A textbook is a confident object. It does not argue so much as instruct, and Fundamentals of Scientific Socialism instructs with the calm of a system that expects to be teaching the same lessons a century hence. It carries the © Progress Publishers date 1988, and for once the spine is nearly honest about the text: the argument runs up through the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 and Gorbachev's statement of 28 February 1987, and stops there, so what you are reading is a primer completed in the first months of 1987 and printed in 1988. That precision matters, because the date is the whole drama of the book. This is the elementary catechism of the "world socialist system" and the "general crisis of capitalism," taught with the assurance of an ascendant creed — and it was published three years before that system dissolved. Between the sentence "Socialism is invincible" and the lowering of the red flag over the Kremlin lie thirty-six months. The book does not know this. It could not. But a reader in any later year holds a document whose confidence is answered by the event it was written just before, and the honest thing is to read it as its authors meant it and let the chronology speak for itself, without gloating.
Ask first who wrote it and for whom, because the answer is not the usual one for this series. The authors are a team of the Moscow Institute of Social Sciences headed by Professor G. P. Chernikov; the translation is by Gayane Chalyan. The Institute of Social Sciences was not an ordinary academy. It was the CPSU Central Committee's school for foreign Communists — the institution that descended from the International Lenin School of the Comintern years — where cadres of the world's Communist and workers' parties came to Moscow to be trained. So this is not export literature aimed at a curious browser in a London bookshop. It is a teaching manual for the cadres of the world movement, and it says so plainly in its closing pages, where it tells the reader to "apply the theory you have learned to concrete situations obtaining in your country and region, to specific tasks facing the revolutionaries," and directs him toward Lenin's writings "devoted to the problems of revolutionary process in developing countries." The worked examples carry the foreign policy of the state that ran the school. This is the elementary "scientific socialism" as the CPSU wished the international movement to learn it, at the exact moment the CPSU itself was beginning — cautiously, in this book barely at all — to change.
That is the first thing to establish, because the book comes dressed in the vocabulary of that change and it is worth being exact about how much of it is real. The perestroika lexicon is present, and datable. The "27th Congress" of 1986 is invoked; there is "acceleration" of socio-economic development, twelve times over, and once the Russian word itself, uskoreniye; there is "new thinking" in the disarmament chapter, tied to Gorbachev's proposals of January 1986 and the Delhi Declaration. What is absent is as telling as what is present. The word perestroika does not appear. Glasnost does not appear; neither openness nor Chernobyl, though the reactor had burned in April 1986, well within the book's evidentiary reach. The single occurrence of "restructuring" is applied not to the Soviet economy but to the demand of the developing countries "aimed at restructuring economic relationships between the developing and the imperialist states" — the old call for a New International Economic Order, not the domestic reform. And the reform that the book does describe is uskoreniye in its earliest and most orthodox sense: the shift from "extensive" to "intensive" growth, better management, the "team form of labour organisation," "socialist production democracy." This is the reform slogan of 1985–86, before it acquired either its later name or its later teeth.
So the honest finding on the reform question is that the new words are grafted onto an untouched skeleton, and the graft does not take. Acceleration, in this book, is bolted onto the same five-stage history, the same general crisis of capitalism, the same world socialist system, the same democratic centralism. Where the reform vocabulary might have opened something, the text closes it. "The strengthening of the Party's leading role," it insists, "far from contradicting the objective of improving and advancing socialist democracy, is in fact its indispensable condition." Democratisation here means the Party doing its work better; it is uskoreniye — that "the development of the Party's political line upon uskoreniye" — not the political opening that glasnost would shortly come to mean. The Brezhnev-era category "developed socialism" is retained. Stalin is not named once in the entire volume; neither is Trotsky; the Terror, the famine, 1956, 1968 are all absent — silences to which we will return. A book that had absorbed the spirit of the reform it names could not have been so undisturbed. This is a doctrine that has learned some new phrases and changed none of its architecture, and it is precisely that quality — an orthodox structure wearing a reformer's coat — that makes it a valuable document of the moment before everything gave way.
The architecture deserves stating exactly, because the book states it clearly and its clarity is its use to us. The frame is the standard one. There is the materialist outlook — "social being plays a determining role in relation to social consciousness" — laid down in the first chapter as the ground of everything after. There is the ladder of formations: "Prior to socialism, four successive stages are known in mankind's history: primitive-communal, slave-owning, feudal," and capitalist, each a "socio-economic formation" defined by its mode of production. There is the October Revolution and "socialist construction," narrated as an unbroken ascent. There is the contemporary epoch, whose leading force is named without hedging: "Socialist nations are the leading force of the world revolutionary process, since they implement the objectives determining the future of all mankind." There is the general crisis of capitalism, whose origin is fixed by doctrine — "the ensuing split of the world into two opposing social systems—the capitalist and the socialist—is the main manifestation of the general crisis of capitalism." There is the anti-imperialist struggle and the "states of socialist orientation." There is the Communist movement as vanguard, and the struggle for peace. Each of the eight chapters takes one girder of this frame, and the frame is offered not as a hypothesis about the world but as the shape of the world.
Some of what hangs on that frame is genuine, and a reader owes the book the acknowledgement. When it transmits Marx, it transmits him accurately. The chapter on capitalism gives a clean, correct account of surplus value: the worker in a ten-hour day may reproduce his own keep in four hours, and the capitalist "appropriates, without compensation, what the worker produces during the additional 6 hours—the surplus value." It generalises the point in a way Marx would have recognised — "In any exploiter society there would inevitably exist necessary labour and surplus labour; the latter is appropriated by the exploiting class without compensation" — and it draws the honest structural parallel between the feudal lord's levy on the peasant and the capitalist's on the wage-worker. The materialist conception of history, the analysis of exploitation as unpaid labour, the Leninist account of imperialism to which the book gestures — these are not Soviet inventions but the real inheritance of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and where the book teaches them it is teaching something true and worth learning. A reader told that the whole volume is worthless would be misled, and would learn nothing about why so many serious people once found this tradition compelling. The machinery of Marxist analysis is here, in working order.
The trouble is what the machinery is permitted to analyse. Every category the book sharpens — crisis, exploitation, a state that serves a ruling stratum, the deteriorating condition of the masses — is pointed in one direction only: outward, at capitalism. Turn each tool back toward the society that manufactured it and it goes slack. The book can see, with real acuity, that a state may be an instrument by which a minority holds down a majority; that was its account of every formation before socialism. It can see that public property may be captured for private enrichment — but only abroad. In the passage on the states of socialist orientation, discussing Africa and Asia, the book warns with open eyes that "the public sector is used by certain circles close to the government for personal enrichment, spawning a new layer of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie opposed to social renewal." That is a precise and honest observation. It is also the exact category — a stratum enriching itself through its control of nationalised property — that the book declares metaphysically impossible at home. Of the USSR it states flatly: "The establishment of the socialist type of the public ownership of the means of production removed all possibilities of oppression, appropriation of other people's labour, and exploitation of man by man. Exploiter classes ceased to exist." The tool that cuts cleanly through a state farm in Africa cannot be lifted against a ministry in Moscow. This is the reflexivity failure in its purest form: not the frequency of a word, not the presence or absence of citations, but the plain fact that the book's most powerful concepts are barred, by construction, from ever applying to its author's own side.
The same asymmetry governs the treatment of the state and of crisis. The Soviet state is "the socialist state of the whole people," representing "the interests of the entire Soviet people"; its difficulties are conceded but externalised — attributed to "the low level of economic and cultural development at the early stage," to the defence burden imposed by "the most reactionary forces of the old world," to "miscalculations and errors" that "the CPSU does a great job in correcting." Crisis is something capitalism has; the socialist world lives, to borrow the phrase a sibling volume in this series uses of Chernikov's own economics, in permanent daylight. And the daylight is at its brightest exactly where 1988 should have made it hardest to sustain. "The advantages of this type of economic policy and international division of labour," the book says of the CMEA bloc, "have made the socialist community the most dynamic and rapidly developing group of countries in the world." That sentence was set in type as the Soviet economy slid into the stagnation its own economists would soon name, and it is the single most poignant line in the volume — the doctrine at its most confident, on the eve of the refutation it did not survive.
This is not an isolated tic of one textbook; it is the signature of an authorship. Professor Chernikov spent his career applying the vocabulary of terminal crisis to the West. In The Crisis of Capitalism and the Condition of the Working People (Progress, 1980) he built the whole book on the "general crisis of capitalism" as the dying of a system, a death he dated to 1917 and then traced through sixty-three years of the corpse's continued transformation. In The Political Economy of Capitalism (with M. Ryndina; Progress, 1974, revised into the 1980s) he anatomised the capitalist mode with real competence and then, at its frontier, hands the reader over to a companion volume on the political economy of socialism — the crisis kept scrupulously on one side of the join. The present primer is the elementary distillation of that lifelong division of labour: capitalism gets the diagnosis, socialism gets the daylight. And the "states of socialist orientation" doctrine that the book expounds at length — the claim, running through the sibling Progress volumes by Ulyanovsky (Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa, 1978) and Tarabrin (USSR and Countries of Africa, 1980), that formerly colonial nations can pass to socialism "skipping the capitalist stage" under revolutionary-democratic vanguards — is the export edge of the same optimism. The book even concedes that these regimes' "revolutions 'from above' are not supported 'from below,'" and still concludes that "socialist orientation has proved its viability." It was, from the vantage of 1988, on the point of proving nothing of the kind.
Set against this the answer the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition had already written, half a century before, and to the very claims this book repeats. When Chapter Three narrates the completion of socialist construction and presents the 1936 Constitution as its crowning proof — the Constitution that "declared the socialist economic system and socialist ownership of the means of production to be the economic foundation of the Soviet state" — it is restating, almost word for word, the document that Trotsky dismantled in The Revolution Betrayed, written in that same year, 1936. Trotsky's tenth chapter, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution," reads that constitution as exactly a mirror — but of "the ruling stratum," an instrument imbued with a lie. To the book's central boast that exploitation had been abolished, he had the flat reply: "When the new constitution announces that in the Soviet Union 'abolition of the exploitation of man by man' has been attained, it is not telling the truth." To the "socialist state of the whole people," he set the plain observation that the workers' state had not behaved as Marxism said a workers' state must. The programme promised a state that begins to die away from the first day of proletarian power; instead, Trotsky wrote in his third chapter, "at the end of its second decade of existence, it has not only not died away, but not begun to 'die away.'" Far from withering, "the bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses." That is the analysis this primer exists to foreclose, and it was in print, in the book's own founding tradition, before any of its student readers were born. The reader who wants the reply should go to The Revolution Betrayed, chapters three, nine and ten. On the doctrine of peaceful coexistence that Chapter Four restates as "the only form of international relations possible in the current conditions of nuclear threat," the fullest answer from the same tradition is Ernest Mandel's "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution" (International Socialist Review, March–April 1970), which traces the doctrine's real history rather than its official pedigree.
The reflexivity test also names the book's silences, and here the finding is the silence itself. This is a 1988 volume, written as glasnost was reopening the Soviet past in the Soviet press, and it does not touch it. Collectivisation is narrated as the smooth unfolding of "Lenin's cooperation plan," its violence reduced to the state being "obliged to apply the force of law to those who let grain rot rather than sell it." The famine of 1932–33, which killed millions in precisely the grain regions the book names as the vanguard of "total collectivisation," does not appear; the word famine occurs nowhere. Stalin, who presided over the entire construction the third chapter celebrates, is never named. The Terror of 1936–38 is absent. So is the Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — the latter listed only as a country that "took the path of socialist construction." For a cadre manual whose whole authority rests on the record of "socialist construction," these are not incidental omissions. They are the shape of the case: the record is presented with its catastrophes surgically removed, so that the ascent can appear unbroken. A student in Luanda or Managua learning "scientific socialism" from this book would carry away a twentieth-century history from which the Soviet twentieth century's darkest decade had simply been deleted.
None of this makes the book negligible; it makes it revealing. Read it for what it genuinely transmits — the materialist conception of history, the theory of surplus labour, the real analytical inheritance of Marx — and it repays reading. Read it for what it claims about the state it served, and it is a specimen: the last confident edition of a catechism, issued at the hinge of the reform that would expose it, still teaching that the socialist community was "the most dynamic and rapidly developing group of countries in the world" and that "the Earth's future is socialism." Its authors believed both propositions and had spent careers demonstrating them. Within four years the school that taught this book, the Party that ran the school, and the world socialist system whose leadership the book proclaimed had all ceased to exist. The volume is not discredited by that so much as dated by it, exactly, to the year of its own composition — a photograph of a doctrine at the instant before the ground moved, taken by people who had no idea they were standing on a fault line. That is a document worth preserving, and worth reading with the tenderness one owes to any confident thing about to be overtaken by history, and with the clear eyes its own tradition, in Trotsky's hands, would have demanded.