To date, only the Spartacist League (Bolshevik Tendency) has been alert to the true menace of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Tendency sponsored a seminar at the University of Toronto not long ago on ''Gorbachev's 'Reforms': A Marxist Critique,'' though those unable to attend could catch the gist of the discussion from its official slogan: ''Market socialism is antisocialist! ''

The exclamation point is critical. Aside from the Trotskyists, no one has sounded the alarm over perestroika. Oh sure, a few prunefaced old naysayers on the right mutter he won't get away with it. The nomenklatura will dig in against any assault on their privilege. Old-line Brezhnev bunkies in the Kremlin are furiously plotting to unseat him. Moscow is already said to be on a coup watch.

Others think Gorbachev himself doesn't mean a word he says, that the reforms are cosmetic. They point out that the Soviet leader remains a Leninist, perhaps of 1920s New Economic Plan vintage, but a Leninist for all that. The ultimate goal remains the same: world domination, under a one-party Communist state. No less a statesman than Richard Nixon warned last weekend that Gorbachev would lie and cheat in his lust for power. Goodness.

Face value

Perhaps, as Nixon once described another statesman, Gorbachev will indeed turn out to be ''devious, in the best sense of that word.'' But we cannot count on that; it is best to take him at face value. Which raises this puzzling and disturbing question: why has there been no criticism of perestroika itself, on its own terms? Has the left been asleep? If the same market-oriented policies and ideas that Gorbachev and his followers have advanced were touted by any politician in the West, they would be denounced in the most violent language possible. In Canada, they simply would not be heard. Yet the non-Spartacist left has given Gorbachev a free ride.

A few examples, randomly drawn, should prove the point. What, to start with, is an economy for? To produce, right? To create jobs. Everyone knows that. But Gorbachev seems to think the point of economic activity is actually consumption. Listen to this, from a draft Soviet economic reform law, reprinted in Pravda: ''The demands of the consumer are obligatory for the enterprise, and their full and timely satisfaction are the highest ideal and the norm for the action of each work collective.''

Who does this sound like? Why, Adam Smith, whose tie adorns half the necks in Washington: ''Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.''

The interests of producers failing the ''full and timely satisfaction'' test will henceforth explicitly not be attended to. The new enterprise law, effective Jan. 1, forces each outfit to pay its own way. Many will go under, merely because they are producing a good nobody wants at a price no one will pay. Profit has become a social obligation. What about regional development? What about essential strategic industries? What about job creation?

Or take wages. Here is the Soviet news agency Tass explaining the wage reforms introduced last year: ''The aim is to . . . create a direct dependence between the amount and quality of work and pay, and to make the growth of pay dependent on the increase of labor productivity.'' This is needed, writes economist Tamara Zaslavkaya in the Party monthly Kommunist, to provide ''incentives.''

Wages based strictly on productivity? Incentives? Who are these guys, supply- siders? What about fundamental notions of fairness? What about skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions? What about Pay Equity?

Indeed, what about workers' rights in general? Factories in the Soviet Union have been allowed, even encouraged to cut wages - not wage increases, wages - in recent months. That's for the lucky ones. Pravda reports Gorbachev plans to lay off 16 million workers by the year 2000 - the equivalent of 1.4 million jobs in Canada, or almost twice the number Shirley Carr predicts free trade will destroy in the same period.

TWO-TIER SYSTEM

Many others are being pushed out into the private sector, because, as Ivan Gladky, chairman of the State Committee for Labor & Social Issues notes, the state ''has not been meeting consumer demand for goods and services fully.'' There's that word again: consumer. To add deregulation's insult to privatization's injury, the new enterprises will be allowed to charge whatever price the market will bear. What does Carr think of that? We don't know.

Well, at least the state will continue to provide essential social services, on the basis of universal accessibility. Not in health care. Abel Aganbegyan, Gorbachev's senior economic adviser, envisages a two-tier system, offering ''supplementary'' care to those who can afford to pay more. What? Have these people never read the Canada Health Act? ''There is a socialist norm, and there is consumption above the norm,'' Aganbegyan blithely replies.

It's time the left spoke up. If someone doesn't stop this Rambo, dog-eat-dog ideology now, who knows where it might spread.