17 December 2024.
Comrades, what I am about to say I have already echoed in the article titled 'A List of Problems on the Left' (here), from Section VII. A Final Word for the Future.
'My point for the above is that many impatient Marxists in the West do not understand that Comrade Brezhnev, and to-day Comrade Xi, are evidence of socialist success. Modern Leftists are more impressed with chaotic and severe struggles betwixt larger than life characters, rejecting the weekly statistical readings at technical committee meetings attended by 'dull', soft-spoken bureaucrats, as representations of good governance in successful socialism. That this good governance has been rejected so purges and intense rivalries have become ubiquitous with ,,successful socialism'' is shameful'.
I wish to expand the subject of socialist bureaucracy and good governance, for I think it an absolutely essential one, a part of the core problem which Gladsnost and Politstroika seek to address. Let me remind comrades that the well-known and well-respected conservative Comrade Michael Parenti raised something of this matter in his outstanding work, Blackshirts and Reds.
The question which must naturally arise in the inquisitive and honest comrade's mind is one which the Left is, for all its obsession with it, unable to solve. I refer of course to the infamous anti-bureaucrat scenario' and 'bureaucratic degeneration'. If the arch-conservatives Stalin and Hoxha, the arch-Left-communists Trotsky and Mao, and the arch-reformers Bukharin and Gorbachev could not ultimately prevent the rise of so-called bureaucracy, then one must begin to wonder whether the Left has missed some important observation, or more catastrophically, has even misconstrued the concept of bureaucracy.
One need not be a Marxist to fundamentally understand the 'problem' with hunting for such elusive bureaucrats: 'bureaucrat' is, outside of the anti-bureaucrat scenario, merely a crude categorisation of particular office and political work. Most communists, nay, most Leftists have a vision of the untrustworthy bureaucrat, and over time or in times of crisis, the bureaucrat mythos becomes more sinister. The bureaucrat is nay longer untrustworthy or incompetent: he is an opportunist or a wrecker; finally the bureaucrat metamorphises into a counter-revolutionary or a foreign intelligence agent. At the very end of the anti-bureaucrat scenario lies the heavenly gate, obscured only by the flames of bureaucratic hell; and lo, the revelation is made that bureaucrats are in fact heretics, serving the gross evil, and are thus irredeemable.
This laughable mythology may be necessary to obtain the support of otherwise reactionary peasants, but the party membership, and any remotely educated Leftist, ought not to be exposed to nor be made to engage with it. The good cadre is almost always a good bureaucrat, for how else might the party actually put propaganda and policy into practise? all this mythology does is endanger the cadres and whip up the more backwards strata into a witch-hunt-like hysteria, in which they are certain to target our cadres as communists.
But if bureaucrats are so dæmonised, then what kind of man is made saintly by this anti-bureaucrat mythos? The collective, insidious mass-bureaucracy is of course contrasted to and contested by the brave revolutionary leader. The communist rebel archetype remains a powerful propaganda thought in the memory of the post-revolutionary society. When events begin to slow down, when politic falls into the background for good governance, the politically mobilised may not be willing, or even able to understand why it is beneficial, to allow the bureaucrats to rebuild the functions and structures of state. Thus, the politically mobilised clamour for the command of a strong or radical revolutionary leader (sometimes both simultaneously).
The revolutionary leader, perhaps without even realising it, uses the politically mobilised to form a self-pointed vacuum, to increase the proportion of his authority/control compared to that of all the cadres working in the various party and state structures. The politically mobilised are a vacuous external entity, and give way once the bureaucracy has been 'disenfranchised' (purged) from its positions. In addition to this, the politically mobilised are external also in the sense that they are not integrated in the party body as a precisely defined unit, as each member of the bureaucracy is. It is therefore the more difficult to enforce party rules and procedures, including party duties, upon the politically mobilised— which makes this entity both stronger but less competent than the bureaucracy (fueling the well-attested search for spies and wreckers in the bureaucracy).
Eventually, the want of good governance due to the lack of a stable bureaucracy will start to weigh upon not only the politically mobilised but also the masses. The purges of the bureaucracy contribute nay more to the revolutionary leader's popular base. The revolutionary leader himself is likely becoming weary and stressed at this point. This is the stage at which a modicum of normality is restored, and the revolutionary leader begins to divest himself of his over-bearing proportion of authority into a new, mobilised bureaucracy. Such a bureaucracy is at first extremely inexperienced, which can cause a crisis of popular legitimacy, threatening to renew the entire anti-bureaucrat scenario as we have just explained it. A new form of policy is quickly needed.
In lieu of good governance are grand performances had. Circuses and plays are emulated in spirit by major if symbolic feats. The revolutionary leader and the mobilised bureaucracy are indeed generally sincere in wishing to produce improvements via these grand performances of policy, but do not understand or can not fathom to conceptualise what bureaucratic good governance actually looks like, how to establish it.
The various feats are mostly accomplished, albeit at a quite costly and unsustainable margin. A few of the mobilised bureaucrats, who failed to meet their quota, or spoke too frankly or loudly, et cetera are purged or exiled, but most bad bureaucrats are just relocated, retired, sacked, or imprisoned. Nay more are the mass-purges from the time of mobilisation. The once-frantic search for spies and wreckers dissipates as well.
With this more subtle system now reigning, the remnant trails of the previous æra of yezhovshchina are gradually cleaned up, reminders being put away to preserve the new order, basically peaceful and functional. Those still politically mobilised are in various manners decommissioned or officially appointed; maybe a few leaders, or specially troubling ones, are imprisoned for life or executed (but it is not propagated by the revolutionary leader and bureaucracy). Note that I used the words 'put away' and 'decommissioned', not 'disposed of' and 'silenced'. Stalin had to have known that his archive should eventually be excavated and documented/released, which suggests that he saw nothing wrong with this process.
Looking at the completion of this whole cycle, it leaves a fine, nostalgic portrait of a gross revolutionary time, filled with larger than life subjects. Of course, there are those who know better, videre licet the mobilised/new bureaucracy who both lived through the process and must now operate the deficient grand performance model they built from it. Therefore, when the revolutionary leader retires or dies, there is a strong incentive for the bureaucracy to either abandon the system, or usually to reform it.
We must halt here a moment to address an underlying tension in our discourse for these last two paragraphs. The only time so far that we have mentioned ethical measure of these matters, is that Stalin probably felt that nay 'true' or 'fundamental' injustice had been committed, or else why would he leave actual libraries of evidence about what took place? Even the Bolshevik-Leninist characterisation of Stalin can not make sense of this as a 'guilty crime in Stalin's conscience': why would a flagrant anti-intellectual like Stalin, who is also a sly political intriguer of the highest order mind you, keep such vast evidence of his 'final solution'? Clearly, Stalin must be brain-dead (but then how did the genius Trotsky lose to him?).
Then, we have the most immediate tension: is it not a wishful judgement, based upon my own morality or preference, that I state the new bureaucracy usually decides to reform the system, rather than to abandon it? We have a question of interpretation levelled here. What were the natures of the Khrushchev and the Gorbachev æras? I think all but the most hard-line, 'Hoxhaist' Marxist-Leninists agree that Khrushchev was a reformist, albeit perhaps an anti-'Leninist' one; and all but the most bitter/cynical comrades understand (those that have looked into it) that Glasnost and Perestroika were meant to be reforms, but that Gorbachev played too firmly to the demands of the abolitionists like Yeltsin. Yet both of these are ongoing enquiries , as they should be.
So the post-revolutionary bureaucracy attempts to, be it more or less, reform the system. If the bureaucracy is fearful or rigidly conservative, it will maintain a reformed grand performance model, certainly toned down but never the less superficially ,,efficient''— until the same problem, more severe, arises. I believe that this argument could be made about Khrushchev and his reforms. The plentiful corn campaign matches well a grand performance, not bureaucratic technical planning. In place of Stalin and 'Stalinism'/Marxism-Leninism Stalin Thought, there was Khrushchev and Zekism, both of which tore more things down than they built up, in contrast to Stalin (high costs for high achievements).
What then did Brezhnev do? He dismantled the leader cult and the grand performance model. It was under Brezhnev, as far as I am aware, when the principle of collective leadership was (implicitly) reinstated. Collective leadership was finally strong, and would grow from then only stronger. Though grand performances were not phased out entirely, they at least caused but minimal disruption to the normal planning process. Had the bureaucracy of good governance and moderately successful socialism at last been instated? Indeed, but not quite.
Whilst the Brezhnev government proved best governed and most successful, according to a somewhat normal standard of practise, the Brezhnev æra remained stagnant. Why so? Does not this result contradict the praise-worthy system of bureaucratic socialism hitherto promoted? Most certainly it does, and if it were not for the People's Republic of China and the æra of Deng up to to-day not demonstrating otherwise a successful instance, then my argument should here end asunder. The failure of Brezhnev æra bureaucratic socialism is just one more question in the dark trove of Soviet historiography.
I will offer some unhinged conjecture, a door which may lead to truth, some day. There is a question of ‘systemic pathology’, or damnation by routine and presupposition, inherent in a centralized and previously traumatic institution as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. What the contours of this question are is not for me to impose. Then there is the Zek problem: Khrushchev, whether right or wrong to release the Zeks in the manner that he did, gravely erred by granting the Right Zeks and Identitarian Zekists such public authority in the fore-front of Soviet political society. By employing this confrontational stance, Khrushchev and the Right and Identitarian Zeks were deploying the Zeks as front-line fodder to attack the Party bureaucracy (quite a ‘Stalinistic’ manœuvre, in many respects). This failed purge, based upon identity politic, not merely harmed all the Zeks, but assured the inevitable setting-back of reform. For all the ways Khrushchev was not like Stalin, in an important manner did he maintain, or attempt to revive, the cult of the revolutionary leader and the anti-bureaucrat scenario. This is a deeply engrained problem of the pre-Gorbachev reformers: though they may reject Koba's love and teachings, they are Koba's children just the same.
Returning to Brezhnev (and soon Elusive Andropov), he was to my understanding not yet fully enmeshed in politic at the time of the Stalin government, and anywise did not have a personal working relationship with Stalin, as Khrushchev's party secretary office require he have. In this sense, Khrushchev is the last leader of the Stalin æra; Brezhnev is both the first post-Stalin and first Reform leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Brezhnev and Kosygin did the best that they could to subtly and gradually institute cautiously examined reforms. One must try to appreciate the damage which Khrushchev caused for the reform movement. The Zeks wanted to restore the revolutionary leader cult, the anti-bureaucrat scenario, and grand performances for their own ideology; and the conservative bureaucrats rightly feared this, but pointed to Khrushchev's Zekist folly as a just denunciation of reform.
Brezhnev's most crucial tasks to salvage the reputation of reform were to deradicalise the ultra-Zekists and ensure that any attempt to re-implement the three anti-bureaucratism policies should fail; to prove to the bureaucracy that reform does not inherently result in anti-bureaucratism, but on the contrary may be used to at the same time improve and strengthen the socialist bureaucracy.
I am positing, in this unhinged conjecture, that Brezhnev was incontrovertibly a reformer in the practise and policy of the reform tradition, but a conservative reformer, to be sure. He carefully rebuilt the bridge of Reform which Khrushchev burnt, that his comrade Andropov might walk the USSR across it. In this way, Brezhnev is rather the embodiment of the selfless Vladimir Ilyich, with whom the name he shares, knowing that it could not be his place to oversee the realisation of reform, of advancing socialism. Does not Brezhnev's veiled bridging reform effort make some plausible sense when one takes into account both the excesses for disagreements in the Stalin æra and the sacking of Khrushchev whereby he attained the office? it may verily be stated that Brezbev should have been stupid to do otherwise.
So passes Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, whose secret works for the realisation of his ideals fell to Elusive Andropov. Whither Andropov? Andropov Lied: he hid himself in the cloak of a reactionary, when in reality he was even more a reformer than Brezhnev. Forget it not that Andropov was head of the KGB, and should thus be adept in the employment of information warfare and active measures. Using both his conservative credentials and his ailing health, Andropov was able to multiply reassure and deceive the bureaucracy into supporting, or at least acquiescing to reform— where achieving one or the other could only have resulted in bureaucratic apprehension or outright opposition to reform. This I hope to be another view of Andropov opposed to the Anti-Andropov Equation which certain very Right-wing ,,academicans'' engage in (Beichman, anyone?).
The first half of Gorbachev's governance was dedicated to the legacy of Brezhnev and Andropov. Good governance and clean, efficient bureaucracy were the primary object. In the middle of Gorbachev's government, he prioritised the transition to some market-based economic processes and a more pluralistic or liberal republicanism. Gorbachev messed up the market reforms by not first focusing on agriculture, and making deals with industry that could not be reasonably maintained with lesser Party controls on the economy; he would end up giving too much to the traitorous liberal burghers in his cabinet, and himself should fail to do, even to fail to see why so, what was necessary to protect the Party, State, Union, and Socialism. This is the darker half of the æra of Reform, and ultimately ruined it.
In the latter half of his governance, Gorbachev 'want[ed] to go down in history as a clean man, whom no one can accuse of dictatorship', including proletarian dictatorship. Here we see the revolutionary leader cult, the anti-bureaucrat scenario, and grand performances in service of the infantile delusion of ,,democratisation'' and liberalism— two oppositions but which always end in anarchy (if not tyranny). We also see a vicious liberal attack on Soviet martial and high culture, in favour of praising society's lowest common denominator (vulgarism and degeneracy are obscurely yet intimately connected to class society). Brezhnev and Andropov upheld and patronised both fine forms of culture. This is but one subject which displays the ensnaring of the (post-) Modern Left by liberal grand performance theory. Nutteryahoo is not the fascist who needs immediate opposing, but Adolf van Gogh, the Frisian painter turned Dutch Chancellor. We need not indict whatever the Democrats are doing that week, for the Confederate generals shall be risen from the grave through their monuments! And start me not on portraits of Oswald Shakespeare, that racist anti-Semite! A discussion about grand performances and cultural destruction, from the Russian churches, to the Chinese philosophers, to the name-brand cultural degeneracy export of the United States, is extremely important to be had, but such should be a digression from this article's subject.
Much the same happened in the People's Republic of China as had in the USSR. Mao did not fall as hard into the errors of revolutionary anti-bureaucratism, and with the wise counsel of such good advisors as Zhou and Deng, Mao quickly restored to the path of reason and good governance. Unlike Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Zhou did not have to wait for a change in leadership to address reform, and Deng did not have to 'repair the bridge of reform', but could pick up right where his reforming predecessor left off.
Where each new Soviet government was discordant, and oft times outright hostile to the previous one, Chinese governments have found a basic, inter-connective harmony. This has gone a long way towards the legacy of equally thoughtful and measured reform in the Communist Party of China. This legacy also allows for the resolution of erroneous policy far before it may develop into a crisis.
The People's Republic of China now possesses good governance on the road to moderately prosperous socialism. At the time when 'revolutionary' anti-bureaucratism is gaining mass traction in the West, amidst cancellation purges resulting from a general sentiment of betrayal and distrust, the upright bureaucracy fostered by the CPC has earned the trust of the Chinese Folk. As the West edges closer to anarchistic retribution* against hated, 'traitorous' bureaucrats, the Chinese bureaucracy is content rather to serve the masses, as they unite to build a gross ship, whose construction is kept orderly by the Helmsman of the CPC.
*I am referring, now apparently relevantly, to the tactic of of the attentat. Let me clarify that I am offering nay form of judgement towards this sentiment or tactic.
Communists the world over, but specially American communists with their hyper-individualistic liberal background and surroundings, must learn that bureaucratic socialism is successful socialism, and to oppose the revolutionary leader cult and grand performances, and to avoid the destructive paradigm of the anti-bureaucrat scenario. If anti-bureaucratism is indeed revolutionary, it can remain so only for a short time, before it begins to destroy the structure of the revolutionary movement.
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