Weekly Worker 651 Thursday November 30 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Democracy east and west

Leading SP member Paula Mitchell presented a scary vision of socialism in the session, ‘Why the Soviet Union wasn’t socialist and how democracy would work under socialism’. Tina Becker was there

She started off with a relatively uncontroversial potted history of the Russian Revolution and how it created “the most democratic society ever” - though, in her opinion, “democracy is not absolute”. She elaborated on that concept of ‘relative democracy’ when she came to the main part of her contribution: the celebration of the Soviet Union’s ‘planned economy’.

You see, ‘socialists’ only supported the USSR because of its nationalised property forms. The planned economy of the Soviet Union was a “beacon to show how an alternative society can work” and “despite the mismanagement, lack of democracy and massive waste”, the planned economy “proved its superiority to the capitalist mode of production”.

Comrade Mitchell tried to prove her point with a list of facts and figures, according to which “the number of technicians rose 55 times”, “the industrial output 52 times” and there were lots more doctors, nurses and hospitals.

This is stupid. Yes, with the five-year plans, the system of bureaucratic socialism was able to mobilise all resources in the country. But it did so in a military fashion. Hence there was dramatic growth. However, and this is the real point, the system was unable to distinguish between quality and quantity. So much of the 52-times increase in industrial output was in the form of useless products. The same contradiction meant that the system could not sustain extended reproduction. Having mobilised everything available, the bureaucracy could not oversee any consistent improvement in efficiency. The end of the system was therefore inevitable.

So the lack of any kind of workers’ control and democracy in the USSR (after the initial period) is no secondary question, as suggested by comrade Mitchell. Democracy is not something that can be added to the so-called ‘plan’. A ‘plan’ drawn up by bureaucrats from the top and imposed on a slave class of workers actually consisted of little more than the setting of targets. In other words, it was not a plan at all.

Comrade Phil Kent from the CPGB pointed out that a society without thorough democracy and control from below could not possibly create a real planned economy of any description. What existed in the Soviet Union could not be anything other than a bureaucratic nightmare, in which the role of the politically expropriated and exploited mass of people - on whose needs production was supposedly based - was simply to work and follow orders.

In her reply, comrade Mitchell responded to this point, while also picking up on a question levelled against her by a couple of members of the Spartacist League (who accused the SP of having manned “Yeltsin’s barricades” in 1991). She explained that neither Yeltsin nor the generals preparing their putsch “stood for the maintenance of the planned economy”. Both wanted the restoration of capital. As the SP seems incapable of fighting for independent working class politics, it had to opt for the lesser evil: under Yeltsin, there was at least some move towards the “restoration of workers’ democracy”. The SP, she explained, fought for political revolution, because that is the only way to “maintain the planned economy”.

Comrade Mitchell claimed to be “totally puzzled” when I accused her of not taking the fight for democracy seriously. While “you won’t get socialism through the extension of democracy” (for that, the 150 biggest companies have to be nationalised), “of course we want the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords”. When? Right after “parliament has voted for the Enabling Act” and declared the beginning of socialism in Britain.

This summed up the SP’s attitude to this key question. ‘Democracy’, like ‘socialism’, is handed down from above by well-meaning leaders. The notion that the victory of socialism is actually the culmination of the fight for extreme democracy leaves the comrades baffled.

Red and green

Do you have to be red to be green?’ was a debate between Pete Dickenson of the SP and the Green Party’s ‘male principal speaker’, Derek Wall. Simon Wells reports

It was, however, not really a debate at all - comrade Wall is a member of the recently formed Green Left platform and his presentation was fairly sprinkled with Marxist quotes. In fact it was difficult to gauge who was the Marxist and who was the green.

Comrade Dickenson said that catastrophic climate change was probably less than 10 years away. Meanwhile the Kyoto protocol was a “fiasco”, eco-taxes would hurt the poor and the market in carbon permits has collapsed, meaning that the cost to pollute the environment is virtually zero. The idea of contraction and convergence does not add up.

Comrade Wall gave over a section of his speech to Marx. There was a lot in Marxism that is valuable, he said, though not all: the left does not critique productivism and accumulation, and does not understand that we need to go back to William Morris.

Read on: The rest of the left Democracy Ecology and the Greens Weekly Worker archive

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