After sharing experiences for decades, I consider it appropriate to point out several clear ideas that can help us formulate a more advanced ideological concretization, drawing on historical materialism.
The Ideological Repression of Khrushchev
This new internal process within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, following Stalin’s death, produced several verified developments in the years that followed:
– A gradual distancing of workers from the defense of socialist society. At first, this manifested itself little by little, in the face of their failure to understand the political and economic measures adopted by the new government, which became one of the principal causes of the decline in support for the Party.
– After the first few years had passed, a manifest distrust developed when people realized that there were profound differences between words and deeds. While Socialism was being spoken of, capitalist norms and directives were being introduced, such as the growth of a legal and illegal market.
– From 1953 onward, the path toward the construction of communism in the USSR was objectively being lost, because the class struggle unleashed against Khrushchev’s measures in every sphere of social life consequently drove away the most committed workers, who understood the necessity of proletarian control over production in the factories.
If we consider the fundamental ideological aspects of this destruction, we can see that, in determining how capitalism was restored in the USSR, we must recognize that an essential regression took place, because progress toward communism requires the primacy of politics over economics during the period of transition from capitalism to communism, and not the reverse.
In the present era, the unquestionable power that the great corporations of imperialism exercise over states is based on the consolidation of an economy of plunder and accumulation, independently of the will of the entire population. The population is compelled to follow these relations of production like a flock following its shepherd, without understanding where they are leading it. Primitive social instincts, reflections of the struggle for material interests, are systematically channeled.
The social conflicts that arose from this, at the dawn of previous centuries, gave rise in the minds of all workers to the basic necessity of using class-against-class violence when the state imposes the power of the oligarchy by using the forces of “public order.”
At the same time, there is a crushing of the consciousness of the oppressed through persistent propaganda by the bourgeois state under imperialism, as a form of ideological domination and justification of private property, exploitation, and violence.
As Friedrich Engels correctly noted:
“Why do we struggle for the political dictatorship of the proletariat, if political power is economically impotent? Force (that is, state power) is also an economic power!”
(Letter to K. Schmidt, October 27, 1890).
For all these reasons, Lenin, refuting Trotsky and Bukharin, explained:
“Politics cannot but have primacy over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism.”
(“Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin”).
Thus, the principal cause of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the loss of the political power of the proletariat, that is, of the dictatorship of the working class over the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie. In order to achieve this, the revisionists first had to dismantle the instrument of the working class: the Party. Since, during the socialist period of the first stage toward communism, the development or regression of the Party is the principal lever determining its continuation. There can be no other social force capable of governing the state and leading it toward communism.
First, in order to maintain power, the support and organization of the working class are necessary, as is its integration into the governance of the state, promoting socialist measures to consolidate this objective, while also consolidating its integration into its vanguard organization: the Party.
Second, communist society is put into practice through the conclusions of scientific materialism, through the transition from the objectives already achieved toward their fulfillment, and this means that a Marxist-Leninist party is needed to guide society.
Both one and the other are a necessary consequence. A large majority of the Bolshevik vanguard in the time of Comrade Stalin was aware that raising the level of class consciousness of the proletariat was strategically important for the future of socialism. This firm conviction stems from the fact that the Marxist worldview, both before and now, has not become, within the thinking of workers, their principal aspiration in life and for the future.
Consequently, if the Party loses authority, if it loses the capacity to provide guidance on every important political, economic, and cultural question, if it falls into a unilateral practice of coercion, then the system of the dictatorship of the working class is degraded.
After Stalin’s death, in the CPSU, militants who warned about the danger of opportunism and about the objective law of revolutionary struggle concerning the irreconcilability of ideologies were removed. In this way, the revisionist leaders who carried out the coup d’état encouraged the idea that factionalism should be regarded as a mere insignificant disagreement in the understanding of Marxism, a peculiar acceptance of points of view. Opportunism within the CPSU itself sank up to its ears into the mire leading to the destruction of the Soviet Union.
Anti-Marxist Approaches
Thus, the erroneous political and economic measures taken by the revisionist majority of the Party in the 1960s caused a considerable loss of the Party’s authority among young people and the workers’ vanguard. It was the genuine collapse of the dictatorship of the working class.
However, the history of this collapse within the CPSU demonstrated that, in the USSR, the defense of the socialist regime was such a powerful social inertia that even a politician as insignificant as Gorbachev had to make use of that defense in order to destroy it. The prestige of the CPSU, despite all the flagrant sabotage carried out by Khrushchev and his successors, from Brezhnev and Andropov and their accomplices to Gorbachev, remained; the Soviet people retained their identification with support for socialism even at the beginning of the 1990s.
The activity of the Party as the leading force of the dictatorship of the working class is paramount in relation to politics, strategic objectives, tactics, and day-to-day work. When this social penetration is gradually pushed aside, the understanding of Marxism-Leninism is discredited. Indeed, there is an ideological and theoretical weakening of the authority of materialist ideology and the Party, and of the monolithic scientific coherence between Marxist theory and practice.
Khrushchev and his followers caused a profound social rupture. They introduced anti-socialist reforms, both ideological and economic, that consciously undermined the foundations of the future path toward communism in the USSR. They introduced decrees promoting the market, such as the transfer of machinery from the MTS to collective farms, the autonomous management of state enterprises by their directors without workers’ control, the destruction of the 1948 reforestation plan, the reform of all the principles in 1957, etc.
These series of actions stemmed from a single process: the “construction of the cult of personality of I. V. Stalin.” By eliminating the practical and ideological foundations of Marxism-Leninism, Khrushchev’s sabotage of the path toward communism restructured the social consciousness and ethics of the Party. It completely disrupted an intelligentsia that was already ideologically weak, and undermined the authority of communism and the unity of the communist parties of the world.
But this was insufficient for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. It was therefore necessary to form a bourgeois class from within the enterprises. Curricula were changed, and slogans of class conciliation were disseminated, such as “social peace with the imperialists and inhibition in the face of any revolutionary process of the peoples.” Arguments for a return to the market and intellectual imitation of Western capitalism were recurrent and highly damaging to the class consciousness of the people.
Once this bourgeois ideology had been elevated within the Party leadership, the process led to social demobilization, control of enterprises by the various mafias of their directors, and the emergence of the exclusive, mediocre bourgeois intellectual elite of the 1970s. These became the trigger for the final coup of 1991, which was inevitable.
But in This Century, Humanity Has No Other Way Out Than Communism; the Incredible Achievements of Socialist Construction in the USSR Demonstrate This
The victorious period of this construction demonstrated that the subjective factor of the revolution can be considered mature if, at the head of the Party, there are leaders who master Marxism-Leninism and apply it skillfully in organizational practice directed toward our class and revolutionary thought.
The post-Stalin period of the existence of the CPSU demonstrated that if a Marxist party, under conditions of a capitalist environment, does not work with sufficient intensity on its revolutionary formation through the empowerment of the working class, as was done in the time of Lenin and Stalin, the construction of communism stagnates and, ultimately, the Party is degraded and destroyed.
And this is precisely because alongside Lenin and Stalin worked loyal comrades who shared the same class criteria around them, thereby multiplying their strength. Alongside Lenin, Stalin himself was the most steadfast innovator, enjoying Lenin’s complete confidence, together with Sverdlov, Krupskaya, Dzerzhinsky, and many others. Subsequently, from the ideological and political team during Stalin’s time, great activists such as Kirov, Zhdanov, Molotov, and Malenkov emerged, despite all the blows directed against the working class and the revolutionary Party.
It must be clearly emphasized that the cause of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the incompetence of the members of the CPSU, since they did not develop the torch that illuminates humanity and did not carry the name of the Party toward the practical construction of communism.
Yes! It has been tragic for all of us that the USSR returned to capitalism.
But this has happened before. Along the path traveled by the oppressed, there have also been periods of time in which the march toward their emancipation stopped and even retreated, moving from a new structure back toward an older, destructive one.
Along this path of human history, communism was already something primordial and natural, and existed in primitive form. As consciousness advances in this century, communism will move to another qualitatively higher level. If progress toward communist society was not developed in the previous stage together with the USSR, with the full development of its productive forces, then with the advancement of new forces added to communism, it will be achieved through the combined abundance of all the highest productive forces and the eradication of capitalism and imperialism.
It cannot be otherwise. These corrupt societies, which are devouring themselves, will be destroyed because at the heart of this social system lies an insoluble contradiction: the private form of ownership and appropriation of socially necessary labor contradicts the social-collective character of production, which is incompatible with the all-powerful imperialist power.
The social-collective character of production under the imperialist system can find a way out only if there is an absolute change in the paradigm of power, only if there is a transition from private property to the collective social ownership of the producers, the innovative creators, and the oppressed, through the socialist revolution.
The road is broad and deep, and there is only one.
Toward a Communist Society, Through the First Phase of Communism: Socialism!
We know this. We have tried to describe in detail the stages, the causes, and the solution. The current reactionary imperialist system is a temporary phenomenon.
Victory Will Belong to the Working Class, Because Communism Is the Future of Humanity!