My eventual exclusion from the Workers' Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA) (1981).
Trying to open up discussions rethinking Maoism eventually got me excluded but with little hysteria.
While my constant questioning and urge to rethink Maoism had started to influence the whole editorial board of the “Solidair” newspaper, the party leadership took over the board and started restructuring the editorial team. I continued to work for the newspaper on weekends while studying economics, but was eventually excluded from the Party in 1981 by a committee including Kris Merckx, Nadine Rosa Rosso and Juliette Broder.[1] The reason was a 50 page text that I wrote giving my own analysis about China, the Soviet Union, capitalism and socialism. While moving my affairs out of my Berkeley office, I was lucky to find that more or less 45 year old text that I thought I had thrown away in the mid 1990s with my archives from my Maoist past.
Interestingly, that text included many ideas that would lead to my 1987 Ph.D in economics. I sketched the idea of a “Soviet Mode of Production” that was a sui generis economic system that was not capitalist. Legally, the means of production belonged to the state that was under the leadership of the communist party. I rejected the idea that this was a “collective capitalist”. Profit was not the driving force of production, markets did not really exist, prices were unrelated to market prices, investments were not profit-oriented, loss-making enterprises did not close. Maximization of some measure of people’s needs was not the goal either. Instead, it was maximization of macroeconomic growth. Whereas in the market economy, commodities have both a use value and an exchange value, in the Soviet mode of production, I posited that goods produced have a use value and what I called an “indicator value”. Whereas the use value is a multi-dimensional object of all the characteristics generating utility in a product, the indicator value is a one-dimensional indicator of pure quantity that is at the center of the whole production process in the Soviet mode of production and ignores use value to a large extent. Since enterprise managers are rewarded mainly on the “indicator value” produced (tons, liters, number of trucks, etc..) maximization of indicator value comes at the expense of use value and the needs of consumers, leading in general to the well-known low quality of most of the goods produced. I sketched a whole theory of the Soviet mode of production based on this initial idea of the dual value of goods: use value and indicator value. This theory would be very much expanded in my Ph.D. dissertation. Historically, I argued that the Soviet mode of production emerged in countries of the capitalist periphery that were economically less developed than advanced capitalist economies and that growth maximization could be understood in that international context because of the need of a catchup with advanced capitalist countries. I thought that this was in contradiction with socialism that should instead have as objective to reduce rapidly over time the total amount of alienating work in society so that people could have more time for creative activities. Stalinist parties were in that context purely the political instruments of industrialization policies in countries of the periphery. In that sense, I came back to some of Marx’s ideas that socialism could only emerge in the most advanced economies, not in those at the periphery. The Soviet mode of production was thus a kind of mirror image of the capitalist mode of production, both belonging to a family of industrial modes of production that would precede socialism that, in my view, could only emerge in a post-industrial society.
In terms of the political consequences of my analysis, my conclusions were that broadening democracy was the main objective to allow working masses to be empowered. There should not be any guide telling the masses how to think, but the party should help them formulate their wishes for a better life. In that sense, the fight for democracy of dissidents in countries in Eastern Europe and in China (the wall of democracy movement was taking place at that time in China) and the fight of civil society (trade unions, NGOs, voluntary associations) for more democracy in advanced capitalist countries were a common fight, because strong democracies were the prerequisite of a fight to reduce over time the quantity of alienating work and increase what Marx called the realm of freedom, allowing people to emancipate themselves more and more and to become more autonomous. I argued in favor of decentralized and flexible forms of planning and self-management and I rejected democratic centralism as a form of organization that was specific to the Soviet mode of production. Decentralization and flexibility implied the use of markets. Markets would be best used to satisfy consumer demand and increase productivity in the “sphere of necessity” so that total time worked in that sector could decline[2]. At the same time, the state could start shrinking more and more, corresponding to Marx’s intuitions about the emergence of communist society.
Rereading my notes from then, I realize now how anti-Leninist these ideas were and understand better why the Leninist Workers’ Party of Belgium excluded me. While Kris Merckx was quite civil towards me [3], Juliette Broder insulted me, claiming I was turning into a fascist and Nadine Rosa Rosso, in the typical style of a primary school teacher, kept repeating syllogisms based on her Marxist-Leninist background. Overall, there was nothing of the fanaticism and mass hysteria that I had witnessed in the death throes of UCMLB.
Heddy resigned at the same time as my exclusion and went looking for a job, which she found quickly in the Belgian government. Part of her resignation letter is included in Pascal Delwit’s book on the PTB-PVDA (without citing her)[4]. Here is the citation from her letter (translated from French):
“For me, communism is a set of economic, political, social and ethical structures with as goal to abolish the economic exploitation of the working class […]. End political oppression by suppressing the state apparatus, eliminate alienation by offering human beings the possibility of maximally developing their potential and develop their personality, in a nutshell to reach maximum emancipation. Those ideals were the reason I joined the party from the feminist movement. […] I consider that the party does not correspond to these different objectives. It denies these fundamental aspirations (the party’s attitude towards feminism, the amazing contempt for the fight against alienation of individuals seen instead as a product of decadent Western society, the denial of the issue of the shrinking role of the state after the revolution and the party’s concept of democracy […]. The party can only offer us a Soviet-type society [..]. In the name of sacrosanct immutable principles, one completely bypasses this strength of Marxism, this critical method that allows to adapt to new realities. Instead of “doubting everything” (I remind you that that is Marx’s definition of Marxism), one pretends that it is only in the head of a few petit-bourgeois intellectuals that problems exist.”
Pascal Delwit's book on the Workers’ Party of Belgium. Chapter 9 has citations from Heddy and me in the context of what was called the “liquidationist movement”.
Heddy and I now both found ourselves outside an organization and a political movement to which we had devoted ourselves 24/7 for a good part of the 1970s and for which we had given some of the best years of our youth. I remembered then the words of Rosa Luxemburg when she left the German social democratic party (SPD) for its support to Germany’s implication in WWI. She said she felt literally excluded from the world. While having similar feelings, we knew we still had our whole lives in front of us as we were still only in our mid twenties.
(To be continued)
[1] Three other members of the editorial board were also excluded: Grace Winter, Kris Dewinter and Jan Van Duppen. Others stayed until the Tian-An Men massacre 9 years later which was supported by the Labor Party of Belgium.
[2] Rereading this, I realize I was certainly influenced by the ideas of André Gorz that inspired many of the left-wing ecologists in the early 1980s. Cornelius Castoriadis in L’Institution Imaginaire de la Société had reached similar conclusions about the role of the market to satisfy consumer needs when people have equal incomes.
[3] Ludo Martens with whom I always had good relations had told me before my exclusion that my ideas might be correct, but that they would lead to the liquidation of the Party he had built, and thus that these ideas could not be tolerated.
[4] Delwit's book quotes passages from my 50 page text cited by Ludo Martens in his text on the “Liquidationist current within the Marxist-Leninist movement”