The Thinking Reed

Who disposes of this property? Do the working people participate in the running of the state, in deciding the economic and social purposes of development? In other words, is there socialist democracy?137

The Party-state upper circles in China (and not there alone) ‘actually dispose of state property.’138 Hence the conclusion:

The most important criterion for socialist society is: whether power is in the hands of the working class and all the working people. But in this respect China is particularly remote from the socialist ideal.139

This formulation makes one reflect that other countries of so-called ‘actually existing socialism’ are also pretty remote from that ideal, and China just happens to be worse than the rest — in that it is particularly remote. Statocracy, says Burlatsky, is

socialist without any well-being, without any democracy, without any participation in government by the masses, without any freedom of the individual. This is ‘socialism’ based on exploitation of the working people in the interests of the ruling military-bureaucratic group… which formulated its social aims (war production and national greatness).140

Analysis of the social structure provides a fresh stimulus to ideological criticism. Whereas previously liberal publicists demonstrated the falsity of this or that idea, this or that approach, legal Marxism goes further and examines the ideological phenomenon itself. Lukin writes:

The ruling elite sometimes cannot but yield to the temptation to use the prestige of the scientific world-view, exploiting its external aspects and transforming it into a metaphysical optimistic schema, in order to legitimize the existing order and offer the masses ‘radiant horizons’, sometimes departing openly from ‘inconvenient’ objective reality.141

Vodolazov speaks frankly of attempts by the ruling class to cover themselves with Marxism as their banner:

But are these people really Marxists? Is their idea Marxism?… But what does it matter what flag pirates nail to their mast? We have to eradicate piracy, not the country whose flag they have stolen.142

The point is, though, that Marxism does not merely have to be separated in people’s minds from the bureaucratic class and counterposed to the rulers. We find in Marxism the basic principles on which to rely in the fight against the statocracy. It is no accident that book after book repeats that proposition which Marx and Engels themselves repeated — that the new society must make the free development of each the guarantee for the free development of all.

Freedom remains the criterion of progress, the measure of development of human society. T mean’, wrote Tsipko,

the growth of real freedom, the practical manifestation of which, according to Marx, is labour. To achieve real freedom, Marx considers, it is not enough to perceive that one is free or to possess the right to act freely, to enjoy the possibility of freedom, though this is important in itself: it is further necessary to possess real possibilities to act freely, to be free in work, in political life, freely to develop one’s abilities and inclinations. Without that, progress is inconceivable.143