Communism Can Only Be Radical Plebeian Democracy: Remarks on the Experience of S. F. R. Yugoslavia and on Civil Society

ABSTRACT

The essay is divided into approach and two parts plus a short summation. The approach poses the theme of nexus between communism and democracy as the only hope to oppose the present neo-fascist turn of capitalism. Part 1 discusses central political choices after the Yugoslav 1941–45 revolution, focusing on its popular revolutionary horizon as well as on disalienation of labour in workers’ self-management, and sketching the history of their achievements and then reflux after the 1960s. The three available politico-economic horizons were a Soviet-style police state, “market socialism,” and a fully associational plebeian democracy. Choosing the second solution meant, in the absence of central planning, a slide towards a market without democratic control and swayed by international centres of financial capital plus the six or seven regional centres of power in the “federal republics,” inevitably turning to nationalism. This led to economic and state disaster. Part 2 discusses plebeian democracy in a participatory mode, foregrounding the need for open politics in post-revolutionary societies and what might a real “civil society” be (Gramsci). The conclusion is not only that Marx’s horizon of communism can only be radical plebeian democracy, but also that only communism can be radical plebeian democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Communism
• plebeian democracy
• S. F. R. Yugoslavia
• disalienation
• Gramsci

Notes on contributor

Darko R. Suvin, scholar, critic and poet, born in Yugoslavia, studied at the universities of Zagreb, Bristol, the Sorbonne, and Yale, taught in Europe and North America, and is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. He was Co-editor of Science-Fiction Studies (1973–81), Editor of Literary Research/Recherche littéraire, ICLA review organ (1986–95), visiting professor at 10 universities in North America, Europe, and Japan, and Award Fellow of Humboldt Foundation in 1996. He wrote 21 books and many articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction, political epistemology, and three volumes of poetry. In the recent years, he has been writing mainly on S. F. R. Yugoslavia and communism. Major publications: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979); To Brecht and Beyond (1984); Lessons of Japan (1996); Defined by a Hollow (2010).

Notes

¹ It should be clear that modern technology, as it has been shaped by the needs of capitalism and warfare, cannot exist without extensive planning; all the mass media heavy drum-fire against planning for the last century is merely a smoke-screen for leaving planning to the large corporations and their divisions of the market as well as to governments controlled by them spending taxpayers’ money (see Best and Connolly 1982, 32–40, 207: US government spending rose from 8.2% of GNP in 1913 to 38.1% in 1977, while in World War II it peaked at nearly 50%). In other words, a socialist/communist political programme would at some not too distant point have to plan also the problem of reshaping technology for its own needs, to make it as far as possible disalienating inside each single plant and eco-sustainable outside of it; I deal here only with planning within early socialism. In fact, Lenin took his cue for improvising largely from the central planning introduced in all major capitalist states during World War I, especially the German one whose efficiency he much admired, and “the war economy remained the basic model of the Soviet planned economy” (Hobsbawm 2011, 9). However, this super-productivist economism determining politics had the downside of being totally unfit for industrial democracy.

What happened in Yugoslavia under “market socialism” was a dismantling and jettisoning of planning. Yet intelligent planning was the key to solving the major societal contradictions and aporias of what happens during industrialization after a revolution that dispossessed the (largely foreign) capitalist class, including planning’s hidden twin and political analogue, the place and extent of plebeian democracy from below as its indispensable partner. By 1965, planning by basic proportions was replaced by even vaguer “indicative planning,” and federal plans became largely political pious wishes.

This meant surrender to the capitalist market. However, “[s]tandard economic reasoning tells us that, in a typical underdeveloped country, the market mechanism can produce inferior investment decisions” (Milenkovitch 1971, 294). The major argument against market reliance, developed in both titles by Polanyi, was handily summarized by Joseph E. Stiglitz in his 2001 “Foreword” to The Great Transformation:

[Polanyi clarifies] how free market ideology was the handmaiden for [bourgeois] industrial interests, and how those interests used that ideology selectively, calling upon government intervention when needed to pursue their own interests. . . . Today, there is no respectable intellectual support for the proposition that markets, by themselves, lead to efficient, let alone equitable outcomes. (Stiglitz 2006, vii–viii)

Further, the illuminating discussion of Elson richly argues that if one starts from the production and reproduction of labour power, which is wider than the needful attention to workers in paid labour, then a “politics of use values” could use a dialectical approach to the market. With Marx, the useful aspects of market coordination ought to be recognised, negatively as against the personal subalternity in feudalism and positively as helping the mutual satisfaction of needs, as well as the alienating aspect of enforcement of atomised profit mentality it necessarily carries. Not only do people in the cash nexus not at all matter, but their interests are a priori defined and strictly enforced as isolated, and information is valuable and used only insofar as it contributes to antagonistic competitive advantage (Elson 1988, 15). Probably even more important is the fact that “no economy can adjust solely through a market-led adjustment process because there are key resources which cannot be fully commodified. The most important are labour and the environment.” In families and households, “labour power . . . is not produced as a commodity” but as a mainly “altruistic collective behaviour . . . [in] a resource allocation pattern that is not wholly determined by [market prices]” (17; italics added).

A similar horizon is in Horvat's position on “market as instrument of planning”: “there is today no so-called free market; it can be proven that planning is absolutely needed for its functioning well.” However, “the market could be one of the possible planning types, and one among the instruments for . . . the allocation of resources needed for consumption”—especially for short-range plans and consumption goods. This can be brought about by planning control of market forces and prices. However, drawing up the plans should be the prerogative of the people, that is, all economic subjects, with full feedback flow of information (Horvat 1967, 108–12; emphasis original). The system of self-government appears here as the ideal possibility of reconciling central planning with both democracy from below and efficient economic development (Kidrič envisaged this already in 1950).

For Kalecki, self-management in industry would be inseparable from central planning not only for emergencies such as initial industrialization (in which case capitalism also abundantly uses it, as in the World Wars and in general in military investments) but also when a higher level of economic growth is reached. The rejection of central planning implies “either abandoning rapid economic development, or dependence on permanent foreign assistance” (Kalecki 1992, 62): as we have seen, Yugoslavia after the 1960s managed to combine both these negativities.

The Yugoslav government ad hoc countermeasures that took the place of planning ensured neither market nor planning would work properly. A retrospective survey of problems and opinions on the Yugoslav use of the market and then of the plan is in Korošić (1988, 250–59, 271–79).

² This is the best work on S. F. R. Yugoslavia political economics extant; the terms for the competing horizons are taken from Löwenthal (1970) who was generalizing from two communist revolutions: the semi-peasant one in the USSR and the peasant one in China, both possessing important parallels and as important differences with Yugoslavia.

To avoid cumbersome repetitions of the CPY and/or LCY (the Communist Party of Yugoslavia), I shall use for them, in spite of my reluctance at god-words, Party with capital P. I prefer “etatist” to “statist” for a belief in or devotion to the State, which I always capitalize. Unattributed translations are mine, also tacit corrections from extant translations into English where I had the original in Yugoslav languages.

I acknowledge an important stimulation for my categorisation from Ivana Momčilović and Slobodan Karamanić about singularities, and from Kržan's “Nacrt” lecture (2012).

³ The term “republican” is in this essay used, in conformity with Yugoslav practice, to mean the six federal republics.

⁴ There is a vast body of literature on various denotations and connotations of civil society in political philosophy generally, say from Tocqueville through Arendt and Ricoeur to the present, and in the specific debates, say on Hegel or on the 1990s’ wave. I neglect it here in order to isolate and highlight those useful for our needs today, as opposed to the useless or pernicious. As an example, this essay does not deal in direct polemics with a large group (best known in works by John Keane) that couples civil society with the so-called free market. From extensive debates which often lack conceptual clarity, my bibliography below lists only the works cited.

⁵ Quotes from Gramsci have been checked with the Quaderni edition (1975a) and in places slightly modified. His prison notes were in the circumstances understandably beset by varying and confusing terminology, even by incomplete and partly conflicting views, so that interpretation has to be stronger than usual. It is dubious that one could find in him a fully unified and worked out conception of civil society or indeed of the state. This does not detract from the fertility of his outline.

Since he did not repudiate a base-superstructure model, Gramsci logically had to place civil society (as well as the state) into the superstructure. Lucien Goldmann, Raymond Williams, and all the neo-Marxists after the 1950s will later reject this civil-engineering model in favour of the cybernetic model of feedback, where this argument is, without Gramsci's unnecessary stacking into watertight boxes, much more elegant. Having been a small part of this remodelling, I can testify that Gramsci was of great encouragement to it.