A serious obstacle in the path of many who approached the ideas of Marxism in the past was the caricature presented by Stalinism. This played a contradictory role. On the one hand, the tremendous successes of the nationalised planned economy in the Soviet Union powerfully attracted many workers and intellectuals in the West. Prominent scientists such as the celebrated biologist JBS Haldane in Britain were drawn to Marxism, and began to apply it to their own fields with promising results. A large number of works appeared which attempted to explain the latest discoveries of science in a comprehensible language. The results were uneven, but this literature was infinitely preferable to the mystifying stuff produced for popular consumption today.

There is no doubt that the unprecedented advances of culture, education and science in Russia served as a point of reference not just for the international labour movement, but for the best of the intellectuals and scientists in the West. These achievements showed the potential of a nationalised planned economy, despite all the monstrous bureaucratic distortions that ultimately undermined it. They stand in stark contrast to the present situation. The fall of the Soviet Union, and the attempt to move in the direction of a “market economy” has produced a frightful collapse of the productive forces and culture. Overnight, a colossal ideological counter-offensive has been launched on a world scale against the idea of a planned economy, Marxism and socialism in general. The enemies of socialism have taken advantage of the crimes of Stalinism to attempt to blacken the name of Marxism. They aim to convince people that revolution does not pay and that, consequently, it is better to put up with the rule of the big banks and monopolies, accept mass unemployment and falling living standards, because, they say there is “no alternative”.

In reality, what failed in Russia was not socialism, but a bureaucratic caricature of socialism. A totalitarian and bureaucratic system is incompatible with a regime of nationalised planned economy, which as Leon Trotsky explained in 1936 needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen. Without the active and conscious participation of the population at all levels, without complete freedom of criticism, discussion and debate, it would inevitably lead to a nightmare of bureaucracy, corruption, red tape, bungling and mismanagement, which would undermine the basis of the planned economy in the end. This is precisely what happened in the former Soviet Union, as predicted by Marxists decades ago.

The totalitarian regime of Stalinism, with its inevitable companions, corruption, conformism and toadyism, had its most negative effects in the fields of science and the arts. Despite the enormous impulse given to education and culture by the October revolution and the nationalised planned economy that issued from it, the free development of science was held back by the suffocating bureaucratic regime. More than any other section of society, science and the arts need to develop in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, freedom to think, to speak, to explore, to make mistakes. In the absence of such conditions, creative thought will wither and die. Thus the USSR, with more scientists than America and Japan together (and they were good scientists), was unable to get the same results as in the West, and gradually fell behind in a whole series of fields.

One of the things that created all kinds of misconceptions about Marxism was the way that it was presented by the Stalinists. The ruling elite in Russia could not tolerate freedom of thought and criticism in any sphere. In the hands of the bureaucracy, Marxist philosophy (“diamat” as they called it) was twisted into a sterile dogma, or a variety of sophism used to justify all the twists and turns of the leadership. According to Lefebvre, at one point things got so bad that the Soviet army high command insisted that lessons on formal logic be put back on the curriculum of military academies because of the shameful confusion caused by the teachers of so-called diamat. At least lessons in logic would teach the cadets the ABCs of reasoning. This little incident is enough to expose the caricature nature of the “Marxism” of the Stalinists.

Under Stalin, scientists were forced to accept without question this rigid and lifeless caricature, as well as a number of false theories with no scientific basis that happened to suit the bureaucracy, such as Lysenko’s “theory” of genetics. This discredited the idea of dialectical materialism in the scientific community to a certain extent, and prevented a fruitful and creative application of the method of dialectics to different fields of science, which would have made possible serious advances both in the sciences themselves and in the further elaboration of the philosophical ideas which Marx and Engels explained in outline, but left to future generations to develop and fill out in detail.

It is a condemnation of the Stalinist regime that, for more than six decades, with all the resources of the Soviet state at its disposal, the bureaucracy was unable to introduce a single original idea into the theoretical arsenal of Marxism. In spite of the tremendous advantages of the nationalised planned economy, which created a powerful industry and technology, they proved incapable of adding anything new to the discoveries of Karl Marx, working alone in the library of the British Museum.

Despite everything, the benefits of a planned economy permitted outstanding progress in many fields, a fact which the present avalanche of propaganda would like to conceal. Moreover, where scientists did apply the dialectical method to different fields, interesting results were obtained. This is shown precisely by chaos theory, one area in which Soviet scientists, undoubtedly influenced by dialectical materialism, were in advance of the West by at least two decades. It is not generally realised that the original research into chaos theory was done in the Soviet Union, and this gave an impulse to those Western scientists who were independently coming to the same conclusions, and whose ideas in turn stimulated the further development of Soviet research into chaos, as Gleick admits:

The blossoming of chaos in the United States and Europe has inspired a huge body of parallel work in the Soviet Union; on the other hand, it also inspired considerable bewilderment, because much of the new science was not so new in Moscow. Soviet mathematicians and physicists had strong tradition in chaos research, dating back to the work of A.N. Kolmogorov in the fifties. Furthermore, they had a tradition of working together that had survived the divergence of mathematics and physics elsewhere.[42]

  1. Gleick, J. op. cit., p. 76.