Some of them at least did make a show of trying to explain things, but failed miserably. The late Joe Slovo, who was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) until his death, wrote:
The commandist and bureaucratic approaches which took root during Stalin’s time affected Communist Parties throughout the world, including our own. We cannot disclaim our share of the responsibility for the spread of the personality cult and a mechanical embrace of Soviet domestic and foreign policies, some of which discredited the cause of socialism. (Joe Slovo, Has Socialism Failed?, p. 24 (1990), emphasis in original.)
Joe Slovo’s pamphlet was written in response to “the dramatic collapse of most of the Communist Party governments of Eastern Europe” in 1989. Their downfall, he admits, “was brought about through massive upsurges which had the support not only of the majority of the working class but also a large part of the membership of the ruling parties themselves. These were popular revolts against unpopular regimes; if socialists are unable to come to terms with this reality, the future of socialism is indeed bleak.” (Ibid., p. 1.) On this point at least, we can agree with comrade Slovo. But the question is: how was it possible that after decades of this ‘socialism’ the majority of the working class found itself involved in popular revolts (Joe Slovo’s own words) against the regime? Something was clearly badly wrong. But what?
He says that “commandist approaches took root during Stalin’s time”, but where did these ‘approaches’ come from? What did they reflect? What class interests did they represent? To these questions, no answer is forthcoming. Nor is any reason given as to why the terrible phenomenon, which mysteriously appeared “during Stalin’s time”, should have continued to exist for decades after Stalin’s death, and reached the point where they led to “popular revolts” supported by the majority of the working class. Such developments cannot be ascribed to insignificant little deviations (“spots on the sun” as someone once put it) but must be the product of profound and irreconcilable differences of interests between different social groups. What groups? Again, no answer is given.
Slovo stated that:
The fundamental distortions which exist in the practice of existing socialism cannot be traced to the essential tenets of Marxist revolutionary science. If we are looking for culprits, we must look at ourselves and not at the founders of Marxism.
Nevertheless, throughout the pamphlet he persists in describing these regimes as ‘socialist’.
These lines were an improvement on the position held by the leadership of the SACP for decades which, in common with Communist Parties internationally, was one of uncritical support for the Russian bureaucracy. For example, let us recall the report of Yusuf Dadoo (national chairman) and Moses Mabhida (General Secretary) of the SACP on their visit to the 26th Congress of the CPSU as recently as 1981:
The Congress hall was filled with delegates who had, by their honest labour and toil for the common good, richly deserved the highest honours and distinctions which the CPSU and Soviet government could bestow on them. These delegates were no armchair theoreticians. They were the life and blood of the heroic Soviet people…
Here were the heirs of the great Bolsheviks, no less fervent in their commitment to create a better life, not only for their own people, but for all humanity. There is no other party which has produced such selfless, devoted and disciplined Communists, such tenacious fighters for peace, freedom and socialism. (African Communist, 3rd Quarter, 1981, p. 48, my emphasis.)
At that time the bureaucracy had already ceased to play a progressive role. The economy was in trouble. The corruption of the bureaucracy was common knowledge, but it would seem that these comrades saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. Yet, as Joe Slovo tells us, the conditions were already being laid for a massive social crisis – including popular revolts!
From time to time, the Communist Party leaders criticise the ‘bureaucracy’ of the former Russian and East European regimes, but this very criticism shows that they do not know what bureaucracy is. They confuse it with mere red tape, i.e. the most superficial and trivial manifestations of bureaucracy and thus draw attention away from the essence of the matter: a monstrous ruling caste of privileged functionaries, engaged in looting the state and lording it over the working class. Such a ruling caste needs an oppressive totalitarian regime, with secret police and the complete denial of workers’ rights and can exist on no other basis.
In some cases the deformations experienced by existing socialist states were the result of bureaucratic distortions which were rationalised at the ideological level by a mechanical and out-of-context invocation of Marxist dogma… In other cases, they were the results of a genuinely-motivated but tragic misapplication of socialist theory in new realities which were not foreseen by the founders of Marxism. (Slovo, op. cit., p. 11, my emphasis.)
So, there we have it. It was all a tragic mistake, the result of a little misunderstanding by sincere but misguided people. The membership, however, needs to know the truth. It is no accident that none of these parties has proposed going back to Lenin, that same Lenin who worked out the famous four points which are the prior conditions, not for communism or socialism, but for the initial stages of workers’ power, that is, for a healthy workers’ state at its very inception. Nor have they understood the causal relationship between the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the theory of socialism in one country, which they still accept. They still have not understood that this idea was an expression of the interests of the bureaucracy, not the working class.
The false position of the official Communist Party leaders in relation to Stalinism is only the other side of the coin of their abandonment of Marxism, their attitude to capitalism and the bourgeois state and all that flows from it. One thing flows from the other. Having in the past accepted uncritically all the crimes of the Stalinist regime, with the collapse of Stalinism, they abandoned the revolutionary road altogether.