I. Russian Capitalism
¶Conspicuous social divisions, wage differentials, privileges
according to type of work, and a division of labour which dooms
manual workers
to the factory inferno and which reserves for
intellectuals the monopoly of comfort, can these really be said to be
compatible with Socialism as the CP men shamelessly assert? A villa for
Kosygin, and hovels for the workers; missiles to the moon and queues in
front of the butcher’s shop; a nuclear arsenal and meat and cereal
shortages: are these edifying pictures of the society of the future?
However, it is not sufficient merely to answer; No! For the bourgeoisie
has already learnt how to skilfully exploit the disillusionment of
certain workers confronted with stark Russian reality. It is as goods as
says to them that since Communism doesn’t offer anything better, why not
be satisfied with good old democratic capitalism? For the defenders of
the new roads to Socialism
the language is scarcely modified.
Each people will have their very own Socialism which will take account
of their traditions and their degree of civilisation
!
¶If we, as revolutionary Marxists, wish to demonstrate that Russian Communism is false, it isn’t with the slightest intention of disgusting workers with the truth. Rather, it is to show that the defects of present-day Russian society are common to all existing political regimes, because all of them – Russia included – are capitalist.
¶To pronounce on Russia with these observations supposes that one
knows the fundamental characteristics of Socialism, but even knowing
this is conditional on first knowing the nature of capitalism, and it is
precisely this which is mostly ignored by the clever persons who hold
forth on the subject on radio and television or in learned
scientific
works. For it is not a matter of discerning a few
accessory and incidental aspects of this mode of production, but of
defining its fundamental characteristics so as to be able to recognise
it in all circumstances. These characteristics can be summed up as
follows:
¶In Capitalist society commodities are produced, i.e. human activity is dedicated in the main, to the manufacture of objects destined to be exchanged for money, i.e. sold. Meanwhile, the great mass of producers are deprived of the means of production (as opposed to the artisan or the small peasant who possess their own work instruments).
¶These producers, possessing only their own labour power, are therefore forced to sell this commodity, adapted to the conditions of modern productions, associated labour, concentration of industry, high-tech production. All economic exchange, all buying and selling and especially of that particular commodity which is the workers’ labour power, takes place through the medium of money. Capital is born and develops according to the combined utilisation of all these factors.
¶The social class that is deprived of all the means of production and
forced to sell its labour is the proletariat. This labour power is a
commodity that has the miraculous
quality of producing more
wealth than it requires for its maintenance and reproduction. In other
words, in a working day of 8 hours, the worker produces, let’s say in 4
hours, the value of his daily wage, but continues to work 4 extra hours
for capital.
¶The price of labour power represents the worker’s wage. The difference between this wage and the mass of values produced remains the property of the class which retains control of the means of production: the capitalist class. It is called surplus-value or profit and this in its turn is exchanged against new labour power and new products of labour (machines, raw materials, etc.) becoming capital. This process repeated ad infinitum is the accumulation of capital.
¶All these elements are strictly linked within the capitalist mode of production and are therefore inseparable from it. It is therefore an insulting falsehood to deem that a society is worthy of the name Socialist when there exists within it both money – exchangeable against labour power – and wages, through which workers obtain the necessary products for the maintenance of themselves and their families, whilst the accumulation of values remains the property of businesses or the state. Well, exactly such a state of affairs exists today in Russia.
¶In the USSR it is possible, with roubles lent by the statebank, for a group of individuals to buy labour power and keep for themselves the difference existing between the value produced and the amount of wages paid; such is the case with the ephemeral joint-stock companies responsible for the construction of housing and public buildings and edifices, and with the kolkhoses that remunerate tractor drivers and seasonal workers as wage-earners by paying them in cash. Indeed these same kolkhoses have been forced by the authorities, for several years, into setting up preserve factories and other processing industries, using partly profits from their enterprises, and partly the salary system for factory personnel. Finally it is the same with the state businesses themselves, which both pay their workers in money, encouraging and developing wage differentials related to labour power, and which invest, i.e. the profit which is realised is transformed into capital.
¶In Russia the worker pays in money for all the foodstuffs and products that he needs, suffering silently from market fluctuations and even from the speculation indulged in by the individual producers, namely the kolkhosniks, who as well as having their share of the total kolkhos income, possess livestock and personal land which they are free to sell at whatever price they can get.
¶Finally in the USSR money yields interest. This occurs through Government stocks, which bring in profits to the stockholders (as in the classical capitalist countries) and also in the form of interest which the state derives by lending to its own enterprises.
¶How is all this different from the bourgeois societies of the
capitalist west? In the USSR everything operates under the banner of
value which in modern societies is merely a source of profit, capital
accumulation and of exploitation of labour power. In Russia, everything
is exchangeable with this cursed money. Everything is for sale, from the
services of prostitutes to those of intellectuals, whose task consists
of singing the praise of national Socialism
and generally licking
the boots of the powerful.
¶Later on, we will explain how it is that such a company of profiteers, toadies and parasites could arise amidst the ruins of the glorious October Revolution at the expense of the blood and toil of the Russian proletariat.
¶It is sufficient though to underline this essential fact: Socialism is incompatible with the categories of capitalist economy, such as money, wages, accumulation, and the division of labour.
II. The October Revolution and the Russian Economy
¶The first measures that must be taken by the proletariat on taking power in a developed country, are those which aim to eliminate the capitalist characteristics of the economy. In bourgeois society, the essential commodity, and the very origin and basis of capital, is labour power as a commodity. The price of labour power, on the labour market, is expressed by a salary which is the money equivalent of the products necessary for the worker’s maintenance. However, even when labour power is paid at a correct value that enables the wage labourer to provide for his own and his family’s needs, the capitalist enterprise always gains a surplus from the sale of products. This surplus value or profit, this inexhaustible source of capital and prime mover of accumulation, is the economic foundation of the social power of the capitalist class.
¶With this established, it is evident that to be able to destroy
capitalist exploitation, it is necessary to destroy the fundamental
relationship that forms its basis, that is, the commodity character of
labour power. This is possible only on one condition: the abolition of
the form of remuneration known as wage labour. The means to achieve this
end predicted by Marxism is the system of labour vouchers
. We
will look at in more detail later on.
¶We have already said in regard to such a system, despite the
sarcastic remarks of modern
philistines, that it is not the least
bit utopian. Yet on reading Marx’s description, it becomes immediately
apparent that it can only be realised in countries that have reached a
sufficient degree of economic and technical development. In October 1917
however, such was not the case for proletarian Russia; on the one hand
because the country was economically backward, and on the other because
of the destruction caused by the civil war against the Whites and the
struggle against foreign intervention.
¶Not only could the revolutionary Bolshevik power not address itself immediately to the fundamental task of the Socialist Revolution, i.e. abolishing capitalist relations of production, but on the contrary, first of all it had to develop them so as to be able to abolish them later on. The Russian proletariat had come to power under the impetus of a bourgeois revolution which the Russian bourgeoisie had been incapable of carrying through. The price the proletariat paid was to carry on its shoulders the heavy burden which historically devolves on the bourgeoisie: the primitive accumulation of capital.
¶Instead of abolishing the division of labour, based on the wage earning system, it was necessary for the proletariat to make best use of it in the form that it already existed in Russia. Far from wiping out the market, inseparable from remuneration in money for labour power, it brought it back to life. Rather than undertake the impossible tasks of socialising millions of farms, it was obliged to encourage small peasant production so as to be able to feed the towns. In a word, it had to persevere with holding the political power that would eventually destroy the capitalist economy, whilst at the same time, it was led by force of circumstances to accelerate the latter’s development!
¶Certain extremists
would, retrospectively, consider this
gamble as doomed to failure from the start. A bid for proletarian power
in semi-feudal Russia could only – they say – lead eventually to
national capitalism! But this ignores two key elements. On the one hand,
the First World War caused the revolution to mature in every conceivable
manner in Russia, and furnished a unique opportunity for the proletariat
to reverse the relations of social forces on a world scale by taking
advantage of the congenital incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to
accomplish its own revolution. On the other hand, after the October
insurrection and the social crisis provoked by the war in Germany, the
hypothesis becomes possible through a revolution in that country. In
this case, the coming to power of the German proletariat, by alleviating
the economic tasks of the Bolsheviks, would have permitted the
Bolsheviks to pass over the problem of accumulation of capital without
risking, under one form or another, the restoration of capital’s
political and social force.
¶For Lenin and for all the Bolsheviks – including Stalin before he
theorised Socialism in One Country
– the goal of the October
Revolution was by no means the immediate transformation of the Russian
economy in a Socialist sense. On the contrary, thousands of texts and
speeches testify that the perspective of all Communists of the period
consisted of making the power of the Soviets into a sort of progressive
bastion of the world revolutionary struggle. Only if the revolution had
reached the most developed European countries, where the fundamental
first measures of Socialism were immediately realisable, would it have
been possible to envisage their gradual realisation in Russia. Lenin
emphasised this constantly with his formula: No victorious revolution in
Germany – No Socialism in Russia! In order to hasten this victory, and
to concentrate there all the forces of the international proletariat,
and so as to free the soviet power from the ball and chain of having to
restore Russian industrial production, it was ready to rent out to
foreign capital the most important enterprises! This certainly gives a
rather different impression to the image of a patriotic Lenin they are
peddling nowadays! Lenin’s preoccupations were miles removed from the
one who claimed after him, to have made
Socialism in his country
alone.
¶History, however, did not comply with the expectations of this
generation of political giants. The Berlin Commune of 1919 was crushed,
and the workers’ insurrections in central Europe were defeated. It was
precisely these consecutive defeats of the International Revolution
which forced the Bolsheviks to adopt a set of economic policies, which
Stalinism would later consecrate with the label Socialism
but
which, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with it. In fact, measures
like workers management of factories abandoned by their owners, the
re-establishment of a certain level of internal trade, industrial
planning and the substitution of the compulsory wheat requisitions with
the tax in kind, all these were merely economic expedients, palliatives
against misery and under-production. They were temporary measures in
view of a recovery of the world proletarian struggle and no
revolutionary of the day, worthy of the name, considered renouncing such
measures.
¶The weakening and defeat of the international struggle was necessary
in order that the greatest fraud in modern history be perpetrated. For
which became expedient that all those who remained faithful to the
positions of Lenin, in Russia and elsewhere, be massacred or deported:
thus was consecrated as Socialist
, the most backward and barbaric
system for the exploitation of labour power ever known.
¶Socialism abolishes the hierarchy of remuneration; the Bolsheviks were to stimulate the productivity of labour with high wages. Socialism reduces the length of the working day; the soviet power lengthened it. Socialism eliminates both money and the market; the Russian Communists gave free rein to internal trade. The Proletarian State had to accumulate capital in order to reconstruct the destroyed means of production and create new ones. In other words, the Russian proletariat had political power, but economically, it was wearing itself out keeping alive a backward country that was centuries behind.
¶The Bolsheviks were, however, quite aware of these necessities and contradiction. They were certain that there was one link only between the Russian proletariat and Socialism: The Communist International, directed entirely towards the proletarian struggle of Europe, Asia too.
§ III: Isolation and Defeat for the Russian Proletariat
¶Only a proletarian victory in the developed capitalist countries
could help to shorten the misery and suffering of Soviet Russia, and
avert the social dangers involved in reconstructing the economy. Lenin
never said, or wrote, that it was possible to make socialism
in
backward Russia. He relied on the triumph of the workers’ revolution
first in Germany and central Europe, then in Italy, France and England.
Only with this revolution, and this revolution alone, did he hold out
the possibility for a Russia of the future to be able to make its
initial steps towards Socialism.
¶When Stalin and his cronies came to power and decreed, as though through royal edict, that Socialism was possible in Russia alone, they de facto destroyed the perspective of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They broke the only link connecting the Russian proletariat to a possible future Socialism: separately the Russian party’s link with the European Communist Revolution.
¶The relations of production in Russia at that time, had (where it had been possible to go beyond the archaic stage of small production and natural economy) bourgeois foundations alone. On these foundations could develop only social strata that were eager to politically consolidate their economic advantages, and who were hostile to Socialism. These were especially the shopkeepers and small private capitalists who had had restored to them appreciable freedom of action by the NEP and the enormous peasant masses who had become fiercely conservative since being given land after the workers’ revolution.
¶If the revolution had succeeded in Germany, the soviet power would
have been able to abide by the concessions already made to private
capitalism and the Russian peasantry, and overcome all the social
consequences, but to renounce the European Revolution, like Stalin, was
to give free rein to capitalist relations in Russia, and to give the
classes who would be the immediate beneficiaries supremacy over the
proletariat. This section of the proletariat, in an extreme minority,
decimated by the war against the whites, and bound by a crushing task of
production had one weapon only against the speculators and the greed of
the peasants: the hammer of the Soviet State. This state, however, could
only remain proletarian in so far as it united with the International
Proletariat against reactionary strata inside Russia. To decide that
Russia was going to create its
Socialism all by itself, was to
abandon the Russian proletariat to the immense pressure of
non-proletarian classes and to free Russian capitalism from all controls
and restraints. What’s more, it was to transform the Russian State into
an ordinary state. An ordinary state endeavouring to make Russia into a
great bourgeois nation as quickly as possible.
¶This was the real meaning of Stalin’s turning point
and of his
formula Socialism in one country
. In baptising unadulterated
capitalism as Socialist
, by bargaining with the reactionary mass
of the Russian peasantry, by persecuting and slaughtering all
revolutionaries who remained faithful to the perspectives of Lenin and
to the interests of the Russian and international proletariat, Stalin
was the maker of a veritable counter-revolution. However, although he
accomplished this through the cruel terror of an absolute despot, he was
not the initiator but the instrument.
¶Following the crushing of armed insurrections and the catastrophic
tactical errors of the International, after the peasant raisings and the
famines in Russia – defeat both on the internal and international levels
– it became evident, around 1924, that the Communist Revolution in
Europe was to be postponed indefinitely. From this moment, a terrible
period hand to hand combat began for the Russian Proletariat with the
other classes. These other classes, momentarily moved to enthusiasm for
the anti-tsarist revolution, aspired henceforth to enjoy their conquest
in the bourgeois way, i.e. they gave up the revolutionary perspective so
as to establish good relations
with the capitalist countries.
Stalin was only the mouthpiece and the accomplisher of these
aspirations.
¶But when we say Russian proletariat
, we don’t mean the working
masses themselves, who, afflicted by unemployment and famine, had the
lifeblood squeezed out of them after their considerable effort and
sacrifice, and who were incapable of political spontaneity. We refer to
the Bolshevik Party, in which was condensed and concentrated the final
revolutionary will of a political generation to which history no longer
responded. It cannot be emphasised enough that the economic situation at
the end of the civil was a terrible one, with the whole population
wishing, at no matter what cost, for a return to security, bread and
work. In all periods of revolutionary reflux, what triumphs is not
revolutionary consciousness but the most trivial demagogy. It was all
too easy under these circumstances for a few unscrupulous politicians to
advocate before the hungry masses the necessity of a compromise with the
capitalist west, and to stigmatise as the initiative of adventurers the
grim determination of the Bolshevik minority to follow Lenin’s
line
, which consisted of subordinating Russian politics entirely to
the overall strategy of the International Communist Revolution. Stalin,
however – to whom the most refined progressive Western intellectuals
yielded down like prostitutes of the lowest order – never took the
initiative, leaving to others the superhuman, and in the long run,
impossible, task of reconciling the indispensable capitalist economic
foundations with the retention of proletarian power.
¶Such an attitude made him available for the liquidation of the perspectives and raison d’etre of Bolshevism.
¶This liquidation called for a blood-bath, certainly, but what
bewilders the historian inclined towards the Russian Revolution, is that
it developed within the Bolshevik Party, as if it were a matter of
leadership struggles or a family feud, rather than a clash between two
diametrically opposed historical perspectives. This mystery
, we
will proceed to explain in the next chapter.
§ IV: The Stalinist Counter-Revolution
¶This imposture disguises one of the most misunderstood events of contemporary history. Not only does a genuine view of the October revolution remain buried under half a century of political and doctrinal falsifications, but it has come to represent to those who have actually managed to unravel things, such an incredible affront to the rhythm of history, such a superhuman ambition considering the conditions in Russia at the time, that it hardly seems credible to them anymore. As we will never cease repeating, the key to a Socialist solution lay outside of Russia.
¶In the Russia of the twenties, the double character of the revolution couldn’t be kept up indefinitely, for the economic development that required the bourgeois revolution completed could only undermine and eventually overwhelm the purely political victory of the Socialist revolution.
¶In fact, within the interior of Russia, all that proceeded from national economic necessity, everything which expressed Russian social interests, constituted a moral danger for Communism, and every conceivable internal social strategy for Russia concealed, depending on the state of the International Revolution, the same fatal risk for the Russian proletariat.
¶Thanks to the destruction of feudal landed property, the bourgeois
peasantry acquired a considerable economic and social influence. They
bought up the land of the poor peasants and then rented it out. They
illegally employed wage labour and went as far as monopolising wheat and
starving out the cities. In the administration, where tens of thousand
of militant Communists have metamorphosed into functionaries, there
develops a bureaucratic machinery whose motto is administration for
administration’s sake
and the state for the state’s sake
. In
a country where famine rages, to have work or accommodation becomes a
privilege. Finally, after 1923, defending a genuine Communist opinion
becomes an act of heroism.
¶But why particularly after 1923? Certainly, what we refer to as the
Stalinist counter-revolution was the culmination of a process that
spanned a period of several years, and it is difficult to exactly
ascertain the key
moment. Yet 1923 isn’t an arbitrary point of
reference for it marked the definitive defeat of the German Revolution.
With this, the last chance for an immediate extension of Communism in
Europe fades away. The shattering significance of this fact was so well
understood, that in the Russian party the news provoked suicides. It is
also the year in which the catastrophic situation of Russian production
is revealed by the scissors
crisis: thus are respectively
represented, in the diagram shown by Trotsky at the 12th party congress,
the curves of agricultural and industrial prices, and their growing
divergence poses a grave problem of economic orientation and social
strategy. Must heavy industry be helped immediately, or should instead
the policy of tax relief in favour of the peasantry be continued at
heavy industry’s expense? The issue is left unsettled, but the situation
continues to worsen with 1,250,000 unemployed.
¶Additionally, in 1923, Lenin suffered a third attack of
arterio-sclerosis which was to cause his death in January 1924; but not
before he had been able to denounce, in what can be considered to be his
political testimony, the powerful forces which are deviating the
Soviet state from its course
. He had also broken with Stalin who
embodied, he said, an apparatus that is thoroughly alien to us, and
represents a hotchpotch of bourgeois and tsarist reversions
. 1923 is
also the year in which the first plot against Trotsky was hatched during
Lenin’s illness, due partly, it is worth mentioning, to the blindness of
the old Bolsheviks
manipulated by Stalin. Against the organiser
of the Red Army are now propagated the first political falsifications
which will go on to become the slanderous pack of foul and ludicrous
accusations which the riffraff of the other Stalinist parties, despite
all their denials – including those of their ex-venerated Khrushchev –
still continue to use today as their historical reference points.
Lenin’s best comrades in arms would only understand two years later,
that the real enemy of the revolution was the foreign body
in the
Bolshevik party, which history destined, in the course of the next ten
years, to be its own executioner.
¶Looking at the vain efforts and countless vicissitudes of the
opposition regrouping around Trotsky against Stalin’s almighty clique,
we can see today how feeble and precarious were the strictly Russian
foundation of Lenin’s great perspective, considering that the West
(which any revolution in Russia, according to Marx, ought to stir
up
) was not in a position to respond forcefully to the call.
¶At the crucial moments, there were only a few hundred genuine
Communists, courageously opposing about a million new, generally
inexperienced elements introduced en masse into the Bolshevik Party by
Stalin to back his policy of liquidating the International Revolution.
Such a disproportion of forces is inexplicable unless a fundamental
issue of the October Revolution is taken into account; that beyond the
purely bourgeois tasks of the revolution, the Russian nation
–
that is, all the classes except an extremely small proletarian minority
– represent nothing but an obstacle to the struggle for Socialism. This
is the cardinal fact that is either ignored or underestimated by all
democratic critics of Stalinism who correctly contrast the scientific
honesty of Lenin with the coarse political brutality of the unscrupulous
Stalin, but who don’t go beyond what is merely the phenomenology of a
colossal movement of historical and social force, i.e. Russian
capitalism. A political party which was conceived to usher in Socialism,
was considered, with good cause, as its most immediate obstacle, and to
make its way, Russian capitalism is forced to brake its political
backbone by emptying it of its social content.
¶We will not go on to explain here, even briefly, how this came about.
Whilst referring the reader to our study Bilan d’une Revolution
,
we will limit ourselves to outlining its main features on the political
level.
¶During the internal struggles which preceded the definitive victory
of Stalinism in 1929-30, none of the economic measures over which the
party factions clash claim to be free from the framework of capitalist
production relations; none of them have the right to declare themselves
Socialist. In the picturesque formulation of the scissors
crisis,
the problem keeps worsening with all the resultant economic and social
consequences, with all its corresponding effects on the state of
industrial productions and the social balance of forces. Trotsky’s left
maintains the principle of a preliminary industrialisation as a
precondition for the development of agriculture, sanctioning at the same
time support for the poor peasant. Bukharin’s right (though names are
given here as points of reference only) counted on the enrichment of the
middle peasant and on the increase of his working capital, thinking
towards its eventual confiscation. Stalin’s centre doesn’t have a
position, being content to pilfer from the right and the left anything
that allows it to keep at the helm of the state, and it is for this
reason therefore that its polemics do not show a clear demarcation
between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Thus the Stalinist
centre, able to use any old measure, whether inspired by the
right
or the left
, has in the last analysis one function:
saving and reinforcing the Russian state. By forcing the double
revolution into an anti-feudal, and therefore capitalist, pigeonhole, it
is completely anticommunist.
¶Both faithful to Lenin, the right and the left know that everything
depends, in the end, on the International Revolution, that it is a
matter of holding out until it triumphs, and if there are violent
conflicts between them, it is on the respective efficacy of the various
measures that are proposed for that purpose. The centre is preoccupied
with other things however; it has already broken with the International
Revolution and has therefore only one political point of view: to
eliminate those who still pursue the International Revolution. The way
in which Stalin finally triumphs illustrates this clearly. First of all
he supports the right from which he adopts the programme of support for
the middle peasant, meanwhile showering Trotsky with abuse and accusing
him of sabotaging the infallible Leninist
alliance of peasantry
and proletariat. Next, in the face of the failure of this policy, and
panic stricken by the threat of the kulaks, he dismisses the right and
engages in mud slinging at Bukharin who he accuses – wrongly – of
expressing the interests of the rural bourgeoisie. The manoeuvre
succeeds so well that Bukharin, when he would have attempted a
rapprochement with Trotsky, fails to convince him that the right is
Marxist whilst the centre isn’t; in fact, certain of Trotsky’s
supporters will even consider Stalin borrowing some of their positions,
for his own interests, as a step of the centre towards the left.
¶Needless to say, this physical
struggle taking place at the
head of the party and state is merely the expression of the subterranean
offensive that we have mentioned above, but it shows how drastic a
reversal on the political level was necessary for them to be able to
triumph. Meanwhile, on the economic level it wasn’t so indispensable to
proceed in the same way, since neither the solution of the left or right
was Socialist. The Stalin solution
wasn’t more so, although it
seemed to draw its inspiration – through forced collectivisation – from
a caricature of Trotsky’s position. The explanation of this paradox
resides in the fact that no Russian solution could bring about, even in
the long term, the realisation of Communism if the International
Revolution was defeated.
¶The superhuman effort of those who tore each other to pieces over the means of preventing this hard historical reality, hid from view the common enemy; which Bukharin identified perhaps only at the moment when he felt the cold revolver of the executioner on his neck.
¶The fact that the enemy of a social revolution could be a mere gang of killers proves that if isolated from the anticipated support of the International Proletariat, the socialist character of October 1917 reduces itself to being the will of a party, i.e. a group of people, which, moreover, becomes thinned out under the weight of hostile events; to kill revolutionaries is well nigh incumbent on any counterrevolution.
§ V: Socialism and State Capitalism
§ VI: Socialism and Small Production
- Natural economy: i.e. patriarchal production, almost totally consumed by its producers.
- Small commodity production:
this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain
. - Private capitalism: whose rebirth goes back to the N.E.P.
- State capitalism: i.e. grain monopoly and national accounting of production, which the proletarian power strives to accomplish in the face of a multitude of difficulties.
- Socialism: On this last point, Lenin is crystal clear; it is, he
says, nothing but a
legal opportunity
of the proletarian state. An opportunity that could only become an immediate reality if the Russian revolution, as Lenin sharply reminded Bukharin on another occasion, had inherited the historic results from acompleted Imperialism
froma system in which everything was in submission to finance capital
and in whichit remained only to decapitate it to leave everything else in the hands of the proletariat
.
§ VII: The False
Communism
of the Kolkhos
¶The compromise with small production shouldn’t be attributed, as Stalin’s international band of servile adulators would have one believe, to the carefully weighed-up inspiration of a brilliant leader, but rather to the despotic requirements of particular political and economic conditions. These conditions can only be adequately analysed by returning to the previously mentioned discussion within the Bolshevik party on the agrarian question. We’ll see that Trotsky’s left gave priority to industrial development as the indispensable prior condition for putting agriculture on its feet, whilst Bukharin’s right prioritised capital accumulation by the rural middle classes.
¶It should be recalled of that debate the categorical difference which
became apparent between the preoccupations of the left and the right of
the party on the one hand, and those of the Stalinist centre on the
other. The latter interested itself little in the respective
reasonableness of the theses that it had to deal with; for it, being an
expression of the Russian national state, what mattered was the ruthless
elimination of the last phalanx of the party. Stalinism was acting
already on its specific terrain: the abandonment of the struggle for the
World Revolution, the stabilisation and consolidation of existing
structures, and the transformation of the centre for the revolutionary
direction of the World Proletariat into a mere national state apparatus.
Of Stalin’s intentions and ambitions, neither Bukharin nor Trotsky were
yet fully aware. The importance of the decisions on which they were
divided was of more importance to them than the sordid maneuverings of
the secretary general
for nothing was really viable if the
International Revolution didn’t gain second wind. With this hope, their
respective positions took on for their passionate defenders the nature
of an All or nothing
gamble, which engaged them in intransigence
as opposed to conciliation. In Trotsky’s eyes, who saw salvation only in
a thorough industrialisation, Bukharin – traitorously used and defended
by Stalin – appeared to be defending the rich peasant. For Bukharin,
prioritising industrialisation was full of undesirable bureaucratic
consequences, and it seemed better that the accumulation of capital be
confined to a rural bourgeoisie with which we would eventually settle
accounts
. The harshness of this conflict between the right and the
left, equally committed to maintain the economic bases the least
unfavourable to the dictatorship of the proletariat, hid from view the
menace which weighed on the political base from the centre. Both would
underestimate the counter-revolutionary danger that this
represented.
¶In actual fact, it was entirely with political aims in view that
Stalin supported the Bukharin solution
, linking it from them on
to the liquidationist formula of Socialism in one country
. On the
other hand, the slogan Peasants Enrich Yourself
hadn’t had the
effect on the economic level counted on by the right. The middle
peasant, instead of increasing his working capital as hoped for by
Bukharin, instead increased his personal consumption. The production of
grain collapsed to the point of giving rise once again to the spectre of
famine in the towns.
¶In January 1928, the production of corn was 25% below that of the
preceding year, showing a deficit of 2 million tons. The Stalinist
direction of the party and state – uncontested since the 15th congress
and excluding the left – reacted by sending armed contingents into the
towns. Repression and confiscation of stocks alternated with peasant
rebellions and massacres of workers dispatched by the party to the
countryside. By April, the corn reserves are somehow or other restored,
whilst the central leadership backs out, condemning the excesses
it itself had ordered. Can it really be said – as one is given to
believe by every foreign language catechism bearing the Stalinist
imprimatur – that it was all a matter of a line of conduct sagely
elaborated? In reality, the central committee acted through panic and
the grossest possible empiricism. It didn’t set out, wrote Trotsky, with
any particular political line, and adopted policies that were valid for
only a few months at a time, not to mention years! In July, the central
committee forbids all seizure of corn, whilst increasing the price. At
the same time it leads a violent campaign against the kulaks who the
right were accused of defending. Still in July – just a few months now
separating us from the forced collectivisation that will follow – Stalin
lays the blame on those who think that individual exploitation has
had its day
, who, he exclaims have nothing in common with our
party
! Although the first five year plan, adopted at the end of
1929, foresaw only 20% collectivisation of the land, and that only by
1933, the idea of the kolkhos was taken up by the central committee, and
propagated under the boastful slogan: The introduction of Communism
into agriculture
.
¶Attacked from April 1929, Bukharin capitulated in November under an
avalanche of insults, slanders and threats of the purest Stalinist
stamp. Then, in accordance with a concept of irresponsibility, which has
since spread down to the very last cell of the national communist
parties, it is the Right which becomes the scapegoat for the failure of
the Bukharin formula. The clique which has ever been unable to take any
decision which doesn’t involve repression, will emerge bedecked in
haloes from the discovery of a solution
which has nothing
whatsoever to do with Socialism: a collection of co-operatives which,
operating within the market system, will end up escaping from all state
control and accounting
, and which will display the economic
insufficiencies of small production in conjunction with the backward and
reactionary mentality of the peasant.
¶During the second half of 1929 and throughout the following year,
what the central committee will refer to as dekulakisation
and
collectivisation
unfolds amidst incredible high-handedness,
violence and confusion. It is apparent once again that political schemes
prevail over economic initiative because of the threat of famine and
unrest; it becomes a matter of turning the perennial hatred of the poor
peasant against the middle peasant, and thus bypassing a difficult
obstacle that endangers the very existence of the state.
¶In fact hardly any preparations are made for this
collectivisation
with only 7,000 tractors provided for everybody,
whilst according to Stalin 250,000 are required! Then again, in order to
incite the small producers to join the Kolkhos, a grant of cattle is
made to them. The result is that the ones already in their possession
are then sold or eaten! The immediate consequences of the measures prove
catastrophic, provoking in certain regions an armed rebellion of the
peasants against the functionaries who collectivise everything right
down to glasses and shoes!
¶By the time the Spring sowing comes around, the dread of civil war
moves the government to condemn the excesses
of collectivisation
and to allow the peasant to leave the kolkhos; this provokes a mass
exodus reducing the number of kolkhosians by half. Trotsky was to
observe the film of collectivisation going in reverse
. In order
that a new influx of peasants into the kolkhoses is possible, and to
enable Stalin to conclude that collectivisation is a success
, it
will be necessary that he make considerable concessions, which will
cancel out socially anything that is technically collective
in
the kolkhos. But before looking at the content, it is important we
explain the causes of collectivisation itself.
¶According to the opinion shared by Stalinists and their left
adversaries alike, it was a response rendered necessary by the blackmail
exercised on the Soviet power by the rich rural bourgeoisie (the kulaks)
whose importance hadn’t stopped increasing since the revolution. The
scarce documents at our disposal tend to show, on the contrary, the
extension of production by the small and middle peasants, whose very
existence considerably slowed up the indispensable condition for the
progressive elimination of small production in the countryside – the
devolvement of wage labour. Under these circumstances, collectivisation
isn’t a veering to the left
of Stalinism, a stray
socialist
impulse of the state bureaucracy, but is the only means
available in the backward conditions of the Russian countryside, to
impel – in an emergency and in response to a severe crisis – the general
course of the economy towards capitalism.
¶In fact there are several reasons for thinking that Stalin embarked
on this adventure because of the success of the grain requisitions that
commenced in 1929, the favourable reports on the development of the
co-operatives, and the conviction that the peasantry as a whole would be
unable to put up an effective resistance. For whatever reason, the
determinism of facts, if not the statistical proof, is persuasive: the
kolkhos-form
turns out to be the only one possible given the
economic, social and political conditions that are the result of the
irretrievable reflux of the International Revolution.
¶Any political solution in the end survives only in so far as it
eliminates those solutions which lack the indispensable conditions. What
is evident for revolutionary solutions is as true for
counter-revolutionary ones. After the proletariat’s superhuman effort in
Russia, capitalism was now unable to return to the
under-developed
vassal form which it had assumed under the tsars,
neither could it be defeated by Socialism because the International
Revolution had been defeated. The construction as an intermediate
solution
of a national capitalism – in other words an autonomous
centre for the accumulation of capital in Russia – was possible under
these conditions only by stabilising the immensely conservative social
force represented by the Russian peasantry in the kolkhoses.
¶This particular road, which one could call Russian capitalism mark
2
expresses the complicated dialectic of the social upheavals in the
imperialist phase: The capitalist mode of production for the Russian
economy of the time is revolutionary, but is made possible only by the
victory of the world counter revolution. The proletarian elimination of
the Russian bourgeoisie that had failed in its historic task achieved
nothing less than the triumph of bourgeois relations of production! It
is understandable that these contradictory events, forming an object of
profound perplexity for an entire historic generation of
revolutionaries, considerably complicates the nonetheless indispensable
act of clarification. It is possible, however, to sum things up by going
back to an old touchstone of Lenin’s formulated well before the victory
of 1917, and which poses the fundamental alternatives for modern Russia;
the proletariat for the revolution or the revolution for the
proletariat? Stalinism is, in the final analysis, the realisation of the
first part of the formula to the detriment of the second; thanks to the
blood of the Russian proletariat, modern Russia founded its national
state. What does it matter if the class to whom this task has
historically been given is physically destroyed, if the relations of
production which are installed, after several decades of upheaval are
the relations proper to this class and guarantee its reappearance in the
more or less distant future.
¶The social type of the kolkhosian form incarnates the long historic tradition which has been necessary for it to come about. As collective farm worker, the kolkhosian – who receives a fraction of the product proportional to his provision of work – is related to the wage-earners of industry. He will never be a wage-earner proper though, until a further evolution of unknown duration has taken place because of his plot of land. He isn’t propertyless, but an owner of means of production, even if reduced to two or three hectares of land, a few head of cattle and his own house. Under this last aspect, he appears similar to his counterpart in the west, the smallholder. But, as distinct from the latter, who is ruined by the usurer, the bank and the market fluctuations, he cannot be expropriated; the little that belongs to him is guaranteed by law. The kolkhosian is therefore the incarnation of the compromise between the ex-proletarian state and the small producers passed on in perpetuity.
¶The indispensable condition for Socialism is the concentration of capital. Whilst the confiscation by the proletariat of ultra-centralised forms like trusts, cartels and monopolies is possible because property and management have long since become dissociated in these institutions, when considering the myriad of kolkhosian micro-proprietors it becomes unthinkable other than at the expense of long periods of failure and defeat. Not only is this Socialist perspective totally excluded without a new revolution, but even the simple concentration of capital comes up against difficulties, to the extent in fact that today’s Russia endeavours to achieve it by going back to the start of a process already completed by the developed countries. This is the significance of the principles of competition, of profitability on which the Russian leaders probably depend to eliminate the non-competitive kolkhoses and, in the long run, to transform their members into bone fide wage-earners. We will next examine the stages already completed within this long, drawn out process.
¶The rural collectivism of Russia isn’t Socialist, but Co-operative.
Trapped within the laws of the market and the value of labour power, it
shows all the contradictions of capitalist production without partaking
of its revolutionary element which is the elimination of the small
producer. But it has allowed the national state, firmly propped up on
the stable
peasantry, to realise at the expense of incalculable
proletarian suffering, its primitive accumulation and achieve its only
modern capitalist element: state industrialism.
VIII: All the Defects of Capitalist Agriculture with None of the Advantages
¶Socialism is, above all, the abolition of relations of exchange
founded on value, and the destruction of their fundamental components:
capital, wages and money. These categories the kolkhos guarantees
through the transformation of the small rural producers, whose social
position it crystallises, partly thanks to remuneration in money (or in
negotiable products) for their work on a co-operative farm and partly
through allowing for the individual exploitation of plots of privately
owned land and cattle, the produce of which can be sold on the open
market. Far from being a kind of Socialism
, the Kolkhos is akin
to the self-management
systems which exist in certain of the
newly independent underdeveloped countries; there, by usurping
terminology in just the same way as their Russian forbears, such systems
serve to conceal their role as historical stopgap between the archaic
natural production preceding capitalism and the latter’s full
development.
¶After having examined the political motivations for Russian forced
collectivisation
, and drawn attention to the support given to the
Stalinist counter-revolution by the immense soviet peasantry, we must
now show that it is by this path – a meandering one but with definite
salient features – that an out and out national capitalism was founded
on the ruins of the October Revolution.
¶The personality of the kolkhosian reflects well enough the economic
and social impasse of a revolution that, within its national frontiers
couldn’t bypass the stage of a bourgeois historical transformation. The
kolkhos, a transitional solution necessitated by the abandonment of the
international revolutionary strategy, continues to represent the main
obstacle to a rapid development of capitalism in Russia. It is an
obstacle that certainly doesn’t denote the intransigent survival of an
archaic road
to Socialism as Trotskyists have maintained, despite
all evidence to the contrary. In fact rather it demonstrates the heavy
tribute paid by the proletariat to history when the counter-revolution,
after having clearly broken with the perspective of Socialism, doesn’t
even offer the creation of its most radical social and economic premises
by way of compensation.
¶By revealing the backwardness and economic difficulties of
present-day Russia, from which the politicians and economists of the
west believe it is possible to deduce a failure of Communism
, we
wish instead to establish the real causes. This is not just in order to
counter the Stalinist lies and the illusions of those who maintain the
survival in Russia of conquests for Socialism
, but rather to
disprove critics who reproach Lenin with having imprudently taken the
path of state capitalism. The kolkhos is neither a Socialist
accomplishment
, or an expression of state capitalism. Its
beneficiaries are peasants who supply to the collective fund a parcel of
land and a certain number of cattle (if they were without them, the
state provided them). The kolkhosian participates in the collective
valorisation of all the plots, henceforth reunited, and of the herds
thus constituted. As a result of this, he receives a part of the product
proportional to the number of days set aside for work, meanwhile having
at his disposal a plot of land and cattle, the products of which he can
uses he pleases.
¶Through his circumstances as much as by his social psychology, the
kolkhosian is as foreign to Socialism as the Kentish market gardener or
the winegrower of a Co-operative in the South of France. The way his
labour is remunerated in the collective farm is related to that of the
wage labourer, but also to that of the small shareholder in the
capitalist countries, for whilst he receives a part of the profit of the
enterprise, the fact of his minuscule ownership confers on him a
position identical to that of the peasant smallholder in the west. The
personality
in the rural society of the USSR who most
approximates to proletarians in the capitalist west and susceptible to
behaving as such, is the sovkhosian. But the sovkhos, or state
enterprise represents only a tiny part of Russian agrarian
production.
¶The kolkhos, from whichever angle it is considered, is the most reactionary element both socially and economically in soviet society, not only because of the psychological conservatism of its members, but because of the burden it exerts on the only modern class: the proletariat. Indeed, one can easily see why it was that at the time of the last world war the Russian rural small producer – saved from famine and expropriation by the kolkhos – didn’t begrudge his blood to defend, along with the Stalinist state, the guarantees of survival and stability that the latter granted him. However, it is necessary to consider the entire Russian economic and social structure to understand that this survival and this stability, in the final analysis, is due to the overexploitation of the proletariat. The mediocrity of conditions in the Russian countryside should not deceive us: the kolkhosian system, beyond the fundamental distortions that it accentuates in the capitalist nature of Russian relations of production, constitutes the main obstacle to a general rise in the standard of living.
¶Imposed by Stalinism’s political strategy, which ceased to link the destiny of the Russian state to that of the International Proletariat, the kolkhosian form has become quasi-ineradicable, to the extent that it can only be destroyed – as yearned for by present day soviet leaders – through competition from a more productive form. This though is highly unlikely, unless through a general subversion, in the short term. In this connection, some figures will go towards filing out these ideas: in Russia, the average yield of cereals despite increasing between 1913 to 1956 by 25% as compared to around 30% in the United States and Canada, is still manifestly insufficient given demographic growth. The peasant population is still very high, a reliable indicator of the feeble agricultural productivity, in 1956 it was 42% of the population as against 12% in the U.S.A. and 28% in France, and there is the frightful situation regarding livestock which, excepting a spectacular growth in pigbreeding (+63%) – diminished by about 20% from the level in 1913 for beef and dairy cattle.
¶This deficiency of the kolkhosian system resides not only in the
inadequacy of its production, but also increasingly in its overall
management. The Russian state selling tractors instead of hiring them to
the kolkhoses lost the sole means of pressure at its disposal for laying
down the production of indispensable foodstuff; which prior to the
famous Khrushchev reform, it had fixed in price and quantity. The
original promoter of this reform was afterwards observed dashing around
the Russian countryside and exhorting without success the kolkhosians to
produce corn, instead of barley and oats which allow the considerably
more lucrative rearing of pigs. Thus under Russian pseudosocialism, the
appetite for lucre of the kolkhosian enterprises prevails over the
pressing need to feed the allegedly in power people
!
¶This doesn’t mean on the other hand that the lot of the kolkhosians
themselves is a wonderful one. Quite the reverse in fact, for after
deductions are made from the aggregate product of the kolkhos (amongst
which figure the same rubrics that govern all enterprises in the west,
notably a rate of investment at a comparable level) there remains little
to divide
amongst its members. This fact, in constraining the
kolkhosian to make up his inadequate wage
by the sale of products
from his personal plot, aggravates yet again the anarchy that is rampant
in the provisioning of the population.
¶In reality, the feeble productivity of cereals (which is still the
basis of the Russian diet) combines with the de facto independence of
the kolkhos and results in its tendency to produce not what is
indispensable but what gives the best return, thereby decreasing the
availability of foodstuffs on the official market and causing the price
to climb in the parallel
market. Thus the kolkhosian gains as
much from selling the produce of his plot at market, as much as from his
labour in the kolkhos. To get an idea of the price which the urban wage
earner must pay for his existence, we need only know that in 1938,
three-quarters of the agricultural products put on the market came from
individual plots, with less than a quarter provided by kolkhoses, and
still today half of the total income of the kolkhosian is derived from
the exploitation of his individual plot.
¶We lack space here to relate how it was that the Khrushchev
reform
of the kolkhoses imposed itself on the soviet leadership
(covered in our party work entitled Dialogue with Stalin
) but it
shows that the Russian economy – and particularly its Achilles’ heel,
agriculture – obeys the inexorable laws of capitalism. The sole
irrefutable criterion of Socialism is the triumph of use value over
market value: not until this has become a reality can one affirm that
production serves the needs of people and not capital. The
pseudo-socialist agriculture of the USSR strikingly illustrates the
opposite, that it is market laws and not the most fundamental needs of
workers which determine qualitatively and quantitatively kolkhosian
production.
¶Even the development of the Russian economy as a whole – which both
permits at the same time necessitates access for Russia to the world
economy – serves further to throw light on its contradictions.
International competition requires that the costs of production are kept
down, thus agricultural prices are lowered so as to enable salaried
labour to be fed without having to pay out too much. This then results
in one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, that since
natural limitations exist in the agricultural sector on the turnover of
capital, the latter is directed by preference towards industry. The
growth of agricultural productivity, which, despite the above, western
capitalism attains (thanks to the industrialisation of cultivation and
the time-honoured expropriation of the small producer) is far more
difficult for Russian capitalism, because of the heavily entrenched
kolkhosian sector, which the soviet power endeavours to make successful
merely by selecting
profitable kolkhoses over unprofitable
ones.
¶One can imagine the degree of exploitation imposed by this same soviet power on its industrial wage-earners in order to lower its costs of production, thereby compounding the endemic misery of the agricultural sector (due to the reasons we have just given with, the most barbarous exploitation of the workers, of whom we will speak in our next and final part.
¶Russian capitalism, like all youthful capitalisms, throws light in
the clearest way on the contradictions of capitalism in general: for
this reason, its international lackeys won’t be able to cover up the
exploitative nature of so-called Socialism in one country
and
maintain indefinitely this superstition which disarms the proletariat,
in every country in the world, before the bourgeoisie.
§ IX: The Reality of Russian Capitalism
¶Evidence for the exploitation of labour power doesn’t reside only in
the fact that the class which works receives only a portion of the
social product, whilst they who do nothing award themselves a fat slice
from for their own personal consumption. Such an injustice
doesn’t contain in itself the perspective of the possible and necessary
disappearance of capitalism. What condemns the latter on the historical
level is that it finds itself having to transform an ever increasing
part of the social product into capital: a blind social force which
survives only by exasperating more and more its own contradictions, the
revolt by the class which is its main victim.
¶Denouncing the existence of this blind social force in allegedly
Socialist
Russia, isn’t therefore, as the Stalinists
unconditionally assert, to attack and defame Communism
, but to
unmask its most infamous forgery. It is to orientate the instinctive
hostility of workers as regards manifestations of capitalism, against
its inner core and against its murderous categories: wages, money and
competition. It is to demonstrate that the proletarian movement has been
beaten because it capitulated, in Russia as elsewhere, before these
features of capitalism.
¶Others have described much better than ourselves the ferocious exploitation of labour power in Russia. We will therefore limit ourselves to illustrating the causes with one of the most characteristic laws of capitalism: that of the increasing growth – as born out in all bourgeois countries – of the sector that produces capital goods (sector A), to the detriment of sector B which produces consumer goods.
¶Those who jeered at Hitler’s formula Guns before butter
and
who now imitate him with their strike force
, were able to
translate the dictum into Russian as follows: machines before shoes,
heavy industry before light, and accumulation before consumption. Some
figures will suffice to illustrate this. From 1913 to 1964, total
Russian industrial production had been multiplied by a factor of 62.
That of sector A by 141, and that of sector B by 20. Taking demographic
growth between these dates into account, the capital goods sector
increased by a factor of 113 times, whilst the consumer goods sector
increased only 12 fold.
¶More important still are the social effects of this conflict between
production and consumption in the USSR. The Russian economy can make up
for the backwardness
of light industry and cure its deficiencies,
but it can no longer free itself from the contradiction that is
inseparable from capitalism; accumulation of riches at one extreme and
poverty at the other.
¶Already the engineer, the technician and the specialist have their
villas on the Black Sea. But to the unskilled labourer, the Tartar, the
Kyrgyz and the Kalmouk uprooted from their rural or natural existence,
there remains only the same misery that is the lot of the Algerian and
the Portuguese in France, or the southern immigrant in Italy. That this
monstrous aspect of the Russian model
of Socialism no longer
shocks today’s workers is the most damning indictment of all that
history will make against Stalinism, which reduces the terms
Socialism
and capitalism
to being merely different labels
for the same thing.
¶Seeing that labourers and workers accept piecework as being eternal,
along with all the other aspects of competition between those who give
their labour-power, it is easy for intellectuals and opportunists – who
are convinced that the principal merit of the October Revolution is that
Russia was brought out of economic backwardness – to equate socialism
with accumulation of capital. The fact that the entire Third-World in
revolt against imperialism in its turn makes this formula its own,
demonstrates the full extent of the defeat of the proletarian movement,
which destroyed not only the life force of the working class, but more
serious still, affected its political consciousness. To follow this
terrible path to Socialism
is to condemn all proletarians of the
world, each in their turn, to pass through the Calvary of horrors which
is the mark of capitalism everywhere.
¶It suffices to see what it was like in Russia under Stalin. The
five-year plans – which it is all too easy for the western intellectual
who has never touched a tool in his life to admire – were literally a
worker’s hell, a carnage of human energy. Even the most basic protection
of the workers’ interests were suppressed, making the lot of the Russian
wage earners – by the institution of work passes
– the same as
the French wage earners under the iron rod of the second empire. They
humiliated the workers with the infamous methods of Stakhanovism;
recruited labour under the blows of repression; wasted it usually in
useless projects
; called the fruits of bureaucratic negligence
sabotage; and brought to trial in monstrous mediaeval trials those who
were to be baptised Trotskyists
. These Stalinist excesses
were not due to the specific conditions
of Russian
Socialism
as those who owe their sinecures to bureaucrats or
politicians would have us believe, but to general universal conditions
appropriate to the genesis of all capitalism. The primitive accumulation
of English capital executed thousands of free peasants; that of Russian
neo-capitalism transforms Russian citizens into political criminals, so
as best to turn them into convicts: during the second world war, the
chiefs of the NKVD (the political police) finding itself short of labour
in the concentration camps, made this edifying self-criticism: we
haven’t been vigilant enough in our political surveillance!
¶All these atrocities have been committed by burning incense to a
false god, with the praises of Socialism sung, and sacrifices made to
production! The post-war industrial growth kept up the pretence.
According to Stalin, decadent capitalism was no longer capable of
developing the productive forces. For the Western Communists
ensconced in bourgeois governments of patriotic reconstruction, these
words were gold dust, with strikes became weapons of the Trusts
the proof of Socialism in the USSR was to be discovered in the ascending
curve of the indices of Russian production, whilst in the capitalist
West, they stagnated once again.
¶The illusion was to last exactly as long as it took for the Western economy to take off in a new direction. It is a constant in the history of capitalism that the rate of growth of production diminishes as capitalism gets older. This rate, markedly higher for the young Russian capitalism which started from virtually nothing, was bound eventually to assume its correct place behind those capitalisms; which although undoubtedly older, had been considerably rejuvenated by wartime destruction. If the annual rate of growth was really a criteria of Socialism, it would be necessary to admit that Federal Germany and Japan, whose volume of production gallops forward at a hallucinatory pace, are more Socialist than Russia! In reality, the average increase in production in Russia has progressed as follows: 22.6% from 1947-1951, 13.1% from 1951-1955, 9.1% from 1959 to 1965. This squeezing effect, which is verified in the history of all capitalisms, shows that the Russian economy missed out on none of its essential characteristics.
¶The Stalinist bluff as regards the irresistible march of Russian
production was bound to be called after having served as a pretext for
the liquidation of the cold war
and the reconciliation of the
Russians to the Americans. Not only the miracles
of Soviet
production, in spite of the fanfares of Khrushchev, have failed to
convince the latter of the superiority of the Socialist system over
the capitalist system
(not surprisingly!), but the promoter of
competition between different systems
had also to recognise the
necessity that the Russians join the western school of technology.
¶The last veils concealing the reality of Russian capitalism are
removed by the economist Lieberman with his keynotes: productivity of
labour and profitability of enterprises. The phase of primitive
accumulation of capital in the USSR is achieved: Russian production
strives to find a way into the world market and is therefore contorting
itself to meet all its demands. The market is a place where commodities
come face to face. To say commodities is to say profit. Russian
production is also production for profit. But this term must be taken in
its Marxist sense – as surplus value destined to be converted into
capital – and not in its vulgar formulation as the bosses
profit
.
¶Assuming this crass disguise, it was easy for the Stalinists to deny
the existence of profit since private property in the means of
production doesn’t exist in the USSR. As for their left adversaries who
maintain that Russian labour power is exploited, they confine themselves
for the most part within juridical and purely formal criteria, by
invoking the existence of a bureaucracy
which arbitrarily
monopolises the national profit.
¶This explanation simply isn’t one. Bureaucracy
, by-and-large,
has always appeared at definite moments in the genesis or evolution of
all the important modes of production. Well then, it is the nature of
these modes of production which determines the roles and privileges of
the bureaucracy and not the other way around. After all, the structures
of modern capitalism, in their traditional
as much as in their
Russian expressions, tend to link up. The capitalism of Europe and
America bureaucratises
itself to the extent that, property and
administration having been dissociated there for a long time, the
function of the state becomes determinative and engenders a whole Mafia
of managers
and speculators who are the real masters of the
economy; meanwhile, Russia, which is going through its’ countdown
to liberalisation
, relaxes state control of production and
preaches the virtues of competition, commerce and free enterprise. This
process in Russia isn’t linear though but is full of contradictions, for
political and social reasons which we will certainly have cause to
examine in the future.
¶Applied to the economic history of the USSR, the criteria put forward at the start of this article allow the genesis of Russian capitalism to be traced out. Wage labour and accumulation of capital are manifestly incompatible with Socialism. Imposed on the October Revolution by the economic backwardness of the country it meant Socialism was something for the future; but still, for socialism to really happen, capitalist measures could only be employed to satisfy the demands of social life in the USSR and must be strictly subordinate to the strategy of the international extension of the revolution.
¶With this strategy abandoned, peaceful coexistence
translated
itself into a struggle for the world market. Russia was to publicly
proclaim the primacy in its economy of the universal categories of
capitalism; competition and profit. Indeed, this has come about without
the existence of a bourgeois ruling class for whom the bureaucracy,
which in other respects is declining, deputises. But this class didn’t
wish to live its underground existence for ever, hidden, almost
clandestine, as it is still today. The political bagmen who conclude
agreements in the foreign capitals act on its behalf just as much as the
military which has subdued by terror any notion of emancipation by the
brother-parties
of central and Balkan Europe. Similarly,
instruments of the future Russian bourgeoisie in the same measure are
the diplomats who help
the Arab countries and North Vietnam, and
the tanks that police Czechoslovakia. Military oppressor rather than
valid
competitor, touter of forced labour rather than extorter of
surplus value in the refined way of its western rivals, Russian
capitalism, during half a century of Stalinism, has passed along a route
marked by blood, violence, infamy and corruption – the royal road of all
capitalism.
¶The lesson to be drawn can be summed up in a few sentences. The possibility of Socialism in the USSR was conditional on the victory of the Communist Revolution in Europe. The Stalinist deception, by assimilating present production relations to non-capitalist relations, erased any distinction, even the most basic, between capitalism and Socialism, ruining the only true weapon of the proletariat; its class programme.
¶The essence of this programme is the dictatorship of the proletariat on the political level, and the abolition of mercantile exchange founded on the exploitation of labour power on the economic level. Of these two conditions of Socialism, the October Revolution achieved only the first, powerless to maintain it for more than a few years whilst it was incapable – and its leaders knew it – of coming through to the second.
¶The dictatorship of the proletariat has died in the wake of the
degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. The latter, by becoming an
instrument of the Soviet State instead of being its master, rendered the
international victory of the proletariat impossible, as it did the
withering away of the state which forms such a fundamental postulate of
Marxism. On the social level, meanwhile, the democratic constitution
of 1936
gave priority to the immense conservative mass of the
Russian peasantry, on the economic level, the USSR definitively
submitted itself to the law of value; to the mechanism of the
accumulation of capital, the which, being irresistible forces, must,
without the help of the International Revolution, result in the same
defects and the same monstrosities reappearing in Russia as
elsewhere.
¶From the moment when the inexorable logic of the facts become evident to even of the most incredulous, the denunciation of the infamies and contradictions of false Russian Socialism becomes the primary condition for the recovery of the International proletariat and its revolutionary objectives and for the rehabilitation, before the exploited of the entire world, of the fundamental principles of Communism.