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From International Socialism, No.47, April/May 1971, pp.33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Turning Point of Socialism
Roger Garaudy
Fontana 35p
‘The book that led to the expulsion of France’s leading Communist intellectual from the Central Committee and the Party’ it says dramatically on the front cover. I’m afraid this says more about the sad state of the French Communist Party than it does about the quality of Garaudy’s book. For, really, this is a boring book – physically difficult to read because of the sociologese in which it is written (or translated?) and frustrating because of its failure to come to grips with the problems that face members of modern Communist parties.
At the root of Garaudy’s argument is the belief that the second half of the twentieth century is the age of the new scientific and technological revolution.
‘A revolution in science has paved the way for a revolution by science. The former cause and effect relationship between the demands of production and scientific progress,’ Garaudy says, ‘is being reversed. Scientific progress becomes a motivational factor in the development of production which it precedes and leads on instead of following.’
For example, ‘Einstein’s theories anticipate the utilisation of nuclear energy.’ The result of this is the inversion of the relation between subject and object, between man and machine, described by Marx as the division of labour, opening up the prospect of the removal of the division between manual and mental work and the ultimate realisation of human potential.
The rationale of the new, scientific revolution demands diversified, democratic centres of initiative, management and administration. The centralised, bureaucratic states of the USA and the USSR are incapable of fulfilling this and thus result in increasing alienation. This argument seems similar to the contemporary ideas of ‘lateral thinking’ current in advanced capitalist circles. The conclusions Garaudy draws from his analysis of the new scientific revolution determine his view of the socialist model – a model (not, he says necessarily the practice) that he finds in the Yugoslav state. Garaudy poses the idea of the ‘historic bloc’ – a fusion of the manual working class and the alienated non-manual workers, scientists, technologist research workers – as the agents of social change. There seems little doubt in Garaudy’s mind that it will be the intellectual, non-manual worker who will provide the dynamic in this ‘historic bloc’.
This historic bloc of the working class and its technological allies is to act through the ‘traditional’ Communist Parties, inspired, Garaudy hopes, by a reformed USSR. Garaudy retains a certain naive faith in the Soviet Union, essential to one who survived the Stalinist era.
‘In 1956’, he writes, ‘after inflicting upon us, the old militants, the worst shock we had ever experienced the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR was able to raise the hope that such mistakes would not be made infuture, that no more such crimes would be perpetrated ... the 20th Congress was able to open op prospects of a new future after setting an example of self-criticism such as no party or state had ever provided before ... True the manner of that self-criticism was strange, having been made in camera and on the condition that fraternal parties should not divulge its terms.’
However as Garaudy firmly rejects the state-capitalist analysis of Russia, he is left with the dilemma of how to achieve reform of the Russian Communist Party. Here Garaudy returns to his opening theme.
‘If the Soviet Union wishes in future to avoid reverses such as it has already suffered in the field of cybernetics and lunar exploration, it must meet the growing demand inherent in the development of the new scientific and technological revolution: the demand for democracy at every level.’
‘Pressure from fraternal Communist Parties’, Garaudy adds, might help.
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Last updated on 9.2.2008