Communism: The Specter and the Struggle

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by introducing cryptocapitalist measures, such as a modest return to private enterprise and profits for individual farmers. They are not so much concerned with making Communist power more humane as they are with making it more pragmatic. They face the staggering problem of feeding a billion people. Also, their hostility toward the Soviet Union makes the Chinese leaders all the more determined to modernize their archaic industry and develop their economy.

But the Chinese experiment is by no means sure to succeed. For one thing, the laboratory in which it is being conducted is still permeated with the vestiges of Stalinism and its peculiar Chinese mutation, Maoism. Even limited decentralization of economic and managerial authority risks debacles of the sort that occurred early in 1981, when the state planning commission grossly overestimated China's ability to afford seven petrochemical plants and was forced to renege on a multibillion-dollar deal with Japan. Setbacks like that, coupled with unrealistic hopes for the future, could lead to a backlash against Senior Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping and his reforms. While the Hungarian and Chinese authorities are pretending to adhere to Communism even as they depart from it, the Polish opposition has rejected it. "The reason this whole problem [the Polish economic crisis] came about," said Alojzy Szablewski, a Solidarity official at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, "is that there has been only one party, with no checks and balances." True enough, but that is hardly an unforeseen or unintended result of Leninism. Lenin designed the party precisely to avoid checks and balances. One result, as Polish events have proved: the party leadership can resort to the most sudden, severe and sweeping crackdowns against its challengers.

"What we are now witnessing in Poland," says Djilas, "is the end of the power of the Leninist Party." By sending in the troops, the Polish leaders have in effect admitted the failure of the party. If that failure turns out to be irreversible and Solidarity survives and ultimately prevails, Djilas will have special cause for sardonic satisfaction, for the workers' self-management that Solidarity advocates as a check and balance to party power is a concept invented almost 30 years ago by Josip Broz Tito, with Djilas' help, partly to distinguish their Yugoslav path to socialism from the Stalinist road not taken.

But even in independent, relatively liberal Yugoslavia, self-management is more an ideal than a reality—and for the same reason that it is anathema to Leninism-Stalinism: true self-management, like genuine democracy anywhere else in the system, would undermine the party's power.

"It should not be expected that the political forces in Communist countries will readily give up the power they have gained," says Aleksandar Grličkov, a top leader and theoretician of Yugoslavia's League of Communists. Since that prospect is unrealistic, he adds, "our preoccupation should be in making that power more humane. Our experience tells us that possibilities for this do exist, even though this need not be synonymous with political pluralism."

As Grličkov's extraordinary candor implies, wherever Communists rule, they will not give up power, or even share it, without a fight. A literal fight, if