WHY DID EASTERN EUROPEAN SOCIALISM FALL?
A CubaNews translation by Maria Montelibre
Edited and this note by Walter Lippmann, February 2005.
 

On the last Thursday of every month, Cuba's TEMAS magazine sponsors a public discussion on themes of general interest. At its June 2004 meeting, several important Cuban researchers and writers on this subject addressed the group. Their discussion lasted over two hours and this is the transcript of their discussion. Audience participants also included the historian Oscar Zanetti and Prof. Carlos Alzugaray, who teaches at the Superior Institute for International Relations (ISRI) Cuba's school for training diplomats. Give yourself time to read this. It's nearly twelve thousand words long.

CubaNews is extremely proud to present this translation
of the transcript to the English-speaking public.

Participants:

Rafael Hernández. Political scientist and researcher. Director of Temas.
Francisco Brown
. Máster in Contemporary History and Researcher. Center for European Studies.
Ariel Dacal
. Máster in Contemporary History. Editor. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.
Julio A. Díaz Vázquez
. Ph.D. in Economic Sciences. Professor and Researcher,
    Research Center of International Finances. (CIEI), University of Havana.
Fernando Rojas
. Licenciate in History. President, National Council of Casas de Cultura. 2004


TEMAS magazine Number 39-40, October-December 2004
The Spanish original transcript may be found in PDF format:
http://www.temas.cult.cu/revistas/39-40/09.html
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Francisco Brown

Ariel Dacal

Julio A. Díaz Vázquez

Fernando Rojas

Rafael Hernández (moderator):

This year it will be fifteen years since the beginning of the end of Socialism in Eastern Europe, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was dramatic due to everything that transpired afterwards. It is the result of a series of triggering factors with serious consequences.

It would be very difficult to comprehend this phenomenon in all its scope and in each national reality, not only in the USSR, but in different countries, such as the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, or Albania. The panel would not be able to go deeper into all relevant issues, much less study each national case. Considering that, we want to reflect about all the problems faced by Socialism in Europe and in the USSR.

The first question is: Which socialist model was historically used in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? How could it be described in relation to the events that originated it, and in relation to European revolutionary movements in the first two decades of the XX Century, where many of those processes had precedents?

Fernando Rojas: I will limit myself to the Soviet Union, for now. It is praiseworthy how this type of comparison is made in Rafael’s second question. It refers to how those revolutionary processes, from the first two decades of the XX Century, start being questioned by Bolshevism from the beginning, in the 20s. Intentionally I underline Bolshevism, because three times should be differentiated in that involution. The first time, when Bolshevism as such, starts introducing changes in its own tradition, challenging even the Party’s leader. A second stage, when different factions start forming, and start struggling among themselves, ending, as it is well known, in the victory of Stalin’s. And the last time, when it changes - this idea belongs to Trotsky - from the power held by Stalin’s faction to the power held by Stalin himself.

All this happens in less than a decade.

In what areas those changes are taking place? I would point out only a few, which in my opinion are the most important. At the same time, I will not point out references to historical precedents of these revolutionary projects, the Marxist precedent, because the analysis itself will take us to that

An area related to the reason behind world revolution, or, to be better situated in the Eurocentric version of many of these movements, the reasoning behind the European revolution. The generalized criteria of all parties, including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramasci, (although he came into this movement at a later time, he should be considered part of it), in all parties of the revolutionary left, formed in 1915 - and which later started the Third International - was to acknowledge that the revolution could start in an isolated country, i.e., Russia. But no one ever thought that the revolutionary process could be permanent without a revolution in other European States, without the expansion of that process, which had been defined by Marx, and, especially by Engels, spreading more or less quickly, to other countries.

Even Bolshevism’s foreign policies and the new Soviet Union always went in that direction. That idea, however, was replaced with the opinion that it was possible to build a national socialism. That idea took hold gradually, not immediately, and it was included in the Soviet Constitution of 1936, with logical consequences for domestic policies and, especially, for foreign policy, for the political parties, for the State, and for the Communist International, which rather ended in representing the interests guaranteeing the national security of the Soviet State.

A second subject relates to socialization - I use this term intentionally - of property, the process of transformation in relations as it refers to property, the production relations in their totality. The Bolsheviks, in the first year of the revolution, tried to implement that quickly, to the point that even "War Communism," a forced measure introduced because of the pressure of civil war, was even considered a permanent consequence of economic development, to the point that, in December 1920, a decree was being prepared to abolish money. The Council of Commissars was already discussing the first project in that decree.

At the beginning of 1921, Lenin, with the help of Trotsky and Bukharin, advocated a more gradual approach to socialization. In 1922, in the Eleventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party, he stated that the retrocession should be stopped - meaning the forms of privatization, and concessions to foreign countries created by the so called New Economic Policies (NEP) - which could be understood as starting a more rapid development of socialization.

However, a few months later, at the end of 1922 and beginning 1923, the idea was to achieve socialism through cooperation - literally translated from Russian, although it can be understood as cooperativization. This was not, however, the formula applied at the end of the 20s, but included different types of cooperatives, with a more gradual conception about progressing to a model which - as Lenin himself would say - the bourgeois could co-exist with state property, and, gradually, become a producer, a worker for socialism. The debates were very intense, but we all know that they ended with something like a revolution from the top down, even using murder and punishment as methods, and quickly turning all Soviet agriculture into cooperatives, and nationalizing, also quickly, all industries. This is another topic where Bolshevism at first, and Stalin’s power later, went against the ideas previously held.

A third topic is democracy in society, in the Party, Soviet democracy. In a recent essay about Rosa Luxemburg, I wrote that the idea of destroying the bourgeois state had nothing in common with creating limitations to all types of democratic expression in Soviet society, that was the opinion of Rosa Luxemburg, and also Lenin’s.

This way of thinking was substituted by the State of the Soviets, the bureaucratization of the Party, and, as a result, the moment when Stalin established his personal power, arbitrarily, through murder and assassinations, as it is known.

A fourth topic is that of nationalities, which will be very important when we approach the subject of "dis-messing it," using that fortunate term. Not much has been said about it, but Lenin definitely opposed the Constitution of the USSR. He used the following phrase, "I advise to go back," writing it the day after the USSR was established. Going back would mean to annul that constitutive action and to go back to the previous situation, when the republics had been declared autonomous.

Pragmatically, and in spite of successive constitutions, in the model established, the Russian Center had power over the rest of the nations.

There is a fifth topic, which is perhaps less known, it does not come from the Bolshevik tradition or other parties of the first two decades, but it is important, because it was Lenin’s belief, and, in my opinion, without due recognition. Due to its relevance, and, above all, due to its influence in the formation of a world revolutionary process, it should have been much more analyzed. He dictates this in his article "Rather small but well" on March 2, 1923. On March 6 Lenin left work forever, ending up sick and remaining so for the rest of his life, without being able to carry out almost any activity. He believed that advanced capitalist countries in Western Europe - please note that he did not mention the United States, which would give way to many hypothesis, but it would take us too long to analyze- will not achieve socialism through a gradual process of maturation in their conditions, but through the exploitation of the nation defeated by war, Germany, and of the entire East. Lenin used the word East following the European academic tradition, meaning the entire non-European Third World. Even today, when a Russian says East he means Egypt, China, India. Such idea makes us understand world geopolitics, in the sense that the Third World will have a large revolutionary initiative when contemporaneous conditions are appropriate. And this is a subject which has not been heeded as it should, as it has been shown after the crisis generated by the Chinese revolution, a few years after this prediction.

Julio A. Díaz Vásquez: I think that in the XXI Century - although many of us will not be here anymore - the reasons for the fall of socialism in Europe will continue to be discussed, and perhaps the archives will be open, which, in my opinion, is a necessary step to delve into the reasons for the failure of this first assault on heaven.

I will talk about the "Classic Socialist Model," (Soviet), which had three big pillars.

The first one was nationalization, or the establishment of Social property. Social property was identified - and this is another ongoing debate - with State Property.

The second one, was the political element of the State, the democracy represented by the so-called "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," that is, a dictatorship by the majority, which later, with the evolution of the USSR, was identified as the State of all the people.

And last, socially, the elimination of exploitation of man by man, guaranteeing housing, health care, education, care of the elderly, etc.

These three pillars would gel in the subordination of the State and the Government to the Party on the basis of ideology. In other words, the system sustained itself on ideology, from which it would go to politics, and from there to the economy. This was the model which started, mainly, at the beginning of the 30s.

Now, state social property was used to sustain an economic model based on central planning, excluding the market, establishing itself on a vertical direction - from the ministry to the corporation. For example, money, in this model, had a passive role, it had some activity as to distribution, related to workers’ salaries, by which they could satisfy their basic needs. From there, the problem of maintaining the balance between the state budget and circulating currency. The main problem with this "economic model" was the lack of self-regulating tools, that is, it did not generate ways which could perfect the model itself.

The question would be: Why did it succeed? I think it did because of the events leading to this model, which were the crisis of capitalism and the beginning of accelerated industrialization, which in a way it was like going back to "war communism."

Every author analyzing the model’s limitations always timed it between 1918-1920, since in order to develop in a few years - I think Stalin said "in ten years we can do what capitalism needed hundreds to achieve" - it was necessary to centralize them and put them as a function of industrialization. When this country launched industrialization, it had three conditions to extensively resolve that problem, an abundant workforce, natural resources, and, also - which has not been stressed enough - in the 20s and 30s, technological differences between the most developed capitalist centers and the industry which was taking hold in the USSR were not so big. Let’s remember that famous tractor factory sold by Ford to the USSR in 1929, built in Stalingrad, without much difference from the tractors manufactured at that time in the U.S., But this model finished before the end of the 30s.

It is hardly mentioned that already in 1938 a reform in prices was necessary, to correct distortions in the economy, because the sector in charge of the means of production and natural resources was inefficient, causing waste, because the basis of the economic model was to offer natural resources and cheap machines as an incentive to consumption, which ended in low profits for the primary branches of the economy.

I am referring to the importance of taking into account the precedent of "war communism," because this at first started as a political opportunity, something which later was like an experiment which, let’s say, could reduce the road to socialism.

But it did not happen, and it had long term repercussions in the genesis of the model. The genesis of what happened several decades later, start there. This was the disease that destroyed it. At the end of the civil war - in my opinion - at one time Bolshevik centers, large groups of workers in some cities, such as Moscow and Leningrad, were destroyed.

Some of them went to the Red Army, others tried to survive in the rural areas, and those who stayed in the cities had lost all the characteristics shown at the beginning of the revolution.

Then the Party, essentially, replaced all representatives of society, especially the Soviets, and became the guarantor of the revolution. This is the germ of bureaucratization. Additionally, we have the bureaucratic heritage of the Czarist State itself , the slow development of productive forces, the low educational level of the population, fundamentally the farmworkers. And there was a further element which has been sidestepped, although pointed out by Trotsky: the role played by the demobilization of the Red Army. In 1924 there were nine million soldiers in the Red Army, so that when this was taken apart, the leadership of these armies went to the Party, that is, to the partisan organization, or to the Soviets.

These winners, who became members of other social sectors, had the methods which had made them winners in the civil war. And when that monolithic unity achieved by the Bolsheviks in the work centers was lost, the Red Army, then, had the real power. All of this had a definite influence in the bureaucratization unleashed later. This "economic model" was energized when preparing for war in the 30s. First, the threat of Fascism, and reconstruction later, renewed this extensive model. In this way, in the mid 50s, when the losses had been recovered and, the economic and, in a way, social wounds, had been healed, it was found that the model was exhausted.

The lack of a self-regulating mechanism - which, as I stated above, was the main reason for its deficiencies - brought about the need to develop another, more dynamic model.

Eugenio Varga, a young economist in those times, born in Hungary, but now a Soviet, wrote an article at the end of the 20s, stating that "contingentation" was exhausted. Lenin came up then and warmly approved Bujarin’s book about the economy in a transition period, however, three months later, Lenin supported the NEP.

Many years later, before he died, in 1964, after he was Director of the largest institute of social sciences that the USSR ever had, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Varga wrote that Soviet Society, the people, the common man, those who suffer and cry every day, did not have any possibility to surmount the situation in the country. In my opinion, he was summarizing his experience on the entire development of socialism in the USSR, rather than referring to the attempted change brought about by Nikita Krushev as Secretary of the Party in all those years, the so-called thawing, which in the end did not solve the fundamental problems of that model

By then, all the conditions for the crisis were already there, it was only a question of time until they would enter the fray and become part of history.

Ariel Dacal: A political perspective is vital, in order to analyze the Soviet model and its expansion into Eastern Europe, because the fundamental errors are mainly there.

First, it is necessary to differentiate between Leninism and Stalinism. The Bolshevik revolution took on tremendous challenges. One of the main debates at the time was whether Lenin had forced history, whether he had tried to accelerate the revolutionary process, whether the revolutionary process was utopian or not. The main objective was to find an effective way to achieve those three pillars described by Professor Julio Díaz.

That historical challenge, which consisted of building a new reality in a backward country, was tried through trial and error.

There is a constant thread in Lenin’s projections, as they relate to his expectations about the European revolution. The Russian Revolution was, for Lenin, only a prologue to the European revolution, and he died hoping that Europe would raise the socialist flag.

It is important to notice, not a failure in revolutionary forms and projections, rather, the meaning of Stalinism, which marked the socialist model we are analyzing, far from what Lenin intended.

The first characteristic was the excessive upward movement of political decisions.

Bureaucracy - which was mentioned here - was taking over all political decision-making in Soviet society, a style which was later taken to other experiences. Not only concepts are structured in this way, but institutions as well.

This new dominant sector starts to formulate the project based on its own interests, joining the Party with the State. The Party, instead of being an ideological entity which guides debate, made the State into its administrative tool. Instead of ideas, propositions, concepts, political directives came down. A type of militarized party was the result, which was very different - and I want to insist on these elements - from the loyalty and discipline expected by Lenin. He created a disciplined party, firstly, due to the historical opportunities in which he had to develop them, to direct, to teach, to educate the working class, not to tame it and subjugate it.

It is a party with a similar basis, but it operates essentially in a very different way. In his last years, which were very painful, Lenin saw, on the one hand, the challenges for a revolution which lacked the support of European revolutions, after the waves in 1919 and 1923, which gradually subsided, and on the other hand, a group of elements emerging in the crude Russian reality, in politics, in society, in the economy, and which needed new answers.

He classified bureaucracy as a residual element in the revolutionary process, a heritage, which could have a definite influence if not caught in time. The figure represented in this sector - and we are not going to exaggerate the role played by figures in history - was Joseph Stalin, as well as the ideal man to capitalize on leadership and control at the time.

Firstly, he was a Bolshevik from the beginning of the revolution, a man used to obey and give orders, symbolizing something which still holds true for the Russian culture today, the idea of the strong man, able to personify and practice the epic spirit of a people.

Stalin, sometimes skillfully and at other times morbidly and even criminally, (Stalin physically eliminated his opposition), surrounded himself with loyal individuals, but loyal to him, to the leader, rather than to the idea, to the debate. And something which is vital to any revolutionary process was cut off, the revolutionary debate itself. As Trotsky pointed out, already in the 30s - and I agree with him on this, in spite of all the personal contradictions he had - a counter-revolutionary process gelled, related to the essence of the Bolshevik project, even acknowledging that this project was not free from contradictions and challenges.

This Stalinist institutionalizing led to an iron control, by a political system formed by politics of the masses strongly manipulated by an official unidirectional ideology, coming from the Politburo, and supported by a very efficient use of the media. It must be remembered that the last big debate in Pravda was in 1923, about prices in agriculture and industry. There have not been serious debates ever since, until the 80s, with glasnost, already near the collapse. This model had a unilateral, inflexible, strong vision, about what building socialism should be like. There was a deadly fusion between the social image, the social psychology of this new subject which was getting involved in the revolution - and history proved that later - between power and truth, because the truth could only come up through the decisions by power.

This mentality, this partial way to see life and the revolutionary process itself, harmfully infiltrated all aspects of society. There was not a single aspect in society which was not subordinated, dominated, and subjugated by this concept.

We are referring to the failure of this particular model, which from the beginning was denying any possibility for change. It is true that there were material and cultural elements which evolved, but its development, in all these years, was not solid enough, but rather counterproductive for the whole system. One of the big achievements of the Soviet period was to make culture accessible to the large illiterate masses, but, because of its authoritarianism, lack of participation and lack of democracy, in the broadest sense of the term, even if there was cultural development which increased the ability to think and see the world from different perspectives, there were no mechanisms for that culture to flow through different structures of the system.

So that this cultural development, which was echoed in the 80s, did not become a legitimation process, but one of disengagement and disdain for the basic values they felt identified with at one time.

Rafael Hernández: Since we cannot go deeper in all these problems for lack of time, I am going to ask Francisco Brown what are his thoughts about the second subject: how was the crisis foreshadowed? - some talks have already referred to this aspect - also: which were the triggering factors of the collapse, that is, the model’s failure?

Francisco Brown: I am going to synthesize what I said in my book Europa del Este: el colapso (Eastern Europe: the Collapse), published by the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales a few years ago. But before talking about those problems, I want to point out that there is an important difference between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the USSR, the collapse, or defeat, of socialism was not programmed beforehand, nor seen beforehand from its beginnings. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the germ of the collapse was already present when beginning to build socialism, simply because they had the Stalinist model we have been criticizing here . In Eastern European countries, we do not have a revolutionary process which emerged from societies’ own demands, but socialism was imposed from the outside, in a context of capitalist-communist confrontation, which started in the Cold War, in the years immediately after WWII.

In this model, socialism is such that man is considered to be a small nut in the gigantic social machine. Different from Lenin, who conceived socialism as the vital creation of thousands and millions peoples, this model is understood as a process imposed from the top down. Eastern European countries had a double imposition: external, the Soviet Union, which comes out victorious from WWII, and internal, politicians were elected who were not the most able to lead the process. As it is well known, communists came out weakened by the fascist occupation of their countries.

In cases such as Poland, for example, the Catholic church played a very significant role to preserve national identity before the foreign occupation, as well as social-democratic and other forces, however, most of these were relegated, some of them had to go into exile, others, had to enter the communist party, which became the main leading vector in society. It was the imposition of a model, with all the problems and distortions which have been mentioned above.

The double standard is an expression of this phenomenon, as well as the alienation of electoral political processes, which became a formality. You voted to avoid problems, and there was just one candidate to vote for. .

Julio A. Díaz Vázquez: You voted without entering the booth.

Francisco Brown: Exactly. Economic alienation is another symptom, a straight producer that has adopted consumer norms, since the legitimacy of the system is questioned from the beginning, it must be legitimized through consumption. It is not a coincidence that at the time of the collapse, these societies had tremendous debts wit the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other symptoms are: elements of inertia and passivity in the citizens, electoral processes by formalism, large deviations and distortions in democracy, psychiatric hospitals for those who disagreed with the official line, because someone disagreed if he/she was crazy. All these symptoms revealed that the process was deadly ill.

Rafael Hernández: About this symptomatic process announcing the end, who wants to add something to Brown’s short list ?

Julio A. Díaz Vázquez: I just want to add that this model, made in the USSR and Eastern Europe, could not be reformed - it is something I could explain in broad terms- : it had to be totally accepted or rejected. Everything Brown mentioned was present in the USSR. If I were told that now we are dissecting it, like an autopsy of a cadaver, I would say that the possibility of saving it - from my understanding of all the implications - should have been done later by NEP, but NEP went to heck, and right there ended all the possibilities for that model, which had already been born and was ill. Its death, according to better informed and shrewder analysts, was only a question of time.

What has been said over here about Eastern Europe is true, but I also want to stress there were conditions over there for a non-capitalist development. If we analyze the situation after WWII, all that area had the possibility of a development without a capitalist cycle. But the "Soviet model" was imposed upon them. That’s why the USSR and Eastern Europe should not be put in the same bag, without analyzing those differences. Although this subject is much more complex, I would rather not talk about it now, because it could be a topic for another occasion. Essentially, the time for reform in all these countries was over, at least, that’s what life proved.

Fernando Rojas: The cultural deficits pointed out by Ariel and related to the production of a cultural life, must also be considered a symptom, because they were growing. They became more serious every decade, at the level of sclerosis in art, in critique, in everything involved in the creation of spiritual life. It is enough to remember what happened in the Academy, the research methods introduced, how social sciences were treated, which was becoming more sclerotic with time.

Rafael Hernández: Then, you agree with Julio, that the crisis could not have been avoided during the 80s?

Fernando Rojas: I want to advance one of my own doubts before talking about this. I am not sure if without forced industrialization, without agricultural cooperatives and without national unity -and we know how this was achieved - the USSR could have defeated the Nazi army. This problem is a contradiction with the previous analysis. Of course, it cannot be verified, history cannot be repeated in a lab.

Now, you analyze the victory over fascism, social economic conditions, and, of course, the military, who allowed it, and the influence of those processes are at the basis of it all. What means, what methods, what springs were used to get to those conditions? There is an ethical dimension here to the problem which is very important for us to note.

Rafael Hernández: Please, clarify, Fernando. You mean that the defense of the Soviet Union facing the Nazi invasion would have needed anyway an authoritarian regime, like Stalin’s?

Fernando Rojas: I don’t know for sure, but I wonder that. Neither industrialization, cooperativization, national unity nor Soviet ideas, as it could be stated, are exactly related to Stalin’s authoritarianism. I think they are two different things, although, of course, they are undoubtedly interrelated. It is a very problematic topic for me. About your other question, I think things could have been different in the second half of the 20s - trying to put it in chronological perspective - other decisions could have been made when these issues were discussed, all of us have mentioned them somehow, when a direction was taken which finally led to Stalinism. Later, the victory in the war created a propitious climate for a change. Julio is suggesting that it was necessary to make another revolution. Correct. But, as a whole, haven’t the events in the 20s been called a "revolution from the top down?" And what Gorbachov started doing, couldn’t also be called a "Revolution from the top down?" This revolution could have been made at the end of the 50s, when there was talk about a personality cult. And, of course, during the 80s, although we know the results, awareness was mobilized. That is a factor solid enough to presume that a process of transformation could have been started.

Francisco Brown: I would suggest talking more carefully about this topic, irreversibility of historical processes - referring to Julio and Rojas’ assertions-. I would not do it so freely and decisively, I would not risk stating that it is irreversible, period. History summarizes itself in man’s conscious activities, which give him access to the process, advancing it, delaying it, or deviating it from its course. The statement that the collapse was irreversible would be valid only during a stage of the socialist revolution. We would have to determine which was the exact moment when there was no other solution. We should not forget that many dogmas were formed in this context.

Rafael Hernández: Dogmas?

Francisco Brown: Dogmas. Classic Marxist-Leninist thinkers never talked about a one party system. Lenin spent all his energies trying to achieve a coalition government, with the involvement of forces which did not want, such as the bourgeois parties did not want in Cuba, at one time, to collaborate with the Revolution, thinking that a Revolution in Cuba, 90 miles from the United States, would not last over three months. The dogma replacing polemic with servile obedience was instituted; the dogma that socialism is a society without any contradiction, the dogma of harmonic and proportional development of the national economy. And, in the meantime, reality was working otherwise, an alarming slow-down of economic and scientific and technological development was taking place, socialism was running behind capitalism, it was losing in its economic emulation.

Then, there was also the lack of access to leadership by new generations. And Marxist liturgy has to be added to all this, which became a collection of quotes, that is, Marxism’s creative character was eliminated. I was marveled at that first question . You wondered, Rafael, what kind of socialist model? That would have been a very dangerous question in the 80s, because the concept of model was then considered to be revisionist. Socialism had things everybody had to comply with, and Marxist thought did not accept that every country has to build Marxism around its own conditions, its historical and national characteristics. All these phenomena contributed to the socialist collapse.

Ariel Dacal: Some historians say that Trotsky failed because he left an open field for Stalin, that he could not concretize some things, and that he struggled with those contradictions. I was surprised at the power of peoples subordination to what the Party represented. During the famous "purges," they would rather rot as human beings than be disloyal to the Party. It was a much more complex psychological process than double standards, which I think are more epidemic. These contradictions involved more than the soul. At certain moment, Trotsky lived that contradiction, but it was too late, perhaps, when he solved it. I think we must go back to the beginnings of the revolution.

Lenin’s big question was to formulate, with his political genius and his responsibility, the historical challenge, who will defeat whom? He knew that they were living together and struggling, a system which was dying and one which was being born, that capitalism had not lived enough and could not die, The possibility of trying to make socialism live in these conditions was lost. I want to insist that a set way of understanding politics, of doing them, of trying them, which prevailed for decades in the USSR, was coming to an end.

As to the ability to restore the model, I am in the middle. In the Soviet case, which I know best, I agree with Brown’s idea, that it was imposed on the others. Once war was over, in Eastern Europe, those models called popular democracies had positive results at the end of the 40s, when some mobilization was achieved - a valid and interesting term - in that building process. But later, the Stalinist model, riding the tanks, became stronger. It would be very categorical to state that the collapse was irreversible and it was not reformable, although it is also very utopian and passionate to say yes.

Yes, I think that it was possible to achieve a reform, although there were several stages, several opportunities to achieve this. I insist, at the same time, that, given the characteristics of the system, any change could only have been made from the top down. And if we can understand that those who could have access to the channels of political decision-making were the result of double standards, of pretenses, or at least of that way of understanding politics, a change was very difficult.

Those leaders did not comply with Lenin’s almost urgent demands: the necessity of having learned, honest, and, above all, thinking people, who were the only communists able to face that historical problem.

Gorbachov summarized a whole generation, although he was not personally responsible for what happened in the USSR, he was the outcome of a system, because he had been traveling that road for a long time, where he had to be docile, repetitious, not creative at all, in Lenin’s sense.

Brown talked about the lack of generational relief. That fact allowed the "water to go down the drain in the tub," understanding that water was socialism and the tub was history’s experience.

The generation from the 30s to the 80s broke with Stalinism. At that moment there was a vacuum, and a new generation came, which had not practiced anything beyond obedience, obeying orders coming from that "gerontocracy," which at the same time included a "meritocracy" coming from WWII.

At Andropov’s funeral, only 7% of the members of the Political Buro were under 60, and over half of them were over 70. In the Council of Ministers, only 17% were under seventy. When they started dying, there was a domino effect, and everybody was dying.

These spaces of power were taken by people like Gorbachov, the visible face in all that generation. These are the same people who are currently ruling capitalist Russia, if that can be called capitalism. To have an idea of the political transvestism suffered by the dominant caste, in 2002, 71% of the political Russian elite had belonged to the old regime, as well as 60% of the business elite. It was a parasitic caste established during many decades, able to subvert the system, to return to private property, to capitalize their power, which waited for the opportunity in history to disassemble everything, and today they are nothing else that the face of a distorted, residual, bourgeoisie, that had been hidden for a long time.

Francisco Brown: About the last issue mentioned by Ariel, this phenomenon of a new political and economic Russian elite is being equally reproduced in the other socialist countries. During the time of the so called real socialism, the dominant elite was recycled, that’s why they were involved, contributed, and became benefitted by the collapse.

Rafael Hernández: Now we will let the audience speak.

Carlos Alzugaray: I want to emphasize only a vital problem to understand what happened, and it is the gross use of deceit and manipulation with political ends, of practically all scientific sectors, and in the first place, of course, the social sciences. We all remember textbooks by Kuusinen, Konstantinov, and others, or the five history texts published by the CPSU, all different.

The use of deceit, lies, justification through social sciences, the political changes, inevitably lead to disappointment and de-legitimization, beyond economic factors. I agree with Julio, although I would rather think that reforms were possible to make four or five times.

About Fernando’s statements, I rather think that Stalinism appealed to Russian nationalism, the defense of the homeland - WWII was called the Great Patriot War. But surely, other leaders could have done what Stalin did, and would have mobilized the people to defend against fascism.

Lastly, I agree with the lack of legitimacy of Eastern European regimes pointed out here, but I would like to add something. Although Poland’s case was more complex than other countries, like Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, communists had a role in the anti-fascist struggle, and they became stronger. They could have been part of coalition governments, although they should not have been the only ones in the government. That was the big mistake in the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. Regimes guaranteeing the safety of the Soviet State could have been established, including communists, perhaps as a political alliance in the government. On the other hand, in many of these countries communists who had fought were later killed. Rudolf Slansky, Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, leader of the Slovak National rebellion, was sentenced to death during the Stalinist purges of the 40s. This finished any legitimacy which communist parties could have had at that time, because all of them, including in Poland, were prestigious for having fought fascism.

Armando Chaguaceda: Ariel, I think it is necessary to explain better the relation between Leninism and Stalinism. There is a total divorce between them, and Stalinism is presented in a deformed, poor, authoritarian version. However, some authors have pointed out to the possibility of finding some political precedents during Lenin’s times. In my opinion, socialism committed two main mistakes in the XX Century.

First, it did not achieve the development of a radically new and superior social organization for production and property. I agree with Professor Julio about the mercantile hybrids achieved.

The second mistake was related to society’s democratic mechanisms of self-regulation. This last one should be debated. For example, the original idea of dictatorship by the proletariat and democratic centralism. It is analogous to Cuba’s 1940 Constitution, which was good, but lacking complementary laws to put it into practice. Same thing happened with the Leninist conception.

It is not possible to radically separate both approaches. It is true that Stalinism was rude and authoritarian and closed debate in Pravda, but it is also true, for example, that the rebellion in Kronstad showed that there was a need for a change in direction. In that sense, democratic debates, as those mentioned by Rosa Luxemburg, would have sent a signal to the political elites that there was a need for something else. At the same time, discussions between the role of mediation and democratic regulations as to representation, seem to ignore, or to reduce, the concepts of dictatorship by the proletariat and democratic centralism, or at least, they do not talk about it.

If you are talking about the development of the bourgeoisie as a caste, it is precisely the idea of democratic centralism becoming stagnant in many cases, without building real tools for grassroots to control processes, that allows the lack of regulating mechanisms and grassroots control.

Desiderio Navarro: I am very happy with this debate, especially for one reason, many have mentioned how knowledge about the socialist bloc was passed, a knowledge which was not only pre-made, but many of the people who went to the Soviet Union accepted that knowledge, that is, enjoyed the advantages of staying in the showcase, looking only what they could see from there, and communicating it to others. And there was really poverty in the USSR, which unfortunately was not seen by those who stayed inside the showcase. I had the opportunity to come out of the showcase and see it, because there was poverty in the Third World -- at the level of Africa -- when you would go to Tadzhikistán, around Uzbekistán, or other places.

In the same way that illusion was reproduced, the explanations you can sometimes hear by the people are, for example, that socialism collapsed because Gorbachov was a CIA agent, because of treason - a vision that is not Marxist at all. I recall that during that time I tried through different means to break that ideal image of the socialist bloc.

I want to point out some issues. One of them is that there was leftist criticism.

The machine mentioned above could not overcome everything, because leftist criticism came up, although it was always silenced or annihilated, even physically, in all countries. But it is important to consider that the processes did have elements for internal rectification. Leftist people in different positions were expelled from the Communist Party, their work was eliminated, in some cases they had to leave the country.

Such is the case of Gyorgy Lukáacs, and his involvement in the process in Hungary; Rudolph Bahro, in Germany - just to mention a few names. And it must be acknowledged that, in many cases, that criticism was made from the inside in socialism. We must also remember the problems which were criticized even during Lenin times. Maiakovski committed suicide, precisely, after he finished all the critique he made between 1924 and 1933. He had already criticized all the phenomena we have mentioned over here, during that period - corruption, lifestyle, abuse of power, even many who were not written down - all of them appear in Maiakovski’s poetry, which was also leftist.

As to the problem of the position of bureaucracy in the system, it is necessary to explain it in terms of class, especially because of the point reached. When you pick a textbook from that era, you see a trick as to the portrayal of the class concept. I classic Marxism, class was determined two ways, by the ownership of the means of production, and by the distribution of the social product. It is described as such even by Lenin. In textbooks, starting at the end of the 20s, the second element disappears, which points out that the unequal distribution of the social product could form a class. And the hierarchy Party-State-Army influenced a lot all these processes.

About the opposition between model imposed and not imposed, there is a case breaking up this scheme, Yugoslavia, which is very interesting.

Now, talking about the reason for the collapse of socialism, and joining some of the final comments, it should also be questioned where did it collapse from. When we watch the collapse, we can see all the hierarchies of communist parties in the current capitalism, as it has been mentioned over here.

Jerzy Urban is a paradigm, Jaruzelski’s spokesman, the furious ideologue until the last minute. He is a multimillionaire today, one of the one hundred wealthiest men in Poland. Then, how communist were really those communists? I disagree with comrade Ariel, that there was a bourgeoisie hidden for a long time, always there. It just happens that these processes of "original accumulation" of capital, if you want to call it that, start within socialism itself. Economic capital, cultural capital, a process of concentration even by endogamy, families which start forming one class, because of their education and capital (economic, cultural, social), because of their relations with the Western world. After having that concentration and accumulation, the socialist machine became a hindrance for the members of that class, and they realized that they would come out gaining in a transition to capitalism. And they were right. Now it is well known that a change like that one was possible without an apocalypsis - that image of socialism collapsing where dignitaries were going to be persecuted and dragged through the streets , but, the reverse was true, they could be the winners in the whole thing.

Hiram Hernández: My first question, playing with the idea why real socialism, State socialism, collapsed, would be, how come it lasted that long? The second question is fundamentally related to the analysis of power.

Ariel Dacal. We are talking about authoritarianism, personality cult - sometimes charismatic - sometimes, not, about democracy understood as mass movements, manipulated masses, humans treated as objects, a political system which tries to put people into a unidirectional framework, a militarized party, a police - as George Orwell says - of thought, totalitarianism. My concrete question is, what essential differences can be found between Stalinism and socialist models such as the State socialism and fascism?

Roberto González: Leon Trotsky predicted in the 30s that bureaucracy would end up by owning the means of production, and the numbers given confirm that prediction. I agree with Chaguaceda and Desiderio Navarro that large part of the roots of the Soviet collapse are in Stalin’s crimes and distortions. Without ignoring the differences between Lenin and Stalin, which of course are immense, I wonder whether if there were other problems and distortions. Let me illustrate that with two concrete examples. The first one is the concepts used by the party, questioned by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky at the beginnings of the century, who referred to "constitutionalism," a concept by which the Secretary General could substitute the entire party. The second example is the end of the civil war, a certainly tragic time for Soviet Russia, when Lenin suspended democracy within the Party, banning all factions. It should be remembered, by the way, that he did this with the support of all Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky, who later complained about that decision. In his final writings, in 1924, Lenin begins to become aware of all these problems, but those policies remained. Stalin’s actions were based on that, with the cooperation of all the Party’s leaders, who later, when Lenin died, helped Stalin to hide what has been later metaphorically called "Lenin’s testament," where he criticized everybody, and where he proposed eliminating Stalin from the post of Secretary General. Stalin convinced the rest of the leaders, so that the other Bolsheviks are also responsible, including Trotsky himself, with all his merits.

My question goes to Fernando Rojas’s statements, about industrialization, collectivization, and the defeat of Nazism. I agree with Alzugaray that national mobilization is key for these achievements. Czarist Russia defeated Napoleon who had, in his historic moment, the most advanced army in Europe, the so called Great Army, equivalent to what in the XX Century would be the Nazi army. Without this mobilization, collectivization and industrialization would not have taken place. Naturally - and this coincides with Navarro - there was a leftist alternative, because the Bolshevik opposition had a solution which was partly stolen by Stalin, applying it but criminally.

Industrialization and collectivization could have happened in another way. But my question goes further, Soviet bureaucratization, the distortions by the revolution, Stalinism, the collapse, are not they related to the initial Russian backwardness? Could it be that the "attempt to get to heaven" in Russia, with those conditions, when the Bolsheviks did it, was destined to drag those unresolved problems?

Oscar Zanetti: One of the most controversial moments this afternoon occurred when Julio Díaz Vásquez discarded the possibility of social reforms in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Socialism then was a system, and it is presumed that one of the fundamental and functional principles of all systems is to preserve and reproduce itself, doing it the only possible way in this world, that is, changing. A process which could go from the cynical formula of Prince Salina, in the novel "El Gatopardo," -- "it is necessary to change something so that everything continues being the same," -- until the revolution.

Now, it should be clarified what changes. Firstly, it must be acknowledged that there were changes, for example, Hungary in the 80s was different than in 1958. The question would be, in what direction, with what forces, to what ends those changes were made? It would have to be weighed whether the structural conditions of that possibility for change agreed with the nature and the scope of necessary change, in order to surmount the level of analysis in the debate.

Carlota Ams: My question is related to the fact that the socialist bloc all along was facing a strange system, the capitalist world. I wonder to what extent facing that, and the necessity to confront a very different economy and society, and to compete with that system, contributed to the collapse of the socialist bloc, dialectically speaking.

Aurelio Alonso: I want to start underlining my disagreement with the title of this debate. European socialism did not "collapse." I think the correct term is "fail." The other interpretation indicates a reticence to acknowledge that in the system being established from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, deep structural distortions were generated and established, which were incompatible with the viability of a project to overcome capitalism. And, as a consequence, what happened was reduced to a mainly opportunistic event. I think undoubtably there were opportunities, big movements in history always happen because of opportunities, but their motives deep down never stay at the opportunistic level. As long as we refuse to analyze the failure without prejudices, we will also be obstructing the search for ways towards a viable socialism.

We cannot consolidate socialism insisting on the fact that socialism in the XX Century was built on economic and supraeconomic suitable frameworks which have to be saved or recovered from reversion.

I neither consider admissible the total rejection of its achievements.

There were considerable achievements, which should not be lost in any attempt at reconstruction. But undoubtedly, socialism of the XXI Century must be reinvented. With a lot of imagination. At the economic level, but also -- and perhaps especially -- the political and cultural levels, since it is obvious that failure resided in the true inability to generate a true democracy, not according to already used models, but starting with the configuration of a system guaranteeing peoples’ involvement in decision making, as leaders, and not only as subjects. A true system of popular power, which the October revolutionaries thought they had already found in the Soviet original version, spontaneously born, besides, from the revolutionary experience, not from the leaders’ minds, and as power got institutionalized, they became a vacuum, a caricature.

Therefore, I dare to say that we are living in a decisive era, where critical analysis is strategic, about experiences which failed as well as those which resisted, internationally, and nationally.

Félix Sánchez: I lived in the USSR at the time of change, from socialism to capitalism. I experienced it in their new Superior School of the Communist Party. In the old section of Moscow, a few blocks from Maiacovski Square and the Novoslobóskaya subway station. It was a privilege. We arrived in 1986, when Perestroika was a promise, and I left in 1990, when there were only a few walls standing in the building which we say today it collapsed. We were a big socialist family when I arrived, no one was speaking about models, we were aware we were united by what was essential.

We must acknowledge that that type of socialism died from the inside, the casualties were the masses, those for whom a theory is valid if they accomplish their dreams, their wishes. The big problem which prevented us from learning from that lesson is precisely here, in the way we are talking today about those countries

A presumable strengthened, superior, relations of production coming apart, people giving away, with less uproar than if a pastry was taken away from them, the means of production that they "had", deserve a more serious analysis.

How would we react if capitalist ideologues were telling us that what’s happening in capitalist disastrous countries, those of the Third World, is because they were applying a wrong model? I am sure that we would use concepts such as economic-social, by which we learned to classify countries not according to their external characteristics, but according to their essence. The fact that those countries collapsed appeared to show that they were the only ones with problems, and the others -- Cuba, China, Vietnam -- did not have any. This is a happy, but inappropriate, conclusion.

To think again about that common structure one must doubt. "Doubt everything," said Marx answering a question by his daughter Jenny about her favorite theme. Too bad that we have always valued more Marx’s and Engels’ written works about history, many times under the uproar of a reply, than their definitions. We saw the cracks of that socialism which has collapsed today. This dialectic, explaining the development process, could have explained that war with capitalism could not be won on delaying strategy, waiting for opportunities.

After so much alienation foisted off to capitalist society, we must acknowledge today that in those socialist societies, man got alienated with power, with the means of production, with ideology. He was so far from those things, that he could see from the gates, without even a shot or a barricade, how their societies were turning around one hundred and eighty degrees.

They were not insensitive to that turn. For them, those from "real reality," the turn was not so big, just a few degrees, and the possibilities from improvement deserved the risk. There was no initiative from the masses to counteract the collapse, because masses’ initiatives had been diluted into an obedience which was understood as conscious unanimity.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of destructive policies was not questioned, because they had learned a long time ago that decisions coming from organizations on the top must be obeyed by organizations in the bottom (including its constituency).

It was customary that ideas originated in the political buro and came down from there. There was no mechanism for correction from below. There never was.

And when Perestroika started tearing apart what was left, they found that same blind obedience to a principle which, theoretically, should have strengthened the Party, instead of making it weaker. Although the cult to Stalin’s personality had demonstrated before, that, as it comes to Party matters, the militant masses were weaker than the one Secretary General, History placed the same rock in front of Lenin’s sons.

When we visited the Autonomous Republic of Karelia in the middle of 1990, while Yeltsin continued with his electoral maneuvers, and the Secretary of one of those areas requested from us, from "the brothers comrades of the Cuban Communist Party" to tell him everything we thought about his disastrous Perestroika, he did not raise his voice to criticize our crudity, the predictions we dared to make even then, but to rebut an expression. "I agree with you on everything, but on one thing. You talk about our Perestroika. It is not like that, it is Gorbachov’s Perestroika, no one discussed it with me or with the Regional Committee, no one asked me for my opinion. I cannot accept that responsibility."

A shrewd professor of the Escuela Superior of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who gave lectures on International Law, told us once, "We have to review many things, comrades. We keep on repeating them, hearing about them, without thinking a lot about them. Why democratic centralism instead of centralized democracy?"

He was neither a revisionist nor a renegade. He was a good man, who was hurting because of the course the country was taking, and on seeing that nothing would prop it up, would always ask us to learn from what was happening to them.

Fernando Rojas: On talking about the October Revolution, related to Russian history and its relevance, the fact that Bolsheviks assumed power because they were the best prepared to face the national crisis which had broken up and had to be solved, needs to be mentioned. The Russian population could not bear war and hunger any longer. Those in power at that time did not have any solutions to offer about the crisis. Remember the answer by Lenin and Tsereteli in a session of the Soviet, when the latter stated there was not a Party in Russia which could guarantee popular demands. From the last rows of the room the voice of the Bolshevik leader thundered, "There is such a party!"

Fidel summarized in a sentence the response to doubts about the need for revolution, "Lenin cannot be blamed for making a revolution in the old empire of the Czars." What happened later, when socialism was built, is something else. Democratic centralism was planned as a consequence of the polemic which divided Bolsheviks and Mencheviks, and it was the only issue - which was essential in forming the iron-strong revolutionary organizations which Lenin wanted to form - about which the two factions disagreed when discussing the statues of the Party in the 1903 Congress. It was about defending the role of the leaders of the Party and its constituency in a popular organization . Lenin mentioned that principle strictly about organizational and disciplinary issues, until his death. He would not talk about them either during discussions about strategy and tactics, or for propaganda.

The three crisis in the Party’s leadership, when Lenin’s position was in the minority, were resolved not through democratic centralism, but because the leader threatened to leave the Central Committee and resign. Stalinism made of democratic centralism a permanent principle of the Party and the State.

Lastly, we should not forget that Stalinism perverted the concept of socialism itself, as a society with universal and increasing comfort, freedom and fairness.

The regime proclaimed in 1936 as socialist, was very different from the new society preplanned during decades of struggle and analysis.

Francisco Brown: The events in socialist countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall must be conceptualized. Jaruzelski humself, the last president of socialist Poland, was saved from going to trial because, with the implementation of martial law in Poland, he prevented the entrance of Soviet troops in the country. Martial law or Soviet occupation, was the dilemma of the Polish leadership at that time.

His selection of martial law allowed him to continue collecting a President’s pension. . So, it is necessary to see the international framework and the framework of every country, where those events took place.

Ariel Dacal: The socialist alternative needed in the XXI Century cannot hide in this experience, but it cannot be built if this phenomenon is not analyzed, delved in, and studied. It has been historically the strongest, the most tangible [system] in the attempt to subvert capitalism, even with the mistakes we have pointed out.

About differences between fascism and Stalinism, I think, with all due respect to those who pointed that out, that it is a somewhat worn-out dream. In spite of all his mistakes, Stalin made a different and better country, badly industrialized, but industrialized, with people who could not be involved, but at least they had access to culture. Fascism left destruction and chaos. The best example of Soviet legacy -- leaving behind theoretical escapades which sometimes make us a little arrogant -- is the common people’s daily impression, "there was something there which got lost."

That collective sentiment, the idea that something had to be saved from that historical experience, is not there when it comes to fascism.

Another issue is Leninism vs. Stalinism, and the emergence of flaws coming up later, which originated when the new system was born. Sometimes we start speaking about the process and we do not think about historical rigor, the responsibility and the risk to try more than one model, a challenge of that magnitude, in the Russian complexity.

Lenin could have wondered, "What did I get myself in?" Nevertheless, the essential difference is that Lenin was entirely an intellectual, a Marxist above all, and Stalin was not. If we make a light review of praxis as it comes to the Party, we will see that Lenin was always very ambivalent, he never had a final position about the role of the opposition. What was done in the beginning of the Russian Revolution, became later a principle. This is the big difference: Stalinism made into principle the necessity dictated by a circumstance, not only for the Soviet Union, but for the whole world. When Lenin died, Stalin’s alocution was in his own favor, "We will follow the teachings of the teacher, of Great Lenin, I am Lenin’s continuer." He is trying to build a myth and identify with him. And this hurt the revolutionary movement a lot, not only during the 20s, but throughout the entire century.

I feel that there is still a lot of passion involved in the analysis of these processes, all over the world. And fifteen years are nothing from the historical point of view, not counting the ideological responsibility. We have been over-saturated with the idea of making the enemy responsible for this failure. But we have been gradually discovering things we had not seen for a long time, although it is still difficult to have a global and integrated view of the Soviet process.

Julio A. Díaz Vázquez: Most of the participants talked more about the consequences of the application and functioning of socialism than to the causes of that functioning. I am going to limit myself to the primary question: socialism emerged in a country without the conditions for building it, where Marxist thinkers considered that the country was not mature enough for change.

I think that socialism as it is known, has not resolved the basic problem, how to create the conditions to go from capitalism, or a developed mercantile society -- it does not necessarily have to be capitalist -- to a new social form?

That question has not found an answer yet. I share the Marxist principle, that whatever replaces capitalism has to be better than what capitalism has given us. In that context, the role of Stalin’s geopolitical theories before the war and those he had later, influenced a lot the development of socialism, particularly in Eastern Europe. That was not a consequence, but a cause, and could explain what happened then.

On the other hand, I totally agree with the idea about preparing a Party to go to power and a Party in power, as well as what has been pointed out today about the essence of exercising that power, which has been excluded from the socialist literature for many reasons, and I think that, above all, because in the model itself these issues were implicitly excluded.

I wonder, why is it that this society in socialism as we know it has shown so much intolerance? The explanation is twofold. First, the political model of a single Party, etc., abrogated the right to interpret society’s directives, that is, in the last analysis, it replaced the Soviets. No other institution has been as democratic when originally conceived as the Soviets.

And, it certainly was not a spontaneous creation by the masses, because the first Soviets were formed in Petrograd, responding to the Social Democrats, although later, they became broader. It was essentially very democratic, because it represented different workers’ platforms, and workers voted. The Bolsheviks won the race with that vote to better represent workers or society at that time.

It lost that core. The first questionable issue was the democracy instituted by that party, which assigned to itself the right to represent all of society, in the name of a class categorized as more progressive. Besides, the economic model was not more efficient. But I said before that it was a consequence of the political model, what was a consequence at first, became later the cause. What made it possible to last so long? The special conditions in Russia.

Having abundant workforce and natural resources made it possible to maintain a model of extensive development for a longer period of time than it would have been possible under other circumstances.

Paradoxically, the power which conquered the cosmos, and also exported natural resources, minerals and gas, was the complete opposite of what we would call a developed economy.

I want to mention an experience I had in 1981. Several specialists from the Institute CAME were riding home in a car from the airport, returning from a meeting in Warsaw, sponsored by the CAME Institute - where I was working in Moscow.

Someone in the group asked the Institute Secretary who was coming back with us, what did he buy in Poland, and he answered, "some shoes for my grandchildren, because I cannot find them [shoes] in Moscow." And he added in Russian, what we in Spanish could translate as, "It is impossible to live like that." This experience indicates that this model did not solve elemental problems at the social level, however, they were conquering the cosmos.

That’s why I agree with the ideas which conclude that the "model" could not be reformed.

How were economic reforms attempted? Allowing for monetary-trade relations, that is, giving more freedom to the market, but this is not possible with centralized planning, and with this political model. The last goodbye to reforms happened in Chzekoeslovakia, with the attempt to reverse or reform that model. Zchek reformers knew they had to get to the political arena, but the problem is that it was untouchable. And they were not allowed to do it. That’s why I stated that cases in Eastern Europe, outside the Soviet Union, should not be treated with the same leveler.

Yugoslavia’s example, for example, cannot be applied to the reality of the rest of the countries - although all of them ended sinking in the same marsh.

I agree with comrade Carlota that competition with capitalism cannot be excluded from the analysis. But I would give it a broader meaning. The model we are talking about, the "Classic Socialist Soviet" needed an enemy to survive, and if there isn’t one, it does not work. When the Soviet Union solved its problems with the others, with the border countries, who was to blame for the lack of harvest in 1934, 1935, 1936? Capitalism. Nobody could say anything about the disparities created by the collectivization process. The enemy, of course, had a role in that failure, because it is no secret that the United States did everything they could, as Reagan said, to break socialism. But the economic model was marching towards failure all by itself.

An example of its irrationality is that forty percent of accumulated rubles went to the machinery industry, which not only fed machinery manufacture, but left other important needs in second place.

I remember a lecture by Academic Agambedián in Moscow in 1985, when he explained the core of the plan they were going to develop with Perestroika. There was a plan before perestroika, called "Acceleration of the economy." I was surprised that the lecture of this famous scientist, whom I respected a lot, was completely technocratic. "We have science and technology and other things, but we must change the correlation between what goes for the machinery industry and what goes for consumption, because in this way, we only produce 2,5% of what we consume." However, as he explained it, the machinery in the Soviet Union was replaced only every forty years, while in the United States - he gave this data - it was changed between eight and twelve. How? Modifying proportions, that is a technocratic measure of production, technology, etc., where people were not taken at all into account. German specialists and Hungarians who were present there, questioned this approach.

I must say that literature and analysis about socialist reforms as it relates to the political, economic and social models, is incalculable, but the attempts to reform them ended always in failure, because they were partial. If the political structure was to be dismantled, the social order would go into crisis. The political system and economic structure prevented the reform of the economic model. And, in the last analysis, who got hurt? Consumers, the citizens.

Bringing successful socialist reforms to the present, for example China and Vietnam, and not referring to what’s specific in both experiences confirm that, essentially, processes which started as a reform, definitely point out to other "socialist models" which have nothing to do with the "fabric of real socialism."

To conclude, in order to replace capitalism it is necessary to create a model which is more democratic than capitalism, more efficient, really responding to the needs of the people. It is not necessary to make an eulogy to the capitalist showcase in order to do this, but to stress the need of rational consumption, without repeating what that specialist stated, "It is impossible to live like this."

Rafael Hernández: Although this panel has lasted two hours and twenty minutes, it is obvious that the problems mentioned are much more complex than what we can clarify in such a short time. We leave this discussion open, because perhaps it is more important to open our minds to all these problems, instead of arriving to our own conclusions, so that we can study them more and more deeply. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Participants:

Rafael Hernández. Political scientist and researcher. Director of Temas.

Francisco Brown. Máster in Contemporary History and Researcher. Center for European Studies.

Ariel Dacal. Máster in Contemporary History. Editor. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Julio A. Díaz Vázquez. Ph.D. in Economic Sciences. Professor and Researcher, Research Center of International Finances. (CIEI), University of Havana.

Fernando Rojas. Licenciate in History. President, National Council of Casas de Cultura. 2004






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