The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology Andrew Roberts Slavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2. (Summer, 2004), pp. 349-366. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779%28200422%2963%3A2%3C349%3ATSOSAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Slavic Review is currently published by The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/aaass.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.org Tue Sep 18 23:04:59 2007

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology Andrew Roberts -When we achieve socialism, all citizens will have their own car. When we achieve communism, all citizens will have their own helicopter. -Why would everyone need their own helicopter? -Don't be foolish. Suppose they have meat in Timisoara. You'd climb in your helicopter, fly over, and get a good place in line.

What do you call the regimes that made up the old Warsaw Pact? Casual observers would likely answer that they were all communist. But in fact many scholars of the region prefer to call them by a different name. They label these regimes "state socialist" or sometimes simply "socialist," as in such recent titles as Elites after State Socialism: Theories and Analysis, The Collapse of State Socialism: The Case of Poland, and The Socialist System.' This is not to say that all authors have given up the term communism. It certainly lives on in much scholarly work (for example, Stephen White's recent Communism and Its Collapse).*What is surprising is that there is still disagreement over what to call these regimes more than a decade after their fall. One can find varying usage even within a single journal issue.3 In this article I want to propose dispensing with variants of the term socialism to describe the former regimes in eastern E ~ r o p eSuch . ~ usage creates unnecessary confusion for scholars and readers. Not only do we refer to one regime by two (or three) names and thus impede easy communication, but we also use one term, socialism, to refer to very different regimes: both liberal democratic regimes in western Europe and authoritarian ones in eastern Europe. These regimes have little in common except their name."his is in fact a classic case of what political scientists call I thank Sheri Berman, John Bushnell, Diane Koenker, Victor Shih, Paul Thomas, Michael Wallerstein, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. The epigraph is taken from C. Banc and A. Dundes, First Prize: Fgteen Ears! An Annotated Collection of Romanian PoliticalJokes (Rutherford, NJ., 1986), 63. 1. John Higley and Gyorgy Lengyel, Elites after State Socialism: Theories and Analysis (Lanham, Md., 2000); Bartolomiej Kaminski, The Collapse of State Socialism: The Case of Poland (Princeton, 1991);Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The PoliticalEconomy of Communism (Princeton, 1992). 2. Stephen White, Communism and Its Collapse (London, 2001). 3. For example, Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993) contains one article entitled "Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania" and another entitled "Thinking about Post-Communist Transitions: How Different Are They?" 4. When I refer to regime in this paper, I depart slightly from standard usage, which mainly concerns the political system. My usage is broader and includes both political and economic arrangements, a usage justified by the close fusion between politics and economics in these countries. 5. Since writing this paper, it has come to my attention that others have made similar arguments. Archie Brown, for example, writes, "Most objective analysts of those systems have, with good reason, chosen to call them Communist rather than socialist. The term, 'socialist,' embraces a far wider range of social movements and governments than those Slavic Review 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004)

350

Slavic Review

conceptual stretching. The term socialism is stretched too thin and is used to cover too great a diversity of systems. This stretching also has a political effect. In labeling these dictatorships socialist, we inevitably diminish the achievements of democratic socialists in the west. Using the same term to describe the failed Soviet experiment and the success of western European socialists gives the impression that a similar logic and comparable commitments underlie both, and it makes it easy to draw the inference that western European socialists might repeat the mistakes of eastern European socialism. This impoverishes political debate because it fails to recognize that the two socialisms share only their historical roots and little else.

Scholarly Dissensus Most scholars are probably aware that there is no standard way to refer to the regimes that organized their societies according to the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong. What some may find surprising, though, is how much divergence there actually is. Indeed, scholars can be placed in two almost equal-sized camps in their choice of terminology. To get a sense of which designation academic writers prefer, I conducted a number of searches in the JSTOR database ofjournal a r t i ~ l e sI. ~ focused on four journals covered in the Slavic Studies section of the database: Europe-Asia Studies (formerly Soviet Studies), Russian Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Slavic Review. JSTOR contains the entire text of all articles appearing in these journals from the 1940s until near the present. By confining my search to these journals, I was able to largely avoid references to socialism in western Europe or elsewhere because these journals are devoted almost entirely to the sphere of former Soviet dominance.' I deliberately avoided journals containing the words communism or socialism in the title (for example, Problems of Communism or Socialist Review) as that might bias the articles they receive. First, I conducted a full-text search in all four journals for the terms communism, socialism, and state ~ o c i a l i s mAn . ~ article with at least one menwhich owed their allegiance to Marxism-Leninism. . . . Communist Parties were far from having a monopoly on the understanding of socialism." Archie Brown, "Communism," in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds., InternationalEnqclopedia ofthe Social and Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam, 2001), 2323. 6. I referenced JSTOR on 9 November 2003. For those attempting to replicate the analysis for the most recent period, minor discrepancies may appear because JSTOR continually adds articles that were originally behind the moving wall. 7. Throughout the paper I use the terms eastern Europe, eastern Bloc or Soviet Bloc, and Soviet-stylesystem to include all of the regimes that committed themselves to achieving communism. These terms are meant to include China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba in addition to the Soviet Union and its satellites. I do not know a better formulation that avoids the contentious words communism and socialism. 8. To capture articles that used only socialism or only communism (and not both), I subtracted the number of articles that used both terms from the initial search. I did not use the adjectival forms, communist or socialist, because of standard formulations like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The terms communism and socialism provide greater, though far from complete, assurance that the reference is to regime type.

351

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology Table 1

Hits in Full-Text Search

1990-2002 1970-1989 1946-1969 Total

Communism Only

Socialism Only

Both Communism and Socialism

State Socialism

169 200 298 667

199 293 256 748

254 255 29 1 800

51 19 13 83

Table 2 Hits in Book Review Search Communism

Socialism

State Socialism

1990-2002 1970-1989 1946-1969 Total

tion counts as a single hit. As table 1 shows, references are almost evenly divided between communism and so~ialism.~ If we look at trends over time, we see that communism was slightly more popular during the Cold War period, while socialism became more popular during detente and after 1989. Surprisingly, a large number of articles used both terms. The most interesting phenomenon may be the rising popularity of the term state socialism, which emerged mainly after the fall of the regime that it was intended to describe. Tracking usage in scholarly books is more difficult than following usage in articles. Library catalogs include too many books dealing with European-style socialism or with the political philosophy of socialism and communism to make such a search easily practicable. To gain a sense of usage patterns in book titles, I searched the book review sections of the same four journals (table 2) .I0 The results are similar to the full-text search, though communism seems to enjoy greater appeal in book titles than in article texts (albeit mainly during the Cold War era) .I1 This phenomenon may have a number of roots. It may partially be an effort to at9. One anonymous reviewer suggested that usage may have differed between the United States and Europe. Since Europeans are used to both communist and socialist parties, they may be more likely to distinguish between communism and socialism. I tested this hypothesis very imperfectly by comparing an American journal (Slavic Review) with a British journal (Europe-Asia Studies). Although I did not find any significant differences in usage, these results cannot be conclusive both for the methodological reasons mentioned below and because I did not control for the nationality of the author, which would be the decisive factor. 10. One flaw in these results is that a single book may be reviewed in severaljournals. 11. Only six book reviews included both terms. In two of these cases, multiple books were under review.

352

Slavic Review

tract general readers more familiar with the specter of communism than the specter of socialism. The political exigencies of publishing during the Cold War may also have played a role. These statistics are, of course, more suggestive than conclusive. A more thorough survey would require that articles be individually evaluated to confirm that the author uses the term specifically to refer to the regime type of these countries.12References to communism and socialism may refer to philosophical positions or utopian ideals as well as to regime type. They may also appear in quotations or be used ironically. The method used here thus casts too broad a net. I present this data simply to demonstrate that both communism and socialism (and to a lesser extent state socialism) are quite common designations for Soviet-style systems. Even this cursory and flawed review indicates that there is little consensus on what to call these regimes.13

A Short Etymology of Really Existing Socialism How did we get to this impasse? These terms originated in mid-nineteenthcentury debates. At that time, a variety of doctrines bearing the names socialism and communism gained general currency. Their originators included such thinkers as Charles Fourier, William Morris, Robert Owen, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Henri de Saint-Simon, though it is difficult to determine why some thought of themselves as communists and others as socialists. Battle lines were drawn more clearly when Marx and Friedrich Engels emerged on the scene. Their Communist Manifesto was written partially out of dissatisfaction with the plethora of works concerned with working-class movements. As Engels wrote in a footnote to an 1890 edition of the Manifesto, they chose the adjective communist, because socialism at the time was identified with, in his words, "multifarious social quacks."14 In their rendering, socialism came to designate a transitory state between capitalism and communism where the proletariat had expropriated the means of production, but the state and alienation had not yet vanished. At the same time, however, Engels referred to their doctrines as "scientific socialism" in contrast to the "utopian socialism" of others.15 Marx and Engels put their initial bets on communism, but the parties that followed Marx's doctrines called themselves Socialist or Social Dem12. It would also be interesting to cross-tabulate these results by discipline or methodology. Anecdotal evidence suggests that differences in terminology are not correlated with any theoretical approach or political orientation. Janos Kornai believes in free markets and Katherine Verdery finds inspiration in Marx, yet both prefer the term socialism. Similarly, we can find both die-hard communists and die-hard anticommunists sharing the term communism. 13. There appears to be much more consensus on the term postcommunism which beats postsocialism in full-text searches by 174 to 41. Post-state socialism is naturally too much of a mouthful. 14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manfesto (New York, 1988), 48. 15. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian w Scientijic (London, 2001).

T h e State of Socialism: A Note o n Terminology

353

ocratic.16The leader of the workers' movement in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had adopted a doctrinaire Marxist line at Erfurt in 1891 and inspired workers' parties in other nations to do the same." This unity can be seen in the Second International, which brought the international workers' movement together under a Marxist banner. Up to World War I, then, socialism and social democracy were associated with revolutionary change, expropriation of property, and rule by the proletariat, all points outlined in the Communist Manzyesto. Challenges from within by Eduard Bernstein and others partially disrupted this unity. These revisionists challenged all of the main tenets of Marxism including the emphasis on the primacy of economics over politics, the prediction of increasing immiseration, and the call for revolutionary, violent struggle. Instead, they laid the basis for a democratic, parliamentary socialism that emphasized gradual change and considerations of morality and socialjustice. Although these ideas were initially rejected at party congresses, they gradually began to influence behavior and tactics. These splits within workers' movements emerged full-blown with World War I. The decision by the main socialist and social democratic parties to support the war was the impetus for radicals to break with them. This split might have healed after the war, but the Russian Revolution made it permanent. The Bolsheviks' successful seizure of power in a communist revolution forced all parties to take sides. As Donald Sassoon writes, "If the outbreak of war was the first body-blow to the pre-1914 European socialist movement, October 1917 was the coup degrr2~e."'~ The result was that western Europe became home to both communist and socialist or social democratic parties. When the Russian revolutionaries called themselves communists-to distinguish themselves from the socialists and social democrats who had acquitted themselves so poorly during the war-they forever appropriated that term.lg Even if they had not, in their own view, achieved communism, the magnitude of their victory made it well nigh impossible to associate any other existing regime with the communist label.20 At the same time, however, the new leaders of Russia refused to relinquish their claim on socialism and believed themselves to be arbiters of the meaning of the term.21Though Lenin stood at the head of the Communist Party, the country that he created was the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Iosif 16. It is important to note that much of what is conventionally referred to as Marxism is the work of Friedrich Engels. 17. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The W s t European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 9. 18. Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, 31. 19. Earlier, thinkers such as William Morris had claimed the word communist. 20. Before the Russian Revolution, it was impossible to speak of socialist or communist regimes because these groups had never held a share of power. 21. Tony Wright, Socialism: Old and New, 2d ed. (London, 1996), 2-3.

354

Slavic Review

Stalin considered any movement that was not pro-Soviet to be antisocialist. As Paul Thomas writes, "Twentieth-century communists showed no reluctance to clothe their particular doctrines in the broader mantle of s ~ c i a l i s m . Here " ~ ~ then is the origin of the current ambiguity: a single regime came to be associated with two different labels. In their effort to hold onto both communism and socialism, Soviet leaders resorted to clever word games. Official propaganda was careful to distinguish socialism-used to denote the transitional phase in which they lived-from communism, their ultimate goal. Even ordinary citizens knew that their schools, hospitals, enterprises, and art were socialist, not communist, institutions. Their leaders and ideals, however, they knew as communist. To keep up the illusion of progress toward communism, Soviet leaders set standards for how much they had achieved. Stalin himself first declared that socialism-synonymous in his lexicon with the end of class divisions-had been established "in principle" in 1936, not coincidentally in the midst of his most brutal purges.23Nikita Khrushchev, perhaps to put his own brand on the regime, however, decided that only in 1961 had socialism been "fully and finally" attained, allowing the construction of communism to begin. It would be built "in the main" by around 1980. Czechoslovakia meanwhile became the first eastern European country to make the transition to socialism when it renamed itself a "Socialist Republic" in 1960; at that time, the other satellite countries were "People's" or "Democratic" or even "People's Democratic" republic^.^^ Khrushchev's fall, however, led more conservative theoreticians in 1966 to come up with a new category in between socialism and the construction of communism: "developed ~ o c i a l i s m . "Their ~ ~ intent was presumably to calm people's expectations after Khrushchev's volatile time at the helm. Shortly before taking power in 1982, Iurii Andropov felt it necessary to warn that developed socialism would be a "lengthy historical stage" that would have "its own periods, its own stages of g r ~ w t h . " ~ " Mikhail Gorbachev meanwhile amended this formulation to "developing socialism." an indication of his reformist tendencies.

Self-Appellations There is thus some precedent for calling the countries of the Soviet bloc socialist. That is how they saw themselves. And indeed this is a common 22. Paul Thomas, "Socialism," in Smelser and Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behaviural Sciences, 14486. 23. Cf. "Soviet Communism" in David Miller, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political

Thought (New York, 1987), 498.

24. When Romania changed its official designation from the Romanian People's Republic to the Socialist Republic of Romania, citizens joked: 'What do you think, have we reached 100% socialism or can things still get worse?" Cf. Banc and Dundes, First Prize: Fifteen Years! 9 1. 25. Cf. Alfred B. Evans,Jr., "Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology," Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1977), and Alfred B. Evans, Jr., "The Decline of Developed Socialism: Some Trends in Recent Soviet Ideology," Soviet Studies 38, no. 1 (January 1986). 26. "Soviet Communism," in Miller, The BlackwellEncyclopaedia ofPolitical Thought, 499.

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

355

justification among scholars.Janos Kornai, for example, writes, "Why seek a label for these countries other than the one they apply to t h e m s e l v e ~ ? " ~ ~ Anthropologists in particular have made a methodological commitment to take entities at their own word when referring to them.28 But there are a number of reasons not to accept their self-appellations. We should first remember that these regimes had ulterior motives for choosing to call themselves socialist. Citizens were supposed to see themselves as contributing to the creation of a paradise, not as already living in one. Though the transitional stage they lived in was already superior to capitalism, much work still had to be done to perfect the system. Since communism referred to a kind of utopia, calling themselves communist carried the danger of exposing citizens to powerful bouts of cognitive dissonance, for it was obvious to one and all that these societies were far from ideal. Just as important was the motivational effect this usage was meant to have on workers who were encouraged to expend extra effort to speed up the attainment of communism. Given that workplace morale was a continual and worsening problem, it is not surprising that the date of attainment kept being pushed into the future. Even for officials intimately acquainted with the ugly realities of the system, the hope of a communist future persuaded them to make considerable sacrifices in the present.2g The anthropologist Jan Kubik believes that the regimes purposely made the terms ambiguous.30 In his study of the Solidarity movement, Kubik finds that Poland's government would stress socialism-with its undertones of democracy and egalitarianism-in times of crisis, while decking itself out in communist garb-with its connotations of centralized power and hierarchy-when it needed to assert its power.g1This ambiguity helped the regime gain legitimacy-they could play one face against the other-and confused the public who had trouble recognizing who the enemy was. Put more simply, the Polish regime played the old game of good cop/bad cop with socialism in the role of the former and communism the latter.g2 Yet, even if the regimes were sincere in their choice of terminology, this is no reason for scholars to accept it at face value. We do not always 27. Kornai, The Socialist System, 10. He does, however, recognize the confusion involved in referring to both eastern European states and Scandina>ianwelfare states as socialist. Katherine Verdery's justification is similar. Cf. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996), 235n2. 28. This rule may be more appropriate to indhiduals and small, democratic groups than to larger, nondemocratic entities like regimes. 29. Evidence of the power of the communist ideal to lead individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice can be found in Arthur Koestler's classic Darkness at Noon (New York, 1968). 30. Kubik refers to "two distinct syndromes of values."Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise ofSolidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (State College, 1994), 69-73. 31. These connotations may have more general applicability. A colleague recounted to me how a manuscript reviewer pointed out her tendency to use the term socialismin positive contexts and communism in negative ones. She had been unaware of even using two separate terms. 32. Another reason for holding on to the term socialism was that the Soviet Union wanted a monopoly on defining this term.

356

Slavic Review

take the self-appellations of countries seriously. Nobody pretends that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a democracy. In reference to the name "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis famously remarked, "Four words, four lies."33 By contrast, we sometimes use terms that regimes do not use. For example, political scientists have recently argued that "sultanism" is a distinct regime type, though no regime actually calls itself " ~ u l t a n i s t . The "~~ same can be said for the designation "state socialist,"which was never used in the region to which it is meant to apply.35

Conceptual Stretching In naming political systems, we try to choose a term that designates the regime in question but does not confuse it with other regimes. By this standard, calling the former members of the "second world" socialist or state socialist falls short. On the one hand, it attempts to merge two distinct regime types under a single heading. On the other, it turns a useful designation into an empty category. The first problem with using the term socialism to refer to eastern Europe is that it stretches the term socialism to the point of meaninglessness. This usage forces socialism to do double duty to denote both a revolutionary dictatorship and an evolutionary democratic regime. Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev called their countries socialist, but there is a venerable tradition of socialism that shares almost nothing with the regimes that celebrated October 1917.36 At the same time that the Russian communists claimed the mantle of both socialism and communism, another socialism,with a rather different philosophy and practice, started to gain hold in western Europe. Reformists like Eduard Bernstein challenged virtually all of Marx's central tenets including the idea of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the abolition of private property. Under their influence, western European socialism began to stand for democracy, civil rights, and a coming to terms with capitalism. Though these ideas were not immediately included in party platforms, they did guide the actions of socialist or social democratic parties in western Europe wherever they held a share of power. According to Anthony Wright, this liberal democratic socialism was "the dominant twentieth-century form of socialism in the W e ~ t . " ~ ' Though socialism has often been viewed as a halfway house between communism and capitalism, parties espousing it in Europe did develop their own distinctive ideology. As Sheri Berman writes, it was a "movement with 33. Quoted in Milan Kundera, The Art ofthe Novel (New York, 1993), 148-49. 34. H. E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regzms (Baltimore, 1998). 35. An even more deceptive term that was common in the region is people's

democracy.

36. This is true even excluding National Socialism or Nazism. 37. Anthony Wright, "Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism,"in Roger Eatwell and Anthony Wright, eds., ContemporaryPolitical Ideologzes (London, 1999), 81.

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

357

a coherence and logic all its own."38While embracing liberal democracy, these socialists looked for wavs to tame the free market. This movement and its philosophical underpinnings are "best understood not as an updated version of orthodox Marxism but as a fundamental rejection of its over ecomost important principle^."^^ Belief in the primacy of nomics and of morality rather than science as a basis for action definitively distinguished these socialists from their supposed counterparts in the Soviet Union. More to the point, they were among the most trenchant critics of c o m m u n i ~ r n . ~ ~ While the commitments of these reformist parties are often associated with the term social democracy, they arejust as frequently associated with socialism itself. France, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, and Spain all continue to support powerful socialist parties (cf. table 3) .41All of these parties have also faced competition from communist parties further to their left. As a democratic alternative to the Communist International, these socialist parties and others founded the still prospering Socialist international in 1951. Even today one of the two largest groupings of deputies in the European Parliament calls itself the Party of European socialist^.^^ And there is good reason to take these parties at their word when they call themselves socialist. They have far less cause to dissimulate than the ideologues of the former Soviet bloc. The crux of the matter is that the ideals and practices of these parties have virtually nothing in common with the eastern European regimes that called themselves s o ~ i a l i s tIf. ~socialism spans the spectrum from Stalin ~ to Fran~oisMitterrand, then it quickly falls victim to what the political scientist Giovanni Sartori has termed conceptual ~ t r e t c h i n gThat . ~ ~ is, there 38. Sheri Berman, "The Roots and Rationale of Social Democracy," Social Philosophy and Poliq 20, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 114. 39. Ibid. 40. Western European socialistswere among the earliest and bitterest critics of Soviet communism. AnimalFarm's author considered himself a socialist. On the other hand, Russian communists viewed the reformist socialism of the German SPD as their greatest enemy, and, for this reason, they made "organizational exclusivity" a key principle of the Comintern. Sympathizers with communism could not simultaneously hold membership in socialist or social democratic parties. As Archie Brown points out, "it was with good reason that Communist leaders and theoreticians regarded the democratic socialist parties of Western Europe as their most dangerous ideological enemies. It was very late in ihe Soviet era before reformist Communists in Russia as well as in Central Europe became part of a one-way, East-West convergence whereby they increasingly embraced a social democratic variant of socialism." Cf. Archie Brown, "The Study of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism," in Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown, eds., The British Study ofPolitics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 346. 41. Interestingly, leftist parties in countries speaking Romance languages tend to call themselves socialist, while those in Germanic countries prefer the term social democratic. 42. Founded in 1974 as the Confederation of Socialist Parties of the European Community, it was renamed the Party of European Socialists in 1992. 43. Theorists of party families almost unanimously place communist parties and socialist/social democratic parties in separate families. Cf. Peter Mair and Cas Mudde, "The Party Family and Its Study,"Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998): 221. 44. Giovanni Sartori, "Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics," American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (December 1970): 1033-53.

358

Slavic Review

Table 3

Names of Moderate Leftist Parties in Western Europe

Country

Main Leftist Party

Austria

Social Democratic Party of Austria (previously Socialist Party of Austria) Socialist Party Social Democratic Party (Socialist People's Party) Social Democratic Party of Finland Socialist Party Social Democratic Party of Germany Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement Social Democratic Party Labour Party Democrats of the Left (previously Italian Socialist Party) Labour Party Socialist Party Norwegian Labour Party Socialist Party (Social Democratic Party) Spanish Socialist Workers' Party Swedish Social Democratic Party Social Democratic Party of Switzerland Labour Party

--

Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Iceland Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom

is no model that includes all of these forms of socialism while distinguishing them from other social orders. The concept is simply stretched too thin. Consider first what the states of the former Soviet bloc have in common. Table 4 lists the elements in three popular definitions. Politically these states were ruled by a single mass party that placed severe restrictions on all forms of civil society and free expression. Economically, they were characterized by the almost complete prohibition of private ownership of the means of production and a high degree of central planning. Ideologically, they were committed to revolution and the massive transformation of existing society. Now if we turn to the various socialist parties of western Europe, we find none of this. All of these parties consistently supported (and support) multiparty democracy and civil liberties. Indeed, socialists have been at the forefront of the struggle for democracy around the ~ o r l d . ~ V econ nomics, their main commitment is not to creating a new man by expropriating the expropriators but to taming the excesses of the market through state intervention. They have also been stubbornly reformist and gradualist rather than revolutionary. They are interested in building socialism or a social market economy, not communism, and had little stake 45. Cf. Ruth Berins Collier, Paths toward Democraq: Wmking Class and Elites i n Western Europe and South America (New York, 1999).

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

Table 4

Characteristicsof Soviet-StyleRegimes

Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956)

Brown (1999)

Bunce (1999)

official ideology covering all vital aspects of a person's existence and containing a chiliastic claim single mass party led by one person

the supreme authority and unchallengeable hegemony of the Communist Party

ideological commitment to rapid transformation

a high degree of centralization and discipline within that organization state, or at any rate, nonprivate, ownership of the means of production the declared aim of building communism as the ultimate legitimizing goal a sense of belonging toand, in the Soviet case, of leading -an international Communist movement

fusion of politics and economics

system of terroristic police control monopoly of control of mass communication monopoly of control of all means of armed combat

domination by a single and highly penetrative party

central control and direction of entire economy Sources: Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 9-10; Archie Brown, "The Study of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism," in Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown, eds., The British Study of Politics i n the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 365- 66; Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 21-22.

in the Soviet experiment. Indeed, at the level of political philosophy, just as at the level of governance, the two socialisms diverge dramatically. Do these two forms of socialism share any commonalities? One might make a case that they share a general commitment to greater income equality and what Gersta Esping-Andersen calls decomm~dification.~~ Socialist parties also once emphasized nationalization of industry, though they never pushed it to the extremes of the communist^.^^ But beyond that the two socialisms share almost nothing. No overarching category of socialism can accommodate both systems. Such a category would be empty of any substantive content. It would contain only the vaguest of ideals and miss just about everything important about either regime it was meant to describe.48 46. Cf. G ~ s t aEsping-Andersen, The Three W d s of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990). 47. For a time, they agreed on state ownership of the means of production but differed radically on its extent and the means for carrying it out. Collectivizing agriculture and nationalizing small businesses and doing so through forcible expropriation has always been beyond the pale for western European socialists. 48. The emergence of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and 1980s suggests either that western European socialists had become too mainstream or that Soviet communists had become too extreme.

360

Slavic Review

The prefix state, as in state socialism, tries to remedy this, but it does not capture what made these regimes distinct from western socialism. It seems to suggest that the category of socialism encompasses a variety of regime types-a state form of socialism and another type.49But this other type is rarely defined and its commonalities with state socialism are left unspecified. It appears more sensible to take advantage of the empty category of communism. Indeed, the regimes of the former Soviet bloc were so distinctive-for example, in their virtual prohibition of private enterprise and thorough repression of civil society- that they seem to deserve a unique name. The result of this conceptual stretching of socialism is what might be called the conceptual emptylng of communism. And this is the second problem. If communism does not include the Soviet bloc, then it is not clear to what it refers. There are, of course, definitions of communism that do not correspond with Soviet practice, but they tend to be overly utopian. Few would take seriously Marx's vision of the end of alienation or the day when a person "can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner." Even more prosaic ideals such as the withering away of the state or to each according to need seem unattainable. While it might be helpful to have a term to describe a vision that captures these ideals and other more practicable ones, the need does not seem great. Indeed, the number of imaginable social orders is infinitely great and it is probably a hopeless task to name them all. One may object that communism, as theorized by Marx, is not a utopian dream, but that it simply has not been tried. In fact, communism has been tried several times at independent sites by people who appear to have sincerely believed in it. Though the Soviet Union cast a heavy shadow over these other attempts, communist parties took power and tried to build a communist society without external force in China, Yugoslavia, Albania, Cuba, and Vietnam, to mention only the noncontroversial cases. The regimes that were committed to communism were similar enough that they deserve a name to themselves. Notice what happens when we use the word socialist to refer to the former eastern bloc. We are first left with a concept emptied of all referents. Communism becomes an empty box to which no regime belongs, a mere storehouse of ideals. At the same time, we have a concept, socialism, that struggles to hold two distinct ideologies whose only commonalities are found in debates that took place over a century ago. Conceptual stretching in the one case leads to what might be called conceptual emptylng in the other.50 There is of course a reason why socialism came to refer to two different regimes and ideologies: both can be traced back to the Second Inter49. Other adjectives placed in front of socialism include utopian, scientzjic, revolutionary, evolutionary, actually existing, market, guild, a n d f a h a n . 50. The phenomenon of conceptual stretching leading to conceptual emptying may be more general. What David Collier and Steven Levitsky describe as the stretching of the term democracy seems to have impoverished our ability to distinguish types of authoritarian regimes. Collier and Levitsky, "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research," World Politics 49, no. 3 (April 1997): 430-51.

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

361

national and the writings of Marx. But, although these historical roots explain current usage, they do not justify it. Words frequently share a common root without sharing the same meaning. For the purposes of communication, we group together concepts that have shared meanings not shared histories. Western and eastern European socialisms shared almost no common meaning.51

Unintended Consequences The conceptual stretching of socialism creates two problems. The first is confusion for academics. Articles entitled "The Politics of Socialism" provoke uncertainty. They may be attempts to understand the regimes that once stood behind the Iron Curtain. But they may also deal with welfare states in western Europe and the success (or failure) of the Scandinavian model. The one seems as likely as the other.52 Janos Kornai's The Socialist System, for example, analyzes the old Soviet bloc, while Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks's It Didn't Happen Here: Why SocialismFailed i n the United States is clearly about a different socialism and a different country.53 Katherine hTerdery's W%at Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? focuses on Romania, but the subtitle of Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism tells us that he is interested in The WestEuropean Left i n the Twentieth Century. This is not to say that the subject matter of these books is confused. All of these authors clearly state what they intend to analyze. It is only to point out that the term socialism always forces readers into a double take. We can see this confusion in the difficulties scholars have had in defining socialism. Indeed, this is the reason I did not counterpose definitions of socialism to definitions of communism. Even dictionaries and encyclopedias, usually paragons of concision, throw up their hands at socialism. Encyclopedia entries suggest that it has grown to mean everything and therefore nothing.54 51. Paul Thomas writes, "Both authoritarian communism and democratic socialism laid claim to a lineage deriving from Marx; but they had little else in common." Cf. Thomas, "Socialism,"in Smelser and Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia ofthe Social and Behavioral Sciences, 14486. 52. Kornai seems to be aware of this confusion. He gives his The Socialist System the subtitle ThePoliticalEconomy of Communism "for the sake of easier perception by those who have not yet read the book." Kornai, The Socialist System, 10. 53. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, ZtDidn't Happen Here: Why SocialismFaikd in the United States (New York, 2000). 54. Poland's former Minister of Finance Leszek Balcerowicz points to a "tendency towards an almost unlimited expansion of the concept of socialism" even in the Comecon countries. His explanation is that "facing, on the one hand, a grave crisis in their countries but unwilling, on the other hand, to openly admit the failure of this ideology, some of these parties have been proposing radical changes, while claiming that they represent modifications of their (fundamentally unchanged) concept of socialism. This is probably meant to convey the impression that there was nothing basically wrong with official doctrine from the very beginning." He also notes that reform economists in the region turned to the same tactic in an attempt "to neutralize ideological attacks" against their proposed reforms and "provide some face-saving for the authorities." Cf. Leszek Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation (Budapest, 1995), 20-21.

362

Slavic Review

Blackwell's Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, for example, notes that there is "disagreement amongst both academic commentators and political supporters and opponents over the identity and existence of 'essential' elements" of socialism." Encyclqbaedia Britannica likewise points out that "the different forms that socialism actually has taken vary dramatically. Socialism can be either statist or libertarian, Marxist or 'liberal,' revolutionary or gradualist, cosmopolitan or internati~nalist."~~ Far more important than this academic confusion are the political consequences of using socialism to describe the old regimes in eastern Europe. Such usage saddles democratic socialists in western Europe with unenviable comrades-in-arms. It is hard to take the democratic left seriously when it is put in the same camp as the former dictators of eastern Europe. Indeed, advocates of neoliberalism may pursue just such a strategy in painting a picture of an all-embracing socialism with all the ugly implications that entails.57 This seems to be Friedrich Hayek's attitude when he dedicates his Road to Serfdom "To socialists of all parties."58In his recent book, Heaven on Earth: The Rzse and Fall of Socialism, Joshua Muravchik takes the same app r o a ~ hMuravchik .~~ follows the history of socialism through fourteen individuals who range from Vladimir Lenin to Clement Attlee and Tony Blair. Such branding is also apparent in the Czech Republic where the main right-wing party consistently refers to the governing Social Democrats as S o ~ i a l i s t sThey . ~ ~ are clearly playing on the fears of voters who lived under a system that called itself socialist. And similar fears may explain why Austria's Socialist Party recently renamed itself the Social Democratic Party. 55. "Socialism," in Miller, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia ofPolitica1 Thcrught, 485. 56. Britannica defines socialism as "a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control." However, it goes on to say, "There are many different forms of socialism, depending on what is meant by 'social control' and on the extent to which, as well as by whom, this control is exercised over civil society." The same of course could be said for any -ism; fill in the blanks correctly and you get any regime you wish. The definition concludes with the following sentence: "The adoption of some national welfare ideas by strenuously nonsocialist systems such as the United States testified to both the strength of many socialist ideals and the protean adaptability of many socialist practices that made socialism itself so difficult to define." "Socialism,"Enqclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1991), 10:926. 37. We should remember that it was not long ago that how a regime was labeled influenced foreign policy. This happened most famously with Jeane Kirkpatrick's distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Though this is no longer the case today, the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic seems to have this potential. The lesson here is that such distinctions need to be backed up by careful empirical analysis. Cf. Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary (November 1979). 58. Friedrich von Hayek, Road to Serjdom (Chicago, 1994). 59. Joshua Muravchik, H e a u a on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco, 2002). 60. The new Czech president, Wclav Klaus, recently proclaimed that he is not an anticommunist because in his view most anticommunists are socialists who believe in the same ideals as communists. Cf. \'aclav Klaus, 'V5clav Klaus o komunismu," LidouB Noviny, 26 April 2003.

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

363

The negative effects may show up in other ways as well. Stephen Crowley argues that Russian miners have been caught in a rhetorical no-man's land, forced by Soviet ideology into a Manichean worldview that admits only capitalism and communism (or socialism in their terms), but nothing in between. For Crowley, this explains why Russian miners jumped from one extreme (support for the free market) to the other (support for the Communist Party) without settling for a compromise position like social d e m ~ c r a c yCreating .~~ a category that includes all of the left regardless of the means and ends it advocates impoverishes political debate and political action ~onsiderably.~"

Reform Communists and Anticommunists I can imagine a number of objections to referring to the Soviet bloc as communist. First, readers may object that, in comparing the two socialisms, I am confusing reality and intention. Communist parties in eastern Europe had already created socialism (at least in their own minds), while socialist parties in western Europe were trying to achieve socialism (or more recently a social market economy) .63 Nevertheless, even if socialists in western Europe had carte blanche to create the sort of society they wished for, it would certainly have little in common with really existing socialism. Consider the German SPD. Like other western European socialist parties, they retained a strong Marxist component in their party platforms through M'orld War 11. Yet, when they governed, their policies had little in common with either the revolution Marx envisioned or the one taking place to the east. Bad Godesberg-the party congress in 1959 where the SPD finally gave up its programmatic Marxist commitments-was significant, not because it changed the way they governed (Social Democrats had ruled the country several times before then without any moves toward a Soviet-type system), but because it brought their rhetoric in line with their governing cornmitrnent~.~~ One could make a case that, as far as regime type goes, the usage I recommend makes socialism an empty category since there are no selfproclaimed western European socialist regimes. Yet a socialist or social democratic regime type that combines liberal democracy with a high degree of state intervention in the economy does exist, although it is difficult to define. Sweden might be the ideal type here. Even if such a regime does not exist, it has long been a very real goal of democratic social61. Stephen Crowley, Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workersfrom theEnd o j the Soukt Union to the Post-Communist Transformations (Ann Arbor, 1997). 62. The same of course applies to the tendency to equate conservatism with fascism. 63. Even parties calling themselves social democratic (e.g., the German SPD) have traditionally seen themselves as pursuing socialism. 64. There is perhaps a general rule that party platforms are stickier than actual governing practices. Clause IV of the British Labour Partv Constitution calling for "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchangen was giminated only in 1995.

364

Slavic Review

ists. More to the point, the parties these socialists formed have played a vital role in political developments throughout Europe. Others may argue that communism still represents a worthy ideal that was perverted by the Soviet Union and should be protected from that taint. Without detailing the enormous practical difficulties preventing the realization of any communism, I would simply note that the same argument applies to any number of worthy ideals. Certainly many democracies, including the most advanced, do not live up to democratic ideals.'j5 Yet, it seems overly idealistic to reserve the term democracy only for a future state that did live up to these ideals. As noted earlier, the use of the terms socialism and state socialism has become more common over time. Political scientists began using the term state socialist in the early 1970s. One of the reasons for this is that these regimes actually changed over time. The terror of the early years receded, replaced by more routinized forms of social control. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars found it increasingly possible to do field research in the region. On these research trips, western visitors saw regimes that did not completely correspond to the traditional definitions of totalitarianism laid out in classic works by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski or Hannah Arendt.'j6 One of the results was that they came up with a new designation, state so~ialism.~' Whether these states had mutated into a different type of regime, however, is another question.'j8 I would argue that in most cases-Poland and perhaps Hungary are the exceptions-they had Violence diminished mainly because the regimes no longer needed it. Compliance had become largely automatic and all alternative sources of power had been wiped out. The monopoly on power and the prohibition against all nonofficial forms of social organization, however, remained. Whether the focus is on their economies, politics, or societies, it is easy to distinguish 65. The political scientist Robert Dahl invented the term polyarchy to refer to these polities for just this reason. Cf. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, 1971). 66. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Automaq (Cambridge, Mass., 1956);Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951). 67. The first book I could find with "state socialism" in the title is David Lane's The End of Inequality? Stratification under State Socialism (Hammondsworth, 1971). Interestingly, the term does appear earlier (even in the nineteenth century), but in reference to states as diverse as the Confederate States of America, Bismarck's Germany, and interwar Britain. I have not seen an explanation of its origins with respect to eastern Europe. Valerie Bunce, however, notes that the term state socialism traditionally refers to all the nations of eastern Europe except Yugoslavia, which should instead be called "socialist."Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 165nl. 68. Even if they had changed significantly, this is not reflected in academic nomenclature. Few scholars talk of a regime transition during the forty years of communist party rule in eastern Europe and fewer still use separate terms for the period before and after the transition. 69. In any case the new regimes did not come to resemble western European socialism. They remained dictatorships that restricted private enterprise.

The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology

365

these regimes from others.'O In cautioning against comparisons between eastern Europe and Latin America, Valerie Bunce notes that "state socialism was different along virtualIy every dimension that political scientists regard as important."'l Other scholars may have chosen a form of the term socialism because they feared the political connotations of communism. During the Cold War and even before, communism was so mixed up with government propaganda that some scholars may have turned to the less emotionally charged socialism.72Social scientists in fact are known to avoid terms that get heavy play in the media and to invent new terms whose meanings they can control more precisely. In political science, references to public opinion or individual preferences have become more common than references to ideology. Yet as important as scholarly detachment is, it needs to be balanced against the unintended consequences mentioned above. The danger today is less that left-wing ideas will be dismissed as communist than that they will be dismissed as socialist and that socialism will retain some of the blemish of the Soviet experiment. After all, the specter of communism has disappeared, while that of socialism remains alive. My final point concerns my definition of regimes. I have characterized Soviet-style regimes according to their political and economic system (and to a lesser extent their ideology). It may be argued that one should differentiate among these aspects. That is, communism should refer solely to the economic system in these countries, while a separate termperhaps Leninist-should be used to describe their political formula. Indeed, certain regimes, especially the Kuomintang in its early stages, seem to borrow from the Soviet style of governing without sharing its commitment to a state-run economy. I do not object to this usage. I would point out, however, that while the political system of the Soviet Union may be separable and transferable to other countries, the same does not apply to the economic system. It appears that in order to function, a communist economic system requires a Leninist political system.73This would explain the fusion between politics and economics noted by most observers of these countries. It also justifies characterizing these regimes in terms of both their political and their economic components. My aim in this article is modest: to start a discussion on the way we label the regimes of the former Soviet bloc and its fellow travelers. My im70. This is not to say that all communist regimes were exactly alike (excellent work on the variations among these countries abounds). The argument here is simply that it is easy to distinguish communist dictatorships from other forms of authoritarianism. Poland was clearly not Peru and Czechoslovakia was obviously not Chad. 71. Valerie Bunce, "Should Transitologists Be Grounded?" Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 119. 72. This does not, however, correspond to the quantitative analysis presented above. 73. Thinkers as diverse as Janos Kornai and Friedrich Hayek have made this argumen t.

366

Slavic Review

pression is that many scholars use the terms communism, socialism, and state socialism instinctively, without deeper reflection. Indeed, despite divergent usage, I have noticed few polemics (or even directions) on the proper use of these words. My recommendation is that scholars of formerly communist countries refrain from referring to them as socialist or state socialist. Such usage stretches the concept of socialism too thin, turns communism into an empty category, and has negative consequences for existing democratic socialists. I should note the limits of my argument. I have done no more than suggest how to refer to the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Because these countries share a number of unique characteristics, I believe they should carry a unique label. Communism appears to be the best candidate for this label. Defining the concept of socialism and the large number of parties, movements, and philosophies that constitute socialism is beyond the scope of this essay and of my expertise. In fact, referring to western European socialism may also be a case of conceptual ~ t r e t c h i n g . ~ ~ My preference, however, would be to keep the term socialism distinct from the regimes that I prefer to call communist.75 Though communism is on the decline around the world, there are still reasons to be careful in our discussions of it.i6 It is no coincidence that the decline and fall of communist regimes occurred around the same time as the birth of the neoliberal orthodoxy. Explicit or implicit association with the Soviet Union discredited many plans for greater redistribution of wealth. This is not to say there are not powerful arguments for free market policies. But we should distinguish these arguments from those that proceed through guilt by association. Reasoned debate, not to mention efficient scholarly communication, requires that we distinguish the unique regimes of eastern Europe from other regime types. More self-conscious labeling of regime types may help us to accomplish this. Words do matter both in politics and in scholarship. 74. Excluding communist regimes from the purview of socialism would significantly assist in defining this regime type. 75. The political scientist Sheri Berman has been working on a better set of conceptualizations of the vast area between communism and capitalism. Cf. Sheri Berman, "Rediscovering Social Democracy," Dissent (Fall 2000). I would argue that socialist should be used to describe regimes and parties that try to give the state greater control over the economy-for example, through nationalization, planning, safety nets-but do so without a monopoly party, without forced mobilization of citizens, without prohibition of private ownership, and without impinging on civil rights and political liberties. Socialists are committed to social and economicjustice and to achieving these goals through legal, democratic means. This definition, however, is far from watertight. Valkry Giscard d'Estaing believed that countries became socialist when they passed a certain threshold of public spending. 76. W7ith market reforms in China and Cuba (North Korea remains a holdout), we are seeing an actual, rather than a conceptual, emptying of communism. Like feudalism, the term, however, retains historical meaning.

http://www.jstor.org

LINKED CITATIONS - Page 1 of 1 -

You have printed the following article: The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology Andrew Roberts Slavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2. (Summer, 2004), pp. 349-366. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779%28200422%2963%3A2%3C349%3ATSOSAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.

[Footnotes] 25

Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology Alfred B. Evans, Jr. Soviet Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3. (Jul., 1977), pp. 409-428. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859%28197707%2929%3A3%3C409%3ADSISI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R 25

The Decline of Developed Socialism? Some Trends in Recent Soviet Ideology Alfred Evans, Jr. Soviet Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1. (Jan., 1986), pp. 1-23. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859%28198601%2938%3A1%3C1%3ATDODSS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6 44

Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics Giovanni Sartori The American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 4. (Dec., 1970), pp. 1033-1053. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0554%28197012%2964%3A4%3C1033%3ACMICP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A 71

Should Transitologists Be Grounded? Valerie Bunce Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 1. (Spring, 1995), pp. 111-127. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779%28199521%2954%3A1%3C111%3ASTBG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.