New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction

353 Pages·1993·9.92 MB·English

by  Ken Jowitt

New World Disorder
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New World Disorder
The Leninist Extinction
KEN JOWITT
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1992 by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubtication Data
Jowitt, Ken.
New world disorder : the Leninist extinction / Ken Jowitt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08272-9
1. Communist state. 2. Political culture—Communist countries.
3. Communism—1945- I .Title.
JC474.J69 1992 91-28260
321.9'2—dc20 CIP
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). ©
This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufac­
tured using toner in place of ink. Type and images may
be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally
printed University of California Press editions.
Contents
Preface vii
1. THE LENINIST PHENOMENON 1
2. POLITICAL CULTURE IN LENINIST REGIMES 50
3. INCLUSION 88
4. NEOTRADITIONALISM 121
5. “MOSCOW CENTRE” 159
6. GORBACHEV: BOLSHEVIK OR MENSHEVIK? 220
7. THE LENINIST EXTINCTION 249
8. THE LENINIST LEGACY 284
9. A WORLD WITHOUT LENINISM 306
Index 333
BLANK PAGE
Preface
The phenomenon of Leninism should be seen in world-
historical terms. For the most part, history is “protestant,” char­
acterized by highly diverse political, cultural, social, and eco­
nomic institutions. Its ‘‘catholic” moments, when the intrinsic
diversity of social life is subordinated to an authoritative and
standard institutional format like Islam, Christianity, liberal
capitalism, or Soviet Leninism, are few, highly consequential,
and thus of particular significance. But does Leninism qualify
for membership in this select historical group? After all, as
an internationally and institutionally bounded entity with a
continuously recognizable identity, Leninism lasted less than a
century.
The Leninist phenomenon embraces the temporal, geo­
graphical, and developmental diversity of the October Revolu­
tion, B6Ia Kun’s short-lived regime in Hungary, Stalin’s “so­
cialism in one country,” Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, Castro’s Leninist conversion, Khrushchev and
Deng Xiaoping’s “Aquinian” reforms of Stalinist “Augustinian-
ism,” Pol Pot’s Nazi-like movement of rage, “Eurocommu­
nism,” and the facade Leninism of Benin, Mozambique, and
Ethiopia. It includes heroic revolutionary figures of Homeric
stature like Trotsky, and the cruel pedestrian despotism of a
Ceau§escu; heroic opposition to the Nazi assault, and hysteri­
cally genocidal attacks on Soviet and Chinese society. It offers
instances of “Rubashov”-like self-sacrifice for “the cause,” and
vulgar “Rashidov”-like acts of personal and organizational cor­
ruption. But the strongest argument in favor of Leninism’s
status as a world-historical phenomenon was the transforma­
tion of ideological word into institutional flesh across develop­
mental time and cultural space. For all the genuine diversity—
historical, social, economic, cultural, political—in the areas
subject to Leninist rule, an authoritative, standardized institu-
vii
viu Preface
tionai format was extended from the Soviet Union to Central
Europe, the Balkans, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Ladn
America. In less than half a century, a set of Soviet replica
regimes was created in the most diverse settings: Albania, East
Germany, Vietnam, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia.
My intellectual passion has been to characterize Leninism’s
novel institutional identity and developmental history.
EITHER . . . OR
Theory and comparative historical study never became central
features of communist studies. There are many reasons: one is
the difficulty of theorizing; a second is the bias in favor of
country or area study, one facilitated by the overwhelming cen­
trality of the Soviet and, to a lesser extent, Chinese regimes.
The result has been a compartmentalized and largely atheoret-
ical set of case studies, with brilliant exceptions like Robert
Tucker’s The Soviet Political Mind and Franz Schurmann’s
Ideology and Organization in Communist China. Ironically, most
studies of Leninist regimes can be described in good Stalinist
fashion as “either . . . or” studies. Western studies of the Soviet
Union and Leninism imagine their subject as either completely
alien to or eventually convergent with Western institutional
forms. The longest standing paradigm—totalitarianism—con­
flated the ethical designation evil with the institutional defini­
tion alien, while those who speak of convergence see a gradual
dilution of the differences between liberalism and Leninism in
favor of liberalism. The emphasis on Leninism’s alien quality
favored a polemically robust, but more often than not analyti­
cally anemic, grasp of the phenomenon, while the emphasis on
convergence erred in the direction of analytically assimilating
the unfamiliar to the familiar.
One can identify very few approaches to the Leninist phe­
nomenon whose thrust is comparison, not assimilation or alien­
ation of the subject. To characterize Leninism’s historical and
institutional novelty, one needs a theoretical perspective and
conceptual language that takes Lenin’s contention that he had
created a “party of a new type” seriously, and situates the Le­
ninist phenomenon in comparative historical terms.
Preface tx
The essays in this book do that.
As an inertial political reality, Leninist regimes still exist in a
minimally recognizable, though still quite powerful, form in a
number of countries, including the Soviet Union and China.
But as a bounded institutional form with a strategic purpose
and unique claim and effect on members’ identity, Leninism is
extinct. In 1973 I wrote an (unpublished) paper titled "State,
National, and Civic Development in Eastern Europe” for a con­
ference at Berkeley. It began with this sentence: "The critical
problem confronting communist regimes today is citizenship.”
Seven years later, Solidarity, the harbinger and, in good mea­
sure, instrument of Leninism’s extinction, transformed theory
into historical reality. Solidarity signaled the origination of the
individual national citizen and the extinction of the party cadre;
but, it may be hoped, not the end of our intellectual engage­
ment with Leninism.
These essays express my engagement with one of history’s
most remarkable political phenomena: with the character, de­
velopment, extinction, and legacy of the Leninist phenomenon.