In February, 1969, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation convened an international conference to discuss the events of August 21st 1968, their causes and consequences. A volume of papers presented at the conference were published in 1969. Here we reproduce Ken Coates’s introduction to this volume along with Bertrand Russell’s message to the conference.
Introduction
Ken Coates
On August 21st 1968, five nations claiming to be “socialist” invaded a sixth nation, also claiming to be socialist. When half a million troops from the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and the German Democratic Republic moved into Czechoslovakia, it was not only a series of solemn pledges under treaty which were broken. The plain fact is that all six governments concerned not only laid claim to pursue, in general, socialist policies: they each also laid claim to be representative of social structures which, in broad outline, had already evolved to embody “socialism”. Was “socialism”, then, beginning to savage itself? Were “socialist” countries no less prone to intimidate one another than their capitalist forbears?
One would search in vain through the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao Tse-Tung, or whomever else in the socialist pantheon might be readily invoked, in order to find analysis of this sort of situation. There is no consideration, in the classic literature of Marxism, of the problems of military strategy in conflicts between socialist states. Bluntly, the originators of socialist doctrine would have regarded such eventualities as inconceivable. Indeed for a society which has truly overcome the exploitation of man by man, such an eventuality is out of the question. This assumption is basic to the socialist tradition, and of course it pre-dates Karl Marx. But it was perfectly clearly said by him in the First Address which he drafted on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association to outline its policy on the Franco-Prussian War:
“In constrast to old society, with its economical miseries and political delirium, a new society is springing up whose international rule will be Peace, because its national ruler will be – everywhere the same – Labour!”
This thought has been expressed in more general terms: “A people which enslaves others forges its own chains”, said Marx again: and it has been amplified:
“The victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing”, wrote Engels. It has also been elaborated, with deadly specificity, by Lenin:
“The social and political character of war is determined not by the ‘good intentions’ of individuals or groups, or even of peoples, but by the position of the class which conducts the war, by the class policy of which the war is a continuation … “
For the world communist movement, the invasion of Czechoslovakia therefore raises some fundamental questions. Either the assumptions of a century and a half of socialist thought are invalid, or there exist unsocialist elements deep in the structure of the socialist countries which initiated the invasion.
There is no way to avoid this dilemma. Although it is possible to maintain that the movement of half-a-million: troops into another country, the arrest of its Governmental leaders, and the subsequent imposition upon them of political options which were not their own, is not an act of war, such a claim is no more convincing than the parliamentary evasions of Mr. Anthony Eden, who claimed that the British bombardment of Port Said did not indicate that there was in progress anything so untoward as .a war with Egypt, but merely revealed that there existed a state of “armed conflict”. Baldly, we can state with certainty that Karl Marx would have found such actions, whether they were styled as acts of war, or of some lesser form of “armed conflict”, indicative of the existence of grave social tensions within the nations that initiated them.
It is widely understood that the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia was not, in fact, at the time of the action, reverting to pre-socialist political or economic norms. The dispatches of the Morning Star’s reporter in Prague provided sharp evidence on this score. So does the fact that opinion polls in Czechoslovakia revealed that more than ninety-five percent of the population were actively in favour of the continued socialisation of their economy. But even if Czechoslovakia had been in fact “reverting to capitalism”, as it manifestly was not, there is ample textual evidence in the writings of, for instance, both Engels and Lenin, to indicate that they, at any rate, would have opposed military intervention of the type which took place last August. The Chinese People’s Republic is led by men who believe, somewhat quaintly, that capitalism is being restored in the Soviet Union. By analogy with the action of the Warsaw Pact powers, they could justify sending their armies to Moscow in order to reorganise its affairs. Stalin believed that not merely capitalism, but indeed fascism, had been re-established in Yugoslavia after 1948. Had he then betrayed the revolution by refusing to act in the manner now established by his successors? Since the vogue in Moscow, among the influential members of the ruling caucus, seems to be towards the rehabilitation of the Generalissimo, it might be useful if they would ponder on that question.
Of course, as an accompaniment of wars, one inevitably meets lies. Liars flourish behind the lines of battle as at no other time. Lies, particularly lies told in pursuance of public duty by state spokesmen, are themselves a classic indicator of underlying social tensions, and of suppressed social conflicts. An orgy of official lies accompanied the movement of troops into Prague. Almost a year after the invasion, the persons who were alleged to have invited the Soviet authorities to intervene in order to save Czech socialism, have still not come forward. Indeed, those eminent Czech and Slovak opponents of the new upsurge of socialist democracy who were nominated, by general rumour, for this honour, have since been publicly exculpated from the thought, by Mr. Husak’s Government. It is, it appears, a gross reflection upon their honour, to say nothing of their nationality, to suggest that they would implicate themselves in any such treason. When the immediate given justification for the intervention has proved so absurdly unfounded, what more need be said about the more extravagant lies, which were told afterwards, concerning arms caches, enemy “tourists” and the like?
When the subjugation of socialist democracy began, after the August days, European socialists had a manifest duty of solidarity with their colleagues in the Czechoslovak trade unions and Communist Party. They had to resist, strongly, both the disgraceful pressures of the Western Governments, such as the British Labour administration, to use the fact of the invasion as a pretext for strengthening NATO: and at the same time the official apologetics of the Russian leadership and its acolytes outside the Soviet Union, including those in Czechoslovakia itself, which were calculated to assist in the process of containing and rolling back the gains which had been made by the working people in the “Czech Spring”.
Today, systematic pressure has eroded those gains to a desperately low level. While Mr. Michael Stewart has orated about “Western defence” he has intensified the pressures upon the Czechoslovak people, since his whole military system is directed no less at they themselves, than at their Soviet and Eastern European occupiers: as often happens, the power structures of West and East have converged to choke out any threat to the status quo. The pressures from the Government of the Soviet Union have been relentless. With the fall of the Dubcek administration, the press has been muzzled, the old policemen of Novotny have been allowed to creep back into positions of great authority and influence, trade union independence has been greatly sapped, and Mr. Husak has been paraded at a convention of the world’s communist parties in order to say that the occupation of his country was “an internal matter” which was no business of anyone else.
But it is our business. No socialist can behave as if this invasion has never happened. Not only has the Soviet Government issued a public declaration that it has the right to do the same thing again whenever and wherever it adjudges a need: but even if there were, as there are manifestly not, all the elements of repentance in the politbureau in Moscow, it would still be necessary to address the question of how such military adventures could possibly come about. This question needs answering not only at the level of micro-documentation: it also requires discussion at the level of broad sociological generalisation. This discussion has scarcely begun in the official Marxist parties. True, a number of notions have been canvassed as possible explanations as to how the conflict could have originated. The official Warsaw Pact view is, of course, that counter-revolution was imminent in Prague, and that in the given circumstances it was expedient to declare “a fig for Engels’ bourgeois scruples!” and rush to restore whatever was salvable of the blessings of the old Novotny order. This view is amply discussed in Ernest Mandel’s: it is, to put it mildly, eccentric. It is, however, shared by Fidel Castro, who believes, however, that the action of the Warsaw Pact powers was totally illegal, if necessary. The Czechs had been busy restoring capitalism, and emulating the Yugoslavs, who have already, on this view, restored it. The Chinese and Albanian communists are all too ready to believe that Mr. Dubcek was about to “restore capitalism”, but, logically within the confines of such a view, hasten to add that the Russians had already beaten him to it.
What sense are we to make of this conflicting mesh of diagnoses? No factories have been auctioned off in any of these countries. The predominant sector of their productive industry remains in public ownership. Czechoslovakia, indeed, had a higher than usual proportion of socialised production. None of them, neither the Czechs, nor the Russians, nor the Warsaw Pact powers in general, have licensed the unlimited freedom of private investment, introduced limited liability companies or anything of the kind. Even in Yugoslavia where the market has more sway than in any other socialised state economy, the basis of public ownership remains generally secure. Can capitalism be restored without capitalists?
Such charge s are clearly ideological rather than scientific. They illuminate nothing. What, then, is the social condition of these nations?
At the risk of being tedious, there are a number of points which need to be made. The first thing is that the countries we call “socialist” are indeed socialist in one respect: that they have passed beyond the capitalist form of organization. To be a little more precise, what’ they have socialized is the means of production. Thai is to say that private property has either ceased to exist or large!)! ceased to exist in the means of production. At this stage it is unnecessary to enter into the argument about what happens when the means of production are undemocratically controlled. It is perfectly plain that some people can become extremely privileged in this situation. But it is also plain that there are, to a very considerable extent, different social and economic laws governing economies which have abrogated the private ownership of property in the means of production to those which apply in an economy which is subject to the dominance of private ownership. That is the first point.
The second point is that none of the socialist countries has yet progressed to the realisation of socialism in the second sense in which the word is understood, which concerns the socialization of the means of consumption. That is to say, none of the socialist countries has passed to a phase of general welfare distribution of commodities. It is perfectly plain that in the traditional Marxist sense socialism was about the socialization of both the means of production. and distribution. It will be said that this insistence mixes up two stages of development: the “socialist” stage, and the “communist” stage which must be seen separately. But there is indeed considerable internal evidence in Marx’s writing that by the word “communism” he means a third stage which is higher, again, than the second phase of socialisation of distribution, in which money ceased to play a vital role in determining transactions between persons. This third stage involves precisely the ultimate goal of the overcoming of the division of labour itself, as a result of which “we shall hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and critically criticize in the evening”.
It seems very clear that it is possible to conceive of the abolition of money as a basic relationship between individual people, considerably before it becomes technically possible to evolve an integrated human kind embodying the overcoming of the division of labour. If this is taken to be the case, we must be very careful when we apply the word “socialist” to a socialist country. Such countries are socialist in one sense, not yet socialist in another sense. They are socialist in the sense that in most of them the overwhelming majority of the means of production have entered into social ownership. They are non-socialist to the extent that the means of production are by no means ready to support truly social forms of distribution, or where they are ready, are, by various impediments, held back from this necessary form of distribution.
This is the problem Fidel Castro has been attempting to face, when he speaks, in Cuba, of “building socialism and communism at the same time”.
However, if one can accept a framework of analysis in which the extended evolutionary process towards socialism can be grasped without eschatology, it becomes clear that within each stage of social organisation there can be located various types of structural obstacles to development, various interests and impulses towards it. These require the attention of socialists all over the world, because in the struggle between them, the model of socialism itself will be marked out.
To assist the cause of the Czech spring, it will be necessary for the socialist and communist movement of the world to begin the work of evaluation suggested by these comments, and to allocate positive support and hostile pressures in measures according to its result.
The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation was concerned from the beginning to help its co-thinkers in Czechoslovakia in their brave attempts to establish “socialism with a human face”.
This paper was commissioned for the first international conference on Czechoslovakia convened in Stockholm by the Foundation in February, 1969. Since then, in May, a further gathering of British socialists took place in London, and it is hoped that other meetings of European socialist, communist and trade union representatives will follow.
Ken Coates, June 1969
Bertrand Russell’s Appeal – to the Stockholm Conference on Czechoslovakia – February 1, 1969
The developments in Czechoslovakia in the past twelve months are of the greatest significance, forming a landmark in twentieth-century socialism. In January 1968 the Czechoslovak Communist Party determined to create what it called “socialism with a human face”. This involved dismantling the old bureaucracy and the secret police, correcting injustices of the past, ending the censorship, beginning to tell the people the truth and taking other necessary steps towards socialist democracy. This new direction gained massive popular support, and it is clear that this support remains to this day. The continuation, in new circumstances, of the demands for socialist democratisation by vast numbers of workers, students and intellectuals is an extraordinary, heroic phenomenon, which requires both our understanding and our support. The persistence with which these demands are maintained despite the scant support of Western socialists and the false “sympathy” of NATO is a measure of the quality of Czechoslovak socialism. If NATO sympathises with Socialist democracy, let them welcome it in Greece or Spain. Meanwhile, however, tragedy advances in Czechoslovakia. When a man burns himself to an agonising death for political reasons, he is appealing to the world after all other appeals have failed. I doubt that we have understood sufficiently the nature of the sacrifice made by Jan Palach and those who follow him, or the desperation prompted by Soviet suppression and the inactivity of Western socialists.
Both before and since the Soviet invasion of last August, the Czechoslovak leadership has been subjected to intolerable intimidation and blackmail, and to inhuman pressures daily. It can not be said too oftel1 that such conduct has no place in socialist behaviour. It is clear to me that the Soviet Union’s policy is to discredit the leadership, break the will of the people and reintroduce bureaucratic rule. The Russians calculate that by intimidating the leaders, they will compel the country to capitulate, and much of their own dirty work will have been done for them. From the Soviet point of view, it is far easier for popular demands to be crushed by Czechoslovak leaders than by Russian tanks.
Equally clearly, however the Czechoslovak people are in no mood to compromise on their basic liberties. Why does the leadership repeatedly make appeals not to act, not to defy the occupation, not to oppose the censorship, not to strike? It is because these appeals are falling on deaf ears, and the people, rightly, wish to ignore them.
I see as a great tragedy the role of those Czechoslovak leaders who have chosen the road of compromise. Their failure to resist Soviet demands, for reasons which I fully understand, will lead inevitably to their discrediting themselves. They must understand that they are compromising with an occupation which represents insatiable demands. Every compromise will be followed by Soviet demands for further compromises, until the whole hope of 1968 is destroyed. That road leads only to demoralisation and defeat. The suggestion that important aspects of the post-January programme can be saved in this manner is an illusion. Asking for time, patience and calm in this situation of advanced popular consciousness is equivalent to asking for mass apathy. It is this for which the Soviet leaders are working, because it is the necessary condition for the reimposition of all aspects of Stalinist control.
These questions concern every socialist, East and West. How we understand and act on them will, I believe, help to shape the future of socialism in industrialised countries for the rest of this century. It is for these reasons that I have called this conference, and I wish it every success.
