Controversies in Soviet Social Thought: Democratization, Social Justice, and the Erosion of Official Ideology by Murray Yanowitch

Author:Murray Yanowitch [Yanowitch, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780873325585
Google: tKswOujQhDEC
Goodreads: 1677378
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1991-01-15T07:45:38+00:00

Introduction to a Future Controversy

All of the discussions related to the theme of political democratization reviewed thus far required that the participants come to terms with some old orthodoxies. It was virtually impossible to confront seriously concepts like civil society, bourgeois democracy, and political pluralism without (explicitly or implicitly) being forced to reassess traditional Soviet views on the nature of the state and the party in Soviet society and the possibilities for working-class political representation in capitalist-dominated societies. But none of the Soviet literature examined up to this point explicitly questioned whether political democracy was possible in a predominantly socialist economy. Among the first to challenge the compatibility of political democracy and socialism directly was the economist L. Piiasheva (1989). In effect, Piiasheva's comments on this theme were part of a broader critique of social-democratic and welfare-state economic policies in Western Europe. Unlike most of the earlier Soviet literature on the social-democratic tradition, however, Piiasheva's appraisal of this variety of socialism was essentially a critique from the "right." Thus, while focusing mainly on the alleged failures of traditional welfare-state redistributive economic policies—policies that mistakenly diverted excessive resources from the "strong and competitive" to the "weak and noncompetitive"—Piiasheva also sought to alert Soviet readers to the potentially dangerous political consequences of the social-democratic movement. "We need to take very seriously the warning served by Hayek ... to the effect that even a peaceful, social-democratic road to socialism leads to total collectivism, socialization, statization, a planned command economy, monopoly, and the suppression of individualism, democracy, and individual freedom" (ibid., p. 99). Piiasheva's point, quite simply, was that the increasingly popular conception of "democratic socialism" was self-contradictory.

Thus, whatever its limitations, the democratization of Soviet political discourse in the late 1980s was not confined to those who argued within the Marxist or even socialist traditions. Piiasheva's critical comments on the social-democratic movement reflected the early stages of a controversy between contending intellectual and political currents (social democrats and "liberal democrats" in the West European sense) whose emergence to prominence in the Soviet Union would have seemed well-nigh inconceivable a few years earlier. We return to some of the principal manifestations of these intellectual currents in chapter 5, where we examine the desanctification of Marxism-Leninism.

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