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Reform and Counterreform
in the Bureaucratic Bloc
It could almost be said that the history of the last twenty years has set itself the sole
task of refuting Trotsky’s analyses concerning the bureaucracy. Victim of a sort of
“class subjectivism,” Trotsky refused throughout his life to recognize in
Stalinist practice anything but a temporary deviation of a usurping stratum, a
“Thermidorian reaction.” As an ideologue of the Bolshevik revolution, he was
unable to become a theorist of proletarian revolution at the time of the Stalinist
restoration. By refusing to recognize the bureaucracy in power for what it is,
namely a new exploiting class, this Hegel of the revolution betrayed rendered
himself incapable of making a genuine critique of it. The theoretical and practical
impotence of Trotskyism (in all its variants) is largely attributable to this original sin
of the master.
In Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement (chapter 1) we said,
a month before the Russian invasion: “The bureaucratic appropriation of society is
inseparable from a totalitarian possession of the state and from the exclusive reign of
its ideology. The present rights of free expression and association and the absence of
censorship in Czechoslovakia will in the very near future lead to one of these two
alternatives: either a repression, which will reveal the sham character of these
concessions; or a proletarian assault against the bureaucratic ownership of the state and
the economy, which ownership will be unmasked as soon as the dominant ideology is deprived
for any length of time of its omnipresent police. The outcome of such a conflict is of the
greatest concern for the Russian bureaucracy, whose very survival would be threatened by a
victory of the Czech workers.” The first alternative was effected by the intervention
of “Soviet” tanks. The basis of Moscow’s total domination over the
“socialist” countries was this golden rule proclaimed and practiced by the
Russian bureaucracy: “Socialism must not go further than our army.” Wherever
that army has been the main force installing “Communist” parties in power, it
has the last word each time its former protégés manifest any leanings toward
independence that might endanger the totalitarian bureaucratic domination. The Russian
socioeconomic system has been from the beginning the ideal type for the new
bureaucratic regimes. But fidelity to this archetype has often conflicted with the
specific requirements of the particular dominated societies; since the ruling-class
interests of each satellite bureaucracy do not necessarily coincide with those of the
Russian bureaucracy, interbureaucratic relations have always contained underlying
conflicts. Caught between the hammer and the anvil, the satellite bureaucracies always end
up clinging to the hammer as soon as proletarian forces demonstrate their desire for
autonomy. In Poland or Hungary, as recently in Czechoslovakia, the national bureaucratic
“revolt” never goes beyond replacing one bureaucrat with another.
As the first industrialized state conquered by Stalinism, Czechoslovakia has over the
last twenty years occupied a “privileged” position in the international system
of exploitation set up by the Russians after 1949, in the framework of the “socialist
division of labor” directed by the Comecon. The naked totalitarianism of the Stalin
era meant that upon their coming to power the Czech Stalinists could do nothing but
servilely imitate the “universal socialist system.” But in contrast to the other
bureaucratic countries, where there was a real need for economic development and
industrialization, the level of productive forces in Czechoslovakia was in complete
contradiction with the objectives of the economic program of the new regime. After fifteen
years of irrational bureaucratic management the Czech economy was on the brink of
catastrophe, and its reform became a matter of life and death for the ruling class. This
was the root of the “Prague Spring” and the adventurous liberalization attempted
by the bureaucracy. But before going into the analysis of this “bureaucratic
reform,” let us orient ourselves by examining its origins in the purely Stalinist (or
Novotnyist) period.
After the [1948] Prague coup, the integration of Czechoslovakia into the Eastern
bloc’s almost totally self-contained economic system made it the main victim of
Russian domination. Since it was the most developed country it had to bear the costs of
industrializing its neighbors, themselves yoked under a policy of superexploitation. After
1950 the totalitarian planning, with its emphasis on metallurgical and engineering
industries, introduced a serious imbalance into the functioning of the economy which
steadily grew worse. In 1966 investment in Czech heavy industry reached 47%, the highest
rate in the world. This was because Czechoslovakia had to provide — at ridiculously
low prices that did not even cover the costs of production and the wear and tear of the
machinery — raw materials (in five years the USSR used up fifty years’ worth of
reserves from the Jachymov uranium deposits in Bohemia) and manufactured goods (machines,
armaments, etc.) to the USSR and the other “socialist” countries, and later to
the “Third World” countries coveted by the Russians. “Production for
production’s sake” was the ideology that accompanied this enterprise, the costs
of which the workers were the first to bear. As early as 1953, in the wake of a monetary
reform, the workers of Pilsen, seeing their wages decreasing and prices rising, revolted
and were immediately violently repressed. The consequences of this economic policy were
essentially: the Czech economy’s increasing dependence on Soviet supplies of raw
materials and fuel; an orientation toward foreign interests; a sharp decline in the
standard of living following a decline in real wages; and finally a decline in the
national income after 1960 (its growth rate fell from an average of 8.5% from 1950-1960 to
0.7% in 1962). In 1963, for the first time in the history of a “socialist”
country, the national income fell rather than rose. This was the alarm signal for the new
reform. Ota Sik estimated that investment would have to be quadrupled in order to attain
in 1968 the same national income growth as in 1958. From 1963 on it began to be officially
admitted that “the national economy of Czechoslovakia is going through a period of
serious structural imbalance, with limited inflationary tendencies appearing in all
sectors of life and society, notably in foreign trade, the home market and
investments” (Czechoslovakian Foreign Trade, October 1968).
Voices began to be heard insisting on the urgency of transforming the economy.
Professor Ota Sik and his team began preparing their reform plan, which was to be more or
less adopted after 1965 by the upper echelons of the state. The new Ota Sik plan made a
rather daring critique of the functioning of the economy over the preceding years. It
questioned the Russian tutelage and proposed that the economy be freed from rigid central
planning and opened to the world market. To do this it was necessary to go beyond simple
reproduction of capital, to put an end to the system of “production for
production’s sake” (denounced as an antisocialist crime after having been
glorified as a fundamental principle of socialism), and to reduce the cost of production
and raise the productivity index, which had gone from 7.7% in 1960 to 3.1% in 1962 and had
fallen even further in the following years.
This plan, a model of technocratic reform, began to be implemented in 1965 and took
full effect from 1967 on. It required a clean break with the administrative methods that
had crushed all initiative: giving the producers an “interest” in the results of
their work, granting autonomy to the different enterprises, rewarding successes,
penalizing failures, encouraging through appropriate technical measures the development of
profitable industries and enterprises, and putting the market back on its feet by bringing
prices in line with the world market. Resisted by the hidebound administrative cadres,
this program was applied only in small doses. The Novotnyist bureaucracy began to see the
dangerous implications of such a venture. A temporary rise in prices that was not matched
by a corresponding rise in wages enabled this conservative stratum to denounce the project
in the eyes of the workers. Novotny himself presented himself as the defender of
working-class interests and openly criticized the new measures at a workers meeting in
1967. But the “liberal” wing, aware of the real interests of the bureaucratic
regime in Czechoslovakia and sure of the support of the population, joined battle. As a
journalist of Kulturni Tvorba (5 January 1967) put it, “For the people, the
new economic system has become synonymous with the need for change” — total
change. This was the first link in a chain of developments that would inevitably lead
to far-reaching social and political changes. The conservative bureaucracy, having no real
support to rely on, could only admit its failings and gradually bow out of the political
scene: any resistance on its part would have rapidly led to an explosion analogous to that
of Budapest in 1956. The June 1967 Fourth Congress of Writers (though writers along with
filmmakers had already been allowed a certain margin of artistic freedom) turned into a
veritable public indictment of the regime. With their last strength the
“conservatives” reacted by excluding a certain number of radical intellectuals
from the Party and by putting their journal under direct ministerial control.
But the winds of revolt were blowing harder and harder, and nothing could any longer
stem the popular enthusiasm for transforming the prevailing conditions of Czech life. A
student demonstration protesting against an electricity shutdown, after being strongly
repressed, turned into a meeting leveling accusations against the regime. One of the first
discoveries of this meeting, a discovery which was to become the watchword of the whole
subsequent oppositional movement, was the absolute insistence on telling the truth,
in contrast to “the incredible contradictions between what is said and what is
actually done.” In a system based on the constant lies of ideology such a demand
becomes quite simply revolutionary; and the intellectuals did not fail to develop its
implications to the limit. In the bureaucratic systems, where nothing must escape the
party-state totalitarianism, a protest against the slightest detail of life inevitably
leads to calling in question the totality of existing conditions, to a human
protest against the whole inhuman life that people are forced to lead. Even if it was
limited to the Prague University campus, the student demonstration concerned all the
alienated aspects of Czech life, which was denounced as unacceptable in the course of the
meeting.
The neobureaucracy then took over the leadership of the movement and tried to contain
it within the narrow framework of its reforms. In January 1968 an “Action
Program” was adopted, marking the rise of the Dubcek team and the removal of Novotny.
In addition to Ota Sik’s economic plan, now definitively adopted and integrated into
this new program, a certain number of political measures were proudly proclaimed by the
new leadership. Almost all the formal “freedoms” of bourgeois regimes were
guaranteed. This policy, totally unprecedented for a bureaucratic regime, shows how much
was at stake and how serious the situation was. The radical elements, taking advantage of
these bureaucratic concessions, were to reveal their real purpose as “objectively
necessary” measures for safeguarding bureaucratic domination. Smrkovsky, the most
liberal of the newly promoted members, naïvely expressed the truth of the bureaucratic
liberalism: “Recognizing that even in a socialist society evolution takes place
through constant conflicts of interest in the economic, social and political domains, we
should seek a system of political guidance that permits the settling of all
social conflicts and avoids the necessity for extraordinary administrative
interventions.” But the new bureaucracy did not realize that by renouncing those
“extraordinary interventions,” which in reality constitute its only normal
manner of governing, it would be leaving its regime open to a merciless radical critique.
The freedom of association and of cultural and political expression produced a veritable
orgy of critical truth. The notion that the Party’s “leading role” should
be “naturally and spontaneously recognized, even at the rank-and-file level, based on
the ability of its Communist functionaries to work and command” (Action Program) was
demolished everywhere, and new demands for autonomous workers’ organizations began to
be raised. At the end of spring 1968 the Dubcek bureaucracy was giving the ridiculous
impression of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It reaffirmed its intention of
maintaining its political monopoly: “If anticommunist elements attempt to attack this
historic reality (i.e. the right of the Party to lead), the Party will mobilize
all the forces of the people and of the socialist state in order to drive back and
extinguish this adventurist attempt” (Resolution of the Central Committee, June
1968). But once the bureaucratic reform had opened participation in decisionmaking to the
majority of the Party, how could the great majority outside the Party not also want to
decide things for themselves? When those at the top of the state play the fiddle, how can
they expect those at the bottom not to start dancing?
From this point on the revolutionary tendencies began to turn their critique toward
denunciation of the liberal formalism and its ideology. Until then democracy had been, so
to speak, “imposed on the masses” in the same way the dictatorship had been
imposed on them, that is, by barring them from any real participation. Everyone knew that
Novotny had come to power as a partisan of liberalization; and that a “Gomulka-type
regression” constantly threatened the Dubcek movement. A society is not transformed
by changing its political apparatus, but by overthrowing it from top to bottom. People
thus came to the point of criticizing the Bolshevik conception of the party as leader of
the working class, and to demanding an autonomous organization of the proletariat; which
would spell a rapid death for the bureaucracy. This is because for the bureaucracy the
proletariat must exist only as an imaginary force; the bureaucracy reduces it
— or tries to reduce it — to the point of being nothing but an appearance, but
it wants this appearance to exist and to believe in its own existence. The bureaucracy
bases its power on its formal ideology, but its formal goals become its actual
content and it thus everywhere enters into conflict with real goals. Wherever it
has seized the state and the economy, wherever the general interest of the state becomes
an interest apart and consequently a real interest, the bureaucracy enters into
conflict with the proletariat just as every consequence conflicts with the
bureaucracy’s own presuppositions.
But the oppositional movement following upon the bureaucratic reform only went half
way. It did not have time to follow out all its practical implications. The relentless
theoretical critique of “bureaucratic dictatorship” and Stalinist
totalitarianism had scarcely begun to be taken up autonomously by the great majority of
the population when the neobureaucracy reacted by brandishing the specter of the Russian
threat, which had already been present from May on. It can be said that the great weakness
of the Czechoslovakian movement was that the working class scarcely intervened as an
autonomous and decisive force. The themes of “self-management” and “workers
councils” included in Ota Sik’s technocratic reform did not go beyond the
bureaucratic perspective of a Yugoslavian-style “democratic management.” This is
true even of the alternative project, obviously drafted by unionists, presented on 29 June
1968 by the Wilhelm Pieck factory. The critique of Leninism, presented by “certain
philosophers” as being “already a deformation of Marxism since it inherently
contains the logic of Stalinism,” was not, as the asinine editors of Rouge
would have it, “an absurd notion because it ultimately amounts to denying the leading
role of the proletariat” (!), but the highest point of theoretical critique attained
in a bureaucratic country. Dutschke himself was ridiculed by the revolutionary Czech
students, his “anarcho-Maoism” being scornfully rejected as “absurd,
laughable and not even deserving the attention of a fifteen-year-old.”
All this criticism, which obviously could only lead to the practical calling into
question of the class power of the bureaucracy, was tolerated and even sometimes
encouraged by the Dubcek regime as long as the latter could coopt it as a
legitimate denunciation of “Stalino-Novotnyist errors.” The bureaucracy does
indeed denounce its own crimes, but always as having been committed by others: it
detaches a part of itself and elevates it into an autonomous entity that can be blamed for
all the antiproletarian crimes (since the most ancient times, sacrifice has been
bureaucracy’s favored method for perpetuating its power). In Czechoslovakia, as in
Poland and Hungary, nationalism has been the best argument for winning the
population’s support of the ruling class. The clearer the Russian threat became, the
more Dubcek’s bureaucratic power was reinforced; his fondest desire would have been
for the Warsaw Pact forces to remain indefinitely at the borders. But sooner or later the
Czech proletariat would have discovered through struggle that the point is not to know
what any given bureaucrat, or even the bureaucracy as a whole, momentarily represents as
its goal, but to know what the bureaucracy really is, what it, in conformity with its
own nature, will be historically forced to do. And the proletariat would then have
taken appropriate action.
It was the fear of such a discovery that haunted the Russian bureaucracy and its
satellites. Picture a Russian (or East German) bureaucrat in the midst of this
“ideological” panic, how his brain — as sick as his power — is
tortured, confused, stunned by these cries of independence, workers councils,
“bureaucratic dictatorship,” and by the conspiracy of workers and intellectuals
and their threat to defend their conquests arms in hand, and you will understand how in
this clamorous confusion of truth and freedom, of plots and revolution, the Russian
bureaucracy could cry out to its Czech counterpart: “Better a fearful end than a fear
without end!”
If ever an event had cast its shadow ahead of itself long before it happened, it was,
for those who know how to read modern history, the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia.
It was long contemplated and, despite all its international repercussions, virtually
inevitable. By bringing into question the omnipotence of bureaucratic power, Dubcek’s
adventurous — though necessary — effort began to imperil this same power
wherever it was to be found, and thus became intolerable. Six hundred thousand soldiers
(almost as many as the Americans in Vietnam) were sent to put a brutal stop to it. Thus
when the “antisocialist” and “counterrevolutionary” forces,
continually conjured up and exorcised by all the bureaucrats, finally appeared, they
appeared not under the portrait of Benes or armed by “revanchist Germans,” but
in the uniform of the “Red” Army.
A remarkable popular resistance was carried on for seven days — “the
magnificent seven” — mobilizing virtually the entire population against the
invaders. Paradoxically, clearly revolutionary methods of struggle were taken up for the
defense of a reformist bureaucracy. But what was not carried out in the course of the
movement could certainly not he carried out under the occupation: the Russian troops,
having enabled the Dubcekists to brake the revolutionary process as much as possible while
they were at the borders, also enabled them to control the whole resistance movement after
August 21. They played exactly the same role the American troops do in North Vietnam: the
role of ensuring the masses’ unanimous support for the bureaucracy that exploits
them.
The first reflex of the people of Prague, however, was to defend not the Palace of the
Republic, but the radio station, which was considered the symbol of their main conquest:
truth of information against organized falsehood. And what had been the nightmare of all
the Warsaw Pact bureaucracies — the press and the radio — was to continue to
haunt them for another entire week. The Czechoslovakian experience has shown the
extraordinary possibilities of struggle that a consistent and organized revolutionary
movement will one day have at its disposal. Equipment provided by the Warsaw Pact (in
anticipation of a possible imperialist invasion of Czechoslovakia!) was used by the Czech
journalists to set up 35 clandestine broadcasting stations linked with 80 emergency backup
stations. The Soviet propaganda — so essential for an occupation army — was thus
totally undermined; and the population was able to keep abreast of just about everything
that was happening in the country and to follow the directives of the liberal bureaucrats
or of the radical elements that controlled certain stations. For example, in response to a
radio appeal aimed at sabotaging the operations of the Russian police, Prague was
transformed into a veritable “urban labyrinth” in which all street signs and
house numbers were removed and the walls were covered with May 1968-style inscriptions.
Defying all the police, Prague became a home of freedom and an example of the
revolutionary détournement of repressive urbanism. Due to exceptional proletarian
organization, all the newspapers were able to be freely printed and distributed
under the nose of the Russians who asininely guarded the newspaper offices. Several
factories were transformed into printing works turning out thousands of papers and
leaflets — including a counterfeit issue of Pravda in Russian. The 14th
Party Congress was able to meet secretly for three days under the protection of the
workers of “Auto-Praha.” It was this conference that sabotaged “Operation
Kadar” and forced the Russians to negotiate with Dubcek. Nevertheless, by using both
their troops and the internal contradictions of the Czechoslovakian bureaucracy, the
Russians were eventually able to transform the liberal team into a sort of disguised
Vichy-type government. Husak, who was thinking of his own future, was the principal agent
responsible for canceling the 14th Congress (on the pretext of the absence of the Slovak
delegates, who had in fact apparently stayed away on his recommendation). The day after
the “Moscow Accords” he declared, “We can accept this accord, which will
enable sensible men (our emphasis) to lead the people out of the present impasse
in such a way that they will have no call to feel ashamed in the future.”
The Czech proletariat, as it becomes more revolutionary, will have nothing to be
ashamed of except its mistake in having trusted Husak, Dubcek or Smrkovsky. It already
knows that it can count only on its own forces; and that one after the other Dubcek and
Smrkovsky will betray it just as the neobureaucracy collectively betrayed it by yielding
to Moscow and falling in line with its totalitarian policy. The emotional attachment to
one or another celebrity is a vestige of the miserable era of the proletariat, a vestige
of the old world. The November strikes and the suicides somewhat slowed down the process
of “normalization,” which was not brought to completion until April 1969. By
reestablishing itself in its true form, the bureaucratic power became more effectively
opposed. The illusions all melted away one after the other and the Czechoslovakian
masses’ attachment to the reformist bureaucracy disappeared. By rehabilitating the
“collaborators” the reformists lost their last chance for any future popular
support. The workers’ and students’ revolutionary consciousness deepened as the
repression became more severe. The return to the methods and “narrow, stupid
mentality of the fifties” is already provoking violent reactions on the part of the
workers and students, whose diverse forms of linking up constitute the main anxiety common
to Dubcek, his successor and their joint masters. The workers are proclaiming their
“inalienable right to respond to any extreme measures” with their “own
extreme countermeasures” (motion by the workers of the CKD to the Minister of
Defense, 22 April 1969). The restoration of Stalinism has shown once and for all the
illusory character of any bureaucratic reformism and the bureaucracy’s congenital
inability to “liberalize” its management of society. Its pretense of a
“socialism with a human face” is nothing but the introduction of a few
“bourgeois” concessions into its totalitarian world; and even these concessions
immediately threaten its existence. The only possible humanization of
“bureaucratic socialism” is its suppression by the revolutionary proletariat,
not by a mere “political revolution,” but by the total subversion of existing
conditions and the practical dissolution of the Bureaucratic International.
The riots of 21 August 1969 have revealed to what extent ordinary Stalinism
has been reestablished in Czechoslovakia, and also to what extent it is threatened by the
proletarian critique: ten deaths, 2000 arrests and the threats of expelling or prosecuting
the puppet Dubcek have not stopped the national slowdown strike through which the
Czech workers are threatening the survival of the economic system of their indigenous and
Russian exploiters.
The Russian intervention succeeded in slowing down the objective process of change in
Czechoslovakia, but only at a tremendous cost for international Stalinism. The
bureaucratic regimes of Cuba and Hanoi, being directly dependent on the “Soviet”
state, could only applaud their masters’ intervention — to the great
embarrassment of their Trotskyist and surrealist admirers and the high-minded souls of the
left. Castro, with a singular cynicism, justified the military intervention at great
length as being necessitated by threats of a restoration of capitalism — thereby
unmasking the nature of his own “socialism.” Hanoi and the bureaucratic Arab
powers, themselves the victims of foreign occupation, push their absurd logic to the point
of supporting an analogous aggression because in this case it is carried out by their
self-styled protectors.
As for those members of the Bureaucratic International that shed tears over
Czechoslovakia, they all did so for their own national reasons. The
“Czechoslovakian affair,” coming right after the heavy shock suffered by the
French Communist Party in the May 1968 revolutionary crisis, dealt the latter another
serious blow; now divided into old-fashioned-Stalinist, neo-Stalinist and
orthodox-Stalinist fractions, it is torn between loyalty to Moscow and its own interest on
the bourgeois political chessboard. If the Italian CP was bolder in its denunciation, the
reason lay in the rising crisis in Italy, particularly the direct blow struck against its
“Togliattism.” The nationalist bureaucracies of Yugoslavia and Rumania found in
the intervention an opportunity to consolidate their class domination, regaining the
support of populations rendered fearful of a Russian threat — a threat that is in
their cases more imaginary than real. Stalinism, which has already tolerated Titoism and
Maoism as other images of itself, will always tolerate one or another sort of
“Rumanian independence” as long as it does not directly threaten its
“socialist model” faithfully reproduced everywhere. There is no point in going
into the Sino-Albanian critique of “Russian imperialism”: in the logic of their
“anti-imperialist” delirium, the Chinese in turn reproach the Russians for not
intervening in Czechoslovakia like they did in Hungary (see Peking News, 13
August 1968) and then denounce the “odious aggression” perpetrated by “the
Brezhnev-Kosygin fascist clique.”
“The international association of totalitarian bureaucracies has completely fallen
apart,” we wrote in Internationale Situationniste #11. The Czechoslovakian
crisis has only confirmed the advanced decay of Stalinism. Stalinism would never have been
able to play such a great role in the crushing of the workers movement everywhere
if the Russian totalitarian bureaucratic model had not been closely related both to the
bureaucratization of the old reformist movement (German Social Democracy and the
Second International) and to the increasingly bureaucratic organization of modern
capitalist production. But now, after more than forty years of counterrevolutionary
history, the revolution is being reborn everywhere, striking terror into the hearts of the
masters of the East as well as those of the West, attacking them both in their differences
and in their deep affinity. The courageous isolated protests expressed in Moscow after
August 21 herald the revolution that will not fail to break out soon in Russia itself.
The revolutionary movement now knows its real enemies, and none of the alienations
produced by the two forms of capitalism — private-bourgeois or state-bureaucratic
— can any longer escape its critique. Facing the immense tasks that lie before it,
the movement will no longer waste its time fighting phantoms or supporting illusions.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
September 1969
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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