Doomsday or Deterrence?

On the Antinuclear Issue

Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317228783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Doomsday or Deterrence? argues against the majority of premises and conclusions of the antinuclear argument as existed in 1986 when this study was first published. Fehér and Heller's study claims that social changes are important to curb technology trends that lean toward the construction of nuclear weapons, as well as using the 'West' as its own value that needs to be defended and emphasising the importance of understanding the true feelings behind the antinuclear argument. This title will be of interest to students of politics and international relations.

III. The Soviet Strategy

What are our sources in assessing Soviet strategic policies? The question is more than rhetoric. If there is any methodologically suspicious element in predictive Kremlinology, it is the ostentatious display of too much inside information. In all reliable predictions the analyst departs from a definite view of the social character of the power under scrutiny and comes to certain conclusions on this basis and on that of one’s political theory and anthropology.^* Our analysis will not differ from this formula. We have set forth our view of Soviet societies in our book, written together with György Markus, Dictatorship Over Needs; accordingly, our predictions, based on publicly and widely known events and no behind-the-scene information, follow from this view of the Soviet regime.

In Dictatorship Over Needs we abandoned the traditional Marxist monist method (which deduces all spheres of societal life from the “basic” one, production) and thereby abandoned the category of the “mode of production” as well. We have sought to understand Soviet societies, as one fundamental version of modernity, in their totality, examining them on several different, but equally crucial, levels of understanding. We have argued that all Soviet societies are characterized by a double dynamic: an on-going, even expanding tendency to increase the material wealth of society (the Soviet regime is an industrial-modernizing one), at the same time expanding the control of the ruling apparatus. This overall social telos^† yields the “goal of production ” (and not the other way around): use value is socially defined in a “dictatorship over needs” by being part of this expanding material wealth and being subjugated to expanding social control. Both the social telos in general and the “goal of production” in particular promote an expansionist logic that cannot be described in terms of “imperialism” (the Soviet societies are not profit regulated and instrumental-rational) but which cannot exist without its expansionist dynamic. Almost all Soviet societies are industrial societies; in fact, the industrializing logic of modernity expands to extents that are inconceivable (as far as speed, social costs, and human “costs” are concerned) in liberal capitalism. If one needs a “material basis” to understand the general social telos of expansionism, excessive industrialization is such a material basis. While obviously no concrete step of Soviet foreign policy can be “deduced” from this universal constellation, the fact remains that Soviet societies cannot solve their inner tensions without expansion, nor can they ideologically legitimize their functions and modes of existence.

Soviet expansionism remained somewhat tarnished under the inwardly murderous and outwardly cautious first decade and a half of Stalin’s rule. Its first signs only became visible during the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact. While this event can be interpreted in whatever way the interpreter wishes, the “minor blemish” of devouring Poland together with Hitler cannot be explained away: it was the first act of Soviet expansionism. Stalin, as shrewd as he was ruthless, went one major step further after the victory, and within three years he completed the occupation of Eastern Europe. Although his armies had moved deeply into Germany, however, he held Austria in a state of suspension and, while occasionally he neared various parts of Scandinavia, never made one further dangerous move. It is now a generally known fact that he even tried to discourage the Chinese communists from a final offensive because, as the most commonly accepted interpretation goes, he considered the Soviet Union to be too weak as yet to venture any further. This explanation could be entirely true, but as far as we can see, it has to be reinterpreted. There are few signs that indicate either that this concern was technological in nature or that Stalin had drawn major technological-strategic consequences from his devastating defeats during the first year of the war. The Soviet Army continued to suffer difficulties during Stalin’s last years. Its best generals were either politely exiled (Zhukov) or used for political purposes (Rokossowski, who became “our man in Warsaw”). Several ideologically motivated bans on technological research and on the use of applied technology remained in force and slowed down development in military technology. (The most famous example is the ban on “bourgeois” cybernetics, without which modern warfare and military training are inconceivable.) Yet Stalin learned other lessons from the war. Official propaganda notwithstanding, he must have clearly known how shaky the foundations of the Soviet regime had proved to be during the war wherever the Soviet Army had pulled back from a region. He was also well aware of the extent to which Hitlerite brutality and ideological fanaticism had been needed to guide a jubilantly anti-Soviet populace back in the direction of a reluctantly pro-Soviet stance. He watched with even greater suspicion the newly occupied Eastern European countries. As the true creator of the regime for which expansion without all-embracing control was worthless, he must have felt that control had to be further strengthened and intensified; the new territories had to be absorbed and governed with an iron hand. In all probability, it was primarily the fact that social control was not sufficiently deeply rooted, not sufficiently all-embracing, rather than military considerations that commanded a halt to Soviet expansionism.

The new features, the whole novel framework of present-day Soviet expansionism, were designed under the confused and contradictory but historically crucial period of Nikita Khrushchev, in whose policies there was, despite undeniable contradictions and spectacular and seemingly irrational changes and improvisations, a much firmer consistency than is generally assumed. In the area of foreign policy Khrushchev is regarded, more often than not, as a shallow clown who liked to travel and behaved on his trips in an unstatesmanly manner, gave speeches on questions he was totally unfamiliar with, and took action with a degree of improvisation (from Berlin to Cuba) that thoroughly endangered the peace of the world (or, viewed from another angle, the well-considered interests of the USSR).

While the details can be correctly assessed, we find the verdict as a whole a complete misreading of Khrushchev’s incomparably more complex political personality. In his autobiography, he narrates an extremely telling story which sheds much light on the origins and genuine objectives of his later foreign policy. As a pillar of Stalin’s last Politburo but as a politician who, up until then, had hardly had any experience in foreign politics, Khrushchev had vigorously encouraged Stalin to display a full and open Soviet commitment to North Korea in the Korean War and give all the military aid “the Korean comrades need.” It is clear from his own description that Stalin had fenced him off with a measure of disdain, giving him a few quick lessons in the basics of “socialist foreign policy. ” The conflict, obviously not serious for Khrushchev had survived, was largely one between two generations of Bolshevik functionaries. For Khrushchev, the postrevolutionary communist, the victorious Soviet Union was strong enough after the war to embark on its historical mission in the rest of the world without hesitation and double talk about noninterference, with all the external insignia of the liberator.^* It is well-known how surprised John F. Kennedy was during their Vienna talks to hear, after the endless, albeit transparent, diplomatic lies of Stalin and Molotov, clear language from Khrushchev. The first secretary stated without camouflage that it was the “duty” of the Soviet Union to lend support—if need be even military support—to so-called wars of liberation everywhere. (Earlier it had been almost regarded as a crime against the state to assume that the Soviet Union had anything to do with any of the communist-led rebellions, revolutions, or partisan wars throughout the world: the “exporting of revolutions” was a Trotskyite idea.) In fact, the “struggle for peace” (the Khrushchev period abounded with his clamorous and wholly unrealistic offers of almost complete disarmament) and the insistence on the “world revolutionary process,” on the “worldwide victory of communism,” form one unitary process. The Soviet Union would not launch a thermonuclear war (Khrushchev seemed to have honestly believed in the universal destruction that would follow in the wake of such a war), but it would develop, whatever the costs, its nuclear strike force, in part as a deterrent (Khrushchev still faced a West that had guts and had not, at least not formally, resigned from the policy of “rolling back” communism), in part as a means of terror and blackmail. It would support uprisings and rebellions of all kinds. Khrushchev’s great, then unacknowledged, invention was that he regarded Lenin’s Machiavellian suggestion (“let us support the emir of Afghanistan who is more progressive than Kautsky because he is hostile to Western imperialism”) a useful, operative idea. Following closely this principle, he decorated Gamal Abdel Nasser as a hero of the Soviet Union. It is less understood that his policy toward Yugoslavia was instigated according to the same principles. Not for a moment did he believe that Tito had “corrected his mistakes” (the resolution of the Soviet Communist Party on the intactly preserved revisionism of the Yugoslavs in the aftermath of the Belgrade meeting testifies to this). But for Khrushchev it was towing the Soviet line that counted, not ideologies, and he hoped, mistakenly, that Tito would tow that line. Maintaining the nuclear balance, increasing Soviet superiority to a point where its power could arouse fear and could be used as a means of bargaining without ever contemplating, however, the possibility of an all-out nuclear war; being able nevertheless to conquer the world through fear, to exploit weakness, subversions, and rebellions of any kind: this was and has remained the master formula of Soviet expansionism under all successors of Khrushchev.^*

Everything that has happened after Khrushchev (and this statement now already covers two decades of Soviet expansionism) has to be understood, in our view, against the double, extremely complicated background of the increasing self-confidence and inner despair of the Soviet oligarchy. The self-confidence, which fuels their self-conceived historical mission of universal expansionism on all continents, is nurtured by three factors. First, the Soviet oligarchy feels, for the first time in Soviet history, that they have time, that they are not threatened with “running out of time.” Second, despite all duplicitous lamentations to the contrary, the Soviet leadership does not have the slightest fear of the West. American military morale in Vietnam and the outcome of the Watergate affair (the near impeachment of an incumbent president is a sign for them of the contemptible weakness of Western democracies) were the last symptoms that were needed to convince them. Further, if the West was not able to attack them when it could have done so with a very good chance of winning and getting away with it, it would hardly do so now. Finally, they realistically know that there is no Western strategy, rather a progressively diminishing degree of Western unity.

Such increasing self-confidence would suggest strategic optimism, were it not more than sufficiently compensated by the inner despair, the result of the unsolved, protracted, and apparently insoluble inner crisis of Soviet society, which can be summed up in the following terms. The Soviet oligarchy could have eliminated the most imminent danger of a general explosion following the death of Stalin, which threatened for three explosive years (1953–1956), from Berlin to Georgia, the edifice of “completed socialism” with “counterrevolutionary” explosions, by rejecting Stalin’s murderous “revolutions from above.” But they have never been able to achieve a genuine transition into a so-called intensive period of industrialization. Industry, except the military-industrial complex, works inefficiently and Soviet society remains technologically dependent on the West; the agricultural crisis cannot be overcome or compensated by an industrial boom; standards of living have been lagging far behind Western societies, and this is still true despite the longest depression capitalism has ever known. André Glucksmann sums up this situation in the following, picturesque way:

The wind of spirit has turned. It is the West that makes the East dream. Bourgeois Europe has become the concrete utopia of the workers, peasants and intellectuals of Soviet socialist Europe. In 1945, the experts of the right despaired of, and the intellectuals of the left were enthusiastic about the idea that Western enterprises could be exploded by a revolutionary and communist ideology, while the system of private property was condemned to crises and catastrophes. Ever since, it is the turn of the masters of the Kremlin to denounce the fifth column which, in the inside of the factories, seizes the minds of workers and provokes “insurrectionist” strikes for such obsolete and formal rights as the freedom of opinion, right to assembly, the right to pray.^*

In Dictatorship Over Needs, we analyzed the most dangerous internal and external enemy of the Soviet regime in a very similar way (except that we added the envy of Western affluence in sheer material terms to the complex). However, while we believe that this characterization is not incorrect, it certainly has to be complemented now.

Without a doubt, the Western way of life, and not the American Army, has remained the most powerful challenge for the nomenklatura, actually the only threat they are afraid of, and the one they wish to eliminate, for otherwise, as they believe, there can be no end to internal turmoil and unrest. But the subject in tacit disobedience (and sometimes in open revolt) that they are facing is now twofold. There is the aforementioned, the “fifth column of the Western way of life.” But there is a novel one as well: the anti-Soviet but anti-Western Soviet Russian fundamentalist, the gigantic image of which can be found in Solzhenitsyn. In an act of statesmanship (which considerably surpasses the capacities that could have been expected from this power elite), the nomenklatura has come up with a twofold recipe against this new danger: the “Soviet way of life” and an updated version of Dostoevsky’s “Russian idea.” Both grow out of a situation in which the word “communism” has lost all seriousness, both at the top and at the social base. Victor Zaslavsky has analyzed in detail what “the Soviet way of life” means: paternalism and guaranteed security at the price of total depoliticization and automatic obedience, “order,” the cult of authority and conservative ways of life, no social reforms or “improvisations,” xenophobia with almost public anti-Semitism.^*One has to add only a short quotation from Dostoevsky to understand precisely what the “Russian idea” means: “A truly great people can never reconcile itself to playing second fiddle in the affairs of humanity, not even playing an important part, but always and exclusively the chief part. If it loses that faith it is no longer a nation. But there is only one truth, and therefore there is only one nation among all the nations that can have the true God, even though other nations may have their own particular great gods.”^† If one were to translate Shatov’s aggressive and laconic text into the banal language of present-day Soviet “literature,” one would understand very well what is meant by the “Russian idea.” However, the “Soviet way of life,” the “Russian idea,” and the ideological struggle against Westerners can achieve their aim only in the event of an utter humiliation, preferably total defeat, of the West. Therefore, expansionism remains vital for a system in crisis, even if the situation is incomparably more complex than Glucksmann’s (or our own original) formulation suggested.

But if this is so, is it not reasonable to conceive the Soviet Union as a military society, a conception which would have been ridiculous under Stalin but which recently has gained an ever wider audience? It has found its best, deepest, and most ingenious formulation in Cornelius Castoriadis’s Devant la guerre (Facing the War), which analyzes the Soviet Union in terms of a “stratocracy,” a military society. Shortly after the book was published, Wojczech Jaruzelski and his way of “pacifying” Poland seemed to present a spectacular corroboration of the theory.

We shall present here our arguments in refutation of Soviet societies as military societies, but we wish to emphasize that there is absolutely nothing in Soviet societies that would interdict with the force of “historical necessity” a regular and visible military takeover. The ineptitude of the Soviet bureaucracy could reach such a level in internal affairs, the danger of general chaos could be so imminent, that the military, motivated as always by so-called patriotic considerations, could sweep party apparatchiks out of power. Such a turn would be clearly visible, however, and in our view it would have the inevitable economic consequence of restoring a market economy for the Soviet Union (with as much state supervision and protection as in many Latin American countries) and leading it to join the capitalist world market. Nothing like this seems likely to happen in the Soviet Union. No relevant signs forecast such a historic turn.

The advocates of a military society can argue in one of two ways. One is to state that the military now in fact occupies the dominant positions in the Soviet hierarchy, and that the Soviet Union is a military society in precisely that sense. There are frequent attempts made to interpret each and every Soviet politician as a direct or indirect representative of the “military complex,” but the facts, which deny rather than corroborate the theory, are so obvious that this is to be regarded as the weak version of the theory. The strong and much more sophisticated version is argued by Castoriadis. According to him, and his theory of the “imaginary institution,” there is not and will not necessarily be any “red Bonapartsky. ” No visible military takeover is needed to assume the actual existence of a military society: no statistical analysis of the members of the Central Committee is required to make this theory more convincing, whatever the findings. There is, however, a social “imaginary institution,” the military conquest of the world, operative in the Soviet society, which works through agents regardless of the external contingencies of whether they wear a uniform or civilian clothes. In this sense, the Soviet Union of the last two decades has gradually been self-transformed into a “stratocratie.”^*

Our first argument against the theory is that the telos we have suggested lies within Soviet societies, namely, the expansion of socio-economic control embodied in social structures and institutions, among others, the “goal of production,” is at least equivalent to the imaginary institution Castoriadis argues for. At the same time, it accounts for the whole of Soviet history, not just a chapter of it. Secondly, Castoriadis has never renounced his theory of Soviet society as a type of capitalism. If this is the case, either there is no need to posit any special telos or imaginary institution for expansionism, assuming that the military telos is a factor common to all capitalist societies (which is at least questionable), or there are some special structural elements in “Soviet capitalism” that make it a military society. These, however, have never been elaborated by the theory of “stratocratie.”

The main question that any theory of the Soviet Union has to address is the following. If we conceive of the party bureaucracy, or apparatus, as the civilian-clothed agent of an impersonal military telos, which at a certain point must mean that it merges, even sociologically, with the army, can this apparatus fulfill all the roles generally ascribed to the party bureaucracy, internally and externally? We believe it cannot, for the following reasons. The political-universal image attributed to the party by itself is a constitutive element of the regime. The party apparatus is the leading stratum required by a political society (a society in which political ideas, goals, and considerations dominate all other life activities) for its longevity, while the military simply cannot fulfill the same functions. This means that if the party is to be reduced to the role of the civilian-clothed age...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I Life and Freedom as Universal Values of Modernity
• II Are We Closer to a Nuclear War?
• III The Soviet Strategy
• IV The Antinuclear Movement
• V The Real Alternatives of Civilization and the Leftist Option