This book is a portrait of a society painted in the months that society began to come apart, by a committee one of whose members was on fire. Socialism as a Social System is a collective monograph, "written by an international team of scholars from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland and the Soviet Union," translated from the Russian and issued in English by Progress Publishers in 1981. It sets out to describe "real" or "developed" socialism as a finished and lasting kind of society — mature, stable, without antagonistic classes, morally and politically united. And it was coordinated, the front matter states plainly, "by the Institute of Basic Problems of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party." The Polish party's own theoretical institute managed a book proclaiming the settled harmony of socialist society during the very year its own working class rose against it. That is not a detail. It is the key to the whole volume.
Date the text, not the spine. The English translation is copyright 1981, but the book behind it is a book of 1980. Its statistics run out at the close of the Tenth Five-Year Plan — repeatedly it reaches "between 1976 and 1980" and stops; its authoritative political reference is the 25th Congress of the CPSU, held in 1976, which it quotes as the last word. The 26th Congress met in February 1981; this book does not know it happened. Its horizon is Brezhnev's, and specifically Brezhnev's at the moment the formula of "developed socialism" had hardened into the reigning doctrine of the Soviet bloc — the idea that the USSR and its allies had left the improvised, transitional phase behind and entered a durable social order with laws of its own.
Who wrote it, and for whom? Not a single author but an editorial machine. The editors-in-chief were Professor T. M. Jaroszewski, a Polish philosopher of the ruling party, and Professor P. A. Ignatovsky of the Soviet Union; the chapters were parcelled out to national research teams. The introduction, the economics, the account of the socialist community's "historical role," and the conclusion were prepared by Soviet teams; the Czechoslovaks wrote on the essence of socialism, the Hungarians on the political system, the East Germans on the "socialist mode of life." And the chapter titled "Socialist Humanism. Moulding the New Man" — the chapter on how socialism forms the moral character of its people — was written by the Poles. This was a commissioned, multilateral text, an official self-description of the bloc as a bloc, produced for export in the language of international circulation. It is meant to be read as the considered voice of seven ruling parties speaking together. That is exactly what makes its silences audible.
The claim at the centre of the book is that socialism is not a passage to somewhere else but a place to stand. "Socialism is an independent, prolonged phase of development," the authors write; "Mature socialism develops on its own foundations, on the basis of the economy, policy, social and class structure, culture and ideology adequate to it." The Marxist tradition had generally treated the period after a workers' revolution as transitional — a battleground between the old society and the new, its outcome not guaranteed. The doctrine of developed socialism closes that battleground. It declares the transition essentially over and the result secure: "The conception of the developed socialist society, elaborated by the combined efforts of the CPSU and fraternal communist and workers' parties, is a great creative contribution to Marxist-Leninist theory."
From this stem the book's load-bearing propositions, each stated without hedging.
On class: socialism has produced "the first non-antagonistic socio-class structure in human history." "Under socialism," the authors write, "there are no antagonistic contradictions between classes." Classes persist, but drained of their sting — "classes in socialist society are not classes in the traditional sense, and, to a considerable extent, lose the classic characteristics and features of classes," so that "society becomes increasingly homogeneous." Where conflicts remain they are "non-antagonistic," resolvable in principle by good management: the socialist economy, they say, aims "at a conscious resolution of the non-antagonistic contradictions of the growth of the socialist economy." The book is careful, to its credit, not to claim that all friction has vanished; it quotes Engels — "if all contradictions are once for all disposed of ... world history will be at an end" — and concedes that "difficult problems of social development" persist. But the concession is bounded in advance. The contradictions that are admitted are the manageable kind. The one kind ruled out by definition is conflict between classes — and, with it, conflict between the working class and those set over it.
On the state: the dictatorship of the proletariat matures into "the socialist state of the whole people," a state that is "many times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic." On the party: it "develops into a party of the whole people, but even so, it fully retains its class character" — quoting Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, the party "gradually becomes the vanguard of the people, a party of the whole people." On society as a whole: among the "advantages of socialism" the authors list "the moral and political unity of the people." That phrase — moral and political unity — is the doctrine's emotional core. It asserts that in a developed socialist society the fundamental interests of every group coincide, that rulers and ruled want the same things, that opposition can only be error or enemy work from outside. The trade unions are described in this spirit: bodies that "perform their traditional functions protecting the interests of working people," schools of communism, belts of participation. There is no room in the picture for a union that workers might have to build against the state, because there is no interest the state and the workers could hold apart.
The formula is not new in 1981. "Moral and political unity" was already the boast of the Stalin period, the companion claim to the 1936 Constitution's announcement that antagonistic classes had been abolished and society welded into a friendly union of workers, peasants and intelligentsia. What the doctrine of developed socialism adds is not a new idea but a new permanence: the harmony once presented as the fruit of a completed construction is now presented as the settled character of a mature and lasting system. And notice the shape of the central propositions. That there are "no antagonistic contradictions between classes"; that the party of a class has become "a party of the whole people" while somehow keeping "its class character"; that the state has grown into a "state of the whole people" — each of these is built so that it cannot be contradicted by any fact. If the party is the whole people's, then a part of the people rising against it is by definition not really the people but its enemies. If contradictions are non-antagonistic by nature, then an antagonism, when it erupts, cannot be reported as one. The doctrine does not describe a society so much as equip it with a vocabulary in which its own gravest crisis has no name.
Here the date and the coordinating institute close together like a trap. The book was assembled under the direction of the Polish United Workers' Party's institute, and published in 1981. In August 1980 — as the manuscript was being finished, or barely after — workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk struck, occupied the yards, and on 31 August forced the Polish government to concede the right to form trade unions independent of the party. Within a year Solidarność had close to ten million members. Polish workers, the leading class of a socialist state by this book's own doctrine, had demonstrated in the plainest possible way that their interests and the party's were not identical — that they wanted, and had been denied, precisely the self-organisation the doctrine said they could not need. On 13 December 1981 the regime answered with martial law and interned the union's leaders: the leading class placed under curfew by the party that claimed to embody it.
A book proclaiming "the moral and political unity of the people" and the impossibility of "antagonistic contradictions between classes" was, at that exact moment, coproduced by the ruling party of the country where the largest working-class revolt in the history of the bloc was under way. Search the text for it and there is nothing. "Solidarity" appears dozens of times — always as an abstract virtue, "proletarian solidarity," "the fraternal solidarity of all working people," never the Gdańsk union of that name. Poland enters only as a supplier of good statistics: worker-deputies in the Sejm, pupils passing to the ninth form. The chapter the Polish team itself contributed is the one on "Moulding the New Man" — the formation of socialist moral character — written by functionaries of a party whose actual working class was, in those weeks, forming a moral judgement of its own and acting on it.
This is not a case of a book being overtaken by later events. It is a case of a doctrine constitutionally unable to register the event happening around it. The theory of moral-political unity does not merely fail to predict a workers' revolt in a workers' state; it forbids one from being conceived. If interests are unified by the nature of the system, a strike against the system can only be sabotage, foreign subversion, or false consciousness — never what it plainly was in Gdańsk, a class asserting an interest of its own against a stratum that had appropriated the state. The "social system" this book anatomises is one that has removed from its own instruments the capacity to detect its deepest conflict. That is the finding, and it is the book's structure, not an accident of timing.
None of this required hindsight to see. The categories that make sense of Gdańsk had been set out forty-five years earlier, in Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — the book against which every Soviet account of Soviet society must be read, because it is the one that took the same object and reached the opposite conclusion by refusing the same evasions.
Trotsky's argument begins where this book refuses to look: with the Soviet bureaucracy as a distinct social formation. The apparatus that governs is not the working class in office, he wrote, but a privileged layer risen above it — "in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." Its relation to the nation's wealth is peculiar and unstable: "The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy." This is the exact conflict Socialism as a Social System declares abolished. Where the 1981 book sees "the moral and political unity of the people," Trotsky saw a society split between an unaccountable ruling stratum and the mass it commanded — the split that Solidarność would make visible to the world.
The point sharpens when the two books are set on the same ground. Socialism as a Social System rests much of its case on the socialist constitution and the harmony it proclaims. Trotsky had answered that move in advance, dissecting the 1936 "Stalin" Constitution that first announced the abolition of class antagonisms and the friendly union of workers and peasants. His verdict is the sentence this whole volume needs and cannot survive: "The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy." A declared harmony that removes the citizen's power to say no to those above him is not harmony; it is the political form of subjection. The constitution, Trotsky concluded, "creates the political premises for the birth of a new possessing class" — the possibility this book treats as unthinkable stated as the live danger it was.
And on the trade unions — the institutions Gdańsk turned into the front line — Trotsky's description of what the bureaucracy had done to workers' own organisations reads like a caption to this book's serene paragraphs. In the USSR, he wrote, there had disappeared "the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries." That is the reality behind the "school of communism" the 1981 authors praise: a union that has had the power to resist removed from it. Which is why, when Polish workers wanted a union that could actually defend them, they had to found one outside the party — and why the party's answer was internment. The book calls the Soviet-type union a protector of "the interests of working people." Poland was, in the same months, the empirical test of that claim, and it failed.
There is a test worth applying to any book of this kind, and it separates the traditions more cleanly than counting words or citations: can the categories the book uses to convict its enemies ever be turned on its own side? The Revolution Betrayed charges the Soviet bureaucracy with appropriating the state and expropriating the workers politically, and it names the mechanism, the stratum and the act — claims that could be shown false and that history was invited to test. Socialism as a Social System deploys "moral and political unity" and the "party of the whole people" precisely so that the reverse charge can never be levelled: by construction, the Polish party could not be in conflict with the Polish working class, because the two had been defined as one. When the conflict came anyway, the doctrine had no way to admit it except to reclassify the workers as enemies — which is, in the end, what martial law did. A theory that can only defend itself by declaring the facts hostile has stopped being a description and become an alibi.
Trotsky was equally clear that the state this book calls the crowning proof of maturity was in fact the mark of an unfinished and deformed transition. Marxism had held that a workers' state, its class enemies expropriated, would begin to wither — to hand its functions back to the people. Trotsky pointed at the opposite: a state that "at the end of its second decade of existence ... has not only not died away, but not begun to 'die away'," but had "grown into a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion." Socialism as a Social System takes the same non-withering, ever-strengthening state and reads it as achievement — "the socialist state of the whole people," more democratic than any republic. The identical fact, opposite verdicts. One of the two readings had to answer to Gdańsk, and it was not Trotsky's.
The correction here is not a private opinion of one exiled Marxist. It was the common property of the anti-Stalinist left, and readers of this series will find the same doctrine met from the same direction in neighbouring volumes of the Progress catalogue. Its companion titles execute the identical substitution of party for class in other fields — the Fundamentals of Political Economy (1980) and G. Chernikov's Fundamentals of Scientific Socialism (1988) state the theory as bedrock; and the closest sibling of all, The Working Class and Its Allies (1980), went to press in the same window and met the same Polish refutation, its central silence — that the socialist working class might want, and be denied, the self-organisation the book granted its Western counterpart — becoming within eighteen months the largest political fact in Eastern Europe. Socialism as a Social System is not an eccentric performance. It is one authoritative statement of a single, coordinated doctrine, and it inherits that doctrine's central blind spot in full.
A reader told that everything in a book is worthless learns nothing, and it would be false to say it here. Socialism as a Social System is not a work of scholarship in the sense of open inquiry — its conclusions are fixed before its evidence is gathered — but it is a valuable document, and parts of it are genuinely useful.
It is, first, the best single-volume statement in English of what "developed socialism" meant to the states that professed it, set down by their own theorists at the doctrine's high-water mark. Anyone trying to understand the self-image of the Soviet bloc in its last stable decade — what it thought it had built, what it thought socialism was — will find it here, stated fully and without the vagueness that afflicts many such texts. As an object of study, its very confidence is the evidence.
Second, the economic and social chapters carry a large body of real material on the bloc as it stood around 1980: the growth of social consumption funds, the extension of ten-year schooling, pension and wage structures, the mechanisms of economic integration among the member states. These figures are assembled to flatter, and must be read as advocacy, but they are not invented, and the book is a convenient compendium of the official numbers a critic will want to test against other sources. The chapter on economic integration in particular is a clear account of how the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was meant to work.
Third — and this is the book's quietest virtue — it does not claim perfection. It admits, in the chapter on the "new man," that "traits are still observable which run counter to socialist morality," that "non-antagonistic contradictions" persist and must be overcome. The admission is fenced off from the one contradiction that mattered, but it is there, and it distinguishes this text from the crudest triumphalism. The authors half-knew that a finished society is a contradiction in terms. They simply could not follow the thought to the place where their own social system was, that year, tearing.
Read Socialism as a Social System as the considered self-portrait of a social order painted at the moment of its greatest confidence and on the eve of its crisis — a portrait made, remarkably, partly by the hands of the very party whose country was about to prove it false. Read its doctrine of moral-political unity and non-antagonistic contradictions for what it precisely claims, because the claim is stated more clearly here than almost anywhere else. Then read it against The Revolution Betrayed, which described the same society's real fracture line four decades before this committee declared it healed, and against Poland, which supplied the demonstration. The book's deepest interest is not what it says but what its saying it, then and there, reveals: a system that had built into its own theory the impossibility of perceiving its own crisis, published in the year the crisis arrived. Read it for the doctrine — and read Gdańsk in the margin.