Understanding East European Socialism by G. M. Tamás

G. M. Tamás is a Hungarian philosopher and an engaged public intellectual. He migrated from Romania to Hungary in the end of the 1970s and soon became one of the prominent intellectuals of the dissident movement there. After the collapse of State Socialism he became a member of the Hungarian parliament as a part of the anti-communist liberal party where he served from 1989 to 1994. Eventually he became very critical of the failures of liberal democracy and the restoration of capitalism and, adopting radical Marxian stance, is currently is amongst the leading European critical scholars.

Outline of G. M. Tamás lecture:

The question is, do we consider any features of Soviet-style ‘real socialism’ (i. e., planned or planifying state capitalism) to serve as a foundation for a new emancipatory politics? In order to answer this question, we must establish a few acceptable principles for historical interpretation.

A. Emancipation as such is not an exclusive feature of socialism or communism, on the contrary. Equality before the law and an end to personal servitude are the results of what used to be called ‘bourgeois’ revolutions, of the development of ‘rule of law’ régimes. Marx knew that liberty and equality in liberal capitalism are real.
B. Communism (= the communist idea) is not simply an emancipatory project, but a decisive cut in the human condition. Mostly it means an end to every kind of hierarchy and coercion and, thus, a transmutation of the dividing line between public & private.
C. Hence: We must ask whether ‘real socialist’ systems did or did not point towards a communist goal at all.

‘Real socialism’ did something that bourgeois revolutions never quite did: It has put an end to traditional agrarian societies with their nobilities, churches, monarchies, their landed gentry, traditional military caste, fundamentally religious and nationalist legitimation ideologies and their ambivalent stance about progress, wealth, secularisation and gender equality. As a modernisation project, ‘real socialism’ succeeded superbly. It has generalised modern, secular, productivist society – based on wage labour, commodity production, a money economy and a dynamic class system – like none other, especially not Western imperialism in the East and the South. It was the most successful extension of radical modernity. With the concomitant horrors, of course. Nevertheless, it could not have ever succeeded, if its politics would have been simply ‘bourgeois’ politics, and it wasn’t. It was the politics of a non-bourgeois capitalism, and the heroism, abnegation, fanaticism and cruelty, so characteristic of the parties of the Komintern, had its source not in any kind of ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ ethos (still the main interpretive framework, after a century) but in a ‘communist desire’, naturally unrealised, then stifled. I shall take one example, internationalism & the equality between the nations (peoples). This is contradicting absolutely any kind of capitalist politics, so if in Stalin’s era the so-called socialist countries had been strongly nationalist, autarchic societies, still – the system could never quite neutralise the anti-nationalist stance inherent in the movement (and NOT the other way around, as stated by Kremlinologists etc.). The Balkans Federation idea (Dimitrov/Tito) is a glaring example. So is the Sino-Soviet split, the 1956 and 1968 occupations and the rest. How communist desire could not be domesticated. This (and similar aspects) seems to me to be more important than the legacy of planning, redistribution, egalitarianism and other welfare-state features which are not to be assimilated to the novel idea in the ‘socialist’ legitimizing ideologies concerning physical & intellectual labour. All this is to be compared to the pseudo-problem of private vs. state property.

Lecture of G. M. Tamás is part f the seminar series In The Aftermath of 1989: new social inequalities of global capitalism and is suppored by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung SEE

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