SOVIET VIEWS IN LIGHT OF THE NEW SOVIET THINKING

We found the Soviet focus on the "crisis of civilization" quite bewildering. We could understand how the impact of the sudden Soviet decline as a world power and internal political and economic chaos could elicit a sense of crisis and doom. We could have understood had they limited their concern with crisis to what was going on within the Soviet Union. But this generalized sense of the end of history and of crisis at the social and individual levels of analysis, this faith in the possibility of world cooperation and assumption that if only people could just work together these crises could be somehow resolved, we found unexpected in light of the serious problems facing the USSR at the time. It is not that they did not discuss Soviet internal affairs; they did, and they criticized the party and the limitations of a socialism gone wrong. But they did not engage in a dialogue with us and it was difficult for us to follow the logic of their thought. We found the notion that the market was the greatest achievement of world civilization amazing, to say the least, and their understanding of the world-system quite remote from what we expected in light of their intellectual formation in Marxist Leninist thought. It was incomprehensible that they did not directly address the questions we posed in concrete terms and preferred, instead, to talk in generalities about the crisis of civilization. For the Westerners, the world system was a capitalist system riddled with contradictions, divided between core, semi-periphery and periphery states; it was a world where global capital ruled over most states, reducing national sovereignty to an empty word. It was a politically divided world where the wealthy capitalist countries impose their terms on the rest and that rest includes now Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For the Soviets, the world was united by its vulnerability to the nuclear stockpiles of the superpowers and to the ecological consequences of uncontrolled industrialization and abuse of nature both in the West and the East. They assumed the possibility of cooperation between the capitalist countries and the formerly socialist countries and the USSR, and demonstrated a rather naive faith in the power of the United Nations to act towards the development of worldwide policies aimed to resolve this crisis of civilization.

In attempting to account for this way of thinking we thought that they might be attempting to increase their scholarly and political legitimacy by presenting a view of the world that disregarded the major tenets of historical materialism and, instead, seemed to emanate from the kind of rhetoric one is accustomed to hear from people involved in the peace and ecolocy movements in the West. Once I returned home, I decided to read more about these issues and sought Soviet sources in translation. It was after I read some articles and read also parts of Perestroika, by Mikhail Gorbachev, that I realized that we had been given the party line developed in the 27th Party Congress of the CPSU. In Gorbachev's words:

     Having adopted in the 27th Congress the concept of a contra-
     dictory, but interconnected, interdependent and, essentially
     integrated world, we begun to develop our foreign policy
     on that basis (Gorbachev, 1987: 16).  

In a rhetoric reminiscent of the "spaceship earth" metaphor, Gorbachev makes the following points:

The world is full of contradictions. There are important scientific and technological advances and the production of wealth in vast quantitities; at the same time there are grave problems related to the enormous poverty in which most of huma nity lives and the enormous environmental deterioration and waste of natural resources. We confront also the dangers of war given the massive amounts of armaments, especially nuclear weapons, at the disposal not only of the superpowers but of most countries as well.

The USSR asks for the development of international cooperation because we live in a world where our fates are interconnected. We all live in the same planet, we all use its natural resources (which are limited) and we need to respect nature and the environment. This is a reality that includes everyone. Hence the pressing necessity for international mechanisms and procedures that effectively and with fairness ensure the rational utilization of the planet's resources as property of humanity as a whole.

The West would like to keep scientific and technological advances for itself- instead, we argue that there must be an internationalization of relations in the areas of the economy, ecology and information. The role of the United Nations, in this respect, is more important than ever.

The nations of the world resemble mountain climbers tied by the same rope: they can together climb to the top of the mountain or fall together to their death. To avoid and prevent disaster, world leaders must work together leaving behind narrow interests.

It is not possible to live in a world of permanent confrontation and under the menace of war. The fundamental principle of our new political attitude is simple: nuclear war cannot be a means to atain political, economic, ideological or any other kind of objectives.

Marxists are convinced that state politics are always dictated by class interests. This tradition is leading the world to nuclear disaster. We are all, however, in the same boat. This is why the center of this new form of thinking is the recognition ofthe priority of human values or, to put it more precisely, the priority of the survival of all humanity. The development of nuclear weapons puts an objective limit to class confrontations in the international arena: the possibility of universal destruction. For the first time emerges a common interest which is neither speculative nor remote: the need to save humanity from disaster.

These considerations influenced the changes introduced in the 27th Party Congress: specifically, we consider that it is not possible any longer to define the pacific coexistence among states with different social systems as a specific form of the class struggle. Given the grave problems that afflict humanity, all states should cooperate setting aside their narrow interests. While the cold war mentality has not yet disappear, we insist in the need for cooperation and acknowledgement of the common problems humanity faces today (Gorbachev, 1987: 157-174).

Other Soviet scholars stress similar ideas in their writings about the contemporary world situation:

They stress the necessity for the development of new economic, political and sociological thinking, a renewed vision of the world rejecting old sereotypes. By these they mean Marxist theoretical and political ideas such as the qualitative differences between capitalism and socialism, the centrality of class struggles and the development of the forces of production as motors of change, and the intrinsec connection between market relations and relations of production. Instead, they identify universal laws of market based production that apply irrespective of political systems (i.e., the radical separation between political and economic spheres) and view capitalism as a variant of market based production rather than its highest expression.

Bipolarity and rivalry between systems are stereotypical ideas: opposing systems can coexist peacefully; peaceful competition is the main form of conflict between capitalism and socialism. The global problems of human civilization have created conditions for new thinking; we must address social issues, nationally and internationally, taking into account the unity of the present day world, the growing interdependence of its parts and the priority of global interests and needs of humanity as a whole.

     CONCLUSION
     Examining the differences between the views on the world

system expressed by Western and Soviet scholars in the symposium it is possible to detect the influence of the "new Soviet thinking" developed under guidelines set in the 27th Party Con-gress and discussed in some detail in Gorbachev's book, Peres-troika and, undoubtedly, in many other written works by him and other scholars and party members. From a Marxist theoretical standpoint, it is possible to identify the objective conditions that led to the development of this Soviet version of the "space-ship earth" approach to social, ecological, and political problems which is so common in the advanced capitalist countries among some sectors of the population and their professional strata. Some of these conditions have to do with qualitative changes in the organization of production and the globalization of the economy such that mae it impossible for the USSR to main-tain previous rates of economic growth and labor productivity. That the development of nuclear weapons threatens humanity's survival is unquestionably as important a determinant of the "spaceship earth" mentality as the ecological problems caused by unrestricted exploitation of natural resources and reckless dis-posal of toxic substances. Last, but not least, the inability of a centralized economy to deal with the complexity of a vast productive apparatus as that of the Soviet state has undoubtedly contributed to changes in the political goals of the leadership. Finally, this whole process can be better understood within the context of global changes in the production and circulation of capital, labor and commodities that, given the balance of power among states and their relative insertion in the world-system, have undermined, at least for the near future, single states attempts to "develop" (i.e., to attain fully developed capitalist or socialist institutions) in a relatively autarkic and nationalist fashion. The power of world capitalist relations has made such attempts unworkable at this time. On the other hand, the issue whether states cave in letting global capital determine their fate or, instead, they form regional organi-zations to protect their interests; the extent to which states insist on maintaining a safety net for workers or expect a trickle down to benefit them; the extent to which capitalism is rendered politically invisible by the emphasis on universal market laws that must be obeyed or, instead, social democratic and socialist politics remain in the agenda, all these are historically contingent issues that cannot be predicted. All I can say at this point is that the change from historical materialism to the "spaceship earth" in the Soviet Union has a material base in the qualitative changes experienced by the world economy in the last decades.