An Alternative to the Break-up of the Forces of the Left, A Movement for Social Democracy

Abstract

F.B. The offensive of the right has become an evident fact. It was manifested with indisputable force at the Fourth Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. Members of the right wing can be called either reactionaries or conservatives—but either way, our policy course is changing before our eyes. First of all in domestic policy, but over the long run there will surely also be a change outside. Reactionary forces are urging the president to establish a military regime of the General Jaruzelski type, which held back reforms in Poland for ten years but did not prevent Lech Walesa from coming to power. I submit that the main cause of what is transpiring is a mistake made at the Twenty-eighth CPSU Congress. Two wings had by that time already become defined within the Party: the right wing, which still believes in the ideology of communism, and the left wing, which takes social democratic positions and which speaks of returning to our origins, but as applied to the new circumstances of life.