The Thinking Reed полностью

People have grown disenchanted with disenchantment. Interest in democratic socialism has begun to grow again, aroused by events in Eastern and Western Europe and penetrations of the idea of neo-Marxism from the West. An opponent of socialism, K. Burzhuademov, wrote in 1974: ‘Unfortunately, socialist-democratic ideas are widespread today, and not bourgeois-democratic ideas, as ought to be the case.’2 Actually, it was in the seventies that the prestige of socialism declined in our country to a lower level than ever before. Yet Burzhuademov’s admission shows that disenchantment with progressive ideas was not so profound as it sometimes seemed. His statement about socialist ideas being ‘widespread’ ought not to make us complacent. They are still far from being spread as widely as Burzhuademov apparently supposed. But what is much more important is that they are widespread and, we may hope, the day is not far off when they will become the real banner of our time. It is not a matter of returning to Marx or to the hopes of the sixties, but of carrying forward the struggle to renew the socialist idea.

In statocratic countries, wrote A. Michnik, one of the leaders of the democratic opposition in Poland, the Lefts

Soviet society has changed since the seventies. Those were years of political equilibrium at the top, but the country’s economic and social development did not mark time. The numbers of the engineering intelligentsia increased markedly:

Sociological research reveals a higher cultural level in the working class, a rapprochement between this class and the intelligentsia and — most importantly — that it is no longer diluted by incomers from the countryside. The flight from the village to the town still goes on, but the multimillioned working class easily assimilates the thinned-out ‘reinforcements’. The number of hereditary workers has greatly increased, while at the same time disbelief in official propaganda has become universal. The most important development of all is that the workers of today are keenly aware of the social antagonism between them and the statocracy, and draw a sharp line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. From this differentiation between ‘us’ (the working masses, the people, the workers) and ‘them’ (the bureaucracy, the government, the exploiters) a class-consciousness is beginning to emerge, and the statocracy possesses no means of halting that process.

The remarkable economic and social stability of the system created by Stalin has deluded many, both supporters and opponents of the regime, and especially ‘calm’ observers. In the postwar period the system revealed its economic inefficiency, yet this society continued to exist and even to increase its well-being. The cessation of mass terror did not reduce but rather increased the stability of the system, for both the statocracy and the lower orders felt safer. However, there is no mystery in this.