of plans which frantically over-stressed the heavy industries and neglect consumer goods. M. No Roy, who knew him intimately at that time, has told us why he did it: it was to build up an invincible army which should force socialism on the rest of the world. Stalin need not have decided to collectivise agriculture, an operation which, as he confessed to Churchill, cost the lives of ten million peasants. He need not have given the series of orders which allowed his police to set up the labour camps, herd scores of millions of innocent people into them, kill those people off by tens of millions, and keep the system going for twenty-five years. These policies were carried out in pursuance of the same end: the building up of overwhelming military power.

Many of the man-made horrors which have befallen our long suffering race have resulted from quandaries, deadlocks, situations of Compulsion, from which there was no harmless way out. The communist policy of forcing socialism on societies which were not ripe for it did not result from any such situation. It was a free decision, made by men who, as well-read Marxists, knew the evil consequences prophesied for it by their own theoretical masters. Yet they did it. Why?

In Lenin’s day it was chiefly ideological fanaticism, for when they seized power before they ought to have done, the Bolsheviks quieted their consciences with the hope that world revolution war imminent and that socialist Germany would save them from the fate Engels had predicted for them. Then disillusionment spread, but Stalin revived the zeal of the party with his campaign of military industrialisation. Djilas argues that the urge behind this campaign was class interest, but he does not make out a convincing case.

He does, however, refer obliquely to the principal force impelling the communists to undertake their huge feats of industrial construction. He speaks of “the senseless race of the ‘leading Socialist country’–the U.S.S.R.–to overtake and surpass the most highly developed countries. What does this cost? And where does it lead? Perhaps the U.S.S.R. can overtake some branches of the economy of the most highly developed countries. By infinite waste of manpower, by low wages, and by neglect of the other branches of industry, this may be possible. It is quite another question whether this is economically justifiable. Such plans are aggressive m themselves...” (Pages 121-122). “During the period of industrialisation, concentrating on power could still be considered natural.” But as all this is being completed, it becomes apparent that in Communism power has not only been a means but that it has also become the main, if not the sole, end...power is an end in itself and the essence of contemporary Communism.” (Page 169).

This ambition to ‘overtake and surpass’ the power of other countries is not new. Germany was for long a notorious victim of it. Japan has been badly bitten. Now the sputniks are frightening America into an attack of it. But Russia is the worst case in history, and China is a close second. Stalin made ‘overtake and surpass’ a principal slogan of his forced industrialisation campaign in the 1930’s, and twenty-five years later Khrushchev is repeating it more frequently than ever. It is a paradox that socialism, which was originally hostile to all manifestations of nationalism, should have degenerated into a means of national aggrandisement.

It has not been sufficiently realised in India that here too socialism is valued largely as a means of overtaking and surpassing the West. In the Marxian historical scheme socialism is a later and higher phase than capitalism; merely by adopting socialism, therefore, one puts one’s country on a higher level than the capitalist West. Socialism rapidly increases the power of one’s country, and it places vast and unprecedented power in the hands of its rulers. This prospect also is intoxicating to those who can identify themselves with the rulers, as all middle-class people now can. It is typical that the nationalist-socialists now in power should rush ahead into grandiose industrial constructions, beyond the capacity of the economy to pay for, and before taking care of the primary necessities of the poor in whose name socialism is being set up. It is reminiscent of the mediaeval noble, as described by Huizinga, who enunciated the principle of the equality of men, but believed it only in a ‘stereotyped and theoretical’ way.

The Indian intelligentsia in fact are yielding to the same temptation as Leain, Stalin and Mao: they are being tempted to force socialism upon a society which is unripe for it, not in order to benefit the poor, but to flatter national pride and to intoxicate themselves with power. It is a project which cannot be carried through by democratic means, as Engels clearly foresaw. The first two years of the attempt have caused increased unemployment, a fall in the standard of life, and much popular discontent. It is bound to continue doing so, and eventually to bring about the downfall of the present ruling party. If the passion for socialism continues to animate the intelligentsia, the result must ultimately be to transfer power to the fanatical party which will scrap democracy, ignore the suffering and suppress the protests of the masses, and force socialism through at any cost–the Communist Party. The only hope is that while there is still time, the socialist intellectuals will read Marx and Engels, who make it perfectly clear that a country in India’s position must undergo a prolonged capitalist development before it can safely embark upon socialism.

¹ The New Class by Milovan Djilas. (Praeger, New York. 2 Dollars)

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