Reality And Experience: An Analysis Of The Draft Program Of The CPSU

A document such as the 1961 Draft Program of the CPSU serves so many different purposes that at first sight it may appear pointless to try to classify it with reference to the tradition it purports to incarnate. It is obvious that its prime use lies in the propaganda field, and that for the rest its significance is likely to depend on shifting political alignments within the ruling Party apparatus; itself a governing body not clearly differentiated from the dominant social stratum of Soviet society, including, as it does, genuine representatives of the latter along with veterans of the Stalinist epoch and spokesmen of a Leninist tradition which almost half a century ago supplied the “professional revolutionaries” with an operational code.

A proper textual analysis of the document would have to distinguish all these strata, relate what is genuinely operational to the actual policies of the Party leadership, draw the necessary distinctions between the general framework of Leninist philosophy and the specific elements of current Soviet theory and practice, and in addition, supply the kind of critical commentary that Marx appended to the Gotha Program of 1875; or, if one wants to be more modest, Lenin’s own rather long-winded “Notes on Plekhanov’s Draft Program” in 1902 (Collected Works, vol. VI). Instead, I propose to address myself to a single subject, namely, the status of the Program within the general tradition of “Marxism-...