However, all of this might be thrown out of kilter by either of two rogue global crises, nuclear war or escalating climate change, the first of these the result of a causal chain emanating from outside of capitalism, the second of a causal chain bigger than capitalism. Either of these might provide the end, not only of capitalism but also of human civilization. The insects would inherit the earth. But finally, in all these affairs nothing lasts forever and policy decisions matter considerably. Humanity is in principle free to choose between better or worse future scenarios—and so ultimately the future is unpredictable. We sometimes act rationally, though usually only with short-term time horizons, and we sometimes act emotionally, ideologically and irrationally. That is ultimately why we cannot predict the future of either capitalism or the world.
4
WHAT COMMUNISM WAS
Georgi Derluguian
There are obvious reasons for discussing communist states in a book debating the possible demise of capitalist markets. Communism still comes to many minds as the prime alternative to capitalism, along with its dreadful images of endless smokestacks, shortages, personality cults, and purges. There are less obvious reasons, too. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was taken for granted after the fact because communism now seemed to almost everyone patently inefficient and oppressive. Yet in the fifties and sixties prevalent opinions admired/dreaded the extraordinary military and scientific prowess of the U.S.S.R. and even many experts considered its nationality questions solved. During the heady years of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the 1980s, many people also, both in the East and West, seemed ready to embrace the humanistic goodness dawning from Moscow. Today the Chinese market miracle is hailed as capitalism’s biggest success and hope for the future, disregarding the oddity of many Chinese entrepreneurs still carrying their Party cards. This fact questions the common cliché that communism has ended in collapse.
The Soviet Union, however, did collapse. Toward the end, it became an advanced industrial society ruled by essentially a corporate oligarchy. Perhaps this allows us to posit on more empirical grounds the question of what the collapse of advanced Western capitalism might look like. Specifically, could a hypothetical anticapitalist revolution follow the classic pattern of 1917, or might it rather resemble the civic mobilizations of 1989? Which brings us to the special reason for considering the Soviet Union in this book. Two of its authors, the same Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins who now predict the end of capitalism, are on record as having predicted, still back in the 1970s and from different theories, the passing of communism in Russia.
Hence my confession: in 1987 I had no authorization from the KGB residentura at our embassy in the People’s Republic of Mozambique to meet the US citizen Immanuel Wallerstein. Waiting under the old jacaranda outside Maputo’s Hotel Polana felt like stepping into a Graham Greene spy noveclass="underline" a young Soviet officer secretly meeting with a famous Western academic in an African country torn by Cold War proxy conflict. The intellectual curiosity driving me into this mad risk could be fully appreciated perhaps only by those who knew the excitement of touching a banned book. The Soviet censors regarded Wallerstein’s Neo-Marxian theory as, of course, heresy. Sensing my unease, Wallerstein graciously predicted: Relax, your generation of Soviets will be soon freely traveling around the world, though I am less sure this will make you much happier. At my incredulous look, he added with a smile: What makes you expect that there will be a military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, let us say safely, on the 7 of November 2017, the hundredth anniversary of an event which by then you might not even know what to call? The word crossing my mind at that prophetic moment was admittedly a cruder Russian equivalent of Preposterous!
Preposterous was also the main reaction of the audience at Columbia University’s venerable Russian Institute after the presentation delivered by Randall Collins in spring 1980. The outsider sociologist calmly told the gathering of Sovietologists that, according to his mathematical model, the dark object of their professional interests would disappear in their lifetime. America was still reeling from Vietnam, economic stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the presidency on the claim that the United States had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union in nuclear armaments and needed a massive arms buildup to contain the communist menace around the globe. And here was Randall Collins, himself son of a career American diplomat, suggesting nuclear disarmament and the continuation of détente. The benign recommendation, however, did not arise from a merely idealistic pacifism. It derived from the geopolitical theory first advanced by Max Weber.[1]
In the Weberian model devised by Randall Collins the U.S.S.R. came out surprisingly negative on all five parameters of geopolitical might. The critical unknown remained in seeing what pattern the Soviet decline would follow. Contrary to the contemporary mood, the same model showed that America in the 1980s was not yet facing geopolitical decline. Therefore the single highest priority for the world and American security was in avoiding a nuclear war with the declining Soviets. The historical precedents of many empires from the past suggested that disintegration from geopolitical overextension typically arrived very suddenly after a period of protracted confrontations gradually reducing the number of belligerents to just two big rivals and their satellites. The structurally weaker empire would then disappear either in an outburst of internal unrest led by separatist governors and weary generals, or in a showdown war fought at unprecedented levels of ferociousness, like Rome versus Carthage.
In all fairness, the Sovietologists had reasons to feel scandalized. Collins drew his empirical evidence from historical atlases of ancient and medieval empires. The geopolitical theory could say little about the latest developments in Poland, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, or Brezhnev’s health. Moreover, the prediction of Soviet collapse came with an extremely vague date, some time in the coming decades. Macrosociological predictions tend to be very general. They can only identify the directions of structural drift and roughly estimate their pace. It is doubtful that anyone could do better in the longer run. In fact, the predictions of Sovietology proved worse even in the shorter run.
How do the old predictions of Collins and Wallerstein relate to what we now know about the Soviet trajectory? The present debate on the prospects of capitalism calls for clarity regarding what actually was its communist alternative. But our object is heavily shrouded in ideological polemics. I suggest that a more meaningful way of explaining the rise and demise of communism is by placing it in a larger macrohistorical perspective.
THE RUSSIAN GEOPOLITICAL PLATFORM
The original communist breakthrough achieved on the ruins of Russian empire was an improbable historical contingency. It was, however, no more improbable than the original breakthrough of capitalism in the West or, for that matter, any consequential mutation in the organization of social power. This does not mean that the Bolshevik revolution was a freak event. Historical contingency typically is the human realization of the not yet evident structural opportunities emerging in moments of crisis when previous constraints are breaking down. Creativity and visionary energy—just like blindness to opportunity and failure of leadership—are all the results of human action on the emergent structural possibilities and constraints. The alternatives seem improbable to anyone except, of course, those who will be proclaimed visionaries in hindsight. What such visionaries actually do is discover new possibilities in the course of action and thus turn the possibilities real. Far from all possibilities, however, become reality. The Bolshevik uprising in 1917 closed the small possibility of Russia becoming a liberal democracy. It also closed the much greater possibility of Russia going fascist at the time. Lenin and his small band of comrades obviously mattered a lot in changing the trajectories of Russia and the whole world after 1917. But causality runs in the opposite direction, too. It no less mattered that communist revolutionaries first took over a country like Russia rather than, say, Italy, Mexico, or even China.
1
The episode is related in Randall Collins, “Prediction in Macrosociology: The Case of the Soviet Collapse,”