planning the overall production of steel in a centralized and authoritative way
(seecommand economies), the Chinese encouraged all their communes to
build their own small-scale steel plants, and treated professional engineers as
undemocratic examples ofclassstatus. The Soviet Union remained quite
strongly hierarchical, even if the criteria for hierarchy differed from the
societies of capitalism, being based on party or professional rank rather than
inherited wealth, but the Chinese communists, at least under Mao, worked for
a much more total equality. During thecultural revolutionthis rose to a
height in which anyone occupying a professional or technocratic job was in
danger of being sent to work as a peasant, or, if less fortunate, forthought
reform. The only generalizations possible about communism as an actual
political and social system are that communist regimes are totally controlled by
an undemocratic party, abolish most inequalities arising from economic
differences, for most citizens, and practise a high degree of economic planning
with an extensive welfare state but very little freedom of expression.
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a
judgement on the failure of one institutional attempt to realize an ideal that
retains great emotional, and respectable, theoretical power. The notion that it
is possible and desirable for people to live in a non-competitive, non-author-
itarian, property-less state of brotherhood and equality has no more been
disproved by events than has any other ideal. Most Western admirers of Soviet
communism have been cut off from their own Marxist colleagues since the
obvious distortion of these ideals byStalin: from the 1940s, at the latest,
Western Marxists regarded communist regimes as examples ofstate capital-
ism, not of communism.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
CPSU are the initials by which the former Communist Party of the Soviet
Union is often known. Until the revolutionary changes initiated byGorba-
chevfrom the late 1980s, the party completely controlled political and social
life in the Soviet Union. About 10% of the population were members,
membership being much prized and by no means automatic. In some sectors,
the army for example, as many as 75% would be party members. The principal
means by which the party exercised control was through what was called the
Nomenclatura, which was simply a list of jobs which had to be filled by party
members, and concerning which the party was given a deciding voice in
appointments. As a result nearly all of the most important managerial, admin-
istrative and intellectual jobs were filled by loyal party members. (As a further
result of this, such positions would continue to be filled by those who at least
had been members, whatever their current profession, for a long time after the
fall of the CPSU from power in 1991.) In addition the party organized much of
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)