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p Roger Garaudy is one of the authors who has lent to the term ’model of socialism’ a revisionist and in fact an anti-Marxist meaning. He is one of the creators of the rightist revisionist ’new model of socialism’ which has been widely publicized in the West in the last few years. Only the authors of the notorious document signed by seventy six Czechoslovak philosophers and sociologists (many of whom later withdrew their signatures), published under the thunderous title ’For a New Czechoslovak Model of Socialism’ in ’Rude Pravo’, the organ of the CSCP, on July 10, 11 and 12, 1968, could vie in this respect for the first place with Garaudy. There is no difference in principle between the conceptions of the Czechoslovak revisionists and those of Garaudy. In Garaudy there is only an attempt at greater theoretical argumentation. That is why we shall first of all discuss the views developed by Garaudy.

p In 1966 Garaudy’s book ’Le Marxisme du XX siecle’ appeared. At that time he had not yet conclusively deviated from Marxism-Leninism and from proletarian internationalism, although he was distorting the nature of the socialist system built up in the Soviet Union. In this book Garaudy writes that ’the development of socialism under different geographical and historical conditions and in more continents has led to the idea of a plurality of ‘models’ (116, p. 39). He does not explain in detail what he means by different models of socialism, but it can be understood from the context that it is a question of the appearance of social models differing in principle from what he presents to us as ’a Soviet model of socialism’.

p Garaudy completes his deviation from MarxismLeninism in his book ’Le grand tournant du socialisme’ in which his anti-Marxist ideas about the models of socialism manifest themselves in a perfected form. At a number of places Garaudy speaks in general about ’different models’, and about many models ot socialism. He enumerates a ’Soviet, a Chinese, a 169 Yugoslav, as well as Czechoslovak model of socialism from the time of the Prague spring’ (115, p. 282). In fact, however, in his book he examines two models of socialism in greater detail. One is the ’Soviet model’ which he, now in unison with the outspoken rightist revisionists from the Zagreb magazine ‘Praxis’ and in unison with the anti-communists from ’Problems of Communism’, calls ’an etatist, centralized model’; and the other is the ’new model’ which Garaudy counterposes to the Soviet model, calling it ’a model based on self-government’, (p. 180).

p While in his earlier works Garaudy had still paid attention to the general features and laws typical of the socialist society, this time he seeks and finds only profound differences in principle between the two basic ‘models’ of the socialist society presented by him. This becomes most obvious in the manner in which he defines the socio-economic structure and political superstructure of these two ‘models’.

p ’In the Soviet model of socialism a typical feature is the identical treatment of public ownership of the means of production and state ownership’, Garaudy declares (115, p. 173). In this ’etatist, centralized model’ the needs of society are determined from ‘above’, with centralized directives of the Party and state (p. 178).

p This statement contains obvious untruths. Here Garaudy ‘forgets’ and distorts elementary, well-known facts, to lend an acceptable appearance to the false scheme of his ’Soviet model of socialism’.

p In the Soviet Union and in all other socialist countries there exist two main types of public ownership: all-people’s (state) and group (cooperative) ownership. The determining and more important type is all- people’s, i.e. state ownership. However, the law-governed predominance of all-people’s ownership under socialism does not mean that the centralized state power governs all state enterprises directly and distributes the newly created (surplus) value. A substantial portion of the means of production and of the public services, such as local industries, retail trade, public catering, health services, etc. are managed by the local bodies of state 170 power. Moreover, some managerial rights over the enterprises which are owned by all the people, including the right to transfer part of the newly-created value, are given over to the work forces in the enterprises.

p In the Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries, side by side with all-people’s ownership, group cooperative ownership of the means of production has also become wide-spread. The kolkhozes in the USSR, the cooperative farms in Bulgaria and cooperative farms in general under the conditions of socialism are based precisely on group ownership and on a corresponding form of distributing the newly createcfvalue among the members of the cooperatives.

p Garaudy makes another untrue assertion that the needs of society in the Soviet Union (and the other socialist countries with an economic structure of the same type) are determined only from ‘above’, i.e. oy the state and the Party. When applying the principle of democratic centralism in the USSR and the other socialist countries with central planning of their economy, the initiatives and opinions of the working people are summed up and the decisions on questions of economic management are taken at all levels—beginning from the labour forces and going up to the central bodies of state power (the parliaments) the government ( councils of ministers) and the central managements of the various public organizations, the most important role among which is assigned to the Party and the trade unions.

p Garaudy’s distorted interpretation of the socio- economic reality in the USSR and the other socialist countries reaches its zenith when he declares that government in those countries has turned into a monopoly profession, the special occupation of a special social group. The ‘monopoly’ of this social group was expressed in the fact that it and it alone took the political decisions—it being understood from the context that this takes place without the consent and against the interests of the working people, and that this group had the ’monopoly of using the surplus value’ (115, p. 174, 175).

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p In this instance, Garaudy in fact repeats in somewhat attenuated form the old slanders of the Trotskyites from the 20s and 30s and those of the contemporary Maoists that capitalism was being restored in the USSR and that the ’ruling bureaucracy’ was an exploiter and oppressor of the working people. Having become aware, perhaps, of going too far, he tries to attenuate the impression and makes the reservation that the ’ ruling bureaucracy’ in the Soviet Union and the socialist countries standing close to it, was not a special class, because it did not own the means of production and its privileged position in society was not hereditary. In spite of this nuance, the main accusation of the Trotskyites, Maoists and Garaudy is the same: that in the Soviet Union and in the other CMEA member-states there exists oppression and exploitation of the working people by a limited social stratum, by the ’ruling bureaucracy’. And to make the slander complete, imitating the name which Marxists give to the most reactionary top crust of the capitalist class in the imperialist countries—the military and industrial complex—Garaudy calls the leadership of the USSR ’a military and bureaucratic complex’, which leads to ’reactionary Bonapartism and dictatorship of the army’. (115, p. 105, 171).

p Then it comes out that what Garaudy presents to us as an ’etatist model of socialism’ cannot in fact be a model of a socialist society, because socialism is quite as incompatible with exploitation as it is with the oppression of the working people. These are all slanderous concoctions brewed by Garaudy, and nothing more.

p Let us also note here the following. Before finally taking his ’great turn’ from Marxism to revisionism, Garaudy also maintained that the Soviet structure and the people’s democratic structure were two similar forms or two kindred models of a socialist society, in which the basic laws and features of scientific socialism were incarnated. Now we see that for him the people’s democratic form or model has completely 172 disappeared and the social system ot people’s democracy is thoroughly identified with the Soviet system.

p Garaudy has done this quite consciously. Because now he criticises and rejects the basic features and laws of socialism in general, and those of the theoretical model of socialism which Marx, Engels and Lenin based on science. And in this respect it is true that the Soviet model and the people’s democratic model are identical and there is no difference between them.

p What has been said above will become still clearer when we see what is represented by the ’new model of socialism’ which Garaudy counterposes to the society actually built in the USSR, or that which is under construction in the other countries from the socialist community.

p In his theorizings about ’new models’, Garaudy breaks entirely with the Marxist-Leninist teaching concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact he denies the role of the socialist state in the overall government of society and, above all, the most important economic and organizing function of the socialist state.

p ’It does not follow at all from the revolutionary role of the proletarian state that this state should become a ruling state’, Garaudy declares and then proceeds to elucidate his thought further. The revolutionary role of proletarian dictatorship as regards ownership consists, firstly, in abolishing private ownership and establishing public ownership over the means of production and, secondly, in elaborating the ’rules of the game’, which will prevent the restoration of private ownership over the means of production in one form or another. However, the socialist state ought not to assume the management of the economy, except in the initial period after the seizure of power (115, p. 173).

p According to Garaudy, the main role in economic management in the socialist society should be played by the work forces in the enterprises. That is why he also calls his ’new model’ a ’model based on self- government (115, p. 180). And unlike the ‘etatist’ model, in the ’new model’ of a socialist society Garaudy maintains 173 that the needs of society should be determined not from ‘above’, by centralized directives of the Party and the state, but by the mechanisms of the market and the demand which manifests itself on it (115, p. 178).

p The main features, therefore, which distinguish Garaudy’s ’new model’ from the Soviet ’etatist model’ of socialism which he rejects, are revealed in the following two elements:

p Firstly, although Garaudy says that he recognizes state ownership as one of the forms of public ownership over the means of production (p. 175, 176), in fact in his model this form is emptied of all content. The management of production is taken from the hands of the state and is vested mainly in the hands of the working people in the enterprises.

p Secondly, in Garaudy’s ’new model’, that which constitutes the very essence of the management of a socialist economy,is rejected: conscious planned development, implemented on the basis of an integrated state plan. Instead of this, he.recommends that the economy should be managed by the ’mechanisms of the market and the demand which manifests itself on it’. In this way, as we have already said, Garaudy wishes to reduce the role of the socialist state in the national economy more or less to an organ watching over the observance of the ’rules of the game’ by the rival enterprises on the market, an organ to prevent the restoration of private ownership over the means of production.

p Garaudy himself feels that the management of the enterprises by the work forces, with the market as regulator, upon which he in fact mainly relies in his ‘model’ of a socialist society, is far from a sufficient mechanism of economic management in an economically, scientifically and technologically highly developed socialist country. And he tries to find a way out of the difficult situation. Making a virtue of necessity, Garaudy recognizes a certain economic role to the socialist state, but restricts it to policies of taxation and economic stimulation through credits (115, p. 220).

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p ‘Market socialism’ has proved to be a ‘model’ which has united therightist revisionists with the pluralizers of Marxism from the anti-communist camp. It is indicative in this respect that the theoretical model itself of ’market socialism’ is in fact the creation of the bourgeois ideologists. As Schumpeter points out, the originators of the conception of ’market socialism’ were the bourgeois economists A.Lerner, A.Bergson and others (160, p. 986-987).

p The hopes which the bourgeois ideologists pin on the part played by the market in pluralizing socialist society has been very well expressed by Riidiger Altmann: ’Even the bolshevik society, if it develops and its economy becomes increasingly a market economy, will assume a pluralist character’, he writes (86, S. 19). It is important to bear in mind that Altmann himself belongs to the ‘anti-pluralistis’ when it is a question of modern capitalist society. He recommends, however, that socialist society should develop towards a market economy and ‘pluralism’. Why this is so, we can learn from another modern bourgeois anti-pluralist, Goets Briefs. He warns the bourgeois ideologists that ’pluralism proves a threat to the unity of society, and to the stability of the state’. (119, c. 613). It turns out that this is precisely the reason why the bourgeois ideologists recommend it for the socialist state!

p The concept of ’market socialism’ found a very vivid formulation in the above-mentioned collective article in ’Rude Pravo’ in 1968, which was imbued with revisionism. The nucleus of its content is to give free rein to ‘contractors’, with a view to ’freeing the economy from the tutelage of the state’ and achieving ’a full development of commodity relations, unrestricted by the state and the state plan’. As we can see, this theory is a little further developed, but in its essence it is identical to Garaudy’s.

p Conscious, purposeful planning and management of the national economy on a nation-wide scale, a decisive element of which is the elaboration of the national economic plan based on a scientific forecasting of the real needs and taking into account the potentialities of 175 the society at a given stage, is the essential feature of the national economy in a socialist society. The market still plays an important but subordinate role in the socialist economy.

p In their attempt to reject centralized planning and management of the nation’s economy under socialism, the pluralists very often refer to the statements made by Karl Marx on the self-government of the working people. That is why we, too, shall quote an extremely important statement by Marx on the question. When forecasting the inevitable progressive consequences which will set in as a result of the nationalization of the means of production, he writes: ’Class differences and privileges will then disappear together with the economic base on which they rest. To live at the expense of another man’s labour will be a thing of the past. There will no longer be a government or a state, apart from society. Agriculture, mining and industry—in a word all branches of production—will gradually be organized in a most expedient way. The national centralization of the means of production will become the natural foundation of society, consisting of associations of free and equal producers, performing work for society under a common and rational plan’ (1 c. 57).

p A national centralization of the means of production and production on the basis of a common and rational plan—this is what Marx prognosticated 100 years ago for the future socialist society.

p Modern cybernetics and automation create great technical possibilities for the implementation of forecasting, planning and management of the national economy on a nation-wide scale on a still more solid scientific foundation, taking ever fuller account both of the real needs and of the objective possibilities in all fields of the economy and of social life. Instead of such a conscious and planned assessment of the real needs and potentialities of society within the framework of the whole state, the model of ’market socialism’ put forward by Garaudy and Sick proposes that the striving of the individual enterprise for profits and the 176 spontaneous demands of the market should become the main regulators of the economy. Moreover, this proposal is made at a time when even in modern capitalism free competition and the market are making ever wider room for the monopoly dictat of the gigantic capitalist associations, and when the regulative functions even of the bourgeois state have been increased.

p The ’market socialism’ of Garaudy and Sick is the ‘model’ which summarizes in a general way the rightist revisionist ideas concerning a socialist society. The ’Chinese model’, on the other hand—and it is a question here not of a sober analysis of the vacillations in the actual development of the Chinese People’s Republic,but mainly of the anti-Marxist positions contained in the writings of Mao Tse-tung and the Maoists —can be taken as an incarnation of the conceptions of the contemporary ‘leftist’ revisionists of the socialist system.

p In a collective work bearing the pretentious title ’ Introduction to Political Science’, declared to be the work of associates of the sociological institute and the Institute of Political Science at Marburg University in the Federal German Republic, in an article ’The Communist Model of Domination’ Hanno Drechsler upholds the view that today there are three models or systems of socialist construction: Soviet, Yugoslav and Chinese (106, S. 153-154). This work is full of slanders against the CPSU and the USSR in a spirit of primitive anti-communism.There it is said, for instance, that the CPSU not only did not ’avail itself of, but even sabotaged the revolutionary situations arising in different parts of the world during the period between the two world wars! As to the ‘models’, while the Yugoslav model is characterized by Drechsler as ’decentralized planning and economic management’, the ’Chinese model’ is presented as a ’defence of Stalinist theory and practice in home policy, at a time when the industrially developed Soviet Union has started to overcome it’.

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p Mao Tse-tung himself and the Maoists in general do not formally support the conception of pluralization of socialism. However, Mao’s revisionist conception that Marxism-Leninism has to assume a ’national form’ before it is applied in a given country—which is an extreme, nationalistic variety of pluralism—logically leads to the thesis of ‘models’ of socialism in a pluralist sense, which are radically different from each other. This cannot but be reflected in the camp of ‘leftist’ extremism. And indeed, the pluralist thesis of fundamentally differing ‘models’ of socialism, has of late been making headway among certain pro-Maoist representatives of leftist extremism.

p The efforts made in this direction by Rossana Rossanda, an active worker ot the anti-Soviet, proMaoist II Manifesto group, which was expelled from the ranks of the Italian Communist Party, deserve to be pointed out. In the French ‘leftist’ extremist magazine ’Les temps nouveaux’ R. Rossanda wrote a long article ’The Marxism of Mao’ in which she tried to explain that the conflict between the leading group in the Chinese Communist Party, headed by Mao Tse-tung and the International communist movement, headed by the CPSU, was the result of ’a difference in choice of models for socialist construction’ (154, p. 1202-12304).

p Rossanda tries to cover up the fact that the main reason for the dissident activity of the Maoist group in the international communist movement after 1956 was their resistance to the Leninist spirit of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and Mao Tse-tung’s fear that the criticism of subjectivism and of the personality cult might also spread to the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. As a reason for this dissident activity Rossanda gives the concocted consideration that Mao and his supporters had already realized that the main malady if the international communist movement was the ’Stalinist system of government’ and had declared themselves against it. On this basis they started elaborating a ’Chinese model’ of socialism.

p The ’Maoist model’ of socialism, according to Rossanda’s interpretation, combines the features of 178 rightist revisionist slander of socialism in the USSR as ’degenerated Stalinism’ with the main anti-Marxist leftist and reactionary-Utopian features of Maoism. Here again we see, as in the rightist revisionist ’ market model’, that what is presented to us as ’one of the models’ of socialist society, is in fact only a parody of the scientific theoretical model of socialism.

p Rossanda points out the following main distinguishing features of the ’Chinese model’ of socialism, which reveal its inimical attitude towards a number of basic laws of socialist society, as explained by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and which have proved their validity in the practice of all socialist countries: No coordination between rates of development and the level of the forces of material production; rejection of the principle of personal material incentives, for workers and other working people, based on the results of their labour; exaggeration of the role of moral incentives for work for the welfare of society. Voluntaristic disregard is thus displayed, for the objective laws of social development, and the role of the subjective factor, which is considered to be able to act even contrary to the ’natural trends of development’, is held to be absolute.

p In the Maoist ’model of socialism’ thus outlined by Rossanda, the most essential standpoints are reflected from the Maoist writings which are full of contradictions on what the socialist social system should represent.

p The constant convulsions of the Chinese People’s Republic since 1957, when Mao Tse-tung’s group deviated sharply from the unified line of the international communist movement, are an eloquent proof of the inconsistency of Maoist conceptions concerning socialist construction. Insofar as the crises which the Chinese People’s Republic has experienced since then have alternated with periods of relative progress, this has been due to the fact that during these periods the anti- scientific and voluntaristic ‘principles’ of the Maoist ‘model’ here enumerated have been abandoned in practice, and the fundamental principles of socialism have been 179 applied, especially the principle of personal incentives for the working people based on the results of their labour, and the principle of payment according to work done—a principle stigmatized by the Maoists as ’capitalistic’

p Rossanda presents the Utopian, idealistic and subjectivistic features of the Maoist ’model of socialism’ not as a deviation from Marxism, which they in fact are, but surrounded with a halo of romantic revolutionism and moral attractiveness. Thus, for instance, the unattained and unattainable principle of egalitarianism in the communes, which brought about a long and painful stagnation in the national economy of the Chinese People’s Republic, is presented by Rossanda as an ’endeavour to remove the material foundations of inequality’.

As we can see, both revisionist ‘models’ which are in principle counterposed to the ’Soviet model’ of socialist society by the rightist and ‘leftist’ revisionists, with the support of contemporary anti-communists—as well as the ’new model’ of Garaudy and 0. Sick and the ’Chinese model’ described by Rossanda—are in their content hostile to socialism.