Was "Real Existing Socialism" Merely a Premature Form of Rule by Experts

The history of communism in the 20 century, if the current orthodoxy is to be believed, was no more than a detour in a process in which history ends in a world of civil societies organized as liberal democracies, which increasingly relate to each other following the model of liberal democracy itself, through the rule of law, collective discussion, the general recognition of human and civil rights, and so forth. In this image of world history, the worldwide dominance of liberal democracy is the culmination of a process which appears as a first draft in the Westphalian peace, which gradually spread through time, for example, through the internationalist ideology of Woodrow Wilson. In this teleological image of history, Communism appears as a developmental error, an error produced by an accidental combination of erroneous ideology and special circumstances of delayed development in certain countries that made them particularly susceptible to it. In what follows, I propose to reconsider this version of the meaning of 20 century communism especially, but I am afraid very abstractly, with reference to Eastern Europe and Russia. My concern will be with a three part relationship, between the state, civil society, and expertise. I will argue that the system of real existing state socialism was a kind of experiment in the construction of a model of relating expertise, the bureaucratic state, and the political forces arising from “civil society”. I will ignore, or rather bracket, the problem of the Soviet system itself and also the coercive character of Communist regimes, important as these issues are. My concern will be with civil society, or rather with an important but seldom discussed aspect of the problem of civil society, the place of non-governmental organizations in processes involving knowledge and expertise.